All posts by Michael Burge

Journalist, author, artist
Writers

Sumner Locke Elliott – loved us but left us

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PINK EXPAT Novelist, Screenwriter & Playwright Sumner Locke Elliott (main photograph by Lorrie Graham).
PINK EXPAT Novelist, Screenwriter & Playwright Sumner Locke Elliott (main photograph by Lorrie Graham).

WHEN Australians challenge progressive thinkers to pack up and leave if we don’t love what’s happening politically in our country, it brings to mind the ones who actually depart as a form of protest.

With his intriguing, genderless, triple-barrelled name, novelist, screenwriter and playwright Sumner Locke Elliott (1917-1991) remained almost unknown in the country of his birth for much of his life, because he left it early and rarely returned.

I am sure many Australians still have never heard of the writer of the iconic Australian novel Careful, He Might Hear You.

Heavily autobiographical, this riveting debut tells the story of a boy who is fought over by a pair of aunts in post-Depression Sydney. Despite being steeped in the matters of Australians between the wars, it was written in New York.

But it was Elliott’s last book – Fairyland – published in 1990 that really bookended his life.

“Expats often get a bad name, especially when they heed the bogan’s call to ‘love’ or ‘leave’ our shores, but Elliott had the courage to do both.”

Having only experienced gay characters in E.M. Forster’s Maurice up to that point, here was something very thrilling for a closeted Australian man in the year he reached his twenty-first birthday. 

Elliott’s swan song gave me a silent credibility as an Australian who found himself in similar circumstances (minus the conscription).

A product of the theatre community in Sydney during and after WWII, Sumner Locke Elliott made his name with his 1948 play Rusty Bugles, the story of a group of army recruits stuck in the outback, produced at Sydney’s Independent Theatre before an extensive national tour.

But Elliott never saw a single performance of what became the first Australian play to be staged simultaneously in two states. He was, by its opening night, in New York.

The great mystery of Elliott’s life remains why, after this dramatic relocation and eventual re-identification (he became an American citizen in 1955), did he turn to writing in such detail, across many novels, about the country he turned his back on?

Long before turning to fiction after the age of forty, Elliott rode the early wave of screenwriting in America. His New York Times obituary credits him with the role of lead writer on more than thirty live television broadcasts during the 1950s.

At least one of these dealt with an Australian subject. Televised in November 1948, (when the Sydney media noted Elliott was ‘visiting’ the USA) his Australian play Wicked is the Vine (also set in the outback) was broadcast on WNBT New York.

But the patriotic fervour ended there, at least for American television audiences. Elliott continued to write for the small screen, including scripts for Kraft Television Theatre, Westinghouse Studio One, and later, Playhouse 90. As the names suggest, these series were heavily advertiser-focussed, and therefore tended to present palatable classics, but the work put Elliott in the pathway of many of America’s producing, directing and acting luminaries.

Most of the scripts required ingenious adaptations of well-known storylines (such as Jane Eyre and Little Women) for the fast-paced live television machine.

The pay for writers was not huge. The secret to success seemed to be sheer prolificacy. Writer and New York denizen Helene Hanff (author of 84, Charing Cross Road) also wrote for the New York television industry.

In her first book Underfoot in Show Business (1961), Hanff describes how the once flourishing East Coast TV behemoth collapsed almost overnight and decamped to Hollywood in the early 1960s, leaving many of its writers behind.

Elliott had as many failed Hollywood and Broadway dreams as Hanff, but the most documented of these was his failure to land the screenwriter’s job for a highly anticipated film – Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).

Elliott took Truman Capote’s characters – the nameless gay protagonist and the prostitute Holly Golightly – and created a screenplay that by all accounts was faithful to the eccentricities of the original.

Lengthy Paramount studio memos, however, reveal grave concerns about the overt effeminacy of the male lead, and anything that got in the way of a conventional love story between he and Holly. On advice, Elliott and his screenplay were quickly dumped from the production.

Like Hanff, Elliott used what might have been a disappointing turn of events into a new writing identity, by turning his typewriter to recording his own experiences.

CUSTODY BATTLE Poster for 1983's 'Careful, He Might Hear You'.
CUSTODY BATTLE Poster for 1983’s ‘Careful, He Might Hear You’.

Careful, He Might Hear You was published to great acclaim in 1963, winning that year’s Miles Franklin Award.

After an intense fifteen-year period adapting the work of other writers for the small screen, this novel unleashed Elliott’s true voice.

