Oh get over it, Rodney Croome ...
Down on home
I went to HHS (Hobart High School) in the fading days (became Hobart Matric College) with Peter Conrad and Amanda Lohrey (nee Howard), amongst many other interesting people. HHS had a habit of producing interesting people. Pity it closed.
I know that at that time -1964, speaking from personal experience, Peter was behaving very happily as a heterosexual. I'm sure that at the time that I knew him, his sexuality, whichever way, didn't particularly bother him. Of much greater concern was his working class background, parents, and Goodwood. We have all been teenagers and felt pain regarding where we came from, but Peter had great difficulty in handling his working class background at that time.
By the way, we had obviously homosexual mates - it was not an issue.
Peter and I used to read the obits in the Mercury for a laugh - "Stumpy, ever loved and missed, WW1 " - that sort of thing, and giggle ourselves silly at the silly bastards getting blind drunk every Anzac day (some of the sneering justified - my paedophile uncle never heard a shot on war service in Sydney because he was too busy rooting boys in Kings Cross while my father worked in a timber mill in Tassie, busting his guts and being abused for not serving - my father, even in 1940 odd, was given a white feather, despite the fact he was not allowed to serve, being in an essential industry).
We also used to muck around with seances, so fashionable then, Vera was our medium, of course.
We were shitty little snobs from a working class background, admired because we were smart and made it to HHS, and with reasonably large egos because if we had been from the previous working class generation we would have been fitters and turners and dressmakers, at best.
I really believe that Peter was not suffering a sexual crisis at that time - certainly not from my experience, we were all still experimenting behind the sofa!
I can completely relate to his image of Mt Wellington looming over one at all times - I still find the mountain almost overwhelming whenever I visit, and I'm a boring old fart in her mid-fifties who left Hobart at 21 for Sydney, did the hippie trail, lived abroad and returned, but to Sydney. Why? Because Hobart is just too cold for older bones, even though my love for the place is awesome, and in my heart there is no lovelier place.
I do agree that he tended to denigrate Tassie for a while, but then all of us expats did that until we became wiser, got a bit of maturity. Sadly the silly and totally out of date Humphries is still at it.
I still have Peter's copy of Coonardoo, suitably annotated by him in about 1963 and given to me by him. Needless to say the annotations stand him out, he was bound for greatness - he just had to deal with the Goodwood. I think he has, as well as one can.
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Thursday, August 19, 2004