Days Like These

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page i

Days

like

These

As a playwright and activist, Michael Gurr has been a close observer of Australian public life and culture since the early 1980s. This is his personal account of a changing nation and a writer’s evolution. Born in Melbourne in 1961, he wrote his first play at eighteen. His mentor in the theatre was the legendary Australian playwright Ray Lawler. His plays have been performed around Australia and in the UK and USA. He has won four State Literary Awards for Drama in Victoria and NSW and Green Room Awards for Sex Diary of an Infidel and Jerusalem. He has written screenplays, radio plays and worked as a radio arts presenter. His plays include Julia 3, The Simple Truth, Shark Fin Soup, Crazy Brave and Intelligence. Michael Gurr has been active in both mainstream Labor politics and alternative political causes. He worked as speechwriter in the campaign that brought Steve Bracks to power in Victoria in 1999. His documentary play Something to Declare—about asylum seekers in Australia—has been performed many hundreds of times around the country.

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page ii

Also by Michael Gurr Plays Crazy Brave* Dead to the World DesireLines The Hundred Year Ambush Intelligence Jerusalem* Julia 3* Magnetic North A Pair of Claws Sex Diary of an Infidel* Shark Fin Soup The Simple Truth* Something to Declare These Days Underwear, Perfume and Crash Helmet* *published by Currency Press Radio plays Our Beautiful Daughter Test Pilot Screenplays Departure Emmett Stone

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page iii

Days

like

These

Michael Gurr

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page iv

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2006 Text © Michael Gurr 2006 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2006 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Edited by Eugenie Baulch Designed by Nada Backovic Typeset in Bembo 10.5/14 point by Syarikat Seng Teik Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia Printed in Australia by Griffin Press National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Gurr, Michael, 1961– . Days like these. ISBN 978 0 522 85282 0. ISBN 0 522 85282 3. 1. Gurr, Michael, 1961– —Biography. 2. Dramatists, Australian —20th century—Biography. 3. Dramatists, Australian— 21st century—Biography. 4. Speechwriters—Victoria— Biography. I. Title. A822.3

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page v

For my niece and nephews Andrew, Celia, James, Joshua, Lewis and Nicholas

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page vi

Michael Gurr

vi

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page vii

Contents One thing leads to another

1

Days Like These

5

Acknowledgements

285

DLT 0 prelims (i-viii) 6/21/06 4:46 AM Page viii

Michael Gurr

viii

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 1

One thing leads to another

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 2

Michael Gurr

One thing leads to another.

Asked to audition as the presenter of an arts program on ABC Radio National, I go along. The audition involves presenting the show—live. I quiz the outgoing host, Michael Cathcart, about a book he’s co-editing—a collection of Australian speeches. Two years later, he asks me to launch Stirring Australian Speeches at a bookshop in Brunswick. Sybil Nolan of Melbourne University Publishing, hearing the launch speech, asks me to write an essay for a book about the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Reading the essay, she suggests the book you hold now. The idea is to set down what it’s been like to work in the theatre and at the edges of politics over a couple and a bit decades. To be born in 1961, begin work in the early 1980s, to still be at it in 2006. To pause, lift my head and have a look around. Generalisations that label eras or decades as one thing or another make me uncomfortable. But in setting these things down, it’s hard to ignore the temperature of different times. And I realise that I have been in and of time, more influenced by the cultural climate than I thought. The exploratory 1970s, the jittery 1980s, the divided 1990s beginning politically in hope and moving up to the present—with so many in furious bewilderment at a time when truth has lost its currency—nationally and worldwide. From the detail of Australian politics to the making of war, a new kind of dishonesty seems to be in fashion—and its effect has yet to be properly felt. This book takes a discontinuous form because that’s how it arrived—one thing would lead me to something else so I would write about that. It follows an internal chronology rather than the calendar. With the exception of the political diaries, it’s all been written in retrospect. I’ve followed the instruction I was given: What did it feel like at the time?

2

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 3

Days Like These

I live in Melbourne’s West with my partner of fourteen years, Brandon Hardie Jones. He appears as ‘Hardie’ in these diaries and only infrequently because this book is mostly about work. And anyway, good things are harder to describe than difficult ones. Likewise the friends who sustain me more than they imagine make only guest appearances. Hardie disputes that this is possible, but my first memory is at eighteen months. I’m sitting on a table being posed for one of those official baby photographs. The photographer is taking a long time to set up and I want him to get a move on—this was the birth of impatience. I also recall my first ambition—to be an adult. I imagined and kept imagining that a certainty and clarity would somehow settle around me when that wonderful moment came. Politics and art would somehow set the world to rights. It’s no big surprise to find that certainty and clarity remain always out of reach, but a question haunts me: Do we change much? Or do we spend our time gathering evidence for the first things we felt? Days Like These is a diary about faith and home. Faith, because that’s turned out to be the subject of most of my writing; home, because it describes various places where I’ve tried to make one. Michael Gurr Footscray

3

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 4

Michael Gurr

4

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 5

Ten year olds don’t get a lot of mail

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 6

Michael Gurr

November 1971 Ten year olds don’t get a lot of mail, so it’s an event to find a letter addressed to you on the kitchen bench after school. It’s written in old lady’s handwriting on a small piece of notepaper. Included is a green two-dollar note. She is writing to say how sorry she is to hear about my paraplegia, how she was moved by the poem I wrote about my condition, how she admired the bravery I showed by having it published in the Herald and that I might spend the two dollars on something to brighten my day. The Herald has published the poem in their ‘Kidz’ section, announcing it with a mere, ‘Here is a poem by Michael Gurr, aged 10. He says it is a look at the world through the eyes of a paraplegic’. It’s a guilty thrill: the joy of having convinced someone. Returning the money doesn’t hurt at all. She writes back to say she’s glad I’m not a paraplegic, has spent the money on some needy children and good luck with my poetry. You can feel the bristle in her tone. My maternal grandmother asks me if it would be possible to write some happier poems. Ivy wants something a bit more uplifting; she especially doesn’t like the one about the war in Vietnam, though at least it rhymes. We are sitting together watching the sea from the verandah of her house in a service-station and milk-bar town called Indented Head. This is the usual destination for school holidays, where a walk to look at the disappearing wreck of the paddle steamer Ozone is a regular event. At some unspoken signal, Ivy goes inside the house and returns with a large book. Today it is Van Gogh. At other times it will be Italian sculpture or Renaissance painting. She handles these books with infinite respect—they contain a kind of magic. We look through them, very slowly, mostly in silence. It seems we stare at each colour plate for five minutes before the page is turned. Time drifts. 6

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 7

Days Like These

Holidays exaggerate my feeling at ten years old that nothing ever happens, a sense of perpetual waiting, whether on a kitchen chair, a beach or at night under a drift of mosquito repellent in the bungalow. Tomorrow there will be a church service in Portarlington, followed by a long afternoon watching great uncles and aunts play at lawn bowls. The white and green of summer, the knock of bowl on bowl, the afternoon tea. None of this has boredom’s fidget, it is more like time suspended, the narcotic effect on a child of spending long hours with old people. Van Gogh’s chair is a lightning strike, a point of voltage, a postcard from somewhere where something is actually happening.

Februar y 1969 Mrs Neat wears a hat and teaches religious instruction. On Tuesday mornings she comes into our classroom at Lloyd Street Central School and relates Bible stories to the modern world. The Prophet Amos was like a newsreader, but he had good news to tell. The Centurions were like bad police, if we could imagine such a thing. She is like a skinny Margaret Rutherford.Very interested in hygiene, she is strongly opposed to handkerchiefs, which she sees as germ factories. Tissues only, she says, demonstrating the use of one and dropping it decisively into the bin. I enjoy Mrs Neat, I like her whole mad endeavour: to find modern analogies for ancient Middle Eastern politics. But then I discover that hers is a solo show—audience participation is not welcome. I ask her, not entirely innocently, whether Jesus had brown skin, given where he was born. Her look is savage—she has identified An Enemy and I am exorcised from the classroom. In the corridor, she zeroes in: Where did I get these kinds of ideas? What was I trying to prove? She was furious and going to need a tissue in 7

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 8

Michael Gurr

a minute. Getting sent to the Principal for under-age sedition is no fun, but experiencing a capacity to upset is oddly exciting.

October 1968 My father’s parents live in a sparsely furnished flat a long way from the big white house in Malaysia where my grandfather worked for Pacific Tin. It’s very quiet here, with my grandmother having taken to her bed, a presence to be visited at arranged times, her soft worn leather Bible never far from her side. The detail of what is spoken has passed into a tone: courtesy and decorum, an elevated sense of good behaviour. My grandfather speaks only very occasionally of his previous life: the war he spent in Changi and Syme Road Jail, of chalk marks drawn around each man’s space, to be crossed at some danger. He had delayed leaving Singapore—believing along with all Englishmen that Churchill would defend the place. When the truth dawned he had the family dog put down and buried under a palm tree outside the Raffles Hotel. His wife and son waited in Australia. The images are colonial, the life recalled in genteel calm as if through tropical growth or under soporific ceiling fans. My grandmother’s German-American past remains shrouded—a career as an English teacher is talked of—but not the name change from Messerschmitt to Smith. I listen a lot, sit still, absorbing images but not meanings. Again the sense of waiting, of hoping that something will begin.

8

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 9

Days Like These

Februar y 1973 At the National Theatre Drama School in St Kilda, the Director

Joan Harris sits behind her desk. Her office is a clutter of actor’s head-shots, crumbling props and mugs full of dead biros. She has maintained a conversation here for years. It feels like one you can drop in and out of, whoever you are: terrified wannabe actor, staff teacher or pushy parent. The place is divided into two halves—a serious course for adult actors and Saturday morning classes for everyone under eighteen, where I have enrolled. The conversation in Joan’s office is about making things happen. Not about theatre necessarily, but something. For Joan, standing still is the enemy of talent. She radiates an endless curiosity, an enabling warmth. Whatever your idea or problem, you want to leave this office with her endorsement. I started coming here when I was twelve. It’s the first place I’ve been excited and at ease. There is now something beyond the endless Monday to Friday of the maths I cannot grasp, the lunch hours that stretch into days and the hundred-yard races I excel at but can’t see the point of. A student with a fast mouth and a melancholy that won’t go away, I don’t know what to do with most of what I think. Weekends aren’t much better: what exactly is supposed to happen? I watch other twelve year olds with a kind of bewildered envy as they throw themselves enthusiastically into this or that. I’ve started writing, copiously, aimlessly, sometimes filling a page with the same sentence repeated over and over, just to will something into being. I have a vague sense that my presence somehow offends some of the kids around me at school, that I am always on fairly thin ice. Two or three teachers had tried to help. Little moments of private encouragement, or warnings against standing out too much that I

9

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 10

Michael Gurr

didn’t understand. And then, at last, the eccentric authoritarian who said I should go to the National Theatre Drama School. A man in Coca-Cola print trousers who powered around Lloyd Street State School ordering people about with a kind of effervescent glee. It’s called a drama school but we’re not learning acting. It’s far removed from a talent school for kids who want to be on TV. It seems more connected to finding out how to live. Sure, we learn improvisation and we put on little shows, but it’s light-years away from showbiz. There are three cards on Joan Harris’s noticeboard: TRUST. RISK. ALLOW. Actors must trust their colleagues, actors must take risks, actors must allow new things to happen without fear or ego getting in the way. But these things are bigger than theatre.

Februar y 1981 By the time I’m too old for the junior classes at the National, the writing has turned into plays. Today I am sitting opposite Joan Harris but I can’t hear much of what she is saying because I am staring at a stack of fresh photocopies of the first play I’ve written. This is like being published. The play is called Indoors, a Joe Ortonish domestic murder-comedy, and Joan is going to put on a public reading. Actual actors are going to say my actual words in front of an actual audience. The reading happens, an audience comes, they react. I can’t hear a thing. It’s my first experience of writer’s vertigo—a sensation so exciting and strange that you are deaf to the experience, terrified, and want it immediately to happen again. For the next few months I bring Joan play after play. I work as a stage manager for one of her senior school productions, wrangling a cast of twenty-six. She commissions me, for $600, to write a play for her students. The First Church in Hell, with a cast of thirty-three,

10

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 11

Days Like These

is ostensibly a comedy about religious evangelism in the outback, but it’s really an exercise in traffic management. And then she bundles up all my plays and sends them to Ray Lawler, who is Literary Adviser at Melbourne Theatre Company. I’m invited in to meet him and Carmel Powers, who works there with him assessing plays.

September 1981 Melbourne Theatre Company’s rehearsal and administrative building is known as The Factory. On the red train down there I’m headynervous. Ray and Carmel are interested, curious, Ray particularly about the surreal little collages I make as covers for my plays. Would I like to sit in on rehearsals? For a month or two I watch John Sumner and Bruce Myles directing plays. A discreet presence in the corner, I barely speak to anyone, but there is something about the way these people work that is making me feel at home. It’s a combination of rigour and fun. The work seems very serious yet it’s punctuated by moments of silliness, breakouts of dirty humour. The rhythm of it strikes me as exactly right. Some money is found and I’m offered a job: Playwright-inResidence. No-one seems to know exactly what this job means and it turns out to be pretty much what you want it to be. I’m given a desk, a typewriter and the run of the building. On Day One, I learn something about the role of Marketing and Sponsorship in the subsidised theatre. The man who runs this stuff approaches me as I settle in. He wants my typewriter. His justification is simple: —I have a greater need for it than you do. I stand my ground. For six months, I do what I have never done since: write from nine to five. The workings of a big organisation

11

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 12

Michael Gurr

like this are intimidating for a while, I feel slightly apologetic for my presence. Ray Lawler comes over to my desk. —You don’t have to stay ‘til 5 p.m. every day, you know. We grow closer. He hints at things I should be reading, encourages my disrespect for the formalities of a large organisation, takes me to the pub. When he sees me bored, he asks me to read a few unsolicited scripts, to tell him what I think. It’s very hard to learn anything from great plays—a perfectly realised play has a secret in it that can’t be copied and should just be enjoyed. Crap, unproducable plays are full of instruction: they show you exactly where things have gone wrong. When the six months are over a little party is held in Ray and Carmel’s office. We gather around the cask and chips. John Sumner, until then a fairly distant, unapproachable man, appears in the room. —What’s this in aid of? He’s told. —Then what are you going to do now? He’s told that I have no idea. —Then would you like to stay on? In a few minutes, money is found for another six months and the cask is put sheepishly back in the cupboard. The second half of the year is more loose. I write less, drift in and out of rehearsals more, there are more laughs. To walk from one rehearsal room to another is a series of seductions. I am utterly seduced by Brecht, but realise that his theories don’t actually work when applied to his plays. It’s only when the actors forget to alienate us that the scenes start to live. Or maybe he knew that vulnerable flesh on stage was enough

12

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 13

Days Like These

and you didn’t need to emote? After lunch, a different room, the precisely calibrated moves of actors creating a perfect period world. I watch an hour of bowing. Then back to Brecht. An actor has gone too far with emotion: how to pull it back and show it without telling us how to feel? Then someone else has got it exactly right: there is something called intellectual warmth, where you feel the thing completely but don’t tell the audience what conclusion they should draw. Back across the corridor, women in hoop skirts are still bowing before the Emperor. But not quite right, let’s try that again. Is theatre the only form that people want to work in while knowing so little about it? Aspiring novelists have read novels, violinists have at least heard recordings, but it’s not unusual to meet young playwrights who have seen maybe two plays and read none. This was me: an iron filing to a magnet I knew nothing about. When the year was over, I loftily declined the offer of a job as an assistant stage manager. Twenty-one year olds know when they’ve learnt all they need to know about theatre. The Commonwealth Employment Service only asks that you write down that you’ve looked in the newspapers for a job, scanned the boards in their office and dated your form correctly.

13

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 14

Michael Gurr

November 1975 The playground at Lloyd Street State School is like most of its kind. A few scrappy trees, blue-gray asphalt, a stainless-steel trough of drinking fountains and a caretaker who never talks. His storeroom smells of dust, fuel and damp and is utterly off-limits. But the toughest kid in the school has a key and he stands at the door like a bouncer and admits a stream of fourteen-year-old boys who go in there to fuck, or pretend to fuck, the bad girl with nail polish who wants to be everybody’s friend. Leanne wasn’t that girl. She didn’t join in the competition without rules that is life among fourteen year olds. She didn’t learn the Sharpie dances, she didn’t care whether she was part of the In Group. She laughed at things, couldn’t be bothered with the aggro, and we were friends. When she walked up to me in the playground on November 11, 1975, and said that one of the teachers had just told her the government had been sacked, I didn’t believe her. I said, in a tone I have spent my adult life trying to suppress:

—No. I’m sorry. That’s just not possible. Leanne said: —Wanna bet? We shook on it and the next day I gave her a green two-dollar note. She didn’t really want the money because she thought that Whitlam’s sacking was a bad thing. Between the sacking and the December election, things got a little hot at Lloyd Street. We wrote ‘Fraser’ on the blackboard, replacing the ‘s’ with a swastika. A teacher countered by chalking up the word ‘Whitlam’ with the ‘w’ and the ‘m’ crossed out. We thought ours was better. ‘Shame, Fraser, Shame’ badges were banned. My big yellow

14

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 15

Days Like These

‘We Want Gough’ badge was confiscated. Some of us wagged school to sit in what was then Melbourne’s City Square holding art-class paper we’d painted up with generically outraged slogans. What was I thinking? Why did I want Gough? I knew that somehow something unfair had happened. To object to the Dismissal was to be against those who picked on people. I wonder if that taunted girl at Lloyd Street who couldn’t sit for her father’s whip marks on her legs is alive now. Schoolyard wisdom said she stank and if you sat next to her you’d get her germs. There were songs about her. It seems to me that if you lined up against the bullies you probably thought the Dismissal was wrong. Not that we put two and two together; not that we stood up for her all that much; it was just a feeling of knowing which side you were on. I cycle down to Joan Child’s office: she’s the local Labor candidate. I knock on the door and she opens it. I want to join the ALP. In fact, to a fourteen year old it doesn’t feel like an alternative government at all, more like an oppressed minority. Joan Child asks me how old I am. It’s a dilemma: I’m not old enough for Young Labor. She says to come back when I turn sixteen. I don’t. Probably just as well. By then I was knocking on a shop-front in Glenhuntly Road looking for another home, a place that gives order and purpose to instinct and anxiety. It’s a place where you imagine a sense of rightness and appropriateness will settle around you. A place where self-consciousness is happily subsumed to a common cause. I think I’m grateful to Joan Child for sending me away. God knows what would have happened.

15

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 16

Michael Gurr

August 1977 He wears the tiniest shorts you’ve ever seen, smokes constantly

and smells of booze. He doesn’t actually teach us about English Literature, he just demonstrates its glamour. David Niven, Melbourne High School’s Lit boss, lays down the law to provoke you. —There is only Shakespeare and Chekhov. Everything else is shit. —Gerard Manley Hopkins is better than you think, a fact you will one day discover for yourselves. —T. S. Eliot only wrote one decent poem. I’m going to read it to you now. He picks on you and sends you to the nearest servo for more cigarettes. Wills Super Mild are less than a dollar a pack. He gives me an A for my essay on Sylvia Plath and then pauses dramatically. —Brilliant essay. But however much you like her, you really shouldn’t refer to the poet by her first name. There’s more than a touch of the amateur actor in him, the pleasure he takes in his rich cigarette-wrecked voice, his studied outrageousness. Later, I hear that his life has cracked and the discreet powers at Melbourne High School have employed him to wash bottles in the science department. He’s sleeping at the school. They are looking after him. I heard they even drove his coffin past the school in a guncarriage. Striding into a classroom, David Niven will pretend-shout at the least likely kid: —Read me an Emily Dickinson poem! The boy chokes through it.

16

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 17

Days Like These

—That’s not how you do it. This is how you do it. And throws the switch to actor. The ten of us sitting in a basement classroom are allowed in on a wonderful joke. That novels and poems are sexy and important. After we’ve all sobbed our way through Jude the Obscure he reads us the sequence where the eldest child hangs his siblings in a cupboard and has us in stitches. He’s teaching disrespect. —Who’s rooting a bird at MacRob? says David Niven. Two hands go up. —Well, I don’t think a same-sex school encourages homosexuality, do you? As if we’re going to answer. His unpredictability is so unlike anything else that all of us skip through to high marks for English Lit by doing no work at all.

17

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 18

Michael Gurr

June 1979 The staffroom in the art department at Melbourne High School

is a haven for smart-arse misfits. The teachers there, Rebecca and Frances, smoke and laugh and indulge us. When I meet Frances again years later, she smiles. —We didn’t really teach you anything, did we? She pauses. —Except for the things that mattered. She’s right. They teach us to discriminate a little, and what looks shambolic is in fact a tumbling, disordered generosity. You can say anything, ask anything, promote any idea. Whatever we do is OK if it’s either fun or true. Self-indulgence gets short shrift. From the outside, the room that is permanently scented with France’s Gaulois smoke probably looks clubby and like a form of in-school wagging. It sometimes is, but it’s also an argument about telling the difference between bullshit and real. A good teacher lets you carry on like you’re the only person who has ever seen a Rothko, the first to read Rimbaud. Situationists, performance artists, sudden five-minute infatuations with Max Beckman—it’s art history on fast forward. The art room is also the place where kids can hide, sometimes in cupboards, so they can avoid playing the sport they dread. Pansy sanctuary. Leigh Bowery is there, though he isn’t mates with the teachers the way a couple of us are. Leigh is metaphorically saving up for his airfare, no-one gets very close to him. Later he will turn up as the subject of Lucien Freud paintings, perform gross-out performance art pieces in London, die and be portrayed by Boy George in the West End. But now he does flat acrylic paintings that are part cosmetics

18

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 19

Days Like These

poster, part Warhol. He casts a cynical, knowing eye over the life that is trapping him in Melbourne—holding court without having a court. Bowery plays dry ironic jokes, like choosing an unlikely candidate for adoration and running a graffiti campaign on the subject’s beauty. It is a brutal kind of humour. A boy who was effeminate or in some other way cut from different cloth could always expect the usual dose of exclusion or bullying, but I never saw Bowery copping any flak. Partly because he was built like a rugby player—but he also behaved with an outrageousness that neutralised any attack. When someone is giving a very big, faggy performance, calling them a fag is hardly hurtful. Likewise a corridor encounter between an effeminate student who had taken to wearing foundation make-up and his would-be tormentor. Shirt-fronted outside a classroom, the make-up boy simply raised an eyebrow. The tormentor was literally lost for words.

May 1993 Asked to return to Melbourne High to speak to their student assembly, I put together a speech that aims to provoke a little, to give courage to the excluded. But time has passed and I feel a sophistication and ease coming off this audience. What I am saying seems somehow past its time—a good feeling, but also a disconcerting one. I realise I am speaking to them as though from inside a time capsule—defending the outsiders and ratbags who I now sense are more easily accommodated. I have sat in this hall as a student and watched this happening: the returning ex-student slightly reliving old battles.

19

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 20

Michael Gurr

Januar y 1976 The singer isn’t singing, he’s yelling. The band are ramshackle, the

sound is muddy, the crowd full-on. He gets to the end of a verse, pauses endlessly, seems to walk away from the microphone, turns back and snarls the chorus like it doesn’t matter. Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain concert is broadcast on TV and something falls into place. I actually—how can I put this?—find my instamatic camera and take pictures of the television. Later, it turned out this was the shabby end of the Rolling Thunder Revue; all the lyricism and theatricality had gone by then. But right now, it is imperative to own the album of this concert. The day after seeing the show, it is strangely pleasurable to discover how few kids at school liked it. The snobbery of the pop music crush. True fans, unselfconscious and rapt, find everything infatuating. I absorb the back of the record cover. I memorise liner notes as keenly as the lyrics. Fudged lines, sloppy endings, backing singers coming in at the wrong moment: all these things are right. Idiot Wind burns the house down around you. How can something be so vague and so precise at once? It could be about anything or anybody. The fury of it is exhilarating. It’s a big open wound of a song and this live performance is so misanthropic that you can’t keep the grin off your face. If you’re fifteen and impatient to crystallise vague impulses into something concrete, this album arrives like a new set of clothes. While not your own, they will certainly do until the real thing turns up. Sometimes art throws up things that are both exact and elusive, that come from a very particular sensibility but somehow leave room enough for us to not just look at them but inhabit them. It happens more often in music than anywhere else, but the best paintings do

20

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 21

Days Like These

it. An open expression on the face of a Vermeer woman, the biggest, deepest Rothkos. Bits of Mahler tell you something different each time. They’re the works you feel some sort of partnership with, even ownership of. There’s a swoon in being a fan, an uncritical abandonment, only a little like love, because it lacks love’s outward impulse. The crushfan is focused inwards, the music exists only for him. It’s an overripe moment, sublime and adolescent, in love with the idea of creativity. Bob Dylan drops into my life like a fat encyclopaedia. Suddenly this is the real homework. To get through everything he’s recorded is more important than sitting at a desk in a schoolroom listening to the rat-sized man who is shrinking The Grapes of Wrath to a series of symbols, motifs, themes and objectives. One of those human calculators who could reduce ice-cream to its molecular compounds and leave you with nothing to eat. Along the way in the Dylan education you encounter the Dylan-maddies, the obsessed ones, but you wave them past. They’re silly, they don’t get it. They’re toddlers, I’m real. The intellectual snobbery of a fifteen year old—the only forgivable kind. The intense involvement of being a fan has its shadow-side. A fan can mistake the internal thrill for the real thing; he can come to believe that the thing he loves has been invented for him alone. And when real love or grief or compromise don’t arrive to push him into the messy, plural, grown-up world, things can go wrong. If you can’t share your obsession, or laugh at it, you start to build a cocoon. The fan becomes the owner of what he loves. The collector becomes a hoarder, the follower a stalker. Unless he realises that the joy is shared, he takes a gun to school. The gun isn’t always real, sometimes it is carried in a pocket behind the ribs: a hatred for everything that doesn’t feed me. Those who cling to this way of

21

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 22

Michael Gurr

experiencing the world beyond adolescence find the worries of others boring.You can sometimes see them on the news: autodidact young men being led away with jackets over their heads. The clothes I borrowed at fifteen came from music and from the plays I discovered. There’s that word: I had discovered them. I began more than one conversation with a theatre-wise adult with something like: —Are you familiar with Ionesco? To their credit, the answer was mostly a neutral Yes. Recognising the fan, they mostly resisted the impulse to slap me or walk away. Because, of course, I was the first person to read Ionesco. The first to discover the possibilities of absurdism. The third play I wrote finished with a stage image of a gigantic birthday cake into which the protagonist had put the chopped-up bodies of the residents of his rooming house. If there’s a better image of a narcissistic adolescent ego I can’t think of it just now. Now, I see him singing Happy Birthday to himself and I get the point. Then, I think I thought the protagonist was taking some sort of unspecified revenge on the world. I’m writing a few plays like this, half-digested absurdism and a fair slug of Joe Orton. You could revel in the sex’n’murder of John Lahr’s biography, the playwright as sexual adventurer and scourge of the establishment, but underneath was the stylist, the formalist. Joe Orton wanted his work presented beautifully: he knew that to properly goose an audience they had to be unsuspecting. He hated the experimental. Fans imitate, writers try on styles. It’s hardly conscious—it’s most like someone realising they can sing but not knowing exactly how or exactly which songs. As the ideas form, the craft itches for an outlet. It’s all a muddle. Orton for his sexy epigrams, Edward Albee

22

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 23

Days Like These

for the Jamesian paragraphs, a workout to see how long you can keep a single sentence going. At Melbourne Theatre Company in 1983, Patricia Kennedy stops mid-rehearsal of A Pair of Claws. She’s rehearsing a very long speech. She turns to me. —It’s a bit like Albee, isn’t it? You have to drive the idea through with all those little interruptions coming in between. In one of my least convincing performances I pretend I haven’t read much Albee. Now I think of it, she may have been giving a note to the rest of the cast rather than trying to out me as an imitator. She was probably telling them how to act it—and she would have been right. I’m writing a new play every couple of months. There’s the physical pleasure of writing a character’s name on one side of the page and what they say a few spaces across. Talk’s addictive because it’s all we do. Plays are the least lonely thing to write because there’s always a reply coming. Someone is always about to interrupt.

May 2001 Asked to write 800 words for a newspaper on the state of something—theatre, native title, the Labor Party—I run out of steam at 400. I’ve said what I want to say. Unless someone butts in I can’t get the energy to go on.

August 2004 Bob Dylan at some stadium or other. Now that he’s in his sixties, everything is connecting up. The ancient American folk songs are exposing themselves in his songs. Things are coming together: the

23

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 24

Michael Gurr

performance shows you the bones of where the music came from. He’s called his CD Love and Theft. The ego of originality has given way to something more.You hear old influences coming up, alluded to. At this time of life, simple blues and Woody Guthrie are sort of nodding at each other across Bob Dylan’s songs. There’s a harmony here that is encouraging at exactly the right time. I’m trying to write a play that indicates rather than explains. The Simple Truth is trying to open doors, not walk you through them. This concert gives me courage. More importantly, it gives me back a sense of humour, puts purpose back in my step. The old man seems to be having fun. I don’t know why musicians and writers never meet in Australia. I don’t want interesting crossover projects, but I think we might be able to egg each other on.

24

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 25

Days Like These

June 1996 Tired of shouting at the television screen and fed up with the bullying personality of the Kennett government, I write some paragraphs for Labor Leader John Brumby’s campaign. I fax them to his Chief of Staff who rings and says thanks. They use a bit of what I wrote, lose the election and I get a phone call. I meet with Brumby and walk away realising that I now have a part-time job. We haven’t sat down and talked about anything much, I’ve just shaken his hand and been put on as a part-time speechwriter. OK. It seems that the Victorian Labor Party is trying to beat Kennett at his own game. It’s become a fight between the leaders to be the toughest kid in the school. In Parliament, Scotch College Jeff taunts Melbourne Grammar John with the old Scotch line:

—If you can’t get a girl, get a Grammar boy! It’s like that a lot. John Brumby, doing what everyone agrees is the toughest job in Victorian politics, seems straitened by the conventions of the role. Cast as Opposition Leader, he plays it with conviction, but you sense that no-one is listening to Labor. The Kennett fireworks fill the sky, the booster-party is in full swing: who wants to hear about someone’s grandma stuck on a hospital trolley? John Brumby always gives a professional performance, but people don’t see much of his warmth. Privately, he’s friendly—on TV he snaps to attention. The truism ‘Oppositions never win elections, governments only lose them’ is only half true. Partly it’s about changing the subject, something Labor can’t seem to do right now. Starting a conversation in a different part of the room and hoping like mad that people will come over and join in. In 1996 we’re the wallflowers. Opposition happens in physically cramped offices and is prey to odd moods. There is never any shortage of people to tell you how 25

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 26

Michael Gurr

badly things are going, and many engage in the comforting sport of talking down a half-good idea. We’re like a little herd of Eeyores, A. A. Milne’s defensively depressed donkey. —Good Morning, Eeyore. —Is it? asks Eeyore. Opposition breeds a grim pleasure in some personalities. An adviser meets me in the corridor. —What are you working on? —Brumby’s speech for the State ALP Conference. He can’t contain himself. —Oh God, the Conference speech! Oh Jesus. The dear old Conference speech! He’s cackling now. —Have fun, mate! Have fun! I’m left standing in the corridor thinking that a certain amount of pessimism is probably justified at this time—the Party is at its lowest post-Split point. But glee? Old retired hands offer dark warnings to the rookie speechwriter about the people he is soon to meet: —They’ll set up meetings with two groups, mate. The ethnics and the disabled. Avoid them. Do whatever you can. Jump under a tram, hide under someone’s desk, just don’t get stuck in a room with them. Speechwriting is invisible work—it should be—but an odd sort of magic attaches to it. In a tight corner, a bit of rhetorical lift can

26

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 27

Days Like These

do wonders for everyone’s spirits. People peer at the words in a speech differently to the way they examine a policy release. They hunt through speeches looking for answers. They’re suspicious of you because what you do is just outside the realm of things that can be calculated. You’re taking other people’s work and moving it around, trying to translate it into the voice of the man who will say it, driving it with whatever emotion you think it can hold. You’re taking policy and statistics and trying to make them personal. There are plenty of hands involved in putting a speech together and the writer in me learns pretty smartly that this is a different world, where fondness for a turn of phrase is merely quaint and, especially for speeches addressed to the Party, nuance is everything. It is explained to you that any talk about reform of the education system must be balanced by an equal number of words praising teachers— or else the teacher unions will be itchy in their seats. Of course, the written speech may not be delivered at all—reading the room, the leader might decide to talk about football instead. There are only a couple of speeches for John Brumby that we get right: they are the fighting ones when his leadership is under pressure. The best one was his last Conference speech when some union leaders staged a mini-walkout. I’d been looking forward to the coverage of that speech. The Herald Sun gave us ‘Labor’s Day of Hate’. I can’t say I’m enjoying this job. Long unproductive conversations about how bad everything is don’t lift my spirits like they seem to for some. But then I didn’t sign on for fun. I signed on to find a useful place to put anger. It’s an ugly administration Kennett runs. There’s the disability service that’s had its budget cut by 60 per cent. They’ve been told that if they speak in public about this cut they’ll lose the rest. Dedicated people are given an impossible choice: struggle on delivering an inadequate service, or get a fivesecond run on the news and deliver nothing.

27

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 28

Michael Gurr

Jeff Kennett preens a lot, he runs a fairly preening government. They strut and puff their chests out and act like the state is a fun park run according to very strict rules. I’ve never been to Disney World, but I met someone who worked there once. She got paid lousy money for jumping around in a silly costume. The Empire of Compulsory Joy. Sometimes you feel the state government is just one step away from putting its ministers into uniform. I write an overblown, hyperbolic piece for The Age called ‘Victoria: The S & M State’. They reject it. I had tried to explain something I feel instinctively: that there are moments in history when people seem to take a weird pleasure in being punished. In Victoria’s case, a decade of Labor government had, either symbolically or actually, spiralled down into a kind of dull chaos. Even people who were about to vote Labor had the wry wince on their faces. They knew what was coming and half-felt they deserved it. People seemed eager for Jeff Kennett’s short sharp shock. It was the Thatcher vision of zero government, but with added ad-man. As nurses and teachers were sacked, schools closed and judges seen off, flash events and big new buildings appeared. We didn’t deserve woolly-cardigan things like clean hospitals and well-run schools. We needed punishment. And after our punishment, our eyes red and the backs of our legs smarting from the strap: cake. Casinos and car races. Journalism simply died in Victoria. At some level, reporters wanted the approval of the man. You could almost see them lining up for a smack.

March 1999 It’s happened. John Brumby has stood aside and Steve Bracks is the new leader of the Victorian Labor Party. I’m called in for a meeting.

28

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 29

Days Like These

Officially I am just a speechwriter, I write speeches, that’s all. I’m handed notes in bulk, facts and figures, and I try to distil them into something that someone might actually say. So how to explain this other role, this sense of responsibility? Steve Bracks is not a man for a lazy chat, there’s a diary in his head. He thinks three meetings into the future. If there’s nothing actually happening he doesn’t exactly shoot the breeze. Our moments alone are punctuated with silences, both of us working out the next step. Out of one of these silences I get an idea. What if I asked you questions for an hour, wrote up the answers as an autobiographical essay and we offer that to the press? A sort of ‘get to know the new guy’? We do this. He likes the result but the press think it’s corny and no-one runs it. But out of this go-nowhere exercise come some of the words for the campaign. With the Kennett glitter still wowing the press, it takes a monumental effort for the Opposition Leader’s staff to galvanise around ordinary things like the numbers of kids in classrooms. Labor’s natural pessimism surges up and down. Staffers are sometimes happiest when things are going badly. The feeling is more familiar. But the unnoticed work that John Brumby has done in regional Victoria, tapping into Kennett’s neglect, fuelling their resentment of the city, is quietly paying off. The dining room of the Victorian Parliament is old-fashioned like the Coles caf. I sit down opposite Steve Bracks and order a cup of tea. He likes this place. —You know, this is probably the only place left in Melbourne where you can get tomatoes on a Salada biscuit. And then he politely unpicks the speech I’ve written. He wants all the anger taken out of it. What you write at home at 11 p.m. feels fine. But it looks over the top at 11 a.m. in the Parliamentary Dining Room over Saladas. I take the speech home and tone it

29

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 30

Michael Gurr

down. We won’t compare Jeff to Joh. Cheap grab. In fact we should stop talking about Jeff at all. It’s a speech about law reform and you become an instant shallow expert. I feel I’ve got a four out of ten. What strikes me most on the tram home is how much everyone must work to the top of their form in Opposition. The sheer energy it takes to stay connected and interested. You open the newspaper and someone writes: —Here is another nice-looking man in a suit who will be sacrificed to the lost cause that is the Victorian Labor Party. At least when you put on a play you get slagged for doing something. In Opposition you get slagged before you do anything. Steve Bracks actually cares about infrastructure: he doesn’t just think it’s a good idea, he gets excited about it. I smack my forehead, often and hard, trying to find a better word for infrastructure than infrastructure. A word that would make us actually see a schoolroom, a hospital ward, a train station, actually visualise it, a word that would connect government to daily life. I’ve never found it. There’s a meeting with media and policy advisers in Steve Bracks’s office. We’re going over a speech. There’s a sentence in it that I have to fight for. ‘We must not be afraid to demand from government the things we demand from each other.’ It seems to me to sum up the central problem of politics. I don’t explain myself well at this meeting—you get points for calm reasoning, not for simple insistence. And because I am part-time, with no desk and therefore less familiarity with the office, I know I have outsider status. But this idea seems to me to be at the very heart of the fight for anyone on the Left. How do you take the common daily gestures of generosity and expand them into public policy? Your friend needs fifty bucks to get her through the week. That old guy is struggling with the coin-return mechanism on his supermarket trolley.

30

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 31

Days Like These

Of course you help them if you can, of course you do. But how to expand the ordinary into something bigger—that’s the challenge. Then I realise that the objection to my line is not to the sentiment, but to the sentence construction. It doesn’t exactly zing. The Labor Party is a family you join by choice, but once you put your foot on the flypaper you tend to get stuck. Like all families, it is dominated by clichés. Once you’ve said something about the blacks or—God help you—women, you wear that tattoo forever. One false move and an unspoken nickname murmurs at your every appearance. Labor is founded on a simple question: How can the place be made more fair ? Because of the ‘soft’ emotion behind that question, and because the Party is run by men, its functionaries suppress feeling with a quite surprising vigour. They get very emotional on big occasions like fundraisers and election nights and later put the emotion down to drink. Like most bloke-worlds, there’s a lot of competition for status. And like all bloke-worlds it is attended and served by resigned, forgiving women.

31

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 32

Michael Gurr

Februar y 1983 Upstairs at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne Theatre Company’s smallest venue, the lights go up on the first performance of Magnetic North, a short play I’ve written. It’s part of the company’s season of short plays—bite-sized Brecht, bits of European absurdism. My play is about … nothing, really. I can’t remember why I wrote it. At twenty, I am flexing theatre muscles, trying on styles. It’s a piece of derivative absurdism about a meeting between a judge, a prisoner on trial and the judge’s butler. The judge, for reasons I can’t recall, spends the thirty-five minutes of the play in a bath. Real water, real bubbles. I think it’s been selected as a meditation on the use of power and the slippery nature of perceived reality. Or something. The actors give it all they’ve got, the audience helpfully laughs a bit, but two feelings creep in to overshadow what is my professional theatre debut. Sitting in the audience, I feel a sense of uncomfortable responsibility: the play is written in a spirit of fun, but that fun now looks like carelessness. Things don’t connect. The cast are sweating to will it into coherence—but even absurdism has to play by internal rules if it’s not to become ho-hum. I feel a little embarrassed that I’ve left the actors out there paddling furiously to keep this folly afloat. The other feeling is one I’ll experience again and again: the delay between the writing of a play and its presentation means you are often stifling a small urge to cry out to the audience:

—I’ve moved on! The play I’m working on now is streets ahead of this! Instead of enjoying tonight’s experience, I’m fighting an urge to rush home and finish the new play, the polar opposite of Magnetic North, a play that is stiflingly naturalistic and airless. Dry Storm, a play

32

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 33

Days Like These

about the claustrophobic relationship between a man and his adult twin children, prompts a script assessor/rejection-slip writer who has read all my early absurdism to write: ‘It’s as if the author has finally had the courage to admit how utterly bleak his world view is.’ Which is probably fair but misses how much fun it was to write. Dry Storm is never produced, though MTC gives it a public reading at the Russell Street Theatre. Standing on the darkened set of another play, Carol Burns, Robert van Macklenburg and Ray Lawler read the play to those Sunday enthusiasts who come along to these occasions. It’s curiously satisfying. The dark, inappropriate set, the actors standing perfectly still—this is pretty much what the play would look like if you staged it. I’m growing suspicious of this habit of giving public readings. I see how they are used as go-away presents to unproducable plays. Writers who persist in sending theatre companies draft after draft of something that will never be performed are often given a public reading. The hope is that they and their play will disappear. Someone chirps: —Why don’t we give it a reading? The smart writer will say: —Why don’t we cut out the middle shit and you just return the script? The relationship with the audiences at these events is a mixedup one. Some are 100 per cent theatre enthusiasts who would watch the actors put on make-up if they were allowed. They are always appreciative, and join in the dreaded Q and A sessions with the kind of superlatives you can’t enjoy because you know they’re not true. Sincerely meant, but not true. It just isn’t possible that this is the best

33

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 34

Michael Gurr

play they have seen in twenty years of theatre-going. Not even the 2 a.m. delusions of playwrights can accommodate that kind of praise. Others in these audiences are possessed by a kind of detail-mania. —At one point the young woman leaves to go to the library. I think you should specify that this is her local library, not the State Library, because it would take her more than twenty minutes to get back from the State Library … You nod your thanks and move on. Still others will criticise the author for an attitude belonging to a character. These moments are strangely difficult to deal with because they involve a disjoint of reality. I am completely stumped by the person who says that a young man in a play should not be so rude to his father. Blankly, I come up with: —But that’s because he’s rude. That’s who he is. For a few moments the air in the theatre is empty of all thought. No-one knows how to continue. An actor cautiously offers: —It’s a play. This doesn’t help. Of course it should be pleasing that someone has become so involved that they have developed strong opinions about the characters. But it’s a play. I’m reminded of the actress from Prisoner who was hit over the head in the supermarket with a can of Pineapple Chunks as punishment for her character’s actions on TV. It’s not all ingratitude: simply that in the immediate aftermath of a performance, even one as low-stakes as a reading, the imperative for the writer is to thank the actors and disappear. At this moment he is uniquely ill-equipped to accept anything objectively, compliment or criticism. The experience must be allowed to settle, the

34

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 35

Days Like These

impressions given time to filter through. The hours following the first public exposure of a piece of work are also physically strange. Adrenaline has collected in the joints and the skin itches with histamine. A blood test taken in these hours would probably be enough to get you admitted to hospital.

March 2004 Bruce Myles has written his first play after decades of acting and directing. He has often mocked me with his perception of my typical day. —Hard day, was it? What? Bit of writing, down to Footscray Market, walk the dogs, bit more writing? As he finishes his play, he confesses over the telephone: —Christ, I had no idea how much this physically hurts.

35

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 36

Michael Gurr

December 1966 At Tallebudgera Creek in Queensland the men stand in the

shallows, arms folded above their city bellies, forced together by the task at hand: keeping an eye on the children. Words come not in sentences but in checklists. How long was the drive? Think it’ll rain? How long are you up for? Still a bit cold for me, but the kids don’t seem to mind. The women sit elaborately under striped Neapolitan ice-cream umbrellas corkscrewed into the sand. Having ventured into a world of sand, sun and water, the purpose now is to avoid all contact with it; unless in their bathing caps, some of them stuck with pastel rubber flowers, when the girls emerge from inside the women and take to the water. That’s when I can see who they more truly are. The mother’s daughter who floats on her back as she might on a chaise; the sporty girl who strikes out for forty strokes of freestyle— alarming her husband with her prowess—before surfacing to spout a water fountain and resume her married self. In the shallows I wear what we call ‘Bomba bathers’—named I think for one of Tarzan’s juvenile offsiders. Later of course the square shorts of the men and the modest floral-panelled swimsuits of the women will become the sought-after retro beachwear of my generation. Every generation thinks it has invented irony, but chipping at it I wonder if 1990s fashions are an actual disguised yearning for the image of our parents.

March 1988 The people on St Kilda Pier at 3 a.m. are a collision of shift-workers. The insomniacs, lovers, fishermen and homeless each carefully keeping to their own. It’s not especially hot tonight, but something has brought us all here. Out beyond Kerby’s kiosk is the fence 36

DLT 01 (1-37) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 37

Days Like These

protecting the penguin colony from drunks with dogs and wooden clubs. There’s been a bit of penguin mauling, a bit of penguin bashing going on. It’s here, one of the Kerby men tells me, that they fish out the attempted suicides, every last one of them ungrateful to be brought back to land. The lovers choose the lower mooring points, half hidden and closer to the water, her cardigan covering his bobbing arse. Passing someone on the pier at night it is a breach of etiquette to nod or speak hello—no-one comes here to meet, there are parks and toilets for that. I am here because a tide of writing took me to 3 a.m. and living in a shared flat I have no reason to go to bed. I sit near one of the balustrades and fall asleep for a few minutes to the clink of masts, waking to a circle of green light in the water from a fisherman’s torch.

