The Return of the Bloody Red Baron

Mike’s
Pith & Wind cont.
.. however, as it was the subject of constant headlines and discussed in hushed
tones by disquieted mums over cups of tea and soggy white cucumber sandwiches
from Beaths to Ballantynes.
Strangely however, I don’t once remember lesbianism being mentioned, either
in conversation or in the media, confined as it was in those days to the morning
and evening papers (both broadsheets) and radio. Maybe at the age of nine I
just missed it, but I don’t see it even now when I look back at the contemporary
reportage. The Crown Prosecutor is quoted as saying: ‘At Dr Hulme’s
place they wandered about together, keeping very much to themselves, scribbled
in exercise books effusions which they called novels, spent a good deal of time
in each other’s beds, and made plans for their future life together.’
Draw your own conclusions as to the headlines in the context of today’s
tabloid morality. Mind you, I can’t help thinking that in a judicial sense
this obfuscation mightn’t have been such a bad thing – the coverage was
sensational enough to challenge sensible consideration of what was a deeply
perplexing case.
I haven’t seen Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s film
of the Parker – Hulme story, but I believe it captures some of the repressive
feeling of the times. It may seem strange that a city, well, more of a town
really, like Christchurch produced quite a chunk of New Zealand’s considerable
rock and pop music output. Think Max Merrit, think Ray Columbus, think of my
own band, The Chants, to name but a few. I’m not alone in subscribing
to the theory that it was perhaps because of this perceived repression
that youthful rebellion, often in the form of ‘rock & roll’
music, prospered in Christchurch, and then later in the even more conservative
Presbyterian town of Dunedin. (You can read more about Christchurch and rock
music in Dr Tony Mitchell’s fine discourse on the subject at: http://www.snarl.org/youth/tonym1.pdf)
But it’s funny how often repression achieves the opposite result from
the one intended. The Royal Guardsmen recorded a song called Snoopy vs the
Red Baron in the mid sixties, and in a completely misguided effort to safeguard
the general public’s sensibilities, the song was banned from Australian
airplay. Why? Because of the recurring description of the German war ace as
‘The Bloody Red Baron’, ‘bloody’ here being confused
with the good old Aussie swear word frowned on in ‘polite’ society,
wherever that was.
Here are some of the ‘offending’ lyrics:

That Bloody Red Baron was in a fix
He’d tried everything, but he’d run out of tricks
Snoopy fired once, and he fired twice
And that Bloody Red Baron went spinning out of sight

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more
The Bloody Red Baron was rollin’ up the score
Eighty men died tryin’ to end that spree
of the Bloody Red Baron of Germany

These are the same wankers that prevented The Pretty Things from touring
Australia (although curiously they toured New Zealand), bleeped out the word
‘Christ’ from the radio version of John & Yoko’s The
Ballad of John And Yoko and banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover –
and that’s only in my lifetime.
Funnily enough, (and I’m getting to the point at last), we have a bit
of self-censorship going on in The Age, and presumably all the other broadsheets
(and certainly the tabloids) round Australia today, which I see as a relic
of this kind of moral guardianship. Please tell me what f..k, s..t and c..t
are doing in our newspapers, when we can hear ’fuck’, ‘shit’
and occasionally ‘cunt’ with regularity on TV, that hitherto most
conservative of mediums, and even very occasionally on radio – well,
lots, if you count motherfuckin’ hip-hop.
If the people are saying it, let’s see it in print. We can take it.
We don’t need this artificial prissiness. Cursing, (as those prurient
Yanks will have it), is Australia’s prime expression of egalitarianism.
If you want to produce some sort of high-filutin’ journal that chooses
not to reflect what is actually going on, then don’t aspire to mass
circulation.
Or, to put it another way, fuck off.