(Above: a copy of the front page of the dangerous text discussed below, mine for a knockdown gold coin donation, courtesy of the cat people).
The other day I was passing the cat people shop, and decided on a whim to drop in.
Who knows, some days the best brains in the Labor party might just wake up and think and wonder why they're in a minority government at the moment ...
You never know what people drop off to help save the cats (cat protection society of nsw op shop) and there's none of this 'won't someone think of the children instead of the cats' nonsense. It's cats to the left, cats to the right, even some centrist cats ...
Besides, there's always the chance of seeing local Enmore celebrity Antony Green strolling along the main drag before his next important job - calling the slaughter of the NSW Labor government - and any purchase will help keep a cat in food and fur and purr.
Lordy, what should I stumble on, but vile filth and pornography.
I immediately picked it up and rushed out with it - as cheap and as deadly as a tin of cat food - before the old ladies personning the counter had a fainting fit. (No diminution suggested - statistical data collected on the women fronting the counter is that their best years might be in front of them, but the actual number of best years is circumscribed).
Yep, it was an early work by Frank Moorhouse, The Illegal Relatives, on yellowing paper, joined together by a couple of staples, and be-speckled with what once passed for pornographic images, ranging from scribbles in the Picasso sketching style to sub-Robert Crumb ...
Here's a sample of the surreal. Make of it what you will. Something to do with clocks and cocks:
... and along with the pictures and the stories, a plaintive foreword:
These stories are about the illegal and unacceptable behaviour and thoughts of some of my relatives - inner relatives. I imagine them as a square-nosed, hyperactive, cross-generational, enthusiastically consuming, extended family - very much like the cartoon family of Price in the New Yorker. One of my relatives is Frank, a cousin, a distant cousin, a poet and sociologist - tow of the things I've never wanted to be.
The stories have been published underground and circulated privately because of the obvious legal problems and because of the other harrassments to free communication in this country - booksellers, distributors, the PMG and so on. They are stories which I wanted to get rid of, to have read, so I took the opportunity of publishing in this limited edition and limited way.
At this point, if I can interrupt Frank for a moment, and never mind harassing him about how to spell 'harrassments', I almost fell out of my chair.
The PMG! This was a vintage book. By golly, according to the its short wiki, that wretched monolith and its mail tampering ways were only disaggregated in 1975 into Telecom Australia and Australia Post. (here).
This was a heartfelt plea for freedom from back in day when Gough Whitlam strode the earth like a free-thinking colossus ... Or perhaps even earlier, back into the sixties, way back when the Push meant more than how to start a car, before Don Chipp, Liberal, who actually acted like a liberal, lifted the ban on much printed material once caught in the censorship snare, from Playboy for men who read it for the articles to others who read Lady Chatterley's Lover for the ...
Well actually I can't think of reason for reading Lawrence's work ...
It had to be banned so that the cavortings of John Thomas and Lady Jane became a boring duty rather than a pleasure ... I always suspected that the articles were some kind of feint or front as well ... since anyone with their nose in a Playboy seemed mainly capable of grunting ...
Back to Frank:
Censorship is tiring for a writer who works in the sexual badlands. It is tiring because of the labour which has to go into getting the stories to the readers, the exhaustion of considering legal and social reactions. It also has other problems especially for someone like myself conditioned to seek social approval for my work and the defeating of this conditioning can also be expensive in terms of psychic energy. Naturally, in cold reality, I do not expect the society to love me, to reward me, for going places it doesn't want me to and for distressing them ...
In due course Frank came in from the cold, and became a respected novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, though in the publisher's note, also included, it seems that these early stories managed to shock the authorities in Queensland. What a surprise ...
And then at the end there's this poignant note:
This book is published illegally and consequently the protection of the law on copyright is hardly expected, or sought. If the stories are reproduced the author would appreciate knowledge of it, and a copy. He would, of course, appreciate payment even more, since contrary to popular misconceptions, banned writing doesn't pay.
Well we won't be ripping Frank off, but back then it must have been hard to find him to pay him, since ordinary publication details are missing from the booklet ... and I wonder why ...
All in all, it was a fun find, and tremendously nostalgic.
Coming as it did like a blast from the past, from back when pornography really meant something, and stood for things, and many spent time ferreting out banned literary works (too numerous to mention) as a way of exploring the world around them. And some, like Frank, even took to writing about sex, even if it was in a sedate way, before settling in for the long haul at the League of Nations ...
It all seems so long ago, and a storm in a teacup, since despite the moral outrage, western civilisation didn't decline and fall as a result of the work of Don Chipp and others that followed. If anything, the real problem is the righteousness and prudery of sundry conservative religions and their notion of uncovered meat as an explanation of why women cop a very hard time (ever wanted to drive a car in Saudi Arabia?) ...
These days it's exceptionally droll that you can find Frank's outrageous dangerous underground work sitting lost and alone amongst the little old ladies running the op shop for the cat people (no diminution is intended - scientific study based on random sampling suggests the ladies of the cat shop are inclined not just to be old, but also a little short of height).
But what have we here?
Yep, the PMG mind set still runs strong in the Labor heartland, and once again we have Julia Gillard showing she doesn't have a clue about the intertubes:
"My fundamental outlook is this: it is unlawful for me as an adult to go to a cinema and watch certain sorts of content, it's unlawful and we believe it to be wrong," Gillard said in a press club address.
