Before Margaret Fink would do lunch with me, I had to audition

The thing about having lunch with someone who is famed for throwing great parties and keeping brilliant company is that you’d better bring your A-game.

This is the only “lunch with” where I’ve had to attend something of an audition first. It’s a few weeks after I first meet Margaret Fink at her Darlinghurst home that we finally sit down for a meal that ultimately spans three hours and canvasses art, history, politics and religion.

“Conventionality is something that is worth investigating”: Margaret Fink at lunch with the Herald at Otto.Credit: Kate Geraghty

For Fink – a key member of the Sydney Push intellectual subculture in the 1950s and ’60s, who went on to produce films including The Removalists and My Brilliant Career – such topics are not taboo at the table, but pretty much mandatory.

We are lunching a month after Donald Trump’s convincing election win, and US politics interests Fink most of all. “Far be it from me to be qualified to give any account of world news, but it’s not looking f---ing good”, is her blunt appraisal of the situation.

Born in Sydney around the time Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the 91-year-old has seen enough to cast judgment. She came of age in the post-war Menzies era of economic growth and technological advance, where social conservatism was increasingly being challenged by the incoming generation of bohemians, feminists and academics.

It was among this network of intellectuals and activists that Fink met the likes of Darcy Waters, Roelof Smilde, Sasha Soldatow, Lillian Roxon, and Germaine Greer, the poet Harry Hooton (with whom she would fall in love at 19), as well as Clive James, Robert Hughes and Melbourne’s Barry Humphries (with whom she had a passionate affair).

The Push stands out as a fascinating chapter in Sydney’s history, though Fink says it is poorly chronicled and often misunderstood. For one, they were mostly not big drinkers, she says, save one or two, but chose to meet in pubs because of their “egalitarian atmosphere” (the Royal George Hotel on Sussex Street, now the Slip Inn, was one of the network’s main haunts).

And while the Push was dominated by men, they would only select pubs where women were allowed to drink in the public bar.

The group’s consumption of alcohol may have been overstated, but it is key to Fink’s understanding of a proper lunch, and she is concerned at the outset that she may be sitting opposite a teetotaller. “You look as though you have intrinsic self-control,” she tells me as I rush to correct the record. “It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong if it’s not true.”

It is a vintage summer day for lunch at Otto on Woolloomooloo’s finger wharf, part of the Fink Group of restaurants led by Fink’s ex-husband Leon, who is in his late 80s (they divorced in 1978 but remain good friends). The maitre d’ steers us to Fink’s regular table, and she quickly gets her preferred champagne on the way.

Margaret Fink, producer and originating member of the Sydney Push.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Fink’s parents were singers and enrolled her at the Sydney Conservatorium at just four years of age, alongside her older brother John. “My mother, she thought she was normal, but she was eccentric – in a good way,” Fink says. “In the marriage, she was the general. My father was a lovely, gentle guy, but she ran the show … She also had a bias against the cinema; she thought it was common.”

That was unfortunate for Fink, who as a child was mostly denied the Saturday ritual of going to the movies. At Sydney Girls High School, she would wag sport and catch a tram into the city to watch films on Wednesday afternoons. “I can remember reading the credits and thinking to myself: I wonder what a producer does?”

Later, while studying (her first career was as an art teacher), she watched Akira Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai, regarded as one of the most influential films in history. It had a profound impact on the young Fink. “It knocked me out. I’d been seeing all this American garbage every Wednesday and then suddenly I saw this work of art.”

Jack Thompson and Fink at the launch of the Cannes promotion campaign for My Brilliant Career.Credit: David James Bartho

Fink, nee Elliott, married Leon in 1961 and was living with him in Melbourne years later when a friend sent her a card imploring her to read Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career. She bought the rights, and the adaptation would later become her second feature film, the first being a version of David Williamson’s The Removalists in 1975. Her service to the arts was recognised in last year’s Australia Day honours, where she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia.

We have taken a haphazard approach to ordering food; Fink has summoned a plate of summer vegetables, and I’m convinced to share a dozen oysters. She inquires about the fish – it’s John Dory, which she is amenable to – and supplements it with wilted spinach, kipfler potatoes and a salad for the table. I add an entree-sized saffron linguine for myself. As we get started on wines by the glass (red for Fink, white for me), I realise I don’t know what any of these items cost. Being Otto royalty, neither does she.

Lunch is Fink’s main social outing these days. Until fairly recently, she would throw extravagant dinner parties, attended by new generations of journalists, actors, musicians and other creatives. Friends include Erik Jensen (biographer of Australian artist Adam Cullen, and later editor-in-chief of The Saturday Paper), author David Marr, broadcaster Fran Kelly, and the Whitlams’ frontman Tim Freedman, through whom we are first connected.

