Melbourne Age 8 November 1960 p. 6
It was a bit awful to witness such a disastrous pickup attempt as was made on the train yesterday afternoon between a not unattractive stubbly young Indian man and an also not unattractive young woman of middle-eastern origin (she claimed, though I wouldn’t necessarily have picked it – similarly, the young man identified as Indian). She was drawing, I couldn’t see what (they were both sitting opposite me, on adjoining seats in a way that made me wonder when I boarded the train if perhaps they were actually 'together', but also that if so, the lack of communication between them for much of the journey was odd). He complemented her on her drawing skill at a certain point, probably Ascot Vale, and she thanked him, and then having broken the ice, he became very pushy. He extracted her name from her and was then agitating for her phone number. He didn’t have any friends in Melbourne, he didn’t know how to meet people, etc, and then he suggested she should be his friend, a notion she rejected politely, by claiming probably correctly that the few friends she had were sufficient and then when he insisted, she resisted him more firmly by saying that she knew what he really wanted, a suggestion he did not address, except to say that his friends in India told him he was a good friend. By the time we were approaching Pascoe Vale, he mentioned something about the weather, which misleadingly led into discussion of wanting to go to sunshine, which she took as a desire for a warmer clime. Then it became clear he did actually just want to go to Sunshine, which is of course on another railway line entirely. This was when I got drawn into his life for the first time, and he asked me how he could get to Sunshine. I told him he would have to go back to North Melbourne so he got off the train at Pascoe Vale. ‘Thank god,’ said the girl. ‘What part of “no” didn’t he understand?’ said the woman two seats up from me. The girl said that the man had told her (he must have said this quietly as I heard most of what he said) that in India no means yes. The woman two seats up said that in Australia, no meant no. I make it a rule never to feel sorry for horny young men (or any horny person at least not on the basis of their horniness. I am sure he was lonely. I imagine it’s quite possible he had even just got on the wrong train to sit next to that girl, and then used Sunshine as a way of getting off the train when he realised it wasn’t gonna happen. In another context I might like the bravery of the whole enterprise, though he was, let’s face it, acting way too desperate for any credibility once he started talking to her. Judging by what I witnessed I can pretty safely say it was in no way meant to be. I had just come from the State Library where I was reading various Kew newspapers relating to the town hall. In the early 1960s (I shouldn’t have been reading this, because it actually had little to do with the town hall) there was a big debate in the local newspaper over the white Australia policy. A local clergyman had spoken out against it and had the words ‘Fool traitor’ daubed on his front footpath. The paper reported that Robert Menzies deplored this act (though RM would also have deplored the guy’s politics too). This news gave way to a series of letters regarding the role of white people to lead black people, etc. One woman in particular wrote a long series of letters about communism’s pernicious influence over non-whites and the duty of Christians (not whites per se) to lead them instead. Not I suppose a very original idea for the time but very heartfeltly expressed in long letters to the editor. Ten years later the ESA was still worrying at this shit, running some line about they hoped the Springboks didn’t get the wrong idea about Australians. Geez!!! What really thrilled me however was some other news items from an entirely different age, my favourite era, the 1920s. Kew was growing as a suburb but most of the older settlement was in the west. A group of people in East Kew, which was fairly sparsely populated at that time, started up a theatrical society called the Live Art Club at a house (I’m assuming a house) called The Parthenon. ‘Kew is fast gaining a reputation as a centre of culture’ claimed the Kew Advertiser on 21 April 1927. ‘during the last year numerous literary plays have been produced for the first time in Australia. ‘There have also been many lectures on artistic, psychologic, and philosophic subjects, either under the auspices of the Live Art Club or the Youth Advance Australia Society.’ In April there was a performance of a play by Tagere called Post Office. I have no idea what this is, but the combination of the author’s name, the play’s title, and the year in which it was performed combine to make something quite thrilling to me [Looking in a library catalogue I realise the author's name is actually Rabindranath Tagore. The play was published in 1914]. The Advertiser article continues: ‘All this activity is not only a culture influence in Kew, but it is making Kew magnetic, and already those interested in the movement are looking for residences in Kew to be closer to the work. Quite a community centre on a big scale is anticipated.’ I love the structure of that last sentence. By the middle of the year the Live Art Club was giving a performance of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and ‘a revival of Tagore’s “Chitra” at the club’s headquarters, 10 Grange Road, East Kew.’ The performances were essentially fundraisers for the community centre/ Live Art Club building, ‘a centre where the playwrights, musicians, actors, dancers and artists of the club can experiment and find self-expression. Among the experiments that are to be tried are several that have been successfully carried out at the Edward Gordon Craig School in Florance [sic] and in Russia, but never before in Australia. In both these places some remarkable developments in the art of scene designing are entirely different from what we see in this country.’ (Kew Advertiser 16 June 1927 p. 1) All this information is utterly enticing to me, as a historian who (probably like most historians) enjoys the possibilities of tantalising glimpses into the unknown at least as much as the known/ solved, well, let’s face it, probably more. Of course if I dwell long on it the Live Art Club becomes some kind of insidious lair for a predatory proprietor there at the Parthenon, 10 Grange Road, but if I instead consider it as nothing more than a polite outer suburban middle-class piece of weirdery I can still enjoy the idea of anxious and skinny individuals in loose-fitting or perhaps just oversize clothes rubbing their sweaty hands together and accidentally almost knocking potted ferns from atop plaster columns, ardently muttering about things they’d read in two-year-old British magazines and saying ‘step into the salon for a scone’. I wonder how bohemian they were there – full on? Speaking of bohemians Mia has made an amazing stop-frame film of her creation of her triptych, and put a soundtrack to it with garage band. It all looks and sounds pretty incredible. I hope she puts it on YouTube. Also speaking of bohemians, Batrider and Mum Smokes at the Northcote Social Club on Friday night – should be a blast.
No comments:
Post a Comment