How was your 1970s?

I went to see Swinging Safari, a new Australian comedy set in the 1970s, with a friend who invited me to review it with him on his podcast. So we did that and you can listen to it here* if you want. I very much liked the movie and I also enjoyed the reviewing exercise, despite a slight but persistent feeling of being cleverness-tested. It's been mildly annoying since to remember things about the movie that would've been interesting to tease out further. So it's an amazing piece of luck that I have this blog, right.

One question David asked that I've thought about since was 'how was your seventies?' And yes, the movie did feel like something in which I had a personal stake of some kind - most of the audience in the cinema felt this too, if I understood their reactions correctly. I was born in 1972 so my seventies = childhood, and the movie had a lot to say about 1970s childhoods, but the kids in the movie were older than I am. They were on the verge of not being children any more but that stage in my life happened ten years later. More generally though, the movie was asking the same question I am always asking of myself: what was it about this time that got us where we are now and made us who we are now? It felt like my 1970s was implicated in that question. And when I thought about the film, which is a very slapstick, raucous satirical comedy, deliberately over-the-top visually, and compared it with my small, quiet, ordinary childhood, I was really surprised to realise how well the film had captured some of the leitmotifs of that time. It did that in a hyperstylised, mannered way, but it worked.

I sifted through the box of photographs I keep in a cupboard in the hall.

This is December 1974. My second birthday. I was born the day Labor was elected. This is the kitchen of a rented flat in Lynedoch Avenue, East St Kilda. That's where we lived while my parents did their BAs and Dip Eds. They studied at Monash and they were both on studentships, bonded to the education department. When they finished they were sent to Wonthaggi.

This would be about 1975 or 1976. The legs are my dad's and that's my mum in the red jumper. The other couple are people I remember well. My parents had a large group of friends in exactly the same circumstances as them - all teachers, all young, all posted to Wonthaggi, many of them in pairs. They played five hundred, drank in the pub, had dinner parties, listened to records, and talked, talked, talked. The great majority of them were heterosexual couples with children. I remember two single women in this group, no single men, and a tribe of about twenty kids. I would be taken to parties and bundled into a bed, or a bedlike pile of cushions and rugs, in a room full of children, then eventually retrieved and carried out to the car. 

The adults were kids themselves really, not in an arrested development sense so much as just so very young. Mum had just turned 21 when I was born. In the movie this idea that adulthood is absent was very strong - the grownups were dysfunctional, grotesque, chafing at their bonds, reckless, and the kids were entirely unsupervised. The movie had some highly slapstick comedy around the dangers of this distracted domesticity for kids and pets - cracker night, bluebottles, backyard stunts etc, and for older kids, unwanted pregnancies. That this feeling of a whole society being suddenly let off the leash and revelling in all sorts of risky businesses was worked out in the comic mode is very interesting to me. As I said in the conversation it could so easily have been inflected as tragedy. In fact if you took the same sort of material and tragedised it, you'd basically get The Ice Storm. I think the choice of broad broad comedy represents a sense that this 1970s moment, conceived as the mainstreaming of sexual liberation (or the ambiguous form of it spearheaded by The Pill), was a positive one. A bomb was let off, there was a lot of gore for a while there, but it worked out okay in the end - not for everyone, sure, but certainly for people like the young kids at the centre of the story, who did not fit into or stand to benefit from the very narrowly straitjacketed compulsory heterosexuality in force everywhere except maybe a few pockets of the big cities.

Here's mum driving the Hiace van we had until 1980. (Picture very likely taken on the same day as the previous photo.)  I thought at the time that the movie overplayed the everyday danger of accidents' for children in everyday life, but then I remembered that in fact there always were kids at school with casts on their arms and legs; I doubt the veracity of this next recollection but I also feel like there was a recurring thing where kids would ask each other 'how did you break your arm' and the best possible answer would be 'I jumped off the roof'. 

Maybe it was just one kid? I know I heard someone say it and everyone went wow. And then I remembered, with amazement at having not thought of it before, because I notice and feel cross about this every single day when I'm putting on my makeup, that MY OWN NOSE IS CROOKED because I was riding in the middle of the bench seat of this very van, without a seat belt on, one day when mum or dad slammed on the brakes. I'm physically (mentally??) scarred by my childhood just like the kids in the movie, and moreover, I feel confident in saying that every adult of my age whose body I know at all well also carries the visible scars of the casual manner in which we were cared for and the crazy way we took advantage of the freedoms we were afforded.

