Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Page B

stumbled down the stairs afterwards vowing never to write another play.
    I sank back into prose, and wrote another novel. It was called A Wild Ass of a Man , and it bore the marks of desperation. It tried to be one continuous breathless passage. It was hectic and sometimes overwritten, with occasional colouring from J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man .
    It traced the progress of yet another comically doomed figure called Muldoon—his Catholic boyhood, his foolish undergraduate days, his disasters with teaching, advertising and girls. Finally, rejected by everybody, Muldoon is seized by a desire to announce that the end of the world is at hand, and suffers a revolving crucifixion on a Luna Park ferris wheel.
    It did the usual rejection rounds, gently decaying each time, until John Hooker of Cheshires took pity on the tattered state of the manuscript and took it in. I was so grateful I accepted the meagre advance, submitted to his editing and made no objection to the frantic design of the jacket. Would there be any publicity? I timidly asked. ‘Ah,’ said Hooker. ‘Come with me.’ He led me to a room behind Cheshire’s bookshop and showed me a piece of white cardboard with the name of the novel and its author hand-lettered on it, which would be ‘prominently displayed’—his words—in the adjoining bookshop. ‘There’s your publicity,’ he said, apparently without irony.
    And so it was released—almost furtively, like a petty criminal from prison. There were isolated handclaps here and there; the Catholic Advocate declared it unsuitable for school libraries, and the venerable A.R. Chisholm remarked on ‘the torrential character of the writing, which is feverish but strangely controlled’. Despite a leg-up from Brian Kiernan—‘Funniest since Furphy’—it didn’t sell well. The most significant thing about A Wild Ass of a Man was that it led Cheshires to abandon publishing fiction. In a year, I had closed a theatre and amputated a leading publisher’s fiction arm.

Mama mia
    Given my developing record, it was surprising to be invited to a meeting arranged by the formidable artistic matriarch Betty Burstall early in 1967 at what was to become one of the centres of Melbourne radicalism—the Hannans’ terrace in North Melbourne. Bill and Lorna Hannan had already plotted a breakfast revolution—they were the first to my knowledge to introduce muesli, holding up packs of what appeared to be birdseed to their bemused friends—and were later to attempt bold experiments in education (Sydney Road Community School, where the students had a big say in what was studied and how the school ran) and family life (a group of households forming an economic union, sharing their incomes and just about everything else).
    As we sat around in a semicircle on a Sunday morning, Betty enthused about a new kind of theatre she’d seen in New York—not a place of foyers and curtains and audiences sitting cut off in the dark, but performances in off-off-Broadway cafés where new kinds of plays were being produced—no props, no make-up: a direct, hard-hitting theatre with the actors right there in front of you, close enough to touch.
    Betty, who managed to be regal and alternative at the same time, had it all worked out. The idea would be transplanted here, and she’d found the place for it—a disused underwear factory in Faraday Street Carlton. She was going to rent the shabby old building (for twenty-eight dollars a week), put in tables and chairs, serve coffee, and—looking around at us—put on some plays.
    She called it La Mama—after the pioneering New York space of the same name—and it opened with Jack Hibberd’s Three Old Friends . This was followed by my Witzenhausen Where Are You? —about a messenger in a big corporation who locks himself in the toilet and issues apocalyptic notes under