Re-living in the Seventies

In late 2021, as he moved into assisted care, the Australian writer Frank Moorhouse donated his decades-long collection of anthologies of Australian writing to Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. He died not long after in June 2022. The Frank Moorhouse Reading Room was established as a tribute to his lifelong advocacy on behalf of Australian writers and writing: his work towards fair pay and copyright ownership for all Australian writers, and his commitment to diverse voices, progressive thinking, and social justice.  

As part of this essay stream, we invite writers to help us unpack this singular archive, spotlighting the intergenerational concerns and affiliations through which Australian literature is constantly being shaped and reshaped. This essay is supported by a residency program made possible by our partnership with The Whitlam Institute and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. 

Skyhooks’ ‘Living in the Seventies’ is the first track on their 1974 album of that name. Even if you weren’t around then, you’re sure to have heard it since, probably accompanying a nostalgic montage. If you were, you might also know the second track on the album, ‘Whatever Happened to the Revolution’.  The decade was not even half over, and the band was already disillusioned. We all got stoned, and it drifted away.

I was born in the seventies, and I’ve recently been back there in my mind, taking books down from the shelves of the Frank Moorhouse Reading Room at Western Sydney University and reading them in the former home of Gough and Margaret Whitlam. Sitting in the bright sunlight of the living room, beneath a photo of Gough celebrating his election win in 1972, I was transported to the social world of friendships, households, sexual and romantic relationships, comradeship, parties, pubs, restaurants, conferences and publications, jokes, and forgotten ways of being, all preserved in the pages of a worn and fragile copy of Days of Wine and Rage. With contributors ranging from David Malouf and Les Murray to Wendy Bacon and Rex Mortimer, the book anthologises writing from the seventies, featuring pieces written for magazines and journals, alongside book extracts, poems, and images. Moorhouse was the editor, but also a contributor and interlocutor, introducing and contextualising his selections. Days of Wine and Rage includes a series of photographs, mostly groups of people, some posed, some candid, a visual confirmation that the emphasis in this collection is on relationships and scenes – the milieu rather than the individual. It closes with a list written by Moorhouse, ‘Events of a Decade: a personal chronology’. The opening entry for 1970 is ‘For the first time an Aboriginal Dance company tours Australia professionally’, and an entry for 1971 notes a doubling of arts funding by John Gorton (though modest in comparison to what the Whitlam government would do for writers), but the list also includes apparently trivial events: ‘Jeans designed exclusively for women come onto the market’ and ‘Photographs of Gough Whitlam show that he is no longer using hair oil and is, perhaps, blow-drying his hair’.

I’d been enjoying Frank Moorhouse’s writing since I was still at school, reading short story anthologies borrowed from the library. At the time, I was trying to travel forward into adulthood. Surely it would make sense once I got there. Now I was reading back into the world I was born into, the seventies, looking for the traces of a revolutionary process in the Frank Moorhouse Reading Room and Whitlam House time capsules. I didn’t make the trip alone. Alongside Days of Wine and Rage, I read historian Jenny Hocking’s The Palace Letters and journalist Brian Toohey’s Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State, with its chapters on ‘The Whitlam Era’, hoping to learn more about the Whitlam government while I stayed in the house. And as it turned out, reading about Anglo-American pressure on an Australian government also provided new insight into Moorhouse’s work.  

Hocking’s focus in The Palace Letters is on the principle that Australians should have access to the documents of their own history. She tells the story of the court case that eventually resulted in the public release of a collection of letters between the then Governor General, Sir John Kerr, and Queen Elizabeth II’s Private Secretary, effectively correspondence with the Queen herself. The Dismissal is most often framed as a domestic constitutional crisis in the form of a power struggle between the Prime Minister, the Governor General, and the man who would replace Whitlam as Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser. But Hocking’s archival research and historical analysis in both The Dismissal Dossier, which collected all the evidence prior to the release of the letters, and the Letters, and in subsequent interviews, make clear the role of the Palace and the British establishment. In ‘Events of a Decade’, Moorhouse notes for 1974: 

