I hate the seventies

What a disastrous decade that was. There's a tendency among Gen Xers to romanticise this time, just as every generation does of its childhood era. But let me tell you: very few people in my neck of the woods were interested or able to taste the few cultural highlights (like Danish teak furniture, Marimekko fabrics, new wave music and The Female Eunuch). Most people opted for ugly mission brown and burnt orange over-stuffed lounges, macrame wall hangings, ABBA and Charlie's Angels. Men twisted feminist ideas into self-serving crap: having sex is like having a coffee, no big deal, why should you be jealous, don't be so uptight. Women were herded into frizzing their hair and dressing like earth mothers or Swedish vamps.

All that stuff on TV about Woodstock and free love made suburban dads restless. Mine started wearing body shirts and growing sideburns. Then he left mum for the neighbour's wife, so I had to do my Senior exams with an abscess pounding in one ear and mum pummelling the other: if you ever have an affair with a married man, I'll never talk to you again. (Like that was supposed to deter me?)

Somehow I managed to do so well in my exams that I could have easily got into Law or some other lucrative career path. Instead I chose art college and found myself drawing plaster casts of nude figures (life modelling was illegal back then in Queensland!) and arranging bits of dowel on planks (they called it 3D studies). Disillusioned, I dropped out and applied to a college in Toowoomba which offered the first film and TV course in Australia and the chance to study visual and performing arts at the same time. It was the Whitlam era. All the lecturers were American expats, failed actors and painters who boasted about their "busts" for civil rights protests and recreational drug use. They didn't believe in structured classes or passing value judgements on students' work. No one could fail: the only assessments were "complete" or "incomplete". Toowoomba was a very odd location for such an experiment. In those days it was full of rich pastoralists cruising the streets in Rolls Royces and Bentleys with windscreen stickers complaining about Whitlam's abolition of the super-phosphate bounty. People would stop, wind down their windows, remove their sunglasses and stare at the weird college students. Forced by economics and logistics to hitchhike to college each day, I heard the line every second day: "Can I ask you a personal question? Are you an advocate of free love?" Puke.

I fought with the college director, an evil egotist who'd once appeared in "The Cruel Sea" with Robert Mitchum and had been married at one stage to Agnes Morehead (of TV's "Bewitched" Fame). I'd been his pet to begin with, but later I began to object to his power games. He cast us all in his personal dramatisation of Walt Whitman's poetry. Men could wear jeans and T shirts, but women were forced to wear body stockings. I thought it was exploitative. He thought I was an uptight bitch. Even more disillusioned, I dropped out again and got pregnant (accidentally on purpose) to a man I'd married so I could get tertiary allowance.

Naively I thought that looking after a baby would be like caring for a cat. A nature child at heart, I didn't bother going to classes or reading books. I fervently believed everything would just click into place. It didn't.

To be continued...