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  Surprisingly for an ‘old Com’, her mother had sent Jan to a Catholic ‘reform school’ for wayward girls next to St Kilda Beach. Every day the girls went to early-morning mass. When Jan fainted one morning, she was dragged outside and hit in the face by older girls. She developed callouses on her knees, working nine hours a day in a steam laundry. The girls slept in a large dormitory and at night heard people on the beach, laughing, talking and drinking. Jan’s mother was on a widow’s pension and sent the nuns a pound every week for her board. She once sent two extra pounds for shoes. The nuns gave Jan second-hand men’s shoes. Months later, her mother found out what was happening and took Jan away.

  By chance Jan met one of her fellow graduates of the ‘reform school’ outside Flinders Street railway station. Her friend had become a prostitute. ‘Most of us’, Jan said, ‘landed up on the streets. I’m the only old girl who made good.’ Although Jan assented to the hierarchy of the Push, in practice she ignored it, unconcerned at what would be said when she seduced a ‘private school boy’, and uninterested in the theoretical discussions in the Libertarian Broadsheet. I was with her one afternoon in the Forbes Street house. Nestor Grivas, the burly Greek printer of the Broadsheet, called in. She delighted in Nestor’s company and his burliness. She showed us a sheet of paper that was completely black. She had spent the previous night inscribing circles on it with a ballpoint pen. To prove she had not eaten for a couple of days she squeezed her stomach and made it rumble and croak – alarmingly. She announced she would boil an egg, and turned the cooking and eating of the egg into a comedy.

  Despite its hierarchical nature, the Push was socially porous. The Libertarians were critical of everything (except being critical, as Professor Anderson remarked to the poet Lex Banning). This included being critical of political activism (until the 1970s). If nothing was sacrosanct, everything was tolerated. People with an eclectic range of views were accepted. One of these was ‘Della’, his nom de plume for satirical pieces in the Broadsheet and which Anne Coombs used for him in Sex and Anarchy.

  Della wore glasses, carefully chosen silk ties and a cream linen suit. When I started going to the Royal George, Della was one of the first Push members to welcome me, as I was young and male. He had an often-discussed fantasy: when he reached his hundredth boy, he would take a group of them out one night on Sydney Harbour in a rowing boat and set the boat alight. Hundreds of candles would be burning and rockets exploding. He would have ‘a Viking’s funeral’. Each week he reported on how the tally was going. Then he got into the high nineties and I heard no more about the Viking’s funeral.

  Della was a master of self-parody. More than once I was standing near a doorway in the Royal George and his arm would shoot out in front of me: ‘You are standing in my line of sight. A most beautiful young man has just come in.’

  He was unusual in having a flat in the central business district. After a party at Bondi he offered a friend of mine a lift back to the city. As he was being dropped off, my friend said he was ‘busting for a piss’. Della suggested using the toilet in his flat. As my friend was relieving himself, Della came in holding a ruler and measured his penis. What would have been offensive from anyone else, Della was able to turn into a comic performance.

  One evening I was talking to Della and a Push academic (a psychologist) at the Newcastle Hotel. Peering around speculatively, Della remarked: ‘There’s nothing much going on tonight. I think I’ll go home, and watch TV and eat a biscuit in bed.’

  The academic, a kind man, enjoyed making carefully phrased jokes: ‘Well, Della, be careful not to get a crumb in your bum’. Della: ‘I’ve had plenty of crumbs in my bum and I could even tolerate you!’

  Jan loved the down-and-outs. She was keen for me to meet the poet Bob Cumming, who gave up the trombone (from which he earned a little money) to be a full-time poet (from which he earned nothing). Eventually she introduced us. He was barely coherent and died not long afterwards.

  One afternoon at the pub it occurred to Jan and some of her girlfriends to have a night out at Luna Park – a forbidden place in my childhood. I found myself next to Jan in a roller-coaster seat, clattering up the first steep ascent of the Big Dipper. We paused at the top and suddenly descended – surrounded by the stereophonic amplification of screams I used to hear as a child in bed at night across the bay.

