Rebels of Oz: Germaine, Clive, Barry and Bob; Commonwealth on Film – TV review
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Version 0 of 1. Rebels of Oz: Germaine, Clive, Barry and Bob (BBC4) is the writer Howard Jacobson's investigation of the most seismic of Australian invasions, long before all those container-loads of reasonable white wine transformed Britain into a nation of middle-class drunks. This was the 1960s, and the exportats were cultural, in the figures of Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries and Robert Hughes. It was also, of course, a flight. None of the four, it seems, could wait to leave their birthplace. "There was almost a willed torpor about Australia," said the writer Thomas Keneally of those times, "which these brilliant children wanted to escape." The only person to contradict this assessment was Jacobson, who arrived in Australia in the early 1960s, just as his four subjects were leaving. For him it was a place of liberation, "egalitarian and brave". The University of Sydney, where Jacobson taught, was "a seething cauldron of belligerence", which he loved. Clive James recognised how much he and the others owed to the place they fled. "We came from a blessed land at a blessed time." Jacobson sought escape from stultifying English conformity in Australia, and found it. Greer, James, Humphries and Hughes, however, were looking for a bigger stage in which to make mischief. They found it in Britain. Robert Hughes went to Venice first, to look at the art he knew so well but had never seen. Greer and James pitched up in Cambridge, where they both auditioned for Footlights, when it was run by Eric Idle (Greer did a striptease that took her from a nun's habit down to a wet suit and flippers; it must have taken her ages to get ready). Humphries was in London playing Dame Edna Everage at the Establishment Club. John Betjeman liked the act – apparently that was one way to get discovered in the 1960s. All four of theses rebels are worthy subjects for TV biography, and it was up to this programme to make the case for lumping them together. What did they all have in common? The broadcaster Phillip Adams theorised that they had all been squeezed into genius by the sheer weight of Australia's suburban dullness. "The pressure of boredom produced intellectual diamonds in the likes of Humphries and his collaborators," he said. Above all, Jacobson said, they shared a daunting facility with words, a carefree precision alloyed with their native land's exuberant vulgarity. It fell to Greer to provide an example of the latter, speaking of someone so generous that "he'd give you his arsehole and shit through his ribs". "It's almost metaphysical," she said. It was a fair summing up of a particular moment (there's more to come; this is part one of two), enlivened by old footage and the fact that three of the four rebels are still around (Hughes died in 2012) to offer necessary perspective, and odd memories. A particular favourite was Humphries' image of expats flocking from Earls Court to the reading room at Australia House "to get the news about the royal family" from Australian magazines. From Commonwealth on Film (BBC4), a voyage in the other direction: "I'm a motor mechanic," says a man to a woman standing beside an "Immigration Enquiries" sign. "If I go to Australia, can I be sure of work?" "I'm sure you can't fail," says the woman. "There's plenty of work in Australia for a skilled man." This archive footage, spanning decades and continents and boiled down to four half hours, is sometimes stilted but always arresting. This first instalment focused on work. Here is an Outback "road train" driver telling Alan Whicker that he fends off boredom on the long journeys by reading at the wheel. On the straight roads, he says, he can go for two or three minutes without looking up from his book. Then we see the "port boys" of Accra, open boat rowers who have a dangerous monopoly on loading and unloading ships in Ghana's then-harbourless capital. Once they've negotiated the surf, they carry everything – passengers included – to shore on their backs. In most cases, the film-makers seemed to sense they were recording a vanishing world. At the time it must have seemed remarkable that people still lived the way they did in these far-flung outposts. Now it seems remarkable that anyone ever lived that way. I often associate the word "Commonwealth" with being bored rigid, but I was spellbound, from beginning to end. |