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  We lunched after arriving and walked up a dirt road to the escarpment where my grandfather had struggled with his ‘not ben strong enough’ horse. The modawa tree had a lush canopy of leaves. I stood beside it – a large spreading tree, about 12 metres high, surrounded by a circle of stones – as a pilgrim took photographs with my phone.

  THE SYDNEY PUSH

  I started at the Law School in 1959, in a building since demolished. It was in the city, ‘downtown’ from the university campus. Law was a new discipline and way of thinking. I had no ambition to excel. All I wanted was an interesting livelihood, paying me enough to have a family and write poetry.

  Although I coasted through my four years at Law School, I always went to classes. Examinations were closed book, and held on the main campus. My favourite examination room was in the medical faculty, where we entered through a foyer with glass cabinets displaying pickled heads and diseased body parts in jars of formaldehyde. I sometimes stayed up at night before an exam without going to sleep, memorising lengthy written lists of case names. I was always afraid I might forget critical names during the ten minute reading time before an exam, when putting pen to paper was not allowed. So I waited outside, reading my list. When the ten minutes expired, I entered the examination room, hundreds of case names fluttering through my mind, and hurriedly wrote down those that were relevant to the exam.

  The Law School had several outstanding teachers. A shy, slightly built man, Pat Lane, described by Michael Kirby (brother of my friend Donald) as ‘brilliant and cerebral’, taught us constitutional law from a black letter, literalist view point. At the start of a lecture he would chalk up on the blackboard a little cartoon head and pair of hands, staring over a wall at the class. For me, constitutional law was the most intellectually challenging area of the law.

  I was not as impressed by Julius Stone as some were. His lengthy, self-published texts were turgidly written. In lectures he boasted how he had originated the concept of a Washington to Moscow hot-line.

  Ross Parsons was the professor I admired most. (I got to know him well thirty years later.) He distributed fifty or so pages of material for commercial law where he had cleverly chosen pairs of court decisions with similar facts but in which the courts had come to opposite decisions. The students had to work out why there was a different outcome. Parsons, unlike Stone, was selfeffacing. Many of us underestimated him because of his quiet and studious manner.

  In about my final year of law, Parsons conducted a two-month pilot course on tax law. It was the first time this subject was taught at Sydney University’s Law School, perhaps the first time in an Australian law faculty. Many keener students enrolled. I thought it was irrelevant for my future career.

  My first day at Law School felt like a return to an all-boys high school. There were no female lecturers and only four or five female students in a class of about 100. I made frequent trips to the Sydney University campus to have coffee with friends in student refectories where there were as many girls as boys.

  In 1960 I became an articled clerk with a law firm. With my modest wage, I had begun taking girls out (in addition to S), although I was still lacking in confidence. I was given a small desk in an office with an employed solicitor in his late fifties – a quiet and courteous man. His very pretty young secretary, who wore an engagement ring, sat in the room with us. One day she surprised me, saying, ‘You seem very unsure of yourself with girls. You shouldn’t feel that way … I can say this because I’m engaged. I would be attracted to you.’

  In June 1961 Brian Jenkins, the friend who introduced me to Lex Banning, suggested I drink with him one Friday night at the Royal George Hotel (now the Slip Inn). The George was a workman’s pub, smelling of tobacco and spilled beer, where fights might break out. The walls of the backroom were hot pink with a Robert Hughes mural of expressionist figures blocked out in black. It was there that members of the Sydney Push drank.

  Push members were known for hard drinking, methedrine use (an early amphetamine) and free love (as it was then called), and were intolerant of outsiders or ‘Alfs’. The nucleus of the Push was the Sydney Libertarians, who began as followers of John Anderson, a professor of philosophy at Sydney University. Unusually for such a group, the Push was sceptical about all political positions, left and right. Despite the Robert Hughes mural, Push members were not interested in art, literature or music, except folk singing – Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie rather than Joan Baez, who was suspiciously glamorous.