"If we accept that then it seems to me that the moral question is not changed by the medium that the images come through."
The moral question? Tell that one to Frank.
"If we accept that then it seems to me that the moral question is not changed by the medium that the images come through."
The moral question? Tell that one to Frank.
What about the practical, the technical, and the sensible questions ...?
The intertubes is just a giant cinema, and the valiant Labor party is going to censor the billions of pages and millions of images on the intertubes and give them ratings or ban them?
Good luck with that.
These days of course Frank - if he wasn't scribbling another bit of Grand Days - would be releasing his illegal thoughts on the intertubes, and to hell with the PMG.
Meanwhile, Gillard shows that she just doesn't get it.
It's simply too tiresome rehearsing and rehashing all the arguments. Let's just settle for the good news that the current make up of the parliament means that the great big new filter is on hold until the next election ... And no harm in that.
But it seems, since Gillard has swallowed the Conroy kool aid, and taken to blathering about the moral question and presumably the moral imperative, and the need to think about the children as well as the cats, that we're in for further bouts of righteousness about a filter that won't work. Just as the PMG couldn't stop the pernicious Frank ...
And so, as well as saying bah humbug, and saying to hell with Stephen Conroy, we now have to to say to hell with Julia Gillard, and her silliness about the intertubes being some vast kind of X rated movie theatre from the nineteen sixties, and her mistaken assumption that the grand filter can and will be just some kind of taxonomic assessment of images ...
Who knows, some days the best brains in the Labor party might just wake up and think and wonder why they're in a minority government at the moment ...
Keep thinking best brains, who knows you might even catch up with Frank in his subversive days ...
(Below: the back page of Frank Moorhouse's dangerous publication, courtesy of the cat people. Quick, shut down the screen if you're at work, and whatever you do, don't click on it to make it bigger. Why that could see this site closed down for circulating dangerous, subversive work not approved by the Post Master General. And please explain: why was there never a Post Mistress General?)
Dear Dorothy
ReplyDeleteI am a devoted lurker, and turn to you as often as possible for enlightenment. You have made a small error in this post – an error of omission: The Illegal Relatives was pubished without Frank Moorhouse's authorisation, as announced on the first page of text after his introduction. The unnamed publisher explains how he decided to strip the prima donna (ie author) of his privilege (ie deciding whether something he's written can be published or not). My disapporival of such behaviour didn't stop me from buying a copy back then, and holding onto it since.
Yes, it's true, and the printer did say:
ReplyDeleteNow it's up to you to decide if it's "Art"; if it has the necessary quota of "Community Standards of literary value"; if FRANK is a prima donna; if I am a disgusting soup merchant:.
After so ripped it untimely from Frank's hands, and printed it. But I see that Frank did say back in July 1997 in The Adelaide Review:
"This power (censorship) to decide what people may or may not say to each other directly denies to an individual the opportunity to judge and assess for themselves." (http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives/undercover/013495.html).
My view is that the printer was simply facilitating Frank's deepest inner desires, and quite rightly took the Hollywood approach to the donna's quivering equivocation. He simply stopped the author from an act of self-censorship, of the kind common amongst the minions of Murdoch.
Quite simply, the unknown printer is a hero, while the author - by trying to stop us from giving us the opportunity to judge and assess for ourselves - was definitively a donna.
If Frank now disavows it, let him polish it a little, as proposed by the printer:
After all if FRANK were to change "The Illegal Relatives" in a later publication - Good - We'll be able to see the difference and see that his talent is human after all. No miracle! but plain hard work ...
Welcome to the pond, blood brother and holder of the sacred text ... It's a funny old world ...
Actually there's some quite engaging sex in the League of Nations books, too. Much subtler than that back-page sheila and her power point, but.
ReplyDelete[NB this is a pirated edition of three short stories, printer unknown, illustrated in collaboration with artist Jenny Coopes with additional drawings by Peter ----? added by the printer. This was planned to be an illegal or ‘underground’ publication by Coopes and Moorhouse as an action against censorship and as a way of getting his stories out to a new readership and perhaps to make some return through private sales. In 1973 the Whitlam government stopped censorship of the printed word and the states dropped their court actions against the underground newspaper Thor (with which Coopes and Moorhouse were associated). The printer against the wishes of Moorhouse (see the introduction to the booklet by the printer), went ahead with the publication and sold copies privately and through the Sydney bookseller Bob Gould (who later paid a royalty directly to Moorhouse for the 100 copies he had in his shop). The booklet contains ‘Watchtown’, ‘The Oracular Stories’ (which has three titled parts to it), and ‘The Alter Ego Interpretation’. Revised versions of these three stories appeared in Tales of Mystery and Romance, Angus and Robertson (London), 1977. The sub-titles in the ‘Oracular Stories’ were removed and ‘Watchtown’ was retitled in this and the subsequent editions as ‘The Mystery of the Time Piece’. Tales of Mystery and Romance has had five subsequent editions. Ignoring The Illegal Relatives booklet, Tales of Mystery and Romance was Moorhouse’s fourth published book.]
ReplyDelete