Some of the Postcard programmes were taken up by individual American PBS stations but they rarely made it to the network, and the total PBS audience for them would have been only a tiny minority even if they had. Australia, however, unexpectedly increased the dimensions of our little world. The ABC executive who had devoted his career to keeping my programmes off the air abruptly died, perhaps from exhaustion at the magnitude of what he had achieved. He must have had a warehouse full of our unscreened shows. The man who took over his desk had a different agenda. He put all my programmes on the air at once and I became one of the most familiar faces in Australia practically overnight – a nice study in just how meaningless celebrity status is. The weekly show made a particularly big impression because people like Pavarotti were sitting there talking to the local guy. The Kid from Kogarah was on at Covent Garden! The ABC immediately asked us to come to Sydney and do a series on the spot, with an all-Australian guest-list. At the time it seemed like a good idea even to us, especially when we considered that if we turned it down the new occupant of the desk in question might start emulating his predecessor. So Richard and I flew to Sydney to meet our executive producer, Michael Shrimpton. It was immediately apparent that he was a smart man, and equally immediately apparent that I now had a pair of smart executive producers, which is rarely a profitable duplication. I was lucky that they hit it off, but in other respects the luck showed quick signs of being under strain. Richard got through the welcoming party all right but it was a near-run thing. The ABC boardroom was jammed with executives, many of whom would have quite liked to be in charge of the show, or else, preferably, of a different show without me in it. I think one of them was the dead executive, propped up from behind. He certainly had a fixed smile. Everyone rapidly got smashed on the Chardonnay, a variety of hair oil whose popularity among my countrymen I have never been able to understand. Still on the wagon, I was soon the only person in the room not leaning on someone else. On the boardroom table there were numerous platters of edible refreshment including a magnificent Frog in the Pond, a standard form of festive comestible uniformly provided at any Australian celebratory occasion from a children’s party to the opening of Parliament. I had made a serious mistake in not warning Richard of the possible presence of a Frog in the Pond. I should have seen it coming. This was a Frog in the Pond on the grand scale, about ten square feet of green jelly surrounded by scores of chocolate Freddo Frogs with their snouts buried in the verdant slime. Richard had never seen grown men and women in proper clothes pulling chocolate frogs out of a pond of jelly and sucking the green gunk off the frogs’ heads before biting the heads clean off. For a moment he looked like a young British officer in India suddenly realizing that his first suttee ceremony was going to be climaxed by a widow being burned alive.
But this Frog in the Pond de grand luxe was a sign that the bigwigs of the ABC top echelon were ready to pull every string on our behalf. What they couldn’t do, however, was make the Australian audience tune in to watch Australian guests. Never before had there been an Australian talk show with such a roster. Nowadays, you can get that effect from the solo stars booked by the brilliant Andrew Denton, but in those days it was almost unheard-of to have such people on the air even one at a time, and we had them in bunches. We had Lloyd Rees, the great artist, and Les Murray, the great poet, sitting there next to each other. It should have sent the ratings through the roof, but the reverse happened. Finally the critics, of all people, told me what was going on. They didn’t mean to, but all I had to do was read between the lines of some of the most contemptuous notices I have ever had. Their message was: he does his first-rate stuff abroad, and then he comes here to earn a quick bundle by doing second-rate stuff for us. The underlying assumption was not true – we had worked hard on every aspect of the show – but it was indicative. The assumption was that local achievement didn’t rate on the international scale, and that I had reduced myself to the status of a local again simply by being present. We were shocked, but Richard, typically thinking faster instead of slower when he was up against it, quietly suggested that we might hoist the ratings if we booked Australia’s Own Peter Allen, currently making a concert tour of his homeland. One of those versatile performers whose various talents are held together by nothing but ambition, Allen was famous in Australia for having written and recorded a song called ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, an anthem which somehow gained extra prestige from the evidence that he did no such thing. But at one stage he had been married to Liza Minnelli and for the Australian press he counted as being Big in Las Vegas, even though the majority of Americans couldn’t recognize his face. They were lucky, incidentally, because he was one of the most unpleasant men I have ever met in show business.
