Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Page B

(tall and golden-haired). His monastic flat had become a greenroom, with fronds fanning up from fireplace, windows and walls. ‘Lovely girls,’ Kevin said as we were introduced. (It was his generic term for all young women.)
    When they were leaving, I followed the lovely girls down the stairs, held onto the handlebars belonging to the taller one and asked what she was doing over the Christmas holidays. She said she’d be in Melbourne. I said I would be too. And here we go again:
    â€˜Perhaps we could … at some stage while you were there …’
    â€˜Meet?’ That was the word I was after, but she looked like Botticelli’s Venus and my legs looked skinny in my baggy shorts. ‘Perhaps I could …’ Venus waited patiently for the punch line—‘Give me a ring? I don’t have the number. I’m staying with a friend.’ (A boyfriend, what else?)
    Knowing I had no hope, I battled on. ‘Could I give you mine, then?’ (Don’t call us, we’ll call you.) She wrote it down, and then floated away, as if the bicycle was airborne.
    Every day during that long summer, I hoped for a call. And if she did ring, I worried, she might get my mother. ‘Barry? You want Barry? Who am I speaking to?’
    Uncalled, I sought distraction in literature. Encouraged by the publication of a short story in an ephemeral literary magazine called Direction (four issues) I wrote another, about Burke and Wills, which took as long to appear in Southerly as the duo did to cross the continent.
    Desmond O’Grady, friend and rival, was matching me—he too was in Direction (he was associate editor, so he got himself in twice in the opening issue, one under the unlikely pseudonym of James Desmond) and in Southerly too.
    We were together in prose, and together in drama. Earlier in the fifties we’d seen Lorca, Ben Jonson and Sophocles at the tiny Arrow Theatre in South Melbourne, run by (and whenever possible starring) Frank Thring—the only camp Oedipus I’ve ever seen. Verse drama was the fashionable mode. We were dazzled by Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning , bored by T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral , and prepared to suspend enough disbelief to accept gangsters speaking in verse (Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset )—with the genre put under greatest strain in Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly , as performed at the university’s Union Theatre. When Felix Raab as Ned fell with a crash, his pentameters roaring trapped around his helmet, pathos became bathos, and muted titters could be heard.
    There had to be another way, and in Australia it was Ray Lawler who found it. At the end of 1955, when the phone had stayed silent and hope abandoned, I saw Summer of the Seventeenth Doll , and witnessed a revelation—not in the play’s form (a conventional three-acter) but in what Lawler had done with it. Here were working-class characters speaking gruff working-class language, but when Lawler put an electrical charge through it, its very resistance made the words glow like a filament.
    There were gasps of audience recognition as the rough language poured out—not of themselves but of the working-class types who, in those days, still lived in Carlton. Frissons swept through us as we heard forbidden words—bastard, bloody, bugger—that only seven years before, in Sumner Locke Elliott’s Rusty Bugles , had to be changed, under threat of prosecution, to stinker, mug and dimwit.

Vincent’s Powders
    hen it was back to Maryborough. I took over Kevin Keating’s flat, and Brian Sharp, a fellow teacher and friend, moved into my old room below. He soon had inmates complaining of what Mrs Gillies called ‘that awful music’. It was Sibelius, and he taught me to revere him (I could hear it upstairs). I went to Melbourne less often, and plunged into Proust.
    On Friday 23 November, distant Melbourne suddenly