Monkey Grip

Am rereading Monkey Grip by Helen Garner. It started with reading a biography in which the Carlton crowd in the Pram Factory are discussed, and the writer describes the friendship between Garner and Kerry Dwyer, which dates from university days and involves them in feminist theatre (Dwyer was later involved in the creation of Circus Oz; as a single mother lived in a caravan in Rozelle in the early 80s). The other mention of Garner was in Stephen Cummings biography, he talks of reading the journal of a mutual friend; how Garner busts him and writes admonishing notes in the margins.

Journals. That was what struck me about the era of Monkey Grip, how characters (real life actors and musicians* from mid 70s Melbourne) all kept journals, wrote letters, wrote notes that they left at each others houses, wrote postcards. They tore out pictures of friends in Cinema Paper and pinned them up as shrines, as substitutes for photos of their own (few had cameras, processing film was expensive).

The other thing that I never noticed on previous readings (I've read this book a dozen times, but probably not since I lived in Tasmania) is the descriptions of her domestic life and tasks of motherhood. It's an interpretation that evaded me until I had a child; Kerryn Goldsworthy noted this, summarising Garner's work as a discussion of how two worlds (a sexual life and family life) can co-exist.

Over the years I've clocked references to the Monkey Grip social world in non-fiction pieces by Garner and other people from the Pram Factory crowd. I've seen her in Pure Shit, read Student Chronicles, recognise aspects of her daughter in the character of Poppy in The Children's Bach and script for Two Friends. I like how she borrows from real life-not out of laziness, but because she is an acute observer of what is happening right then. By drawing from real life she framed a social milieu that otherwise could have been lost. You get a feel for the early 70s, for inner city Melbourne, for the Whitlam era, the effect of the single mother pension, the ability of the musicians and artists to live modestly and work hard on their art. Her crowd are educated people, refugees from smaller cities, people who are interested in international issues and living in a haven from mainstream culture.

What I always notice when re-reading the book is the gaps between how I was then and how I am now.  Two thirds of the way through the book her character turns 33, she is almost 2 years younger than I am now. There is a noticeable gap of life experience-she has a 6 year old, I have an 11 week old. I am not as well educated in feminist politics, as brave about casual drug use, nor do I dwell in a world where sexual relations with a variety of partners can happen without fragmenting the primary relationship. But is anyone doing this in the current era? All my friends are single or partnered, parents or without kids. There is no halfway point. Occasionally there are committed long term couples living in separate houses (2 friends married and then had a child after 15 years of living in separate houses with house mates), but there is certainly no sharing of partners. To sleep with anyone other than your official partner would cause confusion, stress, disrupt the social fabric, bring recriminations, damage friendships, jeapordise the family unit and so forth. The same 50s/60s shackles that this group threw off, so they could live their inner city sharehouse life.

When I think of sharehouses in my world, they are sharehouses of single people, of slightly adolescent like adults, people biding time , eventually aspiring to joint house ownership. For the older people who have become single again, a sharehouse is only an option if finances dictate. Some single parents share together, but they are still in a minority. There are probably many more single parents that would benefit from shared/communal approaches to bringing up family, but there is a sense that everyone aspires for permanency-a long term lease, a mortgage-and the communal household is too temporary to attempt. A friend of mine in Sydney is good at that-can leave the city for 12 months or longer, go travelling and hitchhiking, spend months living frugally in a tent in parks, reading books, and then happily return to mainstream society, unconcerned about which rung she will resume on.

I am fairly certain that all the children mentioned in the novel grow up well educated and confident; exposure to the world of theatre and music have empowered them; exposure to shifting romances and drug use haven't scarred them. They have probably all turned out like Alice Garner/  I like best her memories of hitchhiking, as a child, with a family friend to Perth; returning as a teenager to do a summer theatre production; learning to surf in the Indian Ocean. I can picture the colours of this experience: yellow wheat fields, turquoise ocean, quirky purple stone walled cottages of the surprisingly cosmopolitan city of Perth.

When I visited Melbourne, I took walks around the neighbourhood, tried to imagine it as it once would have been. And then, like everyone, I remembered that you can't emulate someone else's life, someone else's era, you have to make your own. Helen was of a generation that got a university education but then married and parented early. My generation attempts marriage and parenthood in our 30s, we have entirely different experiences at different generational stages; and perhaps we even skip some of their dilemmas because of this delayed parenthood. Becoming a parent so late means that neither myself or my husband are much fussed about what we are missing out on-we've consciously chosen this family life as what we need to sustain ourselves with now.

The feminist questions-they are slightly different. There was a real sexism to Australian culture, that meant it was only in the 70s that women had access to single mother support, decent child care, could work and be independent from a controlling husband. And although sexism still lives, it isn't considered acceptable anymore, some men have been brought up to behave differently, or to be more involved in their children's life, to be present at births, to cook and wash. The division of labour isn't equal, but the problem is looked at now, known to be odd, compared to the era when this was considered the norm, and women were whingers for mentioning it.

I thought as well about the social circle I circulate in. Did I finally find the friends I wished for-am I no longer pressing my nose against windows of other people's lives? I think so. It's so true, you make your friends at work, through crises, through living together, by pursuing a passion so integral to you that you find other similiar obsessives, or by becoming a sort of person (in my case, someone adventurous enough to live in different states) that attracts other simliarly experienced people. My husband always empathises with me that my life experience, and the strength it should have given me, isn't so apparent on the surface, covered as it is by my modesty and repetition of teen insecurities. Too much time spent trying to get what other less interesting people have, instead of celebrating what I have, and stoking up more of it. This might be either time wasted trying to befriend pointless people or time wasted, being too fearful to befriend kindred spirits. I do this at work sometimes, let the conventional person dictate the topics of conversation instead of trying to raise the bar. I don't want to be the outsider on the fringes, I want to be confident enough to bring attention to more amusing matters.

*have decided that my blog entries need more visual detail. So added a photo of some friends of friends doing their musician thing... as Duckworth said, this band had incredibly good songs but they were never going to get the success they deserved