Go! Melbourne Go! Melbourne

These reflections on 1960s Melbourne are going to start arguments.

This is going to be the kind of book that starts arguments, because memories are dangerous to mess with. The editors of Go! Melbourne are being quite brave, putting this series of reflections on 1960s Melbourne into an arena in which so many people are going to have strong recollections of their part in the events under discussion.

The articles were originally conference papers and so the collection is intriguingly uneven, with some surprising gaps and inclusions.

The good bits are excellent: Brian Matthews' essay starts the whole thing off compellingly, balancing a vivid personal account of his early years in teaching with wider sociopolitical change. He takes the plenary, universal view that pulls the rest of the articles together. Matthews compresses huge amounts of historical observation and background and yet writes it all elegantly and conversationally. It's an unusual gift, to write with such clear depth.

The better articles are poised nicely between the personal and the public. Readers who saw the Beatles play Festival Hall in 1964, as my sister and I did, will enjoy Keith Moore's contribution on Beatlemania.

Seamus O'Hanlon's piece on youth culture in Melbourne has a few nice digs at Sydney's fuddy-duddy scene, all cabaret and covers. The original stuff that came from Melbourne (Gerry Humphries; Ronny Burns, Normie Rowe, The Wild Cherries, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs) was leagues ahead of the rest of the country.

John Rickard's memories of music theatre are charming, full of names that jog recognition: J. C. Williamson, the young John Truscott, Jill Perryman, Betty Burstall. If there isn't really anything about the Pram Factory or La Mama, that's not a reflection on Rickard, whose ambit was straight music theatre and opera, but more indicative of a gap in the collection - the alternative theatre scene shouts for inclusion.

Where personal becomes political, and vice versa, it makes for good reading. Robert Wolfgramm writes strongly of cultural and personal suppression at a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school in Lilydale. His rebellion is something baby boomers will identify with.

Similarly, Bronia Kornhauser makes Jewish music of general interest by her engagement with the wider context - her story of how Jewish music was affected by increasing conservatism under the leadership of Rabbi Chaim Gutnick is compelling because it has so many resonances for other faiths and cultures.

It's where the political becomes impersonal that it gets harder to hold interest. Some essays succeed by being highly informative: Tanja Luckins' piece on the end of six o'clock closing is one such, and the account of Melbourne City Council by David Dunstan and John Young is a piece of useful backgrounding that you would not easily find elsewhere. There are informative pieces on the motor car, the working mother, the Melbourne University Film Society and camp culture.

Sue Taffe writes of Aboriginal rights, and keeps her cool admirably even when she is writing of the mass fraud perpetrated on Aboriginal workers by white employers. It's sobering to think that the '60s were more than half over when the referendum to count Aborigines in the census and thus enfranchise them was passed. (My school actually had a debate on the topic. I took the "Vote Yes"side with relief.)

By 1967 we were now inclined to question authority and doubt the wisdom of the past. In a small way, Jean Shrimpton set this in motion as much as any activist: she shines as timelessly from the cover of Go! Melbourne as from the front page of The Sun 40 years ago. For those with eyes to see, she was a white swan among fussy ducks, a smooth lily among crumpled cabbages. Sylvia Harrison's essay on the Shrimp's advent at Flemington in 1965 is perceptive, even if she does call Shrimpton's nickname an "epithet attached to her public persona".

The occasional fall into academese is pardonable when you are being interesting, and Harrison's exposition is sound.

The furore caused by Shrimpton's outfit on Derby Day (hatless, gloveless, stockingless and four inches above the knee) was more than just stuffiness; such freedom threatened the whole status quo. It was a pivotal moment: all the young girls wanted to be like the Shrimp, free, cool, elegant. Many young girls headed straight for the sewing box and took up their school uniform hems for the morrow.

Overall, Go! Melbourne is well worth reading. But the gaps cry out. Vietnam protest is mentioned only in passing, without a dedicated article: the Save Our Suburbs movement gets a look-in but Save Our Sons doesn't. Many of the essays work by putting a magnifying glass on one aspect of the big picture, but let you see that there is a big picture there. Others are exclusively focused on one recherche area, such as the one about Greek-Cypriot food.

The other food piece takes a different approach. Diane Kirkby's piece carries the title In Love with a Cafe and What He Could Buy? Commodity, Desire and the Transformation of Dining Out in 1960s Melbourne. It takes an extreme arm's-length view of the subject, quoting extensively from Hal Porter's Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony for his experiences of the Cafe Latin as well as quoting him from two other sources. But it is devoid of any personal account of eating in Melbourne.

A major source of information is a 1961 Australian Librarians Conference publication Where to Eat in Melbourne. Licensed restaurants are listed but there is no discussion of the impact of the BYO. Readers may well wish to address their own memories of the '60s, for by its end the decade had changed Melbourne's eating-out considerably.

The article by its very omissions stimulated me to remember my first taste of pizza at Toto's, the steaks that one selected to barbecue at Jimmy Watson's, toasted raisin bread at Russell Collins, my first taste of borsch at the Intercontinental downstairs in Little Collins Street, omelets at the Coolabah Room; and certainly not least, Sam's Coffee Pot at the corner of Geelong and Somerville Roads, Footscray, where you could get the best hamburgers on the planet.

Some other subjects I would have loved to see done in depth were mentioned only in passing, if at all: Arthur Rylah's banning of Mary McCarthy's The Group; Henry Bolte and the publicly funded road built to his farm; the effect of slum clearance and the culture of corruption that led to the royal commission into the land scandals.

Lastly, does anyone remember when John Gorton gave a speech at Moonee Ponds Town Hall during the 1969 federal election?

Some Melbourne Uni students smuggled gladioli in and waved them at him, a la Edna Everage, who was not yet a dame and still quite ironic. A mean policeman confiscated mine.

By Juliette Hughes
January 21, 2006

Go! Melbourne

Edited by Seamus O'Hanlon and Tanja Luckins
Publisher: Circa

---

❊ Web Links ❊

➼ Go! Melbourne 

➼ Go! Melbourne - Book Reviews - The Age






Update Page