Rebels Without Regulation Footwear
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday December 29, 1992
IT WAS December 1972 and the summer sun was already baking the suburbs. I was a restless 17 years old, crippled by teen angst and five-inch cork-wedgie clogs. The headlines screamed that it was time for a change. As far as my feet were concerned, it couldn't come soon enough.
The Higher School Certificate was over and I was poised on the brink of adulthood. This was going to be the best summer yet.
Whatever happened, it had to be an improvement on the previous summer, which I'd spent slumped in a purple vinyl beanbag strumming an out-of-tune guitar.
Oblivious to the sunshine outside, I had taken eight determined weeks to drone my way through the Leonard Cohen songbook.
It's difficult now to recall why a healthy Australian schoolgirl should want to devote her Christmas holidays to singing Leonard's wrist-slitting lyrics.
What I do remember is that during one of my particularly maudlin recitals, our elderly next-door neighbour dropped dead in his garden. For many years it troubled me that the last earthly sound Ces Bates heard was my tuneless rendition of Suzanne.
But by the end of 1972 the Leonard phase was forgotten. Election fever was in the air. Having only ever experienced Liberal governments in my lifetime, the promise of change was exhilarating.
A few months earlier, my 19-year-old brother had gone into the conscription ballot. I still remember my mother and myself hovering over our HMV radiogram, listening in silence as the list of birth dates was read over the air.
That afternoon left its legacy. I didn't want to see brothers and boyfriends called up to fight in what seemed to me a senseless war.
Debate about Vietnam raged everywhere: on the streets, in Parliament, on the screens of our black and white TVs, even in the classrooms of private girls'schools like the one I'd attended. My headmistress, Freda Whitlam, was Gough Whitlam's sister. As the election loomed closer and the prospect of the Labor victory appeared more certain, I remember the growing apprehension among the more conservative elements at the college that the head of the school could be related to a left-wing Prime Minister.
I also remember an afternoon near exam time when one of my classmates noticed a reporter from This Day Tonight disappearing down the driveway, presumably to seek an interview with her.
Naturally the rest of us dived to the window for a closer look.
"Keep back from the window, girls |" shouted my teacher, whom until that moment I had considered broad-minded. "That man is from the ABC and it's an organisation that's riddled with communists |"
It was definitely time for a change.
December 2 dawned a magnificent summer morning.
Still three years short of the voting age of 21, I had to be content with handing out ALP leaflets at a booth in Billy McMahon's electorate.
Looking back on that day, I realise I hadn't just embraced Labor Party politics, but also the full range of ALP couture: the "It's time" T-shirt, the badges, even a courageous set of "It's time" novelty bobby pins.
That night in a suburban garden I waited with friends for the results from the tally room. As the first figures came through, my best friend and I let out a spontaneous cheer and leapt from our seats.
We turned jubilantly to the rest of the guests, but a sudden chill had descended on the gathering. The Whitlam era, it seemed, was not going to be to everyone's liking.
But there were plenty of other celebrations that summer. In Britain the youth anthem might have been T-Rex's Children of the Revolution, but under the mirror ball at the local high school's sixth form farewell we were dancing to little Jimmy Osmond's Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool.
One evening a group of us took the train into town to see Cat Stevens in concert.
As humiliating as it is to admit in the '90s, by the end of his set we were convinced the man was a musical genius.
On weekends, groups of us would escape to the Eastwood Odeon to see weepies like Ryan's Daughter and Love Story, but a late-night screening of Rebel Without a Cause had an unsettling impact.
Secretly we longed to break free from suburbia and live more dangerous lives. In reality, the closest I ever got to danger was a couple of dodgey hill starts in a second-hand Fiat and an extremely unpleasant incident in which my fingers became jammed in a K-Tel Record Selector. But when it came to action, nothing beat the new Government's rapid-fire program of reform. The nightly news was riveting.