In his book, Brian Toohey discusses tensions around defence policy and the role of both United States and Australian intelligence services in Australia. He also reminds his readers of the Loans Affair, a financial scandal centred on Rex Connor, then Member for Wollongong and Minister for Minerals and Energy. Giving the inaugural Connor Oration in 1979, Whitlam said that ‘Connor knew more about minerals and energy at home and abroad than any person in the Parliament’. Connor’s aphorism, ‘life is an equation in hydrocarbons’, was a remark that reminded his audience of his knowledge of chemistry (a pursuit he had to abandon to support his family after his father’s death) and his materialist politics. Forged in the leftist milieux and heavy industries of Wollongong, his was a worldview that understood the power of mine workers and the minerals their labour extracted. His energy and resources policy would have disrupted global capital’s customary access to mineral resources on this continent and, like the defence and foreign policies of the time, created difficulties for the United States. Toohey reminds us that, while many saw the Loans Affair as evidence of dodgy dealings or poor judgement, an ASIO officer told The Bulletin in 1976 that there were senior intelligence people who suspected some CIA involvement. In Toohey’s account at least, security, defence and economic concerns were matters of negotiation rather than an outright break with American policy. But the scandal foreshadowed the potential problems for the United States should it continue to deal with a less compliant Australia. While Toohey does not go so far as to say that the United States was directly involved in the Dismissal, he does say that Washington and senior US intelligence officials made several attempts to remove Whitlam. 

Moorhouse was part of the political and social movements that helped deliver the Whitlam government’s electoral success. He was especially involved in the anti-censorship campaign, even physically confronting a police officer who had, as he later learned in court, spotted copies of banned publications, Thor and The Little Red Schoolbook, in a car:  

Moorhouse was connected to socialist and anarchist groups before settling – or coming as close as he could to settling – on a libertarianism that sometimes sat uneasily with his loose association with the non-Communist left. In an interview with Michael Morton recorded for the ABC in 1980, and replayed as part of a tribute following his death in 2022, Moorhouse said:  

In Days of Wine and Rage, Moorhouse says, teasingly but seriously, that the counter-culture of the 1970s was such that it was used by ‘socialists and revolutionaries […] as a sanctuary, a social accommodation’, where they were ‘accepted and even listened to […] while the society at large [didn’t]’. Immersed in counter-cultural Sydney, Moorhouse had friends, colleagues and networks in the Whitlam government and in the media, universities, film and literary circles – as well as socialist, communist, and revolutionary friends. The latter likely agreed with Skyhooks’ ‘Whatever happened to the revolution / Everybody thought we could win with a vote / So the band went home without playin’ a note’, and initially, Moorhouse had low expectations of the new Labor government. He wrote a piece for The Digger in December 1972, ‘I Say Whitlam Doesn’t Matter’. It’s reproduced in Days of Wine and Rage, with Moorhouse remembering his younger self ‘looking for a refinement to the standard libertarian political position’ while also ‘proving myself in the eyes of the tribal elders’. But a few years later, lunching with Donald Horne, he finds himself changed, 

‘Protective’ enough that they both participated in demonstrations against the Dismissal and wrote books in response to what Horne described oxymoronically as ‘a constitutional coup-d’etat’. Horne’s The Death of the Lucky Country grappled with the Dismissal in the terms of post-war settlement and in the political and economic context of the oil crisis, while Moorhouse produced what has been described as both a short story collection and a novella, Conferenceville.

I’d previously read Conferenceville as a comedy of manners, its historical setting incidental. The temptation to treat Australian history as a joke is rarely resisted, and Conferenceville is funny, but on this, my third reading, it cut deeper, had become a study of a post-Dismissal malaise. Both Horne’s and Moorhouse’s books were published in 1976, and there is a reference to The Death of the Lucky Country in Conferenceville: 

This argument, voiced by the narrator of a piece of fiction, goes further than Horne in The Death of the Lucky Country. Horne is frustrated by what he regards as a disillusioned citizenry failing to insist on a solution to the crisis in the form of a republic and a new constitution. Moorhouse’s presentation of the post-Dismissal situation is more expansive, complex and ambiguous, less prescriptive, than Horne’s analysis. Moorhouse doesn’t try and fix the rules so much as understand them. And his interest extends beyond formalised rules into relations of power and social practices. As he said to Michael Morton: ‘I’m interested in what I call elusive transformation. I think there are a lot of changes going on that we can’t quite analyse and detect.’ 

