I just finished reading Land Of The Long Weekend, the late Ronald Conway’s 1978 critique of 1970s Australian society, culture and consumerism.
It was heavy going. Whilst I am quite well read, Conway was even more read, in the way of an autodidact, and fond of quoting his interpretations of many famed authors and philosophers throughout his text, which made it necessary to go slowly and concentrate on comprehending every word. I suspect he needed to do this because, despite becoming a lecturer in Psychology at RMIT, he was self taught and wanted to prove to his readers that his intellect was just as good, or better, than that of people who went to university rather than having to drop out of school at age 15.
Conway, as one can tell from the titles of his books – The Great Australian Stupor was that of his previous opus – had a very jaundiced view of Australian society. He was more or less contemporary with the much more famous Manning Clark and Donald Horne, with whom one could say that he shared the outsider’s desire to mock his surroundings, although his own critiques were from a more conservative viewpoint.
I do not think I got much value out of reading Conway, and it is telling that whilst Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country is still in print after 61 years, Conway’s own book is only indirectly now remembered for the title, which occasionally gets used out of context for the economic inertia of our society which supposedly results from our proliferation of public holidays, rostered days off, and tendency to ‘chuck a sickie’. [Indeed, the reason I ordered an out of print copy through Amazon was because I wondered whether this book addressed these latter issues – it doesn’t, not really.]
But on page 296 came a passage on Conway’s dislike for Rock N Roll. I will quote the best bit of it below:
‘The recent death of the ‘daddy’ of rock, Elvis Presley, at the age of 40, bloated, exploited as well as exploiting, taught no moral to his ageing followers. They mourned his hermaphroditic crooning and jelly-postures of sentimental lewdness as if he had been the dead god Adonis instead of an instrument of the most culturally degrading mass profit industry since the African slave trade.’
I wonder whether Conway preferred classical music over rock, but I am not too inclined to worry about it. Personally, I am rediscovering the 1950s big band Italian lounge music my parents used to play on the weekends in my childhood.
Lost For Words! 