Januar y 2006 The surf at Mallacoota’s Bastion Point is bashing every thought out of my head. As the body is forced to learn humility in the water, the brain empties itself. Resisting at first, the mind finally gives way to nothing more than the arrival of the next wave, the body to being pummelled back into the shallows. Vanity is movingly absent in the sideways grin of a woman as she releases a cupful of sand from her swimsuit. The children of relatives and friends have formed an ad-hoc gang—they have sorted each other out, accommodated strengths and vulnerabilities. Are these children more mindful, more aware of each other’s bruises than we were? Do I imagine more compassion? Do these children seem less in thrall to one-upmanship or has salt water and sunburn softened my brain? Certainly this is real: a child, shivering after too long in the laughing line of bodysurfers, finally runs through the shallows towards what must be one of Australia’s most tender gestures—someone waiting with an outstretched towel. 37

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 38

Michael Gurr

38

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 39

Premier Kennett has chosen September 18 for the

state election

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 40

Michael Gurr

August 22, 1999 Premier Kennett has chosen September 18 for the state election.

Smack in the middle of football finals and before anyone will have got a bill for the new toll road. Neat. Kennett insults a woman from the ABC for asking about secrecy in Victoria. Every commentator writing us off. No chance at all. Is this good? Underdog status means people can safely protest vote, but real contender status means they actually listen to us and we’re reported as a serious alternative government. Who knows. My decision to work only part-time as Steve Bracks’s speechwriter and refuse to have a desk and computer in the office is coming back to bite me a bit. It’s inconvenient, the endless faxes, the train trips in and out, but I can’t imagine getting any writing done in there. You get swept up in the moment to moment and it becomes hard to think. It’s when you’re doing the washing up or cleaning up dog shit in the backyard that you get your best lines. Everyone was worrying about how to describe Kennett. We don’t want our guy to sound nasty—and it doesn’t suit him anyway—but we want something punchy to repeat. How about: ‘He’s got an opinion on everything and a solution for nothing’. It’s not an earthquake, but it’s handy. The announcement of the campaign at least washes the habitual pessimism out of the staff. There is no time now to sit around reflecting on whether this is the worst electoral shape the ALP has ever been in. Momentum creates its own hope. Spoke to Julia Gillard about the speech, she’ll be working on it with me. She emailed Head Office: —We need the policy initiatives now that the balloon has gone up.

40

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 41

Days Like These

The reply came: —What balloon? We’ve been drinking pina coladas all day. Julia: —Glad to hear gallows humour still alive in Victorian ALP. Reply: —Gallows humour? No. This is morgue humour. We will meet Tim Pallas, Bracks’s Chief of Staff, on Friday and I’ll find out then what sort of schedule I’ve got. It could be very heavy or very light. There is really only one speech for a campaign, one message, you just slot different things in depending on who you’re talking to. I suspect I’ll write things day to day and fax them. Twenty-five days. The radio is full of callers saying, ‘I’ve voted Liberal all my life, but if they let that block of flats get built in my street, I’ll take my vote elsewhere’. Yeh, right. As if. Pull the other one. Planning will only kick in as a ‘spotlight’ issue for local democracy. Planning is not a switch issue. Planning is something that relatively sophisticated voters in safe Liberal and safe Labor seats get cross about. It’s a letterwriter’s issue, not a throw-out-the-government issue. What will our battleground be? Bracks has announced the financial planning policy. Endorsed by Access Economics. This is Labor’s bid to paint over all the political graffiti about ‘financial irresponsibility’. Behind all the economic language and neatly bound folders full of figures, the message is blunt: We Promise We Won’t Send You Broke. Without persuading people of this they will never come near us. But we must have something social running alongside. It’s all about health and education, it

41

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 42

Michael Gurr

always is for us, this time with added police numbers. It would be fun to wrestle law’n’order off the Liberals. The tough bit is working out how to make the ordinary parts of people’s lives catchy, hummable. We’ve got a government that drowns out the everyday with brighter lights and louder noise. Never mind the hospitals, watch the event. I think we must do streets and suburbs and towns. They can have the Melbourne skyline. They can have the words ‘new millennium’. We have to try to build ‘new pride’ out of bread and butter. Elevate the humble to the heroic. I’m making notes for Beazley’s introduction for Bracks at the campaign launch in Ballarat. Three or four minutes. Feel it should be upbeat, light, optimistic. A couple of jokes.‘It’s time to scratch the seven-year itch.’ And I can use some of the nasty negative stuff I’ve done on Kennett—which Bracks wouldn’t, as alternative Premier, actually say. Talk about Bracks the man—the policy wonk, the conscientious politician, the family man. The first draft of the campaign launch speech has been floated around. There is deep unease about everything that mentions women. This is fascinating. I remember a meeting a couple of years back when I had two paragraphs in a speech for John Brumby about women living in the front-line of Kennett cuts. A man at that meeting leaned back in his chair and said: —What do you want him to say next? Something about Kooris? —Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, women are not a minority group. It was all kind of jocular, in that boysy, jocular Labor way, but the point was clear. That talking directly to 52 per cent of the population was somehow special pleading. The language wasn’t especially bolshie, it was trying to make the point that it’s mostly mothers who know what’s going on at their children’s schools, who know how 42

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 43

Days Like These

long it takes to see a doctor during a child’s asthma attack. Not always but mostly. But when you talk to people about women being worth talking to directly, explicitly, they agree with you but their eyes go blank. At some deep level, women are still seen as an interest group. And so my portrait of a Victorian mother is in danger. It must be a fear that if Labor directly addresses women, all the snappy suits will morph into kaftans, someone will mutter the word ‘feminism’, the leader’s mask will drop to reveal, I don’t know, Betty Friedan?, and thousands of blokes will run whimpering to their sheds. It’s weird, because I just want them to talk about the school run, the mother who is organising a maths tutor because her child is falling behind in an overcrowded class. However. One thing you learn fast is that if you push something beyond the point where others have abandoned it, you wear the maddie tag and lose all credibility.

August 26 Ches Baragwanath, the former Auditor-General, calls for Victorians to ‘mass in the streets’ against the secret state. They don’t. The Herald Sun puts us ten points behind. ‘WAY AHEAD’ is today’s headline, following yesterday’s photo of Kennett with the banner ‘US OR BUST’. The interesting bit in the poll is the age breakdown. About 60 per cent of eighteen to twenty-four year olds want the government returned with an increased majority. The Herald Sun is brilliant today. Their election coverage includes the news that Angus, the Premier’s son, a fashion model, has just returned from overseas with a tattoo. They also have election comment from Edward Beale, a hairdresser. Sorry—‘society snipper’. He pronounces on the respective hairstyles of the leaders. Steve Bracks is just ‘a Ray Martin clone’, while Jeff Kennett’s hair ‘makes a strong statement’. 43

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 44

Michael Gurr

Kennett sounded floppy on 3AW this morning, dog paddling around Baragwanath and tying himself into occasional knots— trying to sound triumphant and humble simultaneously must hurt the brain. The message was ‘I’m brilliant—but of course if you don’t want me I’ll go away and grow daffodils. I’m in charge around here so shut up, er, I’m just your humble servant’. Listening to him was like skipping tracks on a CD. If it’s true that people only hear selectively, then there was something for everyone.

August 27 Met with Julia, Tim Pallas and Ben Hubbard at Head Office. The only part of the speech that’s still in serious question is the portrait of the Victorian mother. Is it too cheesy? The feeling seems to be that I should write it again but with less cheese. I think this means taking out anything adjectival or nice. We’re lots of drafts in but Steve hasn’t seen it yet. Saw a few tantrums in progress. A policy adviser realises that twelve months’ work has been reduced to one line in the campaign speech. He’s ashen with anger. What he doesn’t know is that the one line is about to be cut. The office is a mix of calm organisation and little bushfires. Spoke to Steve. He’s happy. Good days on Labor’s plans to give real power to the Auditor-General and the more the government gets narky about Access Economics auditing our promises, the better. It just draws attention to the fact that they’ve been audited. Steve’s politeness, his rather old-fashioned courtesy, is more than a personality trait or habit. He uses it to set an example. Meetings that include him are invariably civil. Please and thank you. It’s who he is—but it’s also smart management. Saw the schedule for the launch. Mark Seymour might perform and someone will sing the national anthem. Tentatively, I ask whether 44

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 45

Days Like These

there will be signing for the deaf. There won’t be. Good. It’s hard to concentrate on a speech when someone is doing air-origami. I get what was coming to me, delivered deadpan from a Party worker: —I would like it noted that Michael Gurr, on August 27, opposed the inclusion of the disabled at a Labor campaign launch. This woman never says terribly much, she’s a watcher, and she is exactly my cup of tea. So, a new draft this weekend, which I feel OK about. Beazley is in town to deliver the Daniel Mannix Memorial Lecture during the campaign. Someone pointed out that perhaps he could talk about something other than his chosen subject of Gough Whitlam. Like maybe the state election? There are plates of sandwiches cut into triangles being handed around. The campaign is not being fuelled on Coca-Cola and chips—yet. Steve is pleased that the office is eating healthy snacks. He’s promised himself to eat well during the campaign. Greasy food would kill everyone’s spirits. Someone’s little girl is pinning drawings to people’s seats with drawing pins. You feel she has just about out-stayed her welcome. She also seems to be banging away randomly on computers, which worries me a bit.

August 28 An Age poll says the only place Kennett is vulnerable is among Victorian mothers. I bite my tongue. A try-hard non-comedian on TV suggested that the ALP website (to combat the Jeff site which has a grand prix race on it) should be called Losers R Us. The eighteen- to 24-year-old audience thought this was hilarious. I did nothing today. Couldn’t face trying to get the Regional Infrastructure Development Council into sexy modern lyrics. Will try tomorrow. 45

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 46

Michael Gurr

Kennett gags his candidates from speaking to the metropolitan media. This is astonishingly bad politics. Everyone does it, controls their campaign from head office, but why would you say it? I think this is exactly the kind of emotional tip-over issue that is worth actual votes for us. He’s not running a good campaign, really. It’s a bit split. The aim is to be downbeat, to not have an election—but because of the man’s personality and Army-bred loathing of process and debate, they have outbreaks like this. The media is in hyperdrive. The most damaging front page from the Herald Sun I’ve seen. Kennett with hands cupped to his mouth, shouting something. Surrounded by postage-stamp-sized shots of Liberal candidates with ‘No comment’ written underneath their names. The banner headline, as if shouted by Kennett: ‘SILENCE!’ Someone’s idea for the launch of our democracy policy is to have quotes from the first opening of state parliament, and something from Bolte and something from Hamer. I don’t quite get the point of this, but I ring the Parliamentary Library and talk to Susie. She is unable to conceal that she wants our team to win, even though she says nothing of the sort. She is a professional, non-partisan public servant but keeps directing me to other issues and other bits of research she can do. Her heart’s in her throat. —Has Mr Bracks seen all the documents relating to regional policy? I think his office might be interested in them. She stays at work until 8.30 p.m. faxing me nearly two hundred pages of completely useless Hansard transcripts. It starts again the next morning. I want to ring her and say stop, but instead I go to the newsagent and buy more fax paper. There is nothing there for the speech, which I write and send in. Watched a Channel Nine Sunday program at Head Office. An ‘expose’ of corrupt ALP practices. Curiously, it was all old news. 46

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 47

Days Like These

Are most people actually holding their tongues because the campaign’s on? It was all a year old. Except for the shots, taken at night of course, of people walking around inside the building in which we were standing watching this program. Spooky music. And then a slow-motion shot of someone walking into this deeply sinister building at night. Staff watched it in silence. Not out of fear or horror at what was being shown, but because certain factional people who were being sliced up on screen were standing right there in the room. There was a shot of a woman going into the Holt preselection vote and being asked if she knew what she was doing. She was Turkish. Her English wasn’t good. She said: —I don’t like politics. I’m doing this because I do what I’m told. There was a bit of a silence so I filled it up. —That’s a killer quote—we should use it in our ads. There was a bit of a laugh, but not from everyone. Meeting for the speech. I’d asked for the meeting to be kept small, but there were about ten of us. The media office hadn’t read the speech—but immediately started flicking through it dismissively. —I can’t write a press release from this. —There’s no substance—this is all emotional. I put my new technique into practice. When someone says something you don’t agree with, don’t argue about it, just nod, write something down in your notebook, say ‘Good’ and ask the person sitting next to them what they think. Bob McMullan is roaming around. —You’re destroying Labor Party history, he says to me. —How so? 47

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 48

Michael Gurr

—Having a speech ready three days before it’s delivered. Evatt once gave a speech on radio with the pages being typed up and handed to him as he read it. What’s happened to this Party? But Steve Bracks is Mr Preparation—and last-minute panics are not my idea of fun. These two things are probably wrecking a bit of office sport. They want the blood-on-the-walls tale, last lines being dictated from the gutter. A lot of superstition hangs around the campaign launch. Opinions about it run very high, there’s an intensity of feeling about it that doesn’t attach to the daily skirmish. Everyone knows very strongly what they want it to be. It’s one of the things I like about election campaigns—it seems a very oldfashioned idea that there is this moment when the focus is narrowed. For an hour the campaign stops being about the news-grab, the clever line, the instant response. For an hour the journalists must sit still and listen to one person make their claim. Afterwards, the campaign reverts to form, but for this one hour we are forced to do something simple: one person, alone on a platform, must persuade us. I’m sure there are people who would like to see this creaky thing abolished, but the fact that we hold to it is oddly reassuring. Sure, it’s a set piece, but it’s a set piece without interruptions. It has its own peculiar formalities and rituals. Wedding speeches and funeral eulogies share something of this moment. Whatever the temperature of the event, it must be honest if it is to work.

September 8 The speech is finished, though last-minute insecurities are surfacing here and there, minor word changes are being made for the autocue. Many of these suggestions have the tone of panic about them. Those 3 a.m. insights: We will only win the election if these three words are used. I sympathise, I also have 3 a.m. insights. 48

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 49

Days Like These

The Ballarat Town Hall is a pretty average bit of civic architecture with a pretty average statue of Shakespeare out the front. And someone has stuck a piece of blue bubblegum in his arse. It’s the second-choice venue for the launch. Head Office had wanted the plush Theatre Royal, but it was booked up. Steve Bracks came to school dances here, Mary Delahunty endured speech nights here. They’re not wild about this building, but I love it. It is perfect for what we are trying to say. Against Jeff Kennett’s uptown A-list version of the state we are going to be the Ordinary Party. We are going to say that plain things matter, that schools and hospitals are more important than another ‘major event’. We are going to say that Melbourne has become ‘a skyline of monuments with a wasteland underneath’. The atmosphere at this rehearsal is efficient but strained. Things can go wrong. The monitor for our warm-up video doesn’t work. The autocue set-up takes hours. So you shuffle around, go outside for a smoke, make idle chat, sit, wait, want to brush your teeth. Waiting is bad for nerves. I’m making regular trips to the toilet, Steve is wiping his palms too much and this is just the rehearsal. His first run of the speech is a bit wobbly. He knows it. We sit down and go through a few passages. He’s impatient with praise and wants only to know where the dud bits are. The second run through the speech is better. Persuading a big empty hall is a strange ask. I want him to go slower, much slower; tomorrow’s adrenaline rush and the obligatory standing ovation will add all the energy he needs. Then we film the speech for the free-to-air broadcast. Twice. It’s OK, but still rushed. When he takes us into his confidence, something comes alive and he connects. It’s worth remembering that apart from the press, he will be among friends. Acutely conscious of not wanting to load him up with notes and niggles. At these occasions, everyone is an expert and there are a few sharpish exchanges out of the leader’s earshot. 49

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 50

Michael Gurr

But now the hall is suddenly empty. It’s just the camera crew, Tim Pallas and Steve, who wants to go through the script and mark in the applause lines for our applause-leaders in the audience and put asterisks on the autocue so Steve knows when the applause is coming. So we do this. We update the heroin deaths figure in the speech from 213 to 216. We’re using the most reliable source available—this morning’s Herald Sun. Earlier in the day, Terry Bracks has arrived with the children. A football is kicked around the hall. It’s the grounding note in a day of nerves. The young man who is going to sing the national anthem does his rehearsal and blows the roof off the place. It’s a very big baritone out of someone we all thought was a weedy roadie. It’s corny—but it works. He had to read the second verse. There’s an argument about whether to do the second verse—won’t the audience look silly when they don’t know the words? I am asked for my view. I say I don’t care. The Hunters and Collectors’ song ‘Do You See What I See?’ is endlessly tested at very loud volume. It puts some energy into the place. Then a proper walk-through—with people standing in for Mary Delahunty, who is MC, Justin Madden, star recruit, and Kim Beazley. The video works, the family rehearse their entrance, there’s the big beat of the song through the hall, then the bit where they go on stage at the end, and the whole thing is curiously emotional and affecting. This funny little stumble-through in the empty Civic Hall. I find I’m fighting tears. I’d finished Justin Madden’s speech at 6 a.m. I’ve loaded it up with football metaphors and re-told a taxi-driver story I’ve heard third-hand. A few weeks back, Justin had got into a cab and asked to go to Spring Street. The cabbie had said: —So you’ve decided to stand for parliament at last, have you Justin? 50

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 51

Days Like These

—As a matter of fact I have. —In that case I might have to vote Labor. And Justin’s punchline: —So I’ve got an awful lot of taxis to catch over the next two weeks. It’s amazing how lame this sounds delivered to a big hall with a dozen people in it. A few sceptical glances are thrown my way. Tomorrow, hundreds of people will laugh and stamp as if it’s the wittiest thing they’ve ever heard and every paper will quote it. But this afternoon, I think I’ve lost my touch. The leader is meant to do one more run-through for the free-to-air, but he’s tired. Media advisers are pushing him, but I step in and say with a sort of false, understated authority: —It’s very important that we don’t go through it again. This is bulldust theatre magic talk. But everyone nods and agrees. Walk to a restaurant with Steve and Terry to meet up with everyone. He gets mobbed a little bit by Ballarat Labor loyalists. A seventyyear-old woman actually lets out a short scream and grabs her husband’s arm. —Lionel! Look who it is! We stand around while she tells Steve Bracks how she met him once, years ago, and how she’s ‘praying, absolutely praying’ that he wins. He’s very comfortable with this, and good at ending it and getting away without seeming to. Knowing how to end conversations is probably a big part of the politician’s armoury. It’s a long evening with twenty people down a long table. A two-hour wait for food I don’t want and loaded chitchat with a Labor machine 51

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 52

Michael Gurr

man who has assumed I’m interested in the intricacies of branchstacking. He reminds me of a policeman I once met, the same display of withheld information. The cop had implied that he knew things, but of course wasn’t going to say. This ALP office holder is doing the same thing. It is impossible to have a conversation with someone whose demeanour implies: —Hmmnn. The things I could tell you. I move down the other end of the table to sit with the smoking women—the ALP Head Office workers who are up here organising seating and logistics and name tags. They’re much more fun. You can relax down this uncensored end of the table. —Kim Carr called me. Wanted a VIP seat. You’ll get what you’re fucking well given I said to him. I say there is more power down this end of the table than up the other end. —Too right. This is our moment in the sun and don’t we use it. A woman, Jan, self-described ‘MUA wife’, is looking at the menu. Her friends are baiting her. —Oh, you won’t like this, Jan. It’s what you call yuppie food. —I don’t know why people want to eat food on sticks. —Skewers, Jan. They’re skewers. —I know what they are, but God it’s getting hard to get a steak. —Oh come on, Jan, you liked that eggplant dip I brought in. —No I didn’t. I ate it. I didn’t say I liked it. —I always go and see your plays, Michael. I like them. And then you come and do this stuff. You’ve got a funny sort of life, haven’t you?

52

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 53

Days Like These

September 9 Today is Launch Day. The autocue machine dies at 9.30. The Launch is at 11 a.m. The company who provided it don’t have a back-up. Everyone stares blankly. Is there time to get another one up from Melbourne? No. A TV repairman is called, is here in three minutes and fixes it. We start the last run-through. The autocue breaks again, is fixed again, and then there’s nothing anyone can do except hope. We haven’t actually rehearsed him reading his speech off the lectern. There’s a big pocket of silence—everyone thinking through the implications. Steve sits down beside me, a sigh travels up him from his feet and he says: —Oh well, matey. Everyone who’s had anything to do with the Labor Party knows that ‘mate’ is a word with many functions, some of them quite chilling. This is the most resigned I’ve ever heard it. God, how we want the day to go right. I go upstairs with him to a little room and he runs a couple of sections from the speech. Beazley arrives, goes through his speech and then talks football with Justin Madden. Jeff Pulford has been working on advance for the campaign, travelling ahead of the leader organising venues and audiences. We spend this hiatus moment having my last two cigarettes. He says: —I like this bit. The bit where you know you’ve done everything you can. It’s strangely relaxing. Exactly. It’s an opening night. Steve is in a room next to the stage with Terry, Beazley, Justin Madden and a federal cop. Beazley goes into a long, involved riff about rural voting patterns. I think it’s designed to take Steve’s mind off the speech. It nearly does, but he’s wiping his hands. I hug him and nick off. It’s one of those

53

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 54

Michael Gurr

failed men’s hugs where neither of you knows which side to put your head. The audience is in. The reassurance of watching Barry Jones huffing to his seat, of baseball caps with union logos, of every single person here wanting one thing only: that today should go well. I do the mental list. Beazley has his introduction, Justin Madden’s got his speech, a copy of the leader’s speech is gaffer-taped to the lectern as insurance against autocue failure.‘Do You See What I See?’ thumps into the hall and Steve and Terry walk down the centre aisle. Now he’s bounding up the stairs, a wobbly set of stairs, don’t bound Steve, reaching the microphone, settling us down. I’m standing with Julia Gillard, she’s nervous, everyone is. But theatre years let me float above it now, it’s an opening night, nothing you can do. Then it’s happening. You watch these things at one remove, just ticking off the markers as they go by. OK, here comes a big bit, breathe. Good. Now this is where you might want to change gear a bit. Good. These are usually unemotional occasions. But something happens. A tension seems to drop away from him, he looks happy to be here, policy and personality are meshing. I find the only thing I’m worrying about, standing over here on the side of the hall, is the absurd concern that he’s having almost too good a time. The combination of sheer good spirits up there, the sudden, still crazy idea that we might actually unseat the government, the feeling in the hall, all these things plus tiredness are tightening my throat. Hope’s a frightening feeling. I have to shut up a Labor maddie behind me—an old man in a check hat with a sprig of native flowers on his lapel who keeps wanting to stand up and add to the speech—he’s trying to help. And I glare at a woman whose baby cries for three seconds. I’m bad with audiences. And glaring at this audience member in particular should make me ashamed. All that noble stuff about the average

54

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 55

Days Like These

Victorian mother and then she sits behind me in the flesh with her baby and I want her thrown out. I look back to see how she’s taken the Victorian mother sections of the speech, but she’s looking after her child. Afterwards, Steve is flying. —There was one thing you didn’t tell me, he says. —What? —How much fun it is. The TV coverage is good. The press grudgingly acknowledge that they were surprised by the level of passion and optimism. All our lines are all over the place, but we’re still written off. The tone is: Noble effort for a lost cause. September 12 Watched the free-to-air broadcast of our campaign launch on the ABC tonight. I remember when it was compulsory to show it on all channels. Now it’s just the ABC at 9.15. This odd disconnect: the people who are working on this campaign would walk over cut glass for a good ten-second grab, but does anyone, in the real world, actually care? And a shameful confession: the Indonesian militia are destroying lives in Timor but my first thought each morning is how our story is being pushed off the front page. September 14 Steve called. He’s happy with the speech for the Press Club. Last big set piece, this. There’s something for the Herald Sun that has to be written. The Media Office ask me would I mind. It’s an easy cut and paste. They say, helpfully:

55

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 56

Michael Gurr

—But you know, Michael, this is for a newspaper, so don’t make it sound like a speech. Is doing this job the most patronised I’ve ever been? If I puffed my chest out a little more, I’d get stuck in shirt-front office politics. No thanks. Better to do my version of the leader’s politeness. Nod and smile. But because I’m nowhere near as good at that as he is, my politeness probably comes over as annoying. However. Drafted the article. It’s OK, but everything is repetitive now unless some lightning strike happens. Went down to the Malthouse Theatre today to have my photograph taken for their brochure. I’ve got a play coming up. Crazy Brave flirts with terrorism, so I had suggested a picture of me tossing a hand grenade in the air and smiling. So we did that with a little rubber ball—the grenade will be photoshopped in later. Then they ask me to hold a larger rubber ball. —What’s this going to be? —A bomb. We’ll superimpose a bomb over it. With a fuse. And the word BOMB written on it. I said that I would prefer not to advertise my next play holding something called BOMB. They didn’t get this. So I said that, likewise, I would prefer not to advertise my next play holding a turkey. I’ll have to keep a close eye. I did lots of different faces and they took lots of pictures. It will probably come out looking fairly aggressive. Will that sell a ticket? It seems only marginally important right now, this publicity for a play.

September 15 Got up early to polish the Herald Sun piece, and discovered that I had erased it last night. How? I had printed a copy, so it just meant 56

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 57

Days Like These

re-typing five pages. Then Steve rang. What was I doing this morning? Would I come in and look at the Press Club speech? Typed very fast and got in there by 9.30. Ran the speech. Not much to do, he’s in fine shape, looks like he’s reading off a few scribbled notes. Then a little hiatus happens between this work and his next appointment. I realise we have very little conversation. He doesn’t gossip and I have nothing to report. We get on fine, but we know oddly little about each other outside the job at hand. Despite all the apparent energy, I see a glimpse of the deep tiredness that’s setting in. From a few feet away—the energetic campaigner. Close up—the eyes give it away. I know the Press Club is revisiting a place where he had a bad time early in his leadership. He wants to get it right. Advisers want to come in to watch him run the speech again. I sigh: —Great. Another fucking committee. —It’s OK. It just gives me a few more places to look. A break while he does more radio interviews. I hear about Young Labor’s exploits last night. Apparently there is an election tradition the Tuesday before the poll. Young Labor and Young Liberals—why are these names so silly?—go out and get drunk, then steal each other’s front lawn election posters. You get extra points for marginal seats, apparently. The coup last night was dismantling one of those huge signs that hang over the freeways. They took it apart with screwdrivers and took it home. You keep your smile going while you listen to this stuff, it all sounds like jolly dormitory pranks. I feel old. A couple of Party staffers wander out onto the roof garden and try to say something nice about the campaign launch. It’s difficult for them: passing a compliment for these boys is like passing a kidney stone. But the atmosphere around this building is mostly good. Like any activity with a deadline—an opening night, election day—the 57

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 58

Michael Gurr

suppression of nerves into selfless industry is very moving. With nothing to do until the leader has finished a couple of radio interviews, I watch people work. Volunteers are turning out a never-ending stream of food, the complaints about filthy tea towels are good natured enough. Maybe everyone senses the end of the campaign, senses the beginning of tiredness, and doesn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. Affection can slide easily into a slightly mad sentimentalism at these moments: you find yourself making odd connections. I saw it at the campaign launch in everyone’s affection for the Bracks’s children. There was a touch of: if people could see how nice these children are, they’d never re-elect this rotten Liberal government. Emotions mesh. I don’t like waves of Labor sentimentalism, they stop you thinking clearly. And I suspect that’s why so many Labor boys overcompensate with the tough stuff. Back into the big room to do the second part of today’s rehearsal. A seventy-page document on Labor’s costings is being released, the one that’s been ticked off by Access Economics. Five of us sit opposite Bracks and his economics adviser and play journalists. The media advisers enjoy this the most—they get to imitate the people they deal with every day. Tough questions are asked. Then someone says: —Page sixty-four. These people you call ‘cops’. We all turn to page sixty-four. And there it is: a little typo in which the police are referred to as ‘coppers’. On the professional table of police numbers it says things like ’fifteen cops’, ’forty-five cops’. Everyone is stifling laughter. It’s just an editing oversight, but all the Labor seriousness, the sober accounting, could have looked a bit silly because page sixty-four wasn’t proofread. So that’s sent off

58

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 59

Days Like These

to be re-done and the ‘grilling’ session disintegrates. Also, it’s 11.45 and the leader is due at the Press Club in fifteen minutes. There was a stationery strategy going on here. It’s a seventy-page document, printed on both sides, and stapled together. This means that it will take the Liberals longer to pull it physically apart for faxing to their spin doctors. And just twelve copies are being distributed— only to the journalists who matter, and just in time to meet their deadlines without detailed Liberal rebuttal. But now pliers have to be found, twelve copies have to be pulled apart, a new page sixtyfour inserted, and the document put back together. No time for another run of the speech and he doesn’t need it anyway. He seems to be enjoying himself today. Knowing the answer, he asks me: —Did you get a buzz off the launch? —A buzz? I was flying. I didn’t know what to do with all that adrenaline for the next forty-eight hours. He’s grinning, knowing that he did something that the press didn’t quite expect. I ask him where he’ll be on election night. Here at Head Office until 9.30 and then at his electorate in Williamstown. He can feel the end of the campaign: ‘I suppose my election night speech is the last speech you’ll have to do’. I tell him I’ve got one in each pocket. And the one in the good pocket just says ‘Fuck!’ Actually, I wonder. You don’t read a speech on election night. But a few dot points might be handy to look at beforehand. I’ll do them. We won’t win. We might win. It might all turn on the preferences of Independents. All of these things are true. In my absolute heart I don’t think we’re there. But remember Goss, remember Greiner. Seven years is a long time to endure the crappy services delivered with a sneer. But Timor has been the front page for days now: our battle is well back in all the papers.

59

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 60

Michael Gurr

September 16 A news item on ABC radio. The Premier has employed bodyguards because of recent threats against him. What a cheap leak. Faxed some summary lines to Steve for radio grabs. The office calls to make sure I’m coming in on Saturday. They’ve asked me to have a think about lines for the different outcomes. Got off the phone and felt extremely emotional. I don’t want to write the lines conceding the election. Typing them makes me utterly miserable, so I stop. Hardie is home from work, so we do something a bit less harrowing: the supermarket shopping. He counsels me to turn off the radio, have a night not looking at television, leave the newspapers alone. We do the aisles, but he catches me out eavesdropping on a couple talking about the election near the washing powder. I notice again the way Hardie changes emotional gear. It seems effortless, the way he adjusts to the person he’s with, but I bet it isn’t. He’s one of the few people I know who practises the essential tenet of generosity: that the other person is the key to every exchange. Fragile egos demand the world adjusts to them—and get nothing back because they are hearing less. Hardie knows how to exist at high-temperature times. Anxiety has kicked in as this campaign winds up; it has become too important. So I am being happily forced into Safeway and the grounding fact of a shopping list. —I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to stop me going mad. You just don’t want to live with a mad person. —Do we need detergent? But they have newspapers at the checkout in Safeway and the junkie asks for one last hit. The Herald Sun’s election coverage serves me right. A large colour picture of the Premier’s son surrounded by pretty young women. This is how the accompanying article, written by Amanda Ruben, begins: 60

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 61

Days Like These

It was a moment no Mum would want to miss. And Felicity Kennett enjoyed every minute of her model son’s rendition of ‘Edelweiss’ during the Alannah Hill fashion parade yesterday. Dressed as Baron von Trapp, Angus stole the show when he mimed the Austrian song, serenading unsuspecting onlookers. I give up.

September 18 Voted at the Senior Citizens Centre at the end of the street this morning. The Newspoll in The Australian is extraordinary. It has us at 46/46. It then asks ‘Have you changed your vote since the last election?’ Sixty-eight per cent say No. It then asks ‘Who do you think will win?’ Eighty per cent say the Coalition. The same group of people were asked these questions and gave these apparently contradictory answers. To me it says: we’d like to have a government that does what state governments are meant to do, but we’re still not ready to vote for one. Bracks is 50/50 with Kennett. The radio said that the booths were very busy very early. An old theory about this goes that early busy booths are very good for the Opposition. It means people are eager to strike a government down. Another theory goes that people are going to do something they’re not especially happy with and want it over early in order to get on with their day. Both theories are entirely meaningless, I’m sure, but I have to have something to think about between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. We’re not handing out how-to-vote cards anywhere today—I’ve done it at every election since I could vote. But today I want to cook something, calm down and repay Hardie with some domesticity. 61

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 62

Michael Gurr

September 19 Arrived at Head Office at 5 p.m. yesterday, having forgotten the flowers I’d wanted to bring Terry from the garden. So Hardie went off in search. Media staff around, a few others. It was a 5 a.m. finish to the staff party apparently. Glad I didn’t go. On the roof garden, the smokers. MUA Jan is putting industrial quantities of sausage rolls into the oven. She says we’re going to win. Hardie gets back. He’s found some hyacinths. There’s a long wall covered in wellwisher faxes. I show him where this is, as he doesn’t know anyone here and I’ll be nicking off with Steve over the next few hours. The well-wisher wall is a good place to go and be occupied. Steve arrives. Bouncy. We sit down in his office to look at the three alternative speeches. Status quo. Some gains. Victory. I’ve also typed up the ‘Fuck!’ speech for his thirty-seat majority. He says he’s feeling numb, hates election days. Terry comes in, she’s feeling the same, these last hours are endless. Steve is happy with the three versions. We go out to watch TV. During the night he alternates between the kitchen TV with staff and downstairs TV with Party officials. The progress of the night is a long and unemotional blur. Some people can’t watch any more once the trend towards us becomes clear. My head starts to ache a bit. We go through about six drafts of the speech, watching TV through the window of his office as the regional seats keep voting Labor. It’s a long time before news of the city. We’ve now won ten seats. Steve deadpans, ‘This isn’t bad, is it?’ We get tetchy with one another at about 9 p.m. He’s riffed something to me, I’ve taken notes, he’s gone to get a cup of tea— again—while I draft it—again—and then not liked what I’ve done. —But what did I say before? What I said was good.

62

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 63

Days Like These

—I don’t remember. —Where are the notes you took? I can’t read your writing. I look at my notes. The truth is that I can’t read my writing. I’ve got the kind of headache that interferes with everything. We put in the condolences for Peter McLellan, the ex–Liberal Independent who has died overnight. Earlier, when I arrived, someone had shouted at me from the top of the stairs: —Have you heard about Frank and Denise?! I had no idea what this meant, thinking that whoever Frank and Denise are, this is either very good news or very bad news. But Frank and Denise are actually Frankston East, McLellan’s electorate. For a few minutes I’m trying to get people to tell me about this couple who I’ve never heard of but who might be deciding the election. No-one is quite sure what to make of a by-election in four weeks in the electorate of Frank and Denise. A Party official comes in with the latest results, sits down. He seems out of breath from climbing the stairs, but he’s not actually breathing heavily. It’s his whole body that’s shaking. It’s possible we’ll win. About 9.30, we’ve settled on the words. This is in the minutes grabbed between calls and interruptions. I remembered Bracks saying the word ‘honour’ recently on radio. And cursed myself for not realising that it is the exact counterweight to what we’d been calling Kennett’s ‘arrogance’. So honour gets up. Hardie drives us to Williamstown. I’ve got the Melways to get us to the Surf Lifesaving Club where Steve Bracks will not quite claim victory but something very like it. Hardie tells me later that I seemed calm. But I can feel my blood rebelling. It’s like adrenaline is turning into acid. I don’t feel at all jubilant, I just feel a sense of

63

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 64

Michael Gurr

crisis. Like a car accident. It’s very important that we follow instructions, don’t move the injured, wait for the ambulance, stick to the plan, while you’re registering that there is an awful lot of blood around and the car could still blow up. The Williamstown Surf Life Saving Club is crammed with people. You can’t get in. The atmosphere is overpowering. People who have kept professionally impassive faces during the campaign are now splitting into grins. Outside on the lawn, an organiser is talking into his phone: —Yes, he’s arrived. He’s outside, but we’re going to wait a few minutes. The music’s being lined up. Inside, Justin Madden is on the podium, leaning down into the microphone. —And I promise you that very soon I will be able to introduce Steve Bracks. Then the lawn is flooded with TV lights and we go inside to get a spot. Steve and Terry come in. The Hunters and Collectors’ song comes on very loud, but the sound system is cutting in and out with people jumping on the wooden floor. The tall bald cop who had been standing around at Head Office watching the count is escorting Steve and Terry. Steve gets three or four words out at a time. He’s interrupted by chanting. He’s elated, but keeps glancing down during the cheering to check his next bit. He hits every note. We clap and whistle and stamp but I still don’t feel any real joy. I think I’ll get a buzz out of watching a video of this later. MUA Jan is standing with Hardie and I during the speech. She has her arms around us, kissing us, keeps shouting out ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ Peter Reith is on TV silently

64

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 65

Days Like These

mouthing away in a corner. The geography of his face has changed over the course of the night. Hardie and I head outside for air and a smoke. An adviser tells us the story of his girlfriend of five years. She lives in Europe. He’s promised her he’ll be there in a week because Labor will lose and he’ll be getting on a plane. Now, he says, his face in a grin so wide I hardly recognise him: —She’s going to think I’m completely unreliable. Steve wanders past, momentarily alone. A few quiet seconds of nothing much said, just the magnitude of maybe winning government sinking in. He makes the job offer: Will I stay on and write speeches? Even tonight, 50 per cent of me knows I shouldn’t. What does this instant inside-recoil mean? Only that I don’t think I quite belong here. Beyond the wire fence, kids are kicking footballs on Williamstown beach in the dark. Hardie drives us home. What’s this odd melancholy settling around me? Nearly belonging somewhere again? Getting close then pulling away from a place that could be ‘home’? Other strings are pulling at me, the need to write, to get the chatter of an election campaign out of my head and get back to something internal-urgent. Suddenly a scene from a different adrenaline night drops into my head. When the Australian expatriate actress Zoe Caldwell flew from America to Melbourne to farewell John Sumner from Melbourne Theatre Company a few years back, we had fifteen minutes together in her dressing room before she went on stage. She was nervous and did two quick vodka shots. I asked her what she was doing now. —I’ve just directed Hamlet with a ballsy young cast. It was burning good. But then the inevitable happened. —Which was what?

65

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 66

Michael Gurr

—They asked me to stay on and direct four more plays. I thanked them very much and fled. I can’t be somewhere where everything goes on and on like breakfast. Steve Bracks calls from his car phone. Still nothing is clear, there are Independents to worry about, a by-election to have. There’s another piece to write for the Herald Sun. We go over it, it’s fine. After our usual pause, I ask him: —How are you? —Well, I’ve stopped pinching myself. Things are very different now.

66

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 67

Days Like These

March 1983 Zoe Caldwell, an actress who left Australia for elsewhere in the 1960s, is back to play Medea, opening the Victorian Arts Centre. I’m working part-time for MTC, doing the theatre programs. After her opening night, she comes down to the National Theatre Drama School and talks in front of an audience of a hundred drama students. She slightly exaggerates her hangover to get our attention. I saw the performance last night and saw the way that someone with an acute sense of their own magnetism can use it to tell a story. Actors are often ashamed or frightened of their power. To watch someone who delights in it is a pretty sexy experience for a writer. They let you know what’s possible. Male actors often hide their suppleness and the women their energy. The men fear loss of power if they reveal sensuality—and so achieve a rigid imitation of power. The women fear stridency and show the feminine rather than the female. Zoe Caldwell’s Medea walked around the stage as though she was pacing out a psychic house for us—wherever she walked the power followed her. Male or female, the energy was there to be used. Now she removes her trench coat and hat and starts answering questions from young actors. She’s slightly playing with us—she folds actor-voodoo and celebrity together and adds a layer of witty humility on top. Everyone leaves in love. Patrick White said that everyone was always a bit in love with Zoe, but it’s more than being stagestruck: this is someone who gets your blood flowing. Medea kills her children, daring us to agree with what she’s done. She walks towards us and stops, unfolds her right hand and shows us a gout of blood. I hear that Zoe Caldwell has read up on who Medea really is and has realised she is a foreigner in her city, she’s an Asian woman, and that the actress needs to see an Asian

67

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 68

Michael Gurr

person on the street every night before giving her performance. Actor-voodoo. Today is restrained fireworks, a little vocal stretch on a pertinent word, some sounds we might carry away with us. Joan Harris, director of the Drama School and author of this occasion, bustles me into her office for a five-minute audience with the actress. Nothing much happens, young actors want programs signed.

May 2002 Zoe Caldwell’s memoir I Will Be Cleopatra is released in Australia and she speaks to me by phone from the US on the show I’m presenting on Radio National. The conversation is in anecdote of course, the only way this history survives, but she says, apropos of what I can’t remember: —You must do the thing that makes you well. There’s something in the plain richness of the line that reminds me of Lillian Hellman, who Caldwell played on Broadway some years back. Hellman was always saying things like: —You should never bring bad trouble on good people. There’s a Southern fierceness in it, a grand slow moral force, maybe quoting a servant, pulling big questions down to ornery speech. I read that Caldwell found playing Hellman an exhaustion: the old battles about Hellman’s socialism, her appearance before the House Un-American Committee telling Joe McCarthy I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashion—these things still stirred the American theatre establishment and there were feuds and bad feelings around what was meant to be a stage portrait of an American writer. The still photographs were a marvel—the actress somehow

68

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 69

Days Like These

impersonating the writer’s unfixed broken nose, busted when the child hurled herself from a tree after the maid scolded her for gossiping with that line about bad trouble. Lillian Hellman wore that nose like a badge, or a medal earned in shame. Her plays are kind of hard to read now, a little tall with a 1930s and ’40s stage accent, but her prose is level and tender like Johnny Cash and I read her again and again. On the night Caldwell helped farewell John Sumner from Melbourne Theatre Company, I ran interference for her in the foyer after the show. —Stay close and keep talking to me. OK, now walk me away. It’s another old school friend. And then, as the occasion drew us apart, with her fame taking her to another part of the room: —I feel we will know each other more. We haven’t and don’t, but it’s fine. The half-imagined adaptation of Phaedra I thought of writing for her somehow slips away. From these minor encounters—minor in time—what is it that’s been sustaining at odd moments over so many years? Partly the energy of a woman who seems made to do one thing—what she calls keeping the audience awake and in their seats, but is better described from a theatre seat as like watching someone opening a series of curtains. You keep thinking she’s shown you everything, but still there is more. And the final revelation—something all good actors know how to do—is to somehow remind you that you have been watching and that everything you have found out you have found out for yourself. It is so peculiar, this moment, and may be the thing that lifts performances from the just-fine to the great:

69

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 70

Michael Gurr

instead of taking the play away from us, ingesting it, hiding it, the actor will somehow announce the play, hand it over. I think it’s her energy that’s jumped out of memory and back into life and helped me now and then. How, when asked to say something at some occasion, you should be as simple and clear as you can and assume the audience are three beats ahead; how to recognise someone who loves their work; and how in the hundred or so actors who’ve inhabited my plays there is always some point of electrical connection—where tough and vulnerable are not enemies but necessary compliments. Actors are playwrights’ oxygen, and in thinking of Zoe Caldwell, I think of all the actors who have put flesh on characters I’ve written. Their courage is a big part of what keeps me in the theatre. In one room of the mind’s house Caldwell has come to exemplify them—the deep channels of specific eccentric knowledge they gather from play to play, arriving at each job with an optimism that fills up the bottle. Acting is a demonstration of the use of power for good. Even not having seen Zoe Caldwell play Lillian Hellman, there is something of her in her—they both bring out a quality of urgent listening. The actress says in her book that she is the messenger, rushing the story to the audience. Whether the story is grand and murderous or murmured among tea cups, the impulse is the same: I have something important to tell you.

70

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 71

Days Like These

Januar y 1984 Insomnia is more than being unable to sleep. If that’s all it was I

would have written eighty more plays. You can be simultaneously wired and blurry with insomnia. You can knock your own cup over, but have total recall for something someone said eight days ago and how it might be ultra-pertinent now. Insomnia was best described to me by Ray Lawler when I arrived far too early at my desk one day at Melbourne Theatre Company. I had come back to the company to put their theatre programs together; a make-work job. I shared an office with Ray. He cast a canny eye over me and said: —You’ve had a white night, haven’t you? And it is white. It’s not curled up in the gloom wondering when sleep will come, and it’s not catching up on old movies with chamomile tea and a rug. The white nights are a clenched thing: pointlessly vivid, pseudo-creative. They are the nights when all the rooms in the mind’s house collapse into one and a frenzy of characters and images takes over the building. Projected future anxieties and micro-domestic details come at MTV speed. Who said this:‘At 3 a.m. even the ants are angry’? Ray suffered migraines occasionally. He refused painkillers on the grounds that once he’d got through the pain a sort of spacey delight would arrive. There is doubtless a good chemical explanation for this, and some of it goes with the aftermath of not sleeping for three days: a loosening of the anchor ropes, a clarity beyond clarity that is sometimes wondrous and sometimes like staring into the Nothing. Not sleeping puts me on stilts and gives me illusions of allknowing. It also dislocates me from myself, so that I stand slightly away from the body that is walking in the world. I feel I am about to say the wrong thing and doubtless do. In the office, insomnia and

71

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 72

Michael Gurr

migraine meet across a cluttered desk. I wait for Ray’s spacey delight to arrive. It’s a good idea not to talk much until it does. But it gets so that I can tell him before he tells me. —You’ve crossed over, haven’t you? —I have. —What’s it like? —I’ve never been stoned, but I imagine it’s quite like that. Ray is Literary Adviser, I’m compiling notes for the theatre programs. There’s only a handful of people who want lots of waffle about the historical context of plays. You could give the necessary information on a photocopied sheet of A4. Cast, crew, running time. But it’s about advertising dollars and sponsor positioning, so the price of the program is justified with context and comment and other things that aren’t happening on stage. Who buys a program at the movies? We happily sit down to sci-fi or a film about the French Revolution without context or comment, because whatever is important will be on the screen. But there’s this thing about buying theatre programs. However. Biting the hand that fed me for three years, I know that my programs were pretty thin. I just put in lots of pictures. Our joined-up desks morph and soon I’m reading plays. Many, many plays. Ray, while often exasperated, has a conscientiousness about his job that frees me to be crude. He reads the schoolteacher’s heartfelt awful play about the politics of the staffroom searching for one good thing to say about it; I throw the script around the office, act out the worst bits to make him laugh. His sense of duty is my license to have none. It’s a cruisy job; lots of it involves amusing Ray or playing stealthy jokes on the man who runs the company’s sponsorship deals. We put a sign on the door, ‘The Old Man and the Boy: Don’t be too sure which is which’.