One of Moorhouse’s most consistent and effective techniques in this project is that of freely combining fictional and non-fictional characters and events. Conferenceville is narrated in the first-person by a character who is a writer. There is a temptation to identify the narrator as Moorhouse, to assume that we, as readers, have access to Moorhouse’s thoughts and feelings, even as the narrator’s version of events is set against snippets of conversation, cryptic remarks, hints, and jokes that offer alternative, sometimes contradictory, interpretations. The attentive reader cannot easily reconcile the competing meanings.  

There is a section in Days of Wine and Rage called ‘Taking Positions’, in which Moorhouse collects ‘Marxist pieces’, alongside pieces on feminism, a reflection from a born-again Christian, and a profile of a conservative academic, Leonie Kramer. Moorhouse’s use of the ‘position’ in Days of Wine and Rage sheds light on what he means by ‘position’ in Conferenceville. Early on, our narrator laments ‘sometimes I had a position, and sometimes I couldn’t find it again. Oh well.’ Conferenceville, as I discover on re-reading, is a quest narrative, with the object of the quest the narrator’s ‘position’. As a reader, I think of ‘position’ in terms of politics – the narrator’s beliefs or world view – and, more deeply, as the subject position or class of our narrator, ‘position’ as one’s job or role in the social order. It’s not a simple matter of choice.  Our narrator has friendships, alliances, and needs; shared and divergent interests. In a scene where the narrator talks with a young admirer (and eventual denigrator in the course of their conversation), he is dismayed by the ways in which he has been read, ‘I was beginning to think to myself that I may be non-directive but I didn’t think I was this far open to interpretation’. Even if you find your position, it can be misinterpreted.  

Conferenceville is also full of the body’s positions and dispositions – food, sex, sleep – and the constant status games involved in getting those things in the world of the conference. The narrator has a special vulnerability as a writer, his material and social capital especially precarious. This is brought home to him on the flight to the conference when a fellow passenger – who will be chairing the session in which our narrator is to give his paper – namechecks Ray Mathew. In 2025, I can look up this reference on the internet. In 1976, there were, no doubt, readers with sufficient knowledge of Australian literature to recognise the name of a writer who was highly regarded in the forties and fifties, but moved to New York in the sixties and never recaptured his earlier success. Before he has even arrived, the narrator has been reminded that his identity and his status are uncertain, dependent in part on his performance at events like the conference he is about to attend.  

Through the plot of Conferenceville, the narrator negotiates uncomfortable and embarrassing, as well as easeful and pleasurable, social relations. At the opening session of the conference, there is a protest against the inclusion of a keynote speaker, Easton. As the reader will learn, though our narrator does not yet know, Easton is rumoured to be a CIA operative involved in the ousting of the Whitlam government. The conference chair decides to have police evict the protestors, and a meeting is hastily convened in response to this action. The meeting is held at lunchtime; those in attendance are missing lunch. Our narrator is hungry and uncertain of his position, buffeted by the skilful tactics of the old conference hands, by his desire to be thought well of by the younger, more militant participants, and by the contradictions he discovers in his leftist and libertarian politics – he is for free speech, and therefore inclined to be against the silencing of Easton, but not in favour of the forced eviction of the protesters by police. Others in the room suffer no such uncertainty, and whether because of self-interest, settled ideology, national identity or class consciousness, they have a position, and can manoeuvre accordingly.  

It’s only when our narrator takes the stage to give his paper that his anxiety diminishes. Shielded by his notes and references and looking out at the conference audience, he becomes aware that the fifty or so people who had attended the lunchtime meeting are a very small minority of the nine hundred or so attendees, and that the conference as a whole has settled into conservative inertia on the questions he has struggled with. Some of the reader’s tension is relieved as the narrator delivers his paper without major incident. It’s about broadcast media, and our narrator argues for ‘a devolution of control’ and a ‘diverse media’. Here at last he feels secure, a dominant voice, as he calls for multiplicity.  

While the risks of taking a position at the conference are mostly the threat of embarrassment and exclusion, a game played at an informal conference party is a reminder that the stakes can be much higher. In the game ‘Holocaust’, each person at the party is assigned a social and political position in 1930s Germany, supposedly analogous to their position in 1970s Australia. The initiator of the game outlines the choice of actions available to each person, and their likely fate. The game is interrupted by a face at a window. It may or may not be Easton’s; Easton may or may not be a spy; and the narrator may or may not have overheard Easton having a conversation that included the word ‘shlaudemann’ – not, as he discovers, a word at all, but a name, the name of a deputy to the United States Ambassador in Chile at the time of the overthrow of the elected socialist government in 1973. The reference to that event, and to the military dictatorship that came to and was still then in power, reminds the reader of 1976 that violent repression is not safely confined to the past. 

