Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:03 PM
Page i
‘[an] illuminating memoir’ James Walter Australian Literary Review ‘Engagingly written and impressively broad in scope, few, if any, recent Australian political memoirs pack such a range of public and emotional recollections into one volume.’ Quentin Beresford West Australian ‘[an] endearing and intelligent memoir’ The Bulletin ‘. . . a kaleidoscope of Australian political, social and cultural life from the Depression until today . . . clear eyed but generous . . . rich and strange— like travelling with Gulliver as he discovers the world and himself in it. Morag Fraser The Age ‘Barry Jones has written . . . the best autobiography of a politician I have ever read.’ Don Aitken Canberra Historical Journal ‘The brilliant final chapter [is] a profound meditation on the way we live now . . . The tone is apocalyptic, the language incandescent . . .’ Neal Blewett The Australian Book Review
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:03 PM
Page ii
This page intentionally left blank
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:03 PM
Page iii
A Thinking Reed
BARRY JONES
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:03 PM
Page iv
The lines from ‘This be the verse’ (p. 71) from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin are reproduced courtesy of Faber and Faber. First published in 2006 This paperback edition published in 2007 Copyright © Barry Jones 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Jones, Barry, 1932– . A thinking reed. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 978 1 74114 387 4 (hb). 978 1 74175 361 5 (pb). 1. Jones, Barry, 1932– . 2. Australian Labor Party – Biography. 3. Politicians – Australia – Biography. I. Title. 324.29407092 Set in 11.5/14 pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed by Griffin Press, Australia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:03 PM
Page v
Foreword
To contain the bounty of Barry Jones’ life story in a single volume is like reducing a life story to a Who’s Who entry or a Fantale wrapper. Barry’s would require the tiny typeface employed in engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. His years have been so crowded with events, encounters and ideas that a single day, taken at random, would be worth at least a paragraph and possibly a page. So what you’re about to read is just one of a score of possible books about a remarkable life. It is principally a book on a prodigious public life, with much of Barry’s life remaining veiled.Yes, the public life is here—and much of the inner life. But the private life in between is only hinted at. This is a consequence of a natural discretion and his reluctance to cause other characters in his saga any pain. Reading the manuscript, it occurred to me that you might well feel the need to follow the example of Pompeii’s excavators who’d pour plaster into the moulds created by long-gone bodies, producing compelling human sculptures.To some extent a portrait emerges from what Barry doesn’t say. Not that he seeks to hide from himself or his reader. The text, like Barry, is unsparingly honest.Approaching his final years he has yet to learn cynicism. Denied the carapace so often worn in the political world, Barry retains his sincerity and vulnerability. More than anyone I know, he cannot help but tell the truth. If you want to hide from the world, don’t go to some small community. You’ll be noticed. Safer to hide in the full view of public life. Many of our most exalted figures conceal themselves in the limelight by having a protective persona or two. Not Barry Owen Jones. He wears no masks, no v
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page vi
A THINKING REED
disguises. When asked what he feels or believes, he’ll answer. He would have done better in politics had one of his doctorates been in spin, had he learned to dissemble. It’s the same in his book. You’ll read what I have often observed—that a verse of poetry or a piece of music can reduce this man to tears.You will glimpse the philosophical and religious conflicts that have intensified his experiences—and you will, I think, marvel at an extraordinary intellect that has, over the years, become a sort of national icon. Barry’s brain, if bottled, would be a tourist attraction like Phar Lap’s heart. But Barry’s knowledge is no sideshow trick—no freakish consequence of a photographic memory. It comes from his lifelong curiosity in just about everything. His ability with answers, whether in a quiz show or a political debate, comes from his passion for questions. Barry is not alone in questioning facts, policies and authority but is unusual in the way he questions his own beliefs. There are, however, areas where Barry is entirely uninformed, notably popular culture and sport. Odd then, that Barry is an important part of our popular culture. In a nation where most could name a hundred sportsmen but few of Australia’s public intellectuals, everyone knows Barry Jones. Not simply because decades back he came to fame in a quiz show, but because of his lifelong involvement in public issues. Censorship, capital punishment, science, education and, yes, most aspects of our political life. Why was Barry denied the high political office he desired and deserved? In the Hawke Government he was given a junior ministry—no hint of a Cabinet appointment. The party would wheel him out on public occasions—he was on the branches’ short list for any public event because only Hawkie could pull a bigger crowd. I suspect that’s why he was promoted to the Party’s presidency—he could make the ALP look half decent.Yet he wasn’t let into the Cabinet room, despite his prescience on a raft of major issues. (He was, for example, more than a decade ahead on biotechnology, the Information Revolution and its impact on employment, global warming, preserving Antarctica as a wilderness, and the dramatic extension of life expectancy.) When I protested to Hawke about Barry’s exclusion, citing his legendary intelligence, the response was a snarl of contempt. Clearly the PM felt his giant brain was more than enough for one government. But while there was a degree of jealousy in the way he was treated by his parliamentary colleagues, Barry could be his own worst enemy. Not always a good listener, or a skilful tactician, he was rarely, if ever, a team player. His output of energy tended to deflect the energies of others, to vi
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page vii
FOREWORD
ward off their signals. When we were working on film industry matters, he was often oblivious of a meeting’s atmosphere, of the resentments of others. And many of his literary references, which he’d assume everyone understood, made people feel ignorant. That’s why I begged him not to quote Pascal in his maiden speech in the Victorian Parliament, saying ‘When you talk about Pascal, they think you mean lollies’. He promised he wouldn’t but couldn’t help himself. The great quotation about ‘a thinking reed’ works far better in the context of this book, providing the title. Once, introducing Barry for a 60 Minutes program, I revealed that when the planet Krypton was about to explode, not one but two children were sent to Earth in little rockets. One became a mild-mannered reporter working for the Daily Planet, famously doubling as Superman. But the 1930’s comic strip failed to record the story of the other infant refugee. He became a teacher, a lawyer, a writer, a quiz champion, a politician, a prophet, an advocate. Like the caped crusader of Metropolis, fighting for truth, justice and the American way, Barry Jones has been a crusader for our country, displaying superhumanity as a citizen. And while he has his detractors on the conservative side of politics, and within the Labor Party to which he has devoted too much of his life, his contributions are widely recognised. High honours and honorary doctorates have been heaped upon him but more importantly, so has a rare degree of public affection. Clearly people sense the man’s generosity of spirit and an integrity that has survived a lot of battering. Let me confess to being biased about Barry Owen Jones. He is, after all, my oldest and dearest friend. And these words are written in gratitude for what Barry has contributed to my life, and to Australia’s. Phillip Adams
vii
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page viii
This page intentionally left blank
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page ix
Contents
Foreword by Phillip Adams Illustrations
v xi
Overture: ‘An abundant life . . .’ 1 Family 2 Childhood 3 Death Penalty 4 Quiz Show 5 Fifty Years Hard Labor 6 Faces 7 ‘Bump Me Into Parliament’ 8 Life of My Mind 9 Sleepers, Wake! 10 Inside the Hawke Government 11 Ministering to Science 12 Backbench Explorations 13 Beliefs 14 ‘The Third Age’ 15 Years of Exile: 1979, 1989, 2001 Afterword ‘The Second Coming’
1 8 28 72 103 130 182 226 259 310 332 353 395 417 443 475 529 530
Lists Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
531 538 547 548 ix
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page x
This page intentionally left blank
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page xi
Illustrations PLATES
Between page 274 and 275
My immediate family Another family group The marriage of Alec Black and Ruth Potter Shanghai Baby Mary Lilian Baels, Princesse de Réthy Professor W.A. Osborne Pick-a-Box Champions, 1962 Pyramid of Capitalist Systems H.V. Evatt Bruce Petty cartoon Sir John Gorton Gough Whitlam Arthur Koestler Phillip Adams Patrick White The Madonna with Canon van der Paele, Jan van Eyck Issenheim Altarpiece, Matthias Grünewald Old Man and his Grandson, Domenico Ghirlandaio David Hockney, multi-image portrait Barry Jones by Mark Strizic Cover, Sleepers,Wake! Bob Hawke,Yasser Arafat and Catherine Deneuve Meeting the Dalai Lama Haranguing Bill Clinton At the Ring o’ Brodgar
DIAGRAMS Family Tree Crude homicide death rates 1920–1955 The ‘Complexity diagram’ xi
12 95 460
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page xii
This page intentionally left blank
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page xiii
Man is but a reed, the feeblest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him.A vapour or a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his killer, for he knows that he is dying and that the universe has the advantage over him.The universe knows nothing of this. Thus all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space or time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality. Blaise Pascal: Pensées (200 H3)
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page xiv
This page intentionally left blank
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 1
Overture: ‘An abundant life . . .’
A Thinking Reed is an attempt to explain my life to myself, to make sense of the world of experience and belief, followed by a passion to share exposure to great ideas, understanding and aesthetics, to encourage readers to pursue the abundant life, to borrow a phrase used by Jesus. Writing the book has been a painful, self-critical experience, taking far longer than I had expected; but I learned a great deal from the process. A Thinking Reed is an odyssey, often anguished and self-doubting, in search of the unique experience, understanding, validation, the oceanic feeling, and using these feelings to communicate with others or to transform experience. Politics was central, but only part of the experience. So was the search for love. Self-knowledge is the most important, and dangerous, area of exploration, the darkest continent of terra (or terror?) incognita. My intense moments of revelation come in flashes, quantum packages of light, rather than a clear unbroken beam. I was too political to be a fully accepted intellectual, too intellectual to be regarded as an effective politician in the Australian context, conspicuously lacking the killer instinct, too individual and idiosyncratic to be a factional player. Arts, music, literature, history and philosophy were my obsessions. Lacking the divine gift of creativity, I recognised that my gifts for understanding and communicating were second order capacities. I am well aware of my deficiencies, things I do not know and cannot do. I make no secret of that. I have always read voraciously, travelled extensively, wrote and talked a lot, but I failed to master a musical instrument or foreign 1
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 2
A THINKING REED
languages. However, I proved to be a survivor, and many unpopular and unfashionable causes I pushed for ultimately became accepted as part of the conventional wisdom. My life cut across several boundaries—politician, teacher, media performer, arts administrator, science advocate, writer, heritage consultant, traveller, cultural consumer, quasi-diplomat. My long exposure on television gave me national notoriety, but I ran some risk of being dismissed as a mere collector and disseminator of random chunks of knowledge. I rejected the model of Mr Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times: ‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind.‘Your definition of a horse.’ ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer. ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’
Like most Australian males of my generation, I was emotionally inhibited, if not numb. Sport, family and tribal loyalties aroused passion for my contemporaries, but for me it was knowledge, new experience, literature and the arts, especially, indeed overwhelmingly, music. In his Autobiography Charles Darwin wrote: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts’. Uneasily, I have a fellow feeling but I know that Darwin was writing in deep despair, during a period when music, literature and art had ceased to have any meaning for him. I am grateful never to have had that experience. The recurrent, obsessive theme of my life has been an endless quest, searching for meaning, waiting for God (or Godot), coming to terms with death, the entry and exit price of life, exploring the tensions of time, space, infinity and eternity, an insatiable appetite for collecting and disseminating knowledge, communicating experience, analysing evidence, risking the unknown, provoking the shock of recognition, the ‘aha!’ or ‘wow!’ phenomenon, seeking the numinous, transcendent and universal in spirituality, creativity and aesthetics, studying biography, our collective memory, identifying exceptional achievement, exploring the limits of human capacity, celebrating the extraordinary and the beautiful, in creativity or nature, experiencing the passion, pain and danger of great music, with its 2
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 3
OVERTURE
moods of exaltation and risks of falling, the power and penetration of words, the search for love and identification of ‘the other’, understanding linkages, making connections, working in the profession of politics as a mechanism for sharing power and experience.This is the cosmic backdrop in which our tiny lives are played out. When I become preoccupied with a subject, Homer’s Iliad or Wagner’s Ring, for example, the urge to share experience becomes irresistible, even if an audience shows palpable reluctance. My enthusiasm to provide lists of books read, places visited and music heard is not self-praise for my energy or perception, but encouragement for others to take the plunge and expose themselves to Homer, van Eyck, Montaigne, Bach, Tolstoy, Machu Picchu or Brittany. Lists, chronologies, details, relationships seem to have a deep autobiographical significance, far more than might seem plausible to an outside observer. They were central, of course, to Pick-a-Box, which won me national recognition. My pursuit and organisation of knowledge was the mark of an obsessive personality, but was it pathological? I hope not. But it is authentic: the way I am and the way I do things. I set out some typical lists as an Appendix, in which I encourage people in my circle, or even unknown correspondents, to enlarge their experience: great novels to be read, music listened to, paintings seen, places visited. I identified heroes, such as Jesus, Michelangelo, Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Franklin Roosevelt and saw them as exemplars of extraordinary achievement, but they were too far ahead of me to be role models.And I rejected, even as a child, the worst aspects of heroic leadership, subordination of judgment to the hero. I was never an uncritical follower, even of Jesus. In recent decades Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi have shown heroic qualities, refusing to be emotionally crippled by suffering. People often ask, ‘How do you remember so much? Do you have a photographic memory?’ I need a combination of context, passion, understanding and application to master new subjects, and I have no special skills for remembering unsympathetic material, such as random numbers. I never consciously used a memory system and rarely employed mnemonics. My success relied on capacity to build up contexts and affinities. However, I do not suffer from total recall, which can be a major affliction. In my head, from childhood, I constructed a framework of relationships between the living and the dead. This was like a sculptor’s armature, a metal structure to which clay or wax is applied to produce a shape for 3
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 4
A THINKING REED
casting as an artefact. Later, I built up similar frameworks about history, politics, geography, literature or music. Reading about the political history of Australia, Britain, the United States, France, Germany and Russia made me conscious of changing relationships between the living and the dead, as time’s arrow flies past the procession. This approach encouraged my abiding fascination with people and their connections to institutions and events. The results can be seen in my writings, speeches, and my quiz successes. From the age of five or six, I tried to put family dates of birth in a global context, drawing on chronologies listed in Pears’ Cyclopedia. My great aunt Edith Potter was born in 1878, the year that Pope Pius IX and Lord John Russell died and the carmakers Chevrolet and Citroën were born. My grandmother Nana Black’s birth year (1881) had been shared by Kemal Atatürk, Anna Pavlova, Béla Bartók, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Fleming and Pope John XXIII. Thomas Carlyle, Modest Mussorgsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky all died then. I always arranged the ages of those closest to me in processional order so that Auntie Edie, fifty-four years my senior, was classified as +54, followed by Nana Black (+51), my father (+30), my mother (+28), Aunt Iris (+26) and ultimately my sister Carol (–7). I saw myself as isolated in that thirty-three-year gap between Iris and Carol. The oldest relative I could remember, Aunt Levine Hill, rated as +76 in my system, and Professor W. A. Osborne, my later role model, as +59. Instead of describing Gough Whitlam as ‘being in his 80s’ and then recalculating each year, I thought of him as ‘Whitlam, Edward Gough (1916– )’. This fixed point of reference confirmed him as an exact contemporary of Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, François Mitterrand and Dick Hamer. I found it a useful way to store information in my head. I thought of myself as ‘Jones, Barry Owen (1932– )’. The uncomfortable truth is that my mind usually works as a giant memory bank. Getting access to material and disseminating it in a precise and comprehensive form is important and I can be unsettled by misquotations or confused dates or false attributions. Children are often preoccupied with collecting and classifying, sea shells, for example, as a way of making order out of chaos, exercising a degree of control over their environment. Trying to sort out family relations and sequences was my way of putting a complicated jigsaw together. To get a perfect fit at the end, to paraphrase from Georges Perec, if one needed an ‘X’-shaped piece, a ‘Y’ would not do. 4
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 5
OVERTURE
It was said of me, correctly, that I never met a piece of paper that I didn’t like, and I became a collector of books and documents from an early age. My autographed documents and letters included some of the greatest figures of the past two centuries, and I acquired paintings, Luristan metal work, pre-Columbian ceramics, illuminated manuscripts,Aboriginal and New Guinea artefacts, Japanese woodblock prints and thousands of 78s, LPs and CDs. Communication raises the problem of balance: how much is too much? When a subject is raised, I am sometimes uncertain about whether to refer to an event, place or person by name alone, or open the floodgates so that data gushes out. How much is too much? ‘Enough! Enough!’ People may turn palely away, but it isn’t showing off or a desire to dominate/impress: it is a compulsion to share experience. I am grateful for reports of the ripple effect, for example two women in a single day who told me that my enthusiasm for Anna Karenina and the mosaics of Ravenna had changed their lives. In an earlier draft of this book, I was describing the wonderful Mezquita in Córdoba, with its 856 interior columns, looking like a forest of palm trees. The ‘856’ irritated a reviewer who wrote: ‘Always the detail —to show how much the author knows’. Not at all. Call me obsessivecompulsive, but my aim is not to show how much I know, but to infect others with a determination to see the Mezquita for themselves. Would it have been more acceptable to have referred to ‘many hundreds’ of columns, or ‘almost a thousand’? It is no harder to get it exact. I am surrounded by people who are utterly precise about cricket scores or football results. I claim the same privilege. When Mozart’s name is mentioned, a detailed entry appears on the screen in my head, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–1791), Austrian composer, born in Salzburg, followed by a listing of symphonies, concertos, sonatas, operas, sacred works, chamber music, incidental music and so on, and putting him in a historical or intellectual context with, perhaps, a reference to the film Amadeus as a mental footnote.There are vivid recollections too of hearing great performances of specific works.This memory bank is useful in delivering a lecture, or on a television quiz, but may be socially disabling when a plethora of facts, detail and interpretation is presented to unwilling or wilting listeners. I understand all too well that exposure to new ideas and information can be confronting and intimidating, especially when they are complex. As Science Minister I was conscious of eyes glazing over in the Cabinet Room as I attempted to interest my colleagues in biotechnology, radio 5
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 6
A THINKING REED
astronomy, Halley’s Comet, genetic engineering, global warming or the hole in the ozone layer. A mixture of deep curiosity, career choice, persistence, opportunism and luck enabled me to observe or meet many significant politicians, writers, artists, musicians, scientists and thinkers. It was no accident that I spent so long in writing my Dictionary of World Biography. The strengths and flaws of individuals, the characteristics that we describe as ‘genius’, fascinated me and I aspired to an encyclopedic range and depth of knowledge. Collecting autographed documents and letters reinforced that preoccupation. John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation (1990), later a successful film (1993), explored the thesis first advanced in 1967 by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram that there are no more than six degrees of separation between any two individuals on earth. Milgram argued that if a particular person knows 300 people by name, and that each of them also knows 300, then two degrees of separation involves a cohort of 90 000 people (not accounting for duplications), three degrees to 27 million, four to 810 million, and so on. While the mathematics in Milgram’s original experiment was flawed, the ‘small world’ hypothesis is broadly correct, reinforced by commercial and social networks, the jumbo jet and Internet. I liked to play the ‘how many handshakes?’ game. Through Clement Attlee, whom I came to know, I was only two handshakes away from Mohandas Gandhi,Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marshal Tito and Mao Zedong. How many person-to-person engagements does it take to go back, say, 300 years? I could reach Abraham Lincoln with three handshakes: my friend Alger Hiss had briefly been law clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr who as a young Union officer in the Civil War had met President Lincoln. When I talked to Hiss, I sensed the ghosts of Holmes and Lincoln were present. My mentor W.A. Osborne had shaken hands with Oscar Wilde and Buffalo Bill. I could get back to Johann Sebastian Bach in six handshakes. In London, I talked to the veteran French conductor Pierre Monteux who, as a young violist, had met Johannes Brahms. Brahms had known Franz Liszt, who had met Beethoven. Beethoven had been encouraged by Johann Christoph Bach, son of the great J.S. I carry a portrait gallery around in my head, and thousands of faces are familiar to me. Many personal influences shaped my experience. I seized 6
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 7
OVERTURE
the opportunity to meet significant figures, and wrote to those I could not meet. I was always preoccupied with the concept of ‘time’s winged chariot’, the need to act decisively and that there may be no second chances.‘Life is not a dress rehearsal.’* Like Sisyphus, we are all condemned to carry loads. The major difference is the value of the contents. One bag may contain empty bottles, bits of rubble and old car tyres, while the other includes maps of the universe, the teachings of Jesus, the Buddha and Muhammad, the writings of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, music by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, art by van Eyck, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hokusai, the insights of Galileo, Darwin and Einstein, cures to terrible diseases. We must choose which baggage accompanies us throughout life.
* Some dictionaries of quotations attribute the phrase to the British novelist Rose Tremain, and date it to 1989. I am sure it is much older. 7
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 8
CHAPTER 1
ﱗ
Family
Thinking reed. It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. Pascal: Pensées 113
I was born in Geelong, Victoria, on Tuesday 11 October 1932, at St Margaret’s Private Hospital in Ryrie Street, now the Geelong Hospital’s Dialysis Unit, at the depth of the Great Depression. It was a complicated forceps delivery, due to my birth weight, about 5 kilograms (more than 10 pounds), and the size of my head which was compressed in the process. My face still has a distinct droop on the left side.The delivery was difficult for both of us and my mother could have been understandably resentful. The obstetrician, Dr Mary Clementina de Garis* (1881–1963), a Melbourne graduate, had been only the second woman in Victoria to take out the higher degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD). She led a Scottish Women’s Hospitals team in Serbia during World War I and became a pioneer in the feeding of high-protein diets to pregnant women. My mother’s sister Iris proposed the name ‘Barry’, fashionable in the 1930s but rare now. I share it with Barry Humphries, born 16 months after * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, p. 271, Janet McCalman. 8
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 9
FAMILY
me. Barry is common in Ireland, as a contraction of (St) Finbar. In Wales its origin is disputed, possibly from the Celtic word for ‘spear’ or ‘good marksman’, or from ‘ap Harry’ (son of Harry)—say it quickly—derived from the Scandinavian Harald (army ruler). The Welsh town of Barry was named for St Baruch, a holy hermit who lived on a nearby island before the Normans came. Its choice for me owed everything to fashion, none to etymology. My second name, Owen, from my paternal grandfather and very common (as Owain) in Wales, is the Gaelic equivalent of the Greek Eugenios (‘well born’), Eugenius in Latin, Evgenyi in Russian, Eugène in French. In the year after my birth, the national Census estimated Australia’s population as 6.6 million. It was overwhelmingly English speaking and white, with a scattering of Greeks, Italians, Maltese and Chinese. Aborigines, about 80 000, but uncounted in the Census, were virtually invisible in Victoria. Melbourne,Australia’s second city and the Federal capital from 1901 to 1927, had just under one million inhabitants. Geelong, Victoria’s second city, with almost 40 000 people, was dismissed by Melbourne’s residents as ‘Sleepy Hollow’, but in my childhood it was a significant part of Victoria’s economy, a major port and rail link, handling most of the state’s wool crop. Ford cars, blankets, carpets, cement and fertiliser were manufactured there. It had a famous football team in the Australian Rules code, four celebrated private schools (Geelong Grammar and Geelong College for boys, The Hermitage and Morongo for girls), two CSIRO laboratories, many attractive parks, significant heritage buildings from the early colonial period, substantial churches, an art gallery, museum (now defunct), library, botanical garden and a major hospital. My mother’s family arrived in Geelong in 1894, my father’s in 1918. My father, Claud Edward Jones, had been born in Williamstown, Victoria, second son of Owen Jones, then a non commissioned officer in the Commonwealth Naval Forces, and Martha Jane Gerring. He had one brother in Fremantle, one in Geelong, and there were male cousins. Two sisters lived in Melbourne, one in Perth: all three were childless. Claud had followed his father into the RAN as a rating, and had a silver cup to prove that he had been the Navy’s welterweight boxing champion. My mother, Ruth Marion Black, was born in Geelong, eldest daughter of Alexander James Black, a reprobate Salvation Army officer, and Ruth 9
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 10
A THINKING REED
Millicent Potter, a gifted singing teacher. My mother had two sisters, Iris and Tui, but no brothers. Both parents had attended the Swanston Street State School and Geelong High School, but left early. My mother studied piano with Harold Smith and became a skilful instrumentalist. She rebelled quietly against the Puritan culture, religion and taste of the previous generation. As a young man, my father had admired Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a dapper, largely expatriate, spats-wearing patrician. My parents were conservative voters, deferential rather than aspirational. They both smoked heavily. He was a regular social drinker, mostly beer. She liked sherry, much to the disapproval of her mother and aunts. My father was a sports enthusiast, barracked for Geelong in the Victorian Football League, loved horse racing and gambled frequently. He was a voracious, but undiscriminating, reader. In childhood he was reputed to have kept a book by his side as he chopped wood by kerosene lamp. Photographs suggest a resemblance to the English character actor Michael Hordern. After ten years of presumably low-key courtship, my parents married on 18 January 1930 at ‘Montana’, a large house in Drumcondra, overlooking Corio Bay. It belonged to my mother’s relatives, Oswald and Alys Hearne. The Geelong Advertiser carried an article and photograph on the ceremony. It described my mother’s dress as ‘picturesque’. At the time of her marriage, Ruth was a telephonist for Bright and Hitchcock’s, Geelong’s biggest department store. She also taught piano to a few pupils, including my second cousin, Gwen Potter, who was a sharp observer of family matters. By 1932 Claud was working for Bright’s, selling men’s clothing. They both were lucky to be employed. For her to leave work for my birth and nurturing must have been risky financially: I assume her family helped out. In any case, she was married for two years before becoming pregnant with me. Gwen thinks that the marriage lacked much intensity and probably weakened early. I was an only child for seven years until my sister Carol’s birth in September 1939.
FILLING THE GAPS: FAMILY, PLACE AND GENDER There was a striking lack of symmetry with my family connections.While I had the regulation number of parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. (see the family tree on page 12), the only strong links were with the family of my maternal grandmother, the Potters, who lived in Geelong. 10
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 11
FAMILY
This was my family’s emotional centre of gravity where I spent my holidays, but had no friends. In Melbourne, where I lived, went to school and had friends, there were scattered family connections but no relationships. My father had two childless sisters in Melbourne, but little contact with them. Grandmother Jones (née Gerring) died when I was seven, and I can only remember her from the waist down. I received the greatest warmth and psychological support from my grandmother, Nana Black (née Ruth Millicent Potter), and her unmarried sister, Auntie Edie (Edith Anna Potter). These elderly relatives, living remotely and seen intermittently, survived until I was 33. I had far less support from my parents. There were few males around. Grandfather Black had deserted the family in 1910 and Grandfather Jones died nine years before my birth. My uncles, Dad’s brothers, and my male cousins I saw rarely. My father had only a minor role in my life from the end of the 1930s. It was hardly surprising that I began looking for male role models outside the family. They were a diverse collection: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio commentator E.A. Mann (known as ‘The Watchman’), clergyman-missionary-politician Andrew Hughes, Professor W.A. Osborne, retired professor of physiology who dominated a popular radio quiz program, Information, Please, Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, the medical-missionary-organist Albert Schweitzer, pianist and film buff Henri Penn and Methodist clergyman (Catholic convert) Frank Blyth. The Joneses, Gerrings and Potters had all migrated to Australia between 1850 and 1860, the decade of the Gold Rush. They came from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the north and west of England. None came from London or the south-east.The forebears of my mother’s father,Alec Black, came earlier from Scotland in 1833, and others arrived in Australia (about 1880) from New Zealand.
NANA BLACK Ruth Millicent Black, my maternal grandmother Nana Black, was my greatest encourager in the family. I adored her. She had been born in Glengower, Victoria, on 25 November 1881, became a pupil-teacher, developed her singing voice (mezzo-soprano) and performed at church concerts and evangelistic campaigns. In one of these she had the great misfortune to meet Alec Black, was swept off her feet and lost her chance 11
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 12
A THINKING REED
Edward Jones Edward Jones (1829?–1886)
Ann Pugh
Owen Jones (1869–1923) Catherine Edwards (1840?–1895)
Owen Edwards (1812?– ) Sarah Owen (1816?– )
Claud Edward Jones (1902–1947) John Gerring John Gerring (1834–1893)
Mary Smith (1807–1897)
Martha Jane Gerring (1871–1939) Thomas Gilchrist Catherine Butler (1838?–1886)
Ellen Hurst
Barry Owen Jones (1932– ) James Black (1839–1908)
Thomas Black (1806–????) Mary Ann Clark (1812–????)
Alexander James Black (1876–1943) Marion McConnon (1843–1913)
??Thomas Giblin?? (1808–1880) Abigail McConnon (1816–1882)
Ruth Marion Black (1904-1983) George Potter Willerton Potter (1839–1912)
Mary Marsden
Ruth Millicent Potter (1881–1966) Martha Huntley (1844?–1934)
Family tree (with help from Dennis Perry) 12
Henry Huntley (1800–1868) Anna Thomas (1804–1877)
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 13
FAMILY
for a singing career. He persuaded her to break her engagement to Walter Ramsay McNicoll,* a teacher and musician. Ruth and Alec were married in Geelong in January 1904. She was 22, he was 27. They sailed to New Zealand for the honeymoon and, according to her affidavit in the divorce petition, he committed adultery during the short voyage to Auckland.They then returned to Australia.There were three daughters to the marriage, my mother Ruth Marion (born in Geelong in 1904), Iris Willerton (born in Geelong in 1906) and Tui Barbara (born in Auckland in 1908), named for the New Zealand night bird. They had moved to New Zealand in 1905 but Nana Black returned to Geelong in 1906 with two daughters, determined to end the marriage. Alec pursued her and persuaded her to try again. According to family legend, Alec had a mistress in Auckland who also gave birth to a daughter in or around 1908, and she too was called Tui. Alec must have had a keen interest in ornithology. In 1910 Alec, Ruth and daughters returned to Victoria, then Alec deserted. Divorce was uncommon in that period and it took some time to find Alec and serve the papers, but the decree was granted in 1915. His fate was a mystery, except that in the 1920s he worked for a cement company in Kandos, New South Wales, and had written one letter to his daughter Iris. With three small girls, my grandmother needed income and decided to become a singing teacher, taking over the practice of her younger sister Alice, who had married well and abandoned her profession. Nana had studied with Annie Williams but usually described herself as a pupil of Dame Nellie Melba. She kept a signed photograph of Melba on her piano. I suspect that she had little individual tuition, but Melba gave what we would now call ‘master classes’ in Melbourne in 1902, 1909, 1911 and from 1915 to 1916. Nana called herself a practitioner of the ‘Marchesi† method’. She first * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, p. 354, Ronald McNicoll. He became Country Party MHR for Werriwa 1931–34 and Administrator of New Guinea (but not Papua) 1934–42, receiving a knighthood (KBE) for his work in organising relief after a major volcanic eruption in Rabaul in 1937. † Mathilde Marchesi de Castone, née Graumann (1821–1913), a German soprano, was brought up in a great tradition. Marchesi’s teacher, the centenarian Manuel Garcia (1805–1906), came from a unique Spanish singing dynasty. His sisters, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, were as famous as Melba, or Callas, in theirday. His father, an earlier Manuel Garcia, had created the role of Figaro in Rossini’s Barber of Seville. Melba studied repertoire with Marchesi in Paris, but claims that she adopted Marchesi’s method are doubtful even though Melba perpetuated the myth. 13
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 14
A THINKING REED
had a studio in Malop Street, then in her modest house at 12 Sydney Avenue, East Geelong, about 450 metres from the family home,‘Bethany’, in Myers Street, where her sister Edie lived with their mother. She named the house ‘Huntley’, after her mother’s family, and her three daughters grew up there. Nana’s star pupil was the baritone John Brownlee* (1901–1969). He had been born in Geelong and my mother was his first accompanist. He went on for further studies in Melbourne with Ivor Boustead, won the South Street competitions in Ballarat, then sailed for London, attracted Melba’s interest and made his Covent Garden début in 1926, at her London farewell. He sang for years in London, Paris and New York and appeared in the first productions at John Christie’s Glyndebourne Opera in 1936. He had a fine voice, but his diction, acting and stage presence were even better. Nana generally had between sixty and eighty pupils and was able to pay off ‘Huntley’. Many of her pupils came not just for the singing, but for confidence building, learning how to breathe and phrase properly, or as therapy for stammering. Each year she put on a well-attended public concert when her pupils sang. Sometimes my mother accompanied. In the program for her Annual Students’ Demonstration for November 1943 (‘In aid of the Prisoners of War Fund, admission price one shilling and sixpence’) 62 performers are listed, mostly rendering sentimental ballads. On the serious side were two works by Schubert, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Massenet and Edward German, one each by Handel, Thomas, Liszt, Sullivan and Puccini. The duet ‘La ci darem . . .’ (‘Give me your hand . . .’) from Don Giovanni was eccentrically attributed to Donizetti. Nana had been a competent painter in oils, all landscapes, with wellrendered sky and clouds. Only a handful survive. She kept framed prints of Gluck and Mozart on the wall, and an insipid, 19th-century engraving called ‘The Music Teacher’. She occupied the front of ‘Huntley’, while her daughter Iris and her husband Stan Walker lived at the back. When staying with Nana, I shared the sleepout with Uncle Stan’s souvenirs of World War I service in Gallipoli and Egypt. Iris was responsible for meals, although Nana sometimes cooked her specialities. * His performances in the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, conducted by Fritz Busch, and in Frederick Delius’ Sea Drift with Sir Thomas Beecham are still available on Naxos. 14
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 15
FAMILY
Nana lived for fifty-one years after her divorce. She had a devoted suitor called Virgilius Vogel Lorimer, a tally clerk who had once played the double bass, conducted choirs and directed a light opera society. Under his direction, Nana had sung the role of ‘Jill-all-alone’ in Edward German’s Merrie England (1902), once enormously popular, now almost forgotten. He invariably called her ‘Jill-o’. He called round constantly to pay bills and send out accounts to pupils.As he aged, he looked very much like William Ewart Gladstone. As she aged, she looked like Dame May Whitty as Miss Froy in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. I thought she looked vivacious, but she photographed atrociously. In my youthful superciliousness, I found Lorimer irritating and could not understand why he was so often under foot. Now I see the relationship as infinitely poignant. He clearly idolised her. I think she was bored by him, and certainly had no intention of marrying again. At each visit, after a decent interval she wanted to see him off, then go to bed. He would attend to the paperwork, and then, ‘Good night, Jill-o’, ‘Good night, V’, and he would slope off to his lodgings. Did they ever have a physical relationship? Some relatives suspected that they had and fear of scandal was enough to cause a rift. Cruelly, Nana’s sister Alys and her husband never spoke to her for a decade. She was determined not to give in to pressure or moral blackmail and while her three daughters supported her, I doubt that they warmed to her suitor. After the mid-1930s the presence of Iris and Stan in ‘Huntley’ would have inhibited any physical relationship. V.V. Lorimer must have served the extended family in a Jeeves-like capacity over many years, and I was surprised to see that he was the informant on my birth certificate, with the details written in his exceptionally beautiful handwriting. I once tactlessly asked him if he had a wife and family. He muttered that his wife’s name was Ada, and said no more. In 1943 Nana suffered from a frightening episode of acute septicaemia just before penicillin became generally available. We thought she was going to die. I observed Lorimer’s agonised look, complicated by his role as outsider. I felt pain and fear for her—but it would have been inhuman to exclude him. There was clearly a degree of jealousy between us, absurd as it sounds. My sister Carol has a completely different perspective on V.V. Lorimer. She thought he was very kind and a wonderful storyteller. He died in July 1951, aged 79. In 1944, almost twenty-five years after Alec’s last contact, his sister Vida and her husband Benjamin Orames, Commissioner for the Salvation 15
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 16
A THINKING REED
Army in Canada, came looking for him, without success. After Nana died in 1966, I began checking the New South Wales Births, Deaths and Marriages Register. I found that an Alexander James Black, born in Karamea, New Zealand, in 1876, the son of James and Marion Black, had died in St George’s Hospital, Kogarah, a Sydney suburb, in December 1943. His death certificate listed three marriages, to Sarah Maslen, Iris Macey (the Christian name must have appealed) and Alice Irving. Marriage to my grandmother was not recorded. While deeply devout and a fervent Bible student, Nana was unorthodox. She was an ardent member of the British Israel World Federation (BIWF). British Israelites, or BIs, argued that the British, and Americans of British ancestry, were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, scattered at the time of the Babylonian captivity. They also believed fervently in the Glastonbury legend, implicit in William Blake’s poem Jerusalem (‘And did those feet in ancient time . . .’), that Jesus had visited England with Joseph of Arimathea during his ‘lost years’. Most conventional Christians did not make the connection between Jesus and the Jews, Christianity and Judaism. After all, Jesus grew up in Palestine and this raised the possibility that he might, not to put too fine a point upon it, be Jewish. Auntie Edie was quite firm: ‘Jesus wasn’t Jewish, he was Christian’. She probably meant European, or even English. BIs were keen on pyramidology. They believed that precise measurements of the inner chambers of the Great Pyramid of Cheops could be used to interpret the past and predict the future. There is an extensive literature on this subject. BIs also pursued fanciful word associations, for example linking the names Isaac and Saxon, so that ‘Isaac’s sons’ became ‘Saxons’ and so on. Nana pressed much BI literature on me, and I did not like to offend by rejecting it too obviously. She recognised kinship with Jews and saw the importance of Judaism in the life and teaching of Jesus. She was distressed by early reports of the Holocaust in Europe. BI took Nana out of the Christian mainstream, and it was one subject that she could not discuss with her even more pious, but strictly orthodox, sister Edie, but her brother George followed Nana into BI with enthusiasm. V.V. Lorimer was silent on BI and I doubt that he had deep religious convictions. My grandmother shared her membership of the BIWF with the Littleton family who lived nearby. Marge Littleton, an exuberant character who never married, ran the smallest shop I have ever seen, a British Israel outlet 16
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 17
FAMILY
in Ryrie Street where pamphlets were sold. (Her brother Clem was a depressive who had to be encouraged to get on his bike and ride to work each morning. Family members would run alongside him: ‘You’ll be all right. Don’t worry, you’ll get there . . .’) Nana was notoriously forgetful. On one occasion she invited the ladies of the bowling club home to supper, excused herself, forgot they were waiting to be fed and retired to bed. Her kindness made her an easy touch. She allowed a local gypsy called Rogerty Buck to store sacks of manure in her backyard. Early one morning she noticed that one of the sacks appeared to be letting off steam, prodded it with a stick and found that Rogerty was asleep there. She laughed readily and had a forgiving nature. I never heard her blame her deserter husband for anything. She used to say, ‘He must have had his reasons’. She once observed of Adolf Hitler, ‘What a scamp he is’. Unlike Auntie Edie, she spent little time reminiscing. She was also reluctant to recognise or resolve unpleasant or difficult problems, adopting the ostrich strategy. She was always interested in my activities:‘What have you been doing? Tell me all about it.’ She was an encourager and financier too, very generous in buying me books. In her last years, Ire and Stan bought ‘Huntley’ and Nana went to ‘Bethany’ to live with her sister Edie. She continued to teach, but not for long. When Edie was transferred to the Grace McKellar House nursing home in 1965, a decision was made, presumably at Tui’s urging, to sell ‘Bethany’ and buy a smaller house nearby, in Connor Street, East Geelong. Nana suffered from dementia and slowly faded away. She died in May 1966, three months after Edie. My mother was summoned down to Geelong, expecting to be there for some time. I was detained in Melbourne but planned to arrive the next day. However, she died in the early evening, in a deathbed scene which those present never forgot. She appeared to wake, looked up with a beatific smile, then ceased to breathe.