  My first Friday night at the George was daunting. I was an ‘Alf ’. I was relieved to be under the protection of Brian, who had been drinking there for some months. That night I noticed a girl with a pale, translucent face, high cheek bones and dark lustrous eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a plait, and was densely black, unusually so for a Caucasian woman – her face like a Noh mask. I do not remember Brian’s reply when I asked who she was. I would have liked to become her friend and suspected I would have to be a distant admirer.

  I arranged with Brian to go back to the George the following Friday, being two days after I had turned twenty-one (not a birthday I celebrated). That week my mother and Diana went on their annual holiday to Melbourne, leaving my father and me in the Gordon house. That night I met the girl with a face like a Noh mask. Her name was Jan Miller. ( Jan spelled her name in various ways – sometimes Janne and sometimes Millar – she later told me her actual name was Janet Campbell Muirhead.)

  When the hotel shut at ten we went back with a group to the student house where she lived, a narrow two-storey workman’s terrace in Forbes Street, Woolloomooloo. We were soon alone together in the sparsely furnished downstairs living room, lit by a single bare light bulb. I told her I was an articled clerk with a law firm and wrote poetry. She was from Melbourne, she said. She had a child and it had been adopted out ‘to good parents’. She had come to Sydney several months ago and had had an affair with one of the students who lived in the house. That was over now, and they were letting her stay on.

  She pointed to scars on her wrists. ‘The cuts are across my wrists. It’s what I do. If I were trying to commit suicide I’d slit the veins lengthwise. Then they couldn’t bind them up … Tell me one of your poems.’ I recited a poem from a cycle about Adam and Eve:

  Adam spat out a pip.

  The bright red apples which

  Had trembled in the tree

  Were gone.

  A small bird sang

  Cheep-cheep and whirred and flew

  Down upon Adam’s shoulder,

  Bubbling and talkative,

  And Adam smiled and took

  The bird and quietly crushed it…

  And so on. I was busily rewriting much of the Old Testament and Greek mythology into poem cycles. Being so prolific, I could rarely remember any of my poems, but I could recall this, because I had written it just a few days earlier. Perhaps when recited slowly by a boy twenty-one years old – taking time to recall each line – to a twenty-year-old girl at one o’clock in the morning, the poem was not as excruciating as I find it now.

  I offered to leave. She left the room and came back in a red nightdress and said, ‘Tuck me into bed’. I explained I had never slept with anyone before, and followed her into her small bedroom at the back of the house. She pointed with embarrassment to the scar on her abdomen from the caesarean.

  We had unprotected sex in her narrow single bed and fell asleep with the light on. Near dawn I woke, hearing strange noises, like bird calls, that seemed to come from her throat. Some hours later we both woke up. She asked me if I had heard her grinding her teeth while she was asleep – that was the strange sound I had heard.

  Children were playing in the back lane outside. It was a sunny day and they were calling out in Italian. I suggested we go out and spend the morning together. She said no, and we kissed good-bye. ( Jan often did not go out until late in the day. It was one of the reasons why she was so pale.) I found a public phone booth and telephoned my father. ‘It doesn’t worry m
e, son’, he replied. ‘You do what you like.’

  I walked to the Botanic Gardens. I was in a state of shock and confusion. I drank a glass of lemonade, to calm myself down, sitting at an outdoor table in the winter sunlight. My painfully unreciprocated relationship with S, the blonde Catholic girl, would have to end. I was free from her, and free from my mother. I would come and go as I liked – I did not have to come home every night. It was like the moment of freedom when I was seven years old and swam in deep water in the Manly baths. The irony of reciting a poem called ‘The Fall of Man’ to Jan when I was about to be seduced did not occur to me.

  The following weekend I slept with her in a double bed upstairs in the Forbes Street house. ‘You’re quite good’, she told me with an encouraging laugh. This was our second time. It was also the last.

