1960s Counterculture as Portrayed by Monkey Grip

By Eamon Cooper

Living in a late-stage capitalist society, it can be impossible to imagine a world in which the lifestyle championed by Helen Garner’s protagonist is anything but a temporary and entirely reactionary interlude on the inevitable path towards our present political system. If I live in a liberal democracy and believe that this constitutes the ‘end of history’, it is only natural that I struggle to imagine a world in which neoliberalism failed in the 1970s when I think its rise is inevitable, where the exploration of distant stars or the habitation of Mars is inconceivable except through the lens of the profit motive. Could a lifestyle and belief system such as that described in Monkey Grip (1977) have smothered the nascent free market agitator and grown into an entirely different system of beliefs in which the interests of the collective were not subordinate to a minority of empowered individuals?

 For, somewhere, concealed beneath a deluge of the protagonist’s ruminations on the meaning of love, endless descriptions of Javo’s eyes (which are as “blue as blue stones” or “as water coloured by some violent chemical”, a detail pivotal to the plot), there exists some idea, perhaps the faintest suggestion, of a possible substitute to this orthodoxy, a then credible alternative to the emerging cultural hegemony of neoliberalist ideology. Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip may not have been written with the intention of pushing some New Left alternative to the economic and social conservatism briefly pierced by the Whitlam government’s reforms, being based on Garner’s diaries, however by her own experiences of Melbourne’s countercultural scene we may gain some idea of how the movement functioned and hence its key elements from the perspective of a single mother. 

The most prominent of these is the economic; Nora, the protagonist, lives with various friends and fellow progressives in a series of share houses throughout the text, funded via welfare transfers and Nora’s varied work writing for feminist journals and acting in films about heroin addicts. This almost communal lifestyle differs from the nuclear familial unit as is required by the prevailing attitudes of the time, where women, consigned to the duties of the housewife, lacked the economic independence of their male counterparts, who in turn are prevented from any form of activism by their need to provide for their families through the sale of their labour. Nora is doubly disadvantaged in this respect, forced to not only provide for herself, her daughter and potentially members of the collective she is sharing with, but has her time occupied in the taking care of her daughter, Gracie, as well as others’ children, such as the Roaster and Juliet, a role which is almost without exception shirked by the male members.

Nora considers herself to be at the very bottom of the rigidly stratified class hierarchy due to these dependents and subsistence upon the dole, observing numerous examples of inequality such as her inability to afford to ride the “Southern Aurora”, a luxury she laments cannot be for “the likes of (them)”, the destitute, oppressed at the expense of those it and its ilk reserved for, “the enemy”, those wealthy patriarchs such as her uncle with their “ruling class confidence”. This is part of the injustice which their communal living seeks in part to address; the sharing of wealth, a rejection of typical gender roles and the understanding that familial duties ought to be shared between all adults. 

This is somewhat undermined by the fact that she frequents cafes, has access to efficient public infrastructure, and that this lifestyle is supported by the state. The members of the Melbourne counterculture scene were only able to enjoy their hedonist pursuit of expressive art-house films, the avant-garde, activities such as the painting, swimming and holidaying which saturates Garner’s recollections of the time with the permission of the state. Government spending reached a level and scope unseen since the post-war recovery era, without which it is difficult to imagine such a movement ever having emerged through the economic tethers which had bound them ever so tightly. A movement which owes its very existence to the generosity of a benevolent government can hardly pose any legitimate threat to the monolithic structure of which they are an ephemeral permutation. The increasingly market-centric policy of the Hawk and Keating governments followed by the conservatism of the Howard years effectively killed the movement, by which it was never  truly threatened. How can an economic system centred around good will which champions altruism be expected to contend with one rooted in self interest when even its own members (cough cough Javo) commonly steal money from their shared savings to finance their own pursuits (read heroin).

This brings us handily to recreational drug use, which practically permeates not only Monkey Grip but the time in which it was written. Graphic descriptions of opioid use and Nora’s drug induced visions hint at the potential of hallucinogens to allow the imagining of post capitalist structures, conjuring the “spectre of a world which could be free” *. Mark Fisher suggests that psychedelia and its associated experiences such as that achieved through drug use allow the exploration of one’s own thought processes and hence an examination and rejection of capitalist ideology which the rational mind is unable to question so pervasive is its messages in every aspect of our lives, from its inequalities to its injustice. Consequently, the aspect of the counter cultural movement offers the potential for real transformation; alas for most characters such as Javo and Willy it becomes a consuming addiction which destroys not only them but those around them, such as Nora who struggles to form a meaningful relationship the former. The hysterical “war on drugs” waged by successive governments, arguably out of fear of their potential to stoke radical and incompatible reimaginings of the future of human society has all but blunted this weapon.

Even in writing this blog, I see that I have read Monkey Grip not for the joy of reading which Nora imagines is taken from Gracie by the System, through standardised education, but out of a perception that it is a commodity, undertaking education only for its future economic value as opposed to for the betterment of my person. Does Monkey Grip contain a blueprint for a society free of similar perspectives which commodify even the act of developing, a truly utopian society predicated upon selfless individuality? Of course not, and it never intended to. Perhaps it allows us a window into what might have been, however, one in which you can believe in something beyond the entirely material aspirations thrust upon us.

*From Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) 

(1097 words)