1968: Part Two
I'm back. When I left you last I was still in Oz and life was a buzz. But I had itchy feet. I had been saying often to friends that I was going overseas. One Saturday night in the pub my friend James (never Jim) Hilton said, "Listen, bitch, you're always saying you're going, so why don't you go? Look around this bar. You've been rude to half the people here and shagged the other half, so go."
Whilst I like to think there was a lot of hyperbole in this statement, there was also, alas, an element of truth. So I sold the car, resigned from St Pat's and got the Qantas Under 26 cheap ticket on the old Kangaroo Route to London. This allowed two stopovers. I chose Hong Kong and Athens and left Oz in July 1968.
Hong Kong was Ok but uneventful. The only thing I now recall is going to the disco in the basement of the Hong Kong Hilton, a bit of a pilgrimage as that's where Peter Allen was performing when Judy Garland dropped in with daughter Liza and we all know where that led.
Athens was something else. On the flight there I'd teamed up with another Aussie also called Hugh and we shared a cheap hotel room in the Plaka. We were jet lagged and went wandering the streets at four in the morning. Apart from seeing the Parthenon perched up on the Acropolis at dawn, we were gobsmacked to walk into what we would call a milk bar and see all the bottles of booze lined up on shelves behind the bar. This was a whole new world in the Old World.
Athens life was fun, they still broke plates in the restaurants and we met up with an Aussie showgirl (read:stripper) who called herself Sundae Knight (oh, dear) but everyone was saying, you must go to Mykonos.
Today, along with Amsterdam, San Francisco and, I guess, Sydney, Mykonos is a major gay destination. But not in 1968. You caught the ferry, along with Greek nonnas and their various wildlife - trussed pigs and chickens in string bags - at Piraeus, the port for Athens, and arrived in Mykonos several hours later. Those days there were no hotels in Mykonos. Instead, you were met at the dock by the local mamas offering beds in their homes - jostling and shouting that they had the best rooms, the best prices. I lobbed up in one of these, occupying the teenage son's bedroom - he'd been relegated to the couch in the hallway.
In the morning you ambled down to the waterfront - lorded over by Pete the Pelican - and ordered breakfast from one of numerous cafes. Us westerners got a jug of hot water, a small tin of Nescafe, slices of fresh bread, a little jar of honey and, if lucky, a small pot of butter. Oh, and some sugar. Delicious, after a night on the town.
And where had one spent that? Oh, at the Nine Muses, the only nightspot on the island, right on the shore of the harbour. On my first night there I was introduced to Greek dancing - all that holding hands and bobbing about Zorba-style - which was fun. A dashing older man, looking like David Niven, was a major player in all of this, getting all the young men on the floor (there were plenty of girls there, but this was blokes' stuff)and it was only when I lobbed up in London a few weeks later that I saw his picture in all the papers and discovered that he had been Best Man at Jackie and Aristotle Onassis' wedding. (Timing, Hugh).
Though Mykonos was not then a gay venue, there were a few poofs about and we sussed each other out. Each day you took one of the two minibuses (the only motor vehicles on the island) to one of the only two accessible beaches: Plati Yalos and Pisarou (spelling dodgy). Beautiful stretches of white sand bordering the wine dark Agean of Homer. The only structure on each beach was a tumbledown restaurant where you bought beer (or retsina if you were really ill and poor), then at lunchtime you went in and pointed at the food you wanted and feasted on salty, lemony seafood and salad. No need to speak the language. At 5.30 the last bus headed back to the port and there was no question of no room - we all piled on board for a crowded trip. On one trip I said to a friend, "Why don't you give your seat to that pregnant woman?" He said, "I didn't realise she was pregnant." I replied, "She isn't, but she will be before the trip is over." She glowered at me and I learnt a first lesson of travel: don't assume no one else speaks English.
I met two good friends there. David Hayman was a university student from Glasgow and he was camping in a barn just out of town. Each morning he could gather his breakfast eggs without leaving his sleeping bag. The other was Joe Everingham, an older American who was the Director of the theatre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I asked with some surprise why a Technology Institute needed a theatre. He told me that the authorities had realised that while they were producing the cream of America's new scientists, there people could only communicate with each other and machines. Not the man in the street. Theatre was the humaniser and he had a grant of $2 million (in 1968!)to make it happen. These days in most US universities you do first year arts no matter what course you are pursuing. How good is that!
I had intended staying in Mykonos for two days and ended up staying for ten. I only left then because my clothes were managing to stand up by themselves. It was my first experience of a European lifestyle and exotic beyond belief. I thought it the height of sophistication that a group of Germans would stroll down to the port each afternoon around 5 o'clock and order breakfast as if that's what you did. That never happened in Sydney. At about the same hour we were ordering our first ouzo and water (two drachma, that's about fourpence or three cents for you children) and gearing up to hit the tavernas for grilled chicken and wine before heading for the Nine Muses one more time.
Once again the old clock on the wall says time is up and we haven't even got to London yet. So there's more to come.
posted by O'Keefe Family @ 2:24 PM
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