I only met
Darcy once, that was with my cousin Jude, we met him at a café that was a converted
petrol station, on Norton street Leichhardt, it was funny at first because he thought
we were reporters and asked us for money, we laughed and said we will by you
lunch, he grumbled a little and sat down.
I personally did not know about his “Past
Life” while lunching with him, he mentioned his life and his politics, he was
getting on, we Jude and I just wanted to know about family history and Casino,
we did not get that much really, he knew our mothers, and talked about the “Old
Men” how hard and unsympathetic they had been.
He had no children lived like a
leaf blowing in the wind with little or no responsibility to any one, which was
fine by me due to the life he chose to live.
He liked to
Gamble he liked to drink he should have been a pirate, looks like one, but he
was very smart, he knew if he pushed against the machine you better not have
anything to lose.
He did not
die rich or famous but he will live on in history, not many will agree with his
life, not many would care for him, but he did not harm anyone really, he went
against the will of society, openly.
He like me also descends from John Randall African American Per: Alexandra Convict 1788.
Society
for the Promotion of the Fantastic Way of Life
The
following few pages are a ASIO case officer's report, including comments by an
informant, on the Libertarian society, dated 16 September 1959.. It provides
some more perceptive comment on Darcy Waters and other Libertarians:
- Darcy Waters "was a
Philosophy I student at the university for 9 years but always refused to
sit for his examination. He became so expert in Philosophy that he
earned his living coaching Philosophy students. He finally sat for his
exam and gained a 100% pass."
- While he was studying Philosophy
he was engaged by a Government Department. "...to express his brand
of philosophy and practical anarchism he deliberately removed official
files from his office, tore them up, and disposed of them in the toilet.
Waters is proud of this expression of 'Free Thinking'."
- To resolve a dispute in the
Freethinkers, in 1948 the Libertarian Society at Sydney University was
formed. "...at the election of officers, Waters and his followers
secured all positions and then immediately resigned. This action was a
further expression of Free Thinking and Anarchism"
- "Darcy Waters can only be described as a 'con' man. He lives entirely off his wits and has never been known to do a days work in his life." This is obviously in keeping with his membership in 1951 of the Society for the Promotion of the Fantastic Way of Life.
In 1983
Darcy Waters published an anti-corruption newsletter, called Horsetalk,
which focused on corruption within the N.S.W. Labor Party then in office at State
Government level, the police and justice system, and links with the gambling
fraternity and organised crime, including links to the U.S. Mafia. The
publication was subtitled a political form guide to starters, stayers
and scratchings.
Read more on the link below
The
Canberra Times ACT
26 Nov
1995
Intellectuals
with a taste for low life
THE OLD
Sydney Push these days is but a rapidly fading memory; a sepia photograph from
an age of quaintness, but an interesting one, none the less.
Were they
libertarians in the classical sense? Critics of society? Great poets and
thinkers in the making?
Or just larrikins, drunks, barflies, and intellectual
gadabouts who dressed up their sexual promiscuity and drunken debaucheries in
pseudo-academic garb?
It is quite
possible, indeed highly likely, that all of these suppositions are true, their
contrariness and apparent mutual exclusivity notwithstanding; the Push was nothing
if not paradoxical.
Deriving its
name from the larrikin gangs who ruled the streets of inner Sydney a century
ago, the Push in its later incarnation in the1950s was, as the Bulletin wrote,
"a strange pack of academic bores, barroom intellectuals of various
persuasions, homosexuals, crooks and alcoholics, with some reasonable, human
and charming people in all sections".
There was an
authentic philosophical focus for the latter-day Push in the vibrant but
quixotic figure of John Anderson, professor of philosophy at the University of
Sydney from 1927 to 1958.
Anderson, a Scot and a devout freethinker, ran
headlong into the predominantly wowser culture of Australia at the time, and seemingly
delighted in doing so. He was widely condemned, even by the NSW Legislative
Council, as an immoral influence on young minds, but his intellectual legacy
has been immense.
