Sex, Drugs and the Electoral Roll by Fiona Patten

Author:Fiona Patten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2018-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Today, as a member of parliament who attends and loves citizenship ceremonies, all I get to hand out is a small, bare-rooted eucalypt and a plastic, Chinese-made Australian flag bearing the Union Jack. We should be handing new citizens a copy of The Fatal Shore for all its honesty and understanding of the Australian way.

* * * *

My experience with Hughes contrasted wildly with Robbie’s experiences with another great historian, the late Manning Clark. Before I had met Robbie, he had attended a morning tea at Clark’s home at the invitation of Griffith University historian and future Sex Party candidate, Professor Ross Fitzgerald. Ross had written widely on his alcoholism battles and Clark had recently confided to Ross on his own struggles with the demon drink. They were coming together this day to talk about the possibility of co-writing a book on alcoholism in Australia that would revolve around their shared love of Henry Lawson’s work and the fact that he also had been alcoholic.

As they made their way into Clark’s 1950s bungalow-style house in the leafy Canberra suburb of Forrest, Clark’s wife, Dymphna, was making scones on an old wood-burning stove in the kitchen. After twenty minutes of talking about their new project, Clark turned to Robbie and asked what he did. Robbie told him he was the editor of the recently defunct political humour and satire magazine, Matilda.

‘So what are you doing now?’ Clark asked again.

‘I’m a lobbyist for the porn industry,’ Robbie replied.

Clark paused for a minute and reflected. Ross said later that Dymphna looked like they had invited Dracula to dinner. Clark then slowly rose in his chair and walked to the kitchen where he chatted to his wife for a few minutes. When he came back down to the living room, he extended his hand to both Ross and Robbie.

‘It’s been good to see you,’ he said and showed them the door.

Dymphna turned her back on them as they left, without even offering a scone.

* * * *

Crazy people were never far from Eros’s day-to-day work. As Sexpo entered its eighth year in 2000, the organisers were hunting around for something new to keep the crowds coming in. We had recently heard of a bizarre exhibit in a Russian museum that could be the Holy Grail. It was the Mad Monk’s pickled penis. No, not Tony Abbott’s briny budgie smugglers, but rather the preserved penis of the famous Russian monk, Rasputin, a political lobbyist in the court of Tsar Nicholas II. Like many church lobbyists, he hadn’t been all that popular and he had been murdered by a group of noblemen. Before they threw him into the Malaya Nevka River, someone had detached his massive thirteen-inch penis and took it home as a keepsake (or a doorstop)—or so the story goes. There are many other stories including one claiming that it was never detached at all; one that a group of Russian women living in Paris had acquired it and worshipped it as a religious

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.