AUNTIE EDIE Next to Nana Black, the strongest family influence on me was her elder sister, Auntie Edie. Like her sister Ruth, Edith Anna Potter (1878–1966) was born in Glengower.Trained as a pupil-teacher, in 1905 she had gone to Tawonga, 17
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 18
A THINKING REED
near Mount Bogong in north-east Victoria, to nurse her brother Hughie through tuberculosis. She fell off a table and damaged her right hip, which became tubercular and her brother George was summoned from Geelong to take charge. Edie had to be taken from Tawonga to Bright by horse-drawn dray, then to Melbourne in the guard’s van of the train, in great agony for an atrocious operation which removed part of her femur. Her right leg was about 12 centimetres shorter than the left. She had to wear a monstrous high laced-up boot, and walked with a stick. That ended her prospects of a career and marriage, although after her mother died she had a discreet friendship with Joe Morris, a Western District farmer. She was confined to home duties at ‘Bethany’, looking after her imperious mother, raising chooks and maintaining the extensive garden. She was an excellent cook and Christmas dinners were always held at ‘Bethany’. She was a hard-line Puritan in lifestyle, an orthodox Calvinist in belief, quick to rebuke sin or impiety. She was prone to moralising, and was deeply judgmental. But she also had a generous heart and would never turn anyone away. She was not a progressive on gender issues, constantly repeating,‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever!’, which drove me mad. (This was a quotation from Charles Kingsley, the English Christian Socialist, who meant it ironically, although I did not know this at the time. Nor, I suspect, did she.) She read the Bible endlessly, and had an extraordinary capacity to recite slabs from it. It was impossible to argue with her, for example, about inconsistencies in the four Gospels. There was simply a flat denial that there were, or could be, any problems. She kept evangelical publications such as Daily Light, published by the Keswick Book Co. in England, close at hand. Apart from religious texts, she liked biographies and had superior musical tastes. She was a devoted listener to the ABC, keeping her Astor ‘Mickey’ wireless on in the kitchen day and night. She would listen to Beethoven or Mozart on the radio as she munched an apple and read Daily Light, although she rarely talked about music. In those days the ABC broadcast relays of the BBC News as well. Many in the extended family kept in touch with Edie by letters or occasional visits. Elsie Curtin (née Needham), Prime Minister John Curtin’s wife, born in Ballarat in 1890, was a distant relative. I remember meeting her at ‘Bethany’ when she called in for afternoon tea and scones with Auntie Edie. I listened avidly to John Curtin’s wartime broadcasts but never saw him. 18
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 19
FAMILY
Edie suffered from night terrors. She always slept with a light on and could not be left alone in the house overnight. She kept chopped-up fresh vegetables in a drawer by her bed and would munch on a carrot or Brussels sprout, or a biscuit, in the middle of the night when she could not sleep. For many years she had a lodger, Mrs Neilson, in the front room, a tiny, bird-like creature with a tread like an elephant.‘Bethany’ reverberated when she walked. If Mrs Neilson was away with her family, I sometimes had to go down to ‘Bethany’ to stay with Edie, having to give up occasional days at school. But, night terrors apart, Edie was a tough character, much stronger than my grandmother, more practical and determined, and she helped keep the family together. There was a parallel with the New Testament sisters who lived with their brother Lazarus at Bethany, with Edie as Martha and Nana as Mary. Edie was contemptuous of the welfare state and in 1946 after the Constitutional Referendum on Social Security was carried I had to bully her, in my teenage way, into putting in a claim for the Invalid Pension. Extremely frugal, she rejoiced in the survival of what we called the ‘35-year light bulb’, which had become a real museum piece before, sadly, it expired. After a series of strokes, Edie became unconscious and died in February 1966. Edie and Ruth (Nana Black) had been fourth and fifth respectively in a family of eight, of whom three had died early.
RUI, IRE AND TUI Nana’s three daughters, Ruth (my mother), Iris and Tui, were invariably referred to as Rui, Ire (pronounced as ‘Irie’, not to rhyme with ‘dire’) and Tui, a rhyming trio, like Walt Disney’s Huey, Dewey and Luey. They had strikingly different temperaments. None was attracted to BI. All were heavy smokers, drank to varying degrees and had no discernible interest in serious music, or literature or religion. Ire, an office worker, married David Stanley Walker, ten years her senior and a returned soldier from World War I.They had tried growing tobacco, unsuccessfully, at Pomonal, in the Grampians, western Victoria. Uncle Stan inherited and ran a grocery store in Moorabool Street, Geelong, with a machine that baled hay off the lane at the back. I sometimes helped him in the store and steered hay down the race for baling. Ire was childless until 1940 and I spent much time with her. She took me to see many films before the adoption of her much loved daughter, 19
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 20
A THINKING REED
Helen. Ire, Stan and Helen lived in Barwon Heads from 1943 to 1947, then returned to live with Nana at ‘Huntley’. Stan was a conservative but steadying influence. After he died in 1964 Ire became increasingly anxious, which seems to be a family failing, fanatically anti-Communist, seeing Australia on the brink of Red revolution, and developed the shakes. Ultimately she was taken into care and died in 1976. Tui seemed a fascinating character, with a touch of danger and unpredictability about her. She went to Sydney to pursue a stage career. She failed in that, but worked for the theatrical entrepreneur and milk-bar owner Hugh D. Macintosh.* Years later, we found that she had given birth to a son, Seth, in Sydney in 1929: he was adopted out. Macintosh expanded his operations to England in the 1930s, and Tui tried her luck in London, without success, returning to Australia in 1938. No other Potter or Huntley descendant had ever revisited the place they called ‘Home’ until Tui in 1935. I was the second, in 1958. The Joneses, Gerrings and Blacks never visited Britain either. Neither my mother nor grandmother travelled much. The extent of their voyaging was to Perth in the west, Auckland in the east, Brampton Island in the north (a Pick-a-Box prize I gave them) and Apollo Bay in the south. Neither visited Sydney or Canberra. My father never left Australia. In 1940 Tui married Herbert Herald, who lived with his mother in the mansion ‘Labassa’ in Manor Grove, Caulfield, opposite the flat where we lived. They moved into the flat above ours but the marriage lasted barely a year. She worked at Rumpelmayer’s Café in Collins Street, then disappeared. She had a hypersensitivity to alcohol and passed through some traumatic incidents. But in August 1944 she reappeared unexpectedly with her newly born daughter Sue (Ruth Christine) and lived at ‘Bethany’ with Auntie Edie. She ran a modest lending library, The Bethany Book Club, in a detached building just behind ‘Bethany’. In 1946 she had another child, a boy, named Ian, who was also adopted out. This was so close a family secret that I learnt of it for the first time in December 2001. My mother must have known but decided not to tell me. I must have been extraordinarily unobservant because, as usual, I spent some time in Geelong in 1946. On one occasion she attempted to burn ‘Bethany’ down, presumably with its occupants inside. * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, p. 285, Chris Cunneen. 20
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 21
FAMILY
Tui was very funny, with a wonderful capacity for mimicry and to tell, and embroider, a story. She could make me laugh hysterically.‘How we shrieked!’ was a recurrent line in the lives of the Mitford sisters. In Geelong we did a lot of shrieking too, especially when Tui was involved. I never understood why this theatricality did not translate into a career. Tui lived in Perth with her daughter from 1971, suffered from lung cancer and died after a stroke in 1975. My mother, the eldest sister, survived the longest.
NANA AND EDIE’S SIBLINGS Nana and Edie had one surviving brother, George Edward Tertius Potter (1876–1950). A quiet, gentle, generous man, he married May Meakin and had two children, Willerton (‘Wit’) and Gwen. His brother Hughie had talked him into moving to Tawonga and he became a dairy farmer, storekeeper and postmaster there, returning to Geelong in 1936. The only Potter sibling not to live in Geelong was Auntie Mabel Elizabeth (1880–1962), not to be confused with my father’s sister. She married Albert Wood, had two children, Huntley and Minna, and lived in Perth. She made the long train journey back to Geelong every few years to see her siblings. She and Edie exchanged long letters every week, without fail. She had purple lips, suggesting some circulatory deficiency. The last survivor was Alice Ida Octavia Potter (1886–1977). She had a fine voice, became a singing teacher before my grandmother, then married Oswald Charles Hearne, who inherited the firm that manufactured Hearne’s Bronchitis Cure. They owned ‘Montana’, the large house where my parents were married. It had a beautiful garden and a superb view of Corio Bay. Uncle Ossie, an enthusiastic organist, played for years at the Yarra Street Methodist Church. He had a large Wurlitzer organ, reputed to be Australia’s first, installed at home. He served on the Geelong City Council and was an effective mayor during the Great Depression, when the city’s unemployment rate was above the national average. Auntie Alice affected the spelling ‘Alys’. She suffered from deep anxieties, and never travelled: their honeymoon voyage to England had to be cancelled. Before she died she said, ‘I can’t bear to leave my things.’ 21
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 22
A THINKING REED
THE HEAVENLY HOST—THE POTTERS Behind the family members I knew, there was a heavenly host of deceased relatives who remained alive in memory and were constantly talked about, their precious images kept as icons. Much of my lifelong preoccupation with sequencing, or dates, may have come from trying to work out family relationships at a time when I was an only child, with no access to cousins. I found a Potter family Bible with the dates of births and deaths carefully inscribed, and memorised the list. Because of my lopsided family arrangements I knew a great deal about my mother and her mother’s family, the Potters, very little about my father’s side. Nana Black’s father, Willerton Potter (1839–1912), was born in Stokesley, Yorkshire, son of George Potter, a tailor, and Mary Marsden. He became a teacher and followed his sister to Australia, where she lived at Branxholme, north of Portland. According to family legend, he landed in Brisbane and walked to Victoria. Unfortunately, it cannot be true because he does not appear in the Queensland shipping records. However, in 1854, two men identified as ‘W Potter’ landed in Melbourne, one from the Hellespont in January, the second on the Volant in December, and I assume that Willerton Potter was one of them.There is no family memory about what he did between arriving in Australia and joining the Victorian colonial school system in October 1870 as a teacher. His death certificate records that he was in Victoria for fifty-three years—but nobody called Willerton or W. Potter arrived by ship in 1859. In January 1873 in Portland, Willerton Potter married Martha Andrews Huntley (1844?–1934). His sea captain brother, Hugh Potter, with a deeply speculative mind, envied his younger brother’s unquestioning faith but could not share it. He wrote a powerful letter to Willerton about comparative religion, following a visit to Rangoon (Yangon) and observing the great Buddhist stupas. In 1881 on a voyage from Geelong to Le Havre, the SS Eurynome, under his command, disappeared without trace. Martha Potter’s parents, Henry Willis Andrews Huntley (1800–1868) and Anna Huntley, née Thomas (1804–1877), left Exeter with three children on an assisted passage, arriving in Victoria in December 1854 on the Violet, a schooner-like sailing ship. They settled in Portland. Martha Potter, my great grandmother, was said to have been born in Exeter, but her birth is not recorded in the English indices for 1843 or 1844. She told her children that on the voyage out to Australia she had 22
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 23
FAMILY
asked to be lashed to the sailing ship’s mast so that she could watch the storms. Her elder sister Mary Ann came too, marrying Charles Trickey in 1860. The Potter family moved around western Victoria, following Willerton’s teaching appointments, before settling in Geelong in 1894. Great Grandfather Potter’s last appointment was as Head Teacher of the St Albans* Primary School (No. 541), still standing and renamed Geelong East. He retired in November 1899 on superannuation of £116 per annum, and collapsed and died suddenly at home in August 1912. The Potter family was Baptist, Protestant fundamentalist, committed to a literal interpretation of the Bible, deeply opposed to Darwin’s theory of evolution and wary of Catholics. They were total abstainers and generally frugal in their habits. They were Empire loyalists and political conservatives, but not attracted to Freemasonry. Great Grandfather Willerton looks very serious in photographs, bearded, with a bowtie and Schubert-like wire spectacles. He voted ‘Yes’ for Federation. Martha Potter was a fierce matriarch, modelling herself, perhaps, on Queen Victoria. There was some physical resemblance. She retained the dress and manner of the 19th century until her death. She was a formidable pincher, my mother attested. I was her first great grandchild. Apparently she liked to hold me in her arms and repeat,‘Precious babe! Precious babe!’ She died at ‘Bethany’ on 21 April 1934 of ‘chronic endocarditis’ in her ninetieth year. She may have been a year or two older. Her last words were, ‘Have you put out the milk money?’ ‘Bethany’, 275 Myers Street, East Geelong, survives. The oldest relative I recall as a child was Levinia Hill (‘Aunt Levine’), Great Grandmother Potter’s niece. She was born Levinia Trickey in Portland in 1856 and died in Richmond in 1939, having spent her whole life in Victoria. She seemed almost inconceivably ancient to me. I recall a white lace blouse with long sleeves, and a full length cocoa brown skirt. Her grandson, Ted Hill, founded and led the Australian Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), the pro-China breakaway from Moscovite orthodoxy, and was a frequent visitor to Chairman Mao. Ted’s sister Elspeth
* Phar Lap was trained at the St Albans stud. The better known St Albans is north-west of Melbourne. 23
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 24
A THINKING REED
married the radio-astronomer Chris (Wilbur Norman) Christiansen. As a youth Ted Hill went through periods of enthusiasm for religious fundamentalism. My mother recalled the deep embarrassment of family members waiting at a tram stop, when Ted fell to his knees and said, ‘Now, for a word of prayer.’ As Bernie Taft observed, ‘Ted never stopped being a fundamentalist.’
THE JONESES I knew little about my father’s family. Nevertheless, pursuing records of births, deaths and marriages has its incidental rewards. It helped to explain how society evolves and changes in family structure, with higher fertility but lower life expectancy, limited access to education and economic pressure as the reason for emigration. My father’s grandfather, Edward Jones (1829?–1886), was born in Llanaber, near Barmouth, in what was then Merioneth and is now Gwynned, Wales. Barmouth, at the mouth of Afon Mawddach (River Avon), on Cardigan Bay, was where Darwin began The Descent of Man (1871) and Tennyson wrote ‘Crossing the Bar’ (1889). Edward became a miner, presumably working on slate which abounds in Snowdonia and used to be exported to China, the United States and Australia for roofing, but was also useful as ballast. He married Catherine Edwards, then made a very late attempt to join the Victorian gold rush: news must have travelled very slowly in North Wales. He and Catherine sailed as unassisted migrants from Liverpool in August 1861 on the Elizabeth A. Bright, arriving in December. After Ballarat’s gold petered out, many Welsh miners stayed on in Victoria, quarrying bluestone, then much in demand as Melbourne’s population grew. Edward Jones moved to Creswick in the 1870s and died there. Between 1879 and 1886 the town was historically significant, as the birthplace of the artists Norman, Lionel and Ruby Lindsay, of Prime Minister John Curtin, and of the Australian Workers’ Union.After Edward died, his widow accompanied their daughter to New Zealand and died of cancer in Dunedin. My grandfather, Owen Jones, was born at Canadian Hill, Ballarat, in 1869. He joined Victoria’s Colonial Navy before Federation and married Martha Jane Gerring at the Anglican Church in Williamstown in 1892. There were six children, Laura, Mabel, Owen, Claud (my father), Edward and Martha. 24
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 25
FAMILY
My grandfather served in the Victorian Naval Contingent, which was part of an international expeditionary force to China during the Boxer Rebellion (1900). He received a medal for his service in Peking (Beijing). In 1901 he transferred to the Commonwealth Naval Forces, which became the Royal Australian Navy in 1911. As a training officer, he was posted to Williamstown, Portland, Fremantle, then Geelong but had no active service in World War I. He rose from the ranks to be a lieutenant, a relatively rare occurrence, his promotions being attributed to his memory. He was credited with being able to recite all the King’s Regulations verbatim.Why one would want to do so is another question. He became a Freemason but had no church involvement. His last posting was at Osborne House, North Geelong (now the Maritime Museum). He escorted the Prince of Wales during his visit to Geelong on 1 June 1920 and took early retirement, apparently in good health. On 3 June 1923, at his house in Fisher Road, Highton, as my mother played the ukulele, he laughed heartily, slapped his thigh and died, aged 54. The only thing I remember Dad saying about his father was that he used to quote an old naval toast, ‘Here’s to our wives and sweethearts, and may they never meet!’
ABIGAIL MCCONNON AND JAMES BLACK Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, wrote of Jonathan Swift that he ‘could write finely upon a broomstick’, and this theme was taken up by Alain de Botton in Kiss & Tell (1995), a stimulating biography of an otherwise obscure young woman friend, celebrating ‘the extraordinariness of any life’. My ghostly cavalcade of relatives, especially the early ones, passed through times of extraordinary change and reasons for non-achievement can be almost as interesting as achievement. I became increasingly intrigued by some of my unknown forebears, reflecting on how tough they must have been, far stronger than my generation or my parents’. Linkage with the family of my mother’s father, Alec Black, and his McConnon forebears was only genetic, but proved to be unusually interesting. My great great grandmother Abigail McConnon sailed in the schooner Scotia from Leith, the port of Edinburgh, arriving in Hobart Town,Van Diemen’s Land, in November 1833. In 1843 she gave birth to a daughter, Marion, followed by two more girls. Abigail was working as a domestic servant for Thomas Giblin, a widower, in Claremont House, 25
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 26
A THINKING REED
New Town, north of Hobart.The paternity of the three girls is unknown, but when Giblin remarried in 1846,Abigail and her daughters returned to Scotland, presumably at his expense, and there is a distinct possibility that he was the father. Thomas worked for the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, was its managing director from 1874 until his death and chaired several boards, including the Gas Company and the Tasmanian Colonial Library. Born in Holborn, Middlesex,Thomas arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1827 with his parents and siblings. The family, active Congregationalists, became a distinguished Tasmanian dynasty, still very active and numerous. Thomas’ nephew, William Robert Giblin (1840–87), was Premier of Tasmania, an early advocate of Federation and a Supreme Court judge 1885–87. His son, Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin (1872–1951), an influential economist, anticipated the ‘multiplier’ theory popularised by Richard Kahn and John Maynard Keynes, became Ritchie Professor of Economics at Melbourne University 1929–40 and had a major influence on Ben Chifley and ‘Nugget’ Coombs. In 1855 in Aberdeen Abigail married a blacksmith, David Dingwall, falsifying her age in the process, then returned to Hobart. Her husband became the leading blacksmith in Salamanca Place and they lived in Battery Point with their children. Abigail became active in the Hobart Horticultural Society and was, I suspect, a woman of unusual tenacity and forceful personality. The ancestor who travelled furthest was the Orcadian James Black, Abigail’s son-in-law, who left Kirkwall in the late 1860s for a gold rush in the south island of New Zealand, resettled in Tasmania around 1880, then joined the Western Australian gold rush. He married Marion McConnon, governess, in Hokitika, New Zealand in January 1870. I visited Orkney in February 2004 because I wanted to capture a sense of its remoteness, speculating on how far James Black had been pushed by poverty or pulled by a sense of adventure. Settled from the Stone Age, Orkney and Shetland were later invaded by the Vikings, belonged to Norway until 1469 and Kirkwall is the second most remote town in Scotland. Driven by poverty, Abigail and James must have shared an iron determination to travel so far. My descent came through my mother’s absconding father, Alec Black: he was Abigail’s grandson and James’ son. Educated in Tasmania, he joined the Salvation Army and was an evangelist in Auckland for some years, before returning to Australia and 26
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 27
FAMILY
marrying Ruth Potter in Geelong. Charming, but treacherous, he deserted when my mother was six and I suspect this influenced her wariness of males.
27
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 28
CHAPTER 2
ﱗ
Childhood
I was nearly 30 when I finished Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I read the first volume as a university student then, after a 12-year lapse, rushed through the whole work compulsively in a few days. It influenced me profoundly. I tried to recall the images and sounds of early childhood, together with colours, tastes and smells, examining my relationships and how I started to interpret the world. Proust described his novel sequence as an optical instrument for looking inside the mind, helping to explain how we take in sensory experience and interpret it. As André Aciman wrote in his essay ‘Proust Regained,’* ‘In a biography we want to encounter a consciousness, a temperament, a mind struggling to become what we already know it will become’. In Search of Lost Time ‘turned every moment from the most rarefied to the most ordinary into an occasion for boundless introspection . . . Everything he discovered, from tea biscuits . . . to asparagus . . . cried out to be looked at from the inside’. Reading In Search of Lost Time made me far more conscious of relationships, feelings and influences, curious about my family and the milieu in which I grew up and was a lasting influence as I wrote this book. My parents married in January 1930, living first in a flat at 259 Ryrie Street. After my birth in October 1932 they moved to a rented house at 238 McKillop Street, East Geelong. Early in 1935 my father left Geelong * New York Review of Books, July 18, 2002. 28
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 29
CHILDHOOD
for Melbourne, looking for work. At first he lived in digs, alone, a measure of the economic and social despair of the Great Depression, while we stayed in Geelong with Nana Black. This separation, fairly common in Australian families at the time, put additional strain on a fragile relationship. That same year I travelled with my mother by train to Ararat and then by car to Pomonal, a beautiful hamlet on the eastern slopes of the Grampians, 245 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. Her sister and brother-in-law, Ire and Stan Walker, were growing tobacco there for W.D. & H.O. Wills (now British Tobacco). The train journey, more than four hours, allowing for many stops on the way, seemed endless. It is my earliest memory: the noise of the wheels, the smell of coal dust, the smoky green leather seats, the dry yellow landscape and spindly trees.We stayed at Pomonal for months, essentially ‘parking’, staying with relatives who were able to feed and shelter us. My mother helped on the farm, but otherwise she never had paid work in the 1930s. Accommodation was spartan, in a galvanised iron shed on stilts. Space was cramped and I slept in the same bed with my mother. Hessian bags covered the wooden floors. Nights were freezing, and days very hot. There were horses and snakes, and the constant smell of drying tobacco leaves. Towards the end of 1935 my parents were reunited in Melbourne, in an upstairs flat at ‘Liverpool’, 36 Princess Street, St Kilda, a towered building at the corner of Barkly Street, opposite the Presbyterian Church. ‘Liverpool’ had been built in 1888 by Nathaniel Levi, Victoria’s first Jewish Member of Parliament, who died there in 1908. The first memory that I can date precisely is the death of King George V on 20 January 1936. My mother heard the news on the wireless and sent me to tell Mrs Miriam Ellingworth, whose family lived in the adjoining flat. I passed on the message without knowing what it meant to be dead. I don’t recall Mrs Ellingworth’s face or how she reacted, only the carpet on the landing, mushroom or pale cocoa-coloured, with a faint floral pattern. I was barely three years old. My next memory is walking down Barkly Street after tea with my father to look at the ‘Atlantic Lady’, a huge neon sign for Atlantic Petroleum, above the St Kilda Junction Auto Service at the end of St Kilda Road.The display had streaming yellow hair, blue eyes and flashing red and white arrows. The site disappeared when a roundabout was built in the 1960s. At Princess Street I understood how to read, the first major event in my 29
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 30
A THINKING REED
life. I used to torment my parents and any stray visitors into reading to me, interminably, insisting that they underline each word with the index finger as they spoke it. My parents had separate chairs and I used to sit between them in a small chair with high armrests. I soon grasped the relationship between the shapes of letters and their sounds, and shortly after turning three I could work it out for myself. In Geelong, Nana and Edie also encouraged me to read. From June to July 1936 Mum and I stayed at Tawonga, near Mount Bogong, with the family of my Great Uncle George Potter, Auntie May and Cousin Gwen. Again, we were ‘parking’ as we had been in Pomonal, avoiding the costs of rent, food and fuel in Melbourne. Dad gave up the Princess Street flat and boarded with friends. I loved Tawonga and retain vivid impressions of strong cups of Bournville Cocoa, with the purple packet featuring a golden cocoa bean. I remember riding cows, gripping the horns tensely, and the smell of a petrol engine in the country air was new to me. I drove myself in imagination, using a circular package of Tiger brand cheese as a steering wheel. I made an enemy of a local boy, Pat Ballard, who called me a ‘blatherskite’. I probably was. We were able to attend the wedding of my second cousin Willerton Potter to Mona Ryan at the Sacred Heart Church in Yarrawonga, on the Murray River. In our family, a ‘mixed marriage’ was unprecedented. It is hard now to understand the profound religious and cultural divide in Australia in the 1930s between Catholics and Protestants. Unlike Northern Ireland, it was not violent, but characterised by mutual incomprehension and a deep silence. There was de facto segregation; it was rare to mix socially, let alone have friends from across the sectarian divide. The wedding was a cultural shock. A priest in a long frock, talking in a foreign language, was disconcerting. My father had only casual work as a salesman and we were supported in part by Nana Black.With only a single income, renting must have been a heavy burden.When my father found work we returned to join him in Melbourne. Between 1936 and 1938 we had three moves, first to a flat in ‘Winbourne Court’, at the corner of Brighton Road and Alfriston Street, Elwood, then to a maisonette in Lawrence Street, Brighton and finally, in May 1938, to a flat in Manor Grove, Caulfield. Manor Grove was their tenth move in eight years of marriage and the impact of the Depression had forced two periods of separation. Many school friends had similar experiences. The combined effect of the Depression and World War II contributed to family breakdowns. 30
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 31
CHILDHOOD
Until I went to school there was little contact with children of my own age, except at Lawrence Street, and it was painful to leave. Living in rented premises meant no pets, and usually no backyard or garden. When I went out it was mostly with my mother, for shopping, but occasionally with one of her friends to a film, which I always enjoyed. I was an avid newspaper reader and radio listener before the age of five. My parents took the Sun News-Pictorial, a morning paper published by the Herald & Weekly Times group, run by Sir Keith Murdoch, Rupert’s father. It was Australia’s biggest selling newspaper, with a high proportion of space devoted to photographs.The Sun and the wireless, especially the ABC, were my major sources of information about events such as the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in May 1937. I sat by the Essanay wireless, generally alone, listening intently, but I cannot recall that my parents ever discussed the stories reported, either with me or with each other. It was through the wireless that I discovered my first heroes, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jean Batten, the New Zealand aviator, who set many records, including solo flights from England to New Zealand and England to Brazil. I listened to her after her Australia to England flight in October 1937.* Wireless (it was later called radio) also explained the impact of war in China and Spain and the Great Depression. I knew about the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese occupation of China and that children were being killed because of terrible images in the newspapers and the ABC’s rebroadcasts from the BBC. I was fearful for myself. The famous photograph of a howling, bombed baby sitting between railway lines in Shanghai in August 1937, which I saw in the Sun, shocked me deeply. The child could have been me. (It was disillusioning, decades later, to find that the Shanghai photograph had been staged, admittedly in a good cause.) My parents had friends who were desperate because of the Depression. I remember visiting the shanty settlement at ‘Dudley Flats’, in West Melbourne, with my mother, to comfort a friend who had fallen on particularly hard times. ‘Dudley Flats’ was centred on Dudley Street, within the * Jean Gardner Batten (1909–1982) disappeared in the 1970s. There were reported sightings of her in Sydney in 1984 and I talked to her biographer, Ian Mackersey. In 1987, at his request, I encouraged my colleague Mick Young to search Immigration records to check if she had entered Australia under another name. By then she had died, alone and forgotten, in Palma, Majorca. See Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten:The Garbo of the Skies. 31
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 32
A THINKING REED
area bounded by Footscray Road, Victoria Docks and the Railway Canal (Moonee Ponds Creek), west of the new Docklands Stadium. Indigents, Depression victims, lived there in Third World squalor, similar to the favelas in Rio.They sheltered under materials retrieved from the Melbourne City Council’s nearby rubbish tip.They collected drinking water from makeshift roofs: there was only one stand pipe and no sewerage. The stench was appalling. I saw a rat that seemed as big as a dog. My experience of Dudley Flats, not to mention the rat, led to my first, immature, political judgment. People shouldn’t be living like this. Something had to be done about it. From infancy, I spent much time in Geelong, divided between two households, Nana’s (‘Huntley’) and Auntie Edie’s (‘Bethany’), barely 450 metres apart, and my mother generally came too. We went mostly by train, hurtling down on ‘The Flyer’, with speeds in excess of 72 kilometres per hour (45 mph). Sometimes we sailed on the SS Edina, a veteran of the Crimean War, which plied between Port Melbourne and Geelong, with occasional stops at Portarlington. Often I was sent off by train, alone. Several times, when my mother arrived in Geelong after weeks apart, I affected not to recognise her, causing some distress. I can recall a mixture of emotions: sense of hurt, desire to wound and reluctance to engage in intimacy. Dad rarely went down to Geelong, except to see his mother and brother ‘Nookie’. I generally accompanied him on the train. When Nana gave her lessons in the front room at ‘Huntley’ I used to hide, reading, in a big club armchair turned towards the wall. I believed that her students were unaware of my presence. I became familiar with Nana’s teaching techniques. She managed to turn many a sow’s ear into a silk purse and some developed a surprising lightness and vivacity. She played an upright Bluthner piano with good tone. My mother was a far better instrumentalist than Nana, but with less musical feeling. Nana was able to somehow fake her keyboard skills and make accompaniments sound plausible. The poet Peter Gebhardt heard me discuss my grandmother with Margaret Throsby on ABC Radio, and was moved to write a poem which he dedicated to me. The House on the Hill* Laced in darkness, Where the dust dances On the panelled walls * Peter Gebhardt, British Bulldog, p. 39. A student of Seamus Heaney at Harvard, he became principal of Geelong College, a late-called barrister, then a judge. 32
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 33
CHILDHOOD
And the cherrywood chairs, Where dead shadows rest Like antimacassars. On the stairs are the old bears With ribbons round their necks, A small boy sits in a tub chair Listening to the old lady teaching singing, He reads and reads, Until his mind is all coloratura Rising and falling with pitch, The notes will cascade In a future plenitude.
