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Alan Wearne

What You Are About To Hear...

about The Lovemakers

This piece is 1,160 words or about 3 printed pages long.

Ahh, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
            — Robert Browning, Andrea Del Sarto

‘The Lovemakers’ is an interconnected series of large scale overlapping narratives covering urban Australian life 1960–1990. Three groups dominate Book One, ‘Saying All The Great Sexy Things’. The first centres on Jack, a ‘facilitator’ with a penchant for much younger women, Bernie, his no-hoper sidekick, and The Kid a.k.a. The Baron, a young man determined to both seek and avoid trouble. From Melbourne’s East the Price family, their relatives and friends form the second group whilst the third involves teenagers and young adults in Sydney’s southern suburbs. With the intersection of these and other groups the work arrives at its emotional heart: the triangle of Barb, her husband Roger and her lover Neil. (Those lives that have merely taxied in the first half will take off in ‘More Than Workin’ For The Richman’, volume two: Kevin and Kim, the drug czars, Stubbsy, the entrepeneur, Gibbo the comedian, and Sophie, Carrie and Hannah, three young women making definite ways in the world. Then, somewhere in South-east Asia, at the girly bar Crazy Horse, The Lovemakers hurtles to its climax.)

With poetry a form of writing to be tackled by its audience with deliberation, and much of The Lovemakers propelled by voice and voices, readers will be ‘overhearing’ quite a lot of dialogue, and should be prepared for many characters to step forward and address them directly. This, I suppose, is where the Compact Disc comes in. Its selections are meant to give both some idea of the work’s plots and scope, and my way of reading the verse. To catch certain emphases and intonations in these selections certainly won’t hinder an appreciation of the whole. Besides, it has been often proposed that my poetry is written for my voice as much as for the page. Certainly I know I come from an aural (though not necessarily a ‘performance’) tradition. But unless a poem is so dominated by its ‘visual’ elements that reading aloud is near to impossible then all poetry should be drafted and auditioned as much with its creator’s voice as with his/ her pen and paper.

The pieces contained on this CD are as follows:

The Kid In St. Kilda The early 60s. Taken in by two local women a street kid meets two men who teach him a deal about friendship, exploitation and betrayal.
Cross QC: Three Villanelles A murderer’s barrister is presented through two speeches and an internal monologue.
A Lecture In Love 1965. Towards the end of an affair with a man over twice her age a sixth former takes her anger out on her class-mates.
Dave Price Completes His Extension Post war Australia told through the agency of a man detirmined to play by the rules...his own.
Barb At Dot’s Wedding 1972. At her cousin’s reception 18 yearold Barb meets Roger Heath, her future husband.
The Phil Price Limericks The mid 70s. The memoirs of an outer suburban tearaway.
Roger or Of Love And Its Anger The late 70s. Having acquired something of an ‘open’ nature the Heath marriage is now under new pressure: Barb loves someone else. Her husband speaks.

These selections are from the first volume. Certain publishing constraints meant that the work had to be halved in early proof stage (with the hope that being a popular and critical success, the companion volume would follow). And yet, even though this halving is artificial, there is enough of a balance between what was completed and what is starting for me to draw the line with confidence. Barb has left her lover Neil and returned to her husband Roger. With this the emotional core of the first half (and one of the two or three such cores in the whole work) is over. Then true to those soapie devices I always seem to follow (albeit inadvertently) Sophie Cross, a new major character appears; and with her another set of adventures commence. Although her section wasn’t designed this way it may have the potential to help promote Volume Two. For the power of anticipation, of the future and how it is to be confronted, is as alive in art (and yes even in soapie art!) as it is in life.

And then there’s the past! Some aspects, concerns (names even) had been with me for well over half my lifetime. In 1967 attempting to start that novel 19-year-olds expect themselves to write, I conjured the Inter Suburban Christian Crusade, a somewhat sinister cabal of rightwing evangelicals; yet with that book hardly written, let alone commenced, the ISCC never achieved any real mischief. I loved their name however and wouldn’t dispose of it, though by the time The Crusade waltzes into The Lovemakers it’s full of that hearty mid-60s fellowship which would, quite soon, form a defining pillar of the Uniting Church.

But why stop with that worthy body? Ever since my earliest memory (August 1950) so much about this place has continued to buttonhole me. For I know of little more immediate and hence more creatively challenging and enthralling than Australia as it has both developed and regressed in my lifetime. And if I put my hand up as belonging to the ‘What’s new?’ school of human thought (liberal humanist wing) I still trust my imagination can make what I create a great deal in advance of mere nostalgia: to offer in these quite often sour days something new based on what, to many Australians, is still very familiar; though of course quite on my own terms.

Yet you try to recreate a Skase and end up with a Singleton, you try to parody Dransfield’s verse and you’re told your target seems more like Tipping. You attempt to make a drug czar satanic and he finishes more a Mephisto. Art can do many things vis-à-vis life except be life, or rather that thing it is trying to create or recreate. Anyone who observed and/ or was part of the life of risk-taking, mould-breaking Robert Langsford (and there were doubtless thousands) might find him sketched as Leo Pengilly (even to the extent that both Robert and Leo lived at 4/ 9 Foster St St. Kilda in the early 80s). But that time is over. (Robert’s been dead a near decade now.) There’s just art. Short of time machines it’s all we have. Except… forget what I just wrote about the near impossibility of art outdoing life! A poem, a novel, anything with such aspirations has to be lived as much as created. And to the question ‘How much of The Lovemakers’ is (a) real (b) real enough? ‘Yeah,’ I can only shrug. ‘well I get around...’ Or, to slightly adapt ‘Nino’ Carlotta in his preference to ‘They’re A Weird Mob’ ‘...anyone who thinks he/ she recognizes him/ herself in these pages, probably does.’

— A. W., Wollongong, December 2000

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