Sydney launch speech
Mandy Nolan launched Staging a Revolution on Sunday October 16 at the Petersham Bowling Club. She acknowledged the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and gave a speech that was both funny and moving. In my book I write that her current show, Country Witches Association, is made in the same rebellious spirit as the 1972 women’s show at the Pram Factory, Betty Can Jump. Below is the speech I gave at the launch (my speech was also posted here by the good folk at Meanjin).
-Kath
Thank you Mandy, for the acknowledgement of country. I want to acknowledge too the recent passing of Uncle Jack Charles. Jack was an important part of the Pram Factory tribe; he performed in many Pram plays, and he co-founded the Nindethana theatre company at the Pram in 1971
I was in Melbourne two weeks ago, and I walked past the place where the Pram Factory once stood. The two-story brick building was originally built as a livery stable. Over the years, it was variously a dance hall, a coke den and a panelbeaters. In the 1980s, the Pram Factory was pulled down, and the block is now a carpark for shoppers visiting Woolworths or seeing a movie at Lygon Court’s Cinema Nova.
When the Australian Performing Group moved into the Pram in 1970 and stayed for a decade, it was open-all-hours carnival. There were new Australian plays on almost every night of the week, there was a flea market downstairs on weekends, where actors searched second hand clothes stalls for costumes. In the mornings, there could be a rehearsal for street theatre that would be performed at a demonstration that afternoon. Skyhooks played one of their earliest shows there, the first tents for what would become Circus OZ were sewn in its basement.
At some point, a hole was punched in the wall between the Pram Factory and the Tower that adjoined the building, where some of the members of the Australian Performing Group (the APG) lived. Tower residents could tumble out of bed and into a rehearsal. APG member Tim Robertson has written: “People who lived in the Tower, on the whole, were idealists who wanted to live at work and work at play and avoid the nuclear family.”
When I interviewed Helen Garner for this book, she told me: “The thing about the Factory was it had a big energy. You would come home just sore from laughing … Everyone wanted to be a part of it.” The world of women’s liberation and sexual liberation was colliding too in Pram shows. As I was reading descriptions of performances, at times it seemed as if some of the APG members believed that if they programmed just one more show featuring nude cartwheels, the whole patriarchal capitalist complex might come tumbling down.
Before I started this researching this story, when I thought about the Pram Factory, I thought of David Williamson and performers such as Graeme Blundell and Bruce Spence. You might think of Williamson’s Don’s Party and plays about boozy ocker males.
But when I started researching the story of women at the Pram, I learnt that Williamson, for example, was really only there for the first five minutes of the Pram’s 11-year life. And as I opened archives and visited former APG members in Coogee and Melbourne, or in their home outside Daylesford, and as I spoke to them by phone or Zoom in Perth and Castlemaine, I discovered an incredible story of the women at the Pram.
While much of the story of my book takes place in the 1970s, my first chapter begins in the 1960s, when one of the founders of the APG, and Betty Can Jump’s director, Kerry Dwyer, was a student at the University of Melbourne. One Wednesday afternoon in 1964, Kerry took part in a protest against the banning of women at the public bar of the Mayfair Hotel next to the University of Melbourne. This was almost a year before Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bogner chained themselves to the bar at the Regatta Hotel in 1965, an action often described as one of the first signs of the women’s movement in Australia – the 1965 protest was filmed by the ABC, and so it’s remembered.
By the late 1960s, Kerry’s university friend Helen Garner (then called Helen Ford) had become active in the abortion rights movement. When I first contacted Helen, she told me she was reluctant to speak about that time: it was a time of great wrecking and smashing of things – her marriage was breaking down by the early 1970s, she was estranged from her parents and beginning life as a single mother. But it was also a time when they were creating a new culture and new way of living.
I was able to find out so much about the women at the Pram Factory because Kerry somehow found the time to record these years in detail – even though it was a time when she was busy running through moratorium marches with her friends doing street theatre dressed as Viet Cong in black pyjamas and red headbands, when she was going to one of the first consciousness groups in Carlton, and when she was giving birth to her first child.