72

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 73

Days Like These

Plays arrived in odd waves. For a while it seemed everyone was writing about Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the righteous Christian executed by the Nazis. Had there been a biography that had inspired this rush of plays? It didn’t seem so. But still they came, dully poignant, thuddingly well-put-together. Then transsexualism would rear up. Usually in the form of a school reunion where the blokes would spend Act One wondering, Who’s that hot chick called Danielle? Who’s girlfriend is she? Midway through Act Two Danielle was shown to be Danny, the school footy champ who’s had the Big Snip. Cue: long speech from Wayne who just can’t handle it and gets violent. Cue: long speech from Dave, who—Christ!—just pashed Danielle in the car park. Cue: long self-justifying speech from Danny/Danielle. Blackout. These strange unexplainable waves of plays. —Here’s another sex-change one. —You’re joking. I’ve got two more here. —What’s going on out there? —I don’t know. Ray never wrote form letters. He knew that every play came from someone’s heart. He didn’t like the term ‘Literary Adviser’. He wanted to change his title to ‘Playwright’s Advocate’. He was diffident about his own writing, maintaining he had nothing more to get out. Yet while I was there, MTC rehearsed and produced Godsend, his play about the fragility of faith. It supposed that the remains of St Thomas A’Becket were found in an Anglican church. The way he made the layers of belief real put you back into your seat. Anglican bishops and Catholic priests speak of faith like greengrocers speak of oranges. The hope for transcendence would focus down to the detail of some human failing. A childhood prank about the communion in which someone put a mouldy leaf into

73

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 74

Michael Gurr

the mouth of a child became in doubting adulthood a challenge to the whole architecture of belief: ‘The body of Christ or a rotting leaf on the tongue?’ Ray’s exact moment of conversion to Catholicism is something I have never been able to pin down. He’s told me it wasn’t a blinding flash but a sort of growing awareness. In the shared-office days, he’s reading everything I write. He mostly wants me to write the outrageous comedies he thinks I’m holding back, but his insight into what I am actually producing is acute. His skill is restraint—he knows which detail to comment on and how that detail will illuminate the whole play. He also knows that you can’t tell writers what to write, that some things have to be written out before you can move on. Feeling disconnected from most of what MTC are putting on stage, I’m finding nothing on the Fringe. Surrealist clowning feels as dated as some of the stuffier MTC revivals, and even to show up in a Fringe foyer is to be identified as a representative of the Dinosaur Theatre Company. Theatre is oddly factionalised. You are this or you are that—it’s rare for writers and actors to move easily across from a small room to a bigger place. John Sumner occasionally walks into the office Ray and I share, sighs and sits down for what is never a casual chat. John doesn’t do casual. And Ray and John, who have worked together more intimately than any other playwright and director, are oddly formal with each other. Aren’t they the great partners? The ones who went on The Doll Trilogy adventure together? Affection and joshing might distract from the important job they were doing. You would sometimes catch them in shorthand, at a distance, but the ease vanished when a third person approached. They went to their corners: playwright and director. The atmosphere at MTC under John Sumner was about as far removed from theatrical cliché as you could get. Rather, all the clichés about his merchant navy past were true.

74

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 75

Days Like These

He really was the Captain. People really did follow orders. For some actors, writers and directors, John’s methodical brain was too much. Pierced though it was with flashes of stage brilliance, the Sumner mind could wear you down if you weren’t completely convinced of what you were doing. Because he rarely displayed his joy, what many saw was a deflating practicality. They weren’t looking hard enough. If you were smart or telepathic, you realised that the man was in love with talent. His mission was to release it. He would stop dead in rehearsal to marvel, really marvel, at the conjunction of two words in a speech. He’d hold up the way an idea had been transmuted into action for everyone to admire. His remarks to actors were sometimes like those of a painter in a paint shop: Look at that red! And that blue over there! He made me see better. I learnt by watching.

75

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 76

Michael Gurr

August 2005 Julian Burnside, the lawyer and human rights activist, has done

a lot of work on behalf of asylum seekers in Australia. We’re standing around at some function, talking about the state of play. I say that there was a time a year or so back when you could feel an embarrassment among those who spoke up for refugees. They sounded ashamed to be using words like ‘compassion’. They sounded like they were waiting to be slapped down, ridiculed. That following the temperature set by its government, the nation felt meanspirited—some voices were more emboldened than others. And a particularly cynical kind of cruelty had landed on the heads of refugees. But the atmosphere seems to have changed a bit. People seem to be listening now, the lives of refugees are being slowly mainstreamed. Julian Burnside nods. He quotes a theory. —First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. And then you win.

March 2003 Strange days. The government is imprisoning and defaming people who have fled from countries we think are places worth escaping from. The language has been expertly hijacked. Illegals. Queuejumpers. There is nothing illegal about seeking asylum and there are no queues to join in Afghanistan. And isn’t Saddam Hussein the enemy? It was a Labor government who began building prisons in the desert to hide refugees from our view, but as a couple of thousand desperate people arrive they are swiftly manipulated into the service of the Prime Minister. The portraits that government ministers paint are varied according to the audience. For some, these

76

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 77

Days Like These

people are possible terrorists; for others, rich and sneaky freeloaders who—and don’t bother trying to follow the logic—want to take our jobs. But mostly, of course, they are different. In our mindmovie of the Arab world, women wail loudly at funerals while the men mass in dusty streets, shouting, firing rifles into the air. Arabs compete with Jews for the title of the world’s longest-running cartoon villain. The Soviet Union was a system, not a racial cliché— if you thought of Russians at all, they were just miserable sods standing in queues for cabbages and vodka. No-one was afraid of your average Muscovite. But Arabs? Arabs who want to come here? Actors for Refugees comes into existence along with a whole lot of other groups. There’s Rural Australians for Refugees, the Refugee Action Collective, Students and Lawyers and Doctors for Refugees. What looks splintered on the surface is smart in practice: each group doing practical work or getting attention through their specific expertise. The stories coming out of Australian detention centres describe a deceitful and imaginatively cruel system for dealing with vulnerable people. But these stories seem to be falling on deaf ears. Actors for Refugees have been performing a show of readings and music in schools and pubs and churches. Now they want to take the mountains of research they’ve done and do something bigger. We meet in a hall in Williamstown. The key to these meetings is how they stay on track, or not. Very easily, under the twin burdens of disbelief and rage, they can slip into a circular pattern of Isn’t it dreadful? You have to keep at the front of your mind that everyone in the room agrees on the reason they are here. This is harder than it sounds. At a time when asylum seekers are being sledged from all sides, just to be in the company of like-minded people can have you all repeating your misery mantras in a slow, humming crescendo.

77

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 78

Michael Gurr

—Did you hear about what happened to Mohamed? —I know. —I wrote to him. They didn’t give him the letter. —You’re kidding. —Can I read it to you? —What? The letter he didn’t get? Who said,‘The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step’? There are some of the usual suspects: Anne Phelan, whose phone calls demanding political involvement have become legendary among actors, Alice Garner and Kate Atkinson, who first had the idea that actors might put faces to the dots on the deck of the Tampa. Di Greentree, who seems to have surrendered great chunks of her life to this work. About ten people, plus the man who is making a documentary. He films craftily from a corner. Once again, you’re reminded how clever these guys with cameras are. You watch documentaries and think: How could they behave like that with a camera in the room? But the camera is very small, the guy is crouched a long way away and within fifteen minutes you’re oblivious. Anne Phelan tells me months later she’s seen the footage and that while an audience will read my expression as concern, she knows that it more truthfully transmits: God how I fucking hate meetings. For a few hours I listen to accounts of psychiatrists who worked in Woomera, letters from incarcerated children they and others have befriended, and a pile of dully mad obfuscation from the Immigration Department. Also, among the factual accounts, are some fictional pieces. These are the only jarring notes. With this avalanche of facts, of actual human stories, what place does the imagination have? There seems no need to imagine a refugee. Any story a writer could come up with is put immediately in the shadows by the plain facts. It is instantly clear that whatever I put together will have nothing invented in it. It will have no author. 78

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 79

Days Like These

The obvious next step is to visit Maribyrnong Detention Centre. It’s only just up the road. Surely I will learn something from speaking with the incarcerated themselves? But I can’t do it. Whether it is an instinct for self-preservation or an instinct about the play that will become Something to Declare, I know that I have to stay at one remove to get this thing done. I’m offered many opportunities and reject them all. At this point, one handshake with an imprisoned asylum seeker, one meeting with someone buffeted from charity to charity on a temporary visa and the whole project will stop. Because what would words like ‘theatre’ and ‘play’ mean when you could be spending those hours usefully visiting, lobbying, advocating on behalf of someone you have actually met? What use art when the people it represents are physically in front of you? If the job is worth doing, it needs distance. It makes me very uneasy, but I know which way my response would flow if given the choice. And there is only so much time. It’s part of the frustrationrage as I read through the research that’s been gathered: that I’m not doing something more useful.

August 2003 The mountain of research material on refugees is now three telephone books high. I’ve gone into a kind of free fall. There’s no way to use it all. How to shape this thing? But the free fall is about more than the practical task ahead. It’s to do with disconnection: part of me refuses to believe that these things are continuing in this country. And if it is known that this level of induced suffering is going on but there is no mass movement to stop it, then what has happened? What has changed? Has the Howard revolution gone so deep as to cauterise a sense of common humanity? Or has his government just allowed a lurking Australian indifference and 79

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 80

Michael Gurr

antagonism to bask happily on the surface? Is this the real meaning of relaxed and comfortable? These questions can paralyse you. Some friends simply cut the ropes and give up politically, a kind of dismissive surrender to the temperature of the times. A shrug that says: But what can you do? Others turn their wrath on the ALP, disgusted with that Party’s shilly-shallying. Still others are embarrassed into silence. They’ve bought the Right-wing commentators’ line that people who are indignant about the treatment of asylum seekers are a bunch of wealthy inner-city dilettantes, choosing their causes like they choose their wine. Bruce Myles has directed the first productions of eight of my plays. He’s working with Actors for Refugees and he’s got the best antidote for hopelessness. He remembers a football coach, whose team was in dire trouble at a Grand Final half-time. The coach stood there and bellowed at his players: —At least do something! Don’t think! Don’t hope! Do! The charge of electricity that jolts this task into life is an interview Kate Atkinson and Christine Bacon have conducted with Amal Hasan Basri, a survivor of the Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel, known as the SIEV X, which sank off Ashmore reef killing 353 people. There are pages and pages of this interview, and it is very different to anything else I’ve read. More than a catalogue of misery, we meet a real woman who argues with her husband about the use of the family car, who eats a meal with her family on the banks of the Tigris River, whose husband is threatened by Saddam’s police, who makes a run for it to Australia with her son. If we can follow Amal all the way through, then all the other material can interrupt and illuminate it. Suddenly all the other stories are ribs to Amal’s spine.

80

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 81

Days Like These

Amal:

In the morning, Friday October 19th, the driver come down and he told us, ‘In 6 hours we will arrive at Christmas Island’. Everybody happy. In that moment I feel like I am hungry and I want to see my son, because he is on top with the young men. So I ask somebody, ‘Can you give me some water or some bread?’ He told me, ‘No, I can’t give you anything’. I ask him why and he say, ‘Maybe something will happen to us in the ocean, so we keep this’. What I mean is that everybody died hungry and thirsty.

At once, three months of directionless wandering clarifies into something an audience will follow. I make four piles of paper on the floor. Government statements. Eyewitness accounts. Letters from detainees. Amal’s story. The first draft of what will become Something to Declare is assembled in half an hour.

July 2004 The queue is five abreast and stretches from the door of the Melbourne Town Hall, up Collins Street to Russell Street. The gamble of putting on Something to Declare in a venue this size is paying off. Backstage, Helen Morse, Pamela Rabe, Alison Whyte and Daniella Farinacci are getting ready. Onstage, the music has begun. Watching the crowd move in and fill this huge auditorium, it is almost possible to convince yourself that change is happening. But it’s tricky to go by crowd size on occasions like this. Years back, 30 000 gun owners rallied in Spring Street and everyone got jittery. You had to remind yourself that what you were seeing was every single gun owner and their family and friends. That was it—that was everybody. Suddenly 30 000 doesn’t seem so many. Holding that

81

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 82

Michael Gurr

thought, it was still heartening on a freezing Melbourne night to feel the pulse in that hall. Those who stood ready with buckets to collect donations found themselves comforting members of the audience too distressed to stay listening inside. About $11 000 was raised to help refugee families re-settle, and maybe some people went away toughened up to re-start arguments within their own families. The show has now been performed hundreds of times around the country, a rolling piece of actor activism that has reached many, many thousands. You hear back that people have become active after seeing it, got involved somehow, changed something somewhere. But it wasn’t until the fair-skinned Cornelia Rau is falsely imprisoned by the Department of Immigration that the issue comes bounding into the mainstream. Tonight Amal Hasan Basri, SIEV X survivor, temporary visa holder, is in the audience listening to Helen Morse speaking her words. Afterwards, she comes to the stage, crushed under the weight of applause. She begins to speak, and for a terrible moment I think she’s going to repeat everything the audience has just heard. She does, but the effect is strangely right. From Helen Morse, Amal’s story with an actor’s clarity and actor’s restraint. From Amal Hasan Basri, Amal’s story again, as if to verify that everything you have heard is true.

82

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 83

Days Like These

March 1987 In advertising they don’t call your first audition an audition. They call it a chat to camera. This means that you stand in a room at a masking-tape mark on the floor in front of a camera and say chatty things about yourself. There are two, maybe three, people there. The director of the advertisement and a young woman with a zany name who runs the casting agency. This is how they arrive at a short list. Minutes before, you have filled out a form about your shoe size, waist size, ability to skateboard or horse-ride, in a room with other men who look either very like you or, more bewilderingly, nothing like you at all. There is one person who will decide who gets this job. Not the casting agent. Not the director of the advertisement. It will be the head of marketing for the company whose product you are selling. You are dealing with a chain of insecurity. Everyone is looking for the right face, the right voice, but no-one is sure of the correct answer. No-one wants to make the wrong call because millions of dollars are at stake. All you can do is try to stay real in the present. If that sounds easy, try it. Try and fake your interest in a car you have never seen. I don’t mean faking like a spruiker on a game show, I mean faking like a person in an ad. Serious faking. Little movie faking. And these little movies don’t even happen on a movie set. They happen at 11 a.m. under fluorescent light on yellow carpet. You are given one instruction: Just be yourself, Michael. Why am I here? Because I really need the money. One ad can buy me a year’s writing. And who is this self they want me to just be? My nice self, I guess, my friendly self with a quarter smile that implies that I know stuff, but not too much stuff. Tuned in but not thinking. Blandly alert. Sometimes there is camaraderie outside the audition room, sometimes not. Today, I am waiting with six rather unfriendly men. 83

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 84

Michael Gurr

Some are staring ahead in a state of what could be meditation, but is more likely a form of wishful astral travel. They are wishing: Please make me be anywhere but here. Some have picked up Dolly or Vogue Living from the table in the corner and are flipping through the pages with loud ironic grunts. This is meant to signal sophisticated disapproval; more likely they’ve just seen Brad’s abs. It’s like a 1950s VD clinic. Just being here announces our corruption. It’s just a chat to camera.You say: Hello. My name is Michael Gurr. The last movie I saw was. The last ad I did was. My agent is. You learn to lie. To come in with an anecdote. —I’ve got to tell you. I was talking to a mate of mine yesterday? (Always do the slight question mark. Not the rising inflection. The slight question mark indicates interest, the rising inflection indicates insecurity.) —And this mate of mine? I told him I was going for an ad. OK? And he said: Make sure it’s for a car. Because if it’s for a car they might give you one for free! Silence —And thank you. It’s all they want. What do you look like, how do you sound? Handshakes, out the door and the audition headache while you wait for the tram. It’s a crummy little headache this one, because it’s about nothing being fulfilled. Just a spurt of homeless adrenaline. And then you hear back. And this is the real audition. An actual script. In this case, I am to be the young father for a brand of disposable nappies. I go in, meet the director, soften myself a bit, meet my screen wife, do a few improvised lines, go home. The next day

84

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 85

Days Like These

I get the call. I have the job. I am to be the disposable nappies Dad. The day after, we have to meet with the baby who will feature in the ad and ‘bond’ with her. We do this. I’m happy around babies so I don’t see the point, but we pass the baby around and hold her and say how lovely she is. We do this in a pricey hotel room hired for the purpose. The actual mother of the baby is sweet and real and nervous. Her presence makes me uneasy. Doing a TV ad for disposable nappies for $6000 is fine, but this young mother handing her baby around under arc lights for probably less than the baby’s fake Mum and Dad are being paid feels a bit less than fine. On the set of the ad, a house in a very expensive suburb, the owner is packing away the last of her valuables. She has an administered Melbourne tan and is joking about not wanting anything stolen. The film crew stand around in baggy jeans, half-smiling at her, radiating the slow, knowing contempt of Australian men who are sure of their jobs. A few of them are muttering about not wanting to steal her stuff anyway, look at what a pile of pretentious tat it is. What would you steal, mate? Some pussy-willow twigs in a five-foot vase? You want to stay on the good side of film crews. When they decide they like you, life is easy. A vote against and your day is hard. This mob have already decided they don’t care if their boots scuff the skirting boards. Gaffer tape will be all over delicate surfaces within the hour. A child of the house turns up at the wrong time in his private school uniform, interrupting the crew’s work. He ignores them, opens the over-stocked fridge and sighs. The crew watch him with murderous patience. As the kid slumps out, still not having acknowledged the presence of strangers in his house, you think: You don’t know how much danger you were in, little chum. They might have easily snapped off a limb just to hear the sound it made.

85

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 86

Michael Gurr

Australian class distinctions, unspoken by anyone, come surging up. The tradesmen who make up the crew and the wealthy lady who owns the house. She patronises them and they patronise her back. The only difference between their polite contempt for each other seems to be that the crew have a sense of humour. Then there is the difference between the woman who is the baby’s actual mother and the woman who will play her mother in this ad. The actual Mum is fascinated by the world of cameras. She defers to her betters. Us. Someone has told her she can make a packet. She hands her baby over to us hoping only that it will behave. She’s made herself up nicely for the day, and she could be talked into anything. In Country Road costume, we usher her baby away and she’s guided somewhere where she can have a Pepsi and watch it all on a little screen. We pretend to love her child for three hours until the baby squalls for food. Everyone resentfully sits or smokes while the child is fed, then it is back to looking for what is called ‘the magic moment’. This means the bit when the baby will look up towards its pretend-mother’s face and give an expression of such complete love or quirkiness that everyone can go home. It takes hours. I spend most of the day carrying a plastic prop baby around, flying it through the air, cooing things at it. I get to play the disposable nappies Dad three or four times in different ads. They even sell them to New Zealand. Every time they do this I get another few thousand dollars. I am able to write for a few years. The subject of these advertisements was that those who wanted to live nicely could make their lives easier by using this product. The experience of these advertisements was that an aspiring mother could sell a few hours of her baby’s discomfort for a possible greater good: money in the bank for her baby’s future. The result of

86

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 87

Days Like These

these advertisements was that I wrote in comfort for a while. Over a few years I’m in ads about computers, cars, toddler food, domestic violence, a department store, a bank. Every director of every ad is working on a feature film. Every actor is subsidising their work in the theatre. I don’t mind watching ads on TV—I like that people get paid for doing this.

87

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 88

Michael Gurr

April 1986 Rebecca Driffield’s attic flat is a monumental climb, especially

with luggage from Australia. She’s come to Paris to start again. Her life has definite chapters and this is a new one. For now, she is working as a babysitter and painting when she can. I’ve known her for years—since she taught art at Melbourne High School. Worse than the theatre, the world a painter must inhabit is all conducted in code. I think you could submit a play anonymously but not a painting. Curators and gallery owners want to sample the person, want to taste the artist before they will match up the work to their sense of what’s acceptable. They’re curating themselves, really; what hangs on their walls tells their peers what sort of person they are. It’s a strange world, it makes theatre look sensible. Right now in Australia the human face is about the least fashionable thing you could be painting: Rebecca paints nothing else. This is one of those moments when you hope two people who have never met will like each other. My girlfriend Elly is anxious. We’re away for three months and she is about to meet an old friend. It’s meet-the-family time. But up here at the top of the building there is cassis in cheap glasses and talk of what we might all be breathing. Because the nuclear power station at Chernobyl has just blown up. Radiation clouds give us something else to focus on. This is the fatal symptom of the Soviet Union. For days, they don’t tell the world what has happened. They lie while satellite pictures tell us something catastrophic has gone on. The cloud spreads across Europe and with it a low, growling impatience. It’s as if the continent is slowly turning and looking towards the USSR while the last bit of forgiveness trickles out and evaporates. We’ve had the Cold War up to here, the missile shipments through our cities, the lowlevel fear, the overripe East–West rhetoric, and now you’ve gone and done a big toxic fart all over us and lied about it. 88

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 89

Days Like These

Paris is the first time I’ve seen snow falling. I think it’s ash, so light and grey it is, and Elly and I must look like an audition for a particularly swell cinema ad as we catch it, eat it and smack each other’s hands to stay warm. And then realise what is probably being carried in this particular snow, and still don’t care. In London we stay with friends, one of them a nurse who confesses her secret excitement as we move all the potted herbs under cover. —I like a crisis. If there’s ever a plane crash never stop looking for me because I’ll be one of the survivors. The radiation has got serious over Britain and on the news they tell you not to walk in the rain.You tend not to watch the TV news when you travel, but it is sensible this time and we see things we might have otherwise missed. Margaret Thatcher appears on the screen. Our friends have only one word for her. Fake. They point out the way her voice has changed, apparently under the tutelage of one of the country’s best voice teachers, replacing ripped tin with that deadly, patronising whisper. How she has been taught not to move her head. This is something you can learn from royalty. To move your head about quickly and to have mobile expressions shows you to be vulnerable to your surroundings. If you dart around, you’re responding to what’s going on. Face mobility lowers your status. To hold your head still and gently swivel towards your questioner, to barely move a muscle, is very high status. The Queen of England does it, very big Hollywood stars do it, Thatcher did it. We look up to those people who barely respond: we think they must be our betters. The most powerful person in the room is the person who does nothing.You can learn it, it’s not very hard. And Thatcher has learnt it. She leans gently forward towards her questioner and does a slow blink before saying something like, ‘But do you really think that?’ 89

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 90

Michael Gurr

And the questioner undergoes a sort of disintegration. It looks like knowledge and power, but it’s just acting. The late Bill Hartley, Victorian Left-wing dinosaur, used to say: you should turn the volume down on the TV and then decide whether someone is electable. It’s a hateful observation and only sometimes true, but I always do it. How they hold their heads. The way they look from one person to another. Some heads dart around, some do Her Majesty’s slow swivel. It’s my first time in London, so that means I have to see a lot of theatre. It’s hard to find plays that connect. A witty re-setting of The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1950s Britain is a fun night, a production of a play about obscure Russian poets has shouting and angst, but it’s hard to take the temperature of the place. We go to tiny theatres, to the National, but we can’t find a pulse. It feels like no-one is writing about anything. There is something brittle, unsatisfied about it all. It’s a feeling that chimes with a dissatisfaction growing in me. I’m returning to Melbourne for rehearsals of a play I would probably give a pretty tough review of if I wrote reviews and it came my way. Dead to the World treads water artistically. I’m impatient for something but not sure what it is. I feel I’m out of step. Writers are always imposing their moods on the world, seeing their obsessions reflected in newspapers, reading their private causes into someone’s behaviour on the train. We tend to take the weather personally. That said, the 1980s seem somehow guarded and defensive. Behind the international cult of the celebrity entrepreneur you feel there is something jittery going on. The 1980s make you long for the 1950s or ’60s, when theatre and politics surged ahead and seemed to give life some definition. Theatre now seems strangely becalmed, revivals are all over the place. Maybe the ‘decade of greed’ doesn’t suit the form.

90

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 91

Days Like These

It’s a few years until the big ripple runs across Eastern Europe, kids dancing on top of the Wall that was built in the year I was born, but maybe this hollow feeling has some foreboding in it. People you meet seem to want to protect their jobs. They’re unsure what the next ‘thing’ is, politically, artistically. If fashion reflects anything it reflects an unspoken feeling, and a lot of people are dressing the same. What is the power-suit but an outward expression of uncertainty? What are padded shoulders except the most obvious declaration of insecurity? This feels like a time of defensive strutting. Political leaders look like they’re in costume reading off a bad script, all your favourite musicians are putting out so-so albums, we’re in fake-world. The Russians send in unprotected men to pour concrete on the melted core of the Chernobyl reactor. The cloud moves back and forth across the top of Europe. Staying in Kent among bumblebees, squirrels and rumours of badgers, I go for a walk in the woods. The rain that falls is the softest imaginable.

91

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 92

Michael Gurr

May 1986 The first thing I notice about the Cannes Film Festival is its giant billboards for completely invented films. A made-up title, a fake strap-line and the faces of stars no doubt paid for their use are dotted around the streets. I’m told they are a kind of pitch. For example,‘The Last Hostage’ is a script that has not been written yet. The strap-line promises: ‘He’s the last man out and he’s angry as Hell’. And so far Stallone, or whoever the star is, has only signed a contract to have his face used on the billboard. This five-minute executive’s fantasy is meant to give the impression of activity. It is also possible that someone will say ‘What a Great Idea’ and the film will be made. But the billboards are pure spin. Actually, Stallone isn’t in Cannes this year. He was meant to be here, but the USA bombed Libya and the Hollywood war heroes are staying home. There’s a French gunboat moored off the beach. At first I think it’s a prop advertising someone’s film because I’ve just seen a pirate ship in the harbour advertising something Roman Polanksi has directed. But the gunboat is real. The Libyans might bomb Cannes in revenge. The film I wrote is screening here in the market attached to the festival. But I haven’t flown in especially for this, I’m travelling around for three months and Cannes is a detour. Departure is based on my play, A Pair of Claws, it’s directed by Brian Kavanagh, and any congratulations we get are for being brave in putting so much talk into a movie. Anyone who congratulates you for artistic bravery is in fact consoling you, preparing you for critical and popular disdain. It’s the sympathetic pat on the arm, the Never Mind tilt of the head. In this case they’re right. The film is never released in Australia. I’ve seen it on Channel 9 at 2 a.m. once or twice, but that’s been about the extent of it. Someone told me that it did OK in a few of the Nordic countries. 92

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 93

Days Like These

Elly, Rebecca and I walk from the station, trying to find the house where we’re staying, but we’re lost. Eventually we run into Brian Kavanagh, he gives us a key and we walk to the house. It’s taken us three hours and we’re noisy-tired. We wake up David Parker and Nadia Tass who are here to sell Malcolm and are sleeping upstairs. No-one told them we were coming and they think we’re burglars. Travel Diary. First screening. Warned that lots of people walk out of films at Cannes. Buyers want a taste, then they have other films to sample. Well, sure, but after fifteen minutes? Most stay. First time I’ve heard the film with its soundtrack. Bruce Smeaton’s music uses Verdi as its base. A whole lot more sound on the film now, phones ringing, church bells etc. Sound makes a world. Reminds me of the John Berger TV series about art, Ways of Seeing. He was saying that sound could overpower or at least influence how you viewed an image. He showed you a Van Gogh painting and the voice-over said, ‘Here is a picture of some crows flying over a cornfield’. Then he showed you the same painting but with swelling music and a voice-over saying, ‘This is the last picture Vincent Van Gogh painted before he killed himself ’. Even having Berger expose you to the mechanics, your reactions swung across the pendulum. It was a big moment, seeing this. An elderly wealthy American couple who live in Monaco are in love with our film and want autographs. The Wainwrights. They are tall and vague and patrician. Rebecca says they look like characters cut from a Patrick White novel, with eyes trained by long horizons. Interviews at the Majestic to promote the film.

93

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 94

Michael Gurr

We play a game in Cannes. When you leave the foyer of a big hotel and walk into the street, there is a pack of fans with cameras waiting outside. They lean forward to see if you’re famous. Our game is to shield our faces with copies of Screen International and look as if we’re hurrying. It makes them surge forward. They get quite snaky when they realise that we’re nobodies and they’ve wasted film on us. Christopher Lambert, in the great film-world cliché, is shorter than I thought. Ursula Andress hurries by in a parody of the pursued star—but no-one is actually chasing her. A light plane flies over with a misspelt tribute to the British film industry. It says British Firm Industry. Elly and Rebecca and I are not good guests at the official parties. We want to have fun but the feeling is more desperate networking. There’s a fair amount of bulldust being sprayed confidently around. Why don’t I believe anyone who says that they are working on ‘a couple of projects’? Possibly because I’ve used this line myself when it wasn’t true. And no credible adult has projects. Tonight, on the beach opposite the Carlton Hotel inside a cyclone fence enclosure, the Australian Film Commission has gathered money-movers, exhausted journalists and Clive James. People are very serious about not taking Cannes seriously. The jolly-desperate tone is too much and we escape to walk home through the water. Travel Diary. Second screening. Very small audience. Assured that those who were there are buyers. I’m told we won’t leave here without sales to North America. UK/ Europe very interested. Nothing happens. The talk goes nowhere. No-one ever sees the film. They’d flown me to Hobart where Departure was filmed. I had written a tricky speech in the screenplay for Patricia Kennedy, an

94

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 95

Days Like These

actress with a reputation for being demanding. She’s also a writer’s fantasy—language gets her high. The speech had more sub-clauses than an Act of parliament. She greeted me on the set and said Gotcha! into my ear: she’d seen the speech and taken it as a personal challenge. I watched it being shot and the pleasure she took in it. Without exception, everyone I have ever been warned about as demanding has turned out to be merely perfectionist. Travel Diary. We get on a train to Arles, walk near the river as night comes. Swallows are filling every inch of the sky. Dark-bright blue. There was a bridge here once, two supports stand midstream. And on either bank, high on giant slabs, great stone lions sit, each with a raised paw, gazing out in different directions.

95

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 96

Michael Gurr

June 1986 We arrive in New York on Memorial Day. This means retired

soldiers are marching down the street. It’s as good a way as any to meet America. You see crisp white uniforms, buzz-cut Korean War veterans. It all feels safely familiar. Like any Australian, my cultural education has been 70 per cent American. I know these uniforms, the tunes the bands are playing are part of my internal playlist. We walk along, my girlfriend and me, buy a hot dog, stuff like that. Then you see the Vietnam vets. Maybe Hollywood got it right: they walk deliberately out of step, wearing their torture on the outside. They seem to have adopted the costume of bikers, an outlaw group who, unlike hippies, have heavy rules and heavy penalties for breaking them. Maybe that’s the attraction: biker world is army-lite. The uniform is just as strict, the chain of command just as clear. They radiate a sort of defiant absence: we are here and we are not here. It’s emotionally confusing. Inadequate men send people to war. Their ideas flick millions of lives aside. And here’s the tail end of it: survivors walking along a street asking for recognition. We’ll give them that, why wouldn’t we?, but at the same time you’re nudging elbows in the crowd with those who are here to barrack for the idea of war. This strange cheer squad who hang around the edges of Anzac Day marches, who are here on Broadway today, wishing themselves into experiences they’ve never had. What do they want, these people? You see the hunger that turns them into urgers, encouragers of conflict, uniform aficionados, war-gamers. They ripple excitedly with vicarious pleasure. The real sadness is how they repel the people who would like to stand alongside those who’ve been sent to do the dirty work. The story of war has been taken over by hollow men who you suspect would have been the first collaborators.

96

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 97

Days Like These

Soldiers walk down Broadway in the heat. It’s complicated, this honouring of soldiers. You stare and stare. Just as you think you’re about to understand something, see into them, the urgers get in your way again, pushing past for a photo next to someone who took a bullet. I’m looking at American soldiers, but I’m seeing Australians. And in the Memorial Day parade I’m seeing what goes down St Kilda Road every April. Between the people who were sent to war and the people who might love them the most stands a battalion of fakes. The inflated men, who will always be in the way. A woman falls into step with us and begins her monologue. —Isn’t this great? I got here from Florida two weeks ago. I trained as a nurse, you know, but actually I’m an actress. Theatre in Florida is very crap, so if you’re an actress you have to come to New York. Where are you from? Because no-one in New York is from New York, everyone in New York is from someplace else. So where are you from? We tell her. She stops. Looks at us significantly. You feel this might be an Important Moment. —Australia? You know what? That is just wonderful. And she’s gone, on impossibly high heels. Except she’s not: her feet aren’t actually making contact with the ground. She’s suspended by optimism. On Day One we’ve met a thumbnail sketch of the American Dream. I’ve arrived with a list of contacts. People to call, theatre directors to meet. We’re staying at the Iroquois Hotel; they must have been a less fancy tribe than the Algonquin mob, going by the state of the carpet. I start making calls. The Americans are friendly. The contrast to London is astonishing. Having just done the rounds of theatre

97

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 98

Michael Gurr

companies there, I am used to the tired glaze of literary managers and directors, the weary English impossibility of it all. A typical exchange between the Playwright and the Literary Manager in London: P: LM: P: LM:

P: LM: P: LM:

So, have you had a chance to read the plays? Yes, I did get a chance. And? Look, we’re talking about plays of a certain accomplishment, but you must understand the difficulty of things here. What do you mean? Just how hard everything is, you see. Yes. And the terrible state of theatre at the moment.

Pause P: LM:

OK. So, you’re saying: what? The whole atmosphere of Britain now. And British theatre. It’s very hard.

Having begun the conversation in hope, you find yourself boxed into sympathy for the Literary Manager. He’s having a very hard time. How can I help him? Oh, I know. By going away. The Americans, though, the Americans greet you like a new flavour. Though they will forget you the moment you leave the room, they have an old-fashioned new-world enthusiasm that’s easy to take. They love your play so long as they are shaking your hand. I trek around the New York theatres having these conversations. Every single one is uplifting and the tone is flattering, respectful. Then I have to own up to something. I no longer have faith in the plays I’m hawking. If you’re allowed to have a back-catalogue at

98

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 99

Days Like These

twenty-five, that’s what I feel I’m selling. Plays that don’t represent where I think my work should be up to. This is partly because of a time lapse between the writing and the promoting, but also a growing feeling that there is something wrong with the way I’m working. I’m writing from an idea of what plays should be, not an urgent need. It makes for something awkward: a sense of being an advocate not for yourself, but for someone else. These conversations, in London and New York, are an uncomfortable but necessary kick in the shins: something is out of whack. I have to get the things I write into alignment with my thinking. I’ve been writing to a convention I no longer believe in. It’s a moment of dislocation. How can my hand and my brain be so out of sync? Trying to convince people to put on plays that have started to feel like artefacts is a big, uncomfortable jolt. Sometimes a brave friend will sit you down and point out how your life isn’t joining up—how your ideas and your behaviour are out of tune. This was like that. Except I don’t know what I should be writing; all I’m certain about is dissatisfaction. And then, right on cue, because it is the only ticket we could get at Joe Papp’s Public Theatre, we see Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon. It’s not just a great play, it’s advancing what theatre can do. Completely unsettling, long, horrible, it’s a play that works on you like hypnotism. It’s just about a strange woman, Lemon, remembering her childhood. She tells us about her sloppy-liberal family and her charismatic fascist Aunt. She leads us gently to the point of thanking SS guards for doing what no-one else was brave enough to do. What she means is that most of us live lives of comparative ease because certain things are done in our name. And we should thank those people who do bad things so that we might live nice lives. It’s terrifying. I’m not doing justice to the play. It frightened me, not just for Lemon’s argument, but for what it said I should be

99

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 100

Michael Gurr

doing. It showed me how you could do trance. How in the theatre speeches could work not just as arguments but as a kind of snakecharming. Wallace Shawn is much loved by playwrights. He tends to write the plays we wish we had. If nothing else, one night in a New York theatre smartened me up. He set the bar high. Then Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn do a bit of creaky niceness in a vaguely anti-war play called The Petition. An Off-Broadway company do a night of Tennessee Williams one-act plays that you forgive because he doesn’t have a cynical bone in his body. That was a matinee at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. It’s good how Americans aren’t afraid of naming their theatres after people. And then Elly gets an infected tooth and that’s the rest of New York. A dentist who actually had a moose head mounted on his wall gives us the options. —You can have root canal. That’s $3000. Or you can have the tooth removed, that’s $800. Make up your mind. Friends in San Francisco are going to pay for the dentist, but at a cost. We must go to Zabar’s deli in New York and bring them some sort of chocolate thing. It can’t be ice-cream, that would melt, it’s some sort of cake. They collect us at San Francisco airport in, yes, a pink Cadillac, and drive us to Oakland, eating their NYC deli food. Then we stop for onion rings. Then we keep driving to Yosemite National Park and a raccoon walks into the cabin and the man does cocaine while the woman gets poison ivy. It’s a check list of American clichés and they just keep coming. We drive past a lake and wind the windows up. The lake stinks. Why does the lake stink? Proposition 13, a citizen-initiated referendum asked everyone in California whether they wanted lower taxes. Everyone voted Yes. So taxes were cut and the state can no longer afford to clean the lake. It smells of sulphur. But at least everyone had their say. On the way back to Melbourne, we have

100

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 101

Days Like These

twenty-four hours in Hawaii. I swim at Waikiki Beach among American college kids who are happy here on their happy island. But it’s edgy: Hawaiians sit around looking surly. Underneath the plates of spare ribs and abundance, the endless topping-up of breakfast coffee, something simmers. There’s a discontent. Hawaii might be Young America’s fun park, but at night you can hear the ominous resentful sound of someone kicking a swing in the playground.

101

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 102

Michael Gurr

July 1988 There is a rule in the theatre. When the cast outnumbers the audience there is no obligation to perform. This does happen now and then. The rule evolved to protect actors from the indignity of performing to empty auditoriums, but it might just as well be there to protect audiences of three from the insane pressure of carrying the burden of response. Tonight in the small theatre above Melbourne’s Athenaeum we have two people in the audience. These Days, a trio of one-act plays, is being performed by a co-op of seven actors. No-one is on a wage. The cast, designer, lighting designer and director Judith McGrath are all working for a cut of the door. We’ve been given the theatre for free. What we haven’t counted on is that our twoweek season will coincide exactly with a two-week public transport strike that empties the city at night. It’s small consolation that the hit show in the big theatre downstairs is also deserted. It’s 8 p.m. We’re all in costume. No-one wants to pack up and go home, so I’m sent out to ask the audience. I stand at the front of the stage and look down at the two women sitting in the front row.

—Hello. Uh, look. You seem to be it for tonight. We’re happy to do the show if you’re happy to see it in these circumstances. They beam back, nodding. Their verdict energises the dressing room. Dispirited faces are suddenly uplifted. Our audience applaud like maniacs at the end and we applaud them back. Out of the hundreds of voices that inhabit any writer’s head, there is one especially stern one. It is a voice that alerts you that you’re on the verge of becoming comfortable. Just when you’ve adjusted to the water temperature, this voice kicks in and says: Go deeper, go colder. In this case, going deeper and colder means working freelance in an unpopular form. Three one-act plays performed without 102

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 103

Days Like These

the structure and support of a theatre company. One-act plays are never a favourite with audiences; you can put on a solid evening of them and drop the ticket price, but still an irrational sense lingers about not getting value for money. And co-op theatre, while it always begins in hope and democracy, often ends with a good deal of mopping up and someone left carrying the can. It was Ray Lawler who paid the advertising bill I was left with and stalled the eviction knock on my door. He also gave me the best advice about the plays. They were often reflective—the characters often stopped what they were doing to recall something. Ray said: —Beware the cul-de-sac of reflection. Whenever a character in a play feels inclined to begin a speech with the long in-breath of recollection, I hear Ray’s warning. You can wander down the cul-de-sac of recollection and never come out. It’s warm down there, playing writer-music, but it’s the theatrical equivalent of singing in the shower: the good acoustics can be very misleading. David Mamet tells a similar story. As the Prince and Princess prepare to leave the besieged castle, the Princess pauses. Prince: Hurry! We must leave now! Princess: Leave? Leave? How many ways there are to leave … I had a kitten once … And David Hare insists that scenes in plays must be rivers, not lakes. They must go somewhere. (He immediately finds an exception in Act Two of The Cherry Orchard, which simply insists on what has happened in Act One, but never mind.) Back in rehearsals for These Days I remember Ray’s advice but don’t make many changes. Because the plays arrived so strongly, I know they can be worried to death. Let them stand or fall on their own. For the first and last time I’ve stolen a line from actual life. 103

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 104

Michael Gurr

In the first of the plays in the trio, A Million Dollars, two men play a drinking game of moral truth-or-dare. In life, a friend had once peered into her glass of red wine and mis-spoke about what she saw there. She’d said: —There is … sentiment at the bottom of my glass. I stole her line, put it in my play and played the character who spoke it. It was the one line singled out and quoted by the critics. They thought it very witty. You don’t do that twice. What one-act plays give you is the chance to tell a story in one breath. Some of Tennessee Williams’s best are more than sketches, they are melodies that are exactly as long as they need to be. Sam Beckett’s are perfect until they reach that too-exquisite point where putting a word down on the page is an insult to the sensation which inspired it. Some of them you feel are best honoured by not being performed at all. But then Beckett wouldn’t go to performances of his own plays—he would vanish after the ‘perfect’ moment had been reached in rehearsal. Going deeper, colder with These Days, I’m also learning something about music in the theatre. At the end of the last play, No Serious Damage, we play an old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song. The play is about the end of a marriage and the way its protagonists fall into nostalgia for the early days of love. We intend the song ironically. It is meant to come from their old record collection, to demonstrate their refusal to be adult. Nearly everyone thinks it is corny, that the play is falling into nostalgia. We can’t understand it: if you listen to what the characters say, the intention is perfectly clear. Yes, but play one song … Music, especially familiar music, is a quick and hazardous way to generate emotion in the theatre. Forget ironic intention—the memories of the audience carry much more weight.

104

DLT 02 (38-105) 6/21/06 4:57 AM Page 105

Days Like These

These Days, this trio of short plays, turns a corner for me. After a few years of writing plays that look or feel like what I think plays ought to be, these ones arrive with a kind of certainty about them. There’s a naturalness, less striving—for the first time I feel I’m writing in my own voice—recognising my own handwriting. A sudden urgency arrives—I think I know how to write the stories that need to come out. Bruce Myles sees the show. I’ve known him for a few years but we haven’t really connected. He wants to get together and talk about films and plays. After These Days closes, we meet in a pub in Flinders Street and begin a conversation, a collaboration, that’s still alive eighteen years later.

105

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 106

Michael Gurr

106

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 107

Mary Delahunty is the host of the

7.30 Report on ABC TV

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 108

Michael Gurr

September 1993 Mary Delahunty is the host of the 7.30 Report on ABC TV.

Russell Skelton is executive producer. They ask for some satire. I’m up for it. Joan Kirner is Premier of Victoria and about to be thrown out by Jeff Kennett, who is doing his campaign with his lips sewn shut. You hear rumours about his regular meetings with the senior editorial folk at the Herald Sun. Jeff ’s got a reputation for shooting his mouth off. The advice he seems to be getting is: Just shut up, son, hold your tongue until you get in. There is not a word about the cuts to come. The former ad man is letting the ad men run this one. I write a taxi driver, played by Roger Oakley. The idea is that he’s been driving Joan or Jeff to their election campaign appointments. He comments on what they say in the back of his cab. He has no politics, he just observes. We film the first one, which has the driver dropping Kennett off at the Herald Sun headquarters for a little policy advice. It goes to air and we’re pretty happy that it gets the highest number of complaints that the 7.30 Report has ever had. But it’s the ABC so we have to do something called ‘balance’. This means mocking a Labor Premier. Deep breath. The Premier seems isolated, so I write one about her abandoning the taxi and piloting her own helicopter across the state, unable to find a place to land that wants her. It finishes with the helicopter clipping the roof of the taxi, a special effect we achieve with sparklers and cigarette smoke. My heart isn’t really in it. I go back to mocking Kennett and then get another scolding phone call about ‘balance’. The result is a rather esoteric monologue from the taxi driver about the Premier visiting a maternity ward and being in such a rush that she doesn’t wait for the babies to actually be born before kissing them. If you were listening carefully enough it’s an image of some offensiveness, but the ABC doesn’t get a single complaint. The Labor telephone trees must have given up. 108

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 109

Days Like These

The campaign seems endless, possibly because of the sense of inevitability around it. This is the ‘Guilty Party’ campaign, a slogan so overwhelming that even blind Labor loyalists don’t bother contradicting it. Everyone just seems to want it to be over. We make about eight little satire spots for TV, our last one finishing with an exhausted taxi driver locking himself in the boot of his car with a despondent parting shot. —What do you want to wake up to on Sunday? Cold porridge or a cold shower? Later, Joan Kirner will achieve a rehabilitation, not just through activism, but for leading the Victorian Labor Party when no-one else wanted the job. Jeff Kennett’s post-politics re-invention as a crusader for the depressed is genuinely good casting: men whose misery is pushing them to the door marked Oblivion might listen to someone like Kennett. Maybe it becomes OK to talk about depression at the pub. Or in sign language at the Grand Prix. After the election is awfully, thankfully over, Roger Oakley and I ask for a tape of our satire spots from the ABC. It’s all been erased by someone recycling videotape. That’s probably OK: satire should vanish.

