THE PERMIT

In 1969 my dad took over, from a family friend, the care-taking job for a 3 storey building in Taranaki Street that was owned by the Wellington Catholic Church diocese. They had offices in there. The job came with a huge 3 bedroom penthouse apartment that in today's terms would have been worth a fortune. We didn't appreciate this value at the time as inner city living in the 1960s and 1970s wasn't fashionable. My brother and I 'flatted' at the family house in Vogeltown during my 6th and 7th form years at college and early years of university. We kind of lived between the two places - sleeping at the house and having meals at the apartment.

Dad kept his contracting business going for a couple of years before winding that up and doing the care-taking full-time. I was given the cleaning contract for the building which was a doddle being only a few hours a week but bringing in as much money as if I worked full-time. Nepotism was alive and well. I kept this contract all through university.

In the building was a book publishing company.  They used to throw out a lot of interesting things some of which I'd keep when emptying out the rubbish bins. One day I found a couple of boxes of books. I opened them up to discover dozens of copies of 'The Permit' as per the image above. Opening one I discovered that all the pages were blank which is why they were thrown out. I kept the books though as I knew that they would be good note pads being just less than A5 size at 110 cm x 180 cm. These proved to be very useful. I used them at uni and gave away to family members and still have several which I use from time to time..

I was making some notes in one the other day in fact.

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I never read 'The Permit' (well there were no words in the books I had for a start) so don't know anything about the novel.

Today I did an internet search and read about Donald Horne on Wikipedia:

Donald Richmond Horne  ... was an Australian journalist, writer, social critic, and academic who became one of Australia's best known public intellectuals, from the 1960s until his death.
Horne was a prolific author who published four novels and more than twenty volumes of history, memoir and political and cultural analysis. He also edited The Bulletin, The Observer and Quadrant. His best known work was The Lucky Country (1964), an evaluation of Australian society that questioned many traditional attitudes: "Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck."                             WIKIPEDIA

OK, I like that quote from The Lucky Country.


As for The Permit, The Sydney Morning Herald had this to say:

In Donald Horne's 1965 novel The Permit, an ordinary, inoffensive citizen applies to the government for an authorisation: Permit 37A. His case is picked up on a media whim and he is drawn irresistibly into the vortex of politics.
The citizen, Adam Richmond, becomes the subject of spirited exchanges in the parliament as one party uses his case to attack the other. For a moment, he is at the centre of the nation's affairs. And when the case becomes too uncomfortable for the government, the minister for permits, Pat Shennanagen, rises, with the greatest reluctance, to denounce Richmond. The minister discloses that the apparently innocuous applicant for Permit 37A had been a member of the Communist Party, expelled for drunkenness and degeneracy, with a history of bad credit, homosexuality and venereal disease.
"God in heaven!" shrieks the news editor of the Daily Trumpet. "He's a Commo - and a pansy!"
            SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 

Sounds good so I think I'll track it down and read it at long last.