Here they are. Dad liked photography and he had a purpose-made darkroom in the house they built in Wonthaggi (they really did build it themselves, it was small, flat-roofed, slate and wooden-floored, northern-oriented and made of besser blocks painted white inside, with lots of sliding doors, and cedar lining boards in the bathroom). So there are lots of photographs of my seventies, and they are almost all black and white.

The movie is pretty interesting about how class position expresses itself in houses and lifestyle. It's totally schematic and very mannered. There are three families - all white - the Halls, the Marshes, the something elses along those lines - and they are 'Neighbours' in three houses in the same cul-de-sac (although I reckon those houses couldn't really be next to each other, it just doesn't happen that way). The poorest family lives in a little postwar fibro cottage tricked out in wallpaper and Featurist pastels, the middle ones live in a flat-roofed sixties brick veneer with sterile white-and-teak interiors and a very covetable tiled patio, and the ones with the highest disposable income occupy a huge, new-looking two-storey flat-roofed open plan house which has as its main spaces separate adult and child playrooms. The domestic spaces of the movie were overly full of period objects presented in a highly obtrusive and layered way - in one scene the three adult couples are having dinner at the seventies house, and there is a fondue pot! on a Lazy Susan! in the conversation pit! (that's what it is, not a sunken lounge as some of the reviewers seem to think) and watching the movie, all this excess felt inaccurate. But with a little distance, on reflection, I recognise all the elements in my own seventies, only dispersed, quiet, ordinary. I liven in a plainer, calmer version of the seventies house in the movie. Everything in our house was new. There were Flokati rugs on the living room floor, Marimekko covers on the big cushions on the divans, Arabia Ruska stoneware dishes were in the kitchen, and the furniture was either stuff my parents had actually made, or camphorwood and wicker from David Wang. There was seagrass matting on the floor, a small black-and-white TV for watching The Goodies and a big Pioneer stereo for playing Fleetwood Mac and Chuck Mangione records.

In that photo above, Mum is in her parents' house in Beaumaris, a house I don't really remember a lot about although I do remember many of the things in it, because they were all transported up to Bermagui when my grandparents retired there in 1977. My grandfather was an architect and he designed and built both of his houses. (Until recently it always puzzled me that he had this profession, but also I knew that Mum was the first person in her family to go to university. It turned out he got his qualifications in army training courses in the second world war.) Mum is sitting on a chair and leaning on a table which both now belong to me. That household was furnished with modest but exquisitely well-chosen 1950s and 1960s objects, in deep contrast to the third house I knew intimately as a child: the Western District farmhouse in which my dad grew up.

I've written before about how fascinated I was by the contents of this house, which, if you exaggerated their old and plain and threadbare condition into squalor, would correspond to the contents of the poorest house in the movie. These photos show my middle uncle and my grandfather, and my grandmother, and they were taken in the farmhouse kitchen. The walls are a minty-limey shade of pale green and the curtains are barkcloth with a print of fruit and jugs. The alcove behind my grandmother is lined in cement sheeting and in it stands an electric cooker with an aluminium cooking pot on top. Under the anodised orange lid of that pot something is being boiled and it is either a piece of corned beef, or a cabbage, or a lot of potatoes. In the nook by the stove there is a tin of Keen's Curry Powder, a round box of McKenzie's Bicarbonate Soda, and a flip-top plastic container full of salt. The calendar on the wall (under the crucifix) is from a Catholic mission to Africa.

So when I thought about my 1970s as type of upbringing, as overlapping circles of people, as a set of environments, it did in fact match the 1970s in the movie to a surprisingly high degree. It's surprising because the movie presents a parodic, stylised, theatrical rendition of that moment. I liked that very much, as indeed I liked nearly everything about the whole movie. Comedy is the best way to tell almost any story.




*As a matter of fact, you actually can't listen to the conversation because the recording was lost when something went wrong with David's phone. I don't know for sure what happened but I imagine he was probably looking on Discogs for limited edition pink vinyl pressings of Zoot records and he dropped his phone in the toilet!!! We've all done it!! anyway it's Friday night and I can't muster the energy or desire to go through this post and rewrite all the allusions to a podcast that never existed, so my advice is to treat it as a quasi-Borgesian rhetorical device, or even better, don't bother to read the post at all, go out for a walk instead and see some nice cats standing in driveways, waiting to be patted by somebody like you. (Or the review in The Australian that I linked to in the first sentence - read that. It's by Stephen Romei and it's excellent.)