109

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 110

Michael Gurr

August 1978 The poster on the fridge has an unflattering image of Malcolm

Fraser in full Easter Island mode. The caption: He lies and he knows he lies. This hate figure, illegitimate seizer of power, conniver with Kerr or worse, glove puppet of the CIA. But the renters of this house aren’t nursing cups of Dismissal vinegar; the poster will soon rotate to one of Bob Hawke, uranium miner. All questions here are answered by the dread word ‘multinational’. Fraser is only the latest embodiment of ‘power’ and time will splinter around this fridge until it wears the slogans of the anti-globalisation movement, via a late 1980s detour into Leunig whimsy. The Fraser fridge holds the remains of an amorphous stew made of cupboard contents and flabby vegetables, boosted into inedibility by a good shake of Mixed Herbs. The Hawke fridge, with Yellowcake Bob on the door, will have coffee for the plunger, couscous maybe and half a jar of sundried tomatoes. By the time ‘Haliburton’ is the international swear word, a so-what irony has taken over the food chain and fish fingers are back, along with some shrivelled bocconcini. Fraser’s margarine has disappeared—butter really does taste better. The fridge itself, with its cantilevered handle, came with the house and is beloved now—you can even buy new ones in the same 1960s style.

Februar y 2005 Malcolm Fraser, hero of the exasperated Left? The journalists’ question is always: Has Fraser changed or has the Liberal Party changed? The remark from someone listening to his speech about asylum seekers is more to the point: —Jesus. I think I spat at him once in Collins Street.

110

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 111

Days Like These

The weekend-paper psychologists will put his defence of institutions and the processes of justice down to delayed guilt at his own subverting of them in the 1975 sacking. For me, the psychology of the man is less important than a question that rises up again and again. That Malcolm Fraser should defend due process and democratic institutions shouldn’t really surprise. It’s the climate he’s in now—it seems to chafe against his old-world sense of propriety. The question for me is: What would make the Right happy? In Underwear, Perfume and Crash Helmet I wrote Lionel Fleet into being: a Right-wing Canadian philosopher on the international lecture circuit, a man whose final seduction was, ‘The things you want? Have them’. His advice was a kind of moral relaxation, less fretting, more ease, more freedom. He thought himself a kind of poet of the Right. But where are the others? I don’t mean the villains, the roaring demon-kings of fiction—but the true tenors of the Rightwing cause. Where are they—the poets of the Right? There is a wilfully naïve mind experiment that’s useful at odd times: if you took away the things a person hates, what passion would remain? Trying this experiment on any current manifestation of the Right, whether in Kirribilli or the White House, Lyons or Bundaberg, I keep drawing blanks. What would happen to reactionary thought if the source of its irritation was removed? If the lezzos and abos and reffos and towel-heads and femmos were all to vaporise? Or, better, that their advocates were to vanish too, along with their humourless scolding mantras of complaint? Would this be the bright dawn of the Right-wing soul, streets transformed into that Hello Neighbour moment in musicals, just before a big number starts? What exactly does make a neo-con happy? The same experiment conducted on the Left does I think have an answer: a lessening of needless suffering, the entitlement of the weakest to civility. I’m carried away with imagining the behaviour of the Right with

111

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 112

Michael Gurr

all their irritants removed. I ask one of my sisters what she thinks would happen and she fixes me with a level look as if I’ve just asked the dumbest question in the world. —What do you think would happen? They’d turn on the weakest among themselves.

112

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 113

Days Like These

September 2004 It’s one of the odder paintings I’ve seen. John and Janette Howard are standing in an idea of sunlight, smiling at us, in Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery. The point of focus is his hand. It is around his wife’s shoulder and it is holding on a little too tight. Because the surface of the picture is picture-perfect, because the light is so insincere, the story of the painting buzzes around it like flies. I can’t tell if the painter is smirking, fawning or calmly banking a cheque. I turn away and try looking again. Can I forget who the people in the painting are? Is it possible to just look at two people without a swarm of media images? This is Herculean, the faces are too familiar, but I’ll give it a shot. No, it’s still the Prime Minister and his wife. Try again. Too hard. If I didn’t know who they were, who would I think they were? Missionaries, plantation owners, lottery winners? Vindicated lawn worshippers? It’s also a painting suffused with love and love’s exclusive power. These people have decided that their world will not be mocked but will grow and expand into something powerful. As belligerently as any rapper, they dare you to disrespect them. They know what’s what. If Britain had become a republic after World War II and branches of its royal family had gone to live in Perth and bought land and tamed it and done alright and doggedly learnt the words to ‘Waltzing Matilda’, this might have been what they looked like. Because it is so obviously painted from a photograph it radiates impatience. No-one could stand like that for long.

December 2005 Five thousand residents of Cronulla and surrounding suburbs, spurred on by the fake hyperventilation of radio hosts, gather on

113

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 114

Michael Gurr

the beach. They want to ‘reclaim’ it from the Lebanese boys who come there and aggressively insult them and their girlfriends. Australian flags on sticks are used as weapons. T-shirts say things like We Grew Here, You Flew Here and Fuck Off We’re Full. The Prime Minister speaks: —Let’s celebrate the fact that this is still the greatest country in the world in which to live and let nobody tell us otherwise and let’s not wallow in self-pity and self-flagellation and self-criticism. It’s good, this. In one sentence there is patriotism, a cry of Shut Up to those foreigners or locals who might ask questions and a benediction to be free from pity, flagellation and criticism. Paradise. But John Howard’s greatest achievement isn’t the perversion of language, it is to appear as one thing while being another. To transmit that he is a conservative but to behave like a radical. The quickest way to understand this conjuring trick is to imagine what standing a Labor government would have if it had tried to, for example, use the navy for political purposes, introduce a new regressive tax system, take industrial protection away from working people, politicise the public service, abolish the tradition of ministerial responsibility and take the country to war on a lie. Mick Young, a minister in the Hawke government, resigned because he forgot to pay import duty on a Paddington Bear. Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone, deporters of innocent Australians, shrug and move on under the protection of a man who feels he owes no respect to the institutions and traditions you would expect him to honour. Appearances are indeed deceptive. After about seven years of his prime ministership, some conversations have become impossible.

114

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 115

Days Like These

—Did you see Howard on TV? —I don’t watch any more. What’s happened here? Only that argument has been anaesthetised. Certain words—and therefore certain ideas—have been removed from the national conversation. Conscience, responsibility, attention to the tender detail of people’s lives—these things sound off-key when spoken; to say them aloud is to hit a bum note in the choir. Political journalists, being the ultimate approval-seekers, fall into lockstep and praise each reduction of standards as a political masterstroke. Their craving for insider status makes them flatterers. There was something Michelle Grattan wrote, maybe late at night, after the lie of ‘children overboard’ had been exposed. It was part mea culpa, part lecture to the younger writers in the Press Gallery. The upshot of her piece was: Don’t Believe Everything You Are Told: Go And Find Out The Truth And Write It. Grattan had always struck me as a dogged reporter—and that’s no insult—and here she was using seniority to lay down the law. I watch commercial TV news because you should, and read the Courier Mail and the West Australian when they come my way. I don’t think Grattan’s prefectlecture has made a spot of difference. The men and women of the Australian press still sit like judges at the Olympic diving, holding up cards: a ten for a well-executed spin and double flip. They’re not embedded in the government—they’re embedded in their craving to call it right. Outsiders are rarely heard—or else are found blogging away in the nowhere world of the internet, where people convince themselves that chat matters. Who said this: ‘The only place to be radical is from the centre’? So most of my friends are not watching the Prime Minister on TV. And yet, and yet I’ve never felt a deeper yearning around me to have certain ideas articulated. Ideas about justice, ideas about

115

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 116

Michael Gurr

conscience, these dirty words, watching everyone put their chins down into their chests as they give up in embarrassment. Months can be entertainingly wasted inventing insults about a government you oppose, but you’d be missing the point. I grow impatient with people who take cheap shots at the PM and his group. The time is more profitably spent sinking down into their bloodstream and feeling what it is to be them. To feel what it is to want what they want. Very late one night, or morning, insomnia delivers a metaphor that slightly embarrasses me at dawn. It’s the mountain and the river. If you want to achieve the mountain, all your energy and all your intelligence is about reaching the peak. When you reach it, all your energy and all your intelligence is about staying there. It is the Right’s vision of the world—you must stop other people reaching the peak you stand on. The river, though, is analogous to life, always concerned about what’s around the next bend, uncertain, adaptable, dealing with arrows from unseen tribes on the banks, sudden rapids, then becalmed for no reason. There is no end to the river, it’s just birth and death and managing things—while the mountain is an end in itself. The mountain has no and then. The river is all and then. I find myself snapping at the teenage children of friends. This is not how the world is meant to be, you mustn’t accept lies as just the way things are. They look at me like they know something—that it’s all a bit of a joke. And then I notice the way they dress. The boys dress droopy, arseless, shoulderless and slack. The girls pout their midriffs, their lip bolts saying that pain is just a flippant sensation. It’s a kind of passive sarcasm. I retreat—they’ll work it out for themselves. These days I sometimes feel like my mouth is making shapes but words aren’t coming out.

116

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 117

Days Like These

March 1993 Arts for Labor is tricky territory. Even as I post an apocalyptic

letter to The Age warning of potential cuts to the ABC and all the rest of the Coalition’s dire fine print for the arts, part of me worries about what message we’re sending. Surely a whole bunch of actors and writers waving the Labor flag won’t help the Party in the marginals? When Paul Keating says that he loves Mahler, Labor hardheads shudder. They see this as giving a free kick to those hugely wealthy commentators who attack ‘elites’. One of the strangest things about the Labor Party is its willingness to believe the things people say about it. Labor seeks approval; the Coalition assumes it. This phenomenon is more pronounced in Opposition, but never far from the surface in government. I think this deep vein of defensiveness, even defeatism, comes from the Left’s essential appeal to generosity. It makes you feel like a dag, asking people to be nice. And Labor blokes feel a bit emasculated calling up what they see as the softer side of the national psyche. When commentators and Liberals say that Labor can’t manage the economy, the first response of Labor is not rebuttal, but shrinkage. And Labor’s ascendancy in the 1980s coincided with the command it demonstrated and the changes it forced on the Australian economy. If Labor people only feel strong when they feel they are seen as money-savvy, imagine their suspicion of something as indulgent, spare-time, rarefied and soft as the arts. You patiently point out that to believe only privileged people listen to music, go to libraries, watch films and visit the Stockmen’s Hall of Fame is not just wrong but a weird form of snobbery. You point out that office workers in marginal seats read Australian novels that public investment has helped bring into being. Party strategists acknowledge these facts, but they argue the perception

117

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 118

Michael Gurr

that the arts are for toffs. Labor’s blueprint for a national arts policy, ‘Creative Nation’, is dogged by bureaucratic niceties but it’s the first time anyone can remember an arts policy being given such prominence. Maybe it’s the word ‘arts’. It sets people’s teeth on edge. It annoys me. If you talk about books and movies and plays and museums and libraries and TV, you don’t get nearly so anxious a reaction. If you talk about these things, you remind people of their actual lives, how they spend a good deal of their time. But if you say ‘arts’, you just piss them off with a fantasy image of champagne and air-kissing. You argue these things, but to no effect. This election feels like Australia’s referendum on Thatcherism. The Coalition has released Fightback!, a short sharp shock of tax changes and funding cuts. It’s doubtful that many people have read this document but it’s promoted with a sort of excited meanspiritedness. Renters and the unemployed are spat on—Fightback! has dog-eat-dog written all over it. The Coalition seems almost frisky with the idea of smacking down the shirkers, whoever they are. Paul Keating’s unpopularity has become an article of faith among the commentators. It doesn’t look good. More than any election I can remember, this one has people asking: What can I do? So Arts for Labor does a big gig in Sydney and Sam Neill makes a galvanising speech introducing Keating in Melbourne. The Age publishes my letter alongside two others coming out for the Coalition. A famous conductor and a theatre entrepreneur seem to be arguing that a bit of stick would be no bad thing for Australia’s pampered creatives. Next stop: a radio studio for a live debate with the theatre entrepreneur and Senator Michael Baume, the Coalition’s potential Arts Minister. Baume is smart, he’s using the oldest trick in the book: soak up all the available time with waffle,

118

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 119

Days Like These

give ten-minute answers without taking a breath. He’s using boredom as a political weapon. If you interrupt him you’ll sound rude. The entrepreneur sort of fades into the wall and says very little. I’ve got the running and I discover a delicious trick of my own. The word ‘senator’, even when said politely, works not as a courtesy title, but as an accusation. It’s cheap, this, it’s playing off distrust of politicians, and I put the word into every second sentence. Just addressing him as ‘Senator’ shrinks his credibility. A rumour circulates at great speed. If the Coalition wins, the Arts will in fact go to a different senator: Bronwyn Bishop. It’s not known how many people this rumour galvanises into signing on to hand out how-to-vote cards for the ALP, but its awful plausibility sends a shiver up plenty of spines. When the rumour reaches the CEO of one of the country’s biggest arts organisations, he is asked whether he’s heard it. He smiles gently, happily. —Heard it? I started it. I spend the morning of the election with Hardie at a primary school smiling nicely and handing out the how-to-votes. These are always very engaging occasions. The Greens tend to be a little ostentatious in the way they recycle their cards. They really like to let you know how good they are. The Liberals have a nice woman on the gate this morning. She’s a conservative who doesn’t really like politics very much, for her it’s a slightly vulgar topic. If C of E, she would find mention of the Crucifixion a little untoward. She’s from the cake-stall generation, turning up as rostered, pitching in. I like her. We’ve discussed the weather during her shift and we mind her bag while she dashes to the Ladies. —We’ll watch your bag but we won’t hand out your cards.

119

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 120

Michael Gurr

She laughs. During her shift, the act of voting is a sort of goodnatured sport. It’s like we’re collecting for competing charities. Neither of us is really against feeding the starving kids in the other’s chosen famine. But her replacement on Liberal Party duty is a man I have met again and again at school gates on election days. He’s vaguely angry and the way he closes the door of his four-wheel drive is an announcement that the nonsense is over. Forced into the equality of our situation, he can’t quite do the smiles. He’s slightly pushing cards at people. Unaccustomed to the act of offering, he would prefer that people followed his commands. If he’s not actually the coach or referee at his son’s matches, he thinks he should be. He does the short, aggressive nods of the man who is agreeing with his own judgement of others. If he shook your hand he’d be going for the bone-crusher. Handing out how-to-vote cards is one way of making election days disappear. You do the supermarket run, walk the dogs, wonder aloud a lot and try to prepare yourself for the result. When this one becomes clear, we walk across the park to the 7-11 at midnight, unable to sleep, wanting to get the first papers. Inside the shop, a dozen people are jumping gleefully around. The cause of this is the headline of the early edition of the Sunday Herald Sun. It announces a Hewson victory. These collector’s copies are being snapped up. We walk home across the park. There’s a silence settling over us. Later, later we’ll see this moment not as a victory for the open country, but as a kind of false dawn.

120

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 121

Days Like These

September 1986 Julia Blake has broken her ankle. A few cancelled performances

of my play Dead to the World at the Russell Street Theatre, then she’s back on stage with crutches. Curious how much the audience likes this. There are three or four steps on the set of this play and watching her negotiate them, you feel the audience willing her to succeed. More than that, you feel their enjoyment in being allowed into the dressing-room. Real life has intruded onto the stage in the form of Julia’s ankle. Her vulnerability makes them feel closer to the event. They’re seeing micro-heroism and when her character argues with her diplomat husband, there’s no question whose side they are on. Norman Kaye, as the husband, doesn’t stand a chance. By the end of the season I can clearly see what I’ve got wrong in this play. Set in the Australian embassy of a South American country, the play is about moral compromise. A local girl employed at the Embassy pays in rape to visit her imprisoned brother. The diplomat must choose between professionalism and morality. He takes the moral path and resigns. I’d wanted his decision to have some ambiguity around it, to leave a sense that the choice for him was essentially easy: he can return to Australia and comfort and a pension, but he leaves the locals stuck in dictatorship. The easiness of Western choices. But I haven’t made myself clear and the play looks like an endorsement of middle-class nicety. It looks like foreign policy written by the Australian Democrats. Janet Andrewartha gives the central visceral performance as the Embassy employee. The mechanics of the well-made play move around her. If I was writing it now, I’d put her character in the middle of the play, not at the margins, where I’ve made her an exotic example of a country under the boot. Every time I watch Janet conjure up this world, stopping time, concentrating minds, I’m reminded of the play I should have written. 121

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 122

Michael Gurr

John Sumner has decided to annoy his Melbourne Theatre Company audience, arranging for an atmospheric soundtrack to be played in the foyer before our show. It is a tape loop of ominous, rumbling trucks. It’s fairly loud. There are complaints. A man buttonholes John. —Excuse me. But what is that awful sound? —It’s atmosphere, to prepare you for the play. —I don’t want to be prepared for the play. I’ve come straight from work, I just want to have a lemon squash with my wife and this noise is giving me a headache. Performed under the umbrella of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the production suffers as the festival ends. Melbourne has spent its theatre dollar and we end on a whimper. There’s a rising feeling within me that I don’t want plays shaped like this any more. I’m disconnected from its conventional form. I feel I’ve slightly pulled my punches. The plays that are brewing inside feel a long way from smart exposition and crafty builds to good first-act curtains. Knowing a bit about the form now, I’m busting to break out. Interviews and profile pieces describe me as ‘conservative’, probably because a young-ish writer attached to a state theatre company is seen as doing an apprenticeship rather than having an adventure. Journalists would prefer it if the playwright was throwing grenades at the cultural monoliths. When he doesn’t, he must be a captured creature. It’s a strange sensation, seeing this description, but artistically they are not that far off the mark. I’ve fallen a bit in love with theatrical structure and what theatrical structure can do. The expression ‘well-made play’ is mostly used as an insult. It’s never bothered me. Shouldn’t plays be well made? Not stuck in some false notion of the perfect three acts, but actually made well. Like

122

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 123

Days Like These

buildings, however eccentric in design, should be made well. You see the half-baked and the shambles pretending to be avant-garde, but most originality seems to come from people who know exactly what rules they’re breaking. An architect friend comes to the last night of the season. He says he wanted to reach out and grab the words as they disappeared into space. He’s sympathising with me; how painful it must be to have nothing tangible left after all that work. I’m not at all fussed—the opposite. In this game you can move on. The smoke clears after a production and a great new empty space opens up. I don’t think I could bear to sit on a tram and travel every day past everything I’d ever had a hand in building.

Januar y 1987 Ewa Czajor, Assistant Director on Dead to the World, has been murdered on holiday in Thailand. Mystery swirls around the circumstances. Ewa is smart, politely enjoying her apprenticeship at MTC while champing for a gutsier kind of theatre. We pass rude notes during rehearsal. She has the relaxed passion of someone who is in it for the long haul. It’s never very clear exactly what it is that assistant directors do. Observe and learn I suppose, do the ‘research’ that no-one will ultimately use. But having Ewa around puts a good energy into the room—she does what most people who take their work very seriously do—never takes it too seriously. She likes being at work; like me she would happily watch just about anything being rehearsed. Within weeks of her murder a trust is established in her name to help the careers of women theatre directors. A disease or car accident would have been misery enough, but the weirdness of her death on a jungle track in Thailand cracks everyone’s sense

123

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 124

Michael Gurr

of order. The swift organisation of the trust is the reply to this disorder; it pulls the power back from distant violence to something grounded and practical. It says, decisively, this is how we will remember Ewa.

November 1994 The Russell Street Theatre has been closed and sold. Home to MTC, Dead to the World was my only production here, but I seem to have spent years in its seats or backstage with actors. Nothing has been organised to farewell the place. Then suddenly actors take over and a shambolic Last Night at Russell Street is organised. It has no shape or format. People read messages from the stage, tell stories, repeat old scandal. It’s a night of catcalls and interruptions and getting drunk in the foyer. People wander in and out, surfing adrenaline. It’s a night to honour and desecrate the old place. It’s heartfelt, vulgar, sentimental, and it doesn’t know when to stop. In the perfect movie of this night, we would set fire to the place and watch it burn from across the street. In the event, I hear that the night finished with someone crashing through the glass doors onto the pavement. There’s something else being seen off here tonight, something more than a building. A few generations of actors and writers and designers have felt a kind of ownership of the company, embodied in this building. You don’t feel that ownership in the carpet and chrome of MTC’s rented digs at the Victorian Arts Centre. Who would graffiti a wall down there? The closing of Russell Street and the death of MTC’s eternal lighting designer Jamie Lewis are more than marks on a calendar. Both events acknowledge the severing of a link to the company’s beginnings. You see it in the faces of the

124

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 125

Days Like These

actors at Jamie’s funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral. A recognition that the collegiate has passed, passed ages ago. It’s not nostalgia, just a different way you hear people talking. They wonder: Will the marketing people, whose votes now determine so much, remember who I am? Ownership has finally slipped. Canny people love change. At this moment, they say that small independent theatre might be invigorated, they re-adjust to the more corporate atmosphere. It’s one of the best things about working in the theatre: everyone’s willingness to re-invent themselves at a moment’s notice. But at these two funerals, Russell Street and Jamie Lewis’s, you notice those who are folding their tents. Actors of a certain age and usefulness hear the sound of doors closing. The flip side of the way actors re-invent themselves to suit the temper of the times is a sort of willed forgetfulness. Ideally, theatre works as a kind of baton-pass. One generation demonstrating itself to the next, who will cast off the fustiness but keep the good bits: the library of stories, the hints and clues that smart beginners in any field are hungry to soak up. With these two deaths, it feels more like someone burnt the archive.

125

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 126

Michael Gurr

June 1988 No money again. So Marea Jablonski, who looks after casting at Melbourne Theatre Company, offers me a non-speaking role as an extra in a play by Peter Shaffer. Lettice and Lovage is about a woman who conducts tours of a stately English home. It’s nostalgic and champions the eccentric individual over the scary modern world. Like his play about Mozart, Amadeus, its heart is conservative— Shaffer is about the only Tory playwright I can think of. It stars Ruth Cracknell, June Salter, Betty Lucas, Peter Collingwood, a live cat and three extras. The extras play a series of visitors to the stately home and make lightning-fast costume changes—we start off under layers of coats and finish in T-shirts. The cat is so docile you suspect it is drugged. As well as the tiny wage, working in this production gives me long empty stretches in the dressing-room where I can work on my play, The Hundred Year Ambush, which will be playing in this building, the Victorian Arts Centre, in eighteen months’ time. In the second half of the Shaffer I appear as a pair of legs seen through a basement window. Turning down my dressing-room tannoy to concentrate on my play, I miss getting to the stage to do my legwork a few times. My one real task is to yawn loudly on cue when Ruth Cracknell’s character utters a particularly dull line. I never manage to achieve this quite to Ruth’s satisfaction and she peppers the season with little instructions on timing. I swear I am yawning at the same moment each night, at the same volume, and getting the same laugh. But for Ruth these mini-masterclasses in yawning seem to have become a necessary ritual. There are some performers whose capacity to communicate directly to an audience transcends the role they are playing. Close-up over the course of this season, I see that the audience really like

126

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 127

Days Like These

Peter Shaffer’s play, but love Ruth Cracknell. Dorothy L. Sayers, crime writer, translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy and fervent literary Christian, had a theory that all artists contained varying degrees of the Holy Trinity. In God the Father was the idea for the work, in Christ the Son the manifestation or craft, and in the Holy Ghost was its communication. She was talking mostly about writers—that some were all ideas and no craft, that some were more craft than ideas and that the ultimate best-sellers were abundant with the Holy Ghost. It’s quite easy to have cheap fun with this idea, but there is something in it. Audiences want to be in the same room as Cracknell, they want to hear her say things, watch her do things. It’s a personal relationship, taken to its extreme by Hollywood, where a movie will be made because it is a Tom Hanks movie—because people want to see Tom Hanks do things. No successful actor is just one thing, but the balance does tip and it’s always interesting to see what the Holy Ghosters decide to do with their gift. In Ruth Cracknell’s case it seems to tire her slightly, I don’t see her exhilarated by the applause—she seems to have a somewhat fatalistic attitude to being loved. Lettice and Lovage transfers to Her Majesty’s Theatre. It’s a cliché to love old theatres—and a cliché for good reason. These places hum. It’s hard to imagine that they were new once, the vibration in them seems to go back a very long way. Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre is acoustically superior to many newer theatres and seeing a modern play in it is a very sexy experience. Someone once described this kind of sensuality to me as ‘the new car in the old garage’—and an abstract design in the antique setting gives off a real charge. By the end of the season my play is finished and it’s good to be done with the minor humiliation of taking a curtain call each night for doing so little.

127

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 128

Michael Gurr

July 1990 Long afternoons of talk begin with Bruce Myles, who will be directing The Hundred Year Ambush. Bruce likes to unravel plays, to peer into every corner of them before he starts rehearsing, extracting answers to questions. I write primarily by instinct, so these sessions can be a revelation, with themes and patterns emerging under the scrutiny. They also have the great advantage of separating the play from the writer. Over the course of these conversations the play becomes an entity, something we will work on: the visceral attachment is replaced by something more objective. The production of The Hundred Year Ambush is the start of a new family. With Bruce there is Judith Cobb designing and Glenn Hughes lighting. At once, I am among people who happily overstep the official boundaries of their jobs—I’m in script arguments with the lighting designer. This mucking-in immediately takes the burden of responsibility away and galvanises us into a collective passion: getting this play as right as we can. I’ve never understood those writers who talk of the agony of handing their work across to others. Of course there is the misery of misguided productions, but if luck brings you the right collaborators the result is liberation, invigoration. The playwrights who cling are missing half of theatre’s pleasure: of being in an invented family, a chosen family, even for a couple of months. The title of the play comes from a Vietnamese theory of revenge. The idea goes like this: if someone wrongs me, I set in train a subtle series of events that will eventually rebound on them. When they feel the impact, my connection will be impossible to trace. In the metaphor of this idea, it may take a hundred years for the revenge to arrive at its target. But the play doesn’t demonstrate this—it merely takes a sexy idea and bends it to its purpose. It’s a play about cause and effect, about how there is no such thing as coincidence.

128

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 129

Days Like These

It shows greed punished by its impact on the powerless. Some people are eager to discuss chaos theory afterwards, and butterflies flapping their wings in China, but ideas can lose their charm after you’ve written them out of yourself. A letter of congratulation arrives at the theatre from an old family friend I haven’t seen for many years. Strangely, it includes some literature from the League of Rights. It’s puzzling: what is it about the play that has put her in furious agreement with it and connected it to the League of Rights? It takes a while, but I make the link: the property developer in the play is Japanese and if you watched the play focused entirely on him, you could, maybe, take it as a tract against foreign—well, Asian—investment. If you really, really tried. It’s the strangest fan mail I’ve ever got, and reminds me how we see what we want to see. Giving a speech once that attacked the Howard government on indigenous policy, I am congratulated afterwards in the foyer by a man who twinkles at me: —Well done. Have you read all of Ayn Rand?

July 1991 Broke and angling for fast money, I’m sent along to audition for a TV ad about car accidents—one of those visceral, frightening ones. This ad is about a man telling his family that he has run over and killed a small child. It’s clever because it replaces road-gore with guilt. One by one the vaguely similar-looking men in the waiting room go in to do their audition. Each one comes out looking devastated. A particularly nasty director? Nudity? When it’s my turn I realise why each man has come out looking wrecked: you can’t ‘act’ these things, you have to ‘do’ them. The

129

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 130

Michael Gurr

power of these little movies relies not on a performance, but on inhabiting the emotion they describe. To come even close to conviction, you have to go through whatever the emotion is. I leave with a headache, but understanding perhaps why actors who habitually play very emotional roles in films get a reputation for being difficult. On stage, you must re-create—if you live inside the devastation of a role you will die. On film, it is possible to capture the moment of ‘actual’ feeling, the moment when the actor has willed themselves into experiencing the loss of their child/lover/empire. I don’t get the ad. In advertising I do better as the nice Dad feeding his kids cold food sprayed with fake steam.

130

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 131

Days Like These

May 1992 The word is out that someone wants to put on a play about AIDS. Drugs to treat the virus are still uncertain and wildly toxic.You hear things like, ‘It’s my seventh funeral this year’ and there is more rumour around than fact. I mean, people are still having arguments about mosquitos. I meet the man who is running the theatre idea, Brandon Hardie Jones, in Pelligrini’s for our first conversation. His idea is straightforward. He will get a group of people together— HIV+ or involved in some way with friends who are—for a series of workshops. The writer will listen and watch and then go away and write a play. The purpose is to use theatre to advance the cause of humanising people who have a virus still surrounded by superstition. There have been a couple of AIDS plays in America, tough ones I mean. Angels in America has yet to hit Australia. Tony Kushner’s play strangely cancels itself out when I finally see it: the sentiment and the politics seem to come from a self-contained world. Everyone else loved it, you were a bad person at that time if you said, Yes, but what does the angel actually mean? I thought it was built on a strange emotion: I am dying, therefore the world is dying. The play also seemed half in love with heroic death. The stage faggot was back where we were most familiar with him: safely doomed. It works better on TV because the actors are having more fun and we get a bit of historical distance, but on stage I was waiting for the torch songs. My AIDS play is nowhere near carrying Kushner’s theatrical power—he took on the world and wowed it. A week or two after meeting Brandon Jones in Pelligrini’s, and working out that he was more widely known by his middle name, Hardie, I go for my first-ever job interview. The Victorian Aids Council and People Living With Aids are running the project— soon they will become just VAC and PLWA, just as the drugs will

131

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 132

Michael Gurr

become known by their acronyms. Minority politics loves an acronym. Why is that? An unconscious aping of power ? The job interview is an odd experience—I don’t know how to behave, so I probably just tell the truth. I very much want this job, I want to be involved when theatre takes on something tough. I remember someone writing about the ground that theatre can occupy—it’s not the exclusive world of ‘experts’, it’s not the dumbed-down world of the commercial media. Because it is a place of storytelling, it can connect and illuminate. My faith and optimism are high as we begin our work. The Australian reaction to the appearance of AIDS is a good example of how the Law of Visibility works. This Law says that in a 99 per cent Anglo queue at the post office you remember only the black guy. It says that from a day in which nearly everything goes right, you will recall only the one thing that doesn’t. You got out of bed and didn’t fall over, you crossed the road and were not killed, you lit the gas stove and there was no explosion. You did, however, jam your finger in the letterbox. Therefore this was a rotten day. In the theatre, the Law of Visibility means you only recall the lousy review. In life, a month of harmony goes unremarked, but not that single late-night bruising row. What’s different sticks out. The Law of Visibility applied to AIDS through the choices journalists made. I think most people were probably fairly good about the virus in Australia back then, but it was the nasty commentators, the gleeful bully-evangelists, the ugly remarks that stuck in your brain; stuck there adding fear to the blood of men and women who suddenly thought they were about to die. A lot of them were right; they were about to die, and they did. But the bursts of public spite gave the virus an extra membrane. Spite gave the bug a personality, an agenda. This was a disease that was taking revenge.

132

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 133

Days Like These

New categories like ‘innocent victim’ sprang up: these were people infected by blood transfusion, these were the Nice Ones, the accidental AIDS cases. For the rest, the language of punishment swirled around in sulphurous clouds. Or seemed to. A million people say nice ordinary things and one man gives a ten-second brimstone grab. What journalist worth their salt reports the kind remarks? The Law of Visibility. And how the bully-evangelists enjoyed themselves, the spit collecting in the corners of their mouths as they fell upon God’s judgement of the perverts like dogs on food. You wonder why they mattered, these delighted attendants at the Poofter Apocalypse. Why weren’t they laughed off? Why did their routines hurt? Only that they reminded you of that great early Francis Bacon triptych Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. They had come to feed on misery, to drink up calamity, to have suffering fulfil their purplest dreams. Dying homosexuals, dying prostitutes and dying junkies were fresh meat to the Christian Right. I can’t remember who said this: ‘When the fox hears the trapped rabbit scream, he comes running—but he doesn’t come running to help’. Mortality, politics, fear of persecution and minority sex were always going to be a pretty spicy mix, and months later when we opened DesireLines, there was a fair bit of damage around. On the opening night, two of the original participants in those workshops handed out leaflets accusing me of hijacking the lives of sick people to get my name in lights. Lights? We were in a minimum-wage production in a St Kilda church hall, playing to tiny audiences in the middle of the Melbourne International Festival to which we were nominally attached and I’d earned myself an actual ulcer. It made me want to go out and buy some lights. Joanna Cooper helped run the workshops, bringing laughter to a room that often felt bleak. She helped negotiate the competing

133

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 134

Michael Gurr

claims of the participants: for a political tract, a family drama, even a denial that HIV led to AIDS. Together with Hardie, Joanna pushed the room along with lots of butcher’s paper and textas, the writing down of everyone’s concerns. She’s dead now, a crazy accident, but she was a force in the room when I might have tuned out. I think she worried less about the play that would emerge than how everyone felt about the process. We ended up at loggerheads: her desire for good feeling among the group bumping into my pragmatism about writing a play. The last time we saw each other was fraught. And then she was hit by a tram crossing a road in Brunswick. The message on the answering machine just gave us the day and time of the funeral. We went, listened, regretted how things had ended for us. We would stand for an hour in the car park after each session, Hardie, Joanna and me, going over and over what we had just seen and done. What was the next step? Could we push this one or that one to reveal more? What would be fair? Was this helping to build a play? At what point do you leave well enough alone? Was Participant A bunging it on or was that a cry for help? If it was a cry for help were we able to answer it? Was our responsibility artistic or therapeutic? Hardie’s sense of responsibility to this group, this cause, was one of the biggest tests of character I’ve witnessed close-up. The need in the room was clear: If we can put on a play about AIDS then AIDS will somehow go away. I watched, wrote everything down, got drunk with Joanna and Hardie, and wondered what I would write. The whole gang of us went away for the weekend. Some place in the bush, a conference centre. We sat on the floor and talked, played games, talked more, but there was something that I couldn’t reveal to myself. If I had I would have run away. It was that this group needed the talk, the companionship of anxiety, much more than they needed a playwright.

134

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 135

Days Like These

A man would tell us the long story of his life and sexual history. I would think: Yes, and …? Someone would carefully detail their take on the world, as you sat hoping, hoping for something. I’m getting emotions, but no drama. The drama I would have to invent. The ones who had any political perspective had already drifted off. You couldn’t blame them. I kept my cards close, hoping that something would occur that would help me write a play. It’s a truism that you don’t really know someone until you’ve done a day’s work with them, and the intensity of the workshops had shown me all I needed to know about the man who was to become the centre of my life. And love is its own explanation. By opening night, I was living with Hardie Jones. There was the odd bit of hate-mail. I’d used a quote from a Billy Bragg song,‘Most important decisions in life are made between two people in bed’, at the top of one of the scenes in the play, and someone had sent me a scissors-and-glue anonymous letter using it. There were those who felt themselves unrepresented, or ignored, or not cast, in the play I’d eventually written. I shouldn’t have written an invented story. I should have made a documentary play. David Hare says, for subjects like this:‘The facts. Just give us the facts’. He’s right. Much later, with asylum seekers, that’s what I would do, but now, in 1992, I thought my imagination was somehow better than the facts. And yet, and yet, a documentary play that was truly representative of everything? That included the passionate advocacy of pseudo-medicine? Of charging off to the Philippines for blood-cleansing voodoo? That gave space and time to the blame-yourself bullshit of Reiki? Now, yes. Then, no. Now you could look back and make a time-bubble documentary of it. Then, the idea was to humanise, normalise, to put what is after all only a disease into the collective lounge room and make people settle down, look at it and be sensible.

135

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 136

Michael Gurr

There is plenty of rage in DesireLines, but—and isn’t this an uncomfortable thought—a deal of protection and censorship as well. We had a case to make, careful humanising propaganda, and if I was censoring some of the ideas I judged deluded, I was doing it, I said, for the greater good. That’s me blushing: the guilty propagandist. Most of the people who did the workshops that led to the play were not of course medi-cranks or agenda-runners, but that’s the Law of Visibility. And then hardly anyone saw the play anyway. The funny and politically savvy bad boy Bill who stayed in the workshops a while enjoyed shocking the conservatives in the group with charming sex talk on cigarette breaks, and then died at twentyseven. I’ve just checked that. It’s right. Twenty-seven. And what of Eddie, forty-year-old but twelve-year-old Eddie? The man who said he had no idea how he had got the virus? —But Eddie, it would have been through sex. —No, I don’t think so. —Well, it probably would’ve been. —But I haven’t done anything like that. —OK. And then, on a cigarette break: —What have you been up to today, Eddie? —I’ve made a catalogue of my clothes. —A what? —A catalogue. I’ve got some cards and I’ve written on the cards how many of each thing I’ve got. —OK. Some you loved, some infuriated you, but Eddie made your chest hurt. Without AIDS, you might have applied to him the rule that God looks after small children and drunks when they try to cross

136

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 137

Days Like These

the road. He’s one of the few adults I’ve ever met who you could describe as cheerful. He cheered you up. Without AIDS, he would have moved as a benign presence through the world, happy to be included in any circle, slightly wondering what to do until someone came along and hurried him up. He didn’t know what was happening to him, but he hugely loved the improvisations we did in the workshops. He threw himself into them and would suddenly tear the room apart without meaning to. We would set up little scenes for people to act out. A careful scenario would be established about the problems people dealt with when they sought medical help. Tonight, Eddie would play the patient in this scenario. He walked into his scene and began speaking, for no reason at all, in an Inspector Clouseau accent. —‘Ello docteur. He wasn’t trying to make us laugh. He was acting. This is what you did when you acted: you did an accent. Everyone wanted Eddie to be OK because Eddie wanted nothing but our company. He was dead before the play opened. His sister wrote a letter saying what a great time he’d had. I think of him, if I think of him, as a man standing cheerfully marooned on a traffic island, just about to make up his mind.

May 1993 The play takes the form of six different story-lines, some of which intersect. A grieving activist tries to separate politics from emotion, siblings reach across family gulfs, a man leaves his lover to stand on the roof of a hospital and watch a car accident happening on the street below. Judith Cobb has designed a set that echoes the patterns

137

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 138

Michael Gurr

of arteries and veins, the actors move around it like particles in blood. Penelope Stewart and Fred Whitlock as the siblings capture the soul of the play: it’s about people trying to explain things to one another, failing, trying again. Writing on the tram at night going home to St Kilda. Making notes for DesireLines. The vamping tram conductor with the red AIDS ribbon wanders by. He’s Filipino, I think. Or Malay? No, Filipino. He punches my ticket and waits a bit. —What are you writing? Telling people you’re a writer usually invites bleak little conversations. They will instantly know they’ve never seen or read anything you’ve done. You know this yourself. They know you know they know and so on sadly, endlessly. There are magnificent exceptions, great shocking surprises that sustain you for weeks, but not many people go to the theatre so your chances aren’t that good. It’s usually a sorry little exchange that you wish you hadn’t started. The truth often leads to clunky embarrassment. They apologise because they don’t know you—and you want to release them from their obligation to be interested. It’s often better to lie. In barber’s chairs, waiting rooms and in trains I have been a teacher, a gardener and a jobbing cook. But tonight, the Filipino tram conductor is straphanging flirtatiously, he’s got his AIDS ribbon on, I’ve got an AIDS research headache and I can’t be bothered lying. —I’m writing a play. About AIDS actually. His perfected eyebrow goes up, his grin is breaking out. —Can I give you piece of advice for your play? —Sure. —Just don’t make it depressing, honey.

138

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 139

Days Like These

And he’s away on his tag-line, away to sell more tickets. His sashay perfectly partners the swaying of the tram and I’m off the play’s grim hook for now.

August 1993 A meeting with Richard Wherrett, Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. The festival will help promote DesireLines. Richard is in love with the speech that gives the play its title and later asks to use it for the title of the dual-autobiography he writes with his brother Peter. The word comes from architecture and urban design. The play’s narrator is standing on the roof of a hospital where he’s been visiting his lover: In big buildings and in parks, there are paths and corridors which the designers have decided are the best way to move people around. Take a park. There will always be a paved path that leads you around the grassed areas. But there will also be, as soon as you introduce people, another path. It’s the brown bit across the grass, the path people have actually chosen for themselves as the way they would prefer to go. They tread down the grass against the best intentions of the designers. It’s got a name. These things are called desire lines. They’re the way people want to walk. And it happens inside buildings too. The thing about the desire line is that it’s usually the shortest distance between two points. Between the beach and the car park. The swing and the slide. People are very clever, they’re very good at finding the desire line when they want to. But only when they want to.

139

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 140

Michael Gurr

September 1993 We’re midway through rehearsals of DesireLines. At the same time, a revival of Sex Diary of an Infidel is being re-rehearsed across town for its national tour. Bruce Myles and I do baton-changes between rehearsals. It’s wonderful how you can divide your day into halfhour segments when you have to. I would rehearse the DesireLines cast in South Yarra until precisely 1.15, and be at the Malthouse for the Sex Diary crew by 1.45, by which time Bruce would be in the DesireLines room. And all this before he got a mobile phone. We were pretty happy with the way we were exhausting ourselves. Until a conversation at the door of the DesireLines room. Here’s an actor telling me that he cannot rehearse this afternoon, that his partner is very sick. There are enough pauses in this conversation for me to know what this means. I hadn’t known, none of us had, that the actor’s partner was very advanced with the virus. The art/life divide, always as thin as that forward slash, just evaporated. A flame to a cigarette paper. For a while I don’t really want to do a play any more—I just want people to be well again. Dialogue and scene changes and decisions about costumes seem suddenly unreal. The whole endeavour feels like a placebo. In a play about AIDS, the subject itself has walked into the room. I want to call a halt to the play-acting and go and do something real. For a while I deeply hate theatre for its uselessness.

March 1994 The partner of a man who acted in DesireLines has just died. Of AIDS. We go to the funeral. Great music is sung. People speak. I can’t hear most of it: the particular roar of this way of dying is all around.

140

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 141

Days Like These

AIDS deaths have a kind of rage around them that stops you listening properly. I didn’t know this man, but I feel I have inhaled hot smoke. Everyone feels conspicuous at funerals, there is nothing new about that. We’re all inadequately comforting each other. Afterwards, a few people start to talk to me about the significance of the play I wrote. They want to connect what has just happened to what we did in the theatre. I shake them off. Art is just embarrassing, art seems inadequate to the moment of a man’s death. Until later, thinking about the music that was sung. I realise that a song is an echo of something that has happened. It refers back, captures, re-shapes. And that in the singing of it, the singer reminds us that we’re alive. The darkest, most suicidal blues is sung to you by singers defiantly present. They sing death in a way that turns you back onto life—art describes the fact that we are. If you feel a shiver up your spine you feel something. The magnificent trick of the greatest blues singers is to invigorate us by taking us to Hell. You’d think I’d know this—that the depiction of calamity on stage re-invigorates us. But what I have spent my adult life trying to do I have to learn again by someone else’s example, by listening to a song at a funeral.