Outside the conference, the narrator watches office workers kissing in the street; he picks up the phone and a crossed line means he overhears a woman talking about her husband’s health; he chats to a sex worker about her plans to go on holiday or buy a flat; at a party in the college residence, he reads the private letters of a student on an air force scholarship. For all Frank’s advocacy for openness, there’s a poignancy in the furtiveness of these scenes. The sociality of the everyday world intrudes, offering glimpses of an eventual release from the closed social world of the conference and its attendees. But when he does eventually escape, the narrator only finds himself in another closed world – as the lunch guest of another conference-goer. The meal is enjoyed at an exclusive club for an elite who would ‘permit no one else to govern’. There’s a portrait of James Macarthur in the lobby, in case we’re in any doubt about the origins of this class in Australia.  Over lunch, the narrator and his friend converse companionably with their host who tells them the club keeps revolvers in a glass case ‘for when revolution breaks out’. Is it a joke? Funny or not, the class who would permit no-one else to govern understands revolution as an event for which they are prepared (perhaps even more so than the class struggling from below). The closing chapter of Conferenceville sees our narrator comfortable at last, sitting in Moorhouse’s real-life favourite restaurant, reading the last book in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series. He’s waiting for two friends, a fictional version of Moorhouse’s real-life friend, Richard Hall, and a character called Friedman. Hall was a journalist and for a time Whitlam’s private secretary. To the best of my knowledge, Friedman is not based on a real-life person. He has been sacked from the public service, and rumours about his sacking circulated at the conference. The narrator decides he doesn’t care if the rumours – various kinds of financial misdemeanours – are true or not. ‘He was an old mate. We’d swum in the Shoalhaven River together.’ After dinner the men go their separate ways.  

The conference is over, and the narrator returns to familiar scenes, but things are not just as they were. He hails a taxi, thinking of the post-conference gossip his friend Hall has relayed to him, including the claims that our narrator has ‘changed his position’. He mentally rejects the accusation, saying to himself that ‘I knew my position very well, it was one of those days when my identity had clarity’. At that moment, the taxi driver expresses his disgust at the fact that our narrator has chosen to sit in the back of the cab, supposedly out of a sense of social superiority. The writer, hoping to avoid further strife, changes cabs, once again sitting in the back, his physical position at least remaining consistent. And for the rest of his journey, he considers the offer made by his lunch host, to put him up for membership at the establishment club. In the moment, he had refused the offer, but now he decides to accept – then changes his mind again, reflecting that doing so would be ‘heresy for heresy’s sake’. It’s a strange kind of suspense Moorhouse creates here, but very effective. When our narrator decides against literally ‘joining the club’, we are relieved but still uncertain. The narrator claims to know his position, but the reader is left to work it out as best they can.  

I can see now that it’s unfair, and unnecessary, to look for a stable political position in the work of a writer who worked on shifting subjectivities and multiplying contradictions. I didn’t know I was so anxious to find that stability until I gave up on it, in the Whitlam House.   

Rex Connor knew that an equation is a way of describing a chemical reaction, a change. The equations of social relationships are too complex for us to learn as formulae, and besides we can’t separate those relations from ourselves – they are the making of us. Through a long life writing various forms of prose, Moorhouse worked at understanding the ways that people interact with and produce one another – the accommodations and conflicts as well as the mutual delight and appreciation, the real stuff of the social world. Understanding how subjectivities are formed and re-formed in relation to others, rather than treating characters as having essential qualities, was the work of his life. It’s what creates the drama and the comedy in Conferenceville, a book full of the possibility of change, of ‘elusive transformation’. It’s not necessarily revolutionary, but it can be.  

Nick Southall has compared revolution to ‘a river of struggles that ebb and flow’. Something that never ‘drifts away’. It’s raining hard on the east coast today, no doubt the Shoalhaven River is rising, shifting the earth, unsettling foundations. I think about the real Moorhouse and his characters swimming in the Shoalhaven, in the past and in imagination, being pushed by the current, and making currents of their own, as they swim.