  Jan had a small plump friend, a prostitute called Chrissy. I was with Jan in the Royal George and she persuaded me to walk with her down Sussex Street to the ‘Bunch o’ Cunts’ – the Maitland and Morpeth Hotel, a waterfront pub then popular with prostitutes. We began drinking with Chrissy and her friends. It was close to dusk and hot. The girls decided to go for a swim. The harbour is a short walk down from the hotel and they stripped to their bras and panties, wading in as the sun set across Darling Harbour. Jan was wearing a black bra. I stood and watched. I did not want to get wet.

  Another evening I had arranged to meet a Canberra diplomat friend at the Royal George. Jan came with us to the Veneziana in Stanley Street. This was a favourite restaurant of mine, with a singing waiter. (I ate there usually with non-Push friends and always ordered bocconcini veneziana with a bottle of riesling.) Before I could stop her, Jan began playing noughts and crosses with a black ball point on the white starched table cloth. In a few seconds it was ruined. Aghast, my friend and I cast sidelong glances at her and continued talking. The management politely ignored what was happening.

  Jan hid her black moods, only occasionally mentioning her hallucinations – petrol bowsers by the side of the road becoming people – brought on by alcohol, pills and foodlessness. I did not criticise her. I hoped one day she would learn some modest selfishness – some part of her enthusiasm for other people might focus on herself.

  In the first part of 1963 Paddy McGuinness began making plans to go to Europe. Jan wanted to go with him and tried to raise money for the fare with raffles in the pub. I was only vaguely aware of these arrangements. I had just started a new job, working as an employed solicitor with the Government Insurance Office.

  Jan’s raffles were unsuccessful. In May 1963 I attended the circuit hearings of the District Court in Cessnock. I was standing on Maitland railway station one night, waiting for a train to Cessnock as Jan, with a group of Push friends, was farewelling Paddy’s ship from the Circular Quay overseas terminal. Jan may not have eaten for some days, or may have been drunk. She stood up on the railing, perhaps to get a better view, and fell through perhaps 9 metres of air onto the concrete wharf.

  I was told of her death when I came back to Sydney later in the week. She survived for a day or so after the fall, but she did not regain consciousness. I did not go to her funeral.

  If I had been with her when she saw Paddy off, I hope I would have watched her every move. We would have eaten together, and a meal might have made her less reckless.

  Jan never saw her child. A white pillow was put over her face at the moment of birth. She had been my closest friend for almost two years. In our conversations, she sometimes referred to herself in the third person as ‘yer old mum’, as though I was her child. Yet she was a few months younger than me. When she died, she was twenty-two.

  I do not know whether I could have stayed her friend, when my life and hers inevitably diverged. I have no photograph of her or even a memento such as her cream fountain pen. Before Jan’s death, Kathy McMullen died of a ruptured uterus in the eighth month of pregnancy. The rebuke Kathy flung at me was just. I was happy to enjoy the entertainments offered by the Push, but not the hardships the core members endured.

  I met Della by chance at a business function more than forty years after the ‘crumb in the bum’ exchange of witticisms. He did not remember his riposte when I repeated it: ‘Did I say that?’

  Della ( January 2016 at a Push reunion): ‘Everybody who was in the Push seems to be writing a book about it. There are too many of them. I shall buy each of their books and select a page at random and read it, and I shall be able to say, “I have r
ead your book”.’

  Towards the end of his life, Darcy Waters had emphysema and needed help from oxygen, but he was still tall and handsome in a grey and frail sort of way. He was a genial man, greatly loved by members of the Push. He telephoned me a couple of times in later years and said he was ‘working on Hughes’. I did not ask what this ‘work’ was, and tried to dissuade him. I said I liked Robert Hughes and respected his success.

  Coombs has an account of Darcy in the 1960s bringing home a young woman for the night. Gill Burnett was sleeping in the next room and heard everything they said and did through a thin partition wall. The woman (later prominent as a feminist) was horrified and angry when she found out.

  Darcy may not have regarded himself as a victim of the Push, but anthropological studies confirm that hunter-gatherer males bond with just one female at a time (although they may engage in serial monogamy). Although the Push advocated sexual freedom, we did not evolve as members of polyamorous groups (according to Alan F Dixson’s Primate Sexuality). Chimpanzees have relatively much bigger testes – to make large volumes of sperm to swamp the sperm of other males. Our small testes indicate we evolved as a monogamous species.