141

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 142

Michael Gurr

August 1984 The street we drive to is like any nice street. The house is un-

adorned 1950s brick. A lawn and a few camellias. My sister has been coming to Quaker Meeting on and off for a few months and thinks I should have a go. Like me, I don’t think she is looking to be absorbed into a faith, but is trying to join the dots between instincts. An instinct for justice and a longing for ‘home’ draw you towards faith; perhaps it’s that a system might endorse your take on the world. My sister works mostly with disturbed or imprisoned adolescents. Her job might be described as ‘putting things back in order’. She is getting young wards of the state out of the jail they’ve been parked in. It’s no accident that there is a higher rate of burnout among secular social workers than among those attached to the churches. Faith puts society into perspective, it offers private solace. Atheism is always dog-paddling, the secular social workers are always hitting the brick wall of pointlessness: Here we are putting bandaids on deep wounds. You imagine that faith will allow you to work more calmly in the world. For me, I can’t join up the dots between writing plays and wanting to make some more practical contribution to the idea of justice. The inside urge to write plays is powerful but when confidence falls away the whole endeavour loses purpose. I don’t think either of us is expecting a hand to descend through the clouds—but a system, a way of thinking—this would be good. Inside the Quaker House, what was once the living room is now the Meeting room. Chairs are scattered around in deliberate nonorder. The room is nearly featureless, but the light is soft. There are about twelve people here, most of them women over sixty, one elderly man and a younger man who seems to have already begun his meditation. The women are middle class. They are dressed

142

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 143

Days Like These

modestly. The room has that sense of time suspended you get in waiting rooms and galleries. On the way here my sister has explained the rules. Nothing much will be said. At 10 a.m., the Meeting will begin, which means we will sit together in silence for an hour. There is no Bible reading or sermon; no-one will lead. If anyone is moved to speak during this, they may do so. After the hour is up, there will be a few items of Quaker housekeeping: the dates of a peace march, a check that the visiting roster for a sick Friend is in order. And that’s what happens. Because the chairs aren’t in rows, you are free to look around. Some eyes are closed, others fixed on a wall or a tree beyond the window. For fifteen minutes I am waiting for a nurse/receptionist to come in and call my name. Then that passes. Then I’m drowsy. Then fidgety. Then I do what I think I am meant to do: think without thinking, be calm and see what comes. During the time I manage to do this, I find that the thing that arrives is an acute awareness of the people in the room. Their thoughts uncoiling, someone’s slight shift in a chair. The young man looks at his hands, then out of the window. He’s in jeans and a jumper, he wears glasses and there’s a rucksack near his chair. I’m thinking: university student. And wondering what brought him to the Society of Friends. Over the course of the hour I check on him—he goes from a slight physical awkwardness to poise. His neck lengthens a little and his hands are no longer arranged on his lap, but resting where they will. Is he thinking about Christ? I realise I’m shaky on Quaker theology. And that this may in fact be the point. A woman speaks. She tells an over-rehearsed parable about the beeping sound that trucks emit when they are reversing. I’m not quite grasping her point; it could be that we should, in our lives, let

143

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 144

Michael Gurr

others know when we are going backwards. No, that’s not it. It’s something else. I don’t know. It’s her fault that I sneak a look at my watch. The young man leaves as soon as the hour is up. He nods his way out of the room, missing the agenda items. The others might be staying for a pot of tea. We drive away. My sister wants to know: —How did you find it? —OK. Sort of. The woman who spoke about the beeping trucks … —Yes. She always says something. —It sort of sounded like it. My sister tells me no-one minds because they expect it. This woman spots parables in the street, that’s what she does, some of them better than others. I won’t return. But I have found out why I have so far failed at my every attempt at meditation. Many people tell me I should try—which is a bit like being told to settle down, lose some obsessiveness about work, stop taking things so seriously. I’ve tried it on and off, but it’s felt like time wasted. Seeing a woman at Quaker Meeting absently turn her wedding ring, a young man’s hand adjust his glasses in a quick move to change his thought, a Bible covered in soft leather resting on someone’s knee—these things silenced the mind’s rattle. They put all life’s invented urgency outside on the doorstep. For a short time the fleas stopped biting. I realise that the reason I haven’t been able to meditate is because I can’t see the point of doing it by myself. Faith is company. This Quaker Meeting has reassured me that those moments of grace that will sometimes settle over a full train carriage are perhaps not delusional. That when sometimes, standing in a queue, the calm arrives, it may be more than resignation I’m sensing around me. The moments when we do nothing together.

144

DLT 03 (106-145) 6/26/06 3:05 PM Page 145

The bed is twelve feet from the kitchen of Tolarno Restaurant in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 146

Michael Gurr

Januar y 1981 The bed is twelve feet from the kitchen of Tolarno Restaurant in

Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. The sounds are not so much next door as next to me. For four years the comforting clatter of cutlery going into sinks. In the downstairs flat of a cut-up mansion, its big front room painted mission brown, sound is everything. The first and last trams, the drug deals cut in the shared hallway, the familiar rantsong of one of the more benign drunks. His stylus ploughs the last functioning groove in his head, midway through a very old argument that always begins with Listen listen listen and finishes on a descending Cunt cunt cunt. I have always suspected that the mad or shouting work on strict shifts. They never seem to run into one another. Rhino Man, known for his skin-folds and sudden charges, never crosses paths with the War Woman, whose job is to stand guard in the middle of the street with a plastic submachine gun and the word WAR painted in red on her black clothes. It would be against nature for them to come face to face. The Cockatoo Lady, wrapped in black shawls, who refuses every offer of accommodation, never locks eyes with the Giant, whose hair hangs in a single matted log down his back. This is a time when people just pass flats on to each other. You move out of somewhere and give someone else the key. I’ve left a disintegrating share-house and am living on my own for the first time for twenty-eight dollars a week. Poor though the suburb is, it rarely feels desperate. Unless it’s a bucks’ night mini-bus trying to frighten a trannie outside the Palais Theatre, it isn’t a threatening place to live. The marginalised and unemployable maintain something close to a work ethic in the rhythm of existence. A woman goes to the State Savings Bank three times a day; she withdraws money for milk, then money for bread

146

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 147

Days Like These

and finally money for cigarettes just before the bank shuts its doors. She’s as busy as the tellers who stamp her pass-book. The gentleman who walks daily from St Kilda to the city and back checks his watch every hundred yards or so; on paper he has nothing to do but his impatience at pedestrian crossings is as real as anyone’s and he likes to make fair time. Big houses from the 1920s boom are warrens of orange carpet and Early Kooka stoves, home to those who have become defined by how they smell. A satellite photo of this suburb shows it to be full of interesting buildings and right on the sea; plans are being made for this place and soon the tobacconist is a sushi bar and the rooming houses are sandblasted into apartments. I am partly to blame of course. The artists are the developer’s shock troops. We move into interesting places and the rising price of coffee is never far behind. The evicted poor go silently, shovelled off to the shipping-container graveyards we call caravan parks. Passing through twenty years later, I fantasise the exquisite new settlers of this occupied territory perched on leather banquettes in fiercely designed kitchens. As they decide what to do with their evening, they try to ignore a smell. It’s a poltergeist of phlegm and shit from the economically cleansed. Now it’s very late and there are sounds of struggle from the back of the restaurant next door. Through my bedroom window I see it’s only another staff initiation. A new kitchen-hand has been tied naked to a chair, his mouth is gagged. The cooks are meticulously applying fresh meringue to his entire body, carefully shaping it around his head. Later, when he has set, the human pavlova will be photographed and set free. Upstairs in Fitzroy Street, Helena lives with two of the world’s fattest cats, her ‘girls’ she calls them. I never see these animals actually move, they sit like humped pillows on one of her couches. The carpet in Helena’s flat is 70 per cent cat fur. She is somewhere in

147

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 148

Michael Gurr

her seventies and the senior tenant of the building. She is almost exactly round and carries herself with the confidence of those who were once thought very beautiful. She seems to cook full-time, the heavy dishes of her Czechoslovakia, for visitors, other tenants and herself. The hall always smells of her food, and whether you like this food or not, walking into the hall has a homecoming in it. Once in a while I vacuum her over-furnished flat. It’s a Promethean job, and pointless, her vacuum cleaner doesn’t vacuum so much as gently inhale and the cat fur is deep and intractable. It would be quicker to use a hairbrush. The cats watch unmoved. And then, protest is useless, Helena has cooked me lunch. Two steaks, great buttocks of mash and a platter of root vegetables. She’ll be wanting to watch me eat it and explain to me again why she has become enormous in her old age. In the concentration camp she was always hungry and the lesson her mother drilled into her was to eat whatever she could. —I was a slim and pretty girl the day we were sent. But you see, in the camp, slim becomes too thin. After the war she is reunited with her brother through reading an ad in a magazine at the dentist.‘Helena Holec—her whereabouts are sought.’ Her brother is in South Africa. She refuses to visit him since he chastised her for spending time talking with the black servants. She has told him that when his throat is cut he will deserve it. Helena likes to watch Jana Wendt on television, she is proud of the slim Czech journalist made good. Her concentration camp number is a faded blue and when she shows me I see her old skin rippling around it. It’s hard to imagine the young girl holding her arm steady when it was actually done. She describes the day, looking up towards the ceiling of her flat,

148

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 149

Days Like These

away from her arm, as she probably looked up towards the sky or the roof of some shed. It’s completely without emotion, this moment, she’s showing me an ordinary fact. At six years old she meets gypsies near her house and gives a gypsy girl her dress, walking home happily naked. The war killed her idea of being an actress, so it was journalism instead. —I was never an impersonator. But I feel unbelievably real when I’m being someone else. She is disappointed with my weak progress through the lunch she’s cooked and wraps it in foil for me to take downstairs. Reassurance for Helena comes in the shape of abundance. She’s thrilled to be designing a menu for two young friends who are opening a café. She adds cream to every dish described, urging them to embellish and add. There is nothing that can’t be improved by another few tablespoons. When she talks about the concentration camp, there is pride in the girl she was. The portrait she gives is of energy and a kind of wilful ignorance of her surroundings. This girl kept her dress as clean as she could, obeyed her mother and somehow refused to engage with the idea of death. She seems to have involved herself in a sustained act of distraction. Politics make Helena impatient—she has made sensual pleasure a kind of ideology. Her bawdy hints at great love affairs are a better kind of European history. Once a fortnight I lug a sack of birdseed upstairs to her flat. This she throws in great handfuls from her balcony for the pigeons. The landlord’s agent complains about encouraging vermin and she waves him and his mean little beard away. Watching her from across the street as she sends the birdseed out in big gold arcs from her balcony,

149

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 150

Michael Gurr

her gestures are operatic, her face alive. A benediction on the hated pigeons. All shall eat. In hospital, Helena is restless and impatient with the diet she’s being subjected to—she can’t see the point of it. Why are they feeding me rabbit food? There’s no answer. I make a half-attempt to find out what is actually wrong with her, but she smiles the question away. Her look says: Don’t pretend you don’t know I’m dying. The rabbi at the funeral fills in some gaps. Helena fighting with the Resistance, her husband and daughter executed by the Gestapo. Her friends tell me she’s left a terrible financial mess. I know these women from their regular visits to Fitzroy Street. They seem as genuinely cross with Helena as you might be with an irresponsible girl. There is furniture to be dealt with, hoards of accumulated stuff and the cats. A week after the funeral they stand in the hall, clicking their tongues and shaking their heads while blokes in overalls sneeze Helena’s furniture out of the building. These guys are allergic. I forget to ask where her ‘girls’ have gone and no-one seems to worry. The landlord’s agent is watching hungrily at the gate. It’s all over in half a day.

150

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 151

Days Like These

October 1990 The David Williamson Theatre at Prahran TAFE is in fact a dangerously steep raked lecture theatre. The twelve actors who have paid to be here want to learn how to audition successfully. They have each chosen a speech and I’ll rehearse them for ten sessions. They will then go out into the world and try to get work. But the real, unspoken reason they are here is because after our ten sessions together, their final presentation will be assessed by the artistic directors of Melbourne Theatre Company and Playbox. It’s very hard to get an audition with a major theatre company. The actors in this theatre tonight have come by different paths—through the Fringe, through amateur theatre or through no experience at all. So in reality they are paying to audition for the artistic directors of Melbourne’s two main theatre companies. It’s an uncomfortable premise from which to start our work, so it’s worth ventilating.

—If I told you that the artistic directors have cancelled, that they’re not coming any more, would anyone want a refund? Eyes flicker a moment, but they will themselves into an idea of professionalism and stay around. We do the work, trying to maintain its freshness. Working for this long on three-minute speeches, the challenge is to keep it interesting—for everyone. After a few sessions, you feel every nuance has been wrung from the words and the only direction you have left in your armoury is the most useless one of all: —OK. You’ve learnt it and it makes sense, now just be better. The ones who do well are the ones who keep a small part of themselves private and who allow a small part of themselves not to care. Without the privacy, you feel you are seeing everything they

151

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 152

Michael Gurr

are capable of, the personality at full stretch. Truly great singers imply they could sing a few more octaves if they chose, great dancers that they are holding ten per cent in reserve. Not caring too much is a crueller thing to describe. There must be passion and enthusiasm, but desperate strivers repel their audience. To be on the receiving end of ‘I want this more than anything else in the world including oxygen’ is very uncomfortable. To be begged by a performance eradicates talent. Raw need makes an already artificial and unpleasant thing—the audition—close to unbearable. The twelve do fine. The artistic directors turn up to the last session at the David Williamson Theatre and they’re encouraging, they give good strong notes, but the truth behind the exercise is pretty evident all round. The actors have paid to be seen by these two men. As if setting people up for disappointment wasn’t a dark enough proposition—they had to pay for it. Every city has a little underbelly of private drama schools that live off the unreachable ambitions of wannabe actors; I hope at least that over our ten sessions I’ve been able to inject a little healthy disillusion into the mix. Once someone has it fixed in their minds that they will act, they are uniquely vulnerable to the promise of achievement. The mix of fear and hope in a never-going-to-be-an-actor’s eye can bounce back into your own soul. In an especially putrid nightmare of the future I sit alone in a room at eighty-three, waiting for my next student to arrive, nodding off during their Hamlet, waking to the cash-in-hand that will buy me tomorrow’s toilet paper. But teaching these classes and directing students at St Martins, the National Theatre Drama School and the Victorian College of the Arts tells me exactly how much I know. Not until a group of people are standing in front of me in a room, waiting, do I work out what I believe. I am forced to articulate what makes a true performance. Actors in rehearsal can delay the moment of exposure,

152

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 153

Days Like These

but a bluffing director is very naked indeed. For a while I’m working nearly every night of the week, teaching acting masterclasses at the Malthouse, and each new group of fifteen is another room full of question marks. The Malthouse actors are all experienced, so they bring a different kind of demand, they are asking to be kept match-fit. It is the student actors, not yet locked down into habit or theory or safety, who wait expectantly like no-one else. The productions I direct at the National, St Martins and the VCA come hard on the heels of each other—and move across styles and language. Two years at theatre gym. The National Theatre Drama School, being part-time, has less desperation among its students than the VCA. The National students have other jobs and often children, there’s less low-level hysteria than at the VCA, where their graduation day performance has attained the status of First and Last Chance. Agents and casting directors will watch the graduates deliver their pitch for an acting career. It’s a cruel but maybe unavoidable experience. Directing it is a vaudeville performance in itself: twenty-five actors, nearly fifty pieces and a group song. Rehearsals are split into fifteen-minute blocks, jumping from Tennessee Williams to Caryl Churchill via Berkoff. I forget to schedule bladder breaks so I’m looking fairly pained by 4.15 each day. It’s drill-sergeant stuff, but fun. After its Melbourne performance we take it to Sydney. At both shows, you see examples of a life that conducts its business in full, tough public view. In the foyer after their performance, the graduates wander out of the theatre for the meet’n’greet. Agents stride forward, selecting this one or that one for the bestowing of a business card. In the most moving performances of the day, you see faces light up, only to fall when they realise the winner of the business card is standing behind them and they are receiving the agent’s consolation-prize smile. At this

153

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 154

Michael Gurr

moment, no amount of advice can help a young actor brushed past. This is the bit of the ritual that should be banned; the pushy cruelty of it.

September 2005 Alana Valentine and I are guest playwrights at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. I meet her for what I think is the first time on the steps of our hotel. She corrects me. —Oh, no. We’ve met. We shared a table at the New South Wales State Literary Awards. We were both nominated, you won. I’ve blocked the dinner out. Having been given advance notice of the win, making talk with other oblivious nominees wasn’t the happiest time. Alana says something that I make a note to steal. She says that at the heart of every play there should be an unsolvable question.

May 1990 Shirley Gee’s play Never in My Lifetime has got an unsolvable question at its heart. I think that directing it at the National Theatre Drama School is so pleasurable because it is a play without an obvious point of view. Set in Belfast during the Troubles, it’s about how conflict forces people to make impossible choices. The Catholic girl who falls in love with the Proddy squaddie must choose between betraying him to certain death or being mutilated by the IRA for her own betrayal. It’s a play that is turbulent for audiences because you find yourself agreeing throughout it with the last person who spoke. The Catholic girl’s best friend, the wife of an English soldier,

154

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 155

Days Like These

the English soldiers themselves. You’re led to fury at the street-bully tactics of the IRA only to be stopped in your tracks when a young woman flatly declares: —You can’t fight a war with your arms folded. It’s Ibsen again: in a good play everyone is right. Or wrong. Or both. And of course it is a play with a point of view. By opening multiple holes in your heart and injecting the truth and damage happening on every side, it strips easy slogans away and shows you human wounds. It’s propaganda for humanity. Years later in London, I get to meet the author of Never in My Lifetime. There is a quiet afternoon at Shirley Gee’s place. We don’t have a lot to say to each other about her play, or any plays really, which we’re both fine about. It’s only problematic things that really animate; the perfectly realised ones leave you happy, without the need for much talk.

155

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 156

Michael Gurr

May 1990 Rehearsing Never in My Lifetime at the National Theatre Drama

School, there is a scene which involves two British soldiers doing a little bit of drill. Shouldering their arms and so on. We hire the fake guns, but I have no idea how to direct the scene with any conviction. All I have are images from American boot-camp movies. I don’t want this scene to be an idea of the way soldiers hold their rifles, I want it to be exactly the way they do it. I want the actors easy with it, not imitating something. I call Army PR and a man called Wolf comes on the line. I forget his rank, so I’ll call him Mister. He’s friendly, interested, it strikes me he maybe doesn’t have enough to do given that we are not actually at war. He’d love to come down to the theatre and give us a hand. Mr Wolf arrives in uniform and immediately takes over the room. He examines the fake rifles with superior disgust. —What’s this? Some sort of Israeli rubbish from 1973? It’s not really a question. What’s interesting is how the two actors playing the British soldiers are adjusting their posture. I’m doing it too. We’re not exactly standing to attention, but we’re not slouching. Something’s been triggered in us—were we all boy scouts? Are we responding to some film we’ve all seen, or to some imagined commander? It’s both funny and embarrassing to see your body respond to what is, after all, bullshit. Why are we obeying this man, why this involuntary snapping-to? From this tiny moment, a great window opens up in my mind to the whole idea of how wars are practically organised. I mean, how do you get a seventeen-year-old Serb to do what he did in Kosovo? Shout at him? Or, maybe more importantly, imply you will withdraw your approval if he doesn’t do what he’s told? Is this how it

156

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 157

Days Like These

practically happens, the kid-soldiers pushed into atrocity? Maybe you have to infantilise people before they will act this way. I’ve read that the apparently stupid routines and punishments of army training are simply calculated to make a soldier accept the moment when he will walk into gunfire: if he didn’t accept insane orders he would never do what was asked of him. These things are swirling around as I watch Mr Wolf drill the actors. And also another command, the one I can’t get out of my head: they castrated a Bosnian teenager who couldn’t get an erection at gunpoint to fuck his sister. Prove yourself boy, they said, and then slit him. As fast as this window to the confounding world of misery opens, it must snap shut. I’m grateful for what Mr Wolf has given our actors. In our rehearsal room, the women don’t seem affected, they watch from the side of the room as this little ritual is acted out. Mr Wolf manages to transmit the feeling that he is both impatient and prepared to stay here for as long as it takes. —Alright, show me how you shoulder the rifles. The actors show him. —Well, you’d be fucking dead in ten seconds for a start. The expert is in his element. I half expect him to order us to give him fifty push-ups. He drills the cast brilliantly and in half an hour they are efficient and sharp. They also have that particular look in their eyes: a sort of steely resentment. They are determined to get this right and then they might possibly want to shoot at something. We thank Mr Wolf and he promises—threatens—to return to see the production. He’s actually quite a nice guy. Once he’s gone, the women shake their heads and smile. They saw what happened to the three men in the room. The knee-jerk obedience, the deference.

157

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 158

Michael Gurr

We had showed Mr Wolf more than courtesy, we would have shined our shoes if he’d asked us. The man from Army PR was doing some play-acting of his own, of course—it’s probably a while since he got to boss people around about much more than office supplies. Someone told me once that the army was a place where a certain kind of man would be looked after. I asked him what he meant but he left it at that. I think he meant it was a place where men who recognised in themselves the Sherrin’s unpredictable bounce could find a routine, a family, a certainty. It’s probably true that the army now echoes the world of qualifications, upskilling and the ongoing review of competencies—that it has taken on the corporate model. And yet. There is something intriguing about a culture you only get to glimpse occasionally. I don’t mean Mr Wolf and his parade-ground pantomime, but the unmistakable presence of those who have been absorbed in it. It is a secret job; the military is a place where peaceful societies park a lot of things. It exists alongside us but is mostly invisible. I mentioned all this to an ex-army friend, and the fact that I thought I had an unformed army play in me but knew so little. He gave me a look and said: —OK. Just tell me when.

158

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 159

Days Like These

August 1991 Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll has a status that sometimes obscures the actual play. I’ve met people who know of something called The Doll, have never seen or read it but have feelings about it. Unfortunately, once it’s revealed that they haven’t seen the play you don’t get to find out what they think it is. They tend to change the subject. When something becomes part of a national landscape, it can enter Icon World, where it is loved but not experienced. Ray’s play is performed enough for this not to be any kind of danger, but it does make you think. How many people know of Nellie Melba but have never heard her sing? Is Lincoln’s face more familiar than his ideas? De Gaulle, Harold Pinter, Orson Welles? When to hold an idea of someone takes over from knowing their actual work. Curtin, Arthur Miller? Kennedy, Kafka, Odetta? When to feel the name is enough. Whatever laziness is lurking on the edges of name-recognition, the moment I start directing Summer of the Seventeenth Doll something like gratitude settles around me. It’s a student cast and we do have the actual technical problem that our Bubba is taller than our six-foot Roo, but they fall into the world of the play faster than I thought they would. The boy playing Johnnie Dowd doesn’t have enough to do and the smallest roles are often the hardest to play— the actor must achieve instantly what others can build more slowly. And Johnnie Dowd carries the play’s bomb: the threat of youth. Whatever his apparent innocence, he has come here to wreck. In the rehearsal room at the Victorian College of the Arts we establish a few rules. Though nearly everyone is playing older, no-one will play old. Even Emma, wise and cruel and uncheatably an old woman: the young actress will have to use her brain to achieve this, nothing else. It’s remarkably easy. The hearts of these characters flow out of their mouths, not from their outward signs. 159

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 160

Michael Gurr

The first lesson for me comes three days in. The play is written with what are thought of as old-fashioned stage directions. It is set down for you when to sit and stand. Writers rarely set these things in concrete now. Pearl moves across to the couch and sits. Well, we won’t be slavishly re-creating any of that. This director will be ignoring stage directions and following instead the impulses of the scene. Until, suddenly, traffic jams start happening on stage. Someone is impossibly, intractably stuck near a door. Turns out, according to what’s written, they were meant to be on the other side of the room. I turn back to page one and start again, this time following Ray. I can’t stop smiling through the rest of the day’s rehearsal. He never lets you down. More important than this funnyhumbling moment is the way the play unfolds emotionally. It’s about lots of things, one of them the attempt to create an alternative to marriage. When time erodes this possibility for Roo, he tries to adapt, but too much time has passed. A curtain call at any production of this play is a line-up of broken hearts. June Jago was the first Olive in The Doll and she is teaching at the VCA. She has never once seen a production of the play. It’s a pretty big afternoon for her, even under these fluorescent lights and in front of a basic student set, seeing the play from the outside for the first time. I don’t think Ray sees it, I’ve told him not to worry, in any case he’s seen too many productions. Sitting opposite him at my desk at Melbourne Theatre Company years earlier, I’ve seen this play surface in various forms. A cheque from a Polish production lies unattended in a drawer for maybe a year. A few zlotys he forgot to bank. Strange requests come in. As the first Barney, he has more than a writer’s attachment, he has a responsibility towards it, to the whole Doll Trilogy and what it has come to mean. The idea of a

160

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 161

Days Like These

folk-opera, something like Porgy and Bess, gets his ear for a while. A ballet proposal has him shaking his head and laughing at the idea of Roo and Barney on pointe. At the farewell organised for John Sumner at Melbourne Theatre Company, snapshots from past productions are to be presented on the Playhouse stage. Actors from various casts are assembled to do a short scene from The Doll. I’ve written the link-pieces for this night, I have a short piece to deliver, so as I am getting into my suit I watch Ray in a mirror putting fake tan on his legs for his last turn as Barney. Then I’m standing in the wings of the theatre with Carmel Powers, about to make her entrance as Emma. She waits for the moment when she will call out her line. She’s gripping my arm. —Emma, what’re you doin’ out there? —Gettin’ a sea-breeze off the gutter. What d’yer think? It is impossible to describe the audience response to this line on a night already charged with emotion. It’s a big laugh, certainly, but it’s a sound beyond that. It is an uncensored shout of recognition, a surge of emotion, and it rocks Carmel back for a moment. Then she walks onstage. Later, I’m writing something for the newspaper. One of the things they run over summer. This one is asking people to revisit something from many years ago, revisit and reassess. Find out if their feelings are the same about a movie, a book, a place. I get out Todd Browning’s film Freaks and look at it again. It still oddly hurts, this film I saw in the 1970s at the Valhalla. A film about, I think, loyalty and belonging. I write about it and I’m asked for other ideas. Hardie and I have just moved to Footscray, Ray Lawler’s home-place, so I suggest him. Get Ray to come back to Footscray. He writes about walking down the street he grew up in, finding the place unrecognisable, so going back to the top of the street and walking it with

161

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 162

Michael Gurr

his eyes on his feet. His feet will remember. This way, walkingmemory will let him recapture where the agricultural foundry was, the place he worked from thirteen to twenty-four, where his house was. Walking-memory lets the truth float up. He tells us that the Carlton of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is really Footscray. Newspapers vanish, has anyone kept what he wrote? I have a letter Ray sent in reply to my change-of-address postcard. In it, he takes me on a walking tour of Footscray, all around the streets I live in now. It’s easy to follow—walk up this street and turn left, then right and keep going. But somehow this written map is underpinned with great feeling. The language is straightforward, the directions easy to follow, but the underneath-tide is emotionally vivid. Stage directions.

162

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 163

Days Like These

Februar y 1977 Whales and dolphins arrived in the Australian political con-

sciousness along with the first appearance of dreadlocks on white kids and acne on vegans. The whales and dolphins, unlucky enough already, have been co-opted by both ends of politics. For the Right, they are useful sport for teasing the Green Left.‘Stop mining lesbian whales’, or something like it, was among the first lines used by jokey columnists for all that was silly about the environment movement. And down the other end, among the wafty ones, whale song is played in flotation tanks. When whale song is finally decoded you sort of hope it will all translate as,‘Where’s my fucking krill?’ We gather in the City Square in Melbourne for an overnight vigil for the whales. I’m sixteen. Jennifer Talbot, the painter who runs Project Jonah, draws a giant chalk whale and we light candles around the outline of its body. It looks very beautiful at dusk. There is a meeting of the International Whaling Commission tomorrow and Australia is still killing whales in Albany. We get into our sleeping bags and lie down on the freezing flagstones. The city goes very quiet. In 1977 Melbourne doesn’t exist at night—it’s just us, the street cleaners and the mad people who wander around us, shouting a bit. We’re probably on their turf. At dawn we think we’ve achieved something. Just by waking up. People going to work are looking at our guttered candles and our card table with the petition on it; some of them are signing but mostly they’re walking by. It’s a little movement run out of someone’s lounge room. In the painter’s house, we sit on the floor and stuff envelopes for hours. She’d put one ad in the paper and got thousands of replies, thousands of dollars too, in the days when people sent cash through

163

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 164

Michael Gurr

the mail. It’s a bohemian Brighton house, full of paintings, a place where I find out what a mandala is. We stuff envelopes and talk. There’s a rumour: Phoebe Fraser, daughter of the Prime Minister, is apparently very much in favour of the whales and she’s talking to Dad. In the election to come, Malcolm promises an inquiry and Gough promises to close the Albany whaling station. We sit around and argue about who to endorse. It doesn’t matter of course, but we’ve got the whales on the news. You notice that Volvos have bumper stickers. You notice that Friends of the Earth hate us: we are the dilettante middle class. Project Jonah people are cynical about the Friends’ late adoption of our cause and disapproving of the harsh wording on their badges: surely ‘Whaling is Murder’ will only put people off? These were the big issues. Far away from the Brighton whale nights, I’m sleeping in Richmond and Collingwood houses, sitting around with anarchists and talking about things like self-managed energy systems for a selfsustaining future. Anti-nuclear conversations, aggro arguments about what our posters should say. Occasional lessons in how to make an air compressor explode for an upcoming anti-freeway gig. The kitchens are freezing, the rolling of the Drum is endless and hypnotic and someone is always cooking inedible stodge on the stove while we work out the future of the world. The days when you could just about live on the dole. You could make a small career from mocking this world, but it was pretty exciting to be in the company of people who actually took things seriously. And I mean very seriously. OK, actually ballsachingly seriously. See? There it is, the self-excusing hindsight joke. I loved those kitchens with their empty cupboards and the looseness, the feeling that one thing might lead to another, or to nothing, or that someone might walk in and invite you to another house where another conversation was going on.

164

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 165

Days Like These

If I’d admitted I was doing Brighton whales I would have been regarded with scepticism in the Richmond and Collingwood kitchens. More importantly, if I’d owned up to Brighton whales I might have missed out on the sex. Because round about here I found myself on a mattress in a Collingwood or Richmond house between two people, a little older than me, not by much, one woman, one man. It was very friendly this, at sixteen, and very relaxed, one thing smoothing into another, both of them more cool and more sophisticated than I was, never to be so physically unselfconscious again, happily losing track of who’s where in the bed. I got sexgreedy for a while, eating at both ends of the smorgasbord, though I could never cure the sadness of the one-night stand. Regardless of how sublime or perfunctory the fuck, I would always fall if not momentarily in love, then into melancholy that it wasn’t love and mope oddly for a day or two. I envied those who had complete ease, who could frankly kiss you and say ‘See you round’ and seem to mean it, though part of me didn’t believe that ease, or couldn’t. I had an unformed and unpopular conviction that love wasn’t lightly made. A pursed middle-class lady joins Project Jonah and begins a slow takeover. Less politics, she said, she didn’t like the politics, more polite representations to caring Liberals, she said. You watch her transforming from virgin activist to toe-cutter in front of your eyes. One of those people who want something, control most likely, and is going to politely brutally elbow everyone else out of the way to get it. And she got it, of course. They tend to. The simple tactic is persistence: grind away at what you want and eventually people can’t be bothered and give in or simply drift away. Someone should do a study: How The Irritating Shit Always Takes Over. The Richmond–Collingwood kitchens and bedrooms had an ease of coming and going. You just turned up and someone was

165

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 166

Michael Gurr

home or not, playing badly strung guitars or the same side of an album over and over. You met a lot of Trotskyist tram conductors. No-one seemed to listen to the radio. This was the bullying side of the rent-defaulting Left. Pop music was bad for you, it was force-fed rubbish from the multi-nationals. But, I mean, what if you wanted to dance? And voting was out of the question. If you enrolled to vote you were just perpetuating a rotten system, endorsing the power structures of a society that … well, you know how this sentence ends. Or rather, doesn’t end. Ever. I’m happy enough in the kitchens and bedrooms, but I never feel like this is the destination. At some point the profound guy with the goatee becomes repetitive and your antennae go up. The woman who puts anarchism and astrology together tells you the same story for the third time and you slightly twitch. There’s a touch of playacting for me in these houses. I’m visiting, I will leave. I have started to suspect that life in these houses is all talk. A discussion about what life might be instead of actual life. I’m a few years into weekend drama school, those muscles are being stretched, imagined worlds are more vivid than the dull ache of school or home. And at drama school we do things. In these houses we just talk about them. Someone might one day design a poster. Someone else has nearly finished stringing their guitar. And meanwhile, the heavy grey blanket of family misery is upon the family house. Now I’ve lost the chronology. I have to stop writing now and call my father to check the dates. —Dad, what year were you divorced? —1978. But there were a few attempted separations first. —Yes, I remember those. And the final separation was two years before the legal stuff? So 1976 is the final moving out? —Yes.

166

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 167

Days Like These

My father is relying not on memory but on one of his lists of dates. Birthdays, anniversaries, cat vaccinations, probably. He has lists and back-up lists. I wonder whether his childhood in boarding schools, his father spending the war in Singapore prisons, have made him hold tight to the things that are visible. I know I have inherited this, the need to check eight or ten things before leaving the house. And the razzing I give him about lists is just to put my own obsessiveness into some kind of perspective. And I wonder whether anyone really minds inheriting their parents’ quirks. We shake our heads at these things, but they are kind of reassuring. The idea that something continues, even if it raises half a smile. There’s the one thing he’s told me about being sent to boarding school. How on the day he arrived at what? nine? ten years old?, with a trunk of his belongings, he had used the wrong word. The trunk contained his books and clothes, but he had mistakenly said to the prefects: Where should I put my toys? Toys.You see the slow smiles spreading across the faces of the prefects. Toys, eh? Here’s fresh meat. My memory of him in the leaving years is his shape walking away up the hall, carrying another bag, again and again, always at night, the front door closing. That’s the image, but the feeling was: Why don’t you stay and let me leave? I’ve never felt at home here. I should be allowed to go. I want something to begin. I envied him leaving. When the dread settled over the house, my older sisters and I knew some event was looming. We held meetings in the garage, deciding eventually that our father, a doctor, must have killed one of his patients and the news would soon be public. This was exciting, but when the actual diagnosis came it was more prosaic. Irretrievable breakdown, as they said in the court the day I went in to witness the actual divorce. Or was it irreconcilable differences? In any case, there was nothing to mourn: I have no memory of my

167

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 168

Michael Gurr

parents being happy together. Only that once the diagnosis was given to us, there were symptoms to be dealt with, or ignored. The place I live is a place I don’t want to be. The walk down the street towards the family house after school is a walk I prolong as long as possible. The fallout spray of divorce is spilling everywhere. The worst thing about divorce isn’t divorce, it’s the rubbish around it: the smug relatives, the way those adults take sides, people who might have helped five rattled children but didn’t. Anglo privacy’s first rule is Never Intervene. Its consequence is loneliness.

March 1989 Bruce Myles, director of all my adult plays and a marriage amputee himself, is talking to me in a bar. I’ve just had an ugly split—is there another kind?—after a five-year relationship. She and I probably knew we were finished, but needed the climactic event to separate. It arrived, on cue, and with a haste that shocked me a little, I packed up and moved out in three days. I’m sleeping in people’s spare beds for a bit. Bruce says: —It’s like blood running down the inside of your ribs. I don’t make the connection in the bar—why would I? I’m in pain—but later I will go back in time in my mind and sluice off some of the bad feeling towards the two people, my parents, who found themselves at the expiry date of a seventeen-year, five-child family. Separation was probably their survival. In the mess of my own break-up I am at least reassured by Bruce Myles’s blood-rib metaphor. He intervenes lightly—in plays and life. But there is something else going on. Something unexpected.

168

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 169

Days Like These

Being suddenly alone is to be alerted to the great untold story of public transport: its tenderness and eroticism. To be in such proximity to strangers always carries a charge, but never so much as in the morning and when newly single. On the early trains, slightly damp hair and recently applied make-up give you access to bodies so lately asleep or naked that it can induce a sensation like the swoon of a long kiss. You feel you’ve had breakfast with all of them. On the first trains of the day you are closer to a sort of personality nakedness than anywhere else. For someone who has just hurled themselves out of the routine of familiarity, the company of justwashed strangers is sexually inspiring. Their clothes haven’t had time to glue to their bodies, you can still sense the skin beneath. What is actually happening is that you have become hyper-alert to your love of the species. It fills me to brimming and shocks me with its impact. None of those sarcastic snap-judgements you make in the afternoon when the day’s irritations have shut everything down and people travel home in a compulsory grump. By six o’clock we’ve all decided that the world is a shit-heap and nothing’s worth the effort. But mornings are different. At first light you love her sitting over there reading that fat trashy book. And look at him, his lairy socks and his neat suit, he’s thirty-five going on eighteen. The morning is possibility.

Februar y 1977 How can people be sensible when the red curtain has descended over their eyes? How can anyone expect sanity when the players are suddenly weightless in the world? Films about life in outer space have the actors tumbling in circles inside their gravity-free capsules,

169

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 170

Michael Gurr

playing happy games with spilt liquids. Family-wreck is the darker Apollo mission: everyone is bumping weightlessly down halls at head height and banging into windows. My elder sisters have moved away and my younger sister and brother are growing up in a swaying uncertainty. This is a house of odd moods, you never know what you’ll get. The tiny alcoholic neighbour who calls in to cadge sherry at 5 p.m. seems by comparison quite sane. Booze has taken the shame off her and she says of her hulking husband: —He comes home randy as a Mallee bull, but I just say: Oh, forget it. She’s sixty looking ninety but she chirps blearily on, only half aware it seems of the unhappiness in the air. But even she eventually stops dropping by and dies unremarked, at least by us, a pickled sparrow who one day simply isn’t there. Did we not notice her death because of the ingrown sourness of the house? Our place has the wrong kind of electricity in it, it’s lit with the flickers of phosphorescent decay. Dismembered families behave unpredictably: some limbs grow themselves new bodies, others flop around numbly for years feeling phantom pain. Everyone’s looking for home. The artist who drew the whale in the City Square offers me an open hand. I’m talking to her on a public phone, miserable, and she says: —You could come and live with us. My husband is fairly easygoing. You could live with us and finish high school. I can’t believe this, the sound of these words, the casual kindness of them. —You could come and live with us.

170

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 171

Days Like These

Just by saying it she puts courage into me, but I’m not impulsive enough to take up the offer, and there’s duty in the shape of my younger sister and brother. We sort of helped a bit to save the whales, at least it’s no longer polite to say you want to put an exploding harpoon into their heads. So that’s a good thing. Do they still put the divorce cases in the newspaper law lists? On the day that ‘Gurr’ was listed, I was at rollcall at Melbourne High School. New school, not much of an idea who anyone was. The boy next to me was furtively reading the same law list in the paper. His last name also started with G, so as our names were called out one after another from the attendance roll, they matched the order in the law list. We did a couple of double takes. It’s the late 1970s and no-fault divorce is new. Separation and divorce are whisper words; when people talk about divorce on TV they are still filmed in black silhouette. The feeling is that unhappy marriages are meant to continue. We became good friends of course, the other G boy and me. We’d been touched by the shame-that-made-you-interesting, and also by coincidence. Coincidence always cheers you up. Hating each other’s taste in music, competing to see who could be the most obscene, joining Project Jonah together, we were friends until he chose science and I chose humanities and kid-drift happened, bobbing us away from friendship to nodding acquaintance. I don’t think he went along to the courtroom for his parents’ official split. I did, because I didn’t want to be lied to later about what actually went on. That’s what I said then, but there’s also a magnetic pull towards the defining event that wasn’t going to be resisted. I walk down the hill out of the school towards the train station past the caretaker. He raises his head:

171

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 172

Michael Gurr

—Off then, are ya? —Yep. If you rang Caretaker Casting you’d have asked for crusty-andwise if you wanted him. He’d seen a fair bit. Some kids drove their cars to school and rolled joints and girls in the spot behind the sports pavilion. He would have seen that. He’d probably also have seen the two impossibly blond boy athletes kissing there, their affair left unremarked by a school that worshipped their skill on the field and in the pool more than it worried about their crush. The school did a fair amount of policing of its students and I hadn’t asked for permission to leave to go to the Family Court. But no-one asked me anything when I walked out. How sometimes the world knows what’s going on and leaves well enough alone. Out of the school gates and up past the brothel called Mae’s Place, the air sharp from the yeast factory that still makes Vegemite smell of school. —Off then, are ya? —Yep. The court procedure was alert with nerves and very straightforward, much like going through airport customs. Even if you know nothing terrible is about to happen, your body reacts as though it will. You know that everyone in this blond-wood room wishes they’d gone to the toilet one more time. The attention paid to details of clothing. It matters that her blouse is just-so. That his watch is properly wound. Do you know what mice do when cornered by a cat? The very last thing they do before they die? They groom. Even mice do denial.

172

DLT 04 (146-173) 6/21/06 4:58 AM Page 173

Days Like These

I sat at the back, looking at faces. On some, a defiance, what I understand now as a refusal to be seen as unhappy. On others, a determination to survive the next fifteen minutes. And most clearly, the face of the judge: his weary courtesy, the courtesy of him, as he politely euthanased another couple.

173

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 174

Michael Gurr

174

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 175

Two solid men are walking calmly towards the train driver’s cabin

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 176

Michael Gurr

April 1998 Two solid men are walking calmly towards the train driver’s cabin. The driver is younger, lighter than both of them. His eyes are darting around but his face is frozen. The solid men hoist themselves up on the metal steps of the train. They are now level with him. He listens as they talk, nodding not in agreement, but to show that he can hear. He doesn’t meet their eyes. After a few minutes the men jump down and the young train driver climbs down and follows them. A cheer goes up. This is Swanston Dock and the unionised workforce has been sacked. Ex-SAS soldiers have been flown to Dubai to train to work on the docks. The private security guard with the balaclava and the Rottweiler becomes the symbol of this dispute. The Maritime Union of Australia has become the chock you put under the wheels of the runaway car called Union Busting. It stops here. Melbourne’s docks are a confusing maze if you’ve never been there before—and we haven’t. Hardie parks the car a long way off and we walk a while. There are blockades at various sites and when we arrive we ask directions from anyone who looks friendly. We’ve never seen so many police in one place before. Later, we hear rumours that the police did a little less than was asked of them, but today we’re acutely conscious of the vulnerability of human bodies. There are about eighty of us sitting on the tracks in front of this train. We are here to stop deliveries to the docks. Old women, their silent grandsons, their grandson’s girlfriends. We sit, our bums on the train tracks, and wait. You can see the city from here but it seems an awfully long way away. Then the sound comes and for a second I don’t know what it is. A hundred police are marching in tight formation, shouting one of those boot-camp chants. They are two hundred metres away, they’re not actually heading towards us, it’s a show of strength. The way they’re marching, I’ve never seen it 176

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 177

Days Like These

before, they raise their knees very high and pump out the chant. Shields and batons. It would be silly if it wasn’t scary. They turn into one of the mysterious roads around the docks and disappear. People raise their eyebrows at one another. The train comes. And keeps coming. Your first thought is a reassuring one: —Of course he’ll stop. He can see us, so he’ll stop. Your second thought is less happy: —How long does it actually take a train to stop? And thought number three is just pragmatic: —I’m not losing a leg for this. The train stops, right at the edge of us, and the two solid guys climb up for a chat with the driver. Who knows what is said. We know where your children go to school? The driver gets down and walks away, everyone who’s been sitting on the rails stands up and flexes a little, a few jokes about the sore bones in our bums and then we head off to the next place we’re asked to be. The Maritime Union of Australia, an organisation about which no-one here has any illusions, has declared the docks a dry area. As we arrive, a man with a beer in his hand is being asked to leave. And there it is: the icon of the lockout, a fire in a rusted 44-gallon drum. The food tents are working, the PA system is playing radio news and everyone is dispersing the tension with friendliness. It’s quite crowded here— and if you accidentally bump someone the apologies are mutual and overdone. We assert our common cause with exaggerated politeness. As if in defiance of the potential violence of this place, people have brought their children along and household dogs on leads. The fat Labrador versus the Rottie. Nothing much is happening but no-one 177

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 178

Michael Gurr

dares to leave in case the police make a charge at the rows of people sitting down in front of the gates. Over days and days the place is a marvel of calm organisation. Things just happen. Once you’re on the telephone tree, you get three or four updates a day. As the moment draws closer when the High Court will make its judgement about whether a unionised workforce can be sacked, Sue or Mark or Jen will ring you and let you know the state of play. For a fight with such belligerence in it, the ground-level mechanics are unfussed and friendly. It’s one of the unexplored paradoxes or ironies or contradictions of Australian politics that it’s the conservatives who skate closest to lawlessness, who show the least respect for institutions when they want something very badly. They’re not actually conservatives, but impatient radicals, with all the hungry foolishness that comes with that job description. And the Left only wins when it learns the rules very, very well. It looks like this fight won’t come down to batons on skulls, but people poring over legal detail late into the night. The intricacies of the court challenges get harder to follow and when a cheer goes up at Swanston Dock there’s a bit of uncertainty in it. Does this mean we’ve won? Is it safe to douse the fire in the 44gallon drum? Later, on TV, a group of ex-SAS men are glowering in a room. These were the ones who were taken secretly to Dubai to train as a non-union workforce. Now they feel let down by the government. They were promised big things and now there is nothing. They are very unhappy and muttering darkly in an ex-SAS kind of way. They threaten to stalk the Prime Minister throughout the next election campaign. You wait to see what form their heckling will take—this could be exceptionally interesting. They never show up.

178

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 179

Days Like These

Januar y 2001 After a year of part-time work for Steve Bracks, I’m calling it quits.

Plays are lining up to be written like planes waiting to land. Also, I’m not doing very much speechwriting. There is a new speechwriter in the office, am I being kept on for politeness after the work we did in 1999? The occasions I’m called in for—Nelson Mandela and Rubin Carter dropping in, the opening of the Brosnan Centre—are getting few and far between. Getting enthusiasm into a speech about the daily events is also becoming a weight. Good speechwriters can inject life into an address to a suburban Chamber of Commerce. Less good ones get bored. The entertaining part is becoming a fake overnight expert in biotechnology—enough to understand what you are writing. But you know it’s time to go when you’re writing a speech that congratulates a gathering of civic councillors on rebranding their town as ‘The Gateway to Somethingorother’ while fantasising a natural disaster that might allow language to rise above the ordinary. An obscene admission. Architects are among the most frustrated people I’ve met. At the mercy of their clients, they are rarely happy. In Jerusalem, a man says of his son, who has dropped out of studying architecture: —He said, What was the point? Why become an architect? You’ll dream great cathedrals and only ever get to build shopping malls. Political speechwriters dream the Gettysburg address and wake up to the Cheltenham Chamber of Commerce. I offer to work on the next campaign, to be available for the occasional speech. Nice letters are exchanged. Walking out of Treasury Place on the day I resign, the city is in sudden sharp relief. Is there a better feeling than leaving? Faces and buildings are vivid. The sensation lasts as long as it takes to get from Parliament Station to Footscray. By then, I am 179

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 180

Michael Gurr

guiltily aware that I have put the responsibility for a reliable income back on Hardie, again.