A
philosopher with remarkably wide interests, ranging from social theory,
aesthetics and ethics to politics and "pure" philosophy, Anderson, in
his disciple Jim Baker' swords, was "arguably the most original thinker in
each of these areas that Australian philosophy has had".
Anderson was
an ardent communist who later broke with the party to become, in turn, a
Trotskyist and a fierce anti-communist, much to the bemusement of many of his
followers in the Push.
Judy
Ogilvie, a Push survivor, has set down a most valuable set of recollections in
the form of "an impressionist memoir" which, while
Norman
Abjorensen reviews Judy Ogilvie's account of the Sydney Push.
John
Anderson some are inventions, are, as she writes, "Firmly based on typical
personalities and events". .
The main
characters, though quite recognisable, have been given fictional names "in
the interests of veracity and to protect their privacy”. John Anderson, for
example, is “Sandy Gregory" and the Andersonians are, in the book,
"Gregorians".
One thing
that all of the Push had in common — and the straggling remnants that still
exist share it —is a taste for low life, the ratty pubs, sleazy cafes and wild
parties. So successfully does Ms Ogilvie capture this that the very smells are
in evidence in her descriptions.
Ginny, the
main character, is sent to London in 1953, to stop her from marrying Pepinall,
the son of a trade-union activist (a Grouper, actually, but to Ginny's father,
part of a commie ratbag family).
It was not a particularly sophisticated time
in Australia, either socially or politically
Expatriate
life in London is described without sentiment: the menial jobs, the
homesickness, the bleakness, the pretentiousness, the parties, the sex. The
comic-strip innocent, Bazza McKenzie, could have been among the London branch
of the Push.
A big man
from Sydney University, Raddle, much admired in the Push, has gone to London to
work as a journalist on the pro-Labour Daily Mirror, but his existence seems staked
out entirely by seeking out on the pretext of chance young Australian females
and bedding them.
He has a wife, who teaches at the Sorbonne, but he hates
France and, anyway, can't afford the fare.
They summer together at a rented
cottage in Wales.
The expat
Aussies party on. Ginny describes in a letter home one rage thus: "The
usual screaming, drunken mob of Melbourne and Sydney expatriates, Bessy [sic]
Smith and Leadbelly on the record player and everyone trying to get on to each other's
husband or wife."
Back in
Sydney and the Push is in crisis over Anderson/Gregory's anticommunism, but the
Push, characteristically, is all over the place. As one character describes it
as "a watershed ... in the history of Sydney", Gregory's top
follower, Figgins, is busy lecturing Ginny about "an important
inter-connection between sexual servitude and political servitude.
As long as
sexual behaviour is governed by taboos invented and enforced by the ruling
class, it cannot be freely examined because of the fear, superstition, and
false shame which surrounds it."
It is clear
now that Push women were definitely inferior in status to the men, and
"liberation" was somewhat one-sided: the women became "liberated"
by sleeping with the men.
Observes
Ginny: "Life was not as easy for women in the Push as it was for men.
How
to support themselves then and in the future weighed heavily on their minds. A few
had wealthy or potentially wealthy lovers but the more sensible women — and not
many Push women were stupid — knew better than to rely on lovers for life-long
support.
Push women were always conscious of how important it was to graduate.
If they didn't seize the few opportunities open to them.
One of the
last public gasps of the old Push was the arrest of Darcy Waters in 1971 for
allegedly spitting at a police officer who had cautioned him for jaywalking.
It was, as
the Bulletin reported it, "a matter of honour ... an ideological drama".
Darcy Waters
(Clancy in Judy Ogilvie's book) was the quintessential Push figure, a student
after the war but who dropped out to become, to all intents and purposes, a full-time
libertarian.