  As well as getting the physiology of sexual stimulation wrong, the Push was unaware of evolutionary history when it rejected our basic social unit: a man taking responsibility for a woman and their children. After Jan’s death I yearned for marriage. It was still some years away.

  STUDEBAKER YEARS

  My articles had been served with a prestigious law firm. Although my work there was of a humble and junior nature, it was for well-known corporations. I was used to briefing barristers who were future Supreme Court and High Court justices – one of them became a Governor-General. In my last year there I sat in an office with another articled clerk and a secretary we shared. The partners, descendants of two long established legal families, arrived and left in chauffeured hire cars, and went sailing on Wednesday afternoons.

  Because of outstanding examination results as a schoolboy and a letter of recommendation from a solicitor who was my sister’s boss, I had been given an entrée to this world of privilege. It did not occur to me that it could all disappear. When I was effectively sacked, the economy was in recession – that was the reason given for letting me go, but my notoriety after the Robert Hughes article may also have helped, and I was now an unemployed young solicitor with an indifferent law degree.

  I was lucky to start my working career during an era of almost full employment. Even in the middle of a recession I was able to get work again in a matter of weeks. I became an employed solicitor with the Government Insurance Office – a job I would have once turned my nose up at.

  On my first day there (in the old Sun newspaper building, built in 1929 in ‘skyscraper Gothic’ style, embellished with rising sun motifs) I was escorted to the back of a large room where fifty employees sat at fifty desks. I was shown my desk. On it there was a neat pile of fifteen or so files in manilla folders. They were the matters I was responsible for and I had a couple of days to read them all – not a very onerous task.

  I was in the District Court personal injuries section. We only acted for defendants. I was introduced to an older lady who kept a record of who had which files. She also had to write down when each employee arrived in the morning and left in the afternoon. That was all she did. Miss F. was devoted to her job and the high point of her day was when the file of a plaintiff or defendant with an unusual name crossed her desk. ‘Abramovich’, she might say, ‘Isn’t that an interesting name?’

  When a letter arrived, the man distributing mail would ask her who had the related file. He would collect the file and secure the letter to the outside, then return it to the bottom of the pile on the desk from which it came. (This often happened when we were away in court.) We read our files from the top down. It might be a day or two before we came to the file which had a new letter. We would remark to ourselves: ‘Ah, a letter has just come in’. There was an office myth about a plaintiff ’s solicitor who sent increasingly urgent letters. Each time he sent a letter, his client’s file went to the bottom of the pile and he could not understand why it was several weeks before anyone read his letters.

  As I placed my briefcase (with my mother’s cut lunch and a book inside it) beside my desk on my first day, a man sitting behind me greeted me with a booming, strongly accented voice. His name was Dusan Grcic or ‘Dan’. He was balding, swarthy and powerful – over 6 feet (1.8 m) tall – and reading Baude-laire in French under his desk. A Serb, he had studied law in Yugoslavia before World War II and not requalified when he migrated to Australia.

  He had a story about standing in a Berlin doorway at the end of World War II. Two heavily armed Germans with steel helmets were running past, pursued by a lightly armed Russian. The Russian could not catch them, flung his cloth cap on the pavement and swore ‘Yop tvai mat’. ‘Fuck my mother’, Dan explained. The Russian was a Slav, like him. The Germans were a race of weaklings. Years later I discovered Dan swam at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

  The GIO’s District Court section dealt with smaller accident claims, such as whiplash and broken limbs. Ian Sharp, an excellent administrator and a man whose honesty I admired, was in charge. He later gave me good references. We established a rapport, and he delegated some of the more interesting assignments to me. One was to the hearings at Broken Hill, although it was not my circuit. Sharp had become concerned about a spate of claims from a law firm and reports from a particular medical practitioner. My brief was to speak to the other Broken Hill doctors.

  Cessnock was my actual circuit. Years earlier Clive Evatt Senior regularly appeared for plaintiffs at the Cessnock sittings, even when he was a state government minister. (Circuit pickings could be very lucrative for a barrister.) According to legend, at the end of one sittings, he did not wait for the train back to Sydney as the other barristers did. Tall with silver hair, he strode out onto the road and hailed a passing car. Getting into the front seat, he told the driver: ‘I’m your Minister for Housing’. He got a lift all the way to the front door of his Wahroonga (Sydney) house.