Nana used to read the stories of Hans Christian Andersen to me and sometimes made up fables of her own. A common theme was a small boy able to achieve something that older people could not. Spending so much time with ladies more than fifty years older, I sensed continuity with the Edwardian, if not Victorian, era. Sometimes, especially on Sunday afternoons, as the sun set,Auntie Edie would sit in her armchair as she held my shoulder in a vise-like grip. With the fingers of her left hand drumming on a chair arm worn shiny, she would recite once more the stories of the deaths of Hughie, Ethel and Willie, her siblings, who had all died young. The fingers would drum on interminably as she recounted Willie’s death watch for the umpteenth time. I would ask, plaintively,‘Can’t we turn the light on?’ In 1937 I was in the world of 1897. I also spent time with Daisy Brownlow, who lived in a handsome colonial house next door to ‘Huntley’. Daisy, unmarried, was a friend of Nana’s. I sometimes stayed with her, for variety. Her father was Charles Brownlow (1862–1924), secretary of the Geelong Cricket and Football Club from 1887 to 1922. The Australian Football League’s Brownlow Medal, for the ‘fairest and best’ player in the season, is named for him. Despite low income, the flats we lived in all had electricity. In my childhood electricity was a novelty in many houses in Melbourne and Geelong and families relied on kerosene lamps for night lighting. I met people, not all of them old, who refused to use the telephone for fear of electric shocks or lightning strike. Sometimes family members made soap in kerosene tins and clothes were always washed in the traditional method, with a copper, boiling water, scrubbing board and mangle. 33
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 34
A THINKING REED
I never shared my father’s sources of pleasure, and my mother didn’t seem to have many. Dad was a natty dresser, with sparkling shoes and knife-edge creases to his trousers. He gave a high priority to his appearance. He loved drinking, smoking, sport and gambling and I was often taken to bars, which I always loathed, while he had ‘a spot’. My obsession with the arrow of time probably began as we dallied at various watering holes. While Dad was not a heavy or compulsive drinker, I came to feel that to him a beer glass was like a time machine: pick it up, and thirty minutes disappeared as if by magic. Dad tried, as best he knew, to do fatherly things with his son. In March 1937 he took me to the Melbourne Cricket Ground to see Don Bradman play in the last Test match in Australia until after World War II. My clearest recollection of the day is of tasting Coca-Cola for the first time. It had just arrived in Australia and I liked it at once. I remember the noise of the crowd as it cheered Bradman, but the game failed to engage me. I met Sir Donald once, in 1963 at Adelaide airport, when he told me how much he enjoyed my successes on Pick-a-Box. Obviously we shared some obsessive elements. I also had my first rides on Melbourne’s cable trams with my father, an enjoyable sensation only recaptured when I first went to San Francisco in 1958. Dad knew a good deal about the history and culture of boxing, and repeated many anecdotes about 20th-century heavyweight champions Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Max Schmeling, James J. Braddock and Joe Louis. In 1938 he tried to teach me to box, and gave me tiny red boxing gloves. He insisted, ‘Bullies are always cowards’. In my experience, this piece of folk wisdom is not correct. After I accidentally blacked his eye with a hammer, he kept his distance. In my Red Indian phase, when somehow I acquired a cast-off feathered head-dress, I was more interested in wrestling, perhaps influenced by Big Chief Little Wolf, a much publicised figure in Melbourne who was (or claimed to be) an American Indian. His was the world of Willy Loman, so well captured in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). He loved to be liked. He had no assets other than personality, a way with words, and an incurable but unfounded optimism. He was proud of his skills as a salesman. I was also remote from my mother, or vice versa, with little physical contact, although I recall the aromatic smell of her hair, which might have been a by-product of her smoking. Like her sisters, Ire and Tui, she loved to sit, drink tea and smoke, interminably.Although time was taken up with cooking, shopping, cleaning, washing clothes with a scrubbing brush and 34
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 35
CHILDHOOD
putting them through the wringer, she seemed to drift. She never encouraged discussion, nor direct answers to questions. She read little, never listened to music and rarely went to theatre or film except with her friend Jean Moore and her son John. Religion and music, which meant much to their own mother and aunts, bypassed Rui, Ire and Tui. If my mother had any intellectual curiosity about the outside world, it was confined to Canada. She had a penfriend in Toronto, who visited us once, and she read the once popular novels by Mazo de la Roche, about the Whiteoak family in Ontario. She wrote good letters in a clear hand and was an excellent speller. She liked crossword puzzles and kept Chambers’ Dictionary close at hand. She once wrote a fan letter to the film actress Marie Dressler, star of Tugboat Annie, which surprised me. She kept her enthusiasms well hidden. She was very inhibited about expressing emotion. In 1938 my mother had all her teeth out, an event that distressed me because she looked so terrible and took days to recover. Many Australians neglected their teeth and had them all extracted at once, and it was a common pre-wedding ritual for girls. Not surprisingly, Australia was known as the land of gums. The move to ‘Ontario Flats’, 9 Manor Grove, North Caulfield, in 1938 brought a period of stability to our lives. My mother lived there for forty years, my father until his death, and I stayed there for twenty-three years. My parents never owned a house or a motor car. My mother did not have a refrigerator until the 1950s: in the 1960s she lashed out, learned to drive, and bought a tiny second-hand Fiat. At ‘Ontario Flats’ we looked across to a 35-room mansion, ‘Labassa’, built on the highest point in Caulfield, on a 6-hectare site. The original house, ‘Sylliott Hill’, begun in 1862, was acquired in 1887 by Alexander Robertson, a Canadian who bought a half share in Cobb & Co. He commissioned the German-born architect John Augustus Bernard Koch to build a mansion in a combination of German, French Second Empire and Hellenistic style, replete with sculptural ornamentation, which incorporated the original structure. Completed in 1890, it was renamed ‘Ontario’, then ‘Labassa’. Manor Grove was an L-shaped cul-de-sac carved out of the ‘Labassa’ estate on subdivision in 1922. ‘Ontario Flats’, three units, two downstairs, was built on the site of ‘Labassa’s’ former stables and coach house. We had the front downstairs flat, taking it over from my parents’ friends Charles (‘Chap’) and Jess Monteith, who were moving to the country.There was a 35
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 36
A THINKING REED
sitting room, two bedrooms, a sleepout, kitchen, bathroom, a short hall but no back door. We shared a laundry and had a carless garage. But we had a telephone, to keep in touch with Nana and Auntie Edie. We had an ice chest, an unreliable bathroom geyser, but no hot water in the kitchen. My bedroom was windowless, with rising damp in the north wall. The only natural light seeped in from the adjoining sleepout, which had canvas blinds. I slept in Great Grandmother Potter’s iron bed. The rear flat was occupied by the Dixon family. Charlie Dixon was a bookmaker with links to John Wren, an entrepreneur with strong political and sporting influence, later the subject of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1950). Dad sometimes worked as Charlie’s ‘penciller’ at race meetings. The Dixons were Catholics, and the combination of religion and gambling was a distancing factor with many self-conscious Protestants.The substantial backyard, in practice, became the territory of the two Dixon boys, Carl and Kevin (‘Boof ’), both older than me. Later, the Dixons enclosed it and bought a dog. There was a rapid turnover in the upstairs flat at ‘Ontario’. First was Mrs Josepha Reisberman and her son-in-law Louis Holmes, but no daughter. Mrs Reisberman claimed to be Dutch, but may have meant Deutsch: 1938–39 was not a good time to be German in Australia. They had glossy publications about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, illustrated with striking colour photographs of Adolf Hitler, which I borrowed and pored over. I made lists of parallel words in German and English. Mr Holmes, an importer of toys from Japan, turned out to be a crook who stole from his mother-in-law. The police came and it was all very exciting. He went to gaol. She left. Then came my Aunt Tui and her new husband, Herb Herald. They were soon followed by the Patersons and their beautiful daughter Neva, who didn’t stay long either. Next came the Sholl family. Reginald Sholl, a rising barrister, became a Supreme Court judge, a knight, High Court prospect and Consul General to New York. Finally, there was the Carver family, Albert Henry and Ella, and daughters Constance and June, who stayed for decades. In June 1938 I started at kindergarten, at Strathfield College, a kind of dame school in Inkerman Road, Caulfield, run by the formidable Miss Dora Miller. I complained on my first morning, feeling deep disappointment that we little kids had to sit at tiny green tables, instead of proper desks as the Bruin Boys did in the Rainbow comic. I was told this would have to wait. My father must have had an economic windfall for me to be sent to a 36
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 37
CHILDHOOD
fee-paying school, however modest. I assume that Nana helped too. My father had been working at Treadways department store in the city. Later, for about eighteen months he ran CEJ Furnishings (his initials) in High Street, Northcote. Miss Miller’s establishment was overwhelmingly female, as most things were in my childhood. There are only thirty-two children in the 1938 school photograph, twenty girls and twelve boys. Numbers may have been down for fear of polio. Classes were tiny, and the teachers seemed to be elderly dependants of Miss Miller. Miss Bishop, the oldest of them, taught me. We were encouraged to read and learn crafts: knitting, marbling endpapers in old books (using oil paints floating on water), weaving with raffia and sculpting with plaster of Paris. I was very proud of my plaster duck, with bright blue paint up to the waterline.When we assembled each morning, as Miss Miller began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, June Levy got up and led several other children into the cloakroom, where they shut the door. I found this mystifying. In the same year I started attending the Ontario Street Methodist Sunday School where I remained for thirty-five years in various roles.This must have been to please Nana and Auntie Edie because my parents were not churchgoers. I began reading St Luke’s Gospel, in the Authorised Version, with fervour. Our street boasted two celebrities. Louise Lovely, who lived in the recently completed ‘Willas Flats’, in the grounds of ‘Labassa’, introduced me to a new world, away from the suburban or provincial values of Caulfield and Geelong. A former film actress with an implausible professional name, she was married to Bert Cowan, who managed the Victory Theatre in St Kilda. They were childless and both very taken with me, to the irritation of my mother, who rarely expressed much enthusiasm for anything and seemed uneasy about things that excited me. I was six. Louise Lovely* was in her early forties and radiated a beauty and glamour * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, p. 156, Ina Bertrand. Originally Louise Alberti, then Carbasse (1895–1980), she was born in Sydney of Italian and Swiss parentage, made her stage debut at nine, and before the age of 18 had appeared in eight silent films made for the Australian Life Biograph Company. She married, went to Hollywood, became a protégée of the German-born independent producer Carl Laemmle, and worked for Universal Studios and Fox between 1914 and 1922, appearing in many films. She returned to Australia to produce her own Jewelled Nights (1925) in Melbourne but it failed to recoup her investment. Disillusioned, she made no more films. She died in Hobart. 37
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 38
A THINKING REED
completely unknown to me. I remember her elaborate dressing table, with two adjustable winged mirrors, covered with bottles of perfume and skin creams, silver-backed hairbrushes and combs. She took me to the cinema several times, fed me chocolates and let me luxuriate in the texture of her furs and her smell. My life lost this brief touch of glamour when the Cowans moved to Hobart, where Bert managed the Prince of Wales Theatre. Norman McCance, a journalist and broadcaster, lived opposite. He used to work from home, and made daily broadcasts from his study.A bird enthusiast, he kept peacocks, pheasants and guinea fowl in an elaborate aviary in the backyard. I walked from suburbia into an oasis of magic. He also commentated for wrestling on radio. His commentaries became notorious, at least in Melbourne. ‘He can’t get out of it! He can’t get out of it! He can’t get out of it! He’s out of it!’ His wife Dorothy was a bridge obsessive. His daughter, Val, was my closest friend for about five years, between the ages of seven and 12. Val went to a rival dame school, Miss Mair’s Homebush in Balaclava Road, with Yvonne Nicholls, the only other child of our age in Manor Grove. Val and I used to wrestle a lot. One day we argued bitterly about some forgotten issue, and the link was cut abruptly. Fifty years later I met Val again over dinner when she was running a successful poodle-grooming service. Close to Manor Grove was Grimwade House, Melbourne Grammar’s primary school, a mansion, originally called ‘Harleston’, set in generous grounds, built for F.S. Grimwade in 1875. On the other side of the fence was a world of privilege far beyond my reach. I had become conscious of class distinction at an early age and was aware that the McCances had grand friends, including Sir James Barrett, an eminent eye surgeon and Chancellor of Melbourne University. I was introduced to him but understood, almost instinctively, that it would have been out of the question for my parents to be invited across. Occasionally I was taken up to the McCance weekender at Emerald and this was my only exposure to the Australian bush. I realise now that while entering the world of ideas at an early age, I was remote from nature. My parents had no garden and while Nana and Auntie Edie were competent at growing roses, irises, geraniums and other familiar exotics they seemed to have no feel for Australian flora, fauna or landscape. I used to explore Geelong’s Botanical Garden, but that was the extent of my involvement. 38
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 39
CHILDHOOD
My first political hero was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At an impressionable age, he had a great appeal for me. I always liked his oratory, because his messages were easy to understand. His high clear voice was rebroadcast on the ABC, despite the crackling of short-wave transmission, and I also saw him on newsreels. I understood that he was against poverty and unemployment and for education and health. When my mother’s sister Tui returned from England by ship in 1938, I was told that my first words to her as she stepped from the gangway at Station Pier were,‘What is your opinion of the foreign policies of Mr Cordell Hull?’ (Hull was Roosevelt’s Secretary of State.) I don’t recall saying it, but it sounds authentic. Was it spontaneous on my part or contrived for effect? Did I do it often? Probably. Adolf Hitler became my first political villain, a major defining influence, political and moral, even religious. At an early age I understood, instinctively, that people could not be indifferent to politics, because it was central to how they lived and whether they lived in fear of coercion. I followed the Munich crisis of September 1938 anxiously. I used to listen regularly to the ABC Radio news commentaries, At Home and Abroad, given by E.A. (Edward Alexander) Mann* (1874–1951) under the pseudonym of ‘The Watchman’. He was a popular and controversial broadcaster, a former Nationalist MP who had been deeply hostile to Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce. Mann took a Churchillian line, hating Hitler and Nazism as attacks on Western civilisation. Unlike many conservatives of his time, he did not regard Fascism as a useful counterbalance to Communism. He had visited the USSR in 1936, but was also a strong Empire loyalist. The last factor was what attracted my relatives. When he talked about ‘our own flag’, he meant the Union Jack. In the 1930s, newspaper proprietors generally toed the government line, the ABC drew its news reports from newspapers and the BBC, the Labor Opposition was generally tongue-tied on foreign policy and academics were scarce. Mann was a significant figure because he provided the only alternative view on international affairs. When I invited E.A. Mann to speak at Melbourne High in 1947, I was struck by how much he looked like photographs of Winston Churchill: his face, colouring and build, bowtie and cane. I see now that Mann was an early role model, to be supplemented after 1943 by Andrew Hughes and from 1944 by * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, p. 392, E.M. Andrews. His brother Sir Frederick Mann was Victoria’s Chief Justice. See also K.S. Inglis, This is the ABC. 39
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 40
A THINKING REED
W.A. Osborne, at a time when masculine influence or presence was conspicuously lacking in my life. My political life was essentially a relationship between me and the wireless set and not regarded as a legitimate subject for discussion at home or in Geelong. I was conscious that my family was anti-Labor. Relatives had four basic objections to the ALP: it was run by Catholics, disloyal in World War I, anti-British and not respectable. My early sympathy for Labor was a reaction against the family’s wordless disapproval. My mother remained a resourceful cook until her last years. Dedicated carnivores, we had lamb chops, mashed potatoes and peas, with jelly, blancmange or custard two or three times each week. Curried sausages with rice, and spaghetti or vermicelli were other perennials. Sometimes we had fish and chips and occasionally delicious baked rabbit from a shop inside the Flinders Street railway station. Omelettes and bacon and eggs were rare breakfast treats.We generally ate in silence, listening to commercial wireless stations. My father was always absent. I could hardly claim to have been mother’s little helper in the kitchen or indeed anywhere else domestically. I was a strikingly inefficient hewer of wood and drawer of water when systems failed, and my major contribution was food shopping and doing messages. If I had been more useful at home, my maternal relationship might have blossomed. In Geelong we always ate rather well; odd, considering there was not much income. In the late 1930s my Aunt Ire went to the butchers with her friend Beatie (Beatrice).When Beatie ordered a single chop, Ire asked: ‘What are you going to eat?’ Beatie replied: ‘I’ll just have a nibble of Harry’s chop.’ Family members were convulsed, uncharitably, by this story, which became a catch-phrase. Now I see it as just another Depression vignette, tinged with sadness and denial. Nana Black made excellent desserts and I have fond memories of her roly-poly pudding with raspberry jam. No Japanese could have been more devoted to the tea ceremony than members of my family. It seemed to induce a trance-like condition and was a major time absorber. I never liked tea and only had it when it would have been embarrassing to refuse. I made hop beer, using a packaged mix made by the Volum Company. The results were often dramatic and sometimes dangerous. I enjoyed spiders, a frothy mixture of cordial, lemonade and vanilla ice-cream, a taste I retain. My favourite fruits were expensive: raspberries, strawberries, melons, bananas and pineapple, so I rarely had them. Oranges and lemons were grown in most backyards. I liked the quintessential English fare of 40
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 41
CHILDHOOD
peas, broad beans, asparagus, potatoes and cauliflower in white sauce, which was standard for lower middle-class Australians. We used honey, jam, Marmite and Kraft or Coon cheese. In Geelong I had occasional exposure to crayfish and oysters, then relatively plentiful and cheap on Victoria’s south coast before over-fishing made them prohibitively expensive. Tins of oyster soup, with real oysters, were not much dearer than tomato soup. In the 1930s home deliveries were very common, so that housewives remained housebound with little need for shopping. Both in Geelong and Melbourne, apart from newspapers and the mail (twice each weekday and once on Saturday) there were deliveries of bread, milk, ice (for the ice chest), coal and firewood, fruit and vegetables (often sold by Chinese, with horse and cart), Loy’s and Tarax soft drinks, Rawleigh’s and Watkins’ patent medicines and fish. I cannot recall any home deliveries for meat and groceries. In the electoral rolls, ‘traveller’ was a common occupation. Some sold insurance policies door to door. The family had huge meals at Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year, including ham, duck and turkey. We would be densely packed, elbow to elbow, around the dining-room table at ‘Bethany’. Once Auntie Edie, who had a voracious appetite, not only ate her meal but absent-mindedly polished off the plate of mild-mannered Uncle Stan, who was sitting next to her. Christmas pudding was stuffed with sixpences. Auntie Edie swallowed lumps of the pudding, disregarding W.E. Gladstone’s sage advice about mastication. There was some alarm when three coins were unaccounted for.When offered further helpings, relatives would often decline, saying, ‘I’m full up to pussy’s bow [or dolly’s wax].’ Growing up with these expressions, it came as a surprise when strangers seemed unfamiliar with them. Despite short periods on farms at Pomonal and Tawonga, I had no experience in handling animals, let alone processing them, to use the common euphemism. One Christmas at Geelong I was pressed into service to decapitate a goose. It was quite a large bird and my arms were barely long enough to swing the axe. I aimed at its neck, but it pulled back and I severed its bill. It was struggling horribly, but I landed the first of two or three blows on its neck. Once the head was off, the goose’s body ran two circles, with blood spurting from the neck. I never ate goose again, and the experience contributed to my refusal to eat poultry. (Philosophically, I am a vegetarian but a moral backslider with fish, crustaceans, lamb and beef.) 41
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 42
A THINKING REED
My health was generally robust. I was regularly dosed on Bovril, Saunders’ Malt Extract and the revolting cod liver oil tonic Hypol, regarded as sovereign remedies against colds and general debility. My mother nursed me efficiently through measles, rubella, whooping cough, bronchitis and chickenpox. I had occasional attacks of acidosis, a malady unfamiliar today, defined by the Macquarie Dictionary as ‘poisoning by acids formed within the body under morbid conditions’. I can’t account for that. Early in 1939 I was operated on at home to remove my tonsils and adenoids. It happened without warning. I had stayed the night, a rare occurrence, with neighbours and returned to find that my parents’ room had been turned into an operating theatre, the bed removed and the kitchen table brought in. I was held down, a wire mask was put on my nose and mouth and chloroform administered through a towel.The whole procedure sounds Dickensian and I was never able to get a coherent explanation from my mother in later years as to why it had happened. Was it to cut costs? I wondered whether it was even legal. I never found a school contemporary with similar experience. The operation was horrific and the closest that I ever came to being traumatised; it was extremely painful and recovery was slow. One result was that I never fully trusted my parents again. After I turned six, death was very much in my mind. Perhaps it was not surprising that I took notice of deaths reported in the media because death was a subject of constant preoccupation with my Geelong relatives and they talked endlessly about their dear departed. The concept of death and images of death accompanied me. I don’t think it led to an unduly morbid preoccupation or distress but it made me deeply conscious of the fragility of the human condition, and life’s brevity. Religion was not much of a consolation, although I hoped for a long postponement in my own case. That summer, death came in another form with the appalling bushfires which swept Victoria for a week, burning out 1.4 million hectares and leaving 71 people dead, culminating in ‘Black Friday’, 13 January 1939. There were two judicial hangings in Melbourne early in 1939,Thomas Johnson in January, and George Green in April. I read enough about the hangings to fill me with a sense of horror and revulsion about capital punishment that has never left me. Pope Pius XI died on 10 February 1939 and the Sun News-Pictorial published a photograph of him lying in state. This was the first image I had ever seen of a human corpse and it 42
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 43
CHILDHOOD
gave me a lot to reflect on. Then on 1 April my father’s mother died, the first death of somebody I could remember. On 7 April 1939 Joseph Aloysius Lyons, the first Australian Prime Minister to die in office, suffered a fatal heart attack in Sydney. I recall the ABC suspending normal programs to play, interminably, what we used to call Bach’s Air on the G String (the second movement from his Suite No. 3). Photographs of Joe Lyons, framed with black crepe, were seen in shop windows. The following summer I had a close encounter with death. Playing in the surf at Ocean Grove, I had been caught up by the undertow and disappeared. My parents were not on the scene. I remember seeing the roofs on the headland and assumed that it was the end: I did not struggle, and thought of it as fate. Then Ire saw my head bobbing under the waves and ran and swam to my rescue. Soon after, I was confronted at a Geelong tram stop by a deranged boy, wielding a razor blade. He danced about and said, ‘I’m going to cut your throat.’ I put my left hand up to protect myself, he slashed it and ran away, laughing as blood spurted out. I ran to Ire for help and she took me to the doctor. He compressed the cut, without stitches, and the scar is still visible. In January 1939 the English novelist, historian and scientific prophet H.G. Wells, one of my early heroes, was in Australia as guest of the 24th Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science Congress, held in Canberra. While the Victorian bushfires pushed him off the front pages of the newspapers, he was widely reported and I recall his high, squeaky voice on ABC Radio. He had infuriated the conservative Lyons Government by arguing against appeasement, predicting a world war with new weapons of mass destruction, warned that isolation would not protect us and complained about Australia’s press, radio, book and film censorship. (My Geelong relatives thought there was not enough censorship.) Reading was my major interest. My fluency had been assisted by exposure to Magnet, an English boys’ weekly published between 1908 and 1940 by Amalgamated Press, which recounted the stories of Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Mr Quelch and others at Greyfriars School. Magnet was mostly written by Charles Hamilton,* using the pen-name of * Hamilton/Richards/Clifford (1876–1961) survived a critical attack by George Orwell in his essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1940). He published about 72 million words and was, by far, the world’s most prolific author. As Hilda Richards, he wrote
most of Schoolgirl. 43
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 44
A THINKING REED
Frank Richards. It had 28 densely packed pages each week, with about 35 000 words of text, and some line drawings. The content was slight and strung out interminably, but it provided comforting reinforcement for reading skills, and had occasional references to the classics, especially Virgil. If I missed a point the first time it appeared, it would become clearer the second or third time round. As George Orwell observed, its content was fossilised, reflecting 19th-century values about the Empire and class structure, untouched by World War I, the rise of organised labour or the Great Depression. Magnet and its stablemate Gem, also largely written by Hamilton as Martin Clifford, became victims of wartime paper shortages and ceased publication in 1940. When Magnet closed, the Greyfriars characters, Bunter et al., suffered the indignity of being relegated to a cartoon series in the low-brow comic Knock-Out. I transferred my allegiance, rather selectively, to Champion, another story paper, following serials about Rockfist Rogan, RAF, the American Indian wrestler Red Fury and Colwyn Dane, ’Tec. When I walked to the Orrong Road shops to do the messages, I habitually read. Once, as I walked, I read that the poet Samuel Coleridge had been marked out as an oddity by his contemporaries because he always read while walking. I looked up from my book, it may well have been the first time I ever did so, and realised that nobody else in sight was reading. As a seven year old, this came as a shock. Years later, when I saw the film Fahrenheit 451 (1966), I recognised the world I had imagined as a child, with people walking, trance-like, absorbed in their books. The ‘Clover Book Club’, in the Orrong Road shopping centre, was an important source of inspiration for me. Run by Mrs Catherine Edwards, books could be borrowed for threepence or sixpence per week. Barry Oakley, who became the Australian’s literary editor, was a fellow borrower. Glen Tomasetti wrote about a similar library in her novel Thoroughly Decent People (1976). I owe to the ‘Clover Book Club’ early exposure to books by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Stephen Leacock (a Canadian humorist and economist, an unlikely triple conjunction) and P.G. Wodehouse’s novels about Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. I had read Richmal Crompton’s William books very rapidly and moved on, but was never attracted to W.E. Johns’ series about Biggles. The strongest influence was Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882–1944), a Dutch-born journalist and historian in the United States whose The Story of Mankind (1922) and The Home of Mankind (1923) shaped my thinking. The Story of Mankind tried to explain the world and its complexities to 44
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 45
CHILDHOOD
enthusiastic children and mystified adults, has remained in print for more than eighty years and won him international recognition. His books were illustrated with crude but effective drawings and maps, both in colour and black and white. He had the cartoonist’s gift for explaining complex subjects with powerful images. The Home of Mankind was a world geography. He wrote from a liberal perspective, inevitably Eurocentric, mixing compassion with a touch of condescension. He deplored the ‘incurable vice of nationalism’ and the horrors of what he called ‘the Great Era of Exploitation’, during the Imperial expansion of the 19th century. Then came three sentences which horrified me when I read them first around 1940: The man-hunts with horses and dogs organized to exterminate the aborigines of Australia are rarely mentioned in the histories devoted to the early years of that distant continent. Why go on? I am merely repeating what everybody knows.* [My emphasis]
Well, I did not know, nor did my teachers. Nor did textbooks record it. Significantly, although I read few books by Australians or about Australia, I remember that in promotional material for the Sesquicentenary of European settlement (1938) Australian Aborigines had been included in a list of fauna. That did seem odd. On an official visit to Beijing in 1986, I was intrigued when my counterpart, Song Jian, China’s Minister for Science and Technology, and an exact contemporary, told me that the outside world had been opened up for him by reading Hendrik van Loon. Van Loon’s last major work was Van Loon’s Lives (1943), subtitled ‘Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as our dinner guests in a bygone year’, written and illustrated by himself. A bestseller for decades, it describes a series of 21 dinners in which the author, his family and friends invite participation of great figures from the past, a fiction in the tradition of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. The procedure for ensuring that the guests arrive is not specified, only that ‘negotiations had been rather complex’, and that promises had been made that the dinners would be ‘very, very discreet’ and * Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Home of Mankind, p. 481. 45
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 46
A THINKING REED
guests would not be embarrassed. The longest chapters include dinners with Desiderius Erasmus and Michel de Montaigne and the central theme in both is tolerance, which in the early 1940s was a matter of life and death in Europe. I had been given several volumes in the series called The Wonder Books, such as The Wonder Book of Why and What, published by Ward Lock & Co. They dealt with natural phenomena, geology, botany and geography, and with engineering feats such as (British) railway and bridge building. They had many photographs but no diagrams, and made no attempt to examine ideas. They look rather tame now. I developed an early antipathy to Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia which always seemed to be, well . . . childish, over-simple, soft, non-controversial, unchallenging, timid in expression and, although I would not have known the word at the time, condescending. I certainly knew what was meant by ‘talking down’ to children. J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist and essayist, later a resident of Adelaide, had a similar reaction. In Boyhood, he wrote of himself in the third person: Childhood, says the Children’s Encyclopaedia, is a time of innocent joy, to be spent in the meadows amid buttercups and bunny-rabbits or at the hearthside absorbed in a storybook. It is a vision of childhood utterly alien to him. Nothing he experiences . . . at home or school is anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring.
Encyclopaedia Britannica was more interesting, even though its dense pages had few photographs or diagrams. Much of the text was beyond me, but I recognised its seriousness. When I went to public libraries from the age of seven most of my time was spent at the Reference section. At the back of ‘Bethany’ there was a stable with a loft above it, known as ‘the boys’ room’, where I found many of Great Grandfather Potter’s books. They included three massive volumes of David Hume’s History of Great Britain, John Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, but nothing by Edward Gibbon. He had a microscope, which I kept for years, but no books by Charles Darwin or T.H. Huxley. He epitomised orthodoxy. Auntie Edie was dismayed when I pronounced in favour of Darwin’s theory of evolution after reading The Story of Mankind. She said I must ask God for forgiveness because her father had expressly repudiated Darwin. I read avidly about the New York World’s Fair which began in April 1939, intended as a model of future cities and which inspired Disney 46
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 47
CHILDHOOD
World. Its huge white symbols, trylon and perisphere (a 200-metre threesided obelisk next to a 60-metre globe) were so strong that they became my personal symbols of democratic modernity. I remember hearing the fateful broadcast of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, on 3 September 1939, declaring war on Germany. Robert Menzies then followed to say that because Britain was at war, so was Australia. I began to keep a war diary, and drew cartoons of Chamberlain, Hitler, Stalin and Churchill. I cut out maps from the Sun and stuck them on the back of my bedroom door, indicating frontier movements with coloured pins. Events in World War II became central to my understanding of how the world worked. The birth of my sister Carol on 24 September 1939 was a momentous event. Oddly, although I was an acute observer of the outside world, I cannot recall noting my mother’s pregnancy and I doubt if the subject was talked about, let alone rejoiced in, in Manor Grove. Carol was born in a private hospital, ‘Seskinore’, in Burke Road, Camberwell. Dad and I went to visit mother and daughter by tram. Her arrival did not seem to disturb my routine very much and I enjoyed playing with her as a baby. I had a vague idea about the mechanics of sex because at Miss Miller’s a doctor’s son had shown me a diagram of what went where, and what the long-term results were, but nothing about the emotional content. Accepting where my body came from was easy. However, working out where the mind and spirit originated was far harder and I never felt that either had much connection with Claud and Ruth Jones. Phillip Adams later suggested that I might have been a refugee from the planet Krypton, like Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman. I had a recurrent dream, perhaps a day dream as much as a night dream, that there was a brain or spirit production line somewhere in the heavens operating on what we would now call the ‘just in time’ system, and as a baby was about to be born on planet Earth an appropriate brain, with accompanying spirit/soul classified according to category, male or female, black or white, was instantly dispatched and installed as soon as the baby’s head emerged. I no longer believe this to be the case, but I certainly stuck tenaciously to a body/mind dichotomy for decades. I was never exposed to sexual abuse, although I may have come close when a man I met at the Orrong Road shops invited me to his flat at Alma Road to look at his books. He may have observed me at the Clover Book Club. He called himself Mr Matthews, presumably an alias since nobody with that surname appears on the electoral roll for Alma Road in that 47
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 48
A THINKING REED
period. On a second visit he gave me a copy of Martin Rattler (1858), an adventure story for children by R.M. Ballantyne, and invited me to sit on his lap. Disconcerted by his wandering hands, I ran off but thoughtfully retained the book. I noted that the first sentence in the book was ‘Martin Rattler was a very bad boy’. I found it hard to identify with the subject. My exposure to the outside world had come with a rush between the ages of five and nine, and film had the greatest impact, even more than radio, newspapers and books. I can name more than 50 memorable films that I saw in a short period as a child. My emotions, understanding processes, characterisation and visual imagery, including recognising places, taking me out of the familiar and immediate, were largely shaped by film. With later generations this impact came from television. I was fortunate to be exposed to a golden age in film, and even some B-grade movies included outstanding performances. I was more interested in ideas, conflict and villains and soon developed strong enthusiasms, including films directed by Charles Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, and performances by Leslie Howard, the Marx Brothers and the German character actor Conrad Veidt. I was introduced to the world of orchestral music by the film One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), featuring Deanna Durbin and the charismatic conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, and even more by Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), also conducted by Stokowski. In 1940, in Geelong, the first film I went to on my own was Warner Brothers’ Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, directed by the German émigré William Dieterle, with Edward G. Robinson in the title role of Paul Ehrlich.* It seemed an odd choice for a small boy, but the combination of ‘magic’ and ‘bullet’ in the title may have proved irresistible. Ehrlich is best remembered for discovering ‘salvarsan’, an arsenical compound used as a treatment for * Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915), not to be confused with the American population biologist of the same name, was a German-Jewish bacteriologist. He developed staining techniques for the tuberculosis bacillus which assisted the important work of Robert Koch. He demonstrated how Emil von Behring’s anti-toxin for diphtheria could be produced in greater strength and volume by growing it in horses. In 1901 when the first Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded, von Behring received it alone and Ehrlich never forgave his exclusion. He investigated blood cells and immunity to infection, including the side-chain (or chemical affinity) theory in which receptors of cells can be stimulated chemically to promote immunity from toxins. He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Elie Metchnikoff for their work on the theory of immunity. 48
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 49
CHILDHOOD
syphilis in 1910, originally known as ‘606’, because it took 606 experiments to get it right. He worked with the Japanese Hata Sahachiro. Ehrlich described salvarsan as his ‘magic bullet’ and using salvarsan to treat syphilis was an early form of chemotherapy, although the term is not used in the film. The film explores Ehrlich’s frustrations in Vienna. He suffered from jealous rivals, anti-Semitism and meagre resources. Fortunately, assistance is at hand. He goes to see the Minister for Science,Althoff (played by Donald Crisp), who listens sympathetically, and gives orders:‘Give this man everything he needs.’ Identifying a Minister of Science at that time was quite unhistorical. There was no such creature anywhere in 1906. The first Minister for Science anywhere, Bernhardt Rust, was appointed in 1934 by Adolf Hitler, I regret to say. More than 50 years later I saw Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet again, on commercial television. I had not consciously thought about it for years, and yet the action all seemed oddly familiar.The Minister for Science was very appealing. I wondered whether his role as a facilitator had stuck in my eight-year-old brain because the minister in the film was playing the same role I had cast myself for in the 1980s. My Sunday School teacher was Thelma Beeson, sunnily optimistic but unquestioning. One day she was teaching our little group a lesson from the Methodist Sunday School Scholar, an article, illustrated by a map, which began, ‘India is the most populous nation on earth’. I objected at once. ‘That’s not true, it’s China.’‘No, Barry,’ Miss Beeson smiled,‘it’s India.They wouldn’t print it in the Scholar unless it was correct.’ I insisted that it must be wrong, because my encyclopedias at home put China first, then India. After several exchanges, Miss Beeson put her head in her hands and sobbed, attracting the attention of the superintendent, who ticked me off for being so difficult. The incident taught me something about the power of knowledge, and how people with a shaky grasp of evidence could become overly dependent on a single source, whether the Bible or the Sunday School Scholar. At Sunday School I had several fights with Max Kindermann, who declared that he was a Nazi, calling himself ‘Der Schwarze Henke’ (The Black Hangman). He wrestled me on the road in Ontario Street and rubbed horse droppings on my face for my robust defence of democracy. My mother had developed an intense relationship with Lilian Robson, who lived with her husband Alf and two daughters in Labassa Grove.Their backyard was immediately behind ‘Ontario Flats’. For ease of access, some 49
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 50
A THINKING REED
galvanised iron panels were taken from the back wall of our garage and put on a hinge.Alf Robson, a bank manager, was the chief local warden for the ARP (Air Raid Precautions). I enjoyed his demonstrations about extinguishing incendiary bombs, with their brilliant magnesium flares, and other vital information. Diana and Jenny Robson became my sister’s greatest friends. Lilian had a striking presence and a strong soprano voice. She revived and deepened my mother’s musical interests, took lessons from Nana Black on her occasional visits to Melbourne, and they devoted much time to practice. At my urging, Mum joined the Ontario Street Methodist Church, where I attended Sunday School. When the organist left, I persuaded her to apply for the job: she was appointed and Lilian joined the choir. She had interesting books on Wagner’s operas, with parallel English–German librettos, which she let me borrow, and so I had my first exposure to The Ring of the Nibelungs as a concept, not a reality, at about the age of eight. For five or six years from 1940, when we went on holidays to Ocean Grove or Barwon Heads, Lilian and her daughters usually came too, and sometimes Ire and her daughter Helen. So we were one big extended family, seven females, one male. I generally kept to myself, walking morosely along the beach, examining rock pools, occasionally making sand castles, only cautiously venturing into the water. When a swing was available I put some effort into entertaining Carol and friends, but the effort was unreciprocated. Mostly I read, or listened to the wireless when one was to hand. The Bluff (Point Flinders) at Barwon Heads became an icon in the ABC’s television series Sea Change in 1999–2000. In November 1940 the coastal passenger freighter SS Orungal ran aground at the tip of the Bluff, was abandoned and parts of the hull were cut off for scrap metal. After Pearl Harbor, the Bluff was festooned with barbed wire and had an occasional sentry on duty to ward off possible Japanese invasion. Notices warned that this was a military site. Parts of the hulk, pounded by the waves of Bass Strait, remained until 1945, and was a dramatic subject for sketching. A sentry warned me off at gunpoint on one occasion and confiscated my sketchbook as a possible threat to security. It may be in the National Archives. When I was staying with Nana Black in Geelong, Uncle Stan dug an air-raid shelter in the garden at ‘Huntley’ and provided me with a gas mask, a whistle and a rattle which had to be whirled round, making a 50
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 51
CHILDHOOD
fearsome sound. Beau, the dog, could have warned off intruders. East Geelong was certainly ready for the Japanese. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 made the Pacific a war zone. Singapore soon fell, then the Philippines. The Dutch East Indies and much of New Guinea was occupied, Darwin and Katherine were bombed, midget submarines sank vessels in Sydney Harbour and along the coast. There were reports of Japanese aircraft above Victoria, highly unlikely, but I was deeply apprehensive about the prospect of bombing raids. The American occupation of Australia began in 1942. General Douglas MacArthur, fresh from losing the Philippines, arrived at Melbourne’s Spencer Street station on 21 March 1942, was hailed as a saviour and set up his command post as Supreme Commander, South West Pacific, in Melbourne. He lived first with his wife Jean and son Arthur at Melbourne’s posh Menzies Hotel.Years later I bought the general’s bed at auction. The presence of the GIs was very obvious and I saw far more American blacks at that time than Australian Aborigines. Later MacArthur moved his High Command, and family, to Brisbane. It may seem strange that in the context of megadeaths and destruction throughout World War II I was so anguished by two executions in Melbourne, Alfred Bye in December 1941, and the American soldier Private Eddie Leonski in November 1942, both discussed in Chapter 3. After Pearl Harbor, rationing was soon introduced in Australia and buying cigarettes required giving up a coupon from the ration book. I had always disliked the smell of tobacco, apart from in cigars, oddly, so I was no enthusiast for my parents’ habit. One of my tasks was to do the shopping, and that generally included cigarettes. Mum was very distressed if I came home without them. When I pointed out that she had run out of coupons, she sometimes asked me to go back to the shop, to beg for a packet, or even a few loose cigarettes. I found this degree of dependence very demeaning. Far from being a cure for anxiety, cigarettes intensified it. Dad joined the RAAF in January 1942, barely a month after Australia declared war on Japan. He was a volunteer, as were all Air Force recruits. I suspect that his income fell, because his furniture shop in Northcote appeared to be doing quite well but, once again, his change of status was not discussed at home, at least not in my hearing. I had left Strathfield College at the end of 1941, taking with me knowledge of some of the arts of political manipulation. At playtime and 51
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 52
A THINKING REED
lunchtime we broke up into gangs. Mine was smaller, but it invariably won whatever was being fought for, generally possession of a dry vantage spot under the big plane tree.There was a boy who suffered from cerebral palsy, with a shuffling gait and perpetual dribble, a figure like Smike in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby.The girls had such a horror of being touched by him, let alone dribbled on, that to have him on your side meant an automatic capitulation by the other gang. He loved Hoadley’s Violet Crumbles (honeycomb coated with milk chocolate) and I was the only person who could bear to touch him. I used to grip his wrist between thumb and forefinger, offer him a piece of my Violet Crumble, secure his allegiance and win another victory. I recall this with shame. In February 1942 I enrolled at Ripponlea State School, in Carrington Grove, and stayed there until December 1943. Many school buildings had been requisitioned for military use, so pupils from Brighton Road State School (where Sid Nolan had attended) were transferred to Ripponlea, which held twice its normal capacity. Slit trenches were dug in the playing fields in case of air raids. Spiro Moraitis, later a medical practitioner and a leader of Melbourne’s Greek community, shared my desk. Some children were Jewish refugees from Europe and they became friends. I was worried about status, and the downward move to a grossly overcrowded school. Most boys wore boots, which I instinctively saw as the footwear of an underclass, little snob that I was. I never wore boots, even when I was coerced into being part of a football team. My contribution to the war effort was making camouflage nets at Ripponlea and helping to raise money for the Australian Comforts Fund. I was quite a skilful net weaver until the quality of the twine was changed. The new twine was impregnated with creosote and the smell was so nauseating that I had to keep running outside for fresh air. Manor Grove’s residents held a bazaar and I organised a raffle. After being told that the Attorney-General’s permission was required, I wrote to Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, the Commonwealth Attorney-General. He sent an encouraging reply, wishing me well but pointing out that it was a state responsibility. Norman McCance wrote up this exchange of letters in the Sun NewsPictorial. Because all the younger, more lively teachers were in the services, some slippered pantaloons, well past it, had been recalled to teaching, and this forced pupils (me, anyway) to rely on our own resources. So, when walking to school, barely a kilometre away from home, I used to pull a red cart containing some of my essential reference books, including Pears’ 52
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 53
CHILDHOOD
Cyclopaedia and Cassell’s Encyclopaedia.This caused some derision and a boy called Menzies used to kick me in the ankles, so provoked was he by the red cart. The head teacher at Ripponlea, William Young, was white haired, friendly and interested. One day he came into our Grade 4 class and said how much better teaching was in 1942 than it had been in his childhood. (Given the wartime exigencies, I found that hard to believe.) He explained that while History was now being taught in a wonderfully interesting way (we had a text called Vivid History), in his day pupils had to learn dull lists, such as the kings and queens of England. He turned and wrote on the blackboard: George I George II
1714–1727 1727–1760 . . .