He became,
in the parlance of the day, an "informal student" at both Sydney
University and the University of New South Wales. (That is, he was seen
frequently on the campuses of both). He also wrote occasionally (very occasionally)
for both student newspapers. He earned his living from casual work on the
waterfront or from gambling.
The scene
for the confrontation between Darcy Waters and the Establishment was Sydney
Central Court.
Darcy,
long-haired, in duffel coat and jeans, and Inspector William Beath,. In short
back and sides and suit, appeared before a magistrate in Court 5.
The
inspector told the court that on July 6, 1971, at 9.50pm he had seen Darcy Waters
cross against a "Don't Walk" sign, causing three vehicles to stop to
allow him a cross; he had pushed aside a number of people, and again walked
against a "Don't Walk" sign.
Inspector
Beath ran up to him, identified himself as a police officer, and told him he
should have more sense than to walk against the lights. Waters, he alleged, said
"So what?" and spat at his feet.
Waters
admitted that he had walked against the light, but had neither spoken to the
inspector nor spat at him.
Defense lawyer Jim Staples said Darcy had been arrested for "not tipping his hat
to the inspector", who had acted crazily after a few drinks and a hard day
at the anti Springbok demonstration that same day.
The
magistrate found the case had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt and dismissed
the charge.
The incident
was talked about for many years after that, probably the last great confrontation
between the Push and Them.
— NORMAN
ABJORENSEN
did not
become teachers or librarians, the future offered them no security at
all."
The women of
the Push, she notes wryly, were provisional, interchangeable. "The men ...
tended to remain there, mateship enduring as a stronger bond than sexual
attraction. They stayed together, growing 'older, while the women were
continually being replaced by younger ones."
The
Gregorians, for all their public scoffing at convention and middle-class
morality, nevertheless had their own codes which often developed into what
Orwell would describe as "smelly little orthodoxies". For such a
sexually free-ranging lot, secret liaisons were frowned upon, and demerit
points were awarded for being seen with people deemed to be uninteresting, or
even "interesting" only as a curiosity.
It is an
interesting perspective, but perhaps even more so from the viewpoint of a woman.
It is, in some ways, as subversive as was Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters
(1983) in which she demythologised Kerouac and the Beat scene.
The Push was
quintessential 'Sydney, a phenomenon that in Melbourne would have taken on a
quite different form; certainly it would not have been as outrageously self-indulgent
(but then that was part 'of the attraction).
It is
probably dead now, its last organ, the libertarian Broadsheet, having ceased
publication in 1979 Litany case, all the old Push pubs have been demolished or
transformed beyond recognition — the Newcastle; the Royal George, the Tudor,
the Criterion.
It was a
lingering death. Probably the last remnants of the Push were the motley band
who would gather on the footpath of the old Criterion, corner of Liverpool and
Sussex streets, on a Friday night in the1970s.
There were academics, artists, bikies,
journalists and bludgers and a new libertarian element that in that era, circa
1973, was splitting away from the Communist Party of Australia under the influence
of Jack Mundey, a Criterion habitue.
There would
be drinking (schooners, of course), gossip, memories, talk of the dead (even
then there seemed to be many), and the inevitable party at Newtown or Balmain
or Glebe. The political edge had gone, Whitlam was in power, and it was all
amiably aimless.
The
aficionado will find many delightful cameo appearances here, either in disguise
(the king of bohemia Darcy Waters as Clancy) or people under their own names
such as Jack Gulley, former head of ABC television news, characteristically
staging a mock fight.
But what did
it all mean? Ah', that's the province of another book,' I suspect. But what
Judy Ogilvie Has given here is an account of social adolescence in post-war
Sydney — but it never pretends to be universal.
How could it
when to be in the Push you generally had to be a university student? And we all
know how privileged one was to be a student then.
But, then,
the Push always did thrive on contradiction.
The Push: An
Impressionist Memoir, by Judy Ogilvie (Primavera), pp182, $14.95.
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