September 2001 Be careful what you pray for. Be especially careful of praying for disasters to write speeches about. I spend an hour or two today writing the condolence motion for state parliament after planes are flown into the World Trade Center in New York. And then a speech for a big gathering of school children at a tennis centre, to be addressed by Muslims and Buddhists, Jews and Anglicans and the Premier. The idea is to assuage shock with togetherness, to tell a few thousand school children that their world is not about to collapse. I take a punt on the tone of this speech. It would be good if they went away with something apart from condemnation and grief in their ears. If they had something to look forward to, an aim. It’s a funeral speech. Let’s turn them back onto the world, carrying a bit of weight with them. Let’s make them leave the venue slightly older. —Our generation has failed—we have failed to take the hate out of the world. We need another generation that will think deeper, act better, work harder. I half expect this speech to be rejected or at least toned down, but it’s delivered.

November ––December 2002 Friday The call comes: the state election is on. Sandra is Steve Bracks’s speechwriter, in the job two months. I’ve not met her before, but 180

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 181

Days Like These

she sounds friendly, sensible. Naturally, the speech needs to be done yesterday. She promises to do all the policy stuff if I do the rhetoric—but that’s a false division. One comes out of the other. We arrange to meet Monday. Sunday Dug out some old speeches—including the last campaign. Press coverage of the 1999 launch tumbled out too. I need to feel something, re-connect, manufacture a bit of passion for this steady state outfit. I’m on a Viagra search—and have already clearly switched into boysy Labor metaphors. Having governed as a minority for three years, the style of this administration has been steady-as-shegoes. Health and education are back at the top of the agenda, the ‘social black hole’ is being filled, but a common complaint is that while a determination not to frighten the horses is all very well, the horses should at least be aware of your presence. In our favour is a Liberal Opposition behaving in textbook Opposition fashion— a bit lost and cranky. They are led by Robert Doyle, a man who seems at any moment about to revert to his schoolmaster persona and make an obscure joke in Latin. Felt a wave of affection for the last campaign. The first thing I remembered was saying to someone at the Williamstown Lifesaving Club that night: —Whatever happens—we slayed the dragon. It was quite a thing to see. Everyone writing us off. All those people too frightened to speak up. It was a strange time—and you detect among commentators a sneaking nostalgia for it. It’s like they want to be smacked and insulted—made to feel somehow alive. They’re bored by the first term of Steve Bracks because he doesn’t put the rosy smarting handprint on their bums. All we had back 181

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 182

Michael Gurr

then was the massively unfashionable health and education talk. Well, that and Steve Bracks. Making something passionate out of bread and butter. I’ve written a first draft of the campaign launch speech, just to see what’s in my head because there’s no detail. It’s OK, a bit dull. I’ve come up with a lot of negative lines. Things that Bracks probably won’t or shouldn’t say. But that’s OK. Like we did with Beazley last time, whoever introduces him can do all that. There was a good one in 1999 from Beazley: —Do Victorians want to be raking over the ashes of shady deals in the inevitable royal commissions? Invented conspiracy talk, but connecting to a feeling. Beazley could say it then nick off. And that was the news that night. Our launch and Kennett looking cross as he was forced to say: —My government is not corrupt. Monday Into King Street, Labor headquarters, at 9 a.m. to meet Sandra. Upstairs, some familiar faces, lots of new ones. We go out for a cup of tea around the corner. She’s smart and unfussed. We trade a few speechwriter stories, have a bit of a laugh and get down to it. She does a quick reccy around the café and says: —Nah, it’s OK, this looks like a Labor coffee shop to me. We agree on a way to work—just bat drafts back and forth and be brutal with what the other has done. She has to write a speech every day for policy launches. Leave her and wander down past the Victoria Market. Anxiety flickers: is it about working for the Party, about being part of an organisation for a little while? I should feel at home, but don’t. So I go into one of the cooking shops in Elizabeth Street and buy a sieve. We need one. Since finding the 182

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 183

Days Like These

writing of Elizabeth David, cookery books have been like discovering a new kind of music. I have a puritan’s dislike of anything with photographs—what sustains me are the simple stories told through honest descriptions of honest food. Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, Pomiane. The best food writers are the best historians: they come at you from the common room of all cultures—the kitchen. Broader historians are always getting in your way, theories and agendas elbowing actual people aside. If you know something about Italian food, you know something about Italy. How finely a herb is chopped and its quantity guides you into France. If you’re impatient and curious, eat the national dish. Cooking itself has become a very big pleasure and solace. From inception to delivery it is wonderfully fast—none of the months of grind that writing brings. And then it’s over. The many, many jars of quince jam or preserved lemons that have left our kitchen were only partly inspired by the idea of giving them away: the activity is a sanity saver on mid-week afternoons when the silence of writing has descended and the sensual pleasure of warm light and warm bodies on stage seems ages away. I avoid buying any of the promising bowls and unnecessary kitchen toys today. The credit card has its nose barely above water and when the ATM asks me whether I want the balance displayed I always answer No. Train home to wait for Sandra to call about the draft I gave her. I remember John Brumby’s Chief of Staff telling me when I started: —All honour to the first draft. Because without it there would be no second, third or fourth. Without that naked first draft there would be no final speech. It was a compassionate thing to say because it was after I had written my first proper speech for Brumby: a very bad attempt to 183

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 184

Michael Gurr

sum up the state of the world. He saw that what I’d written was utterly heartfelt and utterly wrong and he was nice about it. Tuesday Batted the speech back and forth on email with Sandra. Getting somewhere. But we’re waiting on policy details. Frustrating. You know they’re done, but people hold them back. So the speech is full of ‘We will spend $?? on XXX’ and you don’t know how high to go with the language. Is it modest? Is it major? Confusing messages about the launch. Who is speaking? And in what order ? I will be writing this stuff so I’d like to know. Why do they leave it so late? The launch is next Monday. Wednesday Sandra’s done a new draft—this collaboration is going to work. Into King Street. Upstairs about forty people are eating sausages in rolls listening to the man from Labor’s ad agency take them through the new TV ads. I recognise about a third of the people here. The encouraging thing: how young everyone is. I see MUA Jan and a few of the women from last time. The ads are good. They finish and a young woman next to me says in a horny whisper: —Jesus, I think I might vote for him. To which her friend says, very dry: —Too bad. You can’t afford to live in Williamstown. Sandra and I go back to her desk to wait for the leader to arrive. Saw a seasoned adviser who says that he doesn’t know how many more campaigns he’s got left in him. I can’t help myself: —By the look of you, I’d say about twelve.

184

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 185

Days Like These

He’s the total political animal. You can’t imagine him buying milk or rooting. Finally get in to see Bracks. He’s been on the phone doing live radio with Ernie Sigley. Watched him through the window as he joshed around with Ernie. I raised an eyebrow and he waved me away like a wasp. When we get in, he says: —Well, you’re here—there must be an election on. —Sorry, but you’re the fifth person who’s said that. He looks fit and fine. He likes and doesn’t like the speech we’ve done. It’s the usual: they only know what they want when you show them something. We go through it. He’s a bit nostalgic for last time —but maybe that’s no bad thing. To recycle old lines is fine. I mean, who remembers? He wants more about belief, faith, all those things that made the now Attorney-General Rob Hulls convinced I was a Catholic in 1999. —But you are, mate, you’re a Mick. I mean, read your fucking speeches. I like speeches that seem more rambling than sequential. They subliminally convey the idea that one thought is leading to another, that they’re being riffed, whereas sequential speeches sound ‘written’ and staged. A few more conversations with people as Sandra and I gather facts and policy. I am very moved by people who hold great passion and nervousness in their hearts but work and behave sensibly and pragmatically. A woman who gave us facts and figures about some costings of election promises was utterly efficient, but you could see in her this anxious passion—an emotion she fiercely contained as she did her job. It’s the way good people behave in emergencies, denying their emotions and doing the job at hand, and it moves me enormously. People project onto election campaigns their own hopes and, to

185

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 186

Michael Gurr

some degree, fantasies. If we win this, then everything will be better. Perhaps I am moved because I am reassured that I am not alone in allowing elections to be elevated to the level of metaphor. Left there, walked back into the city trying to think of something interesting to put in the speech. I think campaigns are for Oppositions. At last everyone’s looking at you. You get to stand up and say that the government stinks and here is our great vision. From government it’s a struggle. Aren’t we nice, we did what we said we’d do. There aren’t many bubbles in that glass. Thursday More drafts and policy detail this morning, then went with Sandra to the Bracks’s house to talk through the speech. There are a few late policy changes: bewildering. I can’t believe that they haven’t been ticked off. I’m sure there’s a long dull explanation—but why aren’t these things ready on time? At the house with Sandra, the children seem used to strangers plonking themselves down in front of the news at 6 p.m. We sit in the dining room to go through the speech. We read through it. Again the sense that the campaign launch occupies some old-fashioned and slightly superstitious place: the uninterrupted forty-five minutes for which no apologies can be made. We talk a bit, go through what Steve has written. It’s pretty clear what needs to be done: a bit more faith. A bit less negativity about the Liberals. Home with Sandra for a cup of tea. Hardie arrives, asks how it went and Sandra says: —Well, when he liked something he looked at Michael and when he didn’t like something he looked at me. This is the difference between being staff and a ring-in. We laugh. She doesn’t mind, is genuinely passionate about Labor and has dug out bits of forgotten policy and beefed them up into vision.

186

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 187

Days Like These

Drafts. More drafts. The speech drifts back and forth with everyone’s suggestions coming in. Sometimes you can feel the force being drained out of it. Advice is good, but being in government has put more filters on the process. In Opposition, the job felt more immediate; now you must make appointments to meet people. You can just appear in an Opposition Leader’s office, but a Premier lives by something forbiddingly called The Diary. Friday We gather at Treasury Place for a run-through with the autocue and an audience of four or five. Everyone is remembering the Great Autocue Nightmare of Ballarat in 1999 when the machine hiccupped, died and refused to work until the appointed time. War stories make everyone happy, of course. The autocue people in here today tell us this is now very sophisticated technology. The man says proudly: —There are only three of these machines in the southern hemisphere. I almost say: —That doesn’t augur very well for spare parts. We run it. He’s good. We sit down and talk it through. Everyone sticks their oar in, a hundred changes have to be made. A break while Sandra and I re-draft. My instinct was wrong—it’s far too negative. We should be more upbeat—announce new plans, then get stuck into the Liberals—then more new plans—a bit more negative talk— then something warm to finish. We re-draft—everyone re-assembles, this time a bigger crowd. Most people make smart contributions and I like the way that there’s less fear now—compared to 1999, people seem readier to

187

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 188

Michael Gurr

voice an unfinished opinion and let someone else run with it, finish it, finesse it. I remember the place as being more frightened than this. In 1999, people hardly dared say anything because to be wrong was to be marked down forever in the minds of their colleagues. This feels a bit healthier. And I’ve changed. At one point watching a run of the speech, I wondered what this odd feeling was—and realised it was a lack of anxiety. In 1999 my heart was in my throat. I felt an inappropriate sense of responsibility. Today I feel only a sensible sense of responsibility. The fun moment in the speech discussion comes, as I thought it probably would, when a media adviser joins in. There’s a sentence that goes, ‘My instincts tell me that the alternative government is simply not ready to govern’. The media adviser hates the phrase ‘My instincts tell me’. Adviser: Cut it. Steve’s pen starts slicing through the words. MG:

Excuse me? Who gave you permission to cut that?

Steve Bracks starts smiling. Here comes the entertaining biffo between the media adviser and the speechwriter. Adviser: You don’t need it. Just say the punchy bit. MG: It’s trying to make it conversational. You say something like that at the beginning of a sentence and it sounds a bit more inclusive. If you only say the punchy bit, it’s just another slogan. Adviser: Just cut it. MG: It’s about inviting us in. Sharing an insight. Adviser: Oh yeah. The warm and fuzzy stuff—you like that, don’t you?

188

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 189

Days Like These

MG:

I do. Very much. And so do lots of others. Most of whom vote. Adviser: Then I guess we’ll just have to bow to your higher judgement. A stand-off over four words: how to me they indicate a whole approach, a texture. And in defending them, how precious and obsessive I sound. But the conversation is conducted with quite genuine smiles. Steve sat between us, chuckling happily. It was a moment of recognition that everyone lives with a stamp on their forehead. Mine in there says ‘Warm and Fuzzy’. Later, when I ask Sandra for some meths so I can scrub the words ‘Warm and Fuzzy’ off my forehead, she says: —No, leave them there, they’re better than the words some others have got written across theirs. And someone questioned the word ‘ethos’ in the speech. A word no-one really uses. But nipping in the bud a little chorus of ‘Yes, it’s an odd word, isn’t it?’, Steve said, ‘No, that’s OK, I know what he’s doing’. Meaning: using slightly arcane expressions every now and then is fine. It’s good to sound a bit old-fashioned. Later I overhear two men walking down a corridor: —What’s with the fuckun ethos stuff? Amusing moment of pragmatism in the office when it’s confirmed that Alison Whyte is MC for the launch. Someone says: You know she’s very pregnant? And everyone says: Oh good. This has very little to do with being glad about Alison Whyte having a baby— this is just pleasure at the photo-op of a famous pregnant woman on stage introducing the Premier.

189

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 190

Michael Gurr

Having said that I am now calmer and more sensible about this kind of work, yesterday I had a half-hour physical panic. I started sweating and had that feeling that there was something I had forgotten—something critical. All I could do was water the garden, in direct contradiction of the major new initiatives we’re announcing on water policy. I hope that in a week or two I can put this to one side and re-find the play I’ve put on hold. Spoke to the cast of The Simple Truth— last performance in Sydney tonight. They sound fine—wish I could be there. Sunday Rehearsal day. Go into King Street early afternoon. The plan is to head down to the Kingston Town Hall in Moorabbin at about 1 p.m., but there’s a low-level anxiety around. There is pressure to keep adding policy detail to the speech. It seems a lot of people have had their 3 a.m. insights about what will win the election. Sandra is resisting. She drives us down the long road to Moorabbin past endless car yards. The Kingston Town Hall is perfectly daggy. The Ordinary Party. We walk into the hall while they’re testing the introductory video and my guts turn over. Oh shit, this is an election campaign and it really matters. Steve arrives and we sit down with staff and advisers to go through the speech again. There’s a clumsy bit which sort of implies that the drought will end if we stop hosing our driveways. Being technically untrue, this line is cut. And another bit where the language goes slightly high. Bracks: Bit religious, isn’t it? MG: Yes, like only an atheist can be. So we cut that too.

190

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 191

Days Like These

Sandra and I go downstairs to the autocue and type in these and other changes. We rehearse the speech. He’s remarkably good— clear and using this time well. I think some of Steve Bracks’s public appeal is due to the fact that people sense his passion is for the work, not the office. He transmits dedication, which is subtler than showmanship and inspires a deeper trust. Now, a walk-through. An ALP staffer stands in for Alison Whyte. A man sitting next to me turns and says, ‘Who’s that?’ I say, ‘Alison Whyte’, meaning Alison Whyte’s stand-in. He looks at the stage, back at me, back at the stage, back at me, and nods. He either thinks I am mad or he thinks he’s got Alison Whyte confused with someone else, possibly this blonde ALP staffer. Two goes for the free-to-air filming. It’s OK, but it’s pitched for TV so it’s hard to tell whether or not the big emotional stuff is right yet. On the second go, he’s tired. Fluffing words. He keeps saying ‘epic’ instead of ‘Epping’. Sandra: —I bet he says ‘epic’ tomorrow. Then we’re done. Drive back with Sandra, we’ve done most of what we can. She drops me at Spencer Street and I catch a train. There is an Aboriginal man on the platform. He’s walking up and down waiting for his train. There’s nothing odd about him. He’s plainly dressed. But people stiffen when he walks past. He would feel this several times a day on every day of his life. Monday Launch day. Bad night’s sleep. Not anxiety, just the brain awake and it’s hot. Give up on sleep and have breakfast at 4.30. Hardie drops me at King Street at 7.30. Sandra is being harassed again. Everyone wanting last-minute changes. I watch her save a final copy of the speech onto a disc and

191

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 192

Michael Gurr

put it in her handbag. It’s the only copy. There should be eight copies arriving at Moorabbin by different modes of transport, including one that is flown in by jet. When a Party worker tells me later in the day how he hates launch day because there are so many things that can go wrong, it’s the disc I think of. When Sandra and I get into her car I apologise: —Sorry, but can you just check you’ve got the disc again? Kingston Town Hall is surrounded by logging trucks. Fine. If we’ve upset the loggers and that’s on the news, then aren’t we nice and green? I put Hardie’s name on the door and am given my security pass so that I can move around the building without being questioned or shot. I always feel like an impostor wearing these things. I’m sure security guards are thinking: Bullshit, he must have found that in the toilet. Lots of people milling around upstairs in the big function room. A little section partitioned off for make-up. A platter of watermelon and kiwifruit. There’s too much time to fill and time always drags when you’re ready. I go downstairs with Steve and he does three sections of the speech on stage with full PA sound. It’s good. Other speakers are trying to get used to the autocue. I hate these machines—unless you know the speech very well, you only get it line by line, so it’s not good for building up to a punch, or getting a flow happening. Everything comes at you in separate little mouthfuls. The Premier’s cop is always around at almost the exact same distance. They must learn the distance at cop school. It’s fascinating watching him move smoothly ahead to check behind exit doors, then move smoothly behind and follow at that exact distance. What must it be like having this shadow? Everyone is always asking him whether he wants a cup of tea because he is very handsome. Needless to say he never wants a cup of tea, never speaks, just smiles. Later I see three women from Bracks’s office ask him in succession if he 192

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 193

Days Like These

wants a sandwich. He never wants a sandwich. The way he says ‘No thanks’ makes them sigh. There really is nothing to do, and there’s just a few of us left up here now. Steve and I have one our silences, I shake his hand, tell him to enjoy himself and go downstairs. The hall is full now, camera lights everywhere, and that nervous buzz. Lots of faces. I suddenly wonder whether there is a paper copy of the speech on the lectern if the autocue breaks, then see a staffer come on stage and put one there, taping down the last page so no-one will walk off with it. Then it’s on. Alison Whyte is upbeat and friendly as MC, perfectly ‘ad-libbing’ the lines. To introduce Bracks I’ve gone back to the line I used for Beazley to welcome him in Ballarat in 1999. ‘Please welcome a friend of us all—Steve Bracks.’ I stole this from George Harrison introducing Bob Dylan at the Concert for Bangladesh. Music. The Black Sorrows song ‘Better Times’, Steve and Terry moving down the aisle. Damn it all to hell but I well up. Barry Jones stops him, embraces him, he jumps up the stairs—please don’t trip— and begins. Strong, confident, taking his time. We won’t have to lead the applause, it’s coming after every other line. About halfway through, something subtle happens. I’m not sure if it’s tiredness, but I can see an energy sap. Sure enough, he says ‘epic’ instead of ‘Epping’ but then does such a good recovery that he re-energises himself. ‘Well—it is pretty epic, what we’re doing in Epping!’ Big laugh. God we ask ridiculous things of people. Be perfect. I guarantee this will be in the press tomorrow. He gets on a real roll towards the end. A great finish, and then the family are up on stage. Huge sound— music again and a mighty crash of applause with everyone on their feet. Then they’re down again to embrace his Mum in the front row, then back up for more smiles and waves and then it’s over. I find Sandra, we embrace. I look around for Hardie but I think he’s gone back to work. He knew I’d be doing other things. Backstage, Steve is sitting with his children. I tell him he was great, but 193

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 194

Michael Gurr

he says he made a few stumbles, seems tired. I say that if I could’ve written those stumbles I would have. Walk down the stairs behind Barry Jones. Barry is in the middle of a long monologue to someone about the lighting. Steve, he says, needed a little footlight, on the big video screen his eyes were slightly in shadow. Barry’s right, actually. And I’m sure he could tell us what wattage bulb to use. Sandra’s parked her car near the railway station. We pass a Labor staffer who congratulates us, then looks suddenly worried: —Jesus, you’re not both getting the train home, are you? —Of course we are. Useful for a minute, then utterly forgotten. And I repeat the Don Watson joke I stole and said upstairs a few minutes back: —I am being released back into the community. Sandra drops me home. Tuesday TV and press very good for the launch. But of course the opinion pieces must have an opinion in them, so the Premier’s ‘confidence’ is now read as ‘presidential’. Stumble a bit and you’re the accidental Premier, find your feet and you’re on your way to arrogance. Political reporting follows such predictable patterns. I wonder how much of it depends on how bored the journalists are? Wednesday The office calls. They need a celeb MC for the launch of the youth policy tomorrow at the Vineyard in Acland Street. They need a muso or someone who’s on TV in something that ‘youth’ like. They’ve gone blank. I tell them I’ll try and get David Tredinnick, 194

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 195

Days Like These

who’s playing a gay barman in The Secret Life of Us, which is Channel 10 and youthy. I call David and ask him if he’s voting Green. He’s not. He’s in. Done. Sunday Another Age Poll. Labor streets ahead—and massively ahead in regional cities and towns. If this actually happened, it would be a landslide, but I suspect it will be more patchy than that. You never know what Independents are out there and what a strong showing from them could do to preferences. And it’s unclear where the three current Independents are. And the Greens could be a sleeper in about three seats. Plus, of course, the Liberals and the Greens are now talking up a Labor landslide. This could help the Greens more than the Liberals, as the Green line is smarter. They’re saying:‘Put in some Green MPs to keep the government true to its word on the environment’. Whereas the Libs are saying: ‘If Labor has an easy win, jobs will desert Victoria and the unions will rule’. This doesn’t really square with anyone’s actual experience. It’s an assertion without evidence. Fear campaigns need at least a grain of truth in them. Tuesday The Liberal Party TV and print ads name about ten companies who have either shut factories or laid off workers due to ‘union militancy’ and Labor’s too-cosy relationship with unions. Today, about six of these companies have come out and said they were not asked, it’s not true anyway, and the ads must be stopped. What? The Libs didn’t ask? This issue will run for two days at least, given that the Liberal response is to keep the ads going. They’ve accused Labor of leaning on the companies. The story that comes out of this is ‘Liberal bungle’. 195

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 196

Michael Gurr

A series of photographs in the paper today of Robert Doyle juggling some fruit in a fruit shop. He drops the fruit, which is what inevitably happens when you juggle, and hands sub-editors all sorts of gift headlines. The sound of Liberal media advisers slapping their foreheads. It surely must be Rule One: the leader must not juggle things in front of cameras. For atmospherics, Jeff Kennett quits his radio show in a storm. Irrelevant, but having Kennett in a huff on the news is nice, especially when it bumps Liberal policy launches off the agenda. Still don’t quite believe the polls. Or don’t dare to. Or both. Wednesday Email from Sandra. She’s starting work on the victory/too close to call/defeat speeches for Saturday. Will I collaborate? She tells me that Bracks walked past her computer and saw what she was working on—the victory speech—and got superstitious: —I don’t want to see that! I said I didn’t think I could write the defeat speech—she confessed she couldn’t either. I want to push the fast-forward button. Sunday The biggest majority in Victorian history. Of any party. Ever. And control of the Upper House, which means it can now be reformed. Twenty-one Liberals defeated, including five shadow ministers. Almost the entire eastern suburbs came over, with swings of up to 16 per cent. Held virtually all the regional and rural seats from 1999. ‘Landslide’ doesn’t quite describe it. The Greens did very well in three seats and moderately well elsewhere, but none elected. They’ve taken the Democrat vote since that bunch of saps imploded.

196

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 197

Days Like These

Went into King Street yesterday at 5 p.m. Campaign staff are upstairs, Party heavies downstairs. Banks of TVs. Work with Sandra putting the victory speech into bullet points. We’re not writing the other two speeches. Steve and Terry arrive. The exit polls are sensational, apparently. He looks through the speech, he’s pretty happy. From now until 9 p.m. we watch TV, occasionally fiddle with the speech, making it progressively more humble as the size of the victory becomes clear. More thanks, more inclusion. Despite—or because of—the scale of the victory, people tire of cheering at the TV. Someone calls out: —This is the best night ever! But Steve Bracks’s quiet reply is true: —No. 1999 was better. Words like ‘devastation’, ‘tatters’, ‘shell-shocked’ are pouring out of the TV about the Liberals. Later, I hear that their function was a very lavishly catered affair in Albert Park. No-one ate anything. Great rolling plains of sushi rotted on into the night. It’s an oddly detached evening. Sandra drives us to the North Williamstown Primary School gymnasium where Steve will claim victory. Hardie will meet us there. The gymnasium is crowded, but without the erotic crush of 1999 at the much smaller lifesaving club. Find Hardie. His smile puts the full stop on the campaign. Steve arrives to our theme music, cameramen are tripping over each other, the speech goes fine and Hardie and I leave the moment it finishes. It’s an astonishing result, but it doesn’t have that surge-from-Opposition thing going for it. And once the result is clear, I’m no longer at home. Paul Keating said that when you change the government, you change the country. It seemed an obvious thing to say, but change

197

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 198

Michael Gurr

is about more than tax-rates and foreign policy—it’s about the temperature of the place. At the state level, the tone of public debate has shifted. It’s not fanciful to see more goodwill around in the way that things are discussed. The insult is a less fashionable form of argument now than three years ago. We’re quiet in the car, it’s good when campaigns finish. By the time we arrive home, my aim is to have re-connected to my stalled play. Williamstown to Footscray isn’t quite long enough to achieve this, but we both know what the quiet in the car means: less flicking between TV news broadcasts, back to one newspaper a day.

198

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 199

Days Like These

May 1995 From the plane above Hanoi you see bomb craters. For a while

it’s hard to accept that they’re real. For a while all I’m seeing are stills from my generation’s history class, otherwise known as American films. The bomb craters are real enough, you see more of them alongside the highways. It’s a little incredible that they are still here, and then you realise that some part of you believes that when a war ends everything automatically repairs itself. After victory, normal life. But peace doesn’t collect and dispose of the rubbish of war, and war leaves a lot of rubbish. There is plenty of busted metal lying around Vietnam. It’s only later that you start to think that it’s been left there deliberately for us to see. A B-52 crushed like a Coke can near the runway at Hanoi Airport sets you eloquently straight about who won. The story of the war in Vietnam is all images of the anti-war movement and the versions of horror committed to fictional film. The war that happened here, despite guest-starring roles for melting Vietnamese flesh and the still-life of My Lai, is essentially the story of bad things happening to American teenagers. Its soundtrack has never been Vietnamese music. It’s the Doors, the Byrds, the endless self-pitying loop of chopper blades and 1960s rock’n’roll. It’s safe to say that the story of Ho Chi Minh going to Manhattan, working as a short-order cook and trying to engage the Americans in support of what was then a nationalist struggle, will never be made into a movie. We’re stuck with the generalised emotion that is the opposite of thinking, the sort of interpretations that turn wars into unstoppable acts of nature rather than things that people do to get the things they want. The idea behind our delegation is the vague one of ‘cultural exchange’—to meet, familiarise, make connections. I do know of 199

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 200

Michael Gurr

one concrete achievement from our trip—help for the Vietnamese National Film Archive, whose contents were in rapid decay. A delegation of Australian artists on an official tour of an authoritarian state is always going to get a partial view, and our little group gets a fair dose of indoctrination. The Museum of American War Atrocities is room after room of photographs of massacre and mutilation punctuated by Agent Orange foetuses in jars. A milky eye set in a shoulder staring at nothing. You can meet those who reached full term begging outside the hotels. We get a swift history lesson at another museum, this one a revelation. For thousands of years Vietnam has been invaded and occupied. Each time the invaders have been repelled. You sense the deep resilience and begin to understand why what we call the Vietnam War they call the American War. They have to distinguish it from the Chinese Wars, the Japanese Wars. Through Saigon, Hue and Hanoi, we see some incomprehensible films, a lot of thunderously amplified singing and discover a strange new genre. Western fashion and technology, circa 1970, is creeping into the sombre patriotic displays. So we sit in a hall watching performers in spangled jackets singing into hand-mikes about the rice harvest and the undying spirit of Uncle Ho. It’s a surreal display and along with the wet heat acts as a mind-emptying narcotic. You find yourself oddly engaged by these mongrel forms, the delicate traditional instruments coming at you in mega-decibels. The heat and the beer and the karaoke ideology cradle you dangerously. For a few moments each night you think you could live here, surviving on good soup, the humidity drug and ten American dollars a day. You peer down a corridor you know you won’t take: the brain-dead expat drifting from bar to market to bed. I’m happy to be asked along on this delegation, but I wonder what I’m doing here. The need for teachers and resources is naked and obvious, my purpose here less so. 200

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 201

Days Like These

We troop through the near-squalor of the drama schools, watch performances of folk-tales drilled as tight as any ballet class, visit the collapsing squat that is an animation studio. We meet directors, actors, designers. We see the rotten conditions they work in, meet hundreds of students alive with possibility, shake their hands, move on. We see their struggle to make art with little more than balsa wood and gaffer-tape and promise to stay in touch. We don’t. All Vietnamese film stars have Western bone-structure and Western eyes. While the older teachers at the drama schools stress the importance of traditional forms, their students succeed only to the extent that they resemble Leonardo DiCaprio. One of the young video stars gives our mini-bus a motorcycle escort from the film studio to the cinema to see the film he’s starring in. He loves his sunglasses and he loves his hair. A jet and gold Leonardo, he is coping just fine with being recognised at intersections. We watch him as he speeds alongside our bus, giving V signs and revving his Honda. The world looks out of the window of our bus and says to him: You will always be an extra in the global movie. The world looks past him and sees the men selling air from bicycle pumps and casts them as scenery. The poor are scenery. I can’t decide whether our guide/translator is lazy or censorious. Too often our questions about artistic freedom, which elicited long and careful replies in Vietnamese, would come back to us translated as ‘Yes’. And I didn’t need her simultaneous translation of a film called The Little Crab Moves Along the Eastern Beach. It was, after all, a film about a little crab moving along the eastern beach. Occasionally we slip the leash. If the group simply splits up and walks off in different directions, our guide gives up herding us and retires to the bus. At these moments it is good to be lost in Hanoi, a city saved from carpet bombing by its persistent low cloud cover. Glass Street, Metal Street, Silk Street, all named for what was once sold there. 201

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 202

Michael Gurr

On one of these escapes, two of us find our way to an elderly writer sitting in his studio. He is a translator and working on yet another biography of Ho Chi Minh. In Vietnam, the myth is of a celibate, aesthetic figure who lived above ordinary human functions, his life dedicated to the freedom of his people. The unremarkable truth is that Ho was a bit of a rooter. Asked about this, the old writer shows us, just by his expression, that he has no trouble holding both ideas in his head. It is a question of which idea is more useful to the nation: a real man with appetites or a demi-god? In this the old writer reminds me of a Catholic Cardinal: the question is not about the literal truth of the resurrection or the virgin birth, but what is better for the flock to be told. Popes and revolutionaries have decided, in a manner they think of as benign, that the people need folk-tales and guidance. In an act that contrives to mimic self-sacrifice, they say: Here, we will take on the burden of deciding what is true. We will release you from the effort of choosing right from wrong. God and revolution don’t have a monopoly on this phenomenon; the high-end money-changers do it too. When Rupert Murdoch reaches 112, he will look and sound like this. It’s the old problem: the wise and softly spoken leaders are always just a contradiction away from their true bossy selves. Bossiness doesn’t sound very frightening until it’s backed up by an intelligence service, a prison system and a firing squad. We walk on the bones and ash of those who have provoked the impatience of the powerful. Just as domestic murder is an impatient act, demanding the solution now to something disobedient in the world, mass murderers are always in a very big hurry. I’m ashamed now that I didn’t raise the cases of imprisoned Vietnamese writers when we met the Minister for Culture. I could have made a scene instead of joining in ‘Waltzing Matilda’ as our delegation’s reply to the Minister’s tipsy folk song. They were 202

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 203

Days Like These

open-hearted hosts, the tone of the night pretty jolly. I liked these people. I might have memorised one or two imprisoned names at no great cost. I might have been asked to leave the country, but so what? Later, that time when we think of everything, I thought: That’s the force of eating a banquet with powerful men. Hospitality shuts you up. The Australian Artistic Delegation is collected at its hotel at 5 a.m. and driven to the main boulevard in Saigon. Here we sit in bleachers and watch a five-hour parade to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Liberation or Fall of Saigon. The heat is pushing emergency. We have been given an honoured place, just a few seats along from General Giap, legendary strategist of the war. It’s good propaganda to have some Western faces in the official stand, but our hosts might have thought twice if they’d heard the Australian commentary. After two hours of military hardware, the Moomba/Mardi Gras section of the parade tests our solemnity. Solemnity loses. Is it Bob Weiss who describes a phalanx of young women in traditional dress marching past as ‘Hookers for Ho’? It sets the tone and things get worse; boredom, heat and officialdom are a bad mix. We head back to the hotel and watch highlights on CNN. Sure enough we get a close-up, headachy Hanoi Janes the lot of us. Sigrid Thornton is mobbed in the streets like a pop star because everyone in Vietnam has seen All the River Runs (sic) on video. I watch Sigrid mime the word ‘constipation’ in a Saigon chemist. We think the staff are pretending not to understand in order to prolong her performance. They are also big fans of Colleen McCullough, especially The Torn Buds (sic). I am asked for Colleen’s address by a Saigon fan. It seems OK to say c/– Norfolk Island. Later, two anti-colonialists go for a massage. Separated by a screen, Carillo Gantner and I say a firm, simultaneous ‘No, thank you’ as our masseuse’s hands travel south for extra happy finish.

203

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 204

Michael Gurr

August 2005 It’s my first writers’ festival. Playwrights aren’t usually invited—

something about plays not being literature, I guess. But this year, Byron Bay have got four of us up here. On Day One I conduct a three-hour workshop about writing plays. Sixteen actual or aspiring playwrights gather in a room. Not quite believing that there is much that can actually be taught, that most of it has to be absorbed through seeing and reading, I kick off with a question about the last play each person has seen or read and what it meant to them. Half the room is struggling to think of one. The democratic art of writing allows all comers admittance, but you can’t help wondering, if this was a music workshop and half the room had never listened to Mozart or B. B. King … But it’s a fun three hours and the creeping fear of these occasions—that you will run out of things to say—doesn’t happen. After I make some sweeping statement about political theatre, there’s a spirited exchange with an American man about the Italian playwright Dario Fo. Anecdotes work best. It’s impossible to know what anyone takes away from this session, but I can see some connections being made. For most of the festival I watch audiences. The keenness and good humour of them is somehow moving: maybe these festivals are prayer meetings for left-wing atheists? Maybe this is their Hillsong? Now I’m sitting on a little stage with Shahin Shafei and Putu Wijaya. We’re here to talk about why theatre matters. Shahin escaped Iran after writing one too many troublesome plays, spent more than a year in Curtin Detention Centre and has just been granted some kind of visa. Putu makes theatre in Indonesia—he’s astonishingly prolific and transmits sheer joy about his work. We each speak for

204

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 205

Days Like These

a while and then take questions. Usually I’m OK at this, meaning I have some answers and stories at ready recall, but today I’m swimming in mud a bit. Presumably this audience is here because they think theatre does matter, rather than to be convinced, but I’m feeling responsible that I’m not coming up with good enough reasons to justify the art form we’re all engaged in. It does you good to have to justify your work at its most basic level. Before beginning anything, writers should ask themselves: Why is this a play and not a newspaper article? Why is this a poem and not graffiti? I sort of believe that. In fact the form and the idea are usually so entangled as to be inseparable. But it does do you good to have to say out loud what is otherwise an unchallenged silent certainty. Directing plays helps with this; actually describing aloud why a scene does or does not work makes your writing better. Question time. A woman sits in the front row to my right and she’s criticising the colour of my shirt. It’s black. So’s hers. I don’t get it. I start to wonder if I am hallucinating her, if I’ve conjured her up; it is hot here in the marquee under the sun and theatre lights and I didn’t sleep much last night. But she’s real enough, her words are stabbing the air and she seems to be cross with me. It’s sort of interesting to wonder why. I believe in chemical responses, but she’s a fair way away, too far I think to react to whatever I’m giving off. She doesn’t look like someone with a lot of unproduced plays in a shoe box tied with raffia, though it’s hard to tell. Playwrights used to be identifiable, now they come disguised. She wears pricey jewellery, her hair is just so. Accent hard to pick. How we take in at a sweep what we imagine someone’s life is, boxing people up, needing them to fit the internal address book of personality types. I have made her unhappy, that much is clear. I was talking about the pointlessness of invention when dealing with urgent matters.

205

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 206

Michael Gurr

I am questioning the need to make up a story about refugees when all you have to do is faithfully transcribe and cleverly edit. Sometimes the imagination of the writer seems self-indulgent. I say I’ve seen some imaginative plays about refugees and found them inauthentic, a side-bar to the truth and never equal in their horrormonologues to a simple statement of the facts. Now the reason for her anger is getting clear. She is demanding to know who the hell am I to decide what’s authentic? Who am I to decide what is true? They’re unanswerable questions, all I can say is that I’m not passing laws, only opinions. Then she starts in on my shirt. It’s very confusing—what does my shirt have to do with anything? Then she explains: she says that by criticising my shirt she is trying to making me feel uncomfortable—to feel what it is to be the victim of judgement like the authors of the ‘inauthentic’ plays I have criticised. She’s certainly giving me a headache. She tries to rally my co-panellists against me but they’re having none of it. I make a kind of joke, which rallies the audience to me, and on we go, talking about why theatre matters. Just as the session is about to close, I find my rails and talk about collaboration and theatre being an elected family and how the audience become members of it at a performance. The American man who had attended my workshop is there. He has bought copies of all the plays of mine on sale. I’m signing them and remembering the argument we’d had and how his is the most discriminated-against accent in the world. You hear it and assume the worst. Walking to the next session, where I’m going to interview John Safran about his TV brat assaults, I pick my way across a big lawn. Someone’s lecture has been booked out, and two hundred people are sitting outside in the sun listening to it over the PA. The words of the speech recede and instead my attention is wonderfully held

206

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 207

Days Like These

by this sea of people. These open faces: unaffected, still, listening. People gently adjust as I pick my way through, stepping over legs. The relaxed unselfconsciousness of their concentration is like a drug. It’s one of the most affecting things I’ve ever seen and I want to stay and watch them. John Safran is greeted like a pop star and our session passes quickly. I’ve never met him before, I mostly Dorothy Dix my questions to him and everyone has a nice time. A cheer goes up when I say that it’s the end of a writer’s festival and who would like to watch some TV? We run clips of Safran’s pranks and then it’s a speed drive to the Gold Coast airport. On the plane to a colder Melbourne I fall asleep ten minutes before landing and dream faces on the lawn.

207

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 208

Michael Gurr

June 2005 The phone rings, it’s Kerry Walker. Our friendship was locked in

before she played Vivien in Jerusalem but was cemented by it. She has jumped out of a cardboard box as a surprise interstate birthday present and nursed on a plane a big oval platter in the shape of a fish that Patrick White gave her and now gives to me. The frown on the fish closely resembles the frown of its original owner. We have poured more money into telephone companies than we care to recall: the price of interstate friendship. Tonight she wants to know how the radio went today. The guests on The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine on ABC radio in Melbourne are people who are mostly promoting or selling something but who are often happy to be led off the path. I’m co-hosting with Faine once a fortnight. Kerry wants to know how it went with David Flint, boss of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, ex-head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority and sometime fan-mail correspondent with Sydney radio performer Alan Jones. —So how was the Professor? —Well, he liked that the other guest was Cleo Laine. —Yes. —His shoes were very shiny. —Go on. —And he didn’t answer any of our questions. You confront him with what you think are damning facts and he just sort of purrs at you. It’s quite disconcerting. Flint’s book is delivered to my door by a young man from the National Civic Council who first identifies himself as belonging to that organisation and after further enquiries denies it. Why would you join something and then be cagey about it? The book is full of

208

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 209

Days Like These

familiar ideas—like that the Australian media is dominated by Leftwing elites. This is so demonstrably not true that you wonder whether the immediate past-boss of the ABA ever turned on a radio or a television, ever opened a newspaper. He also makes other complaints: namely about the declining standard of enunciation on the ABC. After the interview the book goes into a bin at Flinders Street Station. The Conversation Hour is an entertaining revolving door. Suzi Quatro is funnier than David Ettridge, the One Nation elder statesman, who says, oddly, that the thing that wrecked Pauline Hanson’s Party was the quality of its membership. I tell Suzi that I had posters of her on my bedroom wall and she raises her hand in a stop sign: ‘I really do not need to know how I helped another man through adolescence’. Gerry Adams is less forthcoming than Cleo Laine, he is consummately hidden, as I guess you would be after a few attempts on your life. Cleo Laine has an infinity of anecdotes at ready recall and so is more stately than Billy Bragg, whose luggage has been lost by Qantas. He’s hungrier for air-time than the poet Terry Jaensch who wants to say simply that he’s published a book. Billy Bragg drops his pants to show what Qantas-issue underwear looks like, which is fun but less arresting than Rowan Gillies, the head of Medicin sans Frontieres, who’s reporting back from Dafur. A prefall Steve Vizard is all puppy energy, while Mark Latham—who in the same breath condemns privacy invasion and then outs a few Canberra rooters himself—barks up and down the fence. Latham also plays a kind of peek-a-boo: he lobs political grenades then ducks away, protesting he’s just a family man. His good insights into the ALP are clouded by the gossip, while ‘crime wife’ Judith Moran, heavy with gold, has a chilling story she seemingly doesn’t want to tell. Mrs Moran’s book is strangely compelling but she sports fewer past lives than Helen Reddy, who helped oversee the building of the

209

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 210

Michael Gurr

pyramids. Meeting Oliver Sacks poses a real problem: Jon Faine and I don’t want to say anything—we just want him to talk. He ripples with unexpected connections—he can undo you emotionally with his love of the periodic table. And so the door revolves. The intimacy of radio is a truism but the sense of connection between presenter and audience is deep. Mention that you have an old collection of vinyl records but no turntable and three calls will rapidly come in with free offers. We invest in radio—and expect more of it than from TV, which is all remote polish and artifice. Which is why it’s consoling when a TV newsreader stumbles: for a second a human connection is made. The radio of childhood was Ormsby Wilkins and Claudia Wright on days spent home with gastro, the jingles still at close recall: 84321—that’s the number to ring Your house will look like new again With Mastercraft uphols-ter-ing. Radio has the closeness of the telephone—it is a kind of telephone—a thing I see as spreading arteries across the city, the back and forth of friendship’s blood-flow. On federal election nights the phone gets a solid work-out—Kerry calling to draw my attention hopefully towards Eden-Monaro, Australia’s legendary bellwether electorate. As the night drags on and the graphic of the House of Representatives turns bluer, the calls move from hope to jokes. In the headachy hour of the victory and concession speeches, another roomful of Liberals chanting for their leader, we console each other with minor obscenities. Kerry and I would probably speak less if we lived in the same city—though I would get to see more of the work of an actress whose performances are underpinned by a conviction that spreads off the stage and across politics and justice.

210

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 211

Days Like These

Januar y 2002 It’s an iffy proposition on the face of it: getting a practitioner to be

a commentator. Asked to audition for ABC Radio’s new national arts program, the reservations float up. I am not a critic, I don’t want to sit around with a bunch of smarty-pants competing to see who can slag off the work under question most cleverly. But it’s OK, they tell me, it won’t be that kind of show. The audition for what becomes Nightclub is to present an episode of Arts Today—live. OK. I do a long interview with Sidney Pollack at 8.30 in the morning, who happens to have directed one of my favourite films, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? We seem to get along fine and halfway through the live-to-air audition I’m reading on the little screen that two stories have been dumped, they want me to keep going with this one. It’s fun and the nervous energy is good. There’s the slick little pleasure of counting down the seconds on the clock and getting out right on time before the news. What I don’t expect is how physical radio is. I come out of my live-to-air audition with sore knees. That’s where unused adrenaline goes. Joints creak and ache. Michael Cathcart, who has been presenting this show, tells me he always has to go for a big walk afterwards. He needs to walk off the ache. Later, doing fortnightly co-hosting on Jon Faine’s program on metropolitan radio, Faine tells me how important it is to stay physically fit for his job. On the face of it, this seems silly.You are sitting in a chair talking into a directional microphone. But it is physically demanding to have the inside-switch always on. I get the job, sort of. The ABC are going to split it between Sydney and Melbourne. Australia’s rudest cartoonist Bill Leak is going to host the Sydney end of things. I do it for eight months until life and work insist I end the contract. If you do this job properly

211

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 212

Michael Gurr

you see two films, read two novels and maybe see a play every week. It’s not a part-time job. It sounds like fun, but it’s not compatible with the writing I have to do this year. Producers do extensive research for you, but it’s a crap feeling looking into some author’s face and bluffing about their book. The show is axed at the end of its first year, of course: it’s an ABC arts program. But in the meantime there are some good meetings. Stretching the definition of what we’re meant to be doing, we get Tony Benn on. The grand old man of the British Left has been touring halls delivering a lecture and taking questions. He says he loves it and the audience loves it because he doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t want to get elected. He does his lecture live from London and then we do talkback. The easy unselfconciousness with which people from Perth, Darwin, Tasmania and Gippsland call in to ask him questions makes it a happy night. There are people actually listening. The oddest thing about these months is the delete button. Someone will ask who was on the show last night and for a long moment you are actually unable to answer. You have pressed Delete. Then you realise it was Derek Jacobi, Deborah Conway and someone who just won the Booker Prize. As open as you try to make these conversations, you are essentially processing people. I hope we do something more than press releases, but it is odd how few people you recall. Inviting film-makers and painters and writers to move slightly beyond what they are here to promote is taking a toll on what I’m trying to do at home. Work is happening in halting steps. When a group of people are invited in to debate the good and bad of books and films and plays, you hear the program edge towards competition: who can be the cleverest in putting down the work under discussion? Enthusiasm makes you vulnerable. Love something and you leave yourself wide open. Pick it to bits and you are

212

DLT 05 (174-213) 6/26/06 3:06 PM Page 213

Days Like These

safe, you are sophisticated. Cynicism is grown-up. The first instinct of many commentators is to inject themselves into the picture, to elbow the work aside and come up with the memorable put-down. Shirley Hazzard said a great thing when she gave the Boyer Lectures years ago. She said that Australians were very good at seeing through things, but not so good at seeing into them. I don’t think it’s exclusive to Australians, and I did want to make her explore this further when I spoke to her on Nightclub, that frail persuasive voice coming down the line from New York. But the occasion was a celebration of a new book by Les Murray. We had Les, Clive James, Dame Leonie Kramer and Shirley Hazzard, all on phones. A conversation negotiated with no visual clues. They got on fine of course, in furious agreement about the myth of ‘political correctness’ and cheering Les along as he read some poems live. The most technically complicated show we did was also the easiest: they were four friends having fun. And I knew that Clive James took a breath exactly every ninety seconds so I knew when to interrupt. Sometimes I was warned about a difficult guest who was coming on the program. Usually it would be a woman, I was rarely warned about a difficult man. She always turned out to be simply serious about her work. One of the really happy things about presenting the program was the movingly secret way in which you hear appreciation. Someone will sidle up and nearly whisper: Thanks for that interview with John Banville. It is as if only the two of us had been present. Ratings figures would have you believe this was literally true, but the intimacy of the tone signalled something else: they had probably been listening alone. And where else would you get Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, Sister Veronica Brady and Lucky Oceans together, sending cheerios from mutual friends?

