Dirty Rotten Love

There it was, in 1980, an absolute cry of pain, once vibrant, now fading. Dirty rotten love declared itself, the words written as a large and urgent graffiti in fading red paint, running in strident letters ten or more metres across the long low sandstone wall that separated the noble Victorian Anglican church of St Stephen’s, with its graceful spire, from Camperdown Park in Sydney’s inner west.

It was a fitting place for a declaration of the anguish of love. Camperdown Park had once been a part of the church’s nineteenth-century graveyard, which had become impenetrably overgrown by 1948 and hence was resumed as public space by an Act of Parliament establishing a Memorial Rest Park. In 1946 it was here that the murdered body of Joan Norma Ginn was dumped and unfound for days, which had probably added impetus to the resumption. The gravestones, those remnants of life’s end, were removed into the churchyard, now reduced to only four acres, where some of the most poignant memorials in this historic place bear the muted tears for what had started as love, or what passed for it, but which had ended all too often in those days as maternal deaths in childbirth. Non-surviving newborn infants were frequently buried alongside their mothers, the pair martyred to Eve’s monstrous fate.

This memoir appears in the latest Quadrant.
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The indentations of the older graves were at that time still visible in the park’s terrain. Staying in a nearby terrace house with my now second husband, and pregnant in 1982 with our first child, my third, I recall wandering that grim graveyard and pondering on life and its times. Later, we both watched with the special love that cooing parents have over a firstborn as our daughter, with us at the park, chased on her toddler legs in delight after the flocks of pigeons. “O the birdies!” she would exclaim with glee as she scattered them to the air under the shadow of the wall’s slowly fading miserere. She was our little miracle, something that tempered for us the suffering expressed in the wall’s confronting plaint, for we were each of us survivors of hard times for love. We had each made early first marriages with other partners, hopeful commitments that had collapsed during the youthquake of the 1960s and 1970s. There must have been an inherent conservatism in us even then, I now think, in that we opted for marriage at all in those heady days.

A late arrival at Sydney University, aged twenty-one in early 1964, my undergraduate days were in the sixties. I’d hung around the edges of the Push and the city pubs since 1961, but as a pretend adult, employed, still sorting out why these confident and attractive and unusual people were so different from me. As a sceptical working-class product of the strait-laced and responsible fifties I had a lot of suspended disbelief with that crowd. I know I am not alone amongst Quadrant readers when I say that much of what Mervyn Bendle analyses regarding the old Sydney Push (see Quadrant, November), and his follow-up essay on the flower-child ideology of “love” in the sixties (Quadrant Online, November 10) resonates strongly with me from my own experience of it. Freed by a Commonwealth Scholarship gained as an “independent” student, for the first time since I was fourteen I had no need to earn my living or pay from my savings for my food, rent and tuition, as I had done for the year of the Day Matriculation course at Sydney Technical College. Even there, the sense of being unshackled from normal life had been exhilarating.

Now, with a prized scholarship and living allowance, I was that fabled being, an undergraduate, just as rich kids from good families had always been able to be. Swept up in the times, claiming back the youth I had never had previously, I no longer had to put up my age to get good employment, in fact, I started mentally to put my age down, so that I felt naturally amongst my age peers in the 1964 cohort. I joined enthusiastically and lemming-like in a new liberation that was personal and also cultural. In my mind’s eye, and that of every other girl then, I was the freewheeling girl walking down the street clinging to Bobby Dylan’s arm, not thinking twice because it was all right, because Bobby and I were blowin’ in the wind, and the songs of his zeitgeist were starting to emote strongly about the Masters of War. We had a purpose and a call, reminiscent of today’s youthful climateers. Additionally, my good looks and political inclinations were fashionable ones at that time, so the charmed circles of the cognoscenti opened a little for me. Vietnam’s US “advisers” were turning into US troops and, for Australia’s commitment, conscription loomed for twenty-year-olds. Bobby moved from folk to rock, and we gave up our beatnik blacks and the Sydney “Folk Attic” in favour of Mary Quant mini-skirted psychedelia, op-shop furs from Tempe Tip, and eventually, Indian cheesecloth blouses and wrap-around long batik skirts with Indian silver baubles attached to our mandatory belts and dangling earrings; soon enough I had hippie hair, long and straight, halfway down to my waist. Fashion was political, as was being under thirty. Never trust anyone over thirty was the mantra.

We were also caught in “the rapture” (see Bendle) of love, with the Beatles now our guiding light. We were captive to the anthem of love: “All you need is love”. And as with the old Push, love was to be free and shared and without ownership or “hassles”. It was also, as George Harrison mystically told us, “within you and without you”. We were of a generation, and it had moral power. We put flowers into gun barrels and told soldiers to drop out, and some did.

We also had LSD, which helped. I took it twice, and could never be enticed again. There is madness enough in my family. A non-smoker and disliking weed, I sat through many a tedious stoned party passing a soggy “Bogarted” joint and secretly wishing to be elsewhere. Other parties were wilder, with thumping music, in terrace houses where people flooded out into the street, and “raced off” each other’s loves for a “quickie” upstairs. No innocent in my past life, I was from experience no convert to “free love” in this one, so at these parties I never did that with other girls’ boyfriends; but plenty were starting to do it with mine.

