nation 1971

I couldn’t help myself. As a staff member I am allowed to borrow volumes of magazines and I was looking for a specific issue of New Society in the wrong place and instead came across what I think is the full run of Nation. You know how some people are addicted to porn or Minecraft? I am addicted to things like this. 

Fucking Nation had everything in the early 70s. Bob Ellis working out his future screenwriting career in television reviews. John Mant on urban planning. Sue Nichterlein on Graham Little. Wendy Bacon on going to prison for eight days. 

Look it’s a little before my time, but it’s full of people who had a big impact on my first few decades, and I find it fascinating. I even find it fascinating that Nation saw it unremarkable to run a regular report from London via one Russell Lansbury with no apologies – whatever happened in England was as Australian as anything else. 

It gets me thoroughly distracted. A small piece by Katie Martin on a very horrible topic sent me down a massive rabbit hole. It is called ‘A ten-dollar look’ and it’s about the towing service which took possession of the car in which Ronald Biggs’ oldest son, Nicholas, died. Biggs had escaped the country by this time but his wife Charmain (who soon after changed her name to Brent) was still in Melbourne (and would remain so until her death just under ten years ago). She crashed her car in Kilsyth. Reporters were charged ten dollars to view the car, I don’t even want to relay what was in it, and it’s 53 years later. I had never really thought about the Biggses living in Melbourne, but they did, for a few years, under the name Cook. They lived at 54 Hibiscus Road Blackburn North (yes, the house is still there and yes, of course I am going to go and look at it). So, rabbit hole for Charmain Brent and fascination about what she studied when she went to university later in life – looks like an arts degree. Fascination also about Katie Martin, who is not the Katie Martin who currently writes for the Financial Review or if she is she’s very well-preserved for a seventy-something-or-older-year-old. 

The letters pages are amazeballs. Clement Semmler in defence of seat belts (he and another correspondent, Bill Purves, reacting to an anti-seatbelt letter from one Roger Page). An ongoing debate – for months – about phonetic spelling, mainly between D. L. Humphries of East Kew and Harry Lindgren of Narrabundah (with a few interjectors such as Daryl Haslam of Mt. Waverley).  

Ellis’ television reviews are extraordinary. In the 6 February issue he writes about four new Australian programs shown in one night on Channel 7: The Group, which sounds like a forerunner to the notorious shambles The Unisexers* and featuring amongst others ‘oh yum Wendy Hughes, bosomy, breathy, ravishingly virginal, the dumb blonde of every man’s dreams’.** It  was followed by a show called Catwalk which sounds extraordinary, in Ellis’ description a kind of glam soap opera the Americans claimed as their own 15 years later. ‘The idea that such adult content on Australian television is now a commercial proposition,’ says Ellis, ‘still has me quaking with pleasure.’ He has few good things to say about the next show, The Shockers, so I’ll pass over that, but the final of the four, E-Force One, sounds extraordinary – ‘a small band of dedicated men fighting to save our natural environment.’  Ellis describes it very amusingly and the fact that one of the characters, played apparently by Neva Carr Glyn (though this might be a joke or a mistake, as he also says she plays ‘the landlord’s swinging old mum’ in The Group) is called Elsie Meatsfoot. This is criticism at its finest IMO: ‘Apart from gigantic incompetence, the episode was smug, self-righteous, paranoid and woefully shabby-genteel, behaving as if it had a million-dollar budget in a squalid little studio, and brandishing one of the worst actresses in living memory, and it finally succeeded in doing the impossible, which was giving pollution a good name.’  Two weeks later Ellis is praising Humphries*** and Garland’s Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie to high heaven: ‘If only we are smart enough to try and live up to Barry McKenzie, instead of trying to live him down, crafty enough to absorb him as a part of our national soul, as laudable in his own way as the wild Welshman, the fighting Irishman or the crazy Yank, instead of trying to vomit him out of our national consciousness as if he was some mere incidental dirty dago…’ Gosh. I think we did. 

I’m so sold on this volume of Nation I’m even pleased to see they gave The Female Eunuch to a man to review, I mean, just because it seems so 1971 to do so. What they might not have been expecting (but they ran it over almost 4/5 of a page of the 15 May issue) was Lillian Roxon’s summary of her career including a response to ‘Germain Greer and her double-edged dedication’ (in TFE) which she says ‘changed my life and is she ever proud of herself!’). Roxon was responding to an article by someone called ‘G. J. M.’ in the 17 April edition – ‘Third Floor Only’ – which pondered the state of women in journalism and which, she felt, misrepresented her career. 

OK I’m half way through 1971. Mirka Mora is defending G. R. Lansell from John Reed in the letters page (‘Mr. John Reed forgets that Mr. Lansell who is twenty-eight years, eleven months and a few days, came only by change to dwell on art criticism… Mr. John Reed who is 300 years old and  a few days…’ and McMahon is prime minister. I’ll come back to this. I may or may not bore you with the details.  

* I actually hate it when people write about cultural phenomena/works of art in withering terms when they haven't actually personally experienced them. That's what I'm doing here and I hate it. 