Kerry conducted and kept interviews with the cast of Betty Can Jump, and the impact it had on their lives. Helen Garner describes an early meeting of the Carlton Women’s Liberation Group at her house, where she is trying to focus on the exercises a visiting American actor called Maggie Helmer has given the group to do. “Finish the phrase ’As a woman, I feel like …’ in your own words,” Maggie asked the assembled women. Helen felt so uncomfortable she started to leave, before finding the will to stay and imagining herself as “a piece of elastic that is stretched and stretched and stretched”.
What I tried to do in my book was to describe what it felt like to be living in the 1960s and1970s, particularly if you were a young woman who was gifted as an artist or writer or director or performer.
At the start of the 1970s, the Coalition government had been in power for more than two decades. Young Australian men were being told they had to fight to preserve our western freedoms. You can imagine how women who were attracted to the antiwar movement and the growing women’s movement must have felt about that. At the time, there were still separate jobs columns in the paper for men and women. There were no women in the House of Representatives. And if you wanted to drink here at the Petersham Bowling Club, you might have to sit in your car while a man brought you a beer.
The production diaries Kerry kept during rehearsals contained vivid descriptions of the Betty Can Jump cast during rehearsals. “Helen is always the one to see a new opening”, she wrote in her diary. Judy Kuring “is always on the ground in the middle of it all.” Evelyn Krape and Yvonne Marini “riff off each other” with improvisations that “are nearly all funny”.
Kerry’s notes also describe a 1970s mansplainer who came to an early meeting to workshop the women’s play. While women sat in a circle, he ran around the edges brandishing a script about men and women screaming: “Damnitall! I don’t know how you are going to achieve anything at all if you won’t accept help and advice from us.”
He gave the Betty collective an excuse to start workshopping their women’s play behind closed doors. When the group realised they needed a man to play the male roles, the women decided the right man for the job was Perth actor Victor Marsh – at that point, Vic was in Sydney on charges after he had taken five tabs of acid, walked through the city lost for two days and let himself into a stranger’s house.
In the end, Vic did turn out to be the perfect man for the job – he was excellent at “wearing the sins of male Western civilisation”, Betty cast member Claire Dobbin told me. He also brought with him his partner Carmen Lawrence, a 23-year-old psychology tutor. When Carmen wasn’t busy establishing the Women’s Electoral Lobby with Beatrice Faust, she was sitting in on rehearsals. Kerry describes how she gave the collective the benefit of her “brilliant mind” to clarify the play’s occasional “muddy patch”.
While the cast was rehearsing in Melbourne, researcher Laurel Frank recalls how she travelled to Sydney with another member of the group to the Mitchel Library, where she discovered stories about colonial settler women’s history in Australia – the early female factories and Vida Goldstein and Louisa Lawson. Laurel and Kay Hamilton landed on some of the same material Anne Summers researched when she was writing Damned Whores and God’s Police. Three years before Summers’ book came out, Betty Can Jump hit on the same critique as Summers of an Australian culture that assigned women to the category of either a saint or a harlot.
Betty Can Jump isn’t remembered in the same way that Summers’ book is, but it made an impact on the thousands of women who laughed and cried every night when they sat in the audience watching the show. Every night was sold out, and the season was extended for two weeks. It changed the Pram Factory – but not with controversy and not without at least one spectacular resignation.
The women in the collective would make a lasting impact on Australian culture – from founding Circus Oz to starring in the television series Prisoner, on Australian stages, and in films such as Babe. Helen Garner needs no introduction. They were part of a generation of women who changed the world in the 1970s. But of course, everything stayed the same as well.
There is a scene in Betty where a character taunts a woman: “Got the rags on, have you?”. Nearly fifty years later, in 2021, I found myself travelling to Canberra for the March4Justice, enraged at a conversation I’d had with teachers about boys in a school playground who were harassing girls with “jokes” about rape and taunts about being “on their periods”.
That day, Scott Morrison told parliament we protestors should feel lucky we weren’t being shot at. Like the scene that Betty begins with, when Vic, playing a British officer, whips the cast playing convict women, violence against women is baked into the way this country was founded.
The women behind Betty and those who led the women’s movement in the 1970s made revolutionary changes to our world. But remembering our history is one way we can try to avoid the revolutions that take us around in circles.
