Pushover

Appo: Recollections of a Member of the Sydney Push, by Richard Appleton; Darlington Press/Sydney University Press, 2009, 300 pages, $35.

You always remember your first love. For years I had been searching for my golden girl from the Sydney University Quadrangle. In London a friend gave me her phone number. “Valerie!” I shouted happily. “It’s me—Bill!”

A quavering voice replied, “Bill, I’m not too well. I don’t get out much these days. Do you mind if I don’t see you?”

The launch of Appo in the Fisher Library at Sydney University was packed. Ponytails do not sit well on the shoulders of eighty-year-olds. Walking sticks were many. A few in the audience may have been under seventy. Age had wearied them.

This was the hardcore Push, unlike the majority who had passed through and on to the professions, married and today bore their teenage grandchildren with anecdotes. Sydney University is now a business enterprise.

In retirement a few wander back. A group known as “The Fossils” listens to a paper in the Glebe Library rooms every second Tuesday, and later drinks in the Toxteth pub (“Sipping their fortnightly formalins”, in the words of the late psychologist Cam Perry).

The Fossils include the last living Andersonian. John Anderson was Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 to 1958. Anderson was responsible for the demise of Australian realism. He was a kindly mentor to most students but, as Richard Appleton (“Appo”, who died in 2005) argues, those who aspired to academia faced hurdles of nepotism and favouritism.

As well, many seemed to have had authoritarian fathers, replaced by Anderson. Apostles became apostates. Love became hate.

At the launch, one of the speakers, University of Western Sydney academic Andre Frankovits, in typical Push style, grumbled that the autobiography contained “Too much poetry,” knowing poetry was Appo’s life. It is sad his politics prevented his poetry from finding a wider audience.

The introduction contains an extract from Clive James’s book of essays As of This Writing. James had assumed the obscure Appo was already dead:

Appleton, who was born with a formal sense that made his meticulous carpentry poetic in itself, was among the most gifted Australian poets of his time. But his obsession with Pound was as fatal to his mind as his impression that benzedrine was a form of food was fatal to his body. Appleton suppressed the natural coherence of his gift in order to sound like the Cantos, an aim in which he succeeded all too well.

Appo had indeed sent one of his poems to Ezra Pound, who published it in the European, but when he found the journal was associated with the British Union of Fascists he broke off correspondence. The journal (1953–59) was edited by Diana Mosley, nee Mitford, and praised by Robert Skidelsky as “an impressive achievement”. Contributors included Roy Campbell, Ezra Pound, Henry Williamson, Wyndham Lewis, Desmond Stewart and Alan Neame. The European’s theme was Europeanism over Nationalism. I read the European regularly in the UK. It was an example of that enigma: good art and bad politics.

Below is the first stanza of Appo’s poem published in the European, called “Daybreak in Drought”:

The moon, a pale-faced convict,

Exhales a wisp of cloud, and

Spins his meteor butt to earth.

A black head-shroud chokes back

Last pleas of innocence,

And stars dim out in sympathy

While sullen day awakes to drought.

Despite spending time at Sydney University, Appleton was Downtown Push, artistic, not academic. Among many others the group included the poets, spastic Lex Banning and the hirsute Harry Hooten who described himself as “Hoorangatang, the only man who grew up from an ape”, comedian Tommy Deane, “The Thief of Bad Gags”, artist John Olsen, anthropologist Lester Hiatt and journalist the late Lillian Roxon, to whom Germaine Greer dedicated The Female Eunuch:

This book is dedicated to Lillian, who lives with nobody but a colony of New York roaches, whose energy has never failed despite her anxieties and her asthma and her overweight, who is always interested in everybody, often angry, sometimes bitchy, but always involved …

Before it was swamped by the sixties, the Sydney Push did have unique Australian characteristics, independence, contempt for authority, close-knit loyalty and love of horse racing.

Well known Push personality the late Darcy Waters requested in his will that his ashes be buried on the rise, halfway down the Randwick straight, five horses wide, because he did not want to be caught on the rails. After the last race one Saturday, despite the anger of stewards, his wish was fulfilled.

In those days, jobs were easy, travel virtually unrestricted and AIDS absent. But the Push had a dark side. It was not all rebellious fun and sexual games. Push women suffered. Abortions were illegal, dangerous, painful and traumatic. As a result some of the brightest of that generation, as subsequent careers proved, became sterile. Was a scarce resource squandered?

One now well-known figure is said to have a shrine in her bedroom, complete with crib and baby doll, a substitute for the child she never had.

Appo would sit for hours staring at one word he had written on a sheet of paper until a window became threatening. Then he would tear up the sheet, light a cigarette, have a drink and take another amphetamine.

When he felt he had “a touch of the s”, to quote another friend’s words, he phoned Paddy McGuinness from his Cessnock home, smoking and drinking as usual.

They say I have a couple of hours, Paddy.

Facing death in this way is almost a Push ritual. In the words of Manning Clark when comparing Melbourne to Sydney:

The one believes in enlightenment and happiness for all. The other is indifferent to the fate of the uneducated masses, and believes in the cult of gaiety and beauty for the few great souls who are capable of them.

One drinks to the future of mankind, the other drinks to the acceptance of life, by which signpost, as Norman Lindsay puts it, he treads the gay road to death.

 Bill Harcourt wrote about Murray Sayle’s memoir A Crooked Sixpence in the January-February 2009 issue.