I was staggered that nobody else in the class was responding, because I knew all these dates and assumed that at least some fellow pupils did too. So I piped up with the later names and dates, while Mr Young wrote them on the blackboard: George III George IV William IV Victoria Edward VII George V Edward VIII George VI
1760–1820 1820–1830 1830–1837 1837–1901 1901–1910 1910–1936 1936 1936 to the present
Mr Young was taken aback, but also pleased. The result was my speedy promotion to Grade 5. It also earned me another kicking on the ankles from Menzies. Under the canopy of a large gum tree at Ripponlea, I recall haranguing the kids about the relative merits of written constitutions. It must have been a very wet lunch break. I took piano lessons from the age of nine but was not a gifted instrumentalist. Miss Ida Doubleday, a teacher of singing and piano, lived at 42 Milburn Grove, near the Ripponlea State School. We had no piano at that time and I used to call in to Miss Doubleday’s every morning for 53
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 54
A THINKING REED
30 minutes practice before school, picking up her milk on the way. She would leave the door ajar for me, and return to bed while I went through my Czerny exercises. As I mangled the scales, Miss Doubleday would cry out from the bedroom: ‘Do it again! Take more care!’ I found her a dull teacher who wanted, no doubt for sound pedagogical reasons, to concentrate on technique and not repertoire. I bought some sheet music and lyingly told Miss Doubleday that my mother wanted me to learn these pieces. They included Elgar’s Salut d’Amour, Chopin’s Preludes No. 4 and No. 20 (Opus 28), Handel’s Largo and Debussy’s Claire de lune. When we acquired a piano (a gift from Nana), I banged them out at home. My mother complained, ‘Why do we have to hear the same things all the time? Miss Doubleday’s other pupils must have gone on to much more interesting ones.’ I said,‘Of the kids my age, I’m the only one who has any pieces to play.’ My co-ordination was poor and I soon realised that I would never be a competent pianist. Unless a child demonstrates skills before the age of six or seven, it is too late. It is the same with foreign languages. I was more interested in composition, using the piano as an aid in notation. I composed short pieces, and asked my mother to play them. Somehow, she never found the time. The Australian Broadcasting Commission nurtured my growing enthusiasm for music. The Enjoyment of Music was broadcast from Sydney for an hour twice each week from 1942.The presenter was Neville Cardus (1889–1975), an English music critic and cricket writer who lived in Australia from 1941 to 1947, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald. He was revelatory about Mahler, enthusiastic for comparing interpretations on record, and spoke respectfully about Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Berg. His Autobiography appeared in 1947. Uncle Ossie (Hearne) was deeply shocked that Cardus disclosed his illegitimacy, and felt that the book should have been suppressed. Caulfield epitomised respectability. Geelong, too. But St Kilda was a different world, glamorous and vulgar, with a Mediterranean seafront, which was an early inspiration for Sidney Nolan and Bert Tucker. When I visited Tunis decades later, I thought:‘St Kilda, with mosques’. I loved it. There were three cinemas, the huge Palais, one of the world’s biggest, Hoyts’ Victory (once managed by our neighbour Bert Cowan), and the small, sleazy Memorial, which concentrated on gangster films and had its own bouncer. On one side of the Palais was the Palais de Danse, on the other Luna Park, with its Scenic Railway, Big Dipper, River Caves and Giggle Palace. Entry was through a huge cement mouth with glass teeth. 54
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 55
CHILDHOOD
There were other attractions on the St Kilda waterfront, notably a miniature steam train, operated for years by the sculptor William Ricketts’ father. St Kilda had a large Jewish community and Acland Street had the most diverse range of shops, cafes and languages in Melbourne. I am not sure when my parents’ marriage went sour and it was probably long before Dad’s Air Force absence, and even before Carol’s birth. He worked in the stores section and was posted to the Gorrie Airfield at Birdum in the Northern Territory, a place that no longer appears on the map. It may have been the dullest posting in the South West Pacific but, at its peak, 6500 service personnel worked there.Ten kilometres to the south is Larrimah, the southern end of the railway from Darwin (disused since 1976, now replaced) on the Stuart Highway. In the Territory, he was part owner of a horse called Compassionate Leave.When he returned on leave, without the horse, my sister slept with Mum while Dad was relegated to the sleepout. There was no open conflict, no shouting or arguing. It was rare for my parents to be in the same room. I cannot now recall a single conversation between them, nor a meal in which he was present. I came to assume that many families functioned like this, and didn’t think about it too much. He used to repeat the mantra that it was important to ‘get even’ and never forget an injury. I never really understood this or shared the feeling. Revenge has always seemed a pointless, self-defeating, instinct. I am not sure what he made of me. He often called me ‘the Count’, suggesting several connotations: being out of touch with reality, having aristocratic tastes, an aloof manner, disinclination for physical work and indifference to sport. He told me that we had some relationship with the Fox-Strangways family, who still hold the Earldom of Ilchester, and our forebears had a coat of arms with the motto ‘Resurgam’ (‘I shall arise’). He also claimed a connection with the Spotswood (or Spotiswoode) family, for whom a Melbourne suburb* is named. In later years I pursued these claims spasmodically but without success. I cannot fathom where he picked up the ideas. Perhaps he had been told that his mother’s family worked for the nobility as servants.This aristocratic fantasy may have reinforced his innate conservatism or passivity. During his occasional leaves, Dad organised brief excursions. Although he did not understand me, he tried to bond with me, more than my mother, who was always close at hand. In September 1942 he took me to * Anthony Hopkins’ least known film Spotswood (1992) was set in the area. 55
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 56
A THINKING REED
Fishermans Bend for a display of Bristol Beauforts, light twin-engined bombers assembled in Australia.We went to the races once, to a VFL match, to Wirth’s Circus, and to see the Errol Flynn film Gentleman Jim (1942), about the heavyweight champion James J. Corbett. I saw a newspaper advertisement for a revival of the French film Damaged Goods (1937), based on Eugène Brieux’ once famous play about venereal disease. I asked Dad if he would be interested in seeing it. He became very red faced and said we should have a serious talk about the subject.We never did. One night in 1942 we visited the Victorian State Parliament, which I found more exciting. Dad was not a Labor voter, but somehow he knew two Labor MPs, Ted Cotter (1866–1947), MLA for Richmond 1908–45, and John Lemmon (1875–1955), MLA for Williamstown 1904–55, who became the longest serving Member in Victorian history. I met them both and was introduced to the Country Party Premier, Albert Dunstan. Dad had also known Hamilton Lamb, Country Party MLA for Lowan, who joined the AIF in 1940, became a prisoner of war and died in Thailand. His son Tony Lamb became a Labor MHR in two stretches, 1972–75 and 1984–90, and a close friend. When in Geelong, other than going to the pictures, I spent much time riding on trams.A few pence could buy a day pass with unlimited rides on every line. I talked to the conductors and drivers and was sometimes allowed to grab the rope attached to the trolley pole which brought electricity in from the overhead wire, hauling the pole from one end of the tram to the other. I haunted the Geelong Art Gallery, the Free Library and Museum, trying to find something to occupy me in the absence of friends. Everyday life was dull and predictable, but I already had a precocious range of enthusiasms and was developing a set of heroes, exemplary lives or, in one case, a love object. I was attracted to Andrew Arthur Hughes (1902–1996), a Church of Christ clergyman and former missionary in India, who frequently appeared as a guest preacher at Ontario Street. He was good looking, charismatic and a spellbinding talker, I thought, especially effective at Sunday School anniversaries. Hughes visited other Protestant churches in the Caulfield area and presumably built up a strong local following. When the State elections were called for June 1943, Andrew Hughes nominated as an Independent candidate.This led to my first involvement in a political campaign. Church people, normally apolitical, ran Hughes’ organisation. My mother, although active at the church as organist, took no part. 56
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 57
CHILDHOOD
There were four candidates, the sitting UAP member Brigadier Harold Cohen, an ALP nominee and two Independents. Hughes ran third on primary votes. When the preferences of the fourth candidate, another Independent, were distributed this put Hughes ahead of Labor, and he then defeated Cohen on the third count. Aged ten, I handed out How to Vote cards for the first time, and the only time not for an ALP candidate. There may have been a whiff of anti-Semitism in the campaign against Cohen, accounting for support from some church members. Hughes’ maiden speech was of unusual quality for the Victorian Parliament, referring to the goals of post-war reconstruction, calling for the school leaving age to be raised to 16 and for the reconstruction of society after the defeat of Fascism. In 1944 the Liberal Party was created by Robert Gordon Menzies out of the UAP and various breakaway conservative groups and in November 1945 its candidate, Alec Dennett, defeated Andrew Hughes in Caulfield. Politics remained an abiding interest and I was already drawn to Labor. But I lived in an area which was deeply conservative except, perhaps, for the Jewish community. I went through a period of religious enthusiasm at about the age of 11, with a strong commitment to the ‘social gospel’ of good works.This was in sharp contrast to the conservative, passive Protestantism of my Geelong relatives, even allowing for Nana Black’s eccentric commitment to the British Israel World Federation. My mother was a notional believer but I never exchanged a syllable with her, then or later, on religious belief. I have no idea what my father believed. I completed reading the Bible for the first time at the same time. Why did I do it? I can think of three reasons: to please Nana and Auntie Edie, as a means of instruction, and possible path to salvation. I felt a great enthusiasm for Jesus as a teacher of compelling authority and hoped fervently for his Second Coming. But there was a reservation. I did not want the Second Coming to be premature, when I was still at school. I wanted to have established myself professionally first, so that I could offer my services to Jesus when He returned, and be taken seriously. I was also keen to be around at a time when death had been abolished. I had developed a strong interest in the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple* (1881–1944). I heard his BBC broadcasts replayed on * I did not know it then, but William Temple was a role model for Dr J.R. Darling, headmaster of Geelong Grammar School. 57
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 58
A THINKING REED
the ABC, and somehow I knew that he had been a supporter of the Labour Party and of the Workers’ Educational Association, an unlikely conjunction for the head of the Established Church in England. I knew that his father, Frederick Temple, had been Archbishop of Canterbury in Queen Victoria’s time. Photographs showed him as fat, jolly, smiling. He was the co-founder of the World Council of Churches. I felt shocked when he died suddenly at the age of 63, because, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, he conveyed a strong sense of optimism about the future, proposing humane social goals for post-war reconstruction. No Australian church leader had the slightest appeal for me. My other religious hero at this time was Albert Schweitzer (1875– 1965), the Alsace-born medical missionary in Gabon who was also an eminent theologian, philosopher, organist and biographer of J.S. Bach. I used to read about him in the Sunday School Scholar and there were photographs of him ministering to Africans in Life magazine, which Norman McCance used to lend me. The Reader’s Digest often featured Schweitzer. I was beginning to develop exotic tastes and often felt drawn to personalities and events far away from Australia and my own neighbourhood. I was not a natural romantic, but from the age of 11 or so I had a rather guilty obsession with the morganatic wife of King Léopold III of the Belgians, Mary Lilian Baels (1916–2002). Photographs in the magazines Life and Time revealed her as an exceptional beauty and I followed stories about her avidly. However, this was not a subject I could talk about to anyone, then or for decades later. Léopold III was a controversial figure with at least three strikes against him. In August 1935 his young, handsome and popular queen, the Swedish princess Astrid, had been killed when he crashed his car. In May 1940 he had surrendered to the Germans against the advice of his government. He chose to remain in occupied Belgium rather than accompany his Ministers to exile in London. His reputation was about equal to the Duke of Windsor, or King Carol of Romania. In December 1941 he married the beautiful Lilian, the London-born daughter of a senior official, and said to be a Nazi sympathiser. She was not made queen, and Léopold gave her the title of Princesse de Réthy. I sometimes dreamed about her. I wished that I could reach out and touch her, even better, that she would reach out and touch me. Photographs of her as a young woman confirm my boyish judgment, nearly sixty years ago, about her radiant intensity, far superior to Grace Kelly or Princess Diana. 58
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 59
CHILDHOOD
At the end of primary school I was off to Caulfield North Central School (CNCS), Balaclava Road, for the years 1944–45. In 1944 three almost simultaneous controversies convinced me that the arts and literature were important, worth talking about, requiring engagement, judgment and the right to express opinions, even if my family was indifferent. In January 1944 William Dobell was awarded the 1943 Archibald Prize for Portraiture by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for a Rembrandt-like study of a fellow painter, Joshua Smith. Dobell’s portrait exaggerated Smith’s stick-like figure, and gave him protruding eyes and Gothic-window ears. It immediately generated national controversy. Newspaper coverage was surprisingly extensive, since World War II was still on and paper was in short supply. Two traditional painters, unsuccessful entrants in the competition, took out a Supreme Court action to direct the Trustees to set aside the award to Dobell, arguing that his painting of Joshua Smith was not a portrait but a caricature. Garfield Barwick, KC, was counsel for the plaintiffs and Frank Kitto, KC, counsel for the Trustees. Both later sat on the High Court. The trial turned into a national symposium on the merits of traditional versus modern art, although by European or American standards Dobell’s work was not particularly adventurous. Although the Trustees won the case, the notoriety inhibited Dobell’s confidence and he became a recluse, although he won the Archibald twice more, in 1948 and 1959, and was knighted. Three months later, the Ern Malley* affair erupted. Max Harris, a poet, critic, publisher and later bookseller, was co-editor, with John Reed of the quarterly Angry Penguins (1941–44), which featured paintings by Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and John Perceval and reprinted literary essays from Britain and the United States. Harris received, in the post, what purported to be poems from an unknown poet, Ern Malley, in full Ernest Lalor Malley, who had died in 1943 at the age of 25. The poems had been forwarded by his sister Ethel. Although Harris at first suspected a hoax, he suppressed his doubts and published the poems in Angry Penguins in autumn 1944. Later some photographic montages were sent to Harris by the useful Ethel. The poems had been written by James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two poets who worked for Alf Conlon and John Kerr in the Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs at St Kilda Barracks, Melbourne.They also created the montages. McAuley and Stewart wanted to expose what * Michael Heywood, The Ern Malley Affair. 59
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 60
A THINKING REED
they regarded as the shallowness of the modern movement and set up the hoax to attack ‘the decay of meaning’.As with the Dobell case, the degree of media interest was unusual and I read every word. McAuley became a cold war warrior, founding editor of Quadrant magazine in 1956, and a professor of English in Hobart. Stewart went to live in Japan. The Ern Malley and Dobell rows were early salvoes in a culture war which is still with us. Nearly sixty years later Ern Malley’s poems remain controversial and the modernist versus traditionalist divide is still deep. Judith Wright and Peter Porter thought the poems, despite being pastiche or parody, had some merit, while A.D. Hope and Les Murray dismissed them. In the Geelong Art Gallery I was attracted by a painting called Danäe and the Shower of Gold, attributed to Titian but almost certainly a 19thcentury copy, showing the Princess of Argos visited by Zeus in the form of a golden shower. Titian painted the subject at least five times. The best known version, simply called Danäe, showing the subject with a wellendowed cupid, is in the Capodimonte Gallery, Naples. St Petersburg’s Hermitage and Madrid’s Prado have other versions, both with an aged serving woman. In April 1944 the painter and critic Adrian Lawlor generated a lively controversy, picked up by the Geelong Advertiser and taken up by The Sun and The Age, proposing that Geelong had the original and Naples the copy.* At Caulfield North, retired teachers were brought in to replace males in the armed forces or carrying out war work. The head teacher, Bert Schruhm, was relatively young, combining Germanic name and appearance. We speculated that he might be a spy, in deep cover at CNCS. I embarked on a major project, writing a History of the World (unpublished), reflecting the influence of Hendrik van Loon and H.G. Wells’ An Outline of History, with the chronology in Pears’ Cyclopedia contributing to the structure. I have preserved the manuscript and it reads quite well. It is a recurrent mystery and frustration that I lack fluency in foreign languages, especially spoken language. I studied Latin for two years at CNCS. It was my first formal exposure to a foreign language and I enjoyed it. But there were limitations. Other than Catholic priests, there were no Latin speakers around, no newspapers or novels to read, no films to see. I had picked up some German vocabulary from reading magazines and Lilian Robson’s Wagner books, but setting out tables of word equivalents * The Naples Danäe was looted by Hermann Goering during World War II. 60
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 61
CHILDHOOD
was absolutely the wrong way to grasp how language works, in a human or social context. Interglossa by Lancelot Hogben (1895–1973), subtitled ‘a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order’, had a strong but, as it turned out, misguided influence on me for a time. This was an attempt to create an auxiliary universal language, like L.L. Zamenhof ’s Esperanto. Hogben used symbols, called isotypes, devised by Otto Neurath, to illustrate concepts in Interglossa. It looked very neat, logical, systematic, invariant and devoid of emotion, in short, all the things that natural language is not. It was one of my private vices. I had nobody to share Interglossa with. As a communication system it failed the first test. The book was published by Penguin Books in 1943 and for a time I carried it everywhere. Dad gave me some curious souvenirs of his RAAF service, including a tin of dehydrated survival rations, carefully sealed with plastic tape, and a comprehensive handbook on coping with emergencies, with a graphic chapter providing essential instructions on preparing corpses for burial. He also passed on copies of SALT, an enterprising and often radical journal, edited by Mungo McCallum senior, produced for and by service personnel, distributed free fortnightly. It contained cartoons, opinion pieces, articles on post-war reconstruction and answers to questions posed by service personnel. SALT was attacked by some of the more rabid MPs in Canberra. My father’s intellectual and moral influence, however, was limited.After 1944 he was essentially supplanted by William Alexander Osborne*, a former Professor of Physiology at Melbourne University, a polymath, and star of a radio panel quiz, Information, Please. For years I attended regularly when the show was broadcast live on Saturday nights from 3DB. Professor Osborne became my major intellectual stimulus and, apart from films and books, a significant male authority figure. I had my first sustained exposure as a quiz contestant in 1944 on radio 3KZ’s Junior Information, and I return to that, and Osborne’s profound influence on me, in Chapter 4. My mother had always warned me darkly about the dangers of being precocious. Nobody liked prodigies and they had unhappy lives, so she always seemed to disapprove my early quiz exposure; she never forbade me to take part, presumably lacking enough confidence for that. Nana and Auntie Edie, who had read about Osborne’s anti-religious views in The Australasian Post, regarded him as ‘a scoffer’ and * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11, p. 103, Barry Jones. 61
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 62
A THINKING REED
worried that he would seduce me away from Christianity. My mother was non-committal on this issue, as on all others. A young teacher at CNCS, Mary Johnson, encouraged me to compete on radio quiz shows. My interest in technology continued. I wrote to General MacArthur with an idea for an invention, an automatic hands-free electrical indicator which would warn when bicycles or motorbikes were turning. I received a courteous acknowledgment, apparently signed by him. Preoccupied with radio and communications systems generally, I spent much time with a crystal set, built into a cigar box, jiggling a spring-loaded ‘cat’s whisker’ made of copper wire on the rough surface of a galena crystal (a primitive semiconductor: in effect, a forerunner of the transistor). If a proper contact was made, wireless signals were (faintly) converted to sound and heard on earphones. I used to read about television in second-hand copies of the American journal QST which I bought at René Eggleston’s shop in Geelong and, later, new copies at McGill’s in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. I liked to muck around with microphones, valves, coils, transformers and resistors, and surplus army equipment could be bought cheaply at disposal stores. I was interested in John Logie Baird’s mechanical television system, rather pointless since his primitive method had been obsolete since the 1930s, having been overtaken by the electronic scanning of Farnsworth and Zworykin. Nevertheless, following a model in the journal QST, I made myself a Nipkow disc, by drilling holes in a spiral formation in the bottom of an old paint tin, put in a shaft fitted to a small motor bought from army surplus, and used a small neon globe to provide the signal input. I could be confident that it was the only Baird scanner in Caulfield. I used to hear rebroadcasts of American radio programs featuring the American ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his partner, the doll Charlie McCarthy. There was a strong audience reaction and this partly compensated for having nothing to see. Reading The Australasian Post at the hairdressers, I was attracted by advertisements asserting that anybody could become an expert ventriloquist by using a device called the ‘Ventrilo’. Its use was guaranteed to produce hilarious situations, as odd voices were projected to unexpected places, thus disconcerting teachers, family and other superiors. I ordered one by mail, attracted by the promise that the price would be repaid in full if the results were not as promised. The Ventrilo proved to be a leather flap, to be placed on the roof of the mouth, with a metal clip at the bottom, enclosing a membrane which was to vibrate. I could not keep it in my mouth without gagging, let alone use it. So I washed and returned it and received my money back. Bang went 62
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 63
CHILDHOOD
another alternative career! Will Andrade’s Magic Shop in Collins Street later put the Ventrilo on sale. I was hopeless at sport. My co-ordination was poor, I was too speculative, and instinctively not a team player, especially in sport but even in politics, as my colleagues later complained. I certainly lacked motivation. If conscripted for football, my instinct was to volunteer as goal umpire, preferably for the weaker team. Nana’s generosity, love and encouragement permeated my life. Because she enjoyed time at the beach, she was keen for me to learn swimming and engaged a young man called Williams to instruct me at the pool at Geelong’s Eastern Beach. He had been a successful coach and assured me, ‘I’ve never had a failure.’ I thought, ‘He’s got his first one coming up’. Nothing worked. I invariably sank like a stone and never learnt to float as Mum, Nana and Ire could all do effortlessly. Ultimately, I evolved a very inefficient form of dog-paddling to get from one end of a small pool to the other. Even though my sporting prowess was nonexistent I was prepared to give most things a go, and in the last days of 1945, using my Christmas money, I flew for the first time in a Ryan trainer which did ‘joy flights’ from Belmont airfield near Geelong. I felt like a pioneer. Nobody in my family had ever flown, not even my father, despite years in the RAAF. It was exhilarating, although my enthusiasm abated somewhat when I read that the plane crashed a few weeks later. My Geelong relatives were generous. If I really wanted something, it could generally be paid for from money given as Christmas presents. I was a frequent visitor to Griffiths’ Book Store, in Ryrie Street, and a small shop run by Syd Farrow. In 1945 I set my heart on Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, saved up and bought it for £2 2s at a time when the Basic Wage was £4 18s. I never regretted the investment. The work purported to be universal in scope, but it had a strong American bias, a useful compensation for the English reference books I grew up with. Some Australians had tiny entries: John Curtin, Bob Menzies, Doc Evatt, Billy Hughes and Sir Thomas Blamey. Webster’s had a powerful influence on my decision to compile my own biographical dictionary. From the age of 12 I haunted the Melbourne Public Library, renamed the State Library of Victoria in 1960, visiting it most weekends for decades. I was awed by the size of the octagonal Reading Room (34.75 metres high, 37.75 metres or 114 feet across), modelled on the Library of Congress in Washington and completed in 1913. Sir John Monash, later 63
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 64
A THINKING REED
our greatest general, initially designed the structural system for its ferroconcrete dome, almost as large as the Pantheon in Rome. After a building dispute, his firm lost the contract. The library staff was unfailingly helpful. I worked my way systematically through my areas of interest—the physics of the atomic bomb, international organisations, such as the United Nations, biographies of politicians, writers and composers, and books on art. I would buy sandwiches for lunch or eat cheaply in China Town. ‘Darp suey’ was available in Celestial Lane for fourpence. Occasionally I saw Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian to become Governor-General, a venerable figure in his nineties, reading in the Public Library and I once sat opposite him on a Toorak tram. I recognised him as a link with the past, but never plucked up courage to speak to him. Until 1968 the National Gallery and the Museum of Victoria were in the same building as the Public Library. I was intoxicated by major paintings bought for Melbourne by the Felton Bequest. My favourites were two Flemish works, an exquisite Virgin and Child, known as the ‘Ince Hall Madonna’, once attributed to Jan van Eyck but now regarded as a fine workshop replica (c. 1435) of a lost original, and Man of Sorrows in the Arms of the Virgin (c. 1475) by Hans Memling. I also loved the Rembrandts, Two Old Men Disputing, Portrait of a White Haired Man and a possible selfportrait, and Tiepolo’s huge The Banquet of Cleopatra. Having listened to him for years, Franklin Roosevelt’s death, on 12 April 1945, was a personal blow. So was John Curtin’s on 5 July 1945. In both cases I heard about the deaths on the radio, my main vector of communication. While I did not talk back to the wireless set (something which became possible with talk-back radio in 1967) I felt that I would have had more response from the bakelite box than from the adults around me. I rushed into the Robsons’ to tell Mum and Lilian about FDR’s death, only to be told not to interrupt their conversation. They were too preoccupied to commiserate with me. Adolf Hitler’s death and the end of the European War in May 1945 was exciting because at last the killing would have to stop and the persecution of millions would end. Election of Clement Attlee’s Labour Government in Britain and Churchill’s unexpected defeat offered the prospect of major social change. The crush outside St Paul’s Cathedral and the Flinders Street railway station on the celebration of V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, on 16 August 1945, was my first involvement in a massive crowd, which seemed to 64
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 65
CHILDHOOD
have a life of its own. I went in to the city with Dad, who was home briefly on leave. I had followed closely the United Nations Conference for International Organisation (UNCIO), held in the San Francisco Opera House in April–June 1945. I was proud of Dr Evatt’s contribution there and looked forward with unrealistic optimism to the creation of the United Nations. (Alger Hiss, who became a friend decades later, was the SecretaryGeneral of UNCIO.) The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), set up in London in October 1945, had particular appeal. Where normals covered their bedroom walls with sporting heroes or film stars, I put up UN and UNESCO posters, mostly home made. Fifty years later, I was leading the Australian delegation to UNESCO. But the subject that dominated my thoughts and might, at least subconsciously, have shaped my career was the production of atomic bombs and their use against Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. My closest friend at Caulfield North was an American, Jack Sutherland, from South Bend, Indiana. General Motors sent his father to Australia to help co-ordinate the manufacture of motor engines. Jack used to deliver The Herald, Melbourne’s afternoon paper, on his bike. I will never forget Tuesday 7 August 1945 when we stood on the porch at 9 Manor Grove to read the Herald’s banner headline: ‘MIGHTY ATOM BOMB SECRETS OUT/Problems of Colossal Force Solved by Scientists’. It described the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima the day before. Oddly, the report read like a British scientific achievement, with some credit being given to the Australian Mark Oliphant. The Americans were barely mentioned. The Herald quoted Prime Minister Attlee’s announcement of the bombing, but not President Truman’s announcement nor his ultimatum that more bombs would be dropped unless Japan surrendered unconditionally. I know that hindsight distorts vision, but I think both of us realised on that day, quite suddenly, that the world would never be the same. I was both excited and alarmed. Goethe had the same feeling when he observed the Battle of Valmy in September 1792 when the French Revolutionary Army defeated the Prussians, commenting,‘A new epoch in the history of the world has begun.’ Jack and I kept press cutting books and pasted in all the articles we could find in newspapers and magazines about the bomb and atomic energy. Jack had a strong grasp of science for his age (barely 13, about six months older than me) and had some good equipment at home. 65
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 66
A THINKING REED
He was able to get some uranium oxide from his father, and used a Bunsen burner and blow pipe to reduce it to metal. We both kept a small piece, about the size of a threepenny bit, in our wallets. In those days, radiation and its long-term effects were not thought of, nor was fallout. We were both lucky not to be glowing at night. By the end of 1947, Jack Sutherland was back in the United States. We lost touch and I often wondered what became of him. Early assumptions about atomic power were very optimistic, that it would produce unlimited, cheap power, transform the world and eliminate poverty. But there was an early recognition that the scientific-technological culture and the political culture did not work well together: they lacked a common language. After leaving Caulfield North, I enrolled at Melbourne High School (MHS) in February 1946. It was one of three elite schools in the state system, the others being University High and MacRobertson High School for girls, named for a generous chocolate manufacturer, Sir Macpherson Robertson. Melbourne High traced its origins to the National Model School, established in Spring Street in September 1854. It was renamed the Melbourne Continuation School in 1905, then Melbourne High School in 1912. Frank Tate, the Victorian Director of Education, saw Melbourne High as providing direct competition to Melbourne Grammar, Scotch and Wesley. It became a boys’ school only after moving to South Yarra. Relocated at Forrest Hill, overlooking the Yarra, the building was completed in 1927 in fake Tudor style, then very much in fashion.The school’s crest was a unicorn’s head placed in a crown, not a conspicuously Australian motif. The motto,‘Honour the Work’, was pinched from Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham. MHS offered a four-year course, from Form III to Form VI, and its intake was ‘streamed’ from Central Schools. A third cousin on my mother’s side, Jim Hill, had been Principal. He had abolished the Cadet Corps on taking up his job in 1934 and stuck to his pacifist ideals throughout World War II when the Royal Australian Navy took over the South Yarra site and the school was transferred to Camberwell High School. In 1944 Major-General Alan Hollick Ramsay* (later Sir Alan), a former mathematics teacher and able artillery officer who served in both World Wars, was appointed to succeed him and took up the job in 1946. * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 16, p. 51, S.N. Gower. 66
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 67
CHILDHOOD
One of his first decisions was to re-establish the Cadet Corps, but it was not compulsory to join. In 1947 General Ramsay was promoted to be State Director of Education and left MHS. (He sent his own children to Scotch College and Presbyterian Ladies’ College, which raised some questions about his confidence in the system he directed.) The staff list was crammed with colonels, half-colonels, majors and captains (no RAAF or RAN officers that I can recall), men who had been plucked out of teaching for war service and had been exposed to a vast new range of experience, making judgments with life and death consequences. In Geography, for example, it was easy to divert the teacher from Victoria’s river systems to a discussion of war crimes or the problems of restoring colonial rule in Borneo or Papua New Guinea. Returned officers had acquired an unexpected range of experience which brought intensity and depth to their teaching.At MHS these teachers were kept in a holding pattern and within a few years, as high schools proliferated, most became principals themselves. The school also had some ex-service students who were being given an opportunity by Repatriation to upgrade their skills. Some were married, smoked heavily and were known to have the occasional beer. Nevertheless they fitted in easily enough and were eager participants in discussions in and out of the classroom. When Alan Ramsay left, William Maldon Woodfull* succeeded as Acting Principal. Bill Woodfull had been captain of Australia’s Test cricket team before Don Bradman and became a victim, both literally and figuratively, of England’s controversial ‘bodyline’ tactics in the 1932–33 Tests, receiving a severe blow over his heart. He suspected that Bradman had leaked his bitter comment to Pelham Warner, ‘There are two teams out there but only one of them is playing cricket’, and it was understood that Bradman was not a subject to be discussed with him. Ironically, Sir Donald Bradman wrote Woodfull’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography referring, cautiously, to ‘his alleged eloquent rebuke’. MHS was very stimulating and it was my first all-male environment. Some of my contemporaries at school went on to distinguished academic or professional careers, including the future Vice-Chancellors Don Stranks, Michael Birt and Keith Hancock, historian Ken Inglis, political scientists Don Rawson and Herb Feith, economist John McCarty, cleric and educator Norman Curry, rabbi Raymond Apple, educator Don * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, p. 561, Donald Bradman. 67
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 68
A THINKING REED
Anderson, political philosopher Felix Raab, physicist Ernie Hondros, FRS, composer Colin Brumby, sculptor Ken Scarlett, Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, lawyer Peter Redlich, businessmen John Gandel, Isi Leibler and Lindsay Fox, and medical practitioner Spiro Moraitis. The future television star Graham Kennedy arrived in 1948. I was elected to the Students Representative Council (SRC) by the whole of Form III, after campaigning for extra privileges for junior students, for example, access to the senior library. My populist program was headlined in the 19 April 1946 edition of The Sentinel,‘the official organ of the SRC’, edited by Ken Inglis: ‘CAUCUS CONSTERNATION. Jones Jargon Jars Judiciary’. The article called me ‘the most prolific of candidates’, accusing me of making a 25-minute speech and of urging a ‘Committee of Action’ for the control of teachers. The SRC was essentially a sounding board on issues that students grumbled about: it had no authority, and no budget. I was re-elected to the SRC for the three following years and elected Form Captain for four successive years. However, I was not made a Prefect in Form VI. The Principal chose prefects in consultation with the staff, and I may have been seen as a vaguely subversive figure. A contemporary reminded me of my crisp answer when a teacher in Form III asked where we wanted to work. I said, ‘Department of External Affairs, Canberra.’ It was a matter of great disappointment that neither parent ever set foot in Melbourne High School, although this may have been typical of the time, when the relationship between schools, parents and community was remote. Dad had stayed on in the RAAF after the war, having risen to the rank of sergeant, and was posted to Sale, in Gippsland. He came back to Melbourne by train for most weekends, but I saw little of him even then. He announced that it was time for us to get to know each other properly and that we should go on a voyage of discovery (his words, not mine) in the second term school holidays, in September 1946. The itinerary turned out to be Castlemaine and Rushworth, where by an eerie coincidence he had Air Force friends whose families ran pubs. We travelled to Castlemaine by train and settled into the Council Club Hotel. He became a fixture in the bar, socialising with his mate, Jack Lewin, and suggested that I explore the town. I began with the nearby art gallery and museum, and after five days came to know it intimately. Every day I walked to the top of Forty Foot Hill to look at the memorial to Robert O’Hara Burke, who had been Castlemaine’s police chief. (Wills was not 68
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 69
CHILDHOOD
memorialised.) Then we went on by train to Rushworth, staying for five days at the Criterion Hotel. The major highlight was a quick dash by car to Echuca, to see the Murray River and cross over the border to Moama, New South Wales. I shared a room with Dad and we breakfasted together, a rare experience for me. He had lunch and dinner with his mates, and I was a mere hanger on. Back in Melbourne I enjoyed the campaign for the Federal election held on 28 September 1946 and attended several election rallies. I was almost fourteen. Before television, people actually turned up to public meetings, especially when they were likely to produce sharp interjections and crushing responses. I heard Robert Menzies, Ben Chifley,Arthur Calwell and the State Premier, John Cain senior. Chifley led Labor to a comfortable win. In 1946 I began my lifelong love for Russian literature by reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. This had been stimulated by hearing a two-part dramatisation on the Macquarie Radio Theatre, directed by Laurence H. Cecil, in which Peter Finch played Raskolnikov. I found the drama compelling and it made me explore my deepest instincts. In my dark bedroom I kept my precious 78 rpm discs, with pickup and turntable fixed in a wooden box, and output leads plugged into a wireless set. John Clements’ crowded shop at 243 Collins Street sold second-hand 78s for as little as two shillings. Barry Humphries called it ‘an Aladdin’s cave’ in his My Life as Me (2002) and contrasted the richness of its offerings with the sourness of the service. He speculated that he might have been the ‘only schoolboy customer’, but I was a second and Frank van Straten a third.The shop did not long survive the transition to long-playing (LP) records and John and Mrs Clements retired around 1955. I began collecting Wagner records, which I found at Charles Copeland’s antique shop in St Kilda, near the Victory Theatre. I was exposed to the glorious heldentenor (heroic tenor) of the great Dane, Lauritz Melchior. His recording of the forging song (‘Nothung! Nothung! Niedliches Schwert . . .’) from Siegfried, recorded before I was born, with Albert Reiss as Mime, has never been surpassed. In 1947 Dad’s last posting had been at No. 1 Stores Depot, in Tottenham, one of Melbourne’s western suburbs. He invariably rose very early, made his own breakfast, and went off by tram and train, not returning until late at night. He would go straight to the bathroom, then to the sleepout, without a word to my mother and only a few words to me. On the last morning of his life, he went through the same routine. I pretended to be asleep as he passed through my room. 69
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 70
A THINKING REED
When I returned home from school on 12 June 1947, I found my mother talking to an RAAF chaplain, the Reverend Canon Harry Arrowsmith, who broke the news that my father had been fatally injured when a crate fell on him at Tottenham and had crushed his chest. He died in an ambulance on his way to the RAAF Hospital at Laverton. I was very distressed, considering that I didn’t really know him well, and we seemed to have little in common outside our occasional excursions. My mother was more concerned about the impact that the news would have on my sister. Nana came up from Geelong and took charge at home. I declined an invitation to view his body at the funeral parlour in Toorak Road.The funeral, at Springvale Cemetery, was a surprisingly large affair, with the RAAF Central Band playing Handel’s ‘Dead March’ in Saul and many senior officers were present. I suspect that the event may have been partly a rehearsal for future ceremonies for older high-ranking RAAF figures. Dad, ‘Skip’ to his RAAF mates, was a good mixer, far more sociable than me. I often speculated that my political career might have been different if I had succeeded in converting him to Labor and turning him into an activist who could talk to people I felt awkward with. He could have been a very effective networker. Later, I was acutely aware of the strong paternal support received by Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke (from an uncle too), John Cain, Evan Walker, Andrew McCutcheon, Ralph Willis, Paul Keating, Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Rob McClelland, even John Button, whose relationship with his father was marked by creative tension. Dad died intestate but, in any case, he had no assets to leave.As a service widow, Mum became eligible for retraining assistance under the Repatriation Commission. Encouraged by Lilian Robson and me, she applied for a course in piano accompanying. Henri Penn, an experienced accompanist who lived nearby, became her mentor. My childhood ended with Dad’s death, as Alan Bennett puts it,‘one of the great unrepeatables’. In processional terms, I would be the next male to go. Apart from my tonsils operation in 1939, I was often disappointed but never traumatised as a child, but certain patterns emerge: remoteness from my parents and their generation, affinity with Victorian relics, a certain isolation, reliance on my own resources (but without boredom), indifference to sport, a feeling for the numinous, and preference for female company. 70
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 71
CHILDHOOD
I came to feel that I had invented myself, with my dark bedroom as my base, library, laboratory, art gallery and music room with a mother who seemed not to be interested (although we developed a strong relationship in her last decades) and a father who wasn’t there. I lived, vicariously, through books, film, radio and newspapers, in the world of words, facts, images and deep, if repressed, feelings. I was old before my time. Later, when I saw Olivier’s film Hamlet (1948), I felt as if parts of the play were lodged in my head in an intrusive, often painful way. Slabs of Hamlet’s soliloquies (‘O, that this too too solid flesh . . .’, ‘To be or not to be . . .’) kept repeating endlessly, usually unbidden, and I memorised more of Hamlet than any other play. This phenomenon may have been commonplace for boys of a narcissistic tendency as they experienced feelings of isolation, rage, frustration, impotence and impatience. Because I could never work out what was in my parents’ heads, it led to alienation and disdain on my part. Should I have been more adventurous: to challenge them and try to establish a relationship? Or did they fail the test? I can never be certain. Philip Larkin’s notorious quatrain,‘This be the verse’ (1974), overstates the case: They fuck you up, your mum and dad, They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
My instinct was to blame myself.
71
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 72
CHAPTER 3
ﱗ
Death Penalty
The death penalty, in theory and practice, might seem to be an extraordinary and emotional preoccupation for a child, but it was a central factor in my early life and has remained so. Hanging was in my head because it was happening in my patch, the city I lived in. Two hangings in Melbourne’s Pentridge Gaol, in January and April 1939 when I was six, started me thinking about the death penalty. I remember reading about them in the newspapers as if it was yesterday. Reports were not explicit, so I relied on my imagination, my father’s graphic description of the mechanics of a hanging and some other reading. I experienced terrors and nightmares, especially in the weeks before and after the event, going over and over what was happening or had happened, and who was doing or had done what to whom. The scene of these childhood terrors was my dank, dark, windowless bedroom at Manor Grove, Caulfield, which became a metaphor for a cell. I can remember thinking of myself as being under sentence of death, waiting, waiting, waiting until the fatal moment, taking part in the rituals associated with executions, kindly visits from the chaplain, an extra allocation of cigarettes, farewells by relatives, and the last meal, to make the condemned feel better. But better for what? For the event? What then? I would wake up shaking and sweating from these nightmares, in which I was dragged to the gallows, observing wan expressions on the faces of official witnesses. I had no one to whom I could explain the depth of my feelings. My father’s interest was limited to what he knew about the process of hanging. 72
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 73
DEATH PENALTY
My Geelong relatives were not concerned by the subject: it simply passed them by, with no more moral content than a bolt of lightning, a car accident or a failed operation in a hospital. I was conscious that Nana Black and Auntie Edie were devoted Bible readers and regarded themselves as devout Christians. Edie was drawn to the Old Testament doctrine of retribution, ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’, but Nana’s natural squeamishness would have deterred her from thinking about the reality of hanging. I was more attracted to the New Testament. I admired—even loved— Jesus and saw Him as being the outstanding victim of capital punishment, and it was hard to understand crucifixion as part of God’s master plan. It seemed self-evident that Christians should passionately oppose the death penalty. Nana and Edie used to say, ‘Crucifixion was needed to give meaning to Resurrection.’ They saw no connection between Jesus and the capital punishment issue generally, so my childish attempt at engagement failed. We seemed to be operating in parallel universes. They loved me, but didn’t understand my preoccupation. Their general attitude was similar to that of many Australians in the 1930s and 1940s: ‘Hanging has been going on a long time. We inherited it from England like cricket and Christmas pudding. Why should we take responsibility for changing it?’ Nothing in my world connected me directly with crime, criminals or the death penalty. I felt involved because the State Government that ordered the hangings was saying, in effect,‘Barry, we are doing it to protect you. Your safety depends on somebody being taken out and hanged from time to time.You are a beneficiary’. Even if I didn’t use those words then, I certainly understood the concept and hated it. I thought,‘I don’t want to be part of a system where my life depends on somebody being murdered on my behalf ’. In the State of Victoria were people living normal, humane, useful lives, caring for families and tending the garden who, twice in 1939, once in 1941, once in 1942, assumed a completely different role, as participants in a ritual murder, an execution where obligation, duty and obedience involved performing a morally repulsive act. It was repellent if they were forced into it, even more so if they were enthusiastic volunteers. I imagined a child asking her father: ‘What are you going to do this week?’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘on Saturday, we’re going to the football, on Sunday I’ll walk the dog, take you to church and prune the roses, on Monday, back to the office, on Tuesday morning to the dentist, then on Wednesday I’m 73
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 74
A THINKING REED
taking part in an execution, and on Thursday . . .’ ‘You’re going to kill somebody?’ the child screams. The father says, ‘There’s nothing personal about it. But I have my orders. Somebody gave me a piece of paper . . .’ I dreamed of a scenario where five patients were in a hospital ward, one of them handcuffed to the bed with an armed guard sitting next to him. I ask, ‘Why is he handcuffed?’ The guard replies, ‘He is under sentence of death. He tried to kill himself. We saved his life, but when he is fully recovered, we’ll hang him.’ Execution is death by appointment, according to a timetable. One of the factors that makes life bearable is the uncertainty of the hour of our deaths. I saw myself challenging participants at an execution: ‘Do you want to do it?’ and they would reply, ‘But I have my orders.’ ‘But could you refuse to do it?’ ‘I suppose so, but they would always find some other public servant to do it.’‘Who gave you the orders?’‘The government has ordered it.’At an early age I asked,‘Who bears moral responsibility for the killing?’ I came to feel that the most objectionable feature in my state’s way of death was the buck-passing involved. Who bore the moral responsibility for sending a man or woman to execution? The judge told the jury that its sole concern was the verdict of Guilty or Not Guilty. They were not to concern themselves about the penalty: that would be determined elsewhere, although they might make a recommendation for mercy.The judge passed the death sentence because it was the only one prescribed by the Crimes Act: he had no option; the decision to hang was not his. Then the death sentence was considered by State Cabinet. But here a Premier could say,‘This death sentence is not my responsibility.The judge and jury determined the verdict that led to the death sentence being imposed. We only fix a time and place for execution.’ The State Governor might exercise the royal prerogative of mercy or sign the death warrant but explained that he only acted on the advice of his ministers.The hangman, of course, said, ‘I’m only a public servant. It’s not my decision. I’m only doing what my superiors tell me.’ Thus jurors, judge, premier, ministers, governor and hangman could all put hands on their respective hearts and say,‘It wasn’t my decision. I take no responsibility.’ It was a system in which the State, supposed to represent community values, inverted those values. A doctor is dedicated to the preservation of life, and he/she does not make judgments about the worth of the subject. But with execution a subject became an object, and the doctor, like everybody involved in the process—lawyers, judges, public servants, 74
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 75
DEATH PENALTY
police wardens, priests—becomes part of the killing party, powerless to intervene. I thought often how an execution caused collateral damage to parents, siblings, wives and children of the executed person, essentially replicating the devastation felt by the victims’ families. I could hardly bear to imagine their feelings, nor those of witnesses and participants in the process. I cannot completely explain my degree of empathy with those condemned to die, people so remote. Later, I identified myself with Jews murdered in mass extermination camps. I thought about individuals such as Edith Stein, a convert from Judaism killed at Auschwitz and later made a saint, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian hanged for supporting a coup against Hitler. I learnt that millions were executed without cause in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and we executed only a handful for serious crimes, yet every execution seemed to be part of a continuum, an illegitimate use of state power.This idea, together with my reactions to the Great Depression, had a profound influence on the early development of a political consciousness. I made up my mind to help abolish the death penalty. There were no hangings in Victoria between 1942 and 1951 but I read extensively about capital punishment. The hanging procedure was not only an inversion of normality and decency; it contained elements of the surreal, Grand Guignol theatre. Its imagery epitomised ‘the horror! the horror!’ that Joseph Conrad wrote about in Heart of Darkness. On 6 April 1857 Leo Tolstoy saw a guillotining in Paris and the image haunted him all his life: I witnessed many atrocities in the war and in the Caucasus, but I should have been less sickened to see a man torn to pieces before my eyes than I was by this perfected, elegant machine by means of which a strong, clean, healthy man was killed in an instant. In the first case, there is no reasoning will, but a paroxysm of human passion; in the second, coolness to the point of refinement, homicide-with-comfort, nothing big. When I saw the head part from the body and each of them fall separately into a box with a thud, I understood—not in my mind, but with my whole being—that no rational doctrine of progress could justify that act, and that if every man now living in the world and every man who had lived since the beginning of time were to maintain, in the name of some theory or other, that this execution was indispensable, I should still know that it was not indispensable, that it was wrong. 75
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 76
A THINKING REED
Two novels, The Trials (Der Prozess 1925) by Franz Kafka and The Outsider (L’Etranger 1942) by Albert Camus, both sensitised me to the imperfections of the justice system, where flawed and fallible processes could never justify an irreversible outcome. I had no faith in the infallibility of legal and political systems, and with death penalty cases the judgment was absolute. I was convinced that the safest and best society is based on a firm, unyielding opposition to all forms of violence, whether carried out by individuals or by the state, and that states, in time of peace anyway, should get out of the killing business. Many great writers had meditated on capital punishment. Their works provided a peep show in my mind, a set of extraordinarily vivid images that I would revisit incessantly, obsessively. Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), recounts how a pitiless God fails to intervene to save the seduced, betrayed, terrified Tess from hanging: ‘ “Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Æschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess’. Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Danny Deever’, one of the Barrack Room Ballads (1892), is a chilling account of a military hanging, with its refrain, ‘An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’’: ‘What’s that so black agin’ the sun?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘It’s Danny fightin’ ’ard for life’, the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘What’s that that whimpers over’ead?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now’, the Colour-Sergeant said. For they’re done with Danny Deever, you can ’ear the quickstep play, The regiment’s in column, an’ they’re marchin’ us away; Ho! the young recruits are shakin’, an’ they’ll want their beer to-day, After hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.
Hanging is a recurrent motif in A.E. Housman’s collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896). One of the most familiar quatrains reads: And naked to the hangman’s noose The morning clocks will ring A neck God made for other use Than strangling in a string.
