| Author | Message | ||
     Lee Bradshaw Member Username: Lee_bradshaw Post Number: 1 Registered: 10-2006 |
There was a thread here about Andy Gill’s article on Grant in the July issue of 'The Word' but I can’t find it now. I wanted to challenge some of the assertions in it before embryonic myths become accepted truths. I am getting a little tired of reading that Robert and Grant brought culture to philistine Brisbane. I don’t believe it serves Grant’s memory at all well to infer that he assumed superiority over the people he socialised, studied and shared a stage with when we were ALL reading ferociously and forming bands in the late 70s. If he disdained the rest of us, he certainly didn't show it. I did classes with Grant in 1976/77 and, whereas he was sensitive, reserved and earnest he was certainly no enigmatic prodigy. I also played quite a few gigs on the same bill as a member of The Supports and later, in London, as a member of Tiny Town. Grant’s artistic integrity was honed over years of life experience, not months of juvenile fantasy, as is suggested here. Being in Brisbane in the seminal era where that famed ‘striped sunlight sound’ originated was a lot more fun than this glib piece suggests. It had to be, right? Grant is quoted in the article as saying, ‘I noticed this tall fellow carrying the Talking Heads record ’77 [Referring to Robert]. I didn’t think anybody else in Australia was listening to it.’ If Grant did say this he was being somewhat convenient with the truth. This album came out in September 1977, eighteen months after Robert and Grant supposedly met - after Robert had dropped out of his university course. They would have heard about this album the same way as everyone else in Brisbane did, from radio station 4ZZZ-FM where it was on the highest rotation. I know this is true because I was a presenter there at the time. Robert may have rushed to buy it on import from Rocking Horse Records, the record shop that every counter-culture vulture in Brisbane went to, where it was on prominent display. Or he could have saved a couple of dollars by waiting a month and getting it from Myers as it was on local release almost immediately because all the public broadcasters had picked up on it. Maybe this was just a fun story – a kind of metaphor – not to be taken literally. Everyone needs to realise that we are now talking about an important deceased writer - one whose back story needs to be very accurate now that he's no longer holding up one end of Ric's Bar, Hemingway-like, tall story telling. Grant’s narrative is no longer a work in progress. It’s done. How does anyone suppose that Brisbane could have sustained such a well-documented vibrant, event-packed alternative calendar without a lot of interested, engaged people to present and support it? The Schonell Theatre was built at Queensland University in 1970 and was Brisbane’s first art house cinema. A widespread interest in continental film dates from that time. The films of Truffaut and Godard as well as Herzog and Fassbinder were shown there regularly in the early seventies. Grant may have been a very active film buff but he did not actually introduce Brisbane to world cinema. There was a thriving intellectual scene in Brisbane by the late sixties which was going strong when I first arrived at University of Queensland in 1973. The doyens of this scene were people like political activists Dick Shearman, Brian Laver, Mitch Thompson and Jim Beatson, (who conceived of the idea of 4ZZZ-FM and led the fight to get it founded before the Whitlam Government collapsed in 1975). University lecturers Carol Ferrier, Peter Wertheim and Dan O’Neill led the radicalisation of UQ from within. And then there was group around the Popular Theatre Troupe which included Lindy Morrison, Errol O’Neill and Geoffrey Rush. These were the people at the forefront of the Brisbane (anti)-social scene. Also prominent in the party-giving business was UQ’s architecture department. The Grudge (later lots of other names), were famed for their extravagant theme parties (World War 2, Hollywood etc). These were great times. If Grant was so embarrassed by his compatriots, why did he write so much about his childhood, the land, the people and why did he maintain such a fierce loyalty to Brisbane as a place to live and be? Grant’s huge artistic legacy survives in its own right. It is not in any way dependent on whether or not people believe he and Robert where a pair of angel-headed hipsters withering in the company of the rest of us pub-rocking cave dwellers. It wasn’t true. It cheapens and sentimentalises Grant’s real and tangible achievements. It's all a bit sad. His memory would be better served by a studious and accurate picture of how things really were and the whole environment that stimulated Grant McLennan’s long and successful career. | ||
| kevin Member Username: Kevin Post Number: 920 Registered: 05-2005 |
Hi Lee, this is what you are looking for http://go-betweens.org.uk/chatroom/messages/1462/1833.html?1152196211 I have never been to Brisbane. However, I would imagine in common with every big city of the world it has/had its fair amount of movers and shakers. Anybody who read Andy Gills piece would need to be naive in the extreme to believe nobody apart from Grant and Robert were at the "cutting edge" (for want of a better expression) culturally | ||
| fsh Member Username: Fsh Post Number: 85 Registered: 05-2005 |
Ok so. | ||
| Elizabeth Robinson Member Username: Liz_the_new_listener Post Number: 3 Registered: 10-2006 |
Dear Mr. Bradshaw - Thank you so very much for writing. It's stuff like this we need to see, and I find it a shame that Mr. Gill could write such pretensious (sp?) material, particularly in the light of what Robert Forster himself has written about his friend in 'A True Hipster'. I would have loved to have known someone like Grant McLennan, back in the days when I was at the University (and, admittedly, pretensious....). - E. |