He had a lot to say, and until his death, he wrote a novel every two to three years.

Among this crop of titles, Eden’s Lost (1969) and Water Under the Bridge (1977) stand out as explorations of the Australian identity, from the perspective of an expat looking objectively back at his homeland during the morally repressed inter-war years.

Expats often get a bad name, perhaps because they heed the bogan’s call to ‘love’ or ‘leave’ our shores, but Elliott had the courage to do both. He wrote about this country with an objective explorer’s courage, and a deep understanding.

Eventually, middle Australia caught-up with Sumner Locke Elliott, when Water Under the Bridge was adapted for television in 1980; followed by the sumptuous big screen version of Careful, He Might Hear You in 1983; and capped-off by an ABC mini-series of Eden’s Lost in 1991.

Elliott’s coming-of-age dramas landed like a surprise in the thick of Australian popular culture, taking a swag of Australian Film Institute awards and finding him a new home-grown audience.

However, he eschewed complex family drama for his next, and last, novel, Fairyland. A smattering of reviews explained that the author was ostensibly coming out with this piece, written from the perspective of a boy who grew to become a successful writer and moved to New York.

Protagonist Seaton Daly explores the homosexual underclass of the Sydney amateur dramatic scene, the army, and, after coming to dubious terms with his sexuality, ultimately encounters the most devastating form of prejudice a gay man can face, far from home.

Fairyland was an extremely courageous move for a writer who’d hidden his sexuality for so long, was well known for plundering his own life story for fictional source material, yet lived long enough to reach a time when homosexuality was no longer illegal in his homeland.

It placed Elliott’s legacy way out in front of gay Australian writers like Patrick White, whose literary award Elliott had been awarded in 1977. The cranky established modernist and the cautious emerging popular writer met, late in both lives, but found little in common.

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They moved in different worlds, and in Fairyland, the boy who bore his mother’s middle name had, in a sense, finally come home in a way that Patrick White never managed to despite returning decades earlier, and I like to think that the success of Sumner Locke Elliott’s books on home turf encouraged the man to finally come out.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

This article appears in Michael’s eBook Pluck: Exploits of the single-minded.

Day Jobs, My Story, Stage

Drama School Dream Factory – Act 2

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HIGH STAKES DRAMA Thalia Theatre Hamburg’s production of Woyzeck.

A Writer’s first lesson in high stakes.

WHILE reading the paper one morning in a cafe during the summer break, I took-in a story about how the city’s best and brightest theatre professionals were being cut down by AIDS. One of the names was John, my NIDA design classmate.

I knew John sometimes struggled to keep up with the physical work, but I’d seen him only weeks before his death made the news, looking well, to all intents and purposes.

Back at NIDA, nobody seemed willing to talk about his death.

The start of my second year saw me in the most receptive space I was ever in while a student. We had a few weeks with industry designers Tom Lingwood and Kym Carpenter, workshopping designs for inspiring plays like Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, and the Greek tragedy Oedipus.

I moved-in with other students, got myself a job at a local cafe (check out my day job in A Waiter’s Revenge Tragedy), and wasn’t such a slave to commuting as I’d been the previous year.

As a result of a little stability, my design skills began to flourish, and I found there was space to actually learn, from experts, how effective designs were executed. I felt stretched, challenged, and supported. Overcoming a few ‘mistakes’ was considered part of the learning process.

But design theory is one thing. Executing those designs on a living, breathing production is an entirely different process. The year’s idyllic start took a very different turn when the stakes started to get higher, and designers-in-training had to start proving our mettle.

As a direct result, a sense of competition began to creep its way into our classroom.

There were two schools of thought in our year. The first was heady, resisted limitations, aimed very, very high and was quite self-serving. The second was more rational, understood creative restrictions, was very grounded, but just a little puritanical.

I never saw myself as the champion of either of these energies, just a necessary participant in both. But battle lines had been set, and lasted until we all graduated, which actually we nearly didn’t, since every one of us was threatened with expulsion if we didn’t find a way to work together harmoniously.

Whether NIDA’s production schedule could have continued without an entire year of design students was dubious, but it was a timely real-world reminder to ‘keep the drama onstage’, as they say.

What was less clear (although this incident tells me it should have been startlingly obvious), was that the trainers at NIDA had a sharp eye on second year students in all disciplines, analysing who had the potential (in their view) to make good in a challenging industry, and who didn’t. The knives were out.