After Peter Allen died of Aids it became infra dig to speak ill of him but I am glad to break the rule. In television, at the end of an interview, there is nearly always a bit of homework that the guest, no matter how illustrious, is called upon to do – a few extra angles, a wide shot, etc. – and you can measure their real stature by the grace they show in doing it. The true stars will turn the homework into a little extra show for the studio audience. Robert Mitchum, sitting still for a wide shot, said, ‘You forgot to ask me what happened after I left the trailer door open while I was fucking the producer’s wife and a dog came in and tried to swallow my balls.’ A woman sitting in the fourth row fell into the aisle. Mel Brooks would slip into his Thousand Year Old Man character and tell the studio audience that ‘many years ago, many, many millions of years ago, there was very little heavy industry, and the main means of transport was fear.’ But some of the lesser stars soon showed you why they weren’t any bigger. They would get impatient and make sure you knew it. Peter Allen was like that. The interview, during which he had been no more interesting than any other cheap hustler with a collection of personal jewellery, was mercifully over, and he had been asked to hold on while we got a wide shot. ‘Can’t you put that together from what you’ve got already?’ I put my hand over my lapel mike so that the studio audience couldn’t hear me and explained to him that no, we couldn’t. He writhed, snarled, and finally said, ‘Jesus Christ, what am I doing here?’ Then he was gone. A long time later, I realized that he was really asking himself what he was doing in Australia, the land he still called home. The answer was that he was robbing the bank.
I suppose I was too, but the money wasn’t really all that great. The ABC, perennially strapped for cash, has never been able to fork out the kind of salaries that the commercial channels lavish on male anchor-men with improbably youthful hairstyles who can reliably generate the same air of vigorous portent when presenting a report on a massacre in Rwanda or the story of the baby crocodile in the bishop’s bathtub. (‘And finally, for more on that baby croc that threatened the bishopric, let’s go over to Raylene Trotter. Raylene?’) But I had other motives, although I was still in the process of figuring out what they were. The process is incomplete even now, but early on I was groping in the dark. The initial thing that had got me going, however, was fairly clear to me. It was something to do with national pride. I wanted to make it clear that I still possessed it, and I thought I might have less ambiguous means of doing so than marrying Liza Minnelli, although I would have been flattered to be asked. (She was the most marvellous studio guest, by the way, full of funny, self-deprecating stories about celebrity, as its most helpless victims so seldom are.) I was shaken by the way Australia’s own arts stars had been regarded as no great event by the very critics who made most fuss about national identity. Had I but known it, this was a foretaste of an argument fated to go on for decades and bear little fruit even yet. Some of my best friends still believe that Australia is being denied its national identity, so I have to be careful when I point out that they were lucky not to have been born in, say, Poland. It was quite evident to me, even back there at the time of the Bicentennial in 1988, that a country which could produce a poet like my old classmate Les Murray wasn’t short of a national identity, it
was only short of people with a proper estimate of poetry. Nationalism, as a state of mind, is all fervour and no judgement. National pride, however, is a different and better thing. To have counted on it, and found it lacking, was a bad blow. But it might have been my fault. Perhaps I had been too long away, and had missed the moment when the land of my birth had graduated to a state of self-consciousness even more nervous than my own.