During his term as a prisoner, Oscar Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), in which he evokes the emotions surrounding a hanging: 76
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 77
DEATH PENALTY
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) provides graphic details about hangings in Dublin and I was much moved by Brendan Behan’s play The Quare Fellow (1956), set in an Irish gaol. George Orwell’s essay A Hanging (1931) is a recollection of his years as a policeman in Burma when he took part in an execution. He wrote of the condemned man being walked to the gallows: ‘And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path’. Was my reaction merely sentimentality? Misplaced sympathy? I did not think so then, or now. I adopted the position of Albert Camus: ‘I stand as far as possible from the position of spineless pity in which our humanitarians take such pride, in which values and responsibility change places, all crimes become equal and innocence ultimately forfeits all rights’. Consequently, if a man held a child at gunpoint, threatening to kill her, I would order him to be picked off by a sharp-shooter if there was no alternative. But this is not equivalent to the situation when an offender is captured, rendered harmless, put in a high security gaol, tried, convicted, sentenced and goes through the appeal procedure, in which his death becomes a matter of choice rather than necessity to those imposing it. The assertion ‘Unless this man dies, society is in jeopardy’ is cheap rhetoric.The reasons for killing a criminal, so pressing at a particular time, look hollow and morally bankrupt in retrospect. I often thought of the execution in Long Bay Gaol in 1936 of Edwin John Hickey, hanged at 17 years of age for having, aged 16, bashed a conciliation commissioner to death in a train.Was his execution a necessity? The government of the day thought so, but who would argue in its defence now? I rejected the implications of the ‘eye for an eye, death for a death’ approach which implied a moral equivalence between the criminal and the State: ‘If he can do it, why can’t we?’ In December 1941 an obscure character,Alfred Bye, aged 42, was hanged in Pentridge.As a youth he had been gassed in World War I and was apparently both simple and deaf. He had stabbed a man to death in a jealous rage in Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens. In the early 1960s I spoke about the case to Bye’s counsel, Murray McInerney, later a Supreme Court judge and knight. He thought of Bye as a victim, not a hardened criminal, and tried to support him 77
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 78
A THINKING REED
before, during and after the trial. Bye did not really understand what it meant when the death sentence was confirmed. He asked McInerney,‘But what will they actually do to me?’Twenty years after the event, Sir Murray still felt deeply distressed about the hanging. The most famous of Australia’s 2050 executions was the hanging of Ned Kelly in Old Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880. Kelly’s iconic status has been perpetuated by several films, the powerful paintings and lithographs of Sidney Nolan and many books. In the Australian States, determination of capital sentences at Cabinet level was an almost random process, like a lottery. Outcomes depended on geography, politics and the psychology of particular politicians. Father John Brosnan, for many years the Catholic chaplain at Pentridge, has been quoted as saying that in the 20th century ‘most Australian hangings have been political’. A plausible case can be made for this proposition. The ALP has been committed to abolition since the 1890s despite a spotty record in Western Australia until 1930 and one case in Tasmania, admittedly in an election year, in February 1946. From 1901 to 1967 there were 115 executions in Australia. Western Australia, with only 6 per cent of Australia’s population, executed 32 men and one woman between 1902 and 1964, an unbeatable record; in addition despite or because of frequent hangings, it had an unusually high rate of multiple murder.A disproportionate number of those hanged were not of English-speaking background. Queensland’s last execution was in 1913 and the death penalty was abolished in 1922, six years after Labor Premier Thomas John Ryan had first introduced legislation which was blocked by the conservative Legislative Council. In New South Wales in December 1916, two members of the Industrial Workers of the World, Robert Kennedy and Frank Franz, were hanged for murder in Bathurst Gaol, largely on the disputed evidence of an accomplice. This was at a time of bitter controversy over conscription for overseas service. The then Premier, W.A. Holman, had been expelled from the Labor Party, formed a coalition with conservatives, and within weeks ordered the double hanging. New South Wales had its last hanging in 1940. However, although Labor held office from 1941 to 1965, it took fourteen years before Joe Cahill’s Government abolished the death penalty in 1955. Due, apparently, to a collective lapse of memory, it remained as a penalty for some other offences—treason, piracy and arson in dockyards— until 1985, when Neville Wran’s Labor Government removed the last vestiges from the statute books. 78
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 79
DEATH PENALTY
Often a decision to hang depended on the mindset of a Premier, for example South Australia’s Liberal Sir Thomas Playford, whose Cabinet authorised seven hangings between 1944 and 1964. Hanging was supported by governments with a strong rural base, and in Victoria was a Country Party speciality. The ALP’s Victorian Branch adopted a policy for the abolition of the death penalty in 1898, and commuted all death sentences during its terms in office. However, its record was not unblemished. Between 1900 and 1949 fifty-two Victorians had been sentenced to death for crimes other than murder, but only two were hanged: Albert McNamara for arson in 1902 and David Bennett for carnal knowledge in 1932. The ALP kept in office minority Country Party governments led by Premiers Albert Dunstan (1935–43; 1943–45) and John McDonald (1950–52), which sent seven men and one woman to the gallows over a period of nearly eleven years. The Victorian Parliament was not sitting when executions took place in 1936, 1939, 1941 and 1951, so there was no opportunity for debate.With my increasing political involvement, I felt appalled that the Labor Party could have acquiesced in them.An American soldier, Private Eddie Leonski, raped and strangled three women in Melbourne in the ‘brown out’ period, when there was widespread fear of Japanese bombing. Convicted by a United States court martial sitting in Melbourne and hanged in Pentridge in November 1942, the State Government must have approved the arrangements. The mood of terror was powerfully depicted in paintings by Albert Tucker and Leonski was the subject of a film, Death of a Soldier (1986), by Philippe Mora. When John Cain senior was Labor Premier (1943; 1945–47; 1952–55), his governments failed to introduce legislation to abolish capital punishment because it would have been defeated in the Legislative Council and might have made hanging a hot political controversy. Capital punishment provides a reinforcement to what are sometimes regarded as ‘common sense’ views about life. In the United States retentionists argue: ‘The community has to defend itself. We kill the enemy in war and crime is a war on society’. Well, yes and no. Under the Geneva Convention, once captured, prisoners of war are securely held: as the United States is a signatory to the Convention they do not execute them. ‘Criminals are only animals, like wild dogs.We kill animals so why shouldn’t we kill criminals?’ The animal analogy is flawed. Rationalising a position by redefinition, characterising a fellow human as an animal is an exercise in evasion. In later years, as a campaigner, I despised defenders of the death 79
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 80
A THINKING REED
penalty who said ‘but we apply it very rarely’, a morally contemptible and bankrupt position. I had more respect for outright retentionists than equivocators. At the end of World War II, the victorious Allied powers set up International War Crimes Tribunals which tried Hitler’s accomplices at Nuremberg and leading Japanese militarists at Tokyo. In 1946 the Nuremberg tribunal handed down 12 death sentences—ten were carried out— and the Tokyo tribunal hanged seven in 1948. The moral authority of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals was deeply compromised by the presence of judges and prosecutors appointed by Stalin, whose regime in the Soviet Union had killed millions and was not far behind the Hitler extermination machine in infamy. Curiously, Stalin insisted on trials, while Churchill would have settled for summary executions. War crimes trials were an acid test of my consistency on the death penalty. I accepted the conventional wisdom that Goering, Streicher, Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner and Frank were monsters, Keitel and Jodl were militarist thugs, but Ribbentrop was a fool, Hess and Rosenberg maniacs, Seyss-Inquart and Speer careerists and some others, like Frick, were grey bureaucrats, running Hitler’s monstrous tyranny and execution machine. Bormann was sentenced in absentia, Goering committed suicide, Hess, Speer and Baldur von Schirach received long prison terms, Schacht and von Papen were acquitted. Nevertheless, I would have preferred the condemned to serve terms of life imprisonment. Everything I learned about the cruelties and horrors in both theatres of war, and the Holocaust, reinforced my conviction that execution was not the best outcome as it reinforced the view that violence had to be met with violence. In addition, many hundreds were tried by Allied military courts and executed.After the Pacific War ended,Australian war crimes tribunals tried 924 Japanese in Rabaul, Singapore, Darwin, Manus and Borneo, 148 of whom were executed. In 1949 Liberal Premier Thomas Tuke Hollway* secured passage of a major revision of the Victorian Crimes Act which reduced the number of capital offences from nine, including attempted murder, rape, buggery with violence, administering poison, carnal knowledge of a girl under ten years and setting fire to a dwelling house, to one: murder. This followed a * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 14, p. 469, Barry Jones. 80
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 81
DEATH PENALTY
thorough review of the Crimes Act by the Chief Justice’s Law Reform Committee, chaired by Mr Justice Thomas Weetman Smith. I had a misplaced confidence that full abolition was on the way. I began a law course at Melbourne University in February 1950 and joined the Australian Labor Party in the same month. I was 17. On 19 February 1951 there was a triple hanging at Pentridge Gaol of Jean Lee, Robert Clayton and Norman Andrews for the atrocious murder and torture of a 73-year-old illegal bookmaker, William (‘Pop’) Kent, in Carlton in November 1949. All three were petty criminals from Sydney who had come to Victoria for the Melbourne Cup season.As a law student, I spent several days at the trial and remember all three distinctly.At the end of one day’s proceedings I was very close to them as they left the dock. I recall Jean Lee’s high-heeled white sandals, with ankle straps. Convicted by the jury, with no recommendation for mercy, the judge sentenced them to hang.They appealed successfully, on the inadmissibility of certain evidence, against their conviction and sentence to the Victorian Full Court, and a new trial was ordered. However, the High Court of Australia reversed the Full Court and the original verdict and sentences were restored. They spent eight months under the shadow of the gallows. In Britain, where hangings were common, sentences were commuted if the verdict was upset on appeal, even if ultimately restored by a superior court. Cabinet confirmed the death sentences and rejected all appeals for clemency. Lee was then aged 31. On execution day Lee was hanged first, at 8.00 a.m, in an understandable state of collapse, strapped to a chair. She was the last woman to hang in Australia, and the only one since Martha Rendell in Fremantle in October 1909. The two men were hanged simultaneously at 10.00 a.m. Clayton’s execution was bungled, and he twitched on the rope for more than 15 minutes. My vivid imagination had me as an observer but, thank God, not in reality of the executions, missing no detail. I was uncomfortably familiar with Pentridge as a Melbourne University debater and as we walked to debates we passed under the scaffold. Was Jean Lee’s death a necessity? In 1951 the McDonald Government certainly thought so. If she had lived, what sort of woman might she have become? If Lee, Clayton and Andrews had been spared, would society have suffered? It is a futile question. The triple hanging left a permanent scar in my mind, which will never 81
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 82
A THINKING REED
heal. I had spoken to John Cain senior, then Labor’s State Leader, appealing to him to intervene but he felt that there was little sympathy for the three. The Age and Argus were vaguely abolitionist, but the Sun NewsPictorial thought they deserved their fate, except perhaps for Lee. I lost much of my enthusiasm for studying law as a direct result of the triple hanging. The capital punishment issue, so central to my thinking, seemed to arouse little understanding, interest or sympathy in the legal profession. I threw myself into political activism and most of my reading was political history, not a subject for which I had enrolled. In 1952 there were three judicial hangings in Australia. Astonishingly, all three were of young Czech migrants: Karol Tapci, aged 22, in Fremantle, in Western Australia’s first execution for twenty years; John Novotny, 19, and Jerry Koci, 20, in Darwin. A fourth Czech migrant, Jan Balaban, was hanged in Adelaide in 1953. The double hanging in the Northern Territory, authorised by the Menzies Cabinet, took place on gallows erected especially for the purpose.The Darwin two were my age.The events were not referred to in any of Menzies’ biographies. Paul Hasluck, as Territories Minister, must have been involved. The only other execution under Commonwealth law had been in the Northern Territory in 1913. At the time, I suspected that the decisions to hang were based on completely unwarranted fears of a possible crime wave by migrants and it was decided to make examples of the three young men. I asked Bert Evatt and Arthur Calwell, who were running the Federal Labor Party, to make representations to Menzies for clemency, but they were unsuccessful. In Prague in December 1952 Rudolf Slansky and ten other officials (mostly Jewish) were hanged in public, charged with collaboration with Tito against Stalinism. The imagery, seen in newsreels and in newspapers, haunted me. There were international protests about the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg* in New York in June 1953 for ‘conspiracy to commit espionage in wartime’, having passed information about the atomic bomb in 1944–45 to the USSR, then an ally. The case against Ethel was threadbare and her death sentence is now acknowledged to have been a device to induce her husband to confess all that he knew about Soviet espionage. I was active in collecting signatures for a petition on the Rosenbergs * There is an extensive, passionate literature on the Rosenberg case, including the novels The Book of Daniel (1971) by E.L. Doctorow and The Public Burning (1977) by Robert Coover. 82
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 83
DEATH PENALTY
which we delivered to the US consulate in Melbourne. I helped to organise a protest meeting at Melbourne University. Dr Daniel Mannix, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, aged 89, sent a message to the White House urging clemency. Ethel refused to seek mercy, Julius declined to talk and both died. In Great Britain there was an ongoing campaign for abolition of the death penalty and I followed the literature carefully, especially the report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949–53), chaired by Sir Ernest Gowers, a civil servant famous for his book on style, Plain Words (1948) and who later wrote A Life for a Life? (1956). Viscount Templewood, better known as the Conservative arch-appeaser Sir Samuel Hoare, was a surprising convert to abolition and wrote a powerful book, The Shadow of the Gallows (1951). We corresponded for some years, but never met. The novelist and essayist Arthur Koestler, with whom I later had a turbulent relationship, was a major figure in the campaign. He wrote Reflections on Hanging (1956) and, with C.H. Rolph, Hanged by the Neck (1961). On my first visit to England in 1958 I met Sydney Silverman, MP, who led the abolitionist debate in the Parliament. The first campaigner for the abolition of the death penalty had been the Milanese economist Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794). His On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene), published in 1764 with a preface by Voltaire, was translated into French, English and 20 other languages. He was deeply influenced by Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters and wrote when penal codes were savage, torture was commonplace, the condemned were mutilated but crime rates remained high. Britain had about 200 capital offences in the 18th century. Beccaria argued, with a classic simplicity, that there is no demonstrable correlation between the severity of punishment and the crime rate: all punishment deters but there is no statistical evidence that execution, or torture, deters uniquely. The aims of punishment, he insisted, are reformation and deterrence, and certainty of apprehension and conviction are consistent with public safety. There is a critical point in punishment beyond which increasing severity is excessive because it has no demonstrable influence on the crime rate. The aims of punishment, he insisted, are purely civil. Divine justice should be left to God, as it is by definition. Beccaria strongly opposed the power of pardon: it indicated a deficiency in the law.‘Clemency ought to shine in the code and not in private judgment.’ He insisted, ‘If I can prove that the death penalty is neither necessary nor useful, I shall have achieved the triumph of mankind’. 83
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 84
A THINKING REED
He was the first scholar to treat crime and punishment as a scientific study, where causes and effects were subjected to dispassionate and statistical analysis. Since Beccaria, there have been no new arguments for abolition. In Victoria between 1955, when Henry Bolte became Liberal Premier, and 1975, when capital punishment was abolished, of 71 death sentences dealt with by Cabinet, 70 were commuted and only Ronald Ryan was hanged. What could be said in support of a law which comes up with the wrong answer 98.6 per cent of the time? I received strong intellectual support from Sir John Vincent Barry, Supreme Court Justice and Chairman of Melbourne University’s Criminology Department, and Sir Eugene Gorman, QC, for many years Victoria’s outstanding criminal lawyer. Jack (John William) Galbally, QC* (1910–1990), Leader of the ALP in the Legislative Council, was a central figure in the Victorian campaign against capital punishment. A former Collingwood footballer, an active Catholic, widely read and an impressive debater, on 14 occasions between 1956 and 1974 he introduced an Abolition of Capital Punishment Bill. These Private Members’ Bills were always defeated on Party lines, but at least time was found for extended debate. The Liberal Leader in the Legislative Council, Sir Arthur Warner, was personally, but privately, committed to abolition and gave Galbally generous support. Over the years, I wrote many speeches for ALP Members. When Dick Hamer, as Premier, moved to abolish the death penalty in 1975, Jack Galbally was grieved that his Bill had not been adopted. His speech on the Second Reading debate was disappointing, but he played a magnificent role in the struggle. The case of Rupert Max Stuart,† a 28-year-old Arrernte (Aranda) convicted of murder and sentenced to hang in South Australia in 1959, was deeply troubling to me. Don Dunstan, later Premier of South Australia, played an outstanding role arguing for Stuart in the State Parliament. Gough Whitlam raised the Stuart case passionately in the House of Representatives in 1960 and clashed violently with Menzies. Stuart’s ultimate reprieve, after a campaign which led to the appointment of a Royal Commission, was a relief. My friend Rohan Rivett, editor of the Adelaide News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, was tried for seditious libel, a vindictive reaction to the intensity of his crusading. Released in 1973, * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 17, forthcoming, Barry Jones. † K.S. Inglis, The Stuart Case. 84
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 85
DEATH PENALTY
Stuart was in and out of gaol for parole violations until 1984. He became active in the Central Land Council and was elected as Chair in 1998. One of the turning points in my life was the controversy over the Bolte Government’s decision in August 1962 to hang Robert Peter Tait.* Born in Glasgow in 1924, Tait spent eight years in a school for retarded children after an accident to his head, then became a miner and a stoker in the Royal Navy. His wife left him because of his homosexuality and alcoholism. He had several convictions for violent crime, always committed while drunk. In August 1961 he went to the Hawthorn vicarage of an Anglican priest (the Reverend George Hall) intending to scrounge money so that he could go to Adelaide. The priest was out and Tait broke in. When the vicar’s 82-year-old mother,Ada Hall, disturbed him, he attacked her. He penetrated her with an electric torch, then killed her with repeated blows, before leaving and booking into a hotel. He hitch-hiked to South Australia and was soon arrested in Port Augusta. At the trial the Crown’s chief medical witness, Dr Allan Bartholomew, agreed with defence submissions by John Starke, QC, that Tait was ‘a chronic alcoholic’, a ‘masochist’, ‘sexually abnormal’, ‘a transvestite’, ‘a homosexual’, ‘a maniac’, and that he was suffering ‘from a mental disorder or disease of the mind’. Nevertheless he did not fall within the M’Naghten Rules on legal insanity (formulated in 1842) and was convicted by the jury and sentenced to death by Mr Justice Dean. Sir Arthur Warner, a powerful Minister under Premier Henry Bolte, once assured me ‘There will be no hangings in Victoria so long as I am a member of Cabinet’. He was as good as his word. He retired for health reasons in July 1962, and Tait’s death sentence was confirmed in August. The execution order led to a storm of protest. David Hirt, a Presbyterian theological student, formed the Students’ Anti-Hanging Committee. The Anti-Hanging Committee (Victoria), founded a week later, became the recognised outlet for abolitionist opinion.Val Doube, a former Labor State Minister of Health, became president and I was secretary, retaining the position until the Committee disbanded after achieving its goal in 1975. Members included Bishop Felix Arnott, Bishop Geoffrey Sambell, John Westerman and Harold Wood (clergy), Professors Rod Andrew, Joe Bornstein, Zelman Cowen, and Sir Peter MacCallum, John Ryan, Janet Clunies Ross, Stephen Murray-Smith, Andrew Brooke and Myra Roper (academics), Maurice Ashkanasy, QC, and Richard McGarvie, * Creighton Burns, The Tait Case. 85
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 86
A THINKING REED
QC (barristers), Dame Mabel Brookes (writer and society doyenne), Harold Blair (singer),William Dargie (artist), David Martin (novelist), Roy Grounds (architect), Prudence Myer, Jan Paterson and David Scott (social workers), Clive Stoneham (Opposition Leader), Austin Dowling and Rosemary Hanbury (teachers), David Hirt and John Ridley (students), Frank Sedgman (tennis player) and Ken Stone (union official). Our patrons were Arthur Koestler and the Earl of Harewood. The Herald and Sun newspapers gave consistent and unstinting support, partly because the chair of the Herald and Weekly Times, Sir John Williams, a practising Catholic, shared my deep visceral and intellectual loathing of the death penalty. The Age was also passionately on side, with deep commitment by the editor, Keith Sinclair, and many senior journalists. George Hall was one of many who urged commutation of the sentence on his mother’s killer. Professional groups protested vigorously, as did Church leaders. Directing the campaign was exhausting and stressful, and in those days there were no e-mails and few, if any, facsimile machines. I was teaching full time at Dandenong High School, and the agitation coincided with my Pick-a-Box exposure. I could not have done it without Rosemary’s unflagging support, and she was virtually assistant secretary of the Committee. Every morning, as I drove to Dandenong, I would call in to see Val and Freda Doube in their house at Oakleigh to plan the day’s strategy. Val (short for Valentine) had been MP for Oakleigh from 1950 until defeated in the 1961 State elections. He was working as a consultant with my friend Bob Mitchell, who ran the Chelmer Diagnostic Clinic in St Kilda Road. In 1970 Val returned to the Victorian Parliament as MP for the safe seat of Albert Park. After a variety of legal appeals to the Victorian Supreme Court, on 31 October 1962, the day before Tait was due to hang, the Full High Court convened in Melbourne to hear argument that Tait was entitled to a mental enquiry under the Mental Hygiene Act (1959) which, bizarrely, was to come into force on 1 November, execution day. I was in the High Court for the hearing. Sir Owen Dixon, Chief Justice, asked counsel for the Victorian Government, Sir Henry Winneke, for an undertaking that the Court would be given time to consider the application. The Supreme Court had found that the matter of Tait’s execution was now entirely in Cabinet’s hands. On the question of the High Court’s jurisdiction, Sir Owen Dixon said, in words I will never forget: ‘The difficulty as to jurisdiction simply does not exist. I have never had any doubt that the 86
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 87
DEATH PENALTY
incidental powers of the Court can preserve any subject-matter, human or not, pending a decision’. The Court then granted an adjournment ‘so that the authority of this Court may be maintained’ and issued an order staying the execution. It was a heart-stopping moment. Faced with further embarrassing delays, Cabinet then commuted Tait’s death sentence and he was certified insane. Bolte was enraged by the humiliation imposed by the High Court. The death penalty, according to some optimistic abolitionists, was now defunct.When reported homicides in Victoria fell to a record low of 22 in 1964, abolitionists thought this a significant sign that under abolition the murder rate would not rise. Deputy Premier Arthur Rylah, however, saw it as a significant confirmation that the death penalty was essential to keep homicide rates down. There were hangings in Fremantle and Adelaide in 1964, and then no more in Western Australia and South Australia. In 1966, as well as teaching at Dandenong High School and appearances on Pick-a-Box, I had begun working for a Master of Arts in Melbourne University’s History Department, with a long thesis on the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790), now remembered, if at all, for his stinginess towards Mozart. My supervisor, Dr Alison Patrick, Rupert Hamer’s sister, was extremely supportive and sympathetic. The death penalty was an important element in my Joseph II thesis. In 1781 he had abolished the death penalty in his domains, and this seemed to identify him as one of the ‘enlightened despots’. However, he was remote from the intellectual circles of the ‘Age of Reason’, going out of his way to avoid meeting Voltaire and the philosophes, although he made exceptions for Benjamin Franklin and Edward Gibbon. He was essentially a pioneer of ‘social engineering’, a high-minded totalitarian. Joseph’s edict had nothing to do with Beccaria’s theories but rested on the ‘populationist’ doctrine that human life was an economic resource that belonged to the state and should be exploited until natural death, not wasted by execution. In the United States between 1930 and 1967 there were 3859 civil executions (54 per cent of them of blacks) and 160 military.* In the 1960s * The US Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia (1972), ruled many death penalty provisions in the States to be ‘arbitrary and capricious’ and thus in violation of the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment against ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. Thirty-six States supporting the death penalty then enacted revised legislation to overcome the Supreme Court’s objections. Executions resumed in 1977, at first in small numbers, then—after 1984—became frequent. 87
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 88
A THINKING REED
the number of executions fell dramatically, leading to an unofficial moratorium, and between 1968 and 1976 there were none. In the 1960s the death penalty seemed to be facing extinction internationally. Most countries in Western Europe had long been abolitionist. New Zealand abolished the death penalty for murder in 1961 (last hanging 1957), Ireland in 1963 (1954), Great Britain in 1965 (1964) and Canada in 1967 (1962). I experienced moods of false confidence, but I underestimated Premier Bolte’s determination, and his anger over the humiliation of the Tait case. On Sunday 19 December 1965 Ronald Joseph Ryan, aged 40, and Peter Walker, aged 24, escaped from B Division of Pentridge Gaol with almost incredible ease. There was no warder on duty at the time. Ryan took a rifle from a guard post and menaced a turnkey into opening the side gate. The escapees knocked over the Salvation Army chaplain who tried to stop them and ran for Sydney Road to steal a getaway car. Ryan aimed his rifle at Warder George Hodson to prevent him from seizing Walker. Hodson fell, hit by a bullet which pierced the innominate artery in his chest, and died within minutes. Ryan and Walker then stole a car and eluded pursuit. They remained in Melbourne for some days, holding up a suburban bank on the day of Hodson’s funeral. On Christmas Eve, Arthur Henderson, an accomplice of the escapees, was found in a St Kilda lavatory with a bullet in his head after having had a fight with Walker. He died next day. Ryan and Walker fled to Sydney, where they were captured in January. I had flown to Vienna in December 1965 to collect materials for my Joseph II thesis, so I failed to grasp the extent of community fear in Melbourne after Henderson’s murder. In March 1966 Ryan and Walker were jointly tried for Hodson’s murder before Mr Justice John Starke. Philip Opas, QC, Ryan’s counsel, stressed the ambiguities surrounding the killing. Hodson, a tall man, was within a few metres of Ryan, a short man, when shot. The downward path of the bullet suggested that Hodson was shot from a height or at a distance. Most witnesses heard only one shot, and prison officer Robert Paterson admitted having fired a shot in the general direction of Ryan and Hodson, although he said that he lifted his high-speed rifle skywards at the last moment. The fatal bullet and its cartridge case were never recovered. However, the jury convicted Ryan of murder and he was sentenced to death. It must have been excruciating for Mr Justice Starke, who had 88
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 89
DEATH PENALTY
fought so hard, and successfully, to save Rupert Max Stuart and Robert Tait, to have been the judge who passed the mandatory death sentence. Newspapers had pointed out Mr Justice Starke’s opposition to the death penalty and his role in the Stuart and Tait cases. Seven jurors later stated publicly that they had considered the death penalty was now obsolete and would have brought in a different verdict if they had realised that Ryan might be hanged. Walker was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 more years in prison, having nine years of his original sentence still to serve. Walker was later tried for Henderson’s murder but convicted of manslaughter only, and sentenced to another 12 years. These differing penalties pointed up the lottery nature of the law. If the jury which acquitted Walker of Henderson’s murder had sat in Ryan’s case, Ryan might well have been acquitted. Ryan appealed unsuccessfully to the Full Supreme Court and the High Court against the application of the narrow and semi-obsolete ‘felony murder’ rule, whereby juries are virtually deprived of the right to bring in a manslaughter verdict where a death has occurred in the course of a felony such as gaol break. On 12 December 1966 State Cabinet confirmed Ryan’s death sentence, 16 years to the day since the decision to hang Lee, Clayton and Andrews had been announced. As was the practice, Mr Justice Starke appeared before Cabinet but was not asked for comment or advice on whether the penalty should be carried out. It was easy, but wrong, to typecast Ryan as a professional killer, ruthless and incorrigibly violent. Born in Carlton in 1925, he grew up in Brunswick and Mitcham. He had a tough childhood with an abusive stepfather.* Apart from an undocumented statement that at 17 Ryan had taken part in a hold-up at a country bank in New South Wales, for which he was never charged, his criminal record began in 1956, at the advanced age of 31. He was a lifelong Liberal Party voter. His crimes began after his marriage (there were two daughters and a son), mostly involving ‘get rich quick’ schemes: false pretences, receiving, forgery, uttering, storebreaking and stealing, running away from a police station, possession of explosives in suspicious circumstances. Ryan spent four years and nine months of his life in gaol until his fatal escape bid. He gained his Intermediate and Leaving Certificates by correspondence in prison and planned to matriculate. * Mike Richards,The Hanged Man. 89
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 90
A THINKING REED
Known to police as a ‘homing pigeon’, easy to apprehend because he was never far from his wife and daughters, he presumably began planning to escape after his marriage broke up and his children no longer visited him. There was a notation on his papers that he needed special supervision because of his desire to see his family. Immediately after Cabinet’s decision to hang (apparently by an 11 to 4 margin, although no formal vote was taken), I convened an urgent meeting of the Anti-Hanging Committee, issued a press release and gave some radio interviews. On one of the last days of the school year, the telephone rang in the staff room. It was Premier Henry Bolte. He said, ‘I am sick of your attacks on the government. You are exploiting your popularity and abusing your position as a teacher. If you don’t shut up, you are finished.’ I took the hint, and resigned forthwith from the Victorian Education Department and held a press conference. I said: ‘I do not want to be paid from the same purse that pays the hangman.’ I regretted leaving Dandenong High School, where I had a significant influence and made many lasting friendships, but could see no alternative. The seven-week campaign over the Christmas–New Year period was even more stressful and frantic than the Tait campaign had been. I worked on it full time. I often talked with Father John Brosnan, Pentridge’s Catholic chaplain, who came to know Ryan well and liked him, as did the prison governor, Ian Grindlay. Apart from personal support, it was music that kept me going, especially the Sinfonia (arioso, for oboe) from J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 156 and Alfred Deller and John Whitworth, counter-tenors, singing ‘Sound the trumpet!’ from Purcell’s Come, ye sons of art (1694). I squibbed meeting Ryan’s mother, Cecilia. I just did not know what I could possibly say to her. I was told that Ryan wrote an appreciative letter to me, but it never arrived. The execution date had been set for 31 January when, unexpectedly, two of my colleagues on the Anti-Hanging Committee, President Val Doube and Vice-President John Ryan, a mathematics lecturer at Melbourne University, pursued a lead that gave some hope for a reprieve. A woman from Gippsland had written to Phil Opas, Ronald Ryan’s barrister, advising that a prisoner, John Tolmie, had been in Pentridge at the time of Ryan’s escape and that he had seen prison officer Paterson fire the shot that killed Warder Hodson. On Sunday 29 January John Ryan made media appeals for Tolmie to come forward. He tracked him down in Dandenong on 30 January, then rushed him to the office of Ralph 90
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 91
DEATH PENALTY
Freadman, Ronald Ryan’s solicitor. I was waiting there. An affidavit was prepared and I took Tolmie down to a judge’s chambers, where it was sworn. An application for a judge to order a stay of execution was then lodged. Mr Justice Starke convened his court at 9.00 p.m., just 11 hours before the scheduled execution. Phil Opas was flying back from London, where he had made a vain appeal for Ryan before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, so the case was then argued passionately by Peter Brusey, QC. Ironically, Starke found himself, as a judge, having to rule on an application very similar to the case he put before the High Court in 1962 over Robert Tait. He made an order staying the execution, using similar words to those of Sir Owen Dixon, pending a further decision by the Executive Council. We were exultant. But not for long. Starke was called in before Cabinet and grilled about his decision. Several other former prisoners came forward to give evidence which supported an alternative explanation for the fatal shot. Then came the revelation that Tolmie had not been in Pentridge on the day of the breakout. The other, and more convincing, affidavits from former prisoners had themselves cast doubt on whether Tolmie was there. On 1 February Tolmie was charged with perjury and the Executive Council set a new execution date. The other affidavits were disregarded. The hanging of Ronald Ryan took place at 8.00 a.m. on Friday 3 February 1967. He was the 186th person to hang in Victoria and the last in Australia. The hangman used the alias ‘Mr Jones’. I felt a terrible sense of personal responsibility for Ronald Ryan’s death: if I had worked harder, networked more effectively, thought more strategically, would the outcome have been different? The Brotherhood of St Laurence, a deeply respected Anglican welfare organisation in Melbourne, published a special report, under the names of Bishop Geoffrey Sambell, the Reverend G. Kennedy Tucker, David Scott and Jan Paterson, which argued what became known as the ‘Tait substitute’ theory, which I regarded as persuasive. If Tait had hanged in 1962 and Henry Bolte had not suffered such a humiliation due to a forced reprieve after what had been an appalling crime, his manic determination to hang someone would have been satiated and Ryan would not have been chosen. I doubt whether Ryan had an intention to kill but I am certain that Bolte did. It was impossible to categorise Ronald Ryan as Victoria’s worst criminal for half a century. 91
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 92
A THINKING REED
On the morning of Ryan’s hanging I could not bring myself to go to the vigil outside Pentridge but stood with another crowd standing in silent protest under the clocks at Flinders Street station. After the execution I went home and, traumatised, lay on the bed all day, just staring at the ceiling. I could hardly bear to imagine the feelings of Ryan’s mother, his wife, his children, his lawyers, Phil Opas and Ralph Freadman, Father John Brosnan, the witnesses and participants at the execution, let alone Ryan himself. It left another deep scar in my mind. It took some weeks to recover and I remain deeply grateful for all the loving support I had at that time. Ronald Ryan was the first murderer to go to the gallows in Victoria under a non-Country Party Premier since 1924. Despite (or even because of ) the intense feeling generated by the Ryan hanging, Henry Bolte won the April 1967 State election with a record majority and again in 1970, but retired in August 1972. For the Anti-Hanging Committee, I edited The Penalty is Death: Capital Punishment in the twentieth century (Sun Books, 1968) and wrote a long chapter,‘The decline and fall of the Death Penalty in the English-speaking world’. This included slabs of material from the Gowers Royal Commission in the United Kingdom, some historical material from Beccaria, and essays by contemporary writers, including Thorsten Sellin and Hans Mattick. I sought out contributions from supporters of capital punishment in order to provoke debate, but these were few in number and embarrassingly feeble in quality. One of Victoria’s most horrible murders took place near Hamilton in January 1971 when Christopher Lowery and Charles King tortured and killed Rosalyn Nolte, aged 15. Community feeling ran high against them for a crime which for sheer horror was far worse than Ryan’s.* I talked to June Nolte, Rosalyn’s mother, whose life was destroyed by the murder. She told me that at first she wanted Lowery and King to hang, but by the time the death sentence came before the Executive Council she wanted their lives spared. She was Lowery and King’s second victim, dying in December 1973 at the age of 42. Having failed to win ALP pre-selection to succeed Arthur Calwell in the Federal seat of Melbourne, in June 1972 I found myself, unexpectedly, as Member of the Legislative Assembly for the State seat of Melbourne, * Lowery and King’s death sentences were commuted to 50-year terms by the Hamer Cabinet, but they were released in 1992, apparently rehabilitated, and disappeared from public notice. 92
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 93
DEATH PENALTY
covering much of the same area, when the sitting Member died and I was returned unopposed. Since the death penalty was a State issue, I set its abolition as my goal. I never faced Henry Bolte in the House because he retired before I was sworn in, handing over the Premiership to his Deputy Rupert James (Dick) Hamer, who privately supported abolition. The Death Penalty Abolition Bill (1973), given a high priority by Gough Whitlam and his Attorney-General Lionel Murphy, abolished capital punishment under Commonwealth law for all offences, including treason. In the House of Representatives, in a free vote, it was carried by 73 to 27. ‘Yes’ votes from the Opposition included Billy Snedden, John Gorton, Jim Killen and Ian Viner. Malcolm Fraser and Ian Sinclair voted ‘No’ with most of the Country Party. Absentees included William McMahon, Doug Anthony, Andrew Peacock and Don Chipp. After passing the Senate, the Bill became law in September 1973. I was a Shadow Minister in the Victorian Parliament when Hamer introduced the Crimes (Capital Offences) Bill providing for the abolition of hanging, and persuaded his party to allow a free vote on the issue. My Second Reading speech was the most passionately argued of my political career.* I mentioned Ryan’s name only twice, in passing. This is really a debate about us, about the members of the Victorian Parliament, giving us an opportunity to declare, not on party lines, just what manner of men and women we are. It is a chance to indicate whether, in the final analysis, we make our judgments coolly and calmly on the basis of evidence which is capable of being weighed and objectively analysed, or whether in discussing the nature of man, objective analysis is useless and we are forced into terra incognita. So, the free vote will enable us all to say,‘Here I stand; I can do no other’. This free vote will enable me to cast my vote for abolition, but only incidentally for abolition. Essentially I cast it against darkness, against obscurantism, against instinct, against pessimism about society and about man’s capacity for moral regeneration. Often people who argue for retention have a fundamental pessimism about man’s capacity for regeneration . . . However, they have no humility about their own judgment; they . . . have not a scintilla of doubt that their judgment is absolutely correct . . . Their confidence in their own judgment and their pessimism about society is an extraordinary paradox. * Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 19 March 1975, vol. 321, p. 4300. 93
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 94
A THINKING REED
Our experience in Victoria, and . . . in other countries, is that in many cases the relatives of the victims do not want vengeance.They often reject the concept of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Execution simply adds to the total horror . . . There are many cases of victims’ families, particularly in Great Britain, where over a long period a large number of executions took place, begging for the death penalty not to be carried out. I wish to quote one case in the United States of America where a nineteen-year-old girl was strangled by a sex killer and the girl’s mother wrote a remarkable letter. The letter was dated 30th November, 1960, and is included in an article entitled ‘What about the Victims?’ by Arthur Koestler and C. H. Rolph. In the letter, the mother stated—‘My daughter was against capital punishment. When she was eight years old she came home from school one day and told me a little boy had thrown a glass of water over her.“And what did you do?” I asked her. “At first,” she said,“I wanted to do the same to him, but I suddenly saw myself doing what he did . . . He would have won”. As she grew up, this idea grew into a desire to help the destroyer.’ If it is to be ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ this will soon be a blind and toothless world.
I referred to Professor Thorsten Sellin, an American sociologist, described by the Gowers Commission on Capital Punishment as ‘perhaps the greatest expert in that field’. Sellin produced an instructive chart comparing homicide rates per 100 000 of population from 1920 to 1955 in three States of the US with similar societies, racially and in urban/rural balance: Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. One State was abolitionist throughout, one executed the death penalty frequently, and the third only spasmodically. I had the chart incorporated in Hansard and challenged the most hardened supporters of the death penalty to examine it and tell me which State was abolitionist and which retentionist. The chart was influential in converting some influential Liberals, Lindsay Thompson among them. I went on: There has been some argument that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder . . . I have never said that it is not a deterrent. The question is whether the punishment deters uniquely. The question which should be raised again and again is whether the death penalty essentially has only a deterrent effect for murder. Nobody ever asks whether the death penalty . . . has a uniquely salutary effect on murder but . . . no comparable effect on other offences. 94
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 95
DEATH PENALTY
11.0 10.0
MICHIGAN INDIANA OHIO
9.0 8.0 7.0 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.0 1920
1925
1930
1935
1940
1945
1950
1955
Crude homicide death rates per 100 000 population, 1920–55 (Thorsten Sellin)
The Parliament was to have a free vote after a long debate and the Liberal majority was large. The Nationals were unanimous in opposing any change to the law. I very much admired Dick Hamer’s lead in the abolition of the death penalty in Victoria, but he didn’t seem to be much of a numbers man. I sometimes talked to him about the prospects for success. It amazed me that when I asked: ‘How do you think so-and-so will vote?’ his invariable answer was ‘I have no idea.’ When I asked: ‘Have you talked with him?’ the answer was ‘No.’‘Do you propose to talk with him?’ ‘No,’ again. On 8 April 1975 the Second Reading carried in the Legislative Assembly by 36 votes to 30 and later passed the Legislative Council by 20 votes to 13. The Labor Party proposed amendments to give judges some discretion in sentencing once the death penalty had been abolished, but these were defeated, essentially on party lines, although two Liberals crossed the floor: an old friend, Brian Dixon, former Melbourne footballer then Minister for Youth, Sport and Recreation, and Athol Guy, composer and performer with The Seekers. I will never forget their courage. In the Legislative Council my strongest Liberal supporter was Peter Block. Helping to end capital punishment gave me a greater sense of satisfaction than any other public activity that I have ever been involved in. 95
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 96
A THINKING REED
Henry Bolte was still around, living on until 1990. Was he hurt by the abolition of the death penalty? I hope so. John Campbell, former Clerk of the Legislative Assembly, in an interview on the Victorian Parliament’s website in June 2001, 26 years after the event, said of the 1975 debate: Barry Jones made a speech which was fairly long but quite remarkable in its content and quality and was remarked upon by Members of all parties as being quite outstanding. It was quite a magnificent speech, well crafted, full of good logic and a tremendous amount of information from the experience of other countries overseas and so on. So, that was one of my memorable experiences . . .
After my election to the Commonwealth Parliament, I raised in the House of Representatives in May 1978 the disappearance from the Australian Archives of files about the trials and executions of many indigenes in Papua New Guinea by the Australian Army, particularly the hanging of 22 men at Higaturu in September 1943. This extraordinary World War II story had been told to me in 1959 by Alfred Conlon,* a consummate networker who advised both Prime Minister John Curtin and Commander-in-Chief General Sir Thomas Blamey, as head of the Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. In Papua New Guinea in 1943 and 1944 the Australian Army tried, convicted and hanged more than 100 indigenes, sometimes for murder or rape, but often for collaboration with Japanese forces. These trials and executions had occurred at the same time as action on the Kokoda Track when indigenes received very sympathetic press coverage in Australia as ‘the fuzzy-wuzzy angels’, so savage punishments, carried out in public but unreported, were hard to explain. The sentences had been confirmed by Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Herring, then General Officer Commanding in Papua New Guinea, but the cases were not referred to Canberra, either for information or confirmation.The Australian Government was in total ignorance of what was being done in its name, but when Prime Minister John Curtin was alerted to the facts in January 1945 he ordered that executions must cease.
* Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 13, p. 479, Peter Ryan. 96
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 97
DEATH PENALTY
This sensitive subject was ignored in the five relevant volumes of The Australian Official War History. The hangings have been effectively filleted from the Australian Archives, so that we did not know how the courts martial operated or what the strategy was behind the trials. Did the accused have the benefit of counsel? Were prosecution witnesses cross-examined? Did the accused understand the concept of ‘collaboration’? In what languages were the trials conducted? Were the condemned able to appeal or petition for mercy? Who decided not to inform the Australian Government? Who was the driving figure behind the trials and executions? Sir Edmund Herring’s role was an extraordinary breach of legal norms, since he had been an eminent barrister who left the Army in 1944 to become Chief Justice of Victoria. My Parliamentary speech was widely reported, including a front-page article in The Times. Even referring to the executions, which I called ‘the best kept and the darkest secret in modern Australian history’, touched some raw nerves. Could their crimes have been worse than the Nazis? Too bad to be even recorded? It seemed implausible. I received more hate mail after this speech than on any other issue in my career. Some of the angriest letters contained important new evidence. I didn’t know what I was talking about, my informants wrote, the hangings had not been at Higaturu but at Samarai/Milne Bay, Aitape, Lae, Rabaul, Port Moresby and in the Sepik where they had been witnesses. The numbers began to rise sharply, to more than a hundred. The few files remaining in the Australian Archives revealed that after Cabinet directed the then General Officer Commanding (GOC), Lieutenant General V.A.H. Sturdee, not to proceed with hanging about fifty indigenes, in July 1945 he sought legal advice from the Army’s Director of Legal Services, Brigadier Alan S. Lloyd, as to whether he was bound to follow Cabinet’s direction. Lloyd replied, drily, that while the GOC might not be legally compellable, a reading of history suggested a certain caution: had he failed to comply, ‘the consequences might not have been happy’ because ‘Cabinet enforces compliance . . . by removing from office any public servant who flouts its instructions’. The oddest feature of the incident was to find a GOC urging execution as a matter of military necessity within weeks of Japan’s surrender. By the mid-1980s in Australia, de facto abolition had become de jure. However, the death penalty returned to the news when Australians Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers were hanged in Penang, Malaysia, in July 97
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 98
A THINKING REED
1986 for drug offences. Prime Minister Hawke called the act ‘barbaric’. There were strong diplomatic representations, bipartisan political protests and a surprising degree of media coverage, all of which reinforced the intransigence of the Malaysian authorities. Chambers’ sister talked to me, but there was no more I could do as a Minister because the Hawke Government had already offended Dr Mahathir by its strong protests. The ALP’s National Conference was meeting in Hobart on the morning of the hangings and I read John Donne’s words, ‘No man is an island . . .’. The atmosphere was electric. A Queenslander, Michael McAuliffe, was hanged in Penang in 1993, also for drug trafficking, but the event passed virtually unnoticed and without protest because the victim apparently accepted his fate. On Sunday 28 April 1996 Martin Bryant opened fire on tourists at Tasmania’s Port Arthur Historic Site with a Colt AR 15 and an SLR semiautomatic rifle and killed 35 people, the greatest mass murder by a single civilian gunman in history. The massacre shocked all Australia. Tasmania’s legal system and its political and social structures handled the whole trauma of the trial and its aftermath with great professionalism, and Chief Justice William Cox, who presided at Bryant’s trial, expressed a fine balance between justice and compassion. Significantly, despite community outrage about Bryant, there was no serious proposal for restoring the death penalty, even by victims’ families. Port Arthur became an important part of my life as a board member of the Port Arthur Management Authority from 1999 and Chair from 2000. I felt a deep sense of release from a long period of anguish when Victoria’s Labor Premier, Steve Bracks, launched Mike Richards’ magisterial book, The Hanged Man, at the Windsor Hotel in February 2002. Thirty-five years had passed since Ronald Ryan’s execution. The Tasmanian Premier, Jim Bacon, sent a long message. Significantly, as teenagers, both Bracks and Bacon had been sensitised to politics by the Ryan hanging. The Grand Ballroom was crowded, and the front rows were packed with jurists, the Chief Justice and other Justices of the Supreme Court and County Court, Liberal and Labor politicians. It demonstrated how much the power structure and value system had changed in those thirty-five years. Many of the grave, ageing jurists had been on the barricades in 1966 and 1967. I was invited to speak alongside Bracks and the author. The occasion was poignant. Many people there had borne injuries for a third of a century. I told the audience: 98
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 99
DEATH PENALTY
I felt such acute sensitivity about the Ryan hanging that until today I have never spoken about it in public, and I have refused all interviews on the subject . . . The Hanged Man is a very rare case of a PhD thesis converted into a book written with passion and precision. We have waited for it a long time—but it is worth the wait. The story is a parable about power and its misuse, differing concepts of justice and confusion between justice and retribution.
Abolition of the death penalty internationally is well advanced in the democratic world, with one notable exception, the United States. The death penalty died in Spain in 1975 with General Franco. The last garrotting was in Barcelona in 1974, but there were shootings in 1975, all of them political executions. In France, where the last guillotining took place in 1977, President Mitterrand abolished the death penalty in 1981. Europe is now uniformly abolitionist, and so is Russia. The death penalty returned to the political agenda in 2005 when the Bali nine, alleged Australian drug couriers, were charged with capital offences, and Nguyen Tuong Van, aged 25, an Australian citizen of Vietnamese origin, was hanged in Singapore (in December) for carrying drugs for his brother from Cambodia to Australia and being caught in transit. Under Singapore’s mandatory death penalty, a system applied with equal inflexibility in China, mitigating circumstances were irrelevant. It would be impossible to characterise Van Nguyen as the criminal of the year or the century, but his penalty would have been no greater if he had been. Execution is the ultimate demonstration of State power; there are no chance factors and the victim becomes a passive object, even before he/she dies. In some jurisdictions, cost is a major factor: execution is far cheaper than lifelong imprisonment. The Canadian philosopher Ronald Wright argues: ‘States arrogate to themselves the power of coercive violence: the right to crack the whip, execute prisoners, send young men to the battlefield. From this stems . . . [what] J.M. Coetzee has called “the black flower of civilization”—torture, wrongful imprisonment, violence for display—the forging of might into right’. States employ ‘various styles of human sacrifice’ as forms of ‘the ultimate political theatre’.* Australians ran the risk of being hypocritical for opposing the death penalty in Australia, or for Australian nationals overseas, but supporting it * Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, p. 71. 99
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 100
A THINKING REED
in cases where Australians had been victims, such as Amrozi and the Bali bombers. It was easy to argue a case for clemency for Van Nguyen, much harder (to some, impossible) to argue for Amrozi, or Saddam Hussein. But if objection to the death penalty is based on principle, then it requires consistency in tough cases. Van Nguyen’s case was distressing, but so were the executions of hundreds of people for drug offences in Singapore and Malaysia in the past thirty years, numbers which suggest that imposing mandatory death sentences has been a spectacular failure. But we should not employ a double standard. Capital punishment is institutionalised sadism and, as Pope John Paul II came to recognise, has to be opposed in all circumstances. Presumably the threat of capital punishment has little deterrent effect on a suicide bomber. In Indonesia Amrozi and his associates, the Bali bombers, have not sought presidential clemency. Should he/they be given what they want, that is, martyrdom, or denied it? Capital punishment is now confined to China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Malaysia, Singapore, much of Africa and some Caribbean mini-states. China has more executions (about 3000 in 2004) than the rest of the world combined. Singapore has executed about 400 people since 1991, far ahead of China or the United States per capita. The United States, as in so many issues, pursues a line of ‘exceptionalism’: it is the only democracy in the world to regularly carry out the death penalty. However, the practice is not evenly spread across the nation. Of 1001 executions carried out between January 1977 and December 2005, 875 occurred in twelve states, nine of them in the old Confederacy with its history of slavery, lynch law, strong gun culture and fervent religious fundamentalism, two in states which bordered the Confederacy, with Arizona (22) in twelfth position. Texas ranked first (with 354 executions). Seventeen states, all in the north, had no executions. The death penalty has had a seriously corrupting effect in American politics, perhaps as great as the corruption from the gun lobby. If an issue is popular, as executions unquestionably are in much of the United States, then it is seen as a bar to political advancement to advocate an unpopular cause, even if a candidate has a deep philosophical conviction for the minority view. Because the politically ambitious in the United States feel obliged to support the death penalty publicly (the Clintons, for example) it is virtually impossible to have a serious debate on the subject. The greatest difference is in degrees of enthusiasm for state killing. Few major party candidates will face the risk of political execution by 100
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 101
DEATH PENALTY
raising issues which the rest of the democratic world wants to have explained: why is the United States the world’s only practising democracy still imposing the death penalty? Do the rest of us all have it wrong? Is there a specifically American truth which overrides universal truth? Is the failure to debate or examine the issue an illustration of political cowardice? The United States is exceptional in advancing retribution rather than deterrence as the major justification for retention. Victims’ family members are eager witnesses at executions. Carnival scenes outside prisons as crowds wait for news of execution are reminiscent of sporting events, with competing teams, and news of a hanging, an electrocution, a lethal injection is cheered like a winning goal by the home team. It reflects deep feelings of anger, frustration, insecurity, inadequacy and a yearning for simple, final solutions to complex problems. The last public executions took place in the United States as recently as the 1930s, but there was some demand to televise the lethal injection of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in June 2001. American executions often occur decades after the crime, so that the condemned in effect serve a life sentence, followed by execution. Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, who had written books against violence and had received nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, was executed in California in December 2005 for murders committed in 1979. Religious fundamentalism is far more significant both socially and politically in the United States than in Australia, and fundamentalists warm to capital punishment. Despite the separation of church and state set out in the United States Constitution, there is a deeply religious sentiment running through American history—a phenomenon vividly described in James A. Morone’s Hellfire Nation (2003). Fundamentalists rely, in part, on a highly selective interpretation of the Bible: on my reading of the New Testament it is difficult to see Jesus as a hard-line retentionist. Fundamentalists prefer the Mosaic code, which provided death for many crimes, including murder, witchcraft and cursing parents. It is worth recalling that as an expression of the prevailing thinking of the Hebrews, when they were nomads without penitentiaries, the Mosaic law expressly endorsed slavery. Those who insist that capital punishment is ‘God’s law’ still read that law selectively. In sharp contrast to the European or Australian approach, crime control in the United States is not primarily a social problem with a variety of measured responses but a primal struggle with the forces of evil. Evil-doers must then be eliminated rather than tamed or transformed. Oddly, some serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer have been ‘born agains’. 101
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 102
A THINKING REED
A major reason for the United States’ refusal to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) was that it prohibited the execution of children, a protocol regarded as an unwarranted interference with domestic law. A decade ago fifteen nations had laws permitting the execution of children. Iraq was one of them, until Saddam Hussein changed the law. In March 2005 the United States Supreme Court ruled, by a margin of five Justices to four, that execution for crimes committed when offenders were juveniles was unconstitutional. The majority opinion cited the opposition to capital punishment by other democracies, a comment which aroused a furious response from judges in the minority and supporters of the death penalty in Congress: ‘The opinion of other nations is irrelevant’. In Australia the death penalty is no longer on the mainstream political agenda, despite evidence of some community support. Polls suggested that the community was evenly divided about retaining the death penalty in Australia, but there was little sympathy for Van Nguyen or the Bali nine. Ending capital punishment has been the cause that I have felt most passionately about for more than sixty years. I take profound satisfaction in my role in securing its abolition in Australia.
ﱗ
Judgments normally inflame themselves towards revenge out of horror for the crime. That is precisely what tempers mine: my horror for the first murder makes me frightened of committing a second, and my loathing for the original act of cruelty makes me loath to imitate it. Michel de Montaigne:‘On physiognomy’ It is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them. Montaigne:‘On the lame’ Three degrees of latitude upset the whole of jurisprudence and one meridian determines what is true . . . it is an odd sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river, true on this side of the Pyrenees, false on the other. Blaise Pascal: Pensées (60 H3) Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others: those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition. Pascal: Pensées (434) 102
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 103
CHAPTER 4
ﱗ
Quiz Show
More than thirty years after the quiz show Pick-a-Box ended, people still approach me in the street: ‘You’re the man who won all those prizes on television!’ Sometimes they mistakenly recall me as a star on Sale of the Century, a long-running quiz from a later era. When I say: ‘No. It was Pick-a-Box,’ they insist: ‘I’m sure it was Sale of the Century.’ Oddly, many enquirers were not even born in my Pick-a-Box years, which ran from 1960 to 1968. But my appearances have had a folkloric quality, and I cannot claim ownership of all the memories. In my period as Minister for Science, from 1983 to 1990, when I was trying to reshape the nation, it was particularly deflating when wellwishers said, ‘We all loved you on the quizzes. Are you still teaching at Dandenong High School? What are you doing these days?’ When I was seeking ALP pre-selection for a Federal seat at the end of 1971, I grew a beard to make old Pick-a-Box publicity photographs obsolete. My quiz appearances attracted public interest long before my Pick-aBox debut. My first media performance was on a radio quiz on 3GL, Geelong, in September 1943, when I was almost 11. The compere, Judy Willing, asked me.‘What was the pen-name used by the American writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens?’ I answered, correctly, ‘Mark Twain’ and received a threepenny bit as reward. After that, there was no holding me. In 1944 I became the youngest finalist on Junior Information, a radio quiz on 3KZ Melbourne. I was encouraged to enter by a young teacher at Caulfield North Central School, Mary Johnson, and she accompanied me 103
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 104
A THINKING REED
to the 3KZ studios in Melbourne’s Trades Hall building. She was the subject of an early crush. The compere was Norman Banks (1906–1985), a competent broadcaster and promoter who founded ‘Carols by Candlelight’, which has become a Melbourne institution. A former Anglican clergyman, then a car salesman, he had a rich fruity voice with a personality to match. He ranged from football commentaries to compering talent quests. Later he was to be an advocate of far Right causes and a strong defender of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. He ran a television talk show in 1963–64 and became a pioneer of talk-back radio on station 3AW in 1967. My hero at this time was Professor W.A. Osborne, who had been the dominant figure on the radio panel quiz Information, Please from its inception in 1938. This was a direct copy of the American program Information Please (no comma), which ran on NBC from 1938 to 1952 and was hosted by the writer Clifton Fadiman. Until 1955 the antipodean Information, Please was broadcast on Saturday nights on 3DB, Melbourne, owned by the Herald & Weekly Times. (Its call sign has now disappeared.) A panel of four experts answered questions sent in by listeners. Questions answered correctly resulted in a 5-shilling reward for the sender. If the panel was wrong, then a gong was struck, with a one pound pay out. Information, Please was not a discussion program like the BBC’s Brains Trust, sometimes rebroadcast by the ABC. Nevertheless, with four experienced performers on the panel, questions often provoked animated argument. Other panellists included Eric Welch, sports commentator with a deep enthusiasm for music, Crosbie Morrison, editor of the magazine Wild Life, pioneer broadcaster on environment issues and later director of Victoria’s National Parks, and Ian Mair, a hard-drinking, widely read journalist. Later panellists included Sir John Medley, former Vice Chancellor of Melbourne University, Alan Nicholls, journalist, and, but only occasionally, a woman, Miss Valentine Leeper, a classics teacher who became a vigorous centenarian. John Stuart was the compere, with (Sir) Eric Pearce as his mellifluous stand-in. William Alexander Osborne (1873–1967), son of a Presbyterian clergyman, had been born in Hollywood, County Down, Northern Ireland. He studied medicine at Queen’s College, Belfast, and in Germany at Tübingen University, then lectured at University College, London. Lord Lister had examined him in Anatomy. He had a good command of German, French, Italian, Spanish and Norwegian, as well as Latin and some Greek. As a young man he had been strikingly good looking 104
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 105
QUIZ SHOW
and considered himself to have been a fine Nordic specimen. Osborne applied successfully for the chair of Physiology at Melbourne University and held it from 1903 until 1938. His enemies, and he had many, spread the tale that he had applied for three Melbourne chairs, History, English Literature and Physiology, and had succeeded in the one he least desired. This story, with its implication that Osborne was essentially a dilettante, was not intended to flatter. He gave some credibility to the myth by saying that he would have preferred to teach humanities. He called the division between science and the humanities ‘the great frustration of my life’. He was an exceptional teacher whose students included Sir Macfarlane Burnet and Sir John Eccles, both Nobel Laureates, Dame Jean Macnamara, Dame Kate Campbell, Sir Edward (‘Weary’) Dunlop, Rod Andrew and Sir Roy Douglas (‘Pansy’) Wright, who succeeded him as Professor of Physiology. However, Osborne did not fulfil his brilliant early promise as a researcher. A formidable polemicist who wrote many newspaper articles, Osborne was deeply opposed to organised religion and staunchly anti-Catholic. He hated lawyers too. He had a keen sense of humour and a ribald atheism. He had been a Fabian Socialist as a young man, but then moved towards the Right. His views reflected the eugenics of Karl Pearson, with whom he had worked. He carried out research in Townsville on the adaptability of whites to working in the tropics, and was deeply committed to White Australia. From 1915 he campaigned strongly for the establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), later renamed the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and resented credit being given to Sir Orme Masson, Melbourne’s Professor of Chemistry. They detested each other. He wrote a biography (1920) of his friend William Sutherland, who conducted original research in the viscosity of fluids and gases, anticipating Einstein’s paper on ‘Brownian motion’, but was regarded as insane by Melbourne academics. Osborne was President of the Royal Society of Victoria 1916–17 and President of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society for decades. He founded the Rotary Club of Melbourne in 1921 and was its first President: Sir John Monash succeeded him. He was a member of the Rationalist Society of Australia, with his friend Sir John Latham, later Chief Justice of the High Court. He became a surprisingly liberal Commonwealth film censor 1928–29. As he explained, he operated on a simple premise: if the 105
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 106
A THINKING REED
Catholic Church objected to a film, he would let it through. He was a rigorous and not always liberal chair of the Advisory Board for the Commonwealth Literary Fund 1944–46, but developed some respect for Ben Chifley who, as Treasurer, also Prime Minister, had to approve recommendations. From 1944 I became a regular attender at the 3DB studios in Flinders Street, next to the Herald-Sun building, when Information, Please was broadcast live. I soon plucked up courage to speak to the great man but, as I found out many years later, this would not have been difficult. After a few meetings, I was obviously a favourite. When the program ended, at 8 o’clock, we would walk down Flinders Street to Swanston Street where he would buy fish from Wise’s Fish Shop, famous for the running water inside the window. (Barry Humphries noted that this feature was adopted by the architect Sir Roy Grounds in his National Gallery of Victoria.) Almost invariably he would comment that the young man serving exhibited the characteristics of Ionian beauty. We would then walk back to the Princes Bridge Railway Station, where Professor Osborne would catch the train to Eltham, from where he was picked up and driven home to Kangaroo Ground. I returned by tram to Caulfield. I was fascinated by his talk. If I had thought of it then, the parallel to Samuel Johnson and James Boswell might have been apt. Professor Osborne (I always called him ‘Prof ’, Melbourne University contemporaries knew him as ‘Ossie’) was a great collector of experiences.As a young man he had interviewed aged survivors of the Irish potato famine of 1846–47. In South Africa he had talked with old people who had been Voortrekkers as children in 1839.As a child he had met a Miss Asche, who as a young girl had been lifted up to the window to see redcoats marching off to repel an abortive French landing at Bantry Bay, in December 1796, in support of Irish rebellion.This made him a link between me and the 18th century! A servant at his mother’s home had been an aunt of the Brontë sisters. He told Geoffrey Blainey, but not me, that his mother had been the childhood sweetheart in Northern Ireland of the bushranger Captain Moonlight.As a child he had seen Disraeli and had met Arthur Orton, the notorious ‘Tichborne Claimant’. He had talked to Oscar Wilde and introduced me to Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland (1886–1967), then living in Melbourne. The Prof introduced me to the Hill of Content Bookshop in Bourke Street, Melbourne, when it was still run by A.H. Spencer, who covered 106
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 107
QUIZ SHOW
the windows with painted notices containing quotations about the nobility of the British Empire. Thelma Holland, Vyvyan’s young wife, used to work there, and Barry Humphries was another schoolboy customer. The Prof also collected books and autographed letters, two areas where he had a lifelong influence. He sent me books, such as Whitaker’s Almanac and Morley’s Life of Gladstone, as well as his own A Visitor to Australia (1934) and collections of essays. Sometimes he talked mysteriously about the book Là-bas (Down There) by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, a novel about Satanists obsessed by the life of Gilles de Rais. His collection of autographs was a revelation: letters from Galileo, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Napoleon, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Darwin, Watt and Banks, and a musical score by Purcell. He also collected American Indian material. Inspired, I began my own autograph collection systematically in 1946 by writing to the eight Australian Prime Ministers still living. The Prof added letters of Prime Ministers Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes, Nobel Laureates in Medicine Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, Sir Charles Sherrington and Sir Henry Dale, and a note by Warren Hastings (1732–1818), first British Governor-General of Bengal, who was to figure in my later role as a quiz star. I was invited to his home at The Hall, Kangaroo Ground, several times. His unhappy wife, Dr Ethel Osborne,* who had been a distinguished and courageous pioneer in the areas of industrial hygiene and women’s health, was far gone in alcoholic eccentricity. I have a vivid memory of beef, peas and ice-cream being served together on the one plate. Having read more about her achievements since then, I am sorry never to have talked with her seriously. The Quiz Kids ran from 1942 until 1962, every Sunday night, for the Macquarie Network from 2GB, Sydney, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. Compered by John Dease† (1906–79), it was based on the long-running American Quiz Kids, which had once starred James (‘Lucky Jim’) Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA.As in Information, Please, listeners sent in questions. Neville Wran was an early member of the Sydney-based regular panel of five juveniles. Victoria provided an alternate panel for about six weeks each year, organised by the heroically named Myles Fortunatus Evelyn Wright, then * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11, p. 100, Diane Langmore. † ibid., vol. 13, p. 601, Barry Jones. 107
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 108
A THINKING REED
a producer at 3AW, later chair of the Australian Broadcasting Control Board 1966–76, and Graham Kennedy’s bête noir. I was a member of the Victorian panel in 1947 and 1948. The Quiz Kids transferred to ABC Television from 1964 until 1968. John Dease and three unidentified Quiz Kids were featured on an 85-cent stamp issued by Australia Post in June 1991 as part of the ‘Golden Days of Radio’ series. Prof Osborne encouraged my quiz performances. His mannerisms in answering questions had a profound influence on my style, providing masses of detail, but also including a degree of grimacing and twitching. He influenced my thinking and interest in the history and philosophy of science, films, ethnography, classical history, archaeology, avidity for experience and travel, and enthusiasm for collecting. And yet, in many areas he had little or no influence. He showed little interest in the performing arts, or in painting and sculpture, matters of passionate concern for me. He had some knowledge of music and described going to hear the great violinist Pablo Sarasate. He read little contemporary writing, inside or outside Australia. He was contemptuous of politics and politicians, especially on the Left, and hated all religions. He was skilled in archery and boomerang throwing, and as a young man had been an accomplished boxer and shot. Around 1956, Prof Osborne moved to Magnetic Island, near Townsville. We still corresponded but I saw little of him in his last decade. Rosemary and I visited him in hospital in Greensborough a few weeks before he died on 28 August 1967. He was frail and shrivelled but his memory remained until the end. We were in Finland and missed his funeral. After my election to the Federal Parliament in 1977, Gordon Dean, Liberal MHR for Herbert, in North Queensland, sought me out.Ten years younger than me, he had grown up on Magnetic Island and from about the age of 15 had been encouraged by W.A. Osborne in the same way I had been twelve or so years earlier. He gave me a copy of a letter Prof Osborne had written to him in 1958, and it came as a body blow. The Prof wrote that he had lost all faith in me because I had prostituted myself and whatever intellect I had to politics, the lust for power and personal advancement. I was deeply hurt. Worse still, it was not even accurate. In 1988 I was commissioned to write a 1500-word entry on Osborne for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. It took far longer than expected. At a party I met Dr Marjorie Tipping, widow of the journalist Bill Tipping and an accomplished historian. She had been a friend of Osborne’s daughter-in-law, Beryl, and after his death she helped to sort 108
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 109
QUIZ SHOW
his papers, consigning much material to the flames. Prof ’s three daughters wanted a more radical culling. The remainder went to Melbourne’s La Trobe Library. She enquired how the Osborne entry was progressing and I told her that the sheer mass of material had slowed me down. She asked,‘How did you deal with the homosexuality?’ ‘Homosexuality?’ I gasped.‘What homosexuality? Until you mentioned it, I had never thought about his sexuality. Are you sure it wasn’t all in his head?’ ‘That’s the last place it was.’ Apparently, on Saturday afternoons he would attend film showings in Melbourne, trawling. He was presumably satiated by the time we met after Information, Please on Saturday night. On hearing this, I remembered that once, as we were walking down the stairs at 3DB, he had kissed me briefly on the lips. I thought it odd at the time, but dismissed it. Marjorie suggested using coded language in my entry. I adopted her wording: ‘He could be seen as warm and generous, cold and wounding: often he was both and he was susceptible to the flattery of both sexes’. In October 1960, 3DB revived Information, Please, with Peter Surrey as compere. I joined a panel including Zelman Cowen, Professor of Public Law at Melbourne University, later a Vice Chancellor of two universities and a successful Governor-General; John Lynch, Victorian Parliamentary Draftsman; and Phil Garrett, chief research officer at the Melbourne Public Library. I was 28, a high school teacher and already a competitor on Pick-a-Box. Over the next few years a variety of panellists came and went, but I remained a fixture. The others included Rohan Rivett, Alfred Deakin’s grandson, journalist and prisoner-of-war of the Japanese; Bill Glanville Cook, school teacher and secretary of the Rationalist Society; and Stephen Murray-Smith, former Communist militant, editor of Overland and academic. In 1973 Beat the Brains, a reincarnation of Information, Please, was broadcast on the ABC, with the veteran Hal Lashwood, a board member on the Commission, as compere—an intriguing illustration of conflict of interest. Panellists included Zelman Cowen, Rohan Rivett, Bill Cook, Stephen Murray-Smith, composer and essayist Felix Werder, and me.The recording sessions were jovial but Stephen was disturbed by reading some critical letters in The Listener In which accused the ABC of replaying old programs. Stephen kept meticulous records in his fine italic hand of all questions asked over many years and often came up from Mt Eliza to stay with Rosemary and me to prepare for these contests. 109
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 110
A THINKING REED
He could always tell precisely when we had been asked, for example, to identify Shakespeare’s longest play and who had answered correctly. He found, to his horror, that all the questions asked in recent months had been recycled. All that differed was the way we answered, with any additional jokes or showing off thrown in. We confronted Hal Lashwood, who confessed that he had no backup staff to acknowledge and check questions sent in by listeners to Beat the Brains and had relied on tapes of old programs. We asked,‘But what about the payouts to listeners whose questions stumped the panel?’ Hal said, ‘That’s not a problem. I just made up the names and addresses and no money was sent out.’ The panel immediately decided to withdraw and the program came to an abrupt, and unexplained, end but Hal Lashwood remained an ABC Commissioner until Malcolm Fraser removed him in 1976. In the 1950s as an undergraduate I represented Melbourne University against a British team in a University Quiz broadcast by the ABC and the BBC. Creighton Burns, then an academic, later editor of The Age, was joint compere. Melbourne lost in a close finish. In 1955 I won some money on Jack Davey’s Give It a Go, on the Macquarie Network. Davey was a witty New Zealander, rivalled in audience appeal only by the extrovert American Bob Dyer. Between them they dominated Australia’s commercial airwaves from the 1940s until television began in 1956.Years later, I found that John Winston Howard, then a 16-year-old student at Canterbury Boys’ High School in Sydney, had also been a contestant on Give It a Go in 1955. In March 1958 I won The Dulux Show, another Macquarie production also hosted by Davey. The prize was a first class round-the-world airfare with Qantas which, with two Lockheed Super Constellations, literally offered ‘round the world’ service. I converted part of the first class fare so that I could take in side trips: to Dublin, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Nicosia, Jerusalem, Beirut and Hong Kong. In May I set off on the Southern Aurora. I had never left Australia before. Percy Campbell, 2GB’s manager, asked if I would like to try for one of the American quizzes, then enormously successful on television, during my visit to the United States. The most popular were Twenty One and Tic-Tac-Dough on NBC and The $64,000 Question on CBS. Twenty One and Tic-Tac-Dough were both packaged by the firm of Barry and Enright. Jack Barry was the host of Twenty One, Dan Enright the producer of both. I arrived in New York immediately before a scandal about ‘fixing’ the answers erupted over Twenty One. This fraud was dramatised very 110
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 111
QUIZ SHOW
effectively in Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show.A defeated champion, Herb Stempel, played in the film by John Turturro, accused producers, sponsors and the network of rigging the show to ensure high ratings by using theatrical techniques to create dramatic tension in each episode. He charged that successful contestants, including himself, were fed answers and coached, as if they were actors, to create maximum suspense. As soon as winners had passed their ‘use by’ date, marked by a plateau or fall in audience ratings, they had to take a dive. One of the unwritten rules of the game was that a big winner had to be defeated by a relatively easy question, so that millions of people watching at home could say, ‘I knew the answer to that’. Stempel was angry that the producers had typecast him as a deferential nerd and suspected anti-Semitism, implausible though this seems in New York’s entertainment world. He was particularly resentful at having been defeated by Charles Van Doren, a handsome, articulate, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant academic. His father Mark, sensitively played by Paul Scofield, was a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet, his mother a novelist. His uncle Carl had won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Benjamin Franklin. Charles Van Doren had an unbroken run of 14 weeks on Twenty One, won $US129 000 and became a household name. His face appeared on the cover of Time magazine. After he took his own, inevitable, dive, NBC gave him a well-paid, on-camera job as an educational consultant. Stempel’s charges were taken up by Richard N. Goodwin, an investigator for a US Congressional Committee on Legislative Oversight. This led to a public hearing and, ultimately, Van Doren’s confession and downfall. Goodwin wrote a book on the subject and, played by Rob Morrow, appeared as a central character in the film Quiz Show, which he co-produced. Percy Campbell gave me a letter of introduction to Dan Enright. I met him in New York and was then auditioned for Tic-Tac-Dough, the second rating NBC quiz. In Quiz Show Charles Van Doren first turns up for an audition for Tic-Tac-Dough, exactly as I did at about the same time. The producers told me I had scored better than any foreigner who had ever auditioned. However, it would not be fair to allow me to compete in a quiz designed essentially for American audiences and participants. If the questions were heavily loaded with American subjects, this would seem to be unfair to me. If American subjects were downgraded or excluded, then this would be unfair to American contestants. I thought this was nonsense, because American history and politics were among my strongest subjects. 111
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 112
A THINKING REED
But there was no right of appeal. As a consolation prize I was put on a panel show in New York, What’s My Line? Dan Enright gave me a letter of introduction to Lew Grade in London, and I appeared on the British version of the same show. The reason for my exclusion became clear when the Van Doren story blew up later in 1958. The program’s producers knew that they could exercise strong pressure on local contestants. They had a powerful motivation to keep silent and not reveal their complicity in fraud. A foreigner was potentially a loose cannon. He/she could not be let into the secret. Twenty One had a serious design flaw which virtually guaranteed ‘fixing’.To win a round, contestants had to reach a score of 21 points.They were invited to nominate the degree of difficulty for questions to be asked. If a champion felt threatened by the challenger, he/she might try to reach 21 points with two questions: one with 11 and the second with 10 points. If contestants judged their opponents as weak, they could take a low-risk strategy, nominating three questions (each with 7 points), or even four (3 ⫻ 5, 1 ⫻ 6). With difficult 10- and 11-point questions (usually with multi-part answers), the producers recognised that there was only one way to guarantee a perfect score. When the truth about Twenty One was exposed it caused a momentary shock, but more than forty years on, commercial television in the United States is committed to ‘infotainment’, information dressed up for titillation and amusement. Neil Postman made a devastating critique of this in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). As the film Quiz Show made clear, Barry and Enright were made to bear full responsibility for the fraud on the public. NBC and the sponsor Geritol (‘for tired blood’) insisted they were not aware of any impropriety: indeed, they acted as if they had barely heard of Twenty One.After a period of exile, Barry and Enright returned and made a fortune with another television game show, The Joker’s Wild.When the film Quiz Show appeared in 1994, Geritol was still sold in pharmacies, although made by a different company.Van Doren had retired after working for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Goodwin had worked for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, then became a writer for The New Yorker. Herb Stempel remained in obscurity. If contestants on Pick-a-Box had needed perfect scores to continue, I would not have survived my first round. On average, I answered four out of five questions in the box-picking segment: a perfect score was far less common. Fortunately, because the format was flexible, it did not matter, so long as my opponent failed to answer more. 112
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 113
QUIZ SHOW
Before my long Pick-a-Box run began in 1960, I had a brief, unsuccessful, foray into Australia’s version of Tic-Tac-Dough, on HSV 7, Melbourne, hosted by Dan Webb. This game show had two elements: answering questions, the order of which was determined by placement on a noughts and crosses board. I was good at answering questions, but woeful at playing noughts and crosses. Bob Dyer (1909–1984), self-styled ‘last of the hillbillies’, had been born in Hartsville County,Tennessee, halfway between Hartsville and Lebanon, near Nashville, the state capital. Bob’s family name was Dies, but he changed it after entering show business in Nashville. As he explained, a show could hardly be promoted with a poster that read: ‘Bob Dies on stage’. His cousin Martin Dies junior (1901–1972), an anti-Communist crusader from Texas, was first chairman of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities 1938–45. After I saw Robert Altman’s important film Nashville (1975) I understood far more of the context in which Bob had grown up, the world of the Grand Old Opry, Nashville’s famous vaudeville theatre, where a talent to entertain was one of the few ways out of poverty. I interviewed him for a profile which appeared in The Bulletin. He told me that he often walked to school without shoes. He said: Back in Hartsville County my elder brother, a Negro boy and I all grew up together. We walked to school every day and walked back home together, but at the cross roads the Negro boy walked one way to the all-black school while my brother and I went to the all-white school.Where was the point of separation during school hours when we were brothers for the rest of the day? Our black friend later got into trouble and died tragically. I often wonder what would have happened if our colours had been reversed. That is why I have always hated racial or religious intolerance.