  Push women were not supposed to have sex outside the Push, although this was acceptable for Push men (particularly if the non-Push women or ‘Daphnes’ or ‘Daphs’ were inducted into the Push and became available to other Push members). I was still an ‘Alf ’. There was the incident when Darcy Walters called out to Jan ‘Hi virgin-fucker’ a few days after our first night together. There was a later incident when Kathy McMullen called out to me, as I was entering the backroom of the George to wait for Jan, ‘Go home to ya mother!’ Kathy had married the man who was the father of Jan’s child.

  Anne Coombs’s 1996 book about the Push, Sex and Anarchy, says Jan ‘took up with’ me soon after she ‘left Paddy [McGuinness]’. Paddy confessed to Coombs that the reason Jan left him was that he ‘was getting heavy’ with her. He told Coombs:

  She was very independent and the men classically used to get possessive and Janne classically used to reject the possessiveness. It’s a very interesting theme in literature. It’s a kind of female type that crops up in literature a lot: she was very beautiful, very attractive and very independent.

  Paddy also told Coombs: Janne was one of those figures that was briefly on the scene but had a big impact. She was just a character of considerable importance, not intellectual significance – she pissed off from school when she was about fifteen – but she was important.

  When she was in Melbourne Jan was a friend of Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer. She probably got to know Humphries when she played a lead role in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. (She called herself Millar or Miller after the playwright and to avoid embarrassing her mother.) Greer was yet to be famous, but Jan was an admirer and often spoke about her.

  In her short life Jan may have had twenty or thirty sexual partners – I am only guessing – but she said she never achieved orgasm. I suspect this was not unusual among Push women. This was ironical given that the Push regarded itself as a pioneer of sexual enlightenment. The men who dominated the Push were not interested in human emotions (as distinct from Freudian theory and Reich). Greer had been a member of the Push when she lived in Sydney. When her book The Female Eunuch was published some Libertarians were ‘upset’, according to Coombs, by Greer’s criticism of Freud, and her reference to the Freudians’ ‘proscription’ of the clitoris.

  In 1972 there were two articles in the Libertarians’ Broadsheet magazine criticising Greer. One was headed ‘Germaine Greer’s Misinterpretation of Freud’:

  It is not that one must get rid of clitoral sensitivity, but rather that one must get rid of vaginal anaesthesia … vaginal eroticism is an essential part, even the major part of full adult sexual gratification…

  The other article was headed ‘Women’s Lib and the Vaginal Orgasm’. Both articles were written by men, in effect telling women they had to become aroused through their vagina, rather than their clitoris.

  Greer did not advocate a simple-minded focus on the clitoris, but suggested that male virility without emotional involvement is ‘profoundly desolating’ and ‘sex becomes masturbation in the vagina’.

  I did not become possessive about Jan after our brief sexual liaison, which ended when she became pregnant, and the hat was passed around in the backroom of the George to pay for her abortion. I was not told about this at the time, and still do not know if I was the father, but this may have contributed to the vehemence of Kathy McMullen’s ‘Go home to ya mother’.

  Jan had lost two molar teeth on the left side of her mouth. This gave her a rabbit-like look, startled, beautiful and comical at the same time. The missing molars may have contributed to her slight lisp, which made her small jokes and witty sayings so captivating for a naive young male.

  I continued to see Jan often and brought friends to meet her at the George. We would sit at a small table by the window in the backroom, looking out over the wharves and across the street at a roaring lion about to jump out of a fading blue mural on a brick wall – an advertisement for ‘Richmond Lager’, a long defunct label. Jan adopted the nickname I gave to the spot where we sat – ‘Tiny Tots Corner’. I was still in love with her but had come to realise I did not want a sexual relationship either. I was hoping to find a girlfriend outside the Push.

  I did not have another sexual involvement until more than a year after Jan. I passed my third year law exam at the end of 1961 – only just. I was employed five days a week as an articled clerk with one of the larger law firms and living at home in the Gordon house with my family. Les Murray and I co-edited the 1961 edition of Arna, the annual literary magazine of the Arts Faculty, and began co-editing the 1962 edition of Hermes, Sydney University’s annual literary magazine.