213

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 214

Michael Gurr

214

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 215

A Pair of Claws, first produced by Melbourne Theatre Company, is going to be performed by an amateur group

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 216

Michael Gurr

May 1983 A Pair of Claws, first produced by Melbourne Theatre Company,

is going to be performed by an amateur group. The play requires a plum tree in full fruit, which two characters harvest in Act Two. At MTC this was solved with ping-pong balls painted purple, a visually satisfying but aurally dangerous option: a dropped plum tended to rather spoil the naturalism. The amateurs ring me in despair. Their designer has been sewing and stuffing calico plums but no-one is happy with the results. They fall gratefully upon the ping-pong solution. Heading across town to their opening night, I’m unprepared for my meeting with the director. As soon as I meet her I realise she is Empress of an Empire—formidably ‘theatrical’, scarfed about and heavy with Eltham jewellery, she is fiercely convinced that her standards crap from a very great height on those over-rated professionals. She sweeps me to my seat in the front row, removes the hand-printed RESERVED sign and eyes me with a sort of amused superiority. I am clearly about to find out what’s what. The play begins at night in a backyard as a retired diplomat reflects on his life. So far so sentimental piano music. The plum tree is a phenomenon: it’s bearing hundreds of plums when, really, about twelve would have done. The production is fine, distinguished by one strange and strangely effective decision. Each of the characters has one Big Speech. In any thoughtful production these grow out of the scene they are in, but not here. A Big Speech is your Big Moment, so as each one arrives, the actor walks to the front of the stage and addresses the audience. They’re like arias and, oddly, it works. In the foyer the Director-Empress assembles the cast in a semicircle around a cask of Fruity Lexia. I am introduced to them in

216

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 217

Days Like These

turn. It’s all I can do to stop myself going the full Prince Philip and asking each one: —And what do you do? Then she stands me in front of the semicircle, arms herself with a Fruity Lexia and begins: —So. How does that compare to the M (pause) T (pause) C? Rarely have I felt so cornered. And yet, heading home, those arias. The shape of the play so clearly shown. Who else but the Empress would have dared?

217

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 218

Michael Gurr

June 2000 On the wall of the room where we are rehearsing Crazy Brave, an odd collection of photographs is accumulating. Ned Kelly, Germaine Greer, Charles Sturt, William Lane, Pauline Hanson, Vincent Lingiarri. We’re finding examples of people who embody something of the title’s personality. People who, either by a lifetime’s example or a single bold gesture, changed the way Australians thought or lived. Mad bastards, idealists, eccentrics, zealots. The quality of crazy brave has something of the fundamentalist, something of the visionary. No cause can come to life without at least one of them—many causes have failed because of them. What else is a force-fed suffragette, a suicide bomber? On the far reaches of both the left and right in Australia you can sometimes detect a regret that their causes have never had the blood baptism. Fighting fascism in Europe doesn’t seem to count, that cause seems to have been drained of its politics and replaced with the emotion that attaches to the slouch hat. This idea runs through the play. In the rehearsal room we talk about the ‘White Armies’ charging around the countryside, how they were pursuing ghosts. Of the fantasies of suburban Trotskyists. Bruce Myles, directing again, but also performing this time, tells his story about Gough Whitlam’s dismissal as Prime Minister. On the weekend after, with emotion high and talk of ‘national action’ in the air, Bruce took a walk through his local park and there were the families at their picnics and barbeques, sitting on the grass under the Australian sun. The mixture of emotions he felt—relief that blood would not after all get spilt and regret at the great Aussie indifference—was uncannily close to the character he was playing. Harold is an old Left-wing lawyer, reduced to a bed-sit, holding no illusions about the likelihood of radical change.

218

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 219

Days Like These

Harold: Every generation discovers this for themselves. That in this country you are fighting an invisible force. And that’s why we lose them, in their thousands we lose them, good kids with righteous hearts, each new battalion coming up, over the top of the trench to fight: what? … You are wrestling with a column of smoke … And there’s something else we have to say to our troops, as they defect in their thousands. We have to say we can’t blame them. We wished for a Bastille, we wished for Generals, we wished for the thing that would make it all clear. But they don’t go down to gunfire, our battalions. They don’t go down to tanks. They go down instead to the chloroform of sunlight … The Australian Revolution? Dead of happiness. The crazy brave character in the play is Alice, being played by Alison Whyte. Alice polarises. Some see in this law school drop-out and marriage defector turned would-be revolutionary the spirit of rebellion. Others see the embryonic suicide-bomber. She and her anti-globalisation group move from pranks to what might be murder. It’s a revelation seeing productions of this play both pre- and postSeptember 11, 2001. The temperature in the theatre is distinctly different. Before, her mission may have seemed exotic to some; afterwards I can feel the audience watching her with a more forensic eye. This apparently familiar woman might be planning the death of someone you know. Time changes the play. Eighteen months after its first production, I see it at Sydney’s Old Fitzroy Theatre and no-one is asking questions about the politics any more. Time should also change the stage directions: initially, in 2000, I want the play to begin with Arabic music. It’s what I’d heard as Alice’s internal soundtrack. Unable to justify this in rehearsal, we

219

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 220

Michael Gurr

threw the idea out and Andrew Pendlebury composed instead something less literal. Now, when Arabic music is only ever heard as the TV soundtrack to reports on terrorism, it would be embarrassingly heavy-handed to stick to the script. One complaint during the first production was that no-one could be as angry as Alice in Melbourne in the year 2000. For me, being confounded by this woman was the point. The way ideas distort as they move through a personality: am I responding to the woman or her politics? Whether you wept or cheered at her ultimate imprisonment mattered less to me than that she had forced you to hear the shouting-match that went on inside her head.

September 2000 Inside the World Trade Centre—that’s the World Trade Centre, Melbourne—on September 11—that’s September 11, 2000— Premier Steve Bracks is delivering a speech to the delegates of a conference on trade and globalisation. The brief I’ve been given is for the speech to sing the benefits of globalisation for culture. It argues that the more familiar we become with each other through music and film and food, the better humanity’s chances at some kind of harmonious future. It’s necessarily high on rhetoric and low on statistics, though it does the obligatory spruik for the number of festivals the state hosts, how many hundreds of thousands of people go to this or that event featuring Iranian films or exotic food. It’s about the nice side of globalisation, which is the growth of cultural familiarity. Its key idea is curiosity: that when people are curious about each other, bad things are less likely to happen, that it is strangeness that breeds fear, that cultural exchange is a vital plank in the congress between nations … and so on and so on to a nice conclusion. The curiosity part is good. 220

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 221

Days Like These

It’s not the kind of speech that tends to get reported, and this one is guaranteed no coverage at all. Because outside the World Trade Centre, steel fences are up and something approaching a riot is going on. The organisers call themselves S11, an acronym that has since unsurprisingly made a polite exit from use. The anti-globalisation movement tries to ‘shut down’ the conference, police horses and baton-charges follow. The Premier calls the protestors’ behaviour ‘fascist’. The protestors call the Premier ‘a fascist’. I miss all this—having written the speech, I’ve left town. Hardie and I are in Far North Queensland where news of Melbourne’s riot reaches us in static-blurred grabs on my portable transistor. It’s too hot here to think anyway, so the whole event passes us by. When we get home, our heads empty, our luggage full of sand, friends tell us how intense the whole thing was. One friend gets very dry: —Lucky you were in FNQ. Means you didn’t have to choose whether to go inside and hear the nice speech or stay outside and join the riot. What—I can’t do both? I’ve always thought it was possible to believe two things at once.

221

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 222

Michael Gurr

June 1994 Underwear, Perfume and Crash Helmet is the fourth play of mine

that Bruce Myles has directed. We have a system. Casting it as early as possible, we get the actors together for a week of examining the script away from the pressure of rehearsal. Sometimes this system works fine, sometimes the play isn’t really ready. Crash Helmet isn’t ready yet, but I’ve written myself to a standstill and only hearing it aloud will help. Describing what it is to put on a play is like describing what it is to paint a wall. First, you open your can of paint. Then you choose a brush. Then you look at your wall, then you begin to paint it. It’s work. You need a great director, a sensibly imaginative set designer, a lighting designer with magic up his sleeve, a composer with enough oddness in them to spark things up without underlining them and wonderful actors. Easy. For a week we sit in a room and talk about the play, sometimes moving a few scenes around on their feet. A peculiar kind of exhaustion comes from this process. Nerves give way to a clogged head and an odd kind of paralysed vertigo. In the midst of these symptoms useful things happen: scenes clarify themselves or show themselves to be unnecessary. For me, it’s all structural. Characters never change and are never cut. New characters are never written. The world that had arrived as a lightning flash remains in place; this process is about finding which parts of the jigsaw are missing or superfluous. The characters in this play move through a world where the Conservatives aren’t in power. A visiting Canadian philosopher seduces them with a sort of Ayn Rand fascism; a homeless girl waits in the park for aliens to rescue her. It had to be written with an icy hand and some people said they felt emotionally distanced from it.

222

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 223

Days Like These

They were meant to, but it’s always useless saying this. I’ve never understood the cast of mind that wants ‘sympathetic’ characters, and fatigue overtakes me before I can begin to recite the list of great plays that contain no-one but bastards and fools. Bruce and I had already had this argument with film producers and funding bodies when we tried to raise the money to make my screenplay Ninety Miles an Hour Down a Dead End Street. Everyone would agree that it was an exciting story, even a story that hadn’t been seen on Australian screens before, but then the dreaded qualifier would come. The characters weren’t exactly sympathetic, were they? Whose journey was it? This dull-mindedness is more common to film, where great sums of money are riding on the judgements of people who mistrust their own instincts profoundly. Forever trying to second-guess the taste of audiences, they rely on genre to a depressing degree. Is it a thriller? A buddy movie? A romantic comedy? You don’t hear these questions in the theatre so often, but film-enablers talk of little else. Recognising the bleakness of it, they even tell jokes about their lack of imagination. The legendary three word Hollywood pitch,‘De Vito. Schwarzenegger. Twins’, is told as a cynical gag by people who wish they’d thought of it. Rehearsing a play is a high-wire act for everyone. Confidence comes and goes. Unforeseen problems rise up like concrete lurching under your feet in an earth tremor. Sometimes the strangeness of what we’re doing will assert itself and the whole notion of makebelieve as a means to the truth will make our work seem very silly indeed. Every day you try to bring your judgement to a fine point: Am I agreeing to something only to keep the atmosphere of the room happy? Is now the time to stick my oar in? Someone said that 70 per cent of being a playwright was knowing when to keep your mouth shut. I mostly end up seeing on stage the play as I first saw it in my head, so I know that patience matters. It’s become a joke

223

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 224

Michael Gurr

now how often I say ‘I don’t know’ in the rehearsal room when begged by an actor for the meaning of a line or the purpose of a piece of behaviour. But it’s true, often I don’t know, and even when I do it’s rarely helpful to show someone the finishing line when they’re still choosing their running shoes. But then I’m sitting opposite a journalist. I know my job. I am here to sell tickets. With luck, the journalist will have read the press release. With even more luck their first question won’t be ‘So what’s the play about?’ I use the politician’s formula: have five things to say and make sure you say them regardless of the questions. Avoid theory. Include two anecdotes. Imply controversy. Say you can’t keep away from rehearsals because everyone’s having too much fun. One day, one day I will say: —It’s very long, fairly bleak, not many laughs and the theatre isn’t airconditioned.

July 1994 Opening night, Underwear, Perfume and Crash Helmet. The actors have needed us until now. But tonight the dressing-rooms have been made into little worlds. A bowl of fruit, a yoga pillow, a humidifier. These things personalise the territory. A subtle shift has happened and the power has moved in the actors’ direction. You distribute the gifts, embrace each actor in turn, then go outside to give a performance of your own: Playwright In The Foyer On His Opening Night. The writer’s costume is simple: you just take all your nerveendings and wear them on the outside. It’s true that a crowd tells you more than any individual. There’s something final about the collective response. It’s easy to win an argument with an individual, harder to ignore the atmosphere in a

224

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 225

Days Like These

full theatre. At last it is glaringly clear where the play drags, where a scene might be missing. Suddenly what felt enigmatic looks obscure. And best of all—unexpected laughter. It’s a good night, the actors crackle, but this play was never going to provoke warmth. It’s about moral vacuums, the civilised face of fascism, a homeless girl is doused with kerosene … No, there won’t be too much joyful foyer whooping after this one. A couple of plays later, I have a spat with the theatre management. One of the things they say, to put me in my place, is that they nursed that unpopular play of mine Underwear, Perfume and Crash Helmet through its difficult season. Perception is a funny thing. It did better box office than other plays of mine, but is less fondly remembered. It’s an ‘unpleasant’ play, so therefore it must have done less well.

225

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 226

Michael Gurr

July 1998 It’s 6 p.m. in a ward of the Alfred Hospital and I’m as sick as I’ve

ever been. Tonight is the last performance of Shark Fin Soup by Melbourne Theatre Company and I want to see it. I’ve been told my temperature is still too high and I won’t be allowed to leave the hospital. Here’s the trick. Walk your drip and pain-relief stand to the window. Press your wrists to the cold glass for ten minutes. The blood flow is strong there and you can cool your body temperature quite quickly. Also, suck ice. When the ice has melted, wait two minutes, then call the nurse for a temperature check. You will come in as exactly normal, the drip will be removed from your arm and you will see the last performance of your play. Shark Fin Soup was conceived as a folk song—at least that’s what I told Bruce Myles when he cornered me in rehearsal. A collection of small stories coming together in a chorus to show how certain personalities thrive at different times in history. The loose, casual, globalised world favours those who worry least, who are easy and adaptable in the way they work and live. Others, needing the certainty of faith and a job for life, find themselves shipwrecked. The way Australia seems to be moving in the late 1990s is liberating for some, frightening for others. The old certainties of religion, economy and institutions have gone. The times suit the improvisers. Andrew Pendlebury has composed a cunning piece of music to open the play that announces its ideas for those who are listening closely: a jamboree warm-up like the orchestral tuning at the start of Sergeant Pepper’s. Different instruments trying to find a common note over the buzz of audience chatter. This play rivals The Simple Truth in its ability to split an audience, including friends. At its plainest, Shark Fin Soup is all story, all episodes. For those who hear the song above the noise, it stays their 226

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 227

Days Like These

favourite play, unpublished and never performed since. Two phone calls, from Aubrey Mellor and Robert Essex, tell me what I need to hear, that this play which begins in order and ends in disarray, with its people grasping after meaning and left with only the secular communion of a sandwich, has got through to them. The critics think it’s Gurr-lite. You always have a special attachment to the kid left out of the team. I’m going to put it on again one day, though I’ll miss Simon Wilton’s dance-offering to the spirit of the improvised life and Kevin Harrington and Alison Whyte as the busted honest lovers. John McTernan’s failed macadamia investor, Catherine Wilkin’s clairvoyant, Peta Brady’s surly couch-dweller and Tammy McCarthy’s broken-hearted fashion designer—they were a group who met by chance and yearning. More of Paul English in a minute. It’s a story about a clairvoyant who has a heart transplant and loses her powers, about two lovers who try to start a restaurant and— nup. The detail means nothing unless inhabited by actors. Their fate matters terribly, especially now that I’m in hospital-prison and can’t get to them. My father’s thirty years as a doctor at the Alfred Hospital mean I’m familiar with the geography of the place. As a kid I would spend a day now and then in his office, playing on his secretary’s typewriter, being ushered past closed screens, being allowed to see my first dead face. Sickness is ordinary, just the daily duty. My father’s medical books, stored in the attic of the garage, with their vivid colour plates of tumours and viscera are my first illicit reading. There was a particular benign cancer I kept returning to called The Turban. It grows on top of your head in giant coils and is quite harmless. The man who wore it looked quite calmly at the camera. The chapter on bed sores was harder to take. The books gave off the smell of dry mould, just as the box of human bones from his earliest anatomy classes made your throat catch. I stole that box of bones and frightened people later with a 227

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 228

Michael Gurr

femur on the dinner table until I passed the box along to a painter who said he needed it for something. A fragment of pelvis waved around before dinner was just Hammer Horror funny; later I found out about the monks who ate with a human skull on the table to remind them of mortality. Later, too, Yorrick’s black eye shafts and the cackle of his jaw. Death is a witty aphrodisiac until you’re twenty-three. After that, you see it coming. Hospital is all luck. Sometimes you get the doctor whose humanity has survived the six years of uni, the nurse who remembers what pain feels like. The most casual smiles and the daggiest of jokes take days off recovery time. If unlucky, you get reluctant attention shovelled in like dry food at the dog pound or the oddly young doctor who thinks he’s aping his elders’ wisdom but in fact conveys indifference. When the Coalition state government cuts funding to hospitals, the cleaners are the first to go. Standing in the ward toilet, tangled in IV tubes, I’m unable to find a surface untouched by shit or vomit and can’t reach the Help button on the wall. I want Coalition MPs to get a whiff of this toilet. That sneering Liberal disregard. If you were a proper person you’d be in the private wing. If you just pulled yourself up by the bootstraps you wouldn’t be waiting in casualty with your asthmatic kid gasping in his crappy tracksuit. You’d have the words and confidence to move yourself to the front of the queue. I experienced privilege in hospital because staff would recognise my father’s name and treat me more carefully. I also knew that if you used a few technical terms they’d listen. Hating it, I did it. Rolling on a bed of Pethidine hallucination, I won’t forget the hand of the Indian cleaner on my forehead in the middle of one vast lonely afternoon. She broke a rule and touched me, asked after me as a son. Hardie arrives at the Alfred Hospital after I complete my temperature trick and drives us to the Victorian Arts Centre to see the

228

DLT 06 (214-229) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 229

Days Like These

last performance of Shark Fin Soup. It’s his favourite play, he says, if he’s allowed to have one. On the days when he has to read each new manuscript, I go for a walk. I don’t want detail, just a verdict, a Yes or No, it’s a rotten hour for us both. I hope I give something back for all I get, and now I think of it, a mixture of high expectations and forgiveness is what gets us through. Down through the burrows of the Arts Centre to see the cast before the show. The place makes me think of a Swedish prison— it’s security-camera plush. Into our seats and I’m watching the play through a drug-haze that makes the world seem as though it’s behind an aquarium. I’m laughing one scene behind. Then the trip back to the ward, to be hooked up to machines by a nurse who pretends to scold me for being back late. I’m very happy: in two days I will be well and home. Tonight the snores and farts of fellow patients are not spurs of irritation, just the soundtrack of life that goes on. It’s a great night’s sleep. Most plays have one performance that surfaces to hold the soul of the production. Sometimes it’s the central role, other times not. It’s hard to explain how this happens. It could be that the character is most like the audience, the character who finds things out at the same time that we do. It could be that the performance embodies the unanswerable question that sits at the heart of every play. In Shark Fin Soup, Paul English wrestled up to us the man who craves a world that is open and easy, but whose personality, dogged by an eldest son’s strictness with himself and others, cruels his attempts to live happily. He did it with a mixture of zeal and vulnerability that made me forget I’d had anything to do with creating the character. I’ve never asked Paul if he knew that his performance occupied this honorary position of play-carrier.

229

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 230

Michael Gurr

230

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 231

Nostalgia is a dangerous impulse

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 232

Michael Gurr

March 2002 Nostalgia is a dangerous impulse. It imagines a world that probably never existed and in yearning for that world holds real malice for the present one. I think murder is a mostly nostalgic act: an attempt to recreate the world as it was before the person you are killing ruined it. Politically, nostalgia is powerful. In Underwear, Perfume and Crash Helmet, I had the right-wing philosopher give some political advice:

—Don’t talk to people about what they want. Talk to them about what they’ve lost. But as confidence evaporates writing The Simple Truth, it’s impossible not to think longingly of another time, when I hammered out plays without a passing doubt. That I wrote on a third-hand typewriter on the back of earlier drafts in a twenty-three dollar a week flat only makes the view look rosier. Not having written much, I hadn’t experienced much rejection—surely the worlds I was conjuring up would soon come to life on stages everywhere. Today, I would give a lot for some of that confidence; on days like these a dose of unshakeable belief would come in very handy indeed. Like all plays, The Simple Truth has arrived as a single image and a mystery needing to be solved. I think you get one lightning strike with a play and must choose whether to pursue it or not. Whenever I’ve tried to modify the first impulse of a play, it has turned into carpentry, an exercise in detached invention. Fiddled with, plays can stop breathing. Once, a wealthy, powerful man tried to convince me that the best way for theatres to proceed was for the board of a company to choose the subjects of the plays and then match up the subjects with suitable writers. This, he said, would inject theatre with something called ‘relevance’. He hinted it would be well-paid

232

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 233

Days Like These

work. I said he was describing drive-through art, corporate stillbirths. And I couldn’t see too many writers signing on to become one of Santa’s elves. So what’s brought this on, this grinding to a halt? Maybe I’ve forgotten my own advice, which I think I stole from some Oriental aphorism. The frog hated the millipede, so he asked the millipede how, exactly, with all those legs, he managed to walk.‘Well,’ said the millipede, ‘it’s simple. I take my right front foot and move it ahead, and then I … no, hang on … I …’ And of course the millipede never walked again. Writing a play is trying to achieve a balance between the unconscious impulse and the internal editor. Because The Simple Truth has less apparent ‘story’ and proceeds from one impulse to the next, it’s prone to moments when its legs stop moving. I envy and don’t envy those writers who begin with a thesis to be proved, who plot the course of their plays on a mental whiteboard. I envy them the imaginary committee they assemble in their minds, the sober thinkers who will help them over each barrier. I envy them their calm. But I can’t see writing becoming another kind of meeting. The Simple Truth is a play about a woman who arrives at a police station confessing to a crime she may not have committed. It’s about two frozen people unfreezing. I know that these two will barely communicate in any familiar sense, that most of what they mean will be left unsaid. It’s like writing the whitecaps and leaving the ocean unspoken. The play is vivid but very hard to reach, hard to access at 9 a.m. I can sense the whole play sitting there, lurking behind something, but I’m too frozen to do anything about it. When confidence evaporates, superstition sets in. The future of the play depends on which street I walk down on the way to the market: a different route will help. The exactly right moment must to be chosen to walk the dogs.

233

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 234

Michael Gurr

Why not talk to someone? Why not nut it out with an old theatre hand? My address book swarms with the names of intelligent people with time on their hands. And domestically, I realise I am continuing conversations with Hardie that I have not in fact begun: I only think I’ve said most of this out loud. The answer is not just that the play is difficult and I’m badly shaken by it; it is also that it’s a dark-side play; there is something about the grief in it that feels bottomless. Sarah and Hirst, the woman and the cop, talk above the things they cannot name and this is leaking into life. I can’t feel the usual sustaining collegiate spirit that animates writing for the theatre—the anticipation of reaching the rehearsal room. When Bruce Myles asks me how the play is coming along, I’m blank. When Aubrey Mellor, Artistic Director at Playbox, rings to gently enquire about my missed deadline, I flannel. When, finally, the millipede gets moving again and I’ve written as much as I can, I hand it over with great reluctance. Will anyone connect with this, or has it gone so internal as to be unreachable? Bruce and I have a shared rueful joke. It involves me writing a play with French doors in the set, a cast of up-beat contemporary characters, a few vaguely risque ideas bounced around and all of us rich forever. It’s a measure of where The Simple Truth has taken me that I don’t even find our comfort-joke comforting. There’s a similar routine with Jill Smith, Playbox’s General Manager. Before the opening of each of my plays, I update her on the progress of my imaginary smash-hit. It’s called Buck’s Night and this game really annoys her. —Act One ends when the stripper arrives, Jill. And we’ll use a real stripper. —Just write the thing, will you? This sort of sport is a long way away as I sit opposite Jill and Aubrey in the Malthouse foyer. They seem a little ashen. At first I’m 234

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 235

Days Like These

hopeful: they are ashen because the play has affected them. But no. It’s because they’re wondering where the author of Crazy Brave has gone. Where’s the politics? And, incidentally, this play is only fortyfive pages long. It’s only a first draft, yes? There’s nothing more pointless than trying to convince people of something they don’t see. It doesn’t work and at forty-two it feels, well, undignified. They either want it or they don’t. I know this play won’t live until it’s inhabited by actors and I’m convinced it will live, but because it is written in air it’s very hard to talk about. I walk away reduced to feelings I associate with adolescence: a sort of petulant defeatism. Does nothing ever get better? Where is the adult world I anticipated so keenly? A place where work was confidently done, insecurity forgotten? What romantic twaddle. I’m at an age when a number of actor and writer friends are moving slowly off the radar. For some it is a decisive cut—for others a more painful drift. There is never enough work, the work that happens is sporadic, very few get the chance to build on what they’ve just done—these things, plus accumulated wounds and eternal insecurity, are thinning our ranks. I admire the people who make the break; there is real courage in it. They are prepared to endure the pain of leaving in order to live better. It’s what Zoe Caldwell said, ‘You must do the thing that makes you well’. But me? I can’t unravel my determination from my fear that this is all I know. I can’t finish the sentence, ‘I am giving this game away and instead I’m going to …’ My relationship with this company is mostly unofficial: hours of churning phone calls about life and art, season choices, internal politics, board eruptions, energy that a smarter guy would have charged for by the hour. The Simple Truth goes ahead as Aubrey and Jill’s courage kicks in. Aubrey is essentially an instinctive man—he knows the smell of a play and whether its heart is beating. And Jill Smith is a faith-gambler—if something has won her heart nothing will persuade her to change her bet. They decide that The Simple 235

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 236

Michael Gurr

Truth is worth the gamble. Rehearsing it, there are moments when the play seems to vanish out of the room; because it works off mood and impulse, it is sometimes very hard to grasp. Usually when rehearsing a play, an actor’s straightforward question, ‘Why do I say this line now?’ has a sensible answer waiting for it. In this case the answer is often the supremely unhelpful, ‘Because that’s what the character thinks of next’. Rehearsals are a wrestle. Gradually, note by note, the play is assembled and by the time it is put in front of an audience, Josephine Byrnes and Kim Gyngell as Sarah and Hirst are casting a kind of spell. Bruce Myles, who usually takes on plays like murder investigations, relishing in clues, is conducting music. Judith Cobb has designed a cool world that manages to be very specific and yet a kind of ‘nowhere’. But the two characters are somehow lonely until Bruce Myles decides that Andrew Pendlebury will join them on stage and play guitar live. He’s the third character and completes the play—at once a conversation starts between the actors and the improvised music. Andrew is the most selfless and astute of theatre composers—as he plays underneath and through the language it becomes impossible to believe he wasn’t there with me when I wrote it. The actors are holding quite extraordinary pauses, stopping time. This is the closest we’ve come to bypassing conventional narrative and going straight for the nerve-endings. The show hovers on the edge of abstraction. Ask me about playwriting now and I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world. What fear? What petulant defeatism? Want to know how a millipede walks? Watch this show. Some friends are a bit bewildered by it—they want me more literal and riffing off the day-to-day. But there are some unexpected emotional reactions that tell me we’re getting through. Visiting rehearsals for the Sydney production, I discover a new cast and director experiencing the same moments of disorientation but I’m able to reassure them it comes good in the end. 236

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 237

Days Like These

April 2002 Tonight, it’s the Q & A with the audience who have just seen the play in Melbourne. The woman who asks the first question nails me with her look. —This is a play about pain. What happened to you? I do charm and squid-ink and we move on. But the people who are here tonight to ask questions are the canniest I’ve seen at one of these occasions, when often the air is thick with the literal or the nonplussed. They talk provokingly about the music and the design; someone thanks the cast for ‘not serving everything up with tomato sauce’. It’s challenging, by no means a love-in, but unusually it proceeds with calm. For once there is no assault question, the one that challenges your right to oxygen. Afterwards, something uncoils in me. For an hour or two we sit outside, our little group, not talking much. The cast and director, the composer, designer, stage manager. Only the lighting man is missing, he’s gone home to Brisbane. For this short time, something very much like contentment settles around me. The light of the evening, the expressions on faces, an easiness I’ve dreamt of forever. As soon as it does, the melancholy of its passing arrives. Theatre is always doing this: it shows you a home and then takes it away.

July 2004 Writing Julia 3, I get shackled by rational thought. Instead of letting the play arrive, I find I’m inventing it. It’s a long-held ambition never to write, but to allow. Never invent, only reveal. The moment I hear writing happening, I stop. Too much consciousness has kicked in with Julia 3 and a month-long paralysis follows. I turn back to cookery books, walk the dogs more often, spend more hours on the 237

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 238

Michael Gurr

telephone. It’s exhausting to fight the same battle with each play— to convince yourself, again, that it matters that the story comes out. Nothing terrible happens in the world when a writer stops writing. But finally there is no option, the image won’t leave the head until it is all written out. Julia is a wealthy widow, a philanthropist with three beneficiaries who are also her lovers. The play offers her great power and watches what she does with it. Her mind proceeds by an odd sort of internal logic, so I have to keep the rational out of it as much as I can. She has no received politics, but moves ahead by the accumulation of highly selective evidence. Silencing the rational brain is good for writing, bad for life. If you forget to put the filters of civility back on after you turn the computer off, you can do a fair bit of accidental damage in your surroundings. Even on best behaviour, you trail bits of razor wire. Just when I begin to feel the life of the play returning, I’m blindsided by an old enemy. Depression is different from the arm wrestle of writing. Arm wrestling makes you feel alive. Depression makes you feel dead. It’s not a great name for the phenomenon. Depression sounds like a gentle dip in the land. And ‘the black dog’ isn’t much better: too heroic. The thing itself has no colour or texture, it is pain without definition, a blunt soundless weight that takes your sense of humour and curdles it into a kind of fake all-condemning insight. How can something so nothing be so fierce? The marrow turns tepid, the skin spongy, the eyes dry, the feet stepping ahead in a flat counting-to-ten kind of way. The achievement of the day is to buy the newspaper from the milk bar, the greatest engagement with the world the way you hand over a dollar twenty to pay for it. You begin to identify with inert objects. A fence post, a wardrobe, a cut stump in the park. You see these things and see yourself in them: a dead thing with a faint memory of f lowing sap.

238

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 239

Days Like These

I have no idea what it is like to come home from work each day and be met by someone who answers the ‘how was your day?’ question with a blank stare. The urgency of Hardie’s work must sustain him—actual lives saved from actual collapse as he trains youth workers to deal with kids in crisis. Am I making this up or does the reality of the street versus the invented nightmare at the desk give him a little perspective? The one thing I manage in the dead month is to put a meal together each night—it’s achievable, worthwhile, continuous. He has a naturally longer view than me— I’m very short term in the dead time. Has patience ever got up as one of the virtues? The eye of depression sees the world with a sort of rancid humour and everything is over before it has begun. Physical activity can help because it leads to real tiredness rather than inertia, but the hardest trick is to move the focus outwards. Each time it leaves, I realise that something has caught my attention, something outside the grey self. A song, someone else’s problem, a new way with good cheap pork fillet suggested in Footscray Market. The infuriating part of the affliction is its unpredictability: there seem to be no reliable triggers. Sitting in a taxi in Sydney once, on the way to see a play that was perfectly realised and doing well, it was as if a poison gas had been released into the car. Seemingly from nowhere, this unreasonable heavy sadness that couldn’t be shaken off. Lost time: two months of near-immobility somewhere in the early 1980s, a week or two here and there since. Each episode erases the most important memory of all: that it passes. This time the sadness leaves in a moment of hallucination. At 3 a.m. I wake up needing for no reason to open the front door of our house. It is a very still night. In the open doorway, at once a gust of wind and a word in my ear in a language I can’t decipher. I must be half asleep, but the moment is terrifying. I return to bed,

239

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 240

Michael Gurr

worried about delusion and madness. In the morning, energy has returned. Though I haven’t connected this period of bleakness with Julia 3, the hallucination finds its way into the play. I’m reminded of the story of the actor who put down the telephone after hearing of the death of his brother. He happened to catch his reflection in a mirror and even out of his pain could not suppress the professionally handy thought:‘So that’s what grief looks like’. He filed it away and went on grieving. Use anything. So Julia says: And sometimes the news doesn’t arrive in the paper, sometimes you don’t see it on screen. Sometimes the news comes like a sudden wind when you open the door for no reason. A word you half-hear. I want to tell Kate Fitzpatrick, who plays Julia, the genesis of this speech, but the moment passes and then it doesn’t matter; it has gone on to mean something else. Her actor-truth is more important than the speech’s origins. With Peter Curtin, Todd MacDonald and Greg Stone, Kate is creating something sensuous and chilling. Bruce and the cast have found colours in this fairly brutal story that achieve something I have wanted for a long time: a combination of seduction and alarm. For the very first time I avoid reading reviews— something I’ve been promising myself to do for years. They can wait. I want to listen to audiences instead and by the time I get to the reviews they are a curiosity, drained of anxiety. Theatre has made me happy. What arm wrestle? What bleakness? What yearning for another life? These things wash away in one of my favourite theatre experiences: closing night. Drinking in each detail in the dark, committing it to memory. Everything more vivid and tender now that it’s about to go forever. It is my so-far vain hope that each

240

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 241

Days Like These

moment of pleasure in the theatre will act as a sort of insurance against the next battle.

October 2004 The cast, director and crew of Julia 3 are here for lunch, the farewell to the group. But the scale of yesterday’s ALP defeat in the federal election hangs over the occasion. Though no-one wants to talk about it, the conversation keeps circling back to the Liberals getting control of the Senate. Some of this group have work coming up, others are stepping back into the void. I don’t know what I’m writing next. Talk turns, as it always does, to the state of the business. No-one can recall a time of less opportunity. Over the washing up I think about how time shortens. After forty, three more years of bad government doesn’t seem an eternity. But just as I allow that thought to console, its partner arrives. Time is indeed short and if I don’t know what I am writing next, I’d better decide soon. Theatre was once an unknown place to me—and therefore seemed full of endless possibility. Now that I know it more, I see fewer openings. Theatre has hardened—less public investment means more conservatism and smaller casts. Marketing managers’ offices have grown steadily in size so that in every theatre company they occupy more physical and intellectual space. Though we are told we live in a booming economy, you don’t see a boom in Australian drama on the ABC—there isn’t any. The options seem to have been reduced. And the artists, of course, have been creatively turned into an enemy—the pampered elites of right-wing imagination. Is it the steam from the washing up, my age, booze in the afternoon and the election result—or is the world of promise shrinking?

241

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 242

Michael Gurr

April 1985 After five months of writing only poetry, I stop. I have to, because

writing poetry puts me on the moon. People will look at you playing golf up there on that planet for a while, or hopping around in slow motion, but eventually their attention will return, and fair enough, to a place where the familiar laws of gravity rule. Poems have a particular energy and groups of them seem to arrive unbidden. The form has a name that seems to provoke a particularly embarrassed response. —I’ve written a poem. Now I’ve really lost your attention. —I’ve written a poem. Those words send us rushing for an alternative thing to do. Anything except experience a poem. Gosh, is that the time? Was that lightning? Can anyone smell something burning? Why don’t we open the back door and let the goats in? Can I have an accident with a knife now so that we can call an ambulance? Anything to get away from those words. Poem. Poetry. It’s literature’s fart in the lift. I read that Wallace Shawn, the American playwright, loves the poets. He likes the fact that they don’t seem to mind that they have such tiny numbers of readers, so few people turning up to their readings. He thinks it releases them from the pressure of other art forms that struggle for popularity. Everyone else craves audiences— and so lives with a level of anxiety. The poets, he says, know that they will only ever have a few people interested, and so happily get on with their work. I recruit the actress-singer Helen Noonan to read an hour of my poems with me in a small theatre. I get a painter friend to design a

242

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 243

Days Like These

little flyer. Distributing it to friendly shops in St Kilda, I hand one to a busy woman who works in the newsagent. She glances at it, misreads it, and perks up. —Oh! Pottery! Then she focuses properly and is immediately downcast. —Oh. Poetry. But still I write them. I’ve become addicted to the way T. S. Eliot reads his poems, I have a recording of him doing The Wasteland in a flat, uninflected tone. I imitate it at the reading that Helen Noonan and I give. A few people say afterwards that she was more animated than me. I’m humourlessly dead to this straightforward theatre note: I was trying to leave personality out of it—don’t people know a bad impersonation of T. S. Eliot when they hear one? The fact that an audience might actually want you to look alive has somehow eluded me. There is a dry, anti-life side to Eliot that takes you down a cul-de-sac: he said once that his favourite thing to do was to play the card game Patience because it was the nearest thing to be being dead. The audience are polite at our reading, but audiences usually are. To thank Helen, I give her a copy of the Dante Trilogy. Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso are all I’ve been reading for a year. The translation I’ve been looking at slightly reduces the poetry to the schoolroom, but it does make clear how Dante sorted out all his factional politics in the various circles of Hell. The Inferno is what happens inside your head when the imagination goes on a masochistic spree. It gallops with amazing zest from one form of suffering to another. Purgatory just feels like daily life. Paradise is the impossible writer’s job: how do you write perfection,

243

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 244

Michael Gurr

how do you write completion, how do you describe a place with no grit in it? It doesn’t even seem to be writing’s job. What is ecstasy except oblivion? And that’s a place where we won’t need words any more. I’m climbing around inside the architecture of religion. It’s a way of trying to see a pattern in the world. Sufism, Catholicism, I’m devouring whatever I can find. The Jewish mystics are the most fun. Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, tells you about the things you can learn from a thief. Among them: —Trust your co-workers utterly. —Always work at night. —Be prepared to risk your life for something you want, even though it mightn’t be worth much. —Be prepared to part with a thing for a fraction of its worth even though you have risked your life for it. And there is something about a train: how you could miss everything in a second. Dov Baer was a man I would’ve liked to have met. He was a teacher, I suppose, but he sounded part cowboy-comedian. But nothing sticks, all the systems feel artificial, forcing human experience into unnatural shapes. The need to find a pattern feels urgent, but the search is taking the wrong form. I’m trying on ideas like clothes, shopping around in a hurry and not listening properly. I imagine that faith is like a resolution, when all the best explanations of it describe a struggle. St Augustine, wrestling in Carthage, burning inside, opens up an idea that comes to seem right: Did he possibly never believe? Was the attempt to believe the real purpose? The more I read the more it seems there is a subterranean meaning being transmitted in most religious writing: so much of it seems to be like music or dance, an attempt to make symmetry out

244

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 245

Days Like These

of disorder. If so much of the machinery of religion is just another kind of art, and so much of it is artless, why not just turn your head back to art? Mahler knocks everything written about Christ into a hat. You can keel over asleep trying to get to the heart of Buddhism when you could just listen to someone setting the world to rights playing the clarinet. The only painter to make me cry, Mark Rothko, gets to the point of human yearning faster than anything I’ve read about faith. A memory check. Did I know Rothko’s paintings before I knew he killed himself? In other words, did his life change the way I looked at the pictures? The memory check is OK. I looked at a picture in a book before I knew who he was. Walking through what feel like the deserted mausoleums of religious faith puts me way out of tune with anything that’s going on in theatre. Half-digested avant-garde theories are having one of their periodic resurgences on the Fringe—lots of Gothic clowning and content-free angst. Conventional productions of conventional plays at Melbourne Theatre Company go on and on. There’s nothing heroic about feeling disconnected, about feeling ‘out of time’. And I’m writing such bad striving stuff right now. Too internal and circular, not connected with the world. I destroy it all, though there’s one poem I miss. It was about being in the supermarket but it was full of things from the Book of Revelation. Apocalypse in aisle five. Maybe it was even funny.

May 1989 Asked to teach a writing course I agree because I need the money. I have no idea what to say. I rebel inside at the idea that something like this can be taught. We’re not talking about the lathe or the

245

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 246

Michael Gurr

violin. The idea of teaching people to write seems strange. Are there actual, teachable things? On the tram towards our first session I can’t help but feel what I’m about to do is in bad faith. Unless, unless the idea might be to endorse the impulse towards creativity. OK. I can do that. Now I have to get off the tram and go in and do that. How do you do that for three hours? Borrowing too much rent money off your friends puts all these questions on hold. We meet: an ex-journalist, an actor and four others with no obvious paths that got them here. —Have faith in whatever urgency got you here. Whatever’s inside you, try and tell it straight. It’s not much to say, it’s a slogan, it’s not teaching, but it turns out they want company. The teenagers are living at home, wanting to know about the possibility of another world. The grown-ups need an evening away from everything. The writing is up and down. They read it out, we sort of talk about it, produce it for radio, listen to the broadcast and call it a day. The experience is friendly, maybe company was enough.

May 2002 We’re surrounded by bits of poetry. Scraps of songs, a bit of old Beatles. Something like changing my life with a wave of her hand, sung along that hopscotch of a melody—it gets poetry back into me. Ten poems arrive over two days. I transcribe them and then stop and wonder what to do next. They are all about war. I show them to people but it’s a bit like confessing to a mental illness. Mostly I get a sympathetic nod. I send one to The Age, it’s about Zimbabwe’s

246

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 247

Days Like These

collapse and the Woomera detention camp. They publish it. Standing in Rundle Mall in Adelaide, I read my first published poem since I was 11. The guy selling the newspapers is interested in my avid look. I’m staring at the poem sitting there on the page. I buy two more copies of the paper, the big Saturday edition, dumping most of it into the bin to keep my bit. The newspaper guy is funny, he’s watching what I’m doing, he promises to read the poem. —It’s a lot of paper to buy for a little bit like that. I talk to the Sydney Morning Herald to publicise a production of The Simple Truth. The conceit of the article is: What would you do if you had a year to live? I settle on poems. You could get more out. I’ve said more about politics in a poem called Albanian Prostitutes in Rome than I’ve said in anything I’ve written elsewhere. It was published at the back of a play, it’s the autistic child we don’t mention, poetry’s embarrassment kicking in. I’m asked what I’ve written that I’m happiest with. It’s a poem called In Memoriam: Krystal Belle, Porn Star. About three people have read it. We’re not the best judges of our own work, of course, and poetry can do your head in. They tell you that you can’t be published in a book until you’ve had eight poems published in magazines. It’s a funny club out there. When I splurge on poetry and send the results to my agent, she sounds the alarm about where we might possibly place them. —Honey, it’s very difficult. They are the first things I wrote, and they arrive unbidden now and then. It seems you get forgiven for them, these things you love the most, that are mostly seen as some sort of faux pas. However.