** Hughes was the main character but only in the pilot, after which she was recast. 

*** I dug up my copy of Nation: The Life of an Independent Journal of Opinion 1958-1972, ed. K. S. Inglis 1989 and it says that the two men more responsible for Nation than anyone, T. M. Fitzgerald and George Munster, were introduced by Humphries at 'Lorenzini's, a wine bar and coffee shop in lower Elizabeth Street', presumably in the mid-to-late 1950s. Humphries said to Fitzgerald, 'I want you to meet a friend of mine who's a genius'. (p. 8). 

flook by trog

Pursuing this Colonel Pewter article (which I am planning to write with Lauren Pikó) has got me a little involved in contexts. Apparently Arthur Horner was asked to do the strip as a response to Flook (I read this in Wikipedia, but I also wrote it in Wikipedia). I figured it would be a good idea to have a look at, at very least, a few weeks' worth of Flook from the early 50s (it started in 1949 so was well entrenched by 1952 when CP began). 

However, the problem here was that Flook ran in the Daily Mail which wasn't available in archive form, so I was kind of despairing about how to find examples, particularly contiguous ones. As you know I pay handsomely for access to newspapers.com but it is a relentlessly American product in the main, used apparently mainly by genies to find out the name of their great-great-aunt's first cousin in Minneapolis in 1877, though it also for reasons unknown supplies access to the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, which is what's mainly interesting to me (Trove is excellent, but Trove generally speaking runs out in the 1950s, aside from the Canberra Times, and so as far as I know newspapers.com supplies the only digital run of any other Australian newspaper in the second half of the C20). Anyway, the only 20th century British newspapers newspapers.com supplies are the Guardian and the Observer and hey these are great but they are not the Daily Mail. So as I said I was kind of despairing but then I thought well whatever apparently Wally Fawkes, who drew Flook, was Canadian-born so maybe there's something in one of the Canadian newspapers about him. 

What do you know, Flook ran massively in North American (well, at least Canadian and US) newspapers in the early 50s. Once again, my assumptions had messed me round. I had figured that being such a British construction, it wouldn't have even made sense in the USA. Maybe that was eventually true, but in the 50s apparently it was more of a fun adventure strip, and the Americans seemingly took to it because it's all over the place - for instance, in the Lincoln Star for 19 August 1952 p. 11 (with a hilarious instalment of Pogo above it for context):

Clearly I have to pursue this Flook story in particular because it appears to deal with some aspect of a postcolonial nation, but wow I l-o-v-e the depiction of the city in the last frame there - Fawkes was quite an amazing artist (or 'is', I guess, he's still alive! 96. But he had to give up drawing because his eyesight failed).

So, yeah, not only am I going to be reading a lot of Colonel Pewter I am also going to be scrolling through quite a bit of Flook, at least until the American newspapers get rid of him, I'm not sure when that happened yet (additionally, and this just occurred to me, I can't really know whether the global Flook is the same as the British Flook, or whether it was created in a dual version - I'll worry about that later). In the meantime I have bought a couple of Flook books online. I balked at paying $120 for a 1950 publication and when I say I balked I'm just bignoting myself because I might still do it, but more likely I can access these strips through newspapers.com and feel like I am accessing less mediate/more authentic source, as well. 

Always on the lookout for hot antisemitism (casual, satirical or otherwise) I am intrigued by the name 'Moses Maggot' (you know, the Moses bit in particular) but I am not going to prejudge. Denis Gifford in The World Encyclopedia of Comics (p. 256) merely says 'The friends' earliest opponent was Moses Maggot, abductor of Sir Cloggy Bile's daughter Ermine.' George Perry in the Penguin Book of Comics (p 206) merely describes Maggot as 'a shrivelled embodiment of all that is evil.' Perry also compares Flook to the Humphries/Garland Adventures of Barry McKenzie strip ('Barry McKenzie has a spirit and attack that is completely lacking elsewhere in British strip cartoon humour, with the exception of Wally Fawkes's Flook') (p. 246). 

Tell you what though, what I didn't think was going to happen when I woke up at 5:40 this morning was that I'd be correcting the wikipedia entry on Sandy Fawkes, Wally Fawkes' first wife, who apparently did not know her parents and was found adrift (?) well, at very least, abandoned 'in' the Grand Union Canal in mid-1929. I was greatly umbraged that whoever wrote the Sandy Fawkes wikipedia entry decided not to bother with a maiden name figuring that since she was Sandy Fawkes after the age of 20 that should do it. Bollocks. I found a maiden name and put it in, though I suppose I was a little unsure, and maybe the original writer was a little unsure, about saying she was 'born' Sandra Boyce-Carmichelle, but I guess a lot of us weren't named until after we were born. That, apparently, was the first name she had anyway. Wikipedia should be called Wifipedia, every second woman on it is defined by her relationship to the man she married. The Sandy Fawkes wikipedia entry is actually pretty disgusting, spending far more time on her drinking and her brief relationship with serial killer Paul Knowles (tbf, she wrote a book about this) than other aspects of her life and work but I can't find access to other material on this and perhaps it's not my job. Perhaps. 

Update later same morning: 

I was partially correct about the Flook published in the US as being remade to be US friendly at least insofar as Gifford writes that the strip started on 25 April 1949 and was originally entitled Rufus. Rufus met Flook 'during a prehistoric dream. He and Flook feel out of the dream balloon and into reality in strip number 21.' Well the strip that began its run in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 10 September 1951 (i.e. roughly 18 months after the debut of Rufus) was called Flook from the outset and Flook himself appears in the 'prehistoric dream' in strip number 2. So something was remodelled to cut to the chase. Here are the strips 1-5 from the Inquirer; the image of Flook falling out of the dream (almost) onto Rufus was reproduced in Horn's World Encyclopedia, on p. 256. 

The drawing is just beautiful and I think owes a little to John Ryan stylistically but perhaps that was the style of the era as well. Great use of black. Actually, great use of everything.