During the Depression he worked in a Chinese laundry, on showboats and carnivals, medicine shows, circuses and even some repertory companies, playing a variety of roles. He first came to Australia in July 1937 with ‘The Marcus Show’, touring with the Tivoli circuit. He then toured England and appeared on television in its primitive era, at the Alexandra Palace, in 1937. He returned to Australia in 1939 with his show ‘The Last of the Hill-Billies’, and stayed. I first saw him at the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne. In September 1940 he married the vivacious Dorothy Mack (née Thelma Phoebe McLean), one of the Tivoli’s chorus girls, always known as 113
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 114
A THINKING REED
Dolly. They had no children, but it was their proud boast that they had never spent a night away from each other. He was a tireless entertainer for Australian and American troops during the war, performing in war zones in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands for the US Special Services Branch Entertainment Section. After World War II he ran a series of successful game shows on radio, earning a great reputation for flamboyance. He had a long-standing rivalry, partly genuine, partly simulated, with Jack Davey, presumably modelled on the ‘feud’ in the United States between Jack Benny and Fred Allen. Davey had a sharper wit, but was essentially a radio performer who failed to make a fully successful transition to television. He was a roaring boy, a great gambler who threw fortunes away with both hands and was a risk-taking racing-car driver. Bob Dyer understood that television was not wireless with pictures, but theatre at home. Despite his flamboyance on stage, Bob was extremely cautious, risk averse to a degree, uxorious, never gambled and rarely if ever drank. Dolly’s mother lived with them until she died. Bob and Dolly’s only conspicuous consumption was big-game fishing. They broke 50 world records and 150 Australian records between them. In 1949, newspapers reported Bob Dyer as paying the highest personal exertion tax in the nation with earnings, in the austere Chifley era, of £13 000. Bob Dyer’s Pick-a-Box began on radio in 1948, and was ‘simulcast’ for five years after its television debut in 1957. Originally, it was shown on Saturdays at 7 p.m. on ATN 7 Sydney and GTV 9 in Melbourne, with Colgate (‘Happy lathering, customers!’) as the principal sponsor. Until 1959, only Sydney and Melbourne had television so there were no national networks. Pick-a-Box was a 30-minute program in two parts. In the first half, there were two or three rounds in which two contestants were asked the same five questions.While the reigning box picker was before the cameras, the challenger was in a sound-proof room until brought in to be asked the same questions. In later years, both contestants were on stage in soundproof booths, wearing headphones which played thickly textured music, blocking out speech except when the director threw the switch to Bob Dyer’s questions.The winner of the round was then invited to pick one of 40 (originally 30) numbered boxes on offer, each with a card inside identifying a prize. But in choosing Box 17 or Box 24 a winner would not know if the prize was a motor car, a washing machine or a safety pin. Before identifying the prize in the box, Bob Dyer would tempt the contestant with a sum of money, say, £150 or £200, in pre-decimal days. The contestant would then ponder whether to risk an unknown prize for 114
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 115
QUIZ SHOW
cash in hand. Bob always asked the studio audience, ‘The money or the box?’ The audience invariably shouted,‘The box’, even when Bob offered more money. Having won the prize, the contestant could choose to retire, or go on to face another challenger, with the right to pick another box. The second half (apart from brief commercials) was generally devoted to a ‘Battle of the Champions’, a ten-week contest between former successful box winners for a cash prize of £1000 ($2000), which seemed a lot in those days. The loser received a consolation prize of £500. The same questions, generally about one hundred all up, were asked of both contestants, each in sound-proof boxes, with their score shown in lights. The first contestant on Pick-a-Box to win high national recognition was Leah Andrew (née Hollings) (1925– ). Like Graham Kennedy and me, she had attended Caulfield North Central School, then went to Methodist Ladies’ College, left at 16, served in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force, then became a physiotherapist, wife, mother and arts graduate. She worked at Monash University in various roles, including student counsellor. On 19 September 1959, having won a record number of 28 boxes out of 30, she lost a round. However, in November 1959 she won the first ‘Battle of the Champions’ contest, against Ken Eccleston. She then won two more, against Frank Fargher and Peggy Tyrrell, losing to Bob Hilliard in the fourth in September 1960. Many Pick-a-Box fans claimed to remember an exciting contest between Leah and me, but we never competed against each other. I had always assumed that if selected as a Pick-a-Box contestant I would do well, because the questions were overwhelmingly in the areas of my strength: history, biography, geography. As an American, Bob Dyer had no interest in Australian sport, so I was never likely to be exposed for my ignorance of cricket, football, tennis or racing. I applied to be a contestant every month from August 1958. It seemed to be harder for applicants living away from Sydney to be selected: it took 19 months for me to be interviewed, auditioned and chosen. My first rounds were to be recorded in Melbourne on 9 April 1960, the day of a fiercely contested Federal by-election, in the La Trobe seat to the north-east of Melbourne in the Dandenongs. The vacancy occurred when Richard Gardiner Casey, Minister for External Affairs, resigned from the House of Representatives on being elevated to the House of Lords. I handed out ALP ‘How to Vote’ cards during the morning, then recorded my Pick-a-Box debut. Dolly Dyer, the show’s co-host, introduced me: ‘Bob, this is Barry Jones from Caulfield, a 28-year-old school teacher’. Shown on Saturday 115
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 116
A THINKING REED
4 June 1960, this was the first of 208 appearances over an eight-year period, the equivalent of exactly four years. With a score of four out of five questions, I defeated the incumbent, Ray Powell. My winning question was: ‘In English history, who was the father of “the little princes in the Tower”?’ I answered,‘Edward IV.’ From the outset I challenged an occasional lack of precision in the questions. In my second show, Bob asked ‘the name of the battle fought on the Plains of Abraham in 1739’. I corrected him at once, pointing out that he must have meant the Battle of Quebec which had taken place in 1759, not 1739. In the Seven Years War both the British and French generals, James Wolfe and Louis Montcalm, were killed in this battle. He laughed and said that a fly speck had obscured the date on his question card. From 4 July 1960, Pick-a-Box was shown on Mondays at 7 p.m., on ATN 7 Sydney, HSV 7 Melbourne and the other stations in what had become the Channel Seven Network. British Petroleum (formerly the Commonwealth Oil Refineries) was the principal sponsor. Bob’s new slogan was ‘Happy motoring, customers!’. The Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac) provided cash prizes and TAA (now Qantas) flew competitors to the recording venue. Other major prizes, such as a car, a refrigerator or travel came from specific sponsors. When the bank provided £1500 ($3000) in prize money for a contest with ten weeks of very high audience exposure it represented an astonishingly low cost, even allowing for contributions to overheads and whatever Bob Dyer charged them.After 1962, Pick-a-Box was only on television, ending when Bob retired in March 1971. My long run on Pick-a-Box was only on black-and-white television. Colour television did not begin in Australia until March 1975. I seem to have made an early impression. In July 1960 John Somerville Smith’s Top-Secret Newsletter denounced me as a ‘top-level Communist agent’ and suggested that Bob Dyer was subsidising me through Pick-aBox, either because he was a fellow traveller or wanted a free trip to Moscow.At least it was flattering to be described as ‘top-level’. In October 1960 Somerville Smith was gaoled for criminal libel (but not of me). The notorious ‘Warren Hastings’* question, ‘Who was the first British * Warren Hastings (1732–1818), a controversial figure, underwent a long impeachment proceeding before the House of Lords, dragging on (but not continuously) for nearly seven years (1788–95). Edmund Burke accused him of ‘oppression, maladministration and corruption’. Sheridan and Fox both urged his conviction. Hastings was ultimately acquitted of all charges and made a Privy Counsellor as a consolation prize. 116
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 117
QUIZ SHOW
Governor-General of India?’, was asked on my tenth appearance, shown on 8 August. It was the turning point of my Pick-a-Box career. I assumed at once that the answer Bob Dyer expected was ‘Warren Hastings’, the conventional wisdom. But I also knew that it was wrong. So I decided to give the answer, but then withdraw it.There was a reason for my certainty. Many years earlier my mentor, Prof Osborne, had given me a short holograph letter by Hastings for my collection. After researching, as was my practice, I found that Hastings’ actual title was not ‘Governor-General of India’ but ‘Governor-General of Bengal’ or, sometimes, ‘GovernorGeneral of Bengal in India’. I had been deeply disappointed at the time. So I took an existential decision to give an elaborate answer. I launched into a monologue: Earl Canning had been Governor-General, but then assumed the title of Viceroy of India in 1858, after the Mutiny. Then the title of Viceroy had been changed back to Governor-General for Lord Mountbatten in 1947 on the partition of India. I added that the original title had been Governor-General of Bengal and went on, ‘Of course, Warren Hastings is generally credited with being the first British GovernorGeneral of India, but this is technically not correct.’ I added that in 1948 Shri Chakravarti Rajagopalachari had become the first Indian-born Governor-General. The elaborate, unfamiliar name raised a cheap laugh, and I regret this now. As I expected, my answer immediately put Bob Dyer on the spot. ‘Warren Hastings’ was the answer on his card, with the authority of Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, my naming, and eliminating, Warren Hastings made him realise that he faced an unprecedented situation. Unfortunately, I could not recall who had first held the title. I assumed that my challenger, Margaret Smith, a Sydney arts graduate, would also answer ‘Warren Hastings’. She was waiting, off stage, in a sound-proof room. Bob Dyer seized the opportunity: ‘Customers, I find myself in a dilemma.’ Before ruling on my answer, he called in the challenger. I had answered four questions correctly in the round and ‘Warren Hastings’ was in dispute. My challenger answered three correctly, missed one, and gave the predictable ‘Warren Hastings’ answer. If I was wrong and she was right, then the round was drawn 4:4. A play-off question would be needed. Pick-a-Box was always recorded in advance, but to my knowledge Bob Dyer never edited, even though he was expert at it. He thought on the run and took a chance—that a relatively esoteric piece of information could sustain 30 minutes of prime-time television. He announced that the Warren Hastings issue would be settled on the next program, broadcast on 117
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 118
A THINKING REED
the following Monday.As usual, because programs were recorded four at a time, there was three weeks to wait for the next session. He decided to devote a full program to the issue, without commercials. In the interim, a panel of three experts was chosen: Marjorie Jacobs (later Professor of History at Sydney University), A.G.L. Shaw (later Professor of History at Monash University), and H.A. Sujan (Trade Commissioner for India) to adjudicate on the question. In the following weeks I did my research as, presumably, did the two historians. The Indian representative seemed bemused by it all. We all agreed that the first British Governor-General of India was Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, because the title had been created for him by statute in 1833. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Bentinck was, and still is, ambiguous, describing him as ‘British governor-general of Madras (in effect of India) from 1828 to 1835’, and later as ‘governor-general of India and governor of Bengal’ from 1827. EB’s entry on Warren Hastings was equally misleading. The first sentence in the entry calls him ‘the first and most famous of the British governors-general of India’, while the Assessment describes him as ‘the first governor-general of Bengal’. Bob scrapped the question, I answered its replacement, won the round and picked another box. The prize, ironically, was a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. After 24 weeks, on 14 November 1960, I became the first contestant to win all 40 boxes. Bob’s experiment with the Warren Hastings question was significant. He challenged the assumption that the mass media had to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the phenomenon now called ‘dumbing down’. He demonstrated, although his initial position may have been instinctive rather than considered, that an obscure esoteric issue could capture public interest provided that it was handled effectively. I was grateful to him for that. The incident was often replayed on commemorative programs on the history of television, and featured at an international television conference in Banff in the 1980s. In 1985, twenty-five years later when I was Minister for Science, the Japanese Science Minister and his officials were walking to lunch with me in Melbourne when a huge truck pulled up at the kerb and the driver wound down the window and yelled, ‘Hey, Baz! Who was the first Governor-General of India? Eh? Eh?’ It was very difficult to explain the incident to the Japanese. I have had hundreds of similar experiences. The story developed a life of its own. In an early round, Bob Dyer asked me to name the first two Presidents 118
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 119
QUIZ SHOW
of the United States, in order. With characteristic over-enthusiasm, I responded,‘I can name all 36 in order if you like.’ But why did I do it anyway? There was a touch of obsessiveness about it all, a passion for being right, and an urge to instruct. Passion drove me, and always does. It sounds self-serving, but I think that the desire to teach was paramount, far more important than the value of the prizes, or a fiercely competitive urge to be a winner. In my political career, which lasted far longer, I was never regarded as an effective competitor. My colleagues saw me as deplorably lacking in the killer instinct. After winning my fortieth box I had a four-week spell, then began a ten-week contest with Bob Hilliard (1923–2001), concluding on 27 February 1961. Modest and unassuming, Bob won a DFC as a navigator in bombers over Germany, worked as an administrator with TAA (now Qantas) and after retirement in 1985 became a volunteer guide at the Melbourne Zoo. His sister Winifred wrote the book People in Between:The Pitjantjatjara People of Ernabella (1968). In September 1960 he defeated Leah Andrew in the ‘Battle of the Champions’. Rosemary and our great friend Bono Wiener coached me. I recognise now, contritely, my lack of gratitude at the time. I also enjoyed very strong support from the staff and pupils at Dandenong High School, where I taught from 1957 to 1966, especially from successive principals Len Cooke and Ken Mitchell. They rearranged time-tabling so that I could take one or two days off each month to record batches of Pick-a-Box. The school received very favourable coverage from my exploits, with feature articles in newspapers and magazines, and it even seemed to make learning fashionable. Unexpectedly, I became something of a role model, as I seemed to become a virtual fixture on the program. I also made up for lost time with the students by holding well-attended special after-school classes, culminating in malted milks and toasted chicken sandwiches down at The Manhattan, opposite the Town Hall, which was owned by the father of Morry Schwartz, the future developer and publisher. I also paid for a scholarship and gave many books to the school library.When the program was recorded in Melbourne, I arranged for groups of Dandenong High School pupils to be part of the audience. One of my forty boxes was a return voyage for two from Sydney to San Francisco on Matson Line’s SS Mariposa. Rosemary and I used it as a belated honeymoon and we embarked in December 1961, visiting Auckland, Suva, Pago Pago and Honolulu on the way. It was luxurious but tedious, although some other passengers, including Zelman Cowen and the 119
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 120
A THINKING REED
Hansen family, were stimulating companions. Mr Oppenheimer, an elderly cantankerous New Yorker who travelled constantly to ensure that no inheritance would be left for his relatives, was written up by the writer Art Buchwald. We crossed the United States by train, flew to Europe, coming home on Qantas’ Kangaroo Route.We never used the return voyage. Another prize was a holiday to ‘beautiful Brampton Island’, as it was invariably called, near Mackay, which I gave to my mother and grandmother. They made their first and last flights. With my twenty-sixth box I won a Morris Major, the worst car I ever owned. Later I won a large caravan which I never saw. My friend Bob Mitchell arranged to sell the caravan for a fraction of its value and gave the proceeds to charity. It would have been impossible to park, too heavy for the Morris Major to pull and, to me, a caravan vacation would have been a holiday from hell. People often speculated that I had a photographic memory. If I did, it was rather limited. A real photographic memory, demonstrated by some idiots savant, involves an ability to recall unsympathetic material, such as arbitrary successions of numbers or names and lists from directories. I can often remember precisely where material is found on a page and there is an extensive photographic archive in my skull, but the subject must be of intrinsic interest for me to recall it accurately. Even if I tried to memorise, say, lists of Melbourne Cup or Grand Final winners, I doubt if I could have recalled names on demand. (Rohan Rivett’s capacity to reel off very complicated cricketing statistics always amazed me.) I recognised some areas of weakness, such as Arthurian legend, a few equivalents in minor Greek or Roman deities, some chemical formulae or late Persian ceramics, where I was vulnerable, apart from sport. Occasionally, I worked out mnemonics, formulas linking items together to assist recall, for example, ‘Many good Salvadorians have nice costly panamas’ to list Central American countries from north to south: Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. But my areas of deepest interest, such as music, United States presidential history or Australian politics, owed nothing to mnemonics, everything to building up a complex armature or matrix of knowledge or experience. Each book read, place visited, piece of music heard, person talked to added to the armature. Much public interest was generated in two very close ten-week contests I had with George Black and Frank Partridge. Far from making me feel stimulated, they made me anxious, gloomy and grumpy. George Black, a conscientious administrator with Australia Post, was a 120
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 121
QUIZ SHOW
great enthusiast for memory systems and mnemonics. I failed to share his passion. He was also an expert calligrapher and I envied his fine italic hand. He wrote an elegant book of memory joggers. He allocated a symbol or a word for every number in the sequence 01 to 100. His symbol for 32 was ‘man’, so he coded George Washington, Franz Josef Haydn and Warren Hastings, all born in 1732, as ‘presidential man’, ‘composer man’ and ‘India man’ respectively, while Edouard Manet, born in 1832, became ‘painting man’. As my birth year was 1932, I was ‘quiz man’. This undoubtedly helped with sequences, so George was precise on dates. But he didn’t seem to read much literature, and his interest in music and painting was limited. He became the second contestant to win all 40 boxes. He then moved on to challenge me in the ‘Battle of the Champions’. We were friendly rivals. In the last round of our ten-week contest, he led by three points and both of us were surprised when I caught up and won by one. I had another close contest with Frank Partridge* (1924–1964). Frank was the last Australian to win a Victoria Cross in World War II, the youngest and the only militiaman. Serving with the 8th Battalion, he won his VC on Bougainville on 24 July 1945. Despite wounds to his arm and thigh he rushed a bunker, killing Japanese soldiers with grenade and knife, then began to attack a second bunker until loss of blood forced him to stop. Frank grew up with his widowed father on a family farm in the north of New South Wales, dairying and growing bananas. They were desperately poor and Frank left school at 13. After returning from the war he devoted himself to self-education, reading Encyclopaedia Britannica by kerosene lamp in the dirt-floored farmhouse. He developed an extraordinarily retentive memory. He was a distant cousin of John Brown, who later served with me as Bob Hawke’s Minister for Sport and Tourism. John recalled having gone to Macksville with his family as a child to visit the Partridges and, as he put it,‘It was real Ozarks territory.’ Frank’s laconic style appealed to viewers, and he was in sharp contrast to George Black and me. He became the third contestant to win all 40 boxes, then moved to the next stage to challenge me in the ‘Battle of the Champions’. I always felt some uneasiness about competing with Frank. He was a genuine Australian hero, a thoroughly deserving case who had emerged * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 15, p. 572, Barry Jones. 121
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 122
A THINKING REED
from poverty and isolation and committed himself to the acquisition of knowledge. In comparison, I had enjoyed a privileged life, never under physical threat or exposed to danger, and with access to superior education. I felt like a smart-arse in Frank’s company. Frank had to be asked the question directly, without frills, whereas I liked to deduce an answer, even if I was unsure. For example, we were both asked, ‘How many hundredweights are there in 0.9842 of a metric tonne?’ I assumed that we were not being asked a complicated piece of mental arithmetic and deduced that the 0.9842 must be the old Imperial ton, of 20 hundredweight (each of 112 pounds). I answered ‘Twenty’ and won the point. Frank started to make the laborious conversion in his head and failed the question by running out of time. I saw it as an easy question, he saw it as a hard one.Again, I won the 10-week series narrowly. Bob Dyer then experimented with a formula in which the trio of Black, Partridge and Jones competed against each other for several weeks. All three of us shared an interest in politics. Before my run on Pick-aBox, I had twice been a Federal candidate for the ALP, in 1955 and 1958, but this was just after a deep Labor split in Victoria which spread nationally and I was not expected to win. In 1963 I was endorsed for the marginal seat of Bruce, which included Dandenong, where I was teaching. George Black was an active member of the Australia Party, begun by the businessman Gordon Barton, the founder of IPEC. Members were mostly dissident Liberals opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. George Black was on its New South Wales ticket in the 1970 half-Senate election. The Australia Party later merged with Don Chipp’s Democrats. After retiring as a contestant, George worked for Bob Dyer, researching questions for Pick-a-Box. Frank was eager to run for Country Party pre-selection for the House of Representatives seat of Cowper. This was a traditional Country Party seat lost to Labor in 1961 under freakish circumstances, when Sir Earle Page, former Party Leader, went into a coma and died without knowing he had been narrowly defeated. At first Frank received encouraging support from the locals, especially in RSL clubs. However, his views were rather extreme, particularly on matters of race, and he had some vague understanding of, and enthusiasm for, Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman (Übermensch) which I found profoundly disturbing. My understanding is that Doug Anthony, then Deputy Leader of the Country Party, also felt uneasy about Frank’s views and suggested that Ian Robinson, a State MP for the area, be encouraged to stand. Robinson won pre-selection 122
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 123
QUIZ SHOW
easily. Frank was shocked by his loss, but gallantly agreed to be Ian Robinson’s campaign director. In February 1963 Frank had married Barbara Dunlop but she remained in Turramurra, a Sydney suburb, while Frank was building a new house on the farm. Frank used to drive down every weekend to see her and their infant son, Lauchlan. Frank also supplemented his income by selling life assurance for AMP. On one of his weekend trips, on 23 March 1964, he presumably fell asleep at the wheel, ran into a timber truck near Bellingen and was killed. Barbara, a nurse, never remarried and suffered from serious health problems. She died in 2000. Although many viewers seemed to think that my Pick-a-Box run was unbroken there were multiples of ten weeks when I was not on the show. Bob Dyer imported several overseas challengers. They included Dr Ralph Dearnley, an Esperanto enthusiast from New Zealand, chosen after an elimination contest against his compatriot, Jim Winchester.There was a similar contest between some English candidates, including Irene Thomas, author of the amusing The Bandmaster’s Daughter, and Ian Gillies. After Gillies won, he had ten weeks against me. I had contests with quiz winners from Ireland, South Africa and the United States. The only American contestant, Grace Jansen from California, was distinctly second rate. She had won some prizes on a daytime program. All the major players, who would certainly have defeated me, such as Charles Van Doren, Herb Stempel and Dr Joyce Brothers, had gone underground after the 1958 quiz scandal. Another English contender was an amusing but reactionary medical practitioner, Dr Rex Webster. Bob encouraged debate in the 10-week round with Dr Webster as we had such radically different views on capital punishment, smoking and politics. The two major death penalty cases that I was involved in, Robert Tait in 1962 and Ronald Ryan in 1966–67, both took place in my Pick-a-Box years and were discussed on the program. I left Dandenong High School in December 1966. I resigned as a teacher after receiving a threat from the Premier, Henry Bolte, because of my heavy involvement in the Ryan case 18 months before I left Pick-a-Box. In 1967 I was an articled clerk with a firm of solicitors, became a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria the following year, but then went off to teach history at La Trobe University. I also doubled as Australia’s first radio talk-back host, a genre which has declined alarmingly, on 3DB. 123
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 124
A THINKING REED
On Pick-a-Box Bob invited me to show off some of my most prized autographs—a volume inscribed by Tolstoy, a handwritten letter from Winston Churchill to Marshal Foch, and some Napoleonic material, but I cannot recall the context. I rattled on about my enthusiasm for Patrick White and gave Bob Dyer a copy of his masterpiece Voss. I doubt that he finished it. The most memorable of my seven overseas opponents was Esko Kivikoski, from Finland. He had an unbroken record at home, and was also the Scandinavian champion. He had a very deep voice and a weakness for schnapps. I don’t know how Bob recruited him, but he provided a strong challenge. A new format was needed, and worked surprisingly well. Both Esko and I were in sound-proof boxes. The questions, the same for each of us as usual, were provided, as Bob read them out, in written form, mine in English, Esko’s in Finnish. The answers required were proper names, without scope for interpretation or argument: ‘What is the capital of Nevada?’, ‘Who wrote Scarlet and Black?’, ‘What is the chemical formula for common salt?’, ‘Who was the last Bourbon king of France?’ There was a Finnish translator and referee on hand, in case of dispute. Our contest, taking 15 minutes per episode, had been shown on Oy Mainos Television in Finland, attracting great interest. At this stage Finland had only one channel, but program times were divided between a government agency and the commercial Oy Mainos. Ratings were extraordinarily high and television was credited with having lightened the national mood. Before television, long winter months created the notorious Nordic or Fenno-Scandian gloom and there was a familiar stereotype of a silent Finnish male, sitting at the table, a knife in one hand and a bottle of schnapps in the other. Kivikoski had never been beaten before and Oy Mainos invited me to Helsinki for a return match. Rosemary and I arrived in Finland in September 1967, via Montreal’s Expo ’67, the Edinburgh Festival, Cambridge and the Tutankhamen Exhibition in Paris. The format was exactly the same, questions simultaneously provided on slips of paper. There were four 30minute heats, without commercials, about the same number of questions as there had been on Pick-a-Box. The compere was a Finnish air force officer whose strikingly attractive girlfriend was a producer. I beat Esko again, this time on his home ground. He seemed to bear no resentment. Oy Mainos put on a memorable meal in which we put on bibs to eat rapu, a delicious small freshwater lobster. Each rapu was supposed to be 124
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 125
QUIZ SHOW
accompanied by a shot of schnapps. I concentrated on the rapu and gave Esko my quota of schnapps. Our Oy Mainos host, Seppo Virtanen, had translated Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Harold Pinter’s plays into Finnish. He was also a heavy drinker, but urbane and charming. There were posters featuring the quiz on the Mannerheimintie, the main street of Helsinki, and I was often recognised.When we were driving about 40 kilometres north of Helsinki, I asked if we could visit the home of the composer Jean Sibelius and his grave at Ainola, near Järvenpäa. Seppo wasn’t sure where it was but I was confident of finding it from biographical films I had seen. Sibelius had been one of the great culture heroes of my youth, before the Mahler revival of the 1960s pushed him aside. I admired his symphonies, especially Nos 4, 5 and 7. I had written to him in 1951, and received a reply. We arrived at Ainola, a substantial log house. Seppo went out first to reconnoitre. He knocked on the door, which was answered by an aged housekeeper. He said,‘I am from Oy Mainos Television. Is it possible for an overseas visitor to look at the house?’ ‘No,’ she said.‘This is not a museum. It’s a private residence and Madam Sibelius is still living here.’ ‘Oh,’ said Seppo,‘that’s disappointing. The visitor has come a long way. It’s Barry Jones, from Australia.’ ‘Barry Jones?’ the housekeeper gasped.‘Here at this house?’ So we were allowed in, met the composer’s widow, Aino Sibelius, shown where he had plunged forward into his soup when he died in September 1957, and visited his impressive grave in the garden. In 1969 Madam Sibelius died at the age of 97 and was buried next to him. Later we visited the planned city of Tampere and went north, to beautiful Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle. After more than seven years, I had become weary of Pick-a-Box and would have welcomed a graceful exit. However, there was a factor that kept me on, for a time: taxation. In 1965 the Australian Taxation Office began cracking down on footballers and other sportspeople who were being lavishly rewarded, often by gifts and motor vehicles, for example.The ATO saw these rewards as being consequential to their employment, and therefore taxable. This raised the reasonable question:Why should game show winners be exempt from tax? The ATO did not pursue the winners in the box-picking segment, considering that there was an element of chance and too many contingencies involved.The tax factor determined the structure of later quizzes, such 125
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 126
A THINKING REED
as Who Wants to be a Millionaire? as lotteries rather than tests of skill. But the ‘Battle of the Champions’ segment was based on skill, not on chance. As I had won twelve of these series, each for £1000 ($2000 after decimal currency came in 1966), I was in a limited, but vulnerable, target category. I sought legal advice from Arthur Webb, QC, who thought my wins were essentially windfall gains, and not taxable. We appealed to the Taxation Board of Review, of which he had been a member. Unfortunately, Bob Hilliard, the champion I had defeated in 1961, had appeared before the board to challenge an ATO assessment, a few hundred dollars on his total winnings of $3000. He had conducted his own case, and in ruling against him the board congratulated him for his skill. The board ruled that the ‘Battle of the Champions’ was ‘a profit-making venture or scheme’ under the Taxation Act, since both winner and loser stood to gain a predetermined sum. Unfortunately, when Arthur began his carefully reasoned argument the board told him briskly that there was a precedent, Hilliard’s Case, and that if we wanted to take it any further we would have to appeal to a court. We decided against an appeal. It would be expensive, the chances of success were only 50:50 at best, and in the future it could be held against me politically. But it meant that all winnings in the last three years were devoted to paying off back tax. When my tax bill was squared in 1968, I told Bob Dyer that I wanted to leave the show. I was relieved that, unlike the footballers, my tax problem never became a media story. Besides having had enough, I wanted to launch my own television interview and discussion program, Encounter, produced by Crawfords, which was to be shown on the Seven Network. My last Pick-a-Box appearance was shown on 11 March 1968 when I defeated Patrick Bowles after a ten-week contest. Bob was stung by suggestions that the show was heavily dependent on me and he lashed out in an interview with The Age’s television and radio guide, saying that I had become ‘poor copy’, too serious, no longer rose to his bait, and that he would have preferred me to be defeated some years earlier. I was distressed by the attack, but I could understand why he made it. I had become a central element in Pick-a-Box, and he could hardly admit that my departure would weaken the show. I hoped that after leaving the show Bob and I might become friends. This sounds preposterous, but after 208 appearances spread over eight years we had been careful not to develop a personal relationship. We had an unspoken understanding not to do anything that suggested even the 126
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 127
QUIZ SHOW
slightest possibility of collusion and until 1968 I never spoke to him without a third party being present. We put on a small dinner at home with Bob, Dolly and our friend Bono Wiener, who talked about his experiences in concentration camps. Bob was deeply thoughtful, but Dolly found it hard to cope. ‘I couldn’t eat grass,’ she protested. ‘Oh, yes, you could,’ Bob said, in barely a whisper. My style of answering essentially made collusion seem implausible. The main complaint about me was that I knew too much and was eager to show it, not that I was an ignoramus who had to be fed the answers. The central factor in Twenty One, that after 14 weeks a champion was disposable, had no application in Australia. My range of interests assisted my performance on Pick-a-Box. Research for my proposed Penguin Dictionary of Biography, despite increasing frustration, forced me to analyse and synthesise. My collection of autographs encouraged me to read the lives of authors, composers, architects, explorers, scientists, soldiers and politicians whose letters or documents had been acquired. I was a teacher, and teaching is itself an important learning process. So is politics, where the collecting and processing of information is central and becomes second nature. The last element was travel: in my Pick-a-Box years I went overseas six times, and sucked in information voraciously. All five elements were powerful reinforcers. Pick-a-Box ended in March 1971. In June Bob Dyer (who remained an American citizen) was awarded an honorary OBE and Dolly (always Australian) an MBE. I saw him for the last time in 1976 when Channel 9 made a program commemorating twenty years of Australian television. As Phillip Adams wrote, it was more like one year repeated twenty times. We still exchanged Christmas cards and talked occasionally by telephone, but he became increasingly reclusive. Bob and Dolly moved to Queensland’s Gold Coast, and he grew a beard. He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, saw nobody apart from Dolly and his carers in his last three years and died on 9 January 1984. I learnt of his death when reporters tracked me down in Denver, Colorado. Dolly lived at Surfers Paradise with friends and revived an active interest in dancing. She too was afflicted by Alzheimer’s and died after a stroke at Gympie on Christmas Day 2004. After leaving Pick-a-Box, I resisted invitations to take part in other quiz contests. I made two exceptions, for my old friend Stephen MurraySmith: Beat the Brains on the ABC, and a BBC Radio team game with the same name involving players from Britain, including Irene Thomas and Ian Gillies, and New Zealand, with my former opponents Ralph Dearnley 127
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 128
A THINKING REED
and Jim Winchester. I also made guest appearances during visits to Britain and New Zealand. In 2004 I began making regular appearances as a ‘Brains Trust’ panellist on ABC Television’s The Einstein Factor. Bob Hawke and I both found ourselves, for a time, in the Guinness Book of Records. He was there for having drunk a ‘sconce’ of beer at Oxford in 12 seconds in 1955. Oddly, I was there not for my number of appearances but for total earnings as a quiz winner outside the United States. I won $A55 000 over eight years, about half of it in goods and services. This figure was soon dwarfed by others’ rapid earnings on Sale of the Century and later by Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Bob Hawke and I had one thing in common, apart from the Guinness Book of Records. We were quite atypical on our side of politics in gaining public recognition before entering Parliament. The reputations of Curtin, Chifley, Calwell, Whitlam, Hayden, Keating, Kerin, Dawkins, Beazley (père et fils), Button and Evans were entirely based on their work in the Parliament. Bert Evatt was another exception to the rule, as were ACTU presidents Simon Crean, Martin Ferguson and Jenny George. How far did Pick-a-Box help my political career? It is hard to be certain, but the benefit was probably only minor, at best. It helped people recognise my name, but undoubtedly created some adverse reactions. (‘Of course, he has an excellent memory for trivia, but it doesn’t mean that he has any judgment or leadership.’) When I contested the marginal seat of Bruce against (Sir) Billy Snedden in the November 1963 Federal Election, at the height of my public recognition, the quiz impact was insignificant. To populists I was an egg-head; to elitists I was a populist who had sold out. Pick-a-Box was an interesting social phenomenon, of which I was the vortex. I always felt oddly ambiguous about my role on Pick-a-Box. It provided useful income and propelled me into national celebrity and yet I felt that the cause and effect of the celebrity was freakish, like being an exceptionally tall basketball player or big feet on a swimmer. Bob Menzies, Don Bradman, Mac Burnet and Bernard Smith were regular viewers. However, it is clear that Pick-a-Box was a stimulus for many young people, encouraging them to take an interest in ideas. Gough Whitlam first came to public notice as a finalist in a governmentsponsored ‘Security Loan Quiz’ series on ABC Radio in 1948, to promote public investment in government bonds. Ben Chifley, then both Prime Minister and Treasurer, used to follow the programs with interest, especially as he was, in effect, the sponsor. He told Reg Downing, a state 128
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 129
QUIZ SHOW
minister, that he was impressed by Whitlam, whose father he had known, and hoped he might become MP for Werriwa. However, they only met briefly, just before Chifley died in 1951. Gough Whitlam says, ‘I made quizzes respectable.’ Stephen Whitlam, Gough and Margaret’s youngest son, appeared on Pick-a-Box in March 1970, winning four boxes, and again in July 1970, as a panellist in ‘Young All-Stars’ segments. I had never met the novelist Tom Keneally, but was an early enthusiast for Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968). When he sat next to me on a plane I was looking forward to a lively discussion about the future of the Australian novel. He got in first. ‘What were Bob and Dolly really like?’
129
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 130
CHAPTER 5
ﱗ
Fifty Years Hard Labor THE CONTEXT From the beginning of human history, power and wealth have never been equally shared. Numbers never counted. The earliest societies were all hierarchical, with the powerful few imposing their wills on the powerless many: men over women, the strong over the weak, whites over blacks. Religion, myth and magic reinforced rule from the top, including slavery, and group identity was reinforced by symbolism, ritual and tribalism. Male aggression, genetics and evolution seemed to suggest that humans were programmed for hierarchy. Feudalism institutionalised hierarchy. When capitalism, urbanisation, secularism and nationalism helped to break down rule by blood, or caste or land ownership, they brought new sets of hierarchies into being. The Industrial Revolution both created the industrial proletariat and strengthened control by the bourgeoisie. For a brief period in modern history, just 200 years, from the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789) to the collapse of the Soviet system (1989), political parties were proclaiming a radical agenda, proposing, in theory, egalitarianism and a redistribution of wealth and power. But egalitarianism was never applied in practice. I was deeply conscious that my 50 years as a Labor Party activist amounted to a quarter of that radical period.* * From the 1848 Communist Manifesto to the collapse of Communism in 1989 was 141 years, from the 1917 Russian Revolution to 1989 only 72. 130
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 131
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, founded the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 and the first volume of Das Kapital appeared in 1867. He proposed the theory of ‘dialectical materialism’ and sought to achieve in economics and history what Charles Darwin had done in biology. As a teenager I was profoundly impressed by a 19th-century German cartoon, ‘Pyramid of the Capitalist System’, which powerfully set out the inequities wrought by capitalism. A money bag is at the top of the pyramid and there are five layers underneath: emperors, kings and presidents (‘We rule you’), clergy (‘We fool you’), soldiers (‘We shoot you’), the bourgeoisie (‘We eat for you’), all resting on the proletariat (‘We work for all’). I was attracted by Abraham Lincoln’s words in his first annual message to Congress (December 1861): ‘Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.’ I soon read that Britain had an alternative radical tradition which long preceded Marxism: during the Civil War, the ‘Levellers’ and the famous Putney Debates, chaired by Oliver Cromwell, in October–November 1647; preaching on social issues by John Wesley and his Methodists; Chartists who set out a series of political demands in the 1830s, including democratic elections; the trade unions and co-operative movement; Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and its humane modification by John Stuart Mill; protests against the ugliness of 19th-century industrialism expressed by William Morris and John Ruskin (graphically portrayed by Charles Dickens and George Eliot); and the economic ideas of the American Henry George. The Fabian Society was founded in London in 1884. The Fabians believed revolution could be achieved through reading. No group was less inclined towards mounting the barricades. They offered a methodology rather than an ideology. Fabian socialism was not a matter of absolutes, but of setting priorities and promoting broad public interest, such as access to education or health, rather than maximising personal advantage. Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice, leading Fabians, made encyclopedic studies of specific evils in society—slum housing, sweated labour, public health, conditions in coal mines—and campaigned for highly specific, piecemeal reforms. Opponents sneered at them as ‘gas and water socialists’. They were elitists, offering intellectual valet service to the trade unions but without an overarching ideology. 131
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 132
A THINKING REED
The Fabian approach in some ways paralleled that of Marx, but the intellectual tradition was entirely distinct. There was no commitment to ‘scientific socialism’, ‘dialectical materialism’ or revolutionary seizure of state power. Fabians stressed ‘the inevitability of gradualness’. The Australian Labor Party was founded in 1891, long before the British Labour Party. Coincidentally 1891 was the year of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (New Things), a mildly reformist document which addressed the condition of the working class, sought remedies for their ‘misery and wretchedness’, supported the formation of trade unions, condemned ‘the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition’ but endorsed the rights of private property. Cardinal Manning influenced the drafting. The ALP adopted a socialist objective in 1921, proposing ‘the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange’, but it had always been ignored in practice. In one of his early Australian tours, Peter Ustinov was asked by a reporter, ‘Are you worried about being in the land of the convicts?’ He replied, ‘I’m more worried about being in the land of the warders.’ This neatly describes the political divide in Australia, ever since European settlement, long before parties were established, between those whose short or dangerous lives were dominated by poverty, rebellion and powerlessness and those who enjoyed property, control, aspiration, respectability, health and comfort. Cynics saw the political divide as being between the party of envy and the party of greed. I saw the distinction as generosity versus meanness, inclusion versus exclusion. I understood, from my childish observation of the Depression, the impact of class on poverty, housing, education, health, experience, power and hope, something that Lenin once described as the central issue of politics: the ‘Who?/ Whom?’ question.Who gives the orders and to whom are they given?
ﱗ
My age shaped my politics. Even as a child, from my experience of seeing the squalor of Dudley Flats during the Great Depression, I started asking: Why are people living like this? Why are some people so poor and others (like us) not so poor? How can it be fixed? Perhaps this ignited my preference for the politics of redistribution. However, World War II had even more impact as a formative influence, especially the contrasting roles of 132
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 133
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt. After thinking about Hitler’s atrocious crimes and his exploitation of political processes, somebody with my temperament and world view could not be indifferent to politics. I could never say,‘That’s not important to me. Why bother?’ I was excited by Roosevelt’s espousal of the ‘Four Freedoms’—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear—ideas that he apparently adopted from H.G. Wells and later incorporated into the Atlantic Charter (August 1941). The goal of freeing people from oppressive regimes or desperate poverty, preventable disease and early death was overwhelmingly attractive. So it was, as I described in Chapter 2, that I felt deeply committed to the United Nations. I adopted Gandhi’s idea that the concept of freedom may be meaningless to starving people, and followed the winding back of Imperialism in India and the Dutch East Indies with enthusiasm. Another preoccupation was the impact of atomic weapons, giving the United States and the USSR a scientific capacity which could, not only metaphorically but literally, change the face of the planet.Technological capacity increased rapidly but the political process was almost glacial in its slowness, where people vaguely understood but feared the significance of sudden change. I was never much of a true believer, generally a qualified believer or doubting Thomas. I never wanted to be a ‘participant in delusional politics’, as Stephen Murray-Smith memorably put it. Part of my problem in politics, apart from my lack of the killer instinct, was that I could always see the opposite side of a proposition (except with capital punishment). What most appealed to me about Marx’ writing was the dialectic, a juxtaposition of thesis and antithesis. I was eager to apply Karl Popper’s test of ‘falsifiability’ to new ideas, looking for flaws. I read a little of Marx’ Kapital at Melbourne High and a short biography, Karl Marx, His Life and Environment (1939), by the British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, whom I came to know in the 1980s. However, the 19th-century political writer who appealed most to me was Aleksandr Herzen (1812–1870), a Russian, the exact contemporary of Dickens. Twice exiled to Siberia, he lived in the West from 1847, mostly in London and Paris (where he died). He was a great pamphleteer, publisher of Kolokol (The Bell ). His My Past and Thoughts (1852–55) is a masterpiece. Herzen was 14 when leaders of the Decembrist conspiracy were hanged (1827) and he said this was the turning point of his political life. 133
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 134
A THINKING REED
Berlin was a perceptive interpreter of Herzen. Both rejected the idea that there was a single or central dogma, whether Christianity, the Enlightenment or Marxism, the truth of which could be demonstrated so as to compel belief and punish dissent. Berlin’s editor, Henry Hardy, wrote that his pluralism justifies his deep-seated rejection of coercion and manipulation by authoritarians and totalitarians of all kinds: Communists, Fascists, bureaucrats, missionaries, terrorists, revolutionaries and all other despots, levellers, systematisers or purveyors of ‘organised happiness’. Berlin endorsed Herzen’s horror of the sacrifices that have been exacted in the name of Utopian ideals due to be realised at some unspecifiable point in the distant future: real people should not have to suffer and die today for the sake of a chimera of eventual universal bliss.
‘The [British] Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism’ was sometimes attributed to Morgan Phillips, once the party’s general secretary, but it was a popular catch-phrase before the 1950s and the progressive end of Methodism was a formative influence on me. It did not take much to convince me that Jesus was on the side of the workers. Between 1946 and 1949, my years at Melbourne High, there had been a brief mood of optimism about solving major political, economic and social problems by the use of reason, international negotiation through the United Nations and the wise application of science, including atomic energy. However, in my first period at Melbourne University, from 1950, politics became dominated by apocalyptic fears. Advocacy for major change meant constantly working against vested interests, and counteracting a prevailing sense of insecurity and fear. I was conscious that my relatives down at Geelong were all thorough reactionaries: to them, Chifley and Stalin differed only by degree. They were part of a continuum. Chifley’s failed attempt to nationalise the banks proved that, they argued. And if Labor people were not Communists, they were Irish Catholics, and disloyal, and it was hard to work out which was worse. I cannot remember exactly when and how I formed my first dark view of the Moscow ‘show trials’ of 1936–38, but it was probably before I went to Melbourne High School in 1946. That such a large cohort of Old Bolsheviks, every survivor of Lenin’s Politburo other than Stalin, should have been identified and condemned as ‘Fascist hyenas’, ‘Hitler’s collaborators’, then ‘purged’ was completely implausible, whether in logic, statistics, 134
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 135
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
history or psychology. Melbourne’s newspapers covered the ‘show trials’ extensively, including a running commentary on them by Leon Trotsky. My concerns were linked with my preoccupation about the death penalty. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941), which I read at the age of 13 or 14, gave a convincing psychological explanation of why the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ accepted their fate, and saluted Stalin. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946) was a powerful study of a totalitarian mindset. My view of politics has always been universal and historical. I was never attracted to it as the means of climbing the greasy pole or determining the spoils of office. I joined the Labor Party out of a deep, but probably naïve, commitment to egalitarianism and human liberation. I saw the conservative symbol as a mirror in which a voter could see the beneficiary of voting Liberal or National: ‘I’m voting for self-interest’. But I saw Labor as the ‘other interest’ party and its symbol should have been a pair of binoculars because often the beneficiaries of its policies were remote: Aborigines, prisoners, refugees, famine and victims of disease. In my teens I was attracted by what democratic reforming governments were attempting. Labor/Labour held office in Australia under Ben Chifley, in Britain under Clement Attlee, in New Zealand under Peter Fraser. In India Jawaharlal Nehru, influenced by the Fabian tradition, was committed to democratic, egalitarian reforms. In the United States, Harry Truman’s ‘Fair Deal’ continued in the tradition of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’. After 1948 the Cold War became more frigid, with brutal policies emanating from Stalin’s Kremlin, harsh suppression of dissent in Eastern Europe and fears that Mao’s control of China would threaten Australian security. My abhorrence of violence had been reinforced by Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948, when peaceful, democratic processes in India were threatened. In December 1949 Fraser had been defeated in New Zealand, followed by Chifley a week later. Attlee’s Government was re-elected on a knifeedge in February 1950, but lost narrowly to Churchill’s Conservatives in October 1951. Truman’s nominee, Adlai Stevenson, was defeated by General Eisenhower in November 1952. So within three years, my comfortable optimism about social democracy had been shattered. In his autobiography The Time of My Life, the British Labour politician Denis Healey approved comments by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski: 135
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 136
A THINKING REED
The trouble with the social democratic idea is that it does not stock and does not sell any of the existing ideological commodities which various totalitarian movements . . . offer dream-hungry youth . . . Democratic Socialism requires, in addition to commitment to a number of basic values, hard knowledge and rational calculation . . . It is an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed and vindictive envy.