Fink’s associates are predominantly left wing. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she has not become conservative as she has aged. The late Paddy McGuinness, who hung out with the Push, “started off a Marxist and became neocon”. Fink was able to maintain her friendship – and at one point infatuation – with Barry Humphries, despite finding his politics abominable.

“Barry was a f---ing genius,” she says, and describes Germaine Greer in similar terms. “A clinical genius is like someone being born super blonde or super tall. It’s something quite rare.”

Fish of the day with asparagus and smoked cream at Otto.Credit: Kate Gergahty

The Push is often portrayed as an intellectual subculture of like-minded people, though it can be difficult to pin down exactly what united it or distinguished it from other bands of thinkers and drinkers. “Libertarianism was the basis of it, if one can dare to generalise so broadly,” Fink says. Later, by email, she reminds me the Push was not confined to one university or even to tertiary institutions; it took in dock workers, unionists, lawyers, artists and even criminals.

The libertarian way is to not just tolerate but welcome opposing views and then argue the case – essentially the opposite of the approach currently fashionable on both the left and right, whereby people demand protection from speech they may find confronting or distasteful, preferring the comfort of the echo chamber.

Fink agrees we are now too quick to judge or “cancel” those we disagree with. “It’s irregular, rising to wrong,” she says. “Making any judgment about human beings is very dangerous.” But politics inevitably separates people, she contends, as does belief in the supernatural.

Fink in her garden in 1979.Credit: David James Bartho

Fink says when she was young she mistakenly thought anyone with any brains must be both an atheist and an anarchist. The celebrated philosopher David Armstrong, who was also part of the Push and died in 2014, set her straight. “[He] was Christian, a believer, and right-f---in’-wing. So to hold those aspects against somebody can be to your own loss.”

Our food arrives, as does more wine, and it’s all terrific – bright, fresh and ideal for a waterfront summer lunch. Fink doesn’t eat much; old age diminishes the appetite, as she tells me. But she is a fine example of the fact old age need not deprive someone of a healthy interest in current affairs, conviviality and even sex.

Fink suggests a second lunch – off the record – would be required to fully explain the great loves of her life. She indulged the conventions of marriage, children and the family home, but wonders if this progression can keep one satisfied forever.

“Conventionality is something that is worth investigating,” Fink says. It might even be irresistible. She recalls going to Push parties in her early 20s and being horrified at seeing a child’s rubber duck in someone’s bathtub. “It was anathema to me, the thought of reproducing.” A few years later, that changed, and a hormonal urge to procreate took over.

She says neither she, nor her husband of 17 years, Leon, were cut out for marriage. “I wonder how many people are.” It’s natural, she says, for interest in sex within a marriage to diminish, but for “sexual urgency” to remain. “And then what? This is what I think – it’s hardly original. If there has to be any sort of arrangement, I think it should be a contract – say, seven years max.” She smiles. “With an option on five, or less.”

Saffron linguine, Moreton Bay bug, zucchini, anchovy and pine nuts at Otto.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Fink is pleased Australians have become more accepting and less moralistic about sex, though many would say there is still a long way to go when it comes to gender identity. “It’s a very important social phenomenon, the more generous-spirited attitude toward sexuality,” Fink says.

Our conversation turns to the city itself; unlike so many of her peers, Fink never indulged the lure of London or New York or some other artistic mecca. She remained loyal to Sydney, though she says that loyalty has never really been tested.

“Sydney leaves me hopeful, I can say that,” she says. “Having lived in Melbourne, it was observedly a more thoughtful city. Considering the physical beauty of Sydney, it isn’t matched by the inhabitants. It’s not a city with personal style … It’s dangerous to generalise and say it’s a bogan city, but it is, to a degree.”

To me, Fink seems like a relic of a different Sydney; one that was less conservative and more spontaneous, less corporate and more Bohemian, less exclusionary and more welcoming. But perhaps that’s nostalgia for a myth.

The bill.

As the three-hour mark approaches, I fear Fink might fade, but then I remember I’m with a semi-professional luncher and indefatigable personality. At 91, Fink says she has a new project in the works, though she is reluctant to let me in on the secret (it is most definitely not a memoir, she stresses).

Fink asks if I want pudding, and I profess I didn’t realise it was on offer. “It’s a restaurant, love,” she replies, deadpan. I end up choosing the affogato. The bill arrives, and I fear I’m about to have an aneurysm, though I assure Fink the Herald is paying.

We’re soon back in the sunshine of the Finger Wharf and I put Fink in a taxi back to Darlinghurst. She’s keen to organise lunch with Herald photojournalist Kate Geraghty, who has reported from Ukraine and the Middle East, and I promise to connect them. It’s refreshing to see somebody in their 10th decade so keen to expand their horizons and social circle.

“The mystery of human beings never ceases to enthral and amaze me,” Fink says. Too right, that.

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