  Stories about Clive Evatt are legion, although many have probably been forgotten by now. For example, he liked addressing the jury at close quarters, in a soft voice inaudible to the court. His nemesis, Justice Jock McClemens: ‘Would you mind speaking up a bit Mr Evatt, so the rest of the court can hear!’ Evatt, cupping his hand to his ear: ‘What was that, your Honour?’ Another time, jumping up to make a pointless objection while an opposing counsel was reading out a complicated submission, he knocked over an inkwell and the opposing counsel abandoned his submission – he could not read his own writing.

  I was given a file that had been troubling the GIO for a year or so – involving a plaintiff called Scrimshaw. His chest had hit the steering wheel when his Plymouth collided with our insured’s vehicle. Scrimshaw had been incapacitated by his injury for much longer than would be expected, and he had as his specialist Dr Brian Haynes.

  Dr Haynes was a notorious plaintiff ’s doctor. Haynes once explained to a court that being hit by a tram gave a plaintiff cancer: the cancer was triggered by ‘autonomic dyspraxia’. Fact-checking for this memoir, I found a review by ‘SC’ in the journal Psychoso-matic Medicine of Haynes’s 1958 book Autonomic Dyspraxia. ‘SC’ was concerned that Haynes’s book made ‘psychosomatic medicine look ridiculous’. Haynes had a paragraph linking autonomic dyspraxia to a wide range of complaints, from chorea to rheumatic fever. ‘SC’ commented: ‘This paragraph is really unbelievable!’

  There was no internet then and we were unaware of SC’s review. But our specialist physician, a Dr Anderson, filed lucidly funny reports with us. Mr Scrimshaw told Drs Anderson and Haynes at their joint examination how he walked despondently around Botany Bay on cold winter days: ‘I have my ups and downs’. When Dr Anderson asked why Scrimshaw had grease under his fingernails yet was unfit for work, Dr Haynes interposed, ‘That’s all part of the autonomic dyspraxia’. O
ne day Scrimshaw halluci-nated while watching TV. He saw his TV set catch on fire.

  It was not our usual practice but I wrote to other compen-sation insurers to see if they had similar claims from Scrimshaw.

  I first obtained Ian Sharp’s approval. Two wrote back stating they did – injuries similar to those sustained in our motor vehicle accident. He was making multiple claims for the same set of symptoms.

  I usually lunched with Ian Fincham, who was an articled clerk in the firm that was acting for Scrimshaw. Sometimes Donald Kirby joined us in his small office. When I finished eating my mother’s cut lunch, I would aim the scrunched-up brown paper bag at Ian’s waste paper basket. A ritual developed where he tried to intercept the bag. I tried to distract him and – while he was not looking – threw it at his basket. These games became more elaborate. I would aim the bag at the ceiling so that it bounced down into his basket as he jumped up to field it. One lunchtime I miscalculated my throw. The bag sailed over Ian’s glass partition, dropped through a void and landed on the desk of an employee of Vanguard Insurance, who was out to lunch.

  During one of these lunch sessions of paper bag basketball I advised Ian that Mr Scrimshaw had made two other almost identical claims through other firms, and Ian’s firm should consider whether they would continue acting in the matter.

  Mr Scrimshaw died many years later, in his seventies. The name in his funeral notice – ‘Henry Burton Peace Scrimshaw’ – would have delighted Miss F, our guardian of the files, except that none of the court documents mentioned he had ‘Peace’ as a middle name.

  The GIO story was that Haynes made so much money from his favourite disease that he could afford a house on Sydney Harbour, where he sat with Mrs Haynes in a love seat on the waterfront watching the sun go down – bright red from autonomic dyspraxia.

  Notwithstanding the strange system for attaching letters to files, the GIO was an efficient and good employer. But after eighteen months the work had become monotonous. One of the reasons I had gone to the GIO was to get experience in personal injuries work, then a lucrative field for barristers. I came to dislike this area of the law intensely and decided the bar was not for me.