Quipu by Damien Broderick Page B

have been already points to where we are going. And where we are going—if we keep our nerve, if we keep our cool, if we keep our truth, if they do not destroy us first—is into the Revolution of Joy.
    The music of the Sixties is our history.
    It is the mad, wild, fierce truth of Dylan, and his lyricism.
    The music of the Sixties is the dream fantasia of psychedelic West Coast America, the surf pulse and the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, the blatant savage adrenaline of Jimi Hendrix, the nimble black Tamla Motown beat, the White Negro voyage of Presley.
    Above all the music of the Sixties is the evolution of the Beatles: the honest sexy excitement of their first songs, the nervy innovations of Sgt. Pepper, their hungry curiosity for new ways to speak and sing and their glad embrace of ancient raga from that crowded Indian manscape that previous generations had despised and crucified, the search for reality and beauty no matter the color of its skin, the discovery of the naked human body, that taming of the devouring computer to the musician’s soul-plucking, sledgehammer art, the welding of East and West and Peace and Love in the strange wonderful harmonies, so vile and so hideous to older ears and eyes, of John and Yoko…
    It is our poetry, scarring the sky and tearing apart the placid paralysis of the air, coming on strong and heavy with all the good and bad vibrations, all of them.
    The music of the Sixties, if it does not fail, if we do not let it out of our hands, is an arrow into the history of the Seventies.
    1971: young love is such a sweet emotion
    Ray Finlay listens to strange music in the sunny autumn of 1971. Holocaust burns in South-East Asia. Gangsters less couth than usual rule in Washington. Toadies more feeble than average govern in Australia. History is flattening into foul stagnation. Eight human beings have stood on the Moon. Naked in the afternoon and conscious of his small but definite pot belly, 29 years old, Ray is fucking with his girlfriend. It is not yet de rigeur for Ray to think of her as his ‘woman,’ not at any rate in Australia. And Marjory Nourse, barely 20, remains legally a ‘girl,’ Of course this legal fiction of physical and mental immaturity would be tested more drastically were she a boy (though if she were a boy she would not be under Ray Finlay’s thrusting body at this moment or any other; oh no), for if Marjory had copped a Y chromosome instead of one of her two X’s, she’d be tumbling in the barrel with all the other hapless conscription marbles. By life-affirming contrast, instead of shivering in peril of some ghastly Indo-Chinese jungle trail she cries and pants and heaves her chubby glowing body against her lover’s.
    They are alone in their household, a rare pleasure. Jan and Peter have strolled across to mad Don’s Blockhouse to plan the final deployment of their contingent in the revolution. Well, the demo. Peter and Jan seem to share an unspoken and ill-defined hope that storming Hyde Park will steamroller events directly into Revolution, though 1969’s assault on the American Embassy in Melbourne mysteriously failed to attain that end. Nor, indeed, did those heart-cracking Moratorium parades, the scores of thousands marching behind Dr. Jim Cairns, socialist parliamentarian and saint of resistance. This time, though, surely the proletarian struggle will be vindicated in a great spontaneous uprising of Workers and Students, 1968 Paris in 1971 Australia, forging, in harmony, out of history and turmoil, the nation’s brave future. “If it doesn’t happen everyone’s in big trouble,” Ray has commented caustically. “Because the buggers are never going to vote for a Labor Government.”
    Actually Ray does not really object to this barmy myth of redemption, having concluded that some people possess a need, rather like a vitamin deficiency, to believe they can make the incredible tangible. On the other hand he’ll fly off the handle if anyone asks his