In the middle of this, my mother was having tests for some health problems. She laughed off the constant ambiguous results, was booked in for exploratory surgery, and on the afternoon her three children arrived simultaneously for a visit, she told us all she’d had a huge amount of cancer removed, with part of her bowel, one kidney and both ovaries.

GEEK’S TRAGEDY (L-R) Susan Prior, Annie Burbrook & Emily Russell in Rachel Landers’ production of Antigone, NIDA 1990 (Photo by Marco Bok).

The reality of this situation had no place in the ‘dream factory’ of NIDA. I think mum knew that – she was a keen supporter of the place, donating her original 1970s clothing to the wardrobe department for an Alan Ayckbourn play, and assisting me in scenic painting during an open day. She eschewed chemotherapy, and, as her children’s lives progressed in new directions, to all intents and purposes, nobody was sick.

But my attention was permanently split, from exactly half way through my course. When some of my classmates whined about their difficult personal lives, I wanted to shout at them to just get on with things … at least nobody had cancer.

I completed that year at NIDA designing a student director’s production of Antigone, Sophocles’ tale of a daughter for whom life’s stakes got very high indeed.

Hanging out at student parties, trying to find some way to fit in, still deeply closeted in a gay-friendly environment, I became the kind of person who got very angry if  anyone started to ask me the ‘wrong’ kind of questions.

The bad news about my family, and the stark realities about making a career in the theatre, had settled into my consciousness, just slightly beneath the surface.

Life was getting very ‘high stakes’, but the final act was yet to be played …

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story, Rebels

The dingo’s not a maybe

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GUILTY VERDICT The disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain has at last been explained (Photo by The GirlsNY)

A Writer’s first lesson in injustice.

I HAVE been obsessed by the Azaria Chamberlain case since I was ten years old. When others in my family would cry ‘change the channel’, I wanted to follow the legal process which led to Michael and Lindy Chamberlain’s conviction in 1982.

It’s hard to get your way at that age, especially when you’re in the minority.

I was the only person I knew who believed the Chamberlains were innocent and was willing to say so. My great-uncle (a retired lawyer) was sure, based on the forensic evidence, that Azaria had not been taken by a dingo but had been killed by her mother. Not surprisingly, his influence was quite strong amongst our circle, and it swung other generally sensible adults over to the ‘Lindy is as guilty as hell’ way of thinking.

A collective energy against an individual has often been called a ‘witch hunt‘, and Australia willingly engaged in one.

I remember the T-shirts at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, the word ‘Azaria’ written in fake blood around the neck.

I remember the time a friend’s mother told me that I wouldn’t be welcome in their home unless I changed my mind and believed that Azaria was killed by her own mother.

I remember getting onto a plane in Sydney bound for Darwin in July 1985, as Michael Chamberlain boarded and bravely ignored the wall of hushed emotion from every single passenger as we craned our necks to stare at him.

I remember the vitriol leveled at Fred Schepisi and the filmmakers behind A Cry in the Dark for producing a movie which told the Chamberlain’s story based on eyewitnesses accounts of events on the night of August 17, 1980, at Ayer’s Rock.

I remember a scene in that movie, when Lindy Chamberlain (portrayed by Meryl Streep) shakily emptied her bottle sterliser as the family packed-up and went to a motel, since Azaria had not been found.

I remember how my mother shuddered next to me in the cinema, as it dawned on her (recalling her own experience of losing a child), that a baby had died that night.

I remember how seeing the accurate portrayal of eyewitness evidence changed her mind about the case.

I remember that one of her friends admonished her for being so easily swayed by something as ‘flimsy’ as a movie.

I remember reading Justice Morling’s 1988 Report, as he unravelled every single rumour about the Chamberlains, and thinking it should be essential reading for anyone who had an opinion about the family.

In 32 years I don’t remember anyone ever coming up with a credible explanation for why they believed Lindy Chamberlain would kill her baby.

I will always remember June 12, 2012, as the day Australia grew up a little, and became a slightly safer place because justice was finally granted to a family who only wanted a truthful explanation for their trauma. Safer not because the dingo had finally gone on record as a predator capable of hunting humans in the Northern Territory, but because our justice system upheld the accounts of eyewitnesses over forensic errors.

No piece of writing could ever rival the case of the taking of Azaria Chamberlain by a dingo. We have lived through events that, if told as a piece of fiction, would be written off as unbelievable.

But it happened. Truth is far stranger, as they say.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.