Disapproval of our clothes, especially mine: the vintage suits and jackets, the long leather boots and fluffy coats. The friend who said primly, ‘You two look like you are always going to a nightclub.’ The relative who said, ‘You don’t want to be like those girls who go clubbing all the time.’ But oh, we did. We wanted to dance. Every weekend, we would glide along railway lines as if they were bannisters to the city, to find places where we could dance, eat nachos at 5 am and wear ill-fitting vintage clothes that were a triumph of imagination over tailoring. We revelled in the freedom of the small hours when the clock stopped and our soles wore thin. Our parents said we were bad influences on each other; both families were regularly aghast at the crimes we committed against fashion. When I sent mine some photos from a backpacking trip to Europe, my older brother, then twenty-one, wrote to me: ‘All I am worried about is the guys and the clothes! But what’s new?’
We danced like maniacs, many nights, for years, trying to shake off something we couldn’t articulate, but often tried to, shouting over speakers, blinking through laser lights, carrying shoes along the sand of Queensland beaches at dawn. We never fought, we never tired of talking. We still speak almost every day and I still get excited when I hear her voice: there’s so much, always, to discuss.
We laughed that we were ‘Dancing Away the Heartache’ like Bryan Ferry. It was more like dancing away the odd feeling you get when you don’t fit in where you live, where you don’t agree with what you are taught, where argumentative girls and stroppy ladies are stuffed into asphyxiating boxes and told to mind their mouths. In church, we heard sermons warning of the lustful thoughts produced by holding hands, and the fact that men were meant to be the heads of women at home and in church, and women were to learn quietly and submit to them — decapitated, for life, we ladies were.
We were trying to find another life, to find a kind of liberation of thought, to free ourselves. When we were on the dance floor, Jock’s face was always dreamy, self-contained and peaceful. Even after several hours of dancing, when some faces grow anxious, sweaty, fatigued, she was the cat with the dream of fresh cream.
But we were also told that to try to think your way out of psychological traps laid for women, to understand that one was not born but made a woman, was sin. I lost count of the number of times we were told that thinking such thoughts would make us unattractive to men, unmarriageable. As for homosexuality, that was unmentionable and viewed only as a sin, a certain shortcut to hell. Still is, where we grew up.
At the same time, we spoke for countless hours about feminism, and devoured Greer and Friedan and Wolf along with D.H. Lawrence and Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Patrick White, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Simon de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing. We confided in each other about the crap we had to deal with just because we were women. The sounds and sights of unwelcome attention were a low-lying, persistent thrum throughout the years of our adolescence. The father of the kids I babysat who tried to grope me. The train station guard who cupped a fourteen-year-old Jock’s breasts in his hands when she was walking by. The cat-calling which switched in a second from ‘Hey, baby!’ to ‘Fuck you, princess!’ The law partner who requested sexual favours. The school kid who raped his sister, our friend. The uncle who abused his niece, another friend.
Around us, young women tried to shrink, to escape notice, to quietly gain control. Friends were hospitalised for anorexia and missed final exams. Jock and I both grew obsessed with food and complained repeatedly in letters, ‘I’m fat. I have become fatter.’ So often, the currency of conversation for women was self-deprecation and self-loathing; we all indulged in it: how stupid and ugly and unpleasant we were. It was a race to the bottom in an eschewing of confidence, a competition in self-hatred. So Jock and I took holidays where we read without moving as the sun circled the sky; we devoured everything we could about the lives and thoughts of other women, and understood what we were being taught was wrong.
The terms used by arch-conservatives for women talking about what it means to be a woman are boringly similar: screeching, shrewish, shrill, strident. The word ‘strident’ describes not just a point of view but a sound: a harsh, grating sound. Our opinions were strident because they were dissonant, discordant, unmusical. To the untrained ear, that was. To our ears, they were the beginnings of a song, and our friendship was the metronome; the steady clicks of company, assurance and fire.
WHEN I WENT BACK PACKING around Europe at eighteen, Jock and I wrote each other reams of letters full of ridiculous stories, lines from books we were reading and feverish laments about not fitting in. When we read through these recently, we howled with laughter. Jock wrote bluntly, in her drunken-fly scrawl, such gems as:
I don’t think there are very many people out there who think the same way I do, especially not 19-year-old Canadian boys.
I’ve eaten chocolate for lunch and dinner yesterday and today.
I love these empty nights, full of sound and fury and glitter and laughter and alcohol and gaiety and frivolity and money and these nights are slowly killing me.
Feeling pensive but wild. I need to do something very stupid tonight.
I’m going to buy myself a red cocktail dress. I don’t give a fuck what it costs, it’s just the idea. I don’t care if I never wear it.
The Renaissance is an incredible era.
IN THE QUIET SUBURBS we lived in, women wore floral patterns; when attending church, some even carried wicker baskets with ribbons that matched their dresses. I am not making that up. The formal dresses were puffy and unflattering. It was little wonder we became fixated on Madonna, with her torn stockings, shoulder-baring T-shirts, obvious arrogance and ripe sexuality.
I also became obsessed with history, especially World War II, and stories of women who, during the last couple of centuries, disguised themselves in men’s clothing, becoming generals, soldier and priests, to escape the monotony and taboos of conventional female life. Jock and I had often worn men’s suits, usually found in vintage stores, for fun. We would turn up in tuxedos to dinner parties, and once went to a Marie-Antoinette–themed twenty-first birthday party held in horse fields dressed in breeches, brocade coats and white wigs. Women in uncomfortable corsets, hoop skirts and high hair whirled around us. On the way home, my boyfriend turned to me, furious, and said, ‘Imagine if you saw two men walk in the door and one of them was your girlfriend.’ My eyes rolled in the dark.
In 1946, Anais Nin described men’s clothes as a ‘costume of strength’ in her book Ladders to Fire:
‘The first time a boy hurt me’, said Lillian to Djuna, ‘it was in school . . . I wept. And he laughed at me. Do you know what I did? I went home and dressed in my brother’s suit. I tried to feel as the boy felt. Naturally as I put on the suit I felt I was putting on a costume of strength. It made me feel sure, as the boy was, confident, impudent. The mere fact of putting hands in my pockets made me feel arrogant. I thought then to be a boy meant one did not suffer. That it was being a girl that was responsible for all the suffering.’