The social awakening of Ray Martin
Ray Martin Before my time, Ray Martin was a groovy ABC worker with short shorts and long socks. According to his bizarre autobiography, though, it looks like Lego man joined the leftwing march a little late (p.73):
“Simply being at the ABC was something of a social revolution for me. For a young bloke from working-class Aussie suburbia with barely a book in the house, it was if I had travelled to a galaxy far, far away from anything I had known. ABC radio in the 1960s was peopled by radicals and reactionaries, political preachers and poseurs, bright thinkers and wankers. Scattered across one small department, in dingy office cubicles, were a highly educated yet frustrated science boffin, a genial philosopher/escapee from an Indian ashram, a dapper opera buff who always seemed to be lunching with Dame Joan Sutherland, a deep melancholic book-show convenor and a veteran thespian with wild grey hair that had a life of its own, along with sundry other drama queens and would-be bohemians. There was also Mungo MacCallum, Snr.”
Or in other words, their ABC hasn’t changed. This galaxy, to be scientific, is far, far away from earth.
Ben-Peter Terpstra is an Australian satirist who blogs at Pizza Trays And Beer Bottles.