  When I came to the Royal George to see Jan, I formed friendships among the less dialectical Push members, such as Kathy McMullen’s brother Terry, a psychology academic. I was no longer an Alf. In August 1962, with the publication of my Robert Hughes exposé, I was unconditionally accepted into the Push – even briefly popular. But I remained celibate, although I was surrounded by casual sex.

  At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, I was with a group of students drinking one night in the beer garden of the Forest Lodge Hotel, not far from Sydney University. I was only mildly interested in the crisis. My attention was focused on a girl in a silvery grey jacket and skirt. I had seen her before, a friend of friends. But we had not spoken until that night.

  At closing time our group drove off to her flat in the northern suburbs. When the party at her flat was breaking up, I was walking to the door, and she reached up and spoke in my ear, ‘Please stay’. Within minutes we were in bed together. She had contraceptives. We had coffee afterwards. I had no change of clothing for work next day and could not stay. Our relationship must be a secret, she told me. I stood on the Pacific Highway, staring at a red and yellow neon sign for ‘Mortein’ insecticide, and flagged down a taxi.

  Twice in the following week I phoned – but there were always unspecified things she had to do. I realised it was hopeless. I saw her again once, when we met by chance at a party some weeks later. ‘Let’s be friends’, she said.

  For years afterwards when I drove down the highway past her block of flats, I asked myself if I failed by not staying the night – or if she had an involvement that was not going well and I was just an experiment.

  Jan Miller’s father died when she was a baby. She greeted men she liked by touching them lightly on the crotch – this was unusual, even for Push women. At a party one night – I had known her for just a few days – she took me with her into an outdoor toilet while she peed. I was surprised and flattered. One night she decided we would hitchhike to get to the address of a party – I was still a student without a car. The houses she took me to had no curtains or carpets, often just a bare light globe hanging from the ceiling, walls grey and damp, mattresses on the floor and kitchen sinks stacked with unwashed dishes.

  Jan was still living in the Forbes Street house (known as ‘PP’ or ‘Paranoia Palace’) when she died in May 1963. The two men who were the tenants treated her with an avuncular kindness. She had no money to help with their rent and did some housekeeping and washing. It was not always easy sharing a house with an ex-lover, whom
she still loved, and particularly hard (she told me) washing semen stains from his sheets.

  Jan sometimes went without food, surviving on beer and pills. During the two years I knew her, I usually saw her once or twice a week, if she was not seeing a lover. By some strange chance, one of these young men was my father’s solicitor when my father administered Carl’s estate. Some action may have been needed with one of Carl’s tenants, and my father told me his solicitor was ‘a smart young rooster’.

  ‘You’re a smart young rooster!’ Jan called out, when her lover joined us at the Royal George.

  When she was by herself, I took her to dinner, usually at the Athenian Club up a steep flight of stairs. We must have eaten there together almost fifty times. I was always keen to make sure she had food. After one of these meals – Donald Kirby was with us – we were walking down Castlereagh Street and she asked me to give her a piggyback. As she was clambering onto my crouching shoulders, she overbalanced and hit her head on the pavement.

  Jan considered seducing another of my friends (she told me later) when I left them together at the Forbes Street house. Instead they talked, and when he left, he shook her hand, saying: ‘You’re the finest human being I’ve ever met.’

  The implicit hierarchy of the Push was congenial for her. ‘My mum was an old Com’, she used to say. When Jan was young she was a member of the Communist Party’s Eureka Youth League. Coming to Sydney and joining the Push was just swapping hierarchies. I am not sure how Jan’s ‘old mum’, as she called her, became alarmed about her morals. Jan went on a trip with people she knew, I think an older couple and a younger man – they may have been friends from the Eureka Youth League. Jan was only thirteen and insisted nothing had happened on the trip. It had been innocent.