In their first fortnight in office, Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard, announced 40 major initiatives; as I remember it, the draft resisters were released, conscription was abolished and the last Australian servicemen were ordered out of Vietnam before Christmas.
Domestic reforms were occurring as well, and by the end of the month we'd established diplomatic relations with East Germany and the People's Republic of China.
On New Year's Eve the mood was still euphoric. Sustained by warm champagne and hormones, a group of us piled into an EJ Holden and wound up on a northern beach shaping our plans for the future as we watched the sunrise. On that morning, everything seemed possible. There was a new vision for Australia and we were going to be part of it.
And as the country's horizons expanded, so did mine - to a theatrical agency above a chemist shop in Granville. Somehow I'd managed to land a temporary job as the receptionist for a Broadway Danny Rose operation, and I spent my days typing invoices for magicians, contortionists, Hawaiian dancers and unicyclists.
According to a smiling young woman in a TV commercial at the time, being a receptionist was "the best, most interesting job in the world", but on those sweltering afternoons in Granville, struggling to stop my sweaty fingers from sliding off the keys of the ancient typewriter, I personally felt she'd overstated the glamour of the position.
My weekly wage of $42 seemed like a fortune. The bulk of it was spent on cheesecloth peasant-look clothes purchased in a West Ryde boutique where the flame of Woodstock still burned bright. Unfortunately my sense of style was still in its formative period. I dressed in batiks, Indian prints, Mexican embroidery, Hungarian shawls and Moroccan jewellery - frequently all at once. No wonder the boys blanched. But in retrospect it was probably the over-enthusiastic application of patchouli oil which prevented any fledgling romances from progressing to something more permanent.
One day in January I had an interview for a cadetship as a radio journalist. It was an unforgettable experience conducted under harsh lights with all the warmth of a Nuremberg interrogation. Surrounded by chain- smoking journalists, I was in the middle of a grilling about how I would cover a ferry smash on Sydney Harbour when an excited young man stuck his head around the door.
"Francis James is over the border," he yelled and the room suddenly emptied.
I didn't get the job. It was back to Granville, with a stop on the way to collect some 10 by 8 photos of The Maestro of Magic and his novelty balloon act.
Towards the end of the season I had a stroke of good luck - I landed a job as a swimming teacher at the local municipal pool. It was there that the forces of destiny stepped in to save my feet.
I didn't realise it at the time, but the combination of an unseasonal spell of rain and the pool's chlorinated water had begun a slow destabilisation of my cork-wedgie footwear.
One morning, in the middle of a swimming lesson, tragedy struck. A landslide in the left clog. A group of dog-paddling seven-year-olds watched in astonishment as I sank lopsidedly to the pavement.
With the clogs relegated to the dustbins of history, I limped home grazed, barefoot and at least five inches shorter.
Summer was over, but my feet were liberated at last.
1973 THE THINGS WE DID THAT SUMMER FILMS Deliverance, with John Voight The Godfather, with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino Cabaret, with Liza Minnelli and Michael York The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, with Barry Crocker and Barry Humphries Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick SONGS Ben, by Michael Jackson Children of the Revolution By T. Rex Nights in White Satin, by The Moody Blues I Am Woman, by Helen Reddy You're So Vain, by Carly Simon TELEVISION The Aunty Jack Show Cilla Number 96 The Great Temptation Young Talent time POLITICIANS Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam Premier: Sir Robert Askin Price of a dozen eggs: $1.56 IN THE NEWS The new Labor Government ends Australia's military involvement in the Vietnam War and arranges the release of Francis James from a prison in China. Unions campaign to impose bans on US services and goods until the US Agrees to a Vietnamn cease-fire. The trial of the "Watergate seven" begins in Washington, and negotiotions for compesatio n for children deformed by the drug Thalidomide begin in London. A 12-day strike by oil tanker drivers results in a fuel shortage that brings Sydney buses toa standstill. The payment of the widow 's pension is extended to single mothers and deserted de facto wives.
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald