As if the work in the insurance office wasn’t tedious enough, the biggest problem I faced was how to fill the lunch hour. I took to wandering the city, willing to be amazed by anything at all, and found solace outside the city cinemas, gazing upon the posters and stills in intimate detail. And then one day, I was indeed truly amazed.
  Right in the very heart of the retail district, just up Bourke Street from Myers and Coles and diagonally across the intersection from Woolworths, there was a small theatre that showed those fine, small budget movies made in England that always started with the muscleman striking the huge gong on behalf of Arthur J. Rank. The latest offering was a comedy called The Fast Lady, an inferior attempt to recapture the delights of Genevieve, but still somewhat better than most of its kind. It was a typical vehicle for the lugubrious playboy Leslie Phillips, and the wonderfully bombastic James Robertson Justice and was enhanced by the first movie appearance of Andromeda herself—Julie Christie.

  But really, it was all about the gorgeous motorcars of the time and the final chase scene is, for mine, the best ever filmed. Racing through the suburban streets and across golf courses, doing all the usual gags of man ducking up and down manhole, gardeners diving to safety in their hedges, and little old ladies crossing between the speeding vehicles with impunity, the chase involved the bad guys in a white Mark IV Jaguar (my personal favourite car), pursued by a green Bentley roadster (the title character played by the same one James Bond owned in Dr No), one of those splendid Wolseley police cars and a Rolls Royce convertible with Justice thundering in outrage all the way. The chase ends when the Jaguar turns over (almost tragically, but fortunately there didn’t seem to be much damage).

  But I’m not here to talk about the movie (even though I have) but instead the lobby cards in a vertical display case out on Bourke Street. One of these—the one directly at eye level, showed Phillips sitting in his red MG with one of his several girlfriends of the movie, this one played by a ravishing minor actress named Irene Barrie. The couple are photographed over the boot of the car in a light embrace, smiling at the camera. She wears hair up, long white gloves and an evening gown though it is plainly daylight. And there, if you peered as hard as I did, you could see, quite plainly, down the front of her dress, a complete female nipple.

  I was floored. I stared. It couldn’t be. A nipple, on open display, right here in Bourke Street where thousands of shoppers bustled by, legions of people’s mums rushing from one department store to another, in this city with the rigid censorship of Arthur Rylah. Surely I was seeing things.You had to think about this. The film was only vaguely sexy and possessed a full set of family values to go with its G rating. Even Leslie Phillips’ brand of sleaze was aimed at buffoonery, rather than titillation. There was no nudity in the film whatsoever. So this lobby card—plainly a posed promotional shot rather than a still from the film—with its tiny patch of pink astonishment, was obviously a huge mistake. One that got past the tasteful producers, that got by the severest censorship system in the western world, got past the conservative values of the cinema management, and all these upright citizens passing by, all without comment. But it didn’t get past me.

  I stood staring long beyond the point of embarrassment. Impatient pedestrians bumped into me and cursed me but still I stood and stared. And finally, long beyond the point when humiliation should have overwhelmed me, I finally pulled myself away. I went about ten paces and then had to go back and stare some more. I was late back to work for the first time ever as a result, suffered an afternoon of guilt, and diverted back to Bourke Street on my way home to stare some more and consequently missed the 5.17 express to Moorabbin for the second time ever. Each day until the end of the film’s run, I returned before and after work and for the full extent of my lunch hour.

  To this day I wonder, was I truly the only person in the whole world to notice, or whether there were really supposedly morally decent folk out there, gently pulling our collective legs?