16. THROW TO AUSTRALIA
After two hundred years of European settlement, Australia was understandably preoccupied with its own story. There was a momentum going that was hard to buck. The country’s most powerful television company, Kerry Packer’s Nine network, wanted an enormous Bicentennial programme that would last an entire evening. It would have three anchors. Two of them were Australian household names – Jana Wendt and Ray Martin – and the third, the ring-in, was to be me. All I had to do was say yes to a preliminary tour of inland Australia so that I might sound as if I knew what I was talking about on the big night. The tour was a wise precaution because like most expatriates of my generation I had never been out of my home state before I went to Europe. Travel within Australia was expensive when we were young. Only the rich flew interstate, and usually because they owned the airline. Fast-forward to a new era, in which Richard and I climbed out of aircraft of various sizes all over Australia for two weeks on end, under the leadership of the show’s producer. Peter Faiman had directed Crocodile Dundee and still owned a large piece of it, which was like having a tap in his kitchen that ran liquid gold. Blessed with the personal cash-flow that enabled him to do anything he wanted, he sincerely wanted to make a TV programme that would help to give Australia a sense of itself, on top of the sense of itself that it had acquired already from sending Paul Hogan abroad to charm the world out of its pants and Linda Koslowski out of her underwear. That sounded good to me and I happily allowed myself to be wound down the shaft of an opal mine in Coober Pedy by the town’s Greek mayor in person. Fifty feet above me he shouted, ‘Is beautiful?’ down the hole. It was beautiful indeed. The opal seams in the walls glowed pink and azure in the torchlight. I was in a bubble of loveliness.
In the flood plains of Kakadu I was in a puddle of danger. Being paddled in a shallow boat through a club-land for crocodiles was nasty enough but a helicopter ride along the escarpment was nastier still, because crocodiles are reasonable creatures compared with helicopter pilots, none of whom, in my experience, can be trusted. There was a whole generation of them who either pined for the great days in Vietnam or else were ashamed they never went. Making the passenger aware of danger was their mission, as if any passenger in his right mind ever doubted the danger: I mean, just look at a helicopter. If God had meant that thing to fly he would have given it wings. We shaved the escarpment so close that I saw a snake pull its head in. Hence the puddle of fear. Not that I wasn’t enchanted by the flood plains on those occasions when I wasn’t being shown off to the crocs or flown by a maniac. Kakadu reminded me of the Masai Mara. Here, surely, the African animals would be safe. Couldn’t they be flown here two by two in an airlift version of Noah’s ark? In years to come I tried the idea out on the PR representatives of several billionaires but I always got the same answer: the quarantine laws would never allow it. The quarantine laws had, however, allowed the importation of the cane toad, which was already, at the time of which we are speaking, taking over the country. The first cane toads had been brought in so that they might eat beetles inimical to sugar cane, but the cane toads quickly proved to be far keener on eating everything else, after poisoning it first. Leopards, I pointed out, wouldn’t do that. Nobody listened.
Research had revealed that there was a town in upper South Australia consisting of one house with two people in it. When we arrived by Land Cruiser at the front door, only one of the people was at home. A large, soft woman who looked comfortable to sit in, she told us that her husband had driven to the next town because a pig was going to be killed. Were she and her husband stocking up on meat for winter? ‘Nar, he just didn’t want to miss the fun.’ On the big night there would be an earth station camped in her front yard to watch her celebrate, so I gave her a firework to let off. When I asked her what she and her husband were doing out there – the desert stretched away on all sides until the world curved – she said they liked the simple life. So do I, really, but the world comes crowding in. Anywhere you set yourself up to be alone, a crew will arrive with a satellite uplink and ask you why you’re there. Death is the only escape. In that year a lot of the Australian billionaires had died of terminal cash deprivation. One of them had sold all his Sidney Nolan desert landscapes to a gallery in Alice Springs. Off on my own during an hour of downtime, I strode into the tiny gallery, stood on the colourful carpet and bought one of the Nolans straight off the wall: a potentially useful gift for a wife who was starting to notice that I was at home far less often than not. It turned out that the colourful carpet I was standing on was an unrolled totemic painting by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Every mark on it represented something tribally important except the two footprints in the corner, which represented my size-nine desert boots. I bought it out of embarrassment but it is still in the family, growing in wonder with the years. Listen closely to it and you can hear the music, that delicious throbbing buzz that the great Aboriginal painters somehow get into the paint.