247

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 248

Michael Gurr

August 2004 We’re standing outside the milk bar at six in the morning, waiting for the shop to open, waiting for our newspapers. It’s very cold and we do that thing of acting the weather to each other. We shiver back and forth. He’s about eighty, I think, eyeing me beadily. He pops the football question:

—How do you think we’ll go this weekend? Footscray is possibly the last suburb left in Melbourne where you could ask this question and know you’re on the same subject. The ‘we’ has certainly vanished out of Carlton. No-one in North Melbourne says it. Maybe they say it in Geelong. We’ve only seen each other to raise a hand in the street—by asking me how ‘we’ will go this weekend, he’s working out who I am. Thing is, he couldn’t have picked a better time. Hardie and I have dropped our casual old team allegiances and attached ourselves to the Bulldogs. It seems only right. I’m on thin ice with football—a game I love but have only been able to arrive at late. Team sports were always run by bully-teachers, excelled at by bully-kids. At some point I pulled down the roll-a-door and said: They can have it, let them have it. Being fast, I was put on the wing, but pelting down the outside would wonder: Why can’t I be somewhere else? Easier to stick to sprinting— a culture of one. But even there, the little blue winner’s ribbons fluttering in my hand—what was the point? The roaring men with stop watches—wanting what? Martin Flanagan, a writer who has helped more people than he knows, describes football in the newspaper in a way that opens doors. I think Flanagan’s great and maybe un-asked for task is to gently, critically unfold Australian masculinity and he does this nowhere better than in his descriptions

248

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 249

Days Like These

of striving and hope on the footy field. He manages to vanish the bullies and let you see what good serious fun a game of football can be. I’m sad about the years of enjoyment I missed, how shallow men stood between me and the game—consequently I know very little about the mechanics of it. But sometimes it’s good to be ignorant and just let those intense conversations that dissect football wash over you. The sound of it felt like exclusion for many years—now it’s a better music. It’s a straight line in my mind from the early exclusion to the memory of a particular man, maybe dead now, who was married to my maternal grandmother. One of nature’s bullies, he invented torment for children, ways of making them afraid. Pointless tasks and confusing questions—he was of course a sort of apparition, who only existed to the extent that other people were scared of him. The day I stood my ground and told him No was the day he disappeared. Just like that he seemed to lose solid form and become nothing much more than a kind of smell. I can still feel the jellylegs of that moment, but also the exhilaration that followed: Wow, bullies just evaporate when you look them in the eye. Friendships with women are conducted face to face; most friendships with men are like standing side by side looking in the same direction. We commentate on what we see. Rather than look at each other, we like to stare at something else. Football is looking in the same direction. After years of feeling that I am slightly standing in the wrong spot in relation to sport, it’s good to stand and look ahead. —How do you think we’ll go this weekend? —No idea. And then Luke Darcy does his knee.

249

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 250

Michael Gurr

July 1996 We sit down, the journalist and me, and begin a familiar routine.

We’re here to talk about Jerusalem, which is about to open at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. Interviews have set patterns. There will be a series of familiar questions and I will offer as answers, if not lies, then at least partial inventions. ‘Why did you write this play?’ is the usual starter. At once I begin to talk in character—the character of the playwright. A few anecdotes, something glimpsed in the newspaper, a political angle. I’ve polished him up over many years, this character, so I can usually get interviews over pretty quickly and return to the place where I find out the real answers to the journalist’s question: the rehearsal room. Today, though, the journalist wants to go a bit further. She wants to know why I stick with an art form that plays to small middle-class audiences. Skipping over the enduring puzzle of why middle-class journalists don’t like middle-class audiences, I can only tell her the truth. I feel alive in the place and there is something about the mechanics of it that is analogous to life; taking disorder and creating, for a moment, the illusion or sensation of balance, of everything being in the right place. That tricky bit of staging that suddenly comes right, the scene that clicks into place with the cutting of a single line, finding the colour for a costume that locates a character precisely in time—these things make me happy. And as for the audience demographic? Well, sure, talk to the management and ask them to drop the prices by three-quarters. It’s not enough. She wants to know what my thesis is, what point I am trying to make with the play. Christ, I think, they’re still sending the juniors out on the arts round. But I answer honestly and beg her to think of theatre in terms of questions, not answers. Please, I say,

250

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 251

Days Like These

think about this as human, not academic. Any play is going to be a mix of its creator’s curiosity, prejudice and yearning. The audience’s response is going to be a mix of exactly the same things. Lunchbreak in rehearsal is finished so the interview winds up. My in-character performance as playwright hasn’t satisfied her, nor has the actual truth. She needs something to write up and almost pleads,‘But what sort of play is it?’ Out of nowhere, I find the answer she wants. ‘Jerusalem is a play without a villain.’ Walking upstairs to the rehearsal room I wonder if I have just described a very dull play. I mean, a play without a villain? In the intersecting stories of Jerusalem, everyone wants to do good. There are Christian volunteers visiting prisoners, a failing Labor MP and his staff, an Irish immigrant being bounced around by officialdom. Ten characters played by six actors. The thing that unites them is that they are mostly trying to improve things—and mostly failing. Part of the play is about the dangers of amateur altruism. Even the child-killer believes she is doing good. She stifles her children at the back of a fundamentalist church believing they will be happier with God than on this bad, bad Earth. When she steals a child left crying alone in a car in a cemetery car park, who’s to say who’s doing bad? The fear in writing it was that without a visible villain nothing much could happen. Later, it became clear that in this play the ‘villain’ was human weakness and the ‘hero’ pure ideals. Or, actually, it could be the other way around. Whichever way it was, there was something emotionally uncensored in the response. There was something about the way the cast of six, playing ten characters between them, drifted onto Judith Cobb’s giant breaking wave of a set to Andrew Pendlebury’s music. The way that Bruce Myles kept the actors onstage, watching every scene as a chorus. These things

251

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 252

Michael Gurr

made you feel responsible, involved in a way that gave the experience a vulnerability. And Glenn Hughes lit it in my favourite stage colour, 201 blue, which seems to both warm and chill. The cast got a perverse thrill from the absolute certainty of a critic who wrote that the characters had obviously been written by me for specific actors. They loved this bullshit—it was the best compliment they got. As responses filtered through, we all began to understand the play better. It’s about trying and failing and trying again. In the Bourke Street Mall a woman catches my eye. She is eating her way rapidly through a bag of liquorice. —I’m sorry, I don’t normally do this, eat like this, but I’ve just seen your play. That she is crying and eating and apologising seems not at all strange. We share the tram and don’t talk very much on the trip. The best reaction I hear comes after a Saturday matinee. Two seventeen-year-old boys are waiting around for a Dad to collect them. I eavesdrop. First Seventeen Year Old: Makes you think, doesn’t it? Second Seventeen Year Old: No it doesn’t. It lets you think. It isn’t a play people want to discuss a lot, which suits me fine. It’s become a joke, that I say ‘I don’t know’ when asked questions in rehearsals. But it’s usually true. And if the production has done its work, the play should have entered the pores rather than the brain. It should make talk difficult. It should be working on the irrational senses. When David Mamet wrote Oleanna, his play about ‘political correctness’, reports came in about fights breaking out between husbands and wives, in foyers, car parks and during the play. But I never heard what anyone was fighting about and I doubt it was ‘political correctness’. The play seemed to me to capture a particular kind of 252

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 253

Days Like These

domestic anger, a moment of profound irritation and irrational selfrighteousness. The pompous university tutor and the manipulative student seemed, if anything, to deserve each other. It’s a fine play about domestic violence, a less interesting one about American university politics. You can argue about the straw man of ‘political correctness’ quite rationally: it is self-evidently silly in its extremes but mostly an invention of the political Right with which to clobber the Left. In Australia, the strangest things would come up in conversation: ‘Did you hear that we have to call short people vertically challenged?’ Well, actually, no, I hadn’t heard that. This is whisper-talk, not observation. This is rumour, not fact. Harder to dissect than the surface politics of Mamet’s play are acts of explosive violence. When the red curtain comes down over the eyes and the temper is actually, truly, lost, we’re in the world of the irrational. Which is what theatre does best. Ibsen was onto it, knowing that a good play is when everyone is right. The thesis writers try to tie down plays under ropes. A PhD paper I read had my work strangely in concert with a then-fashionable academic theory—except for the bits that weren’t, which were ignored. It’s the irrational, the ambiguous, the contradictory that animate a stage. The bad person who does good things, the good person who does bad. In Jerusalem it was the most irritating character who saw the world with the clearest eyes. Yes, he was right, and you wanted to punch him; both for being right and for the way he was right. April 2005 The Federal Treasurer is on TV looking miffed. It seems that Peter Costello has taken exception to Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers. I wonder if he’s actually seen it. It’s a play that takes an ancient 253

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 254

Michael Gurr

archetype—the bad brother and the altruistic brother—and applies it to contemporary Australia. Some in the press are drawing parallels between Costello and his Baptist Minister brother. The play draws on the cloudy circumstances of the sinking of the SIEV X. Immediately, a firing squad of newspaper columnists lines up. The play is a ‘vomit of smug hate’, funded with a ‘flood of government gold’; the playwright is called everything but un-Australian. The treatment of asylum seekers is something that sends a certain kind of columnist into a frenzy. Unable to deny the cruelty, they must make their case in tortuous ways. First, attack refugee advocates as meddling do-gooders. Next, deliver a class analysis that puts you on the side of ordinary people. In this fluoro graffiti, honest battlers want the boats towed back to sea and hypereducated chatterers want to buy all the queue-jumpers a latte. This would come as news to Rural Australians for Refugees, including ‘The Baxter Mums’, who are about as far away from inner-city renovation addicts as it’s possible to get. Factory workers who’ve actually met and worked with a refugee are donating time and money to help. But in the world of the commentariat, only an oversimplification will do. As arguments surge about whether Rayson’s play is an outrageous slur on the military and the nation, it’s impossible not to feel that what you are watching is not a debate about a play but a series of attitudes being struck: some on the Left hop into the play for not being everything they want it to be, while the Right gets frothy about the crime of a subsidised theatre putting on a play that actually says something. Audiences seem to understand what the firing squad pretend not to: that they are watching a play— something that aims to provoke and unsettle. Audiences accept the dramatised history of English kings in a similar way. Behind the vitriol, a suspicion lurks. Are the columnists truly outraged? There’s

254

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 255

Days Like These

a fair bit of pent-up rage, you feel, a desire to put the upstart artists in their place. Some of the responses are very high-pitched, nearly hysterical. An awful lot of poor acting goes on in this country—and very little of it in our theatres. While it’s hard not to have a moment of wonder that all this noise is caused by a play, this seems to be more than an attack on one work. This feels more like a warning from the government’s foot-soldiers in the ‘culture wars’, a warning that’s somehow both feigned and chilling: We’re in charge around here now—so shut-up.

July 1996 Jerusalem goes to Sydney and lots of people remark on what a Melbourne kind of play it is. We’re all sort of irritated by this tired old rehash, though I do consider, for a second, changing two Melbourne place names to their Sydney equivalents. A Sydney throwaway street paper begins its review by saying that this is a very Melbourne play, a woolly cardigan sort of play, where none of the characters have discernible waistlines. Just when I’m about to throw it aside, he goes on to laugh along with the idea and gives the show its best Sydney review. The old Melbourne/Sydney divide has lived so long because it is oddly handy: at its best it is more useful than snide shorthand, it can force people to say what they actually mean. Sydney people know what a ‘Sydney sort of play’ is and, encouraged, will even describe it. Well, they will say, the actors face out front a little more and the brochures and advertising are better. The lighting will be a little more apparent in a Sydney production; in Melbourne there will be shadows at the edges. It’s a party game—but with undertones. Beatles or Stones? Indoors or out? In Launceston, I saw a production of Crazy Brave and

255

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 256

Michael Gurr

encouraged them to take it to Hobart. What’s that—a three-hour drive? A silence fell over the group: the hopelessness of a Hobart transfer sat heavily upon them. Gently, inevitably, I asked: —What? Would this be seen as a very, um, Launceston sort of production? It seemed so. In Sydney I’m cautiously asked by actors in a few different productions: —How does this, you know, compare to the Melbourne production? We’ve taken the Melbourne production to Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Theatre. There has been a sense of rightness around this show from very early, an impossible thing to describe: just a sense that all the elements have been exactly assembled. Kerry Walker, Roger Oakley, Marco Chiappi, Tammy McCarthy, Simon Wilton and Robynne Bourne—and later Janet Andrewartha—play the script’s many scenes with a rare kind of unfiltered feeling. I have dedicated the play to Bruce Myles. I sit down with him before an audience of Sydney Theatre Company subscribers. They haven’t seen the play yet, but want to hear about it. We talk a bit, then take questions. No-one believes that plays come from nowhere, so you need to give some compass points. One of mine is an interview I read with Germaine Greer. Asked what was the most over-rated virtue, she’d said, simply, ‘Kindness’. So apparently off-hand and unexplained, I took it to mean that sometimes kindness was a way of not telling someone the truth. It’s a frighteningly grown-up anecdote. They’re good, this crowd, they seem to have guessed their way into the play with very few clues, and are asking good things. Inevitably, it comes, The Hard Question.

256

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 257

Days Like These

—Why theatre? —You mean why work in this form that relatively few people see? That has so few openings for a writer in a country as small as ours? —Yes. —The answer might be the same as the reason you come to see it. —But I’m asking you. Fair enough. The answer is not in the old cliché about the suspension of disbelief. I don’t think disbelief is ever actually suspended and that might be the point. The earliest memory of being read a story probably had the reader putting on voices. Sometimes the voice of the monster. And as the listener you experienced fear without ever being in actual danger. That’s not the suspension of disbelief, it’s the contract of trust. To be taken somewhere destabilising and emerge physically intact but psychically changed. Everyone does it every day. We’re always re-enacting, telling each other stories. To explain why theatre still holds its power is just to describe its one essential characteristic. The film has been shot. The novel has been written. But a warm breathing being re-enacting in front of you reminds you of the child’s contract of trust, the Boo at edge of the cot, or some exaggerated pub yarn. My own first memories of storytelling are of two poems my father read me. Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn and D. H. Lawrence’s A Snake Came to My Water Trough. I didn’t understand either, but their sound-meaning seeped in. I’ve never gone back to the Keats, preferring the music memory to whatever the poem might be about, but I have re-read the Lawrence. The awful disappointing politics of that poem—as he pointlessly throws something at the retreating snake.

257

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 258

Michael Gurr

December 2000 Moving house, friends advise a garage sale but, I mean, putting

price tags on things? Playing shops for an afternoon? I’ve never seen the attraction of bargaining with strangers about what is, after all, just stuff. The front fence is low brick and you can arrange all sorts of things along it: that reproduction Egyptian cat bought in a museum, the big fat art books never opened. Arranged out there they are gone in minutes. A third of what we own vanishes from the fence. Watching it happen from my desk, I have to stop myself from keeping going: in an afternoon I could clean us out. We could be wonderfully rid of everything we own. And then she knocks at the door. I know her only noddingly, the elderly mother of a grown-up, simple son. She leads him each morning by the hand, him dragging slightly behind, her body stringy with the effort—he’s long outgrown her—down to the shops. After seeing them for a while you realise his scowl is not unhappiness but concentration, each step is his next achievement, the crossing of the road a cautious and seriously considered event. She never gives him a cross word in public. She’s his tugboat—steering this great boy behind her. She knocks on the door. —I just wanted to say that David appreciated the books. We took all of them. He loves looking at the pictures. I’m about to speak but she raises her hand to stop me and walks neatly back along the verandah and out into the street. Thursdays are pension days and in the supermarket old men and women move ahead of their older-younger sons or daughters who push the trolleys. I’m fraught with a play that is tearing my mind to rags and hardly noticing anything. Scraps of ideas flick around: the play is having a tantrum in my head. I’ve got a vague list of what I’m

258

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 259

Days Like These

here to buy but the play’s fury means I could almost be buying what the characters want to eat. The absorption is total: if you’d asked me the time I’d have told you what time it was in Scene Eight. Until stalled and shamed in aisle five by the way he must wait for her, her eyes captured by the glitter of some new product. Her father must be seventy. She’s eighteen-fifty, happy dress, socks and sandals. A spongy hand goes up in slow motion to hold the new thing on offer and a stringy older one deters.

Februar y 2006 His hat is pulled slightly down over his right eye, his lapel is wattled with badges. Because he doesn’t pause much it’s hard to work out which war. His arms and legs are bony inside the suit and whatever the weather he leans into it, he walks like a clock ticking over, he fights sun or wind and makes fair time. She walks behind him stately, observing very slowly according to a different, chubbier clock the blooms on either side of the street or the new weeds in the cracks of the footpath. His daughter is a blown rose to his stick, but it’s back to front, the stick is leading the bloom behind him. It’s not complete dependence, she will be at the bus stop alone sometimes, a handful of coins for the fare in her hand. You have to change time for her—if you smile you must wait a while for the smile back. Alone, he buys two stubbies of Victoria Bitter, a moment without the umbilical. There isn’t anything to be learned from watching, only to be absorbed. Lessons about heroism or humility don’t add up to much, only the watching. Unless the question suddenly appears that’s made all the parents stringy: What will happen to them when I’m gone?

259

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 260

Michael Gurr

Januar y 2005 Waiting is usually a lonely thing but waiting for news of a birth

joins you up to everyone. You’re one leaf on the telephone tree and all the telephones will be engaged because everyone is calling everyone else. On the morning of June 15, 1990, my sister gives birth to Lillian, a child dead by a doctor’s negligence, a fact drawn out in a long report by the Coroner. Later, later we would watch on TV as my sister and her partner emerged from the Coroner’s hearings. I remember thinking, seeing my sister on the news, and on the front of the newspaper: This is what sunglasses turn women into on TV—an underworld widow, a wife of the accused, a mother of one. When bad things happen in a hospital they give you a private room. Approaching the big public lifts, people humanely push buttons for each other. Experienced visitors and the anxious new. A mother of footballers, hair and make-up nice, now in her dressing-gown with an IV drip. We share the ride with a wounded apprentice. His tender attitude to his damaged arm is shocking his girlfriend a little. She’s never seen him this delicate before and is reassembling her picture of this bloke. It’s good news and bad news: he might be this sweet with a baby one day as he is with his broken arm; or he might be a bit of a sook. An hour later, we meet again in the lift as we head down un-together for a smoke. You notice that the younger doctors take the stairs. They’re doing it for the exercise, sure, but they also might be avoiding us. Accidents and deaths are still professional events; not enough has happened to these faces to let them bear our pleas or accusations. Fair enough that they sprint a few flights. The news had been sickeningly vague. I rang the hospital and was told in careful words: Yes, the baby has been born, we cannot give any more information over the phone.

260

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 261

Days Like These

Dead babies are bad magic. For some, it is the great untouchable: an event that leaves an ugly tear in our notion of how things are meant to work out. Others react as if to a chain letter, a ouija board, or a bird nailed to a tree: superstitions cling to this event. Some will hear of the death of a child and throw out rage or fear. They spark like bad fuses, moments of blue flame as they arc their confusion. Trees split in our heads. And a dead child is strange to hold—they’re somehow lighter than living ones. You almost resent their indifference, their vanishing trick after all that expectation. A secret world opens up and we become part of hidden procedures. When she’s brought in to hold you wonder: Where do they keep her? New medical phrases come to our mouths as if we’ve all just done a short course. Movement is restrained. To sit down in a hospital room is to make a particular claim. Standing, there’s the problem of where the hands go. Sometimes a visitor will stay very close to the door; any closer to the bed and the bad magic will suck them down. It’s like the air has fractured and we must all move very carefully—flecks in the lino threatening to open up and swallow us in a second. And through the drugs, the mother is almost apologising. We ask the world of women: from underneath the ice we expect them to comfort us. Inevitably, the taxi away from the hospital that morning stops at the lights next to a hairdresser’s shop. The window is full of pink balloons. The spray paint across the glass says: It’s a girl! The first two phone calls are hard to make until you hear yourself finding the form. I realise again how much of our lives we’ve picked up from the movies. How so many encounters are unconscious echoes of film scenes, just as ‘The Breaking of Bad News’ scene helps me now. Maybe fiction has a purpose after all. Lillian’s funeral goes ahead to a steady, predictable beat. The freezing air of

261

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 262

Michael Gurr

the cemetery, the coffin that looks like a symbol of a coffin rather than the real thing, the faces cracked or hanging. Did we go anywhere afterwards? Who drove? Did anything happen? Somewhere down inside the glacier is the timetable of that day. Fifteen years later and the long drive out to another funeral. This time, no explanation. A girl, again, to friends, Stella her name is. The funeral men wave you gently to your car park and you wonder again about funeral directors and how they do their job, the example they are setting with calm faces as they wave us to the car park. A suit, a job and bit of professional distance. We’re early, of course, and so is everyone else, so groups form. No-one’s dressed up, but here and there a scarf has been added. A man you don’t know straightens his collar and coughs. We talk about how long it took to drive here. You hang around and find out who you are. There is the acute sensation in the car park that every physical movement will be the wrong one. It’s like trying to remember how to stand. Smokers have the advantage here: there’s the business of lights and botting. Everyone’s calves are tingling, again the faces cracked in half or hanging, and this inexplicable sense of forgiveness. We meet in grief and somehow forgive each other, for something, for anything. The story has failed, the message came through backwards and somehow we are all responsible. Inside, we sit and listen and feel that insistent internal rocking at the absence. In the foyer, it’s the smallest signs that rivet the attention: the way cafeteria tea cups are held as if made of precious glass; the man who moves in to discreetly rescue a milk jug from a shaking hand. And then later, later, the steps the woman walks. The slow coming back into the world, the first trip to the shops, the conversations in the second circle of friends. The telling at the milk bar. Guys

262

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 263

Days Like These

behind the counter who’ve watched you expand and now freeze their grins when you tell them what actually happened. For a while Lillian and Stella make us more kind, more careful of each other. But losing them, we’ve all taken on weight. We get out of our chairs and close our front gates heavier with something that isn’t there. Empty clothes weigh more. A new unwanted layer of scepticism, a superstition about hope. It becomes vital to remind ourselves that we’re still connected to everyone who was waiting for a phone call at the beginning. A pledge to refuse grief its way, which might be to split us apart from each other like atoms.

263

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 264

Michael Gurr

264

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 265

The train is late. He sits next to me on the platform and says: Typical

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 266

Michael Gurr

August 2005 The train is late. He sits next to me on the platform and says:

—Typical. But then there’s more. Paul’s a baker, maybe thirty, he’s just done an eight-hour shift and he’s had to travel four hours a day to get to work. —But I’ve got a flat closer to work now. And I’m experienced, I’ve had years in the bakery trade. And I’m not going to work the nightshift any more, I’m only going to do the dayshift. A few people have been laid off but I won’t get laid off. And also I’m going to work up towards being a manager. It’s not a bakery, mate, it’s a place that supplies bakeries, do you understand? And when I was in there today I had to put my foot down about the quantity of knot rolls they were putting out. And not just the quantity but the quality as well, do you understand? It’s about the standard, if I’m going to be manager. I’m going to be in negotiations about this soon but I think I can handle that. And I won’t be doing nightshift. I’ll be OK, I’m negotiating from a position of strength. I think they’ve seen what I can do. I’ve just got to remember not to get angry. And the place I’ve got now, it’s one bedroom and pretty cheap. And I should be OK if they listen to what I’ve got to offer. Opposite us and listening as the train heads into Flinders Street is Christos. He says he’s twenty-three, but he looks a lot more than that. He’s dressed in teenage bike gear, spinning the wheels of his chunky upturned bike. He scans for an eye to catch, for someone to convince.

266

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 267

Days Like These

—If I can knock off the semi-finalist tomorrow at Telstra Dome in the dirt riding championships then I can move up the ladder. And then go to Vancouver and after that Tokyo and Ukraine. And that’s OK because I can ride on snow. Why don’t you come tomorrow? Christos nods towards Paul. —Bring your friend along. Paul the baker edges away slightly. —He’s not my friend, I just met him. Paul the baker gets off at Spencer Street. Christos keeps talking. —Telstra Dome mate, could mean the world. See this wheel? It’s strong, this alloy, you could drive a car across it and it wouldn’t bend. What do you do? I liked doing drama in school, I thought that was good. Thought I could have done some acting. Will you come and see me tomorrow and give me a cheer in Telstra Dome? There is a cigarette paper between these men and nothing. The opposite of walking upright in the world isn’t living on your knees, it’s pretending to be stronger than you are. Paul and Christos are boosting themselves. There’s no joy in the way they talk about their ambitions, they seem scared, even as they cheer themselves on. Both of them are alone. Believing that your value as a human being is measured by your independence and separation from others is the great lie of the market-driven world. To yield, forgive or compromise is weakness. Instead we seem to be asked to think of ourselves as being in some never-ending competition to be first in line.

267

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 268

Michael Gurr

How did this disconnection happen—between ordinary human need and the rhetoric of success? Just for the hell of it, say the advocates of this odd way of living, let’s see what will happen if we remove the underpinnings. Let’s see how thin we can make the tightrope. Let’s watch Paul negotiate his work contract by himself. Let’s see just how little support one person can have and still function. Yes, let’s see what happens if we lock the rabbit in its hutch with nothing for a week: it might invent water. Gosh, it might decide that wire is tastier than grass. There is, finally, something deeply narcissistic and odd about the people who enjoy the pure application of economic models to actual lives. You feel they jerk off to something that isn’t quite human. This morning I was swearing at the radio about the Coalition’s plans to take the last bit of security out of industrial relations. It was just another abstract breakfast curse. Our dogs are used to it and I no longer have to give them a conciliatory pat. They know this tone: I’m not cross with them, I’m cross with the government. But I get out of the train tonight thinking: Yes, let’s pull the last few planks from underneath Paul the baker’s life. Let’s hacksaw out the rungs from Christos’s playground. Let’s do that. Let’s do that and see what happens. Let’s do that and then let’s ask their wives in ten years’ time.

268

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 269

Days Like These

November 2004 Dennis Glover is Simon Crean’s speechwriter. I worked with him years ago in John Brumby’s office. Six months back I offered to do some work with Crean on his speech preparation and delivery and was fobbed off. The ‘Thanks, mate’ that translates as ‘Go away and leave it to the professionals’. But Dennis rang last week and said to come in for a talk. Met with Mike Richards, Crean’s Chief of Staff, Vivien Schenker, who does Media, and Dennis at Crean’s Melbourne office in Treasury Place. The first thing I noticed was how white and empty the walls were. Someone said, ‘We’re not planning on being here long enough to decorate’. Talked about what I see as the disconnect many politicians get, the mechanical thing that makes them almost too ‘on message’. A life in public can turn the ‘grab’ into the only goal. I like it when people loosen up a bit, when there’s a shorter distance between what we see and who they really are. We talked for about forty-five minutes. How there are rules and more rules, most of which contradict each other. Rules for Opposition, rules for government, rules for Labor in Opposition that don’t apply to the other side. I think Labor always has to be optimistic from Opposition. The Liberals can attack their way into government; somehow Labor can’t. We have to hope our way in. I think the next election is winnable with Crean—but then every election is winnable—and every poll disagrees. I said it would be good to lessen the distance between the private and public man. Vivien said, ‘He’s great in Gosford’. Where there are no cameras, no spotlights, only people.

November 14 Spent this afternoon watching Simon Crean videos. Press Club, a couple of parliament speeches and an episode of Insiders. A strong 269

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 270

Michael Gurr

feeling comes through as I watch them: every audience is hostile and that’s how he plays it. Crean has no champion in the media. Not one. Every journalist writes only of leadership challenges. There’s something in Crean we haven’t seen yet, I reckon. Bet he’s funny.

November 16 As Hardie drove me to the Port Melbourne restaurant for lunch with Crean and Vivien and Dennis I gave myself two notes. One: Yes, this is a personality audition but there’s nothing I can do about that. Two: Don’t like him just because I want to. Three hours of lunch later and I do like him—and there are only two glasses of wine involved. He’s funny, generous and smart as a whip. Finally got around to the matter at hand via a long talk about how easy it seems for this government to slide past lies. Truth has a very low political value. How to use it? Or better, how to demonstrate that Labor will stand for something else? How to actually do something from Opposition? Not summits on this or that but acting as a conduit, a facilitator for good local ideas. To use the office for practical good as well as for attack. Initiate a scholarship or two through progressive businesses? Small examples of what might happen on a larger scale if we won. Seems better than always asking for ‘third-party endorsements’. Instead of asking for help, we should go out and do things. How easy this sounds and yet, and yet ... It would be radical and interesting for an Opposition to begin its work before it won. I think there’s a growing, unarticulated unease about the moral obligations we owe each other. A sense that whatever you call it, the economy, the market, the bottom line, is not the ultimate aim. Without ever using the word morality, I believe we

270

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 271

Days Like These

can switch people back to what they know is their duty to each other. So much of it is down to language. Taxi into town with Vivien. Our conversation was in code, no names were mentioned. Then the taxi driver piped up: —So, have you both been working for Simon for a while? He used to be Crean’s driver. What are the chances of that? He laughed away to himself. Made his day.

November 18 My father is the all-time swinging voter. He’s voted for every winning government, state and federal, since I don’t know when. The one exception was ’93, because of Keating. I ask him where his thinking is now. He tells me he thinks Crean’s honest and Howard isn’t.

November 19 First session was hard. OK, civil, but hard. I sort of stall about ten minutes in. Crean and I don’t share a language yet, or maybe here I am, another bullshit artist. On a few hours acquaintance I am asking a lot. We persist. The first session of anything is usually about getting to the second, but I walk away feeling I don’t have much to offer, I’ll wait and see after tomorrow. Can’t sleep.

November 21 Second session. It was very good. Crean said that he’d tried out a few things yesterday during a speech on superannuation. We zipped

271

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 272

Michael Gurr

through much more than I thought we would. He’s cheerful, finds trying out new things entertaining rather than a chore. Also, I don’t believe that people should change in public—I think they should be more like themselves. This is harder than it sounds. As I left I wished him ‘a good Canberra’. He’s back there tomorrow. He said, about his front bench, ‘Yes, time for the cat to go home and stop the mice playing’. Hard to think of anything else right now except this odd sidedoor job. Allow myself a few hours of real optimism.

November 27 Four p.m. Dennis tells me on the phone that it’s over. The ‘leadership group’ have told Crean it’s finished. Much of the Left has gone across to Beazley, but it’s splitting in odd directions. Will they go to Latham? Dennis sounds flat, the tone we use to avoid emotion. The country mimics its leadership—it shrivels or expands in response. But does the Opposition have to? Listening to the radio now. That strange feeling of listening to something I feel is almost private being broadcast nationally. I don’t want to listen. I’m turning the radio off now and putting on some music.

November 28 Watched Crean resign at 10.15 a.m. on Channel 9. I hate the sentimentality of defeat and mostly resisted it, but I could see his decency coming through. The only Labor leader who will never fight an election. Fuck it. Sent him an email and wasted the rest of the week in ‘what if?’ wondering.

272

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 273

Days Like These

September 2005 The interview with Mark Latham on the ABC’s Conversation Hour after the publication of his Diaries finishes with a list of unasked questions in front of me. He was in the Sydney studio, so Jon Faine and I were denied the interruptions that eye contact allows. The line of his leadership and its aftermath is I think the first time a male political leader has experienced the rise and fall usually associated with women. In the eyes of commentators, he went from Madonna to whore in a blink. I would’ve liked to have talked about that. That the media is obsessed with itself has become a cliché—but I wish someone would take the time to analyse the patterns properly. Events skip by at such speed that the shape of things can be missed. I think something quite profound has happened to Australian political commentators: they have discovered, during the Howard years, that their job has no ultimate point. The death of ministerial responsibility under Howard has robbed journalism of its direction. What is the point of pursuing a minister if, even when the scandal is proved, nothing will actually happen? It’s like eliminating the finishing line in a sprint. What’s the point in running? The higher purposes of political journalism are effectively comatose now. Gutted like this, there’s nothing else except whim and the fads driven by professional boredom. Mark Latham might be the first central player on whom this style of journalism has been played out.

March 2006 Watching Crean fight and win his preselection, it’s impossible not to barrack for him. But as Howard ‘discreetly’ celebrates ten years as Prime Minister, a sort of weariness sets in. Is Simon Crean’s victory over factionalism the biggest federal Labor celebration we’ve got?

273

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 274

Michael Gurr

Januar y 2001 A writer’s immediate surroundings are critical to the point of obsessive. The particular disorganisation of books on the table must remain just so. Today is the wrong day to strip and re-make the bed. Today is the essential day to strip and re-make the bed. It is part superstition and part holding onto a thought that was connected with the way unopened letters sat on the table in the hall. Open them and the thought-train is gone. If domestic detail rules the voodoo-room of writing, eviction from the place you have lived for fifteen years does the head in. As St Kilda was stripped of its actual life and replaced by life in quotation marks, I held on with a grim disapproving will. Just behind Luna Park, the four flats had seen a good deal of come and go. Adam, was it, who’s belongings were moved out one day by his family? We stopped them to ask. He’d fallen off his bike and had a head injury. The Canadian, haranguing us gardeners with the folk songs she thought we wanted to hear. But most of all that comforting scream from the Scenic Railway. It was impossible to be sad on bad-writing afternoons when forty people were squealing their way into the first tunnel of the Scenic. And then the real estate agent with bleached blond hair arrived with a clipboard and a smile. Is there a training school somewhere for smarm? He reassured us we would all be OK, warned us not to leave our CDs out when the open inspections happened, moistened his lips and fucked us all over. We all sort of believed that we might be allowed to stay on under a new owner. When they put the For Sale sign up I went out one night and kicked it in. Because at the end of the street was the jetty where Hardie and I had stood one night and recognised the inevitability of being together. That weightlessness. The wind off the sea was whippy that night and

274

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 275

Days Like These

there was one young woman fishing. You looked back from the sea to a few reassuring St Kilda landmarks and felt things would be OK. And I knew people around here. The milk bar owner who said to me: Mate, you’re losing your hair, go for the crew cut. The old woman in the deli who refused to smile. The woman at the greengrocer who warned you off the broccoli towards a bunch of Dutch carrots. The detail that keeps you connected and human. A friend of mine who is turned on by gay porn takes me into St Kilda’s Club X. She asks the man behind the counter which sealed-up mag is better: Stroke or Pump. He wonders for a second and makes his recommendation. She takes Stroke home in an old-fashioned paper bag. It’s a matter-of-fact exchange. But the place is falling away. The first sign, someone said, is an ice-cream parlour. After the eviction, we rent in the conservative old Italian part of North Fitzroy for a while. And see how people from peasant backgrounds love their clean yards and how the educated professionals like the look of decay. In the front yards of old Italians a leaf doesn’t stand a chance. In the yards of the professionals, moss is encouraged on rustic stone seats. You see the older Italian women shaking their heads: why would anyone want something old and dirty in their front yard? Germaine Greer discovered that in an especially poor part of Calabria the dialect word for ‘beautiful’ was the same as the word for ‘clean’. And then to Footscray. And at once, the physical relaxation. Among the South Americans, the old Australians, the Vietnamese and Africans, life suddenly settles properly around me. The man at the fish stall tells the Italian grandmother to explain to the Sudanese woman what you actually do with whitebait. Everyone is looking at each other and laughing. The grandmother says fritto-misto and throws up her hands. The fish-seller shakes his head. Explain how

275

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 276

Michael Gurr

you fry them, he says. The prissy race-consciousness of commercial talkback radio flakes away like scales off a fish. No-one has any idea what anyone is saying. Then the serious business starts. The Italian grandmother puts her shopping bag on the ground with deliberate force. She’s going to talk now. The African woman follows form. The fishmonger leans in. They’re getting very serious about what you do with whitebait. In Footscray Market, the woman who sells me one chicken breast fillet is furrowed and concerned until I tell her that it’s the base for a meal for two. She relaxes and I realise she’s been worried that I live alone.

276

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 277

Days Like These

March 2006 News comes through of a production of one of my plays in

London and another in South Africa. I make a mental note to let Joan Harris know. We’ve known each other for just over thirty years, since the earliest days at the National Theatre Drama School, and we speak every week or so. Joan will sometimes claim to have a diminished interest in theatre, but she’s always keen for news. Though our friendship has deepened over the years, there is still a trace of ‘reporting in’ and Joan doesn’t need much encouragement, thank God, to tell you what she thinks. In the theatre, she’s one of a small number who I very much want to be pleased with my work. ‘Reporting in’ is also a kind of self-assessment. Mostly people only know what they think when they say it aloud, so our conversations often help crystallise my thinking and re-ignite enthusiasm. And the telephone is often enough to make this happen. Deep in work, meeting up might break the thread, but a phone call can give me just enough energy to cross the afternoon’s wasteland. If 3 a.m. is when the insomniac’s spotlight comes on, three in the afternoon is peculiarly listless and grey when you work from home. It’s a good time to get the dogs to the park and I’m about to lock the house and do just that when the phone rings. It’s Joan. She says she’s been looking through the ‘Deaths’ column and before I can launch into a riff about this cheerful hobby, she tells me it’s Danny Sandor, a man who was at the National Theatre with me thirty years ago. Did I have details? What happened to him? I tell her I’ll find out. I haven’t seen Danny for years, but he’s a vivid presence to conjure up: both extrovert and withheld, a roomdominating personality who moved quickly out of theatre and into child legal advocacy. Before I find out what killed him, I’ll take the dogs to the park for Danny—the lake is a good place to let memory drift. 277

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 278

Michael Gurr

Today, a woman of about forty is sitting by the lake. She’s brought a book with her but it sits unopened on the grass underneath her hand. She stares at nothing, her face is loose and unselfconscious. Then, as if some internal alarm has rung, her face begins to change. She composes back into her public self, a shift of the shoulders, a setting of the jaw. By the time she has flicked the grass from her jeans and stowed her book and is walking back up towards the road, she is unrecognisable, firmly back in the world, remade and contained. This public intimacy—in the park you can see the faces lovers see. I take her place, and while the dogs sniff around and stare at the ducks, I think of the important work that Danny did and what a waste his exuberance would have been in the theatre. He put the force of his personality into changing things for the better. Ego is inevitable, so my mind drifts to what I might have done if writing hadn’t kept its grip on me. What practical difference could I have made? And why am I thinking in the past tense? A few alternative worlds appear, most of them requiring a qualification I would have been too impatient to get. Unless it involves a child or an accident, death is experienced at forty-four in a different key. It’s to be expected, I suppose, that your own sense of time is thrown into relief, now that the halfway mark has most likely been crossed. The Greeks have a wonderful toast at funerals, the translation is roughly:‘Life to us!’ There is no such thing as wasted time in a park, but I want to come out of the sinkhole of regret. It’s the smaller of the dogs who snaps me to the present, sniffing my pocket for the tennis ball, grumbling his impatience. I reassemble myself and run them both ragged in the dog paddock, leaving the spot on the grass for the next person who needs a few minutes’ drift.

278

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 279

Days Like These

At the party to honour Danny, judges and lawyers sing his work and I meet up with another friend from the National Theatre. I’ve not seen Wendy for years, though we shared a house in the early 1980s, wrote songs together and made plans for a life in art. She’s changed her name—something I can’t adjust to—and I kind of refuse to go along with it. We stand together for the speeches and then out on the balcony. The feeling between us is warm, but when we ask each other the inevitable question, ‘So what have you been up to?’, it can’t help feeling a little like a prosecutor’s interrogation. Please justify yourself. We accept each other’s evidence and the night ends. I call Joan to fill her in on the occasion—and on other things. The progress of the play I’m writing for the Red Stitch Actor’s Theatre, how Sex Diary of An Infidel went in Minneapolis, where I’m up to with this book. I tell her to stop reading the ‘Deaths’ column, it’s morbid. She laughs at me down the telephone: ‘You’re a fine one to talk. Anyway, I only read it to make sure I’m still alive’.

279

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 280

Michael Gurr

June 2005 We’re driving back at 10 p.m. from Our Lady of Good Counsel

church in well-upholstered suburban Kew. Tonight, 300 mostly elderly Catholics have listened to us give a performance of Something to Declare. They’ve got their own refugee support group and are looking after a few families. The four of us stood at our microphones and told the unhappy, infuriating facts of the imprisonment of asylum seekers in Australia. This audience is already onside, but keen to do something, if only by turning up and listening and leaving here stronger, better armed for the arguments they will have within their own families. I sink inside at these occasions. I want to say: OK, we all know the drill, we all know how dreadful these things are, you don’t need to hear about the eleven-year-old girl in detention trying to kill herself by swallowing shampoo, go home now. You don’t need to hear about the man who was ordered to pay $214 000 to the Australian Government for his time in detention, you don’t need to hear this, go home. Or about thirteen-year-old Rusol who asked for a sharper knife so he could cut himself more effectively. Or that a room in the maternity ward of the Adelaide hospital was excised from Australian territory so an asylum seeker could give birth without her child having any claim to be an Australian. Or about Amal, floating in the sea after the sinking of the SIEV X with petrol in her eyes, losing her son and trying to drown herself, then finding him again. Or that Mohamed Mussa Nazari, deported by us, is now dead. Sent back to Afghanistan and killed in the Zardak Pass by the Taliban he had escaped. Killed because of what our government did. Why don’t we just go home tonight without getting upset?

280

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 281

Days Like These

But we do the gig because the gig is somehow necessary. To hear, in company, the reasons we have arguments with our families. To hear again these facts that keep us awake, churning the question: What’s to be done, what’s to be done? And we do the gig so that someone goes home less embarrassed to be a bleeding heart, less embarrassed to be a do-gooder, and maybe wondering how these words became terms of abuse. They try to dack you with this language. But if your heart doesn’t bleed for Amal and Rusol, who does it bleed for? And if you don’t want to do good then what exactly is it that you want to do? So we’re here in Our Lady of Good Counsel. Modern church buildings are strange places. Without the grime of history, you’re somehow more confronted by the fact of faith. Without the veil that comes with looking at old art and old architecture, all you see is the utilitarian purpose of the place. People come here for a practical reason; they come for the company of faith. I’m quite happy around old-fashioned Christians. I like the dagginess, the interest in the world—in small doses I can even take the holy stuff. What I like the most, though, is their lack of embarrassment about wanting to do good in the world. Christ seems to make them unashamed. New Testament parables are pretty straightforward. Big nude ideas like justice and relief from suffering don’t seem to freeze on their lips like they freeze on the lips of so many of the secular Left. The new Christians, though, scare me with their smiling certainty. The Prosperity Gospel of the mall churches—that God wants you to have a bigger television—is just the latest import, of course, and it’s interesting how rarely you hear them talking about the poor, the downtrodden, the foolish and the ugly: all the people their prophet worried about.

281

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 282

Michael Gurr

Tonight, the priest fusses with the microphone stands, adjusts the lights a bit, instructs us what not to touch. He’s a very contented and efficient stage manager. The people sit in heated pews and listen to the stories, hear the songs, and then put on platters of sandwiches and cakes in the big house next door to the church. Tiny old women ferry pots of tea around, little speeches are made, bottles of wine in green cellophane are handed to the performers to thank us for coming. Money’s been raised. It’s quaint, this, yet somehow moving. Against the crushing injustices we’ve just described on stage, a plate of triangle sandwiches can feel like a secular communion. Sure, we’ve been singing to the choir, but in this climate, activists need regularly to look each other in the eye, to push back the wall of loneliness. Without these occasions, an instinct for justice can make you feel like a freak. Outside, the Nice Liberal who is putting up a private members’ bill to alleviate refugee suffering is stealing my cigarettes and repeatedly shaking my hand. He’s under no illusions about what he can achieve, knows that he is making a gesture, trying to middleclass the issue, get it back in the centre of things. It’s an amiable conversation, but there’s a powerless fury rising inside me. How many more conversations with people of goodwill, shaking our heads at this situation? And after the prisons are emptied, as they will be, what’s to be done with this wound on the country? What name will we give it? Now I am getting a lift back to Footscray with Rebecca, who sang in the church tonight for Actors for Refugees. She tells me about the man she and her family have been visiting in the Maribyrnong prison, how his seven-year-old daughter was flown back to Iran alone, how his hair has gone white, how he has been put on the wrong medication, about the years of despair we’ve

282

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 283

Days Like These

strangely decided to give him. He was agitating for cleaner water in his village and if we send him back he’s dead. And then the lure with the hook in it: Someone must write up his life, she says, it has to be done. She wants me to do it. A pause before she turns left into my street. I am meant to be working on a play and a book: this one. I know I’ll probably shy off writing up the life of the Iranian man, but encouraging noises come out of my mouth as the heart-squirm starts. I want to go inside, selfishly seal up the house for a while, no more smoke under the door for a day or two. Inside the house, the dogs are surly because it’s only me coming home. Hardie is away on work and won’t be back tonight. They only leap around in the hall when it’s the two of us arriving, or when one of us is coming home to join the other. One of us alone is not enough. I let them out for a piss and turn on the TV, no volume. It’s very quiet here tonight and very still in the warmest June on record. The mind has lots of rooms. Tonight there seems to be something going on in all of them. I walk around the mind-house and hear the shouting or whispering behind all the doors. Tonight’s not the time to turn the handle and go into any of these rooms, it’s one of those times to just patrol the corridors. What I’m really looking for is quiet. At the end of every performance of Something to Declare, the cast read out a list of times. Matched to the actual time of each show, we tell the audience what time it is in Maribyrnong and Villawood, on Manus Island, Christmas Island and Nauru, in Port Hedland and Baxter detention centres. The effect is usually arresting: we are here in this theatre or church and right now they are there. Tonight though, I want to forget what time it is in Baxter. Sleep is hours away.

283

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 284

Michael Gurr

In one room of the mind’s house I can feel the work I must do tomorrow turning over and over. This is good—it means I’m working on the play and the book. But up and down the mind’s hall tonight the old question paces, stops, fortifies itself with sleepless fury, turns and paces back again. The old question, punching fearfully at walls. The old question: What’s to be done?

284

DLT 07 (230-285) 6/21/06 5:00 AM Page 285

Days Like These

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Sybil Nolan, my editor at MUP, who helped imagine this book and drove it through with spirit, a sharp eye and her trust. She has been the book’s great ally. Eugenie Baulch’s work in the final stages was greatly appreciated. Fran Moore at Curtis Brown gave me counsel and comradeship. Rebecca Driffield, Bruce Myles, Fiona Todd, Elly Varrenti and Kerry Walker read parts of this book along the way and told me to keep going. Theirs and Janet Andrewartha’s strong faith was critical to its completion. Bruce advised me long ago to keep a diary during election campaigns: ‘You just never know’. My thanks to Steve Bracks and Simon Crean for generously saying that whatever I wrote would be OK with them. To Hardie Jones, who read the book as it arrived and lived with it and me: thank you isn’t big enough for you, but thank you.

285