I’d had two long-term relationships at university. One was with a young private-school boy who in later life became an ambassador. He wanted to get engaged and to marry me on graduation. His mother, who was extraordinarily kind to me, approved. His father did not. I know and am ashamed now that I broke this young man’s heart by dumping him for my next commitment. He wrote me long letters for years and I was unfeeling enough to hardly bother reading them, because my new love was, I decided, my true love at last and I was his. This new love was a recognised “brain” and his powerful academic achievements were the talk of the place. Amazingly, he told me I taught him how to love. I was flattered, thinking it was a compliment to our relationship, but is it too acerbic to note that mild Asperger’s was little known at that time? He was speaking literally, not figuratively. But women were chasing him and of course he gave way. Today, he and I are friends of a sort. We share grandchildren, so enough said.

After we married in early 1969, in a romantic tropical elopement as part of the hippie “journey” to Asia, undertaken to the sound of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and the White Album, the tone of disapprobation towards me on our return from some feminist women at post-graduate parties became intense, perhaps because my persona came from another place and decade than theirs did: “You have to realise,” said one patronisingly to me, “that you are married to a very attractive man. I might even f*** him myself.” By the mid-seventies the marriage of course was doomed, over. Feminist women were my downfall, for they served me and my two children poorly, and my then husband very well, while I did the childcare and the housework. Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique had cautioned about being buried alive in marriage and I think I was seen by the sisterhood simply as a patsy. I’d added a philanderer, or more fairly, someone who did not want to be married to me, which did nothing to improve my state of mind much either. This was where “true love” and the meeting of true minds had got me.

It was a similar tale for my present husband. He is an intelligent and thoughtful man who has an impassioned soul. He can tell his own story. My summary is that he married young on graduation from Cambridge University, where his wedding was held in his ancient college grounds. His beautiful bride wore medieval lace and he was dashing in a velvet smoking jacket, peering out under an early seventies mop of hair and the obligatory moustache. The stage musical du jour of the late sixties was not called Hair for nothing. Their marriage broke up two years after mine, before we met, over the usual claims for self-actualisation and jealousies aroused by the tenor of the times. Thankfully, there were no children from his first marriage. The sad truth is that the fads of the sixties that fed into the seventies saw the destruction of the lives of many children, those of the freewheeling Left in particular falling prey to drugs or sexual abuse by new partners, for divorce was made easy and working to retain a marriage was often dismissed as bad for the children, easing adult consciences about breaking up.

Meeting after our failed relationships, where both of our ex-partners had walked out, we came together as two adults, traumatised by a belief we both had that “true love” could withstand anything. But it couldn’t withstand what the sixties and seventies did with it. Escaped from those decades, but hurt and bruised by them, we clung to a perhaps chimeric reinvented life-raft of old certainties about true love, as shipwrecked mariners, hoping to find our way by the stars. Shakespeare said that first. True love was “the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown”. Nor was true love “time’s fool” for it endured “even to the edge of doom”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in the Victorian period of high romance, saw it similarly, as a passion eternal of the soul, pure and spiritual, kindling the object of desire with “a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints”, a love not just to the edge of doom, but beyond it “after death”. Thus, when we married in a registry office, creating no fuss, this man and I had decided to plight a troth; in that cold irreligious bureaucracy we both said to each other the full King James plighting-unto-death and I think I might even have said obey. He now says I didn’t, but I still think I did.

Emotionally, heading into our second marriages, we had both moved well away from any selfish counter-culture notions of love as Marlow’s self-actualisation (for which, see Bendle on Greer) and by 1984 we were distancing from our other romance, the idea that we could change the world to a better and more hopeful place by substantial political engagement in Labor’s New Left takeover of its inner-city branches. Free love may have been less of a catchcry in the political Left by then, and marriages more common, but divorces and broken relationships were frequent.

We wanted something more stable as a milieu for ourselves and four children. It took longer, but we dropped that political activism too and moved with our children to the conservative suburbs for a bigger house and better schools. We called it laughingly the post-trendy push to the suburbs, little realising we were early adopters of something that paradoxically was to change the suburbs more than it changed the movers. From this and other pressures the wealthier suburbs started to move to the Left.

Camperdown and its neighbouring inner-city suburb of Newtown, however, had pushed ahead with the projects of the earlier decades. By the mid-1980s the Camperdown Park wall was transformed by overwritten graffiti and spray-painted artwork, encouraged in the 1990s by local community groups and eventually by the local council. As Mervyn Bendle explains, the 1960s concept of love as a political ideology had given way to new visions of change in the two following decades; there was a new kid on the block. Power had arrived. “Patriarchy creates destruction” is now one of the older pieces of graffiti, from the mid-1980s, that can be seen in the tours that may be taken today of the highly politicised graffiti art that trendy Camperdown and Newtown now proudly display. Amongst all of this blaring political wish-fulfilment, that now-lost haunting cry from the sixties on the churchyard wall about love’s disappointments has vanished, overwritten. It seems very much a thing of the naive political past.

Except that there is currently a revival of love as an almost Christian concept, a way of creating meaning in a world that has become otherwise inexplicable. As the Roman Empire declined, Christian love survived it. Trent Dalton, a young writer who excels in recounting oral histories for their kernel of meaning, has just published a book called Love Stories, simple tales of kindliness, caring and commitment in various forms. So successful has it been that he took his old Olivetti typewriter to town, sat on a corner with a sign inviting strangers to tell him a love story, and from these encounters is working on another distillation of the quicksilver that is sheer love of others.

Love never dies, it seems, even if the war poet Rupert Brooke did not outlive his war to discover how correct or not was his musing that true love in long-term marriage simply “turned to kindliness”. I’d say it simply remains passionately true to itself and that is what counts.

Elizabeth Beare lives and writes in Sydney