There was more, much more. About three million square miles more. We saw a lot of Australia. But apart from the gallery in Alice Springs, which had not been on the agenda, we saw nothing of the Australian arts, with one conspicuous exception. He was a painter called Pro Hart who was included in the schedule because of his impeccable Australian credentials. Like Crocodile Dundee, he wore a bush hat. Unlike Crocodile Dundee, he did not throw knives. But he did throw paint at the canvas in an uninhibited manner. Sometimes he fired the paint from a gun. Always ready with a few quotable banalities, he had been written up in the Women’s Weekly: still, in those days, among Australia’s most influential periodicals. Faiman and his staff regarded Pro Hart as the essence of democratic free expression. After a demonstration of his irrepressible spontaneity – he created a masterpiece in a matter of minutes, though the results made me wonder why it had taken him so long – Pro Hart was duly signed up for a satellite link on the big night. My suggestion that we ought to be including singers, writers and real painters in our purview fell on deaf ears. Peter Faiman was a nice man and a capable organizer, but he had little knowledge of the arts and cared less. His idea of an important writer was Colleen McCullough. I don’t hesitate to record this, because she had the same idea herself. It was agreed that in the programme she would read out a passage from her own prose which was meant to be a hymn to the Australian identity. Back at Faiman’s headquarters in Melbourne, before Richard and I left for England, I argued that if we could get Les Murray to write a special poem and read it to the camera at his house in the bush, we could get the whole story about Australia’s new international literary status in five minutes. It was promised that this would be considered.
Back in Cambridge I was gratified to discover that I was recognized almost instantly by my family, but they soon noticed that I was further perfecting my trick of disappearing even while I was there. My essay collection Snakecharmers in Texas came out and I had to push it in the media. Profile writers skated through the book’s themes in jig time before getting down to the business of talking about the supposed tensions of fame. It occurred to very few of them that the press profile was one of the tensions of fame. Television interviewers didn’t even pretend to be interested in anything beyond television. Even more unsettling, radio interviewers also wanted to talk about nothing beyond television. Increasingly I felt that I would have needed only a flex with a plug to turn into a television set myself. But some of the reviews, although careful to warn me that my visible presence among the massed breasts of the Playboy gatefold girls might possibly have eroded the authority of my opinions on the poetry of Eugenio Montale, were thoughtful enough to con
vince me that I might still be some kind of writer. This was lucky, because there were several articles due that I had had only a limited time to sketch out while banging around in the outback. On top of those, a vast amount of draft script for the Bicentennial show arrived from Australia via fax, the new world-shrinking machine which, like every technical advance nominally calculated to save labour, actually increased labour by blocking all routes of escape from incoming requirements. The links and speeches that would be expected from me were presented in draft form. Dutifully I set about injecting them with argument, historical background, rhythm, syntax and grammar. Back they went to Australia, only to return immediately with a lot of yellow markings to indicate bits deemed to be either superfluous or too abstruse. Without exception they were the bits that I considered vital. I found myself fighting to save not just phrases, but whole lines of thought. Snatching a Friday lunch with the London literati as a drowning man who had fallen off the back of a liner might snatch at a trailing rope, I bewailed my existence. It was universally concluded that I had asked for it. There was no denying that. Halfway through the main course, a limo driver walked in, tapping his watch. He had come to take me away. Some of the blokes looked sideways. I couldn’t have agreed with them more. There is a wonderful sentence in Philip Larkin’s poetry that gets the feeling exactly. ‘Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives.’ That was the year when we, the men who were Friday, were forcibly reminded that we were lucky to have lives at all. Our beloved Mark Boxer was diagnosed with a brain tumour. The thing was inoperable, and he wasted quickly to death, but there was time to visit him. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan paid calls right up to the last minute. It bothered me, and bothers me still, that I couldn’t bring myself to go. There is a possibility that when I was very young I got a permanent overdose of whatever antibody is released into the bloodstream when we lose a loved one. Anyway, that’s what I wrote in my letter, which he sent word that he had been glad to receive.