Healey noted:‘This is not an ignoble vision. It will do far more to help real people living in the real world today and tomorrow than all the cloudy theories of systematic ideologies, or the tidy blueprints of academic theorists’. But the appeal to rational calculation, which many would equate with economic self-interest, may be lacking in psychological or emotional appeal. My five decades in the Party have been challenging, rewarding and often depressing. In politics, timing is everything. I was usually a dissident in my own Party. My political philosophy evolved steadily, but the Victorian ALP went through convulsive transformations. When I joined in 1950 it was run by the Industrial Groupers, who regarded me as part of the Left until Federal intervention in 1955 resulted in the Split. From 1957 until a second Federal intervention, in 1970, the Victorian ALP was run by an increasingly rigid and authoritarian group which called itself Left but proved hostile to causes such as human rights, was contemptuous of the parliamentary system and crushed dissent. In the 1960s there was a serious attempt to expel me from the ALP and I was attacked as a Right-winger. I was happy when Whitlam became Leader in 1967 and worked enthusiastically with his successors, but even as a Minister I was pushed aside and my policies marginalised. But the ALP, like Australian society generally, has become increasingly conservative and I now find it hard to identify many in the Party to the Left of me.As National President I expressed the views (and frustration) of rank and file party members while effective control was in the hands of factional warlords. However, even if it was a via dolorosa much of the time, the ALP gave me significant opportunities in public life, including 26 years in State and Commonwealth Parliaments and 7 years as an Australian Minister. I joined the Australian Labor Party as it entered a turbulent period.The ALP had passed through three great splits in its national history. The deep division in 1916–17 over conscription for overseas service during World War I was complicated by the passions aroused by the insurrection against 136
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 137
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
British rule in Ireland and its brutal repression. From 1901 to 1916 most Labor members in the Federal Parliament had been Protestants or free thinkers, most of them British migrants, with very few prominent Catholics. Billy Hughes defected with his generally Protestant supporters to form the National Party. In the Referenda campaigns of 1916 and 1917,Archbishop Daniel Mannix took a leading role in the ‘No’ case.This polarised the Catholic/non-Catholic communities politically for nearly 60 years. Many Protestants left the ALP and opponents attacked it as essentially Catholic, or even unpatriotic. It would be 13 years before Labor returned to government, under James Henry Scullin in 1929. Six of Labor’s seven Federal leaders between 1917 and 1967 were Catholics by birth or upbringing, although Curtin lapsed and Chifley was lukewarm. Herbert Vere Evatt, leader from 1951 to 1960, was the important exception. Of 14 ministers in the Scullin Government, 9 were Catholics (7 fervent, 2 lukewarm). Labor split again in 1931–32 over ways of handling the Depression when Jack Lang, the New South Wales Premier, turned Left, and Joe Lyons, Acting Treasurer, turned Right and they combined to bring down Scullin’s Government. In 1931 Lyons defected from the ALP and was embraced by the Protestant ascendancy, which helped him create the United Australia Party (UAP) and made him Prime Minister from 1932 to 1939, the first and only Catholic from the non-Labor side. The ALP, split three ways and overwhelmingly defeated in December 1931, showed remarkable capacity for regeneration and John Curtin was Prime Minister by October 1941, less than a decade later. I was actively involved when the ALP passed through a third great split, between 1954 and 1957, over attitudes to Communism. In 1948 Ben Chifley’s Government legislated to enlarge the House of Representatives from 75 members to 123, and the Senate from 36 to 60. The ensuing redistribution, instigated by Labor, actually proved very damaging for the ALP in the 1949 election, when it came into operation. Sitting Labor MPs generally had their safe seats made even safer, and most of the 48 new seats were marginal. Home, at Manor Grove, Caulfield, had been transferred from the safe Liberal electorate of Balaclava to the new marginal seat of Isaacs, comprising St Kilda, St Kilda North, Elwood, Ripponlea and Caulfield West. I met Prime Minister Ben Chifley briefly during the 1949 election campaign and he asked what I was doing at school, and what I planned to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a Labor MP. He smiled wanly. 137
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 138
A THINKING REED
On polling day, 10 December, Rosemary Hanbury and I handed out How to Vote cards for the Labor candidate for Isaacs. It was our first date. The candidate, Jack Bourke, a barrister, encouraged us both to join the Party, but Isaacs was won by a Liberal, W.C. Haworth. The Liberal–Country Coalition, led by Robert Gordon Menzies, won 45 of the new seats in the House of Representatives and had a comfortable majority of 26. However, the Coalition failed to win the Senate. In an expanded Senate of 60, elected for the first time by Proportional Representation, there were 34 Labor Senators, 15 of them holdovers from the 1946 election when Labor had won five of six States in a ‘winner-take-all’ preferential system. Senators elected in 1946 still had three more years to serve.
THE VICTORIAN ALP Rosemary and I joined the St Kilda branch of the ALP on 21 February 1950, just after Chifley’s defeat. It is an odd thing about Labor, but branch membership generally increases after a heavy election loss. So it was when we signed up at a dismal hall in Carlisle Street. I enjoyed attending political meetings and had some exposure to figures whose experience went far back into Labor history. William James Beckett (1870–1965), a member of the St Kilda branch, had been a Member of the Legislative Council, on and off, since 1914, was heavily involved in trotting and part of John Wren’s machine. Bill Bennett, a character in Frank Hardy’s novel Power Without Glory, was based on him.When he talked excitedly, his false teeth would shoot out, immediately caught by a practised hand. I often saw Edmond John (‘Ned’) Hogan (1883–1964), Labor Premier from 1929 to 1932, who lived in East St Kilda. A former timber worker and Wren man, he had been expelled from the ALP in 1932 during the second great split for supporting the conservative ‘Premiers’ Plan’ for dealing with the Depression by cutting wages, and became fanatically anti-Labor. He was a frequent attender at public meetings, where he would wave his stick and shout curses at Labor and its links with Godless forces. With his wild eyes and shock of white hair, he looked crazy. Victoria had a history of minority governments because the electoral redistribution gave excessive representation to rural areas. Although Melbourne dominated the state’s population, for most of my childhood the Country Party had been in government without a single minister 138
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 139
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
representing the capital. The ALP State Leader John Cain* had two terms as Premier, for five days in September 1943 and between 1945 and 1947, lacking a majority each time. In May 1950 in Victoria, the Country Party secured 10.6 per cent of the votes and 13 seats, the ALP 45.3 per cent and 24 seats, and the Liberals 40.7 per cent and 27 seats. Who won the election? Well, bizarrely, the Country Party. Between 1935 and 1952 the ALP followed the practice of supporting minority Country Party governments in return for legislation adopting some Labor policies. I hated the trade-off because it meant that the ALP was weakly acquiescing in policies it did not support, such as the death penalty, an impoverished state education system, and maintaining gerrymandered electorates. It was also a perversion of democratic practice where a party could hold office after being rejected by nearly 90 per cent of voters. All that Labor exacted from the Country Party was adult franchise for the Legislative Council and nationalisation of the gas supply. John McDonald, a dour Scot, was Premier from 1950 to 1952.The Liberal Party split over personalities. My hatred of the death penalty from childhood had attracted me to Labor, which had a generally consistent commitment to its abolition. But I almost gave up on the Victorian ALP when it failed to act to stop a triple hanging in Melbourne in February 1951, described in Chapter 3.
THE GREAT SPLIT OF 1954–57 The Spanish Civil War 1936–39 intensified divisions in the ALP between those who saw Communism as the greatest political threat to Western democracy and those who were more fearful of Hitler, Nazism and its allies. During World War II Stalin became the ally of Roosevelt and Churchill in defeating Hitler, and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) reached its high point in 1945 with 23 000 members, declining to 8000 in 1951 then falling dramatically after Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s dictatorship at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. The CPA also controlled various ‘front’ organisations, especially the Peace Movement. Inside the ALP the Left had largely drawn its inspiration from the British trade union tradition, especially in the north of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Craft or skilled workers, overwhelmingly male, * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 13, p. 335, Kate White and Robert Murray. 139
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 140
A THINKING REED
often in dirty, life-threatening jobs such as mining or heavy engineering, with a strong sense of collective responsibility, remote from employers, worked, lived and often played together in sport and, as the film Brassed Off! (1996) showed, in bands. Their attitude was partly ideological, largely situational. In recent decades, the Left in Australia has won support from feminists and anti-war, environmental and Aboriginal rights campaigners. The ALP Right, especially in New South Wales, was pragmatic, success oriented, with a fascination for American machine politics, especially in the Democratic Party. It was less ideological, far more pragmatic. It included a significant proportion of Catholics, many with a conservative social agenda. After World War II, with Hitler gone but Stalin still at his height, ALP membership fell into four groups: those who wanted to make a rational response to the Cold War, avoiding extremes of hysteria; those who were ideologically committed to an anti-Communist crusade; a small number of ‘fellow travellers’ who persisted in the delusion that the Soviet Union was a model for humanity’s future; and a fourth, opportunist group, whose hearts were opposed to the Cold Warriors but whose heads feared an electoral debacle. Menzies’ anti-Communism had been a major contribution to his election victory in December 1949. At Melbourne University I was always puzzled that people who were older, more experienced and smarter than me, such as Ian Turner, Stephen Murray-Smith and Ken Gott,* for years uncritically accepted the Communist position, including the Stalinist cult of personality. Did optimism blind them? In Political Pilgrims:Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (1981), Paul Hollander examined the willing suspension of disbelief when intellectuals were searching for a Utopia. With some it was the Soviet Union, others China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Cuba and Vietnam. In the 1930s some intellectuals glowed at what they saw in Germany or Italy. Ian, Stephen and Ken believed passionately that change was not only inevitable, but imminent: the march of progress could be slowed down or speeded up, but not stopped. They anticipated that conservative forces would have collapsed, or even disappeared, throughout the world in a few decades. After 1956 Ian, Stephen and Ken passed through trauma and the destruction of relationships to reach a political position which I had adopted without struggle or trauma, almost too easily. In 1942 ‘The Movement’, originally the Catholic Social Studies * John McLaren, Free Radicals. 140
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 141
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Movement, had been founded in Melbourne by Bartholomew Augustine (‘Bob’) Santamaria (1915–1998), and received support from Archbishop Daniel Mannix and the Catholic Action Office. To fight Communist influence,‘Industrial Groups’ had been established in New South Wales in 1945–46 to promote ALP candidates in trade union elections. They soon spread to Victoria and other states. The Movement became important in the organisation and leadership of the Industrial Groups. From the earliest days, the Movement worked with the secretary of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, James Victor Stout,* in combating Communist influence in unions. (Stout later became a passionate opponent of The Movement and the Groups.) Robert Murray estimated that ‘about 30 per cent of Group members were also in The Movement, while 60 per cent or so would have been at least nominally Catholic’.† Murray argues that ‘the architect and inspirer of the Groups was [Denis] Lovegrove, the ex-Communist, who developed much of their strategy’. He became the Victorian ALP state secretary in 1950. Some important unions had Communist secretaries, most of them very able, such as the Coal Miners, Ironworkers, Railways and Waterside Workers. Opponents charged that the Groups’ methods paralleled those of the CPA: they were secret, conspiratorial, intolerant of dissent and operated in cells. Sometimes charges of ‘Fascist’ or ‘clerical Fascist’ were levelled. By 1949 the Industrial Groups dominated the Victorian ALP. Nationally, controversy over attitudes to Communism was becoming the dominant issue. In April 1950 Menzies had introduced the Communist Party Dissolution Bill largely because of pressure from the Country Party and some of his more excitable Liberal Ministers. Privately, he was sceptical about what it could achieve, although he used florid anti-Communist rhetoric in his 1949 campaign. In 1950 more than 60 per cent of Ben Chifley’s Caucus was Catholic. Many had worked against Communist influence in trade unions and wanted to pass Menzies’ Bill. Chifley, despite his Catholic background, long trade union history and bitter opposition to Communism during the 1948 coal strike, opposed the Bill on general principle, as an attack on the presumption of innocence, freedom of association and belief, however deluded, and was determined to beat it. Labor had the numbers in the Senate to defeat it. However, Caucus was divided, and the outbreak of * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 16, p. 324, Peter Love. † Robert Murray, The Split. 141
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 142
A THINKING REED
the Korean War in June 1950 gave Menzies the opportunity to claim that the Bill was vital to Australia’s security. At the time, the ALP’s Constitution operated on Federal lines, just like the Senate, in which Party policy was determined by a Federal Conference of thirty-six, six delegates from each state (all men, as usual) which met in secret. Federal Conference delegates were elected on a winner-take-all basis, state by state, so that the ruling group controlled all six. If a vote tied on the Conference or Executive a proposition was defeated, so the three least populous states could block propositions from the three most populous. Federal Conference represented the state machines, dominated by trade unions. There was deep suspicion of parliamentarians, including the leadership, which was not invited to attend, even as observers. The Federal Executive which operated between Conferences consisted of twelve members, two from each state. Chifley was humiliated in October when the Federal Executive of the ALP directed Caucus to support the Bill. The Bill passed the Senate and was proclaimed in October 1950. Rupert Murdoch wrote to Chifley from Worcester College, Oxford, to indicate how shocked he was by Labor’s capitulation. Chifley suffered a heart attack in November, and took months to recuperate. Then Bert Evatt, Chifley’s deputy, decided to appear in the High Court to challenge the validity of the Communist Party Dissolution Act. Chifley supported him, but Caucus was cranky. In March 1951, against all expectations, the High Court declared the act invalid by a margin of six judges to one, as being outside the powers given to the Parliament by section 51 of the Constitution. Chief Justice Latham was the sole dissenter. This was the context of my first year in the Labor Party: the Party increasingly divided on Cold War issues, a deepening chasm between the Catholic social conservative wing, liberal Fabian-style progressives and pragmatic trade unionists preoccupied with job security, a party within a party, with Industrial Groups in control of the ALP’s agenda, a loved Federal Leader exposed to humiliation by the Party apparatus, fear that the optimism of the immediate post-war years would turn into a rankling, Hobbesian pessimism and the rule of force, and support for a reactionary state government which imposed the death penalty and corrupted democratic practice. The issues were apocalyptic. Menzies called a Double Dissolution of the Parliament for 28 April 1951, using the Senate’s failure to pass legislation changing the structure of 142
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 143
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
the Commonwealth Bank as a trigger. Jack Bourke stood for Isaacs again. The election campaign was Chifley’s last hurrah. I talked to him briefly at the Melbourne Town Hall, and he had the pallor of death around him. He asked me whether young people were interested in public causes, or preoccupied with careers and making money.As we spoke I could hear Pat Kennelly, Labor’s Federal secretary, standing behind us, repeating in his compulsive stammer, ‘He’s a bl . . . bl . . . bloody beauty! He’s a bl . . . bl . . . bloody beauty!’ Labor won six more seats in the House of Representatives, but lost its control of the Senate. For the second time, Jack failed to win Isaacs. Chifley died suddenly on 13 June 1951, having left early from a dinner celebrating the jubilee of Federation at Parliament House, Canberra. He was only 65. Many of my generation felt orphaned by his death. In Sydney, Eugene Goossens changed the program for a concert, broadcast by the ABC, to conduct the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony ‘in memory of a great Australian’ and I never hear the symphony without thinking about Chif. I was devastated because he seemed to combine wisdom, courage, judgment and dignity of the highest order. In 1952 Melbourne University Press published a collection of Chifley’s speeches and papers, Things Worth Fighting For, edited by my friend Wolfgang Stargardt. That it was published so soon after Chifley died confirmed that his importance was widely recognised at an early date. I can still hear the sound of his speeches, spare and laconic, delivered in an unforgettable, gravelly voice. The title comes from one of the two best remembered phrases associated with Chifley, his statement to the New South Wales State Conference just three days before he died: ‘If I think a thing is worth fighting for, no matter what the penalty is, I will fight for the right, and truth and justice will always prevail.’ The other phrase associated with Chifley is when he compared Labor’s objectives with looking for ‘the light on the hill’. Chifley was a major influence in my formative years, and his range of interests was unusually wide. However, there were some significant omissions: the White Australia Policy,Aborigines, women’s issues and education, which was seen as a state responsibility. On these, Chifley revealed himself as a man of his times. On 20 June 1951, a week after Chifley’s death, Herbert Vere Evatt (1894–1965) was elected unopposed as Leader, and Arthur Augustus Calwell (1896–1973) became Deputy. Menzies tried to take advantage of Labor’s internal conflict by calling a Referendum to give the Commonwealth ‘powers to deal with Communists 143
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 144
A THINKING REED
and Communism’, to be held on 22 September 1951. The Australian Public Opinion Poll, run by Roy Morgan, in June 1951 reported a sweeping 80 per cent support for banning the Communist Party. In August 73 per cent of respondents favoured a ‘Yes’ vote. Some friends at Melbourne University identified themselves with the Communist Party, even though they were not members, and regarded themselves at risk. In the weeks leading up to the Referendum I hid some of their personal papers and diaries at home, having found a loose floorboard in my bedroom. Evatt, almost alone, campaigned non-stop throughout Australia. The Victorian branch of the ALP, dominated by the Industrial Groupers and Bob Santamaria’s Movement, was sympathetic to Menzies’ ‘Yes’ case, but other than Jack Mullens and Stan Keon, two very outspoken antiCommunists, the state organisation toed the Party line and campaigned, without enthusiasm, for ‘No’. However, most Labor voters, those who had loved Chifley and admired Evatt, voted ‘No’ out of conviction. Catholics were divided. The venerable Archbishop Mannix kept an unusual silence during the Referendum despite his strong general support for Santamaria, no doubt recalling that he had made his political reputation by leading the ‘No’ case against Billy Hughes in the two Conscription Referenda in 1916 and 1917, when he rejected patriotic fervour whipped up by an opportunist prime minister. He is understood to have voted ‘No’. Cardinal Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney, and Archbishop Beovich, of Adelaide, were also silent.Archbishop Duhig of Brisbane urged a ‘Yes’ vote. Many ALP branches, such as St Kilda, were conflicted. So were many Victorian Liberals, with professionals in the Deakinite tradition, such as Dick Hamer, Ivor Greenwood, Alan Hunt and Alan Missen, unhappy about a proposition to defeat an ideology by legislation. The minority Country Party Government in Victoria, kept in power by Labor, did not lift a finger to help Menzies’ Referendum. John Cain, an effective orator, campaigned hard to support Evatt. The Argus, a Melbourne morning paper owned by Cecil Harmsworth King’s Daily Mirror group, was the only Australian newspaper to urge a ‘No’ vote. Ultimately there were enough serious doubts about the proposed Communist Party ban for the Referendum to be defeated. Academics, many church leaders and senior journalists argued for ‘No’. Three states voted ‘No’ (New South Wales,Victoria, South Australia), three voted ‘Yes’ (Queensland,Western Australia,Tasmania), and nationally there was a small majority (50.56 per cent) for ‘No’. 144
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 145
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Evatt’s surprising win created an altogether false optimism that the Menzies era would soon be over. In fact, the ‘No’ victory, by consolidating Evatt, actually deepened the ideological divide inside the ALP, leading directly to the great Labor split of 1954–57 which kept Labor out of Federal office until 1972. Not long after the Referendum Stephen Murray-Smith, still a member of the CPA, was unexpectedly invited to the Windsor Hotel for supper with Doc Evatt. Dinny Lovegrove was there as well. Stephen remembered Evatt in a rocking chair, in jovial mood, reminiscing about the Referendum. He recalled that the ALP had put on a congratulatory dinner for him. I’ll never forget it. Fifty of the leaders of the Labor movement, in Parliament and out. Six State Premiers or Opposition Leaders. The leaders of the ACTU and the AWU.And the things they said about me! That I had saved democracy in Australia! I had turned back the tide of fascism! I’ll never forget what those fifty said to me. It was a wonderful night.
He paused, and turned to Lovegrove:‘How many of them do you reckon voted for us, Dinny?’ Lovegrove answered, ‘Fourteen.’ Evatt: ‘I counted twelve.’ Labor’s position in Victoria seemed to be reinforced when it won the Federal seat of Flinders in a by-election in October 1952 and swept to a strong victory in the state election in December, despite the long-standing gerrymander. John Cain became Premier for the third time, with an absolute majority in the Legislative Assembly. It was odd that a Party so deeply divided should have polled so well. The ALP’s Federal Secretary, Patrick John Kennelly* (1900–1981), had three devotions—his family, the Catholic Church and the ALP—but was deeply opposed to what he regarded as clerical interference in the party or the trade unions. In Power Without Glory he was Paddy Kelleher, a political fixer, opposed to the Wren machine. He had been a Member of the Legislative Council and briefly a State minister under Cain. In March 1952 Pat had been defeated by a Grouper in a pre-selection ballot for his Legislative Council seat, when he was grieving over the death of a son. However, he won a bitter contest for nomination to the Senate, serving there from 1953 until 1971, and was Deputy Leader * John Faulkner & Stuart Macintyre (eds), True Believers, p. 103. 145
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 146
A THINKING REED
1956–67. Pat was a very important influence on John Cain Junior and me, because he listened, raised points we had not thought about and gave sound advice. Intense ideological differences inside the party remained largely invisible outside. Apart from my ALP membership, I took out a ticket in the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) and subscribed to its journal, The Worker. The AWU leadership was anti-Communist but also anti-Grouper. The Victorian secretary, H.O. (‘Bramah’) Davis, seemed sympathetic and twice gave me a paper bag containing banknotes for my election campaigns. I also subscribed to The Century, a scurrilous but readable journal published by the veteran John Thomas (Jack) Lang* (1876–1975), who had been an authoritarian Premier of New South Wales 1925–27 and 1930–32, and Henry Lawson’s brother-in-law. Lang, like the AWU, was anti-Communist and anti-Grouper. Lang broke with the Federal ALP in 1931 but ran the New South Wales branch until 1938, then formed his own Lang Labor Party in 1940. Jack Beasley and Eddie Ward, Ministers under Curtin and Chifley, had originally been elected to the Commonwealth Parliament as Langites and in the 1930s his supporters proclaimed: ‘Lang is greater than Lenin.’ Lang and Chifley hated each other because Lang played a central role in destroying the Scullin Government in 1931. In Sydney in the 1950s I sometimes visited Lang, an experience that the young Paul Keating had throughout the 1960s. In his famous ‘Placido Domingo’ speech of December 1990 Keating dismissed Chifley, unfairly, as a ‘plodder’, a judgment reflecting the influence of the aged Lang on the young Keating. I found Lang interesting, but self-obsessed, with little concern about events outside New South Wales. He had a huge head and his eyes blazed with hatred as he recalled controversies from the 1930s. He was profoundly isolationist with more than a touch of anti-Semitism. Keating negotiated for Lang to be readmitted to the ALP in his nineties. As part of my interest in Labor Party history I visited King O’Malley (1858–1953),† last survivor of the first Federal ALP Caucus, in June 1953, five months before he died. He had been a Minister under Andrew Fisher, broke with Billy Hughes (1862–1952) in 1916 and rejoiced in outliving him. A fervent teetotaller, he warned me against the influence of ‘stagger juice’. * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, p. 661, Bede Nairn. † ibid., vol. 11, p. 84, Arthur Hoyle. I described my visit to O’Malley in True Believers, pp. 22–3.There is an extensive literature on him. 146
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 147
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
In the Victorian Caucus, pressure from Santamaria’s forces had led to amendments to a Land Settlement Bill, providing for marginal land in Gippsland to be made available for settlement by the National Catholic Rural Movement. In December 1953 Robert Wilfred Holt, then Cain’s Minister for Lands, dramatically tore up a Land Settlement Bill in the House and resigned. Menzies called a Federal election for 29 May 1954. On economic issues Labor seemed to be in a strong position to defeat Menzies because of high levels of inflation and interest rates, but Communism was yet again an important issue, raising fears about national security. The ALP was already divided over Evatt’s leadership and attitudes towards Communism, both internationally and in the trades unions. The heavy French defeat at Dien Bien Phu by Vietnamese forces, thought to be acting as agents of the People’s Republic of China, added to the prevailing fears. Even more significant was the defection announced to the Parliament by Menzies on 13 April of Vladimir Petrov, a KGB agent who served as a diplomat in the Russian Embassy in Canberra. Mrs Evdokia Petrov, also a KGB agent, was being returned to Moscow when ASIO intervened at Darwin airport and wrestled her from Soviet escorts—startling and politically potent images. Menzies set up a Royal Commission on Espionage to investigate the circumstances and implications of the Petrovs’ defection. His handling of the incident before the election was subdued, making no direct attack on members of Evatt’s staff for providing sensitive information to the Soviet Embassy, but it was effective. Artie Fadden, his Deputy, did the heavy hitting. However, when Evatt’s staffers were named in Commission proceedings just before polling day, this was damaging. During the campaign Bill Bourke, Labor MHR for the marginal seat of Fawkner, attacked Evatt for promising to abolish the means test for pensions, a measure which he thought would blow out the Budget and subsidise middle-class welfare. Bourke was correct, but his attack generated adverse media coverage for Labor. Evatt’s election policies were more conservative than Chifley’s. He had several discussions with Bob Santamaria and sought policy inputs, hoping that the Movement and Industrial Group forces would help to maximise Labor’s vote; but Evatt and Santamaria, while civil, fundamentally mistrusted each other. Another negative factor for the ALP was the royal tour, when Queen Elizabeth and her consort made an extensive visit between February and April 1954, with the Prime Minister dancing attendance. The visit 147
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 148
A THINKING REED
generated much exaggerated euphoria and presumably helped the Coalition but it made me a republican. After the Queen’s succession in February 1952 and the coronation in June 1953, newspapers and newsreels had seemed to be permanently on heat about royalty, with constant references to a new ‘Elizabethan age’. In the seat of Isaacs, despite strong Industrial Group influence, the ALP nomination had been won by Don MacSween, a Left winger, secretary of the Clothing Trades Union, very intense, hard working and active in the peace movement. I worked hard for MacSween and founded the Caulfield West branch to assist his campaign. At the age of 21, I cast my first vote for him. Nationally Labor won a plurality of the popular vote, but Menzies held on with a reduced majority of only seven seats. In Victoria, Labor lost one seat (Flinders) and made no gains. There was a 3.8 per cent swing to the Liberals in Isaacs, raising suspicion that branch members influenced by the Groupers had white-anted MacSween’s campaign. Nevertheless, at the Victorian State Conference in June 1954, Evatt was cheered and congratulated for his leadership during the election. On the eve of the Split, the ALP held every State government except South Australia. On 24 June 1954 Dr Evatt delivered the inaugural Chifley Memorial Lecture, at Melbourne University, under the auspices of the ALP Club.The Chifley Lecture, the first in Australia to commemorate a politician, was founded by Keith Hancock and me. Evatt chose ‘The Basis of Democracy’ as his subject. I chaired the event in a packed public lecture theatre in the Old Arts Building. Regrettably, the text no longer exists and perhaps it never did, because Evatt often produced a pure stream of consciousness in his orations when he was focused. The speech was a classic defence of liberalism, the right to dissent, freedom of speech and association and opposition to censorship. The student newspaper Farrago dismissed the address as ‘dull and uninspiring’. We had invited all surviving Ministers of the Chifley and Curtin Cabinets and High Court justices. Seated in the front row was Sir John Latham, the former Chief Justice. Latham had been the only High Court justice to reject Evatt’s submission and uphold Menzies’ legislation banning the Communist Party in March 1951 and had not exactly been an enthusiast for Evatt when they were judicial brethren. Sir John beckoned to me and offered to propose the vote of thanks to Evatt. Although he 148
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 149
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
had been very conservative in politics, he was a small ‘l’ libertarian on some issues and a rationalist, hostile to organised religion. He praised Evatt in a short, eloquent and unexpected speech. Evatt’s Chifley Lecture was probably the high point of my first period at Melbourne University.* On 16 August Evatt sought leave to appear before the Petrov Commission to defend members of his staff who had been named in a document, packed with gossip, which had been given to the Russian Embassy. It was a monumental error of judgment by Evatt, because he appeared to be defending himself not against specific charges, but against a climate of opinion. After tempestuous clashes with the three judges the Commission threw him out on 7 September. Clement Attlee, still Leader of the Labour Opposition in Britain and a major influence in my political development, agreed to be a patron of the Chifley Memorial Lecture, and sent a warm message of support which I read out. In August 1954 Attlee became the first senior Western politician to visit the People’s Republic of China, leading a delegation including Hugh Gaitskell, who succeeded him as party leader in December 1955, Aneurin Bevan and Dr Edith Summerskill. On the way to China, he visited the Soviet Union for discussions with Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and other Politburo leaders. After an initial hesitation, Prime Minister Menzies invited Attlee to visit Australia after China, and the offer was accepted. Fifty years later it is hard to comprehend the hysteria generated by Attlee’s mission to the People’s Republic,‘Red China’ as it was then called. Gough Whitlam visited China in July 1971, seventeen years later, followed by Richard Nixon in February 1972. Attlee’s discussions with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong were extensively reported and he came under bitter attack in the United States Congress, by elements of the Conservative Party (but not Churchill) and some dissidents in his own party for supping with the devil. He went on to visit Manchuria and Hong Kong, arriving in Australia in September. I had sent a telegram inviting Attlee to visit Melbourne University to address the ALP Club and he responded sympathetically, but indicated that * Unquestionably the most important Chifley Memorial Lecture was the fourth, delivered in July 1957, by E.G.Whitlam, MP, on ‘The Constitution versus Labor’. In May 2004 I chaired the 50th Anniversary lecture, when Carmen Lawrence spoke. 149
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 150
A THINKING REED
he might only be able to confirm arrangements at short notice. The Students’ Representative Council at the university gave me an air ticket so that I could talk to Attlee in Canberra on 9 September. Attlee had some spare time between appointments, Evatt’s office arranged a meeting and the Doc introduced us. We discussed the Chinese visit and what he might say to our students. Later in the afternoon I was told that a speech was impossible because Premier Cain had arranged for Attlee to lunch with his Cabinet next day. However, thanks to an intervention by Arthur Calwell, then our Deputy Leader, I was invited to attend Attlee’s dinner address to the Caucus, in the parliamentary dining room. Jack Mullens, MP for Gellibrand, announced that he would boycott the function as a protest against appeasing the murderous rulers of Red China. Attlee’s speech on China was compelling and persuasive, cool, well informed, consistent, courageous, measured, anti-fanatical, open to alternative views. It was a model of putting a complex, controversial, emotioncharged case and I was grateful to have been there. It did not prevent the mild-mannered Attlee being heckled by Stan Keon, MP for Yarra. I met Gough Whitlam for the first time at the dinner, and he recalls lining up for Attlee’s autograph. In a mood of exaggerated fear and appeal to emotion, Attlee’s visit to China was traduced as a subversion of Western values or, even worse, as condoning dictatorship, mass murder and treachery. There could be no intermediate position. I found this false dichotomy profoundly disturbing and Attlee’s cool, forensic approach was an attractive model. I reacted instinctively against the argument, ‘You must adopt my point of view. There is no alternative’. Other than on the death penalty, I always worked on the balance of possibilities: ‘I have examined all the options, and on balance feel this is the way to go’. This was very much Attlee’s style. Attlee then spent a day in Melbourne. I had coffee with him, although my plan to get him to talk to students had been abandoned. We talked about what it had been like running the home front during World War II while Churchill directed the war effort. Attlee’s visit was a major catalyst in the looming split in the Australian Labor Party which led to open war less than a month later, when Doc Evatt launched his attack on ‘disloyal elements’ in the Party. The central issue concerned attitudes to Communism, both domestically, within the trade unions and internationally, especially attitudes towards Russia, China and their satellites, compounded by ruthless purges, espionage trials, a 150
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 151
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
nuclear arms race, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the exaggerated language of confrontation and the juxtaposition of absolutes. On 5 October in Sydney, while launching Dr John Burton’s book The Alternative, Evatt made a powerful attack on ‘the attitude of a small minority group of members, located particularly in the State of Victoria, which has, since 1949, become increasingly disloyal to the Labor Movement and the Labor leadership’. He referred to ‘a small group . . . deliberately attempting to undermine a number of Labor’s . . . candidates’, and to selective Caucus leaking to the media. He did not name Santamaria, The Movement or the Industrial Groups, but press reporting of his speech identified all three. Until that point Santamaria was completely unknown to the general public. Evatt’s outburst fed into a deep vein of sectarianism. Santamaria’s name was a free gift to his opponents, who often hurled round accusations of ‘clerical fascism’. In January 1954, at a Conference of The Movement in Albury, Santamaria had given an address, ‘The Movement of Ideas in Australia’, in which he urged his followers to ‘destroy the Chifley legend’ and replace it with ‘the Curtin legend’, which he regarded as being more pro-American. The speech added to his notoriety after Evatt’s outburst. The Federal Executive met in Melbourne for several days in November and December to hear Evatt’s charges against the Victorian Central Executive (VCE). Twenty-four witnesses were called to give evidence. Robert Murray was right to conclude that the case Evatt presented to the Federal Executive in November–December for dismissing the Victorian Executive was very thin, but it certainly seemed to be justified ex post facto in 1955 and later years. The Executive decided, by seven votes to five, to dismiss the VCE, dissolve the Industrial Groups and call a Special Victorian Conference in February 1955. The dismissed Victorian Central Executive sought a Supreme Court injunction to prevent the Special Conference being called, lost, then called on its supporters to boycott it. If the Industrial Group supporters had turned up in force at the Special Conference they might have won the day, because they claimed to represent up to 80 per cent of all branch members in Victoria and many of the major trade unions. The year 1954 was not only the year of the Split, it also marked a fundamental turning point in the composition of the Australian labour force, when trade unionists peaked as a proportion of all workers and began a long decline which continues to this day. 151
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 152
A THINKING REED
Although I was not anti-Catholic, I had no hesitation in identifying myself with the supporters of Evatt, Cain and Kennelly and was elected as a delegate to the Special Conference. John Cain had been the State ALP Leader since 1937 and had a reputation for judgment, probity, but also extreme caution. Delegates were overwhelmingly male, middle aged and a surprising proportion bore the marks of industrial injuries such as missing digits, the signs of a tough life. Despite their limited formal education, many were powerful and passionate debaters. This, my first ALP Conference, was in striking contrast to conferences after the 1980s. Now delegates are much younger, tertiary educated, with significant female representation, impeccably manicured, with unlined faces and generally silent because all contentious issues have been finessed through factional negotiation. Dinny Lovegrove,* former plasterer, ex-Trotskyist, strong supporter of the Industrial Groups, had been Secretary of the Grouper-dominated Central Executive and ALP Federal President; he now defected to the New Executive, the opponents of the Groupers. Since the supporters of the dismissed VCE had boycotted the Special Conference, there was overwhelming support for a new Executive elected on a trade union ticket, with the veteran secretary of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, Vic Stout, becoming President. Cain, as Leader, was on the Executive ex officio and other members included Don MacSween, Pat Kennelly, R.W. Holt, Percy Clarey, H.O. Davis and Albert McNolty, as well as Albert Monk and Reg Broadby as President and Secretary of the ACTU.There was a significant proportion of Freemasons. From 14 to 18 March 1955 an unprecedentedly bitter Federal ALP Conference was held in Hobart. The issue was whether it would uphold the decisions made by the Federal Executive in December and accept the six-man delegation elected by the Special Victorian Conference in February. Opponents of Evatt, including Tom Burke and Kim Beazley Senior from Western Australia, Senator George Cole from Tasmania, Premier Vince Gair of Queensland, Bill Colbourne, Lloyd Ross and Laurie Short from New South Wales, made the tactically foolish decision to boycott the Hobart Conference. There was an added complication that weakened the boycotters, that the Western Australian and Tasmanian branches had directed their delegates to support Evatt’s position. On 25 March in Melbourne the dismissed VCE called a meeting of its * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 15, p. 127, John Button. 152
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 153
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
supporters, who included seventeen Members of the State Parliament, four of them Ministers, and seven Members of the House of Representatives. They were promptly expelled from the ALP by the new Central Executive. The seven Victorian Federal MPs, joined by Senator George Cole from Tasmania, elected Robert Joshua from Ballarat as Leader and Stan Keon from Yarra (essentially Richmond and Collingwood) as Deputy. The old Executive elected Frank McManus, formerly Dinny Lovegrove’s assistant, as its Secretary. Thus began the Split, a decisive factor which kept the ALP out of office nationally until 1972, and in Victoria until 1982. These tumultuous events helped to cement me into politics.The Young Labor Association (YLA), which had been firmly in Grouper hands, was taken over by the new executive. I became president of the YLA and Clyde Holding secretary, although neither of us had been activists because the vacuum was largely filled by members of the University ALP Club. So many branch members had been recruited by The Movement that the Evatt–Cain cause was struggling to find people to hold positions, run as candidates or organise campaigns. On 19 April Henry Bolte, the Liberal Leader, moved a No Confidence motion against the Cain Government in the Legislative Assembly. The Grouper supporters of the Old Executive, under the leadership of Bill Barry, Member for Carlton and a member of the Wren machine, decided to support censure. Barry, a rough, tough debater and Cain’s presumed successor, had shown no affinity with The Movement and was a surprising choice as leader of the breakaways. Les Coleman, an Upper House Minister, defected too. The Assembly chamber was packed. I sat in the press gallery, representing Farrago. The bitterness was ferocious. Debate dragged on until 4.20 a.m. Bob Pettiona, a Cain supporter, hurled thirty pieces of silver (actually threepenny bits) at Bill Barry’s associates. The No Confidence motion was carried by 34 votes to 23, with eleven former Labor MPs crossing the floor. One, Charles Murphy, abstained. Cain then asked the State Governor to dissolve the Parliament and an election was called for 28 May. There was a rapid round of pre-selections by the new Victorian Central Executive in May. I was endorsed for the safe Liberal seat of Camberwell, essentially because nobody else wanted it. Keith Hancock, who was too young to vote, urged me to run and became my campaign director. The ALP was not the only party to have split. A progressive splinter group led by a former Premier, Tom Hollway, had broken away from the 153
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 154
A THINKING REED
Liberals.There were four Hollway Liberals in the Legislative Assembly and they abstained in the No Confidence motion against Cain. Hollway’s seat of Glen Iris had been eliminated in a redistribution and so he contested the new electorate of Ripponlea, in which I lived. Despite being Labor’s candidate for Camberwell, I doubled as Tom Hollway’s de facto campaign director. Labor did not run a candidate and we let it be known, by many winks and nods, that Hollway was our man in Ripponlea. He was also endorsed by The Herald and Sun. I rather liked him, but he rarely left his campaign headquarters in the bar at the Windsor Hotel. In Camberwell, the high point of my campaign was a speech by Dr Evatt. I had developed a good relationship with Evatt, who saw me as a protégé and was touched when he agreed to open my campaign at the Camberwell Town Hall. Not all our campaign workers were wildly enthusiastic about ‘the Doc’. His vigorous and successful campaign in 1951 against the Referendum to ban the Communist Party ensured that many saw him as a dangerous radical. The Split renewed accusations that he was a fellow traveller. One of our activists, ex-RAAF member Norm Griffiths, proposed that we proclaim our loyalty by using some patriotic props, the Queen, the Anthem and the Flag, on the stage. The Camberwell Town Hall was packed. The table was covered with an impressive purple pall, behind which was a Union Jack and a framed colour photo of Her Majesty the Queen mounted on her horse, Winston. Norm had brought his gramophone, on which he would play his own recording of ‘God Save the Queen’. Evatt arrived and strode down the centre aisle. The crowd stood and cheered. He mounted the platform, shook hands all round and we all sat, hands clenched, like a school photograph. Norm moved to his gramophone.At the sound of the drum roll all stood and listened to an orchestral rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’. We sat down. Then from Norm’s gramophone came the chorus singing the anthem’s first verse.We all stood up again. God save our gracious Queen! Long live our noble Queen! God save the Queen! Send her victorious, Happy and glorious Long to reign over us God save the Queen! 154
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 155
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
We sat down again, only to hear orchestra and chorus begin the second verse. We stood once more. Thy gracious gifts in store, On her be pleased to pour, Long may she reign! May she defend our laws And ever give us cause To sing with heart and voice God save the Queen!
For the third time the crowd sat. It was rare to go on with the second verse and almost unprecedented to go on with the third. We had reckoned without Norm. He had the full three-verse version, orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar.The chorus embarked on the third verse.The audience rose again. Oh Lord our God arise! Scatter her enemies And make them fall! Confound their politics Frustrate their knavish tricks! On thee our hopes we fix. God save us all!
For the fourth time we sat down gingerly. Evatt glared across at me.At the best of times he lacked a sense of humour and this was not one of his best. His face was suffused with rage. He hissed: ‘You only did this to make a fool of me. Calwell put you up to it!’ The ALP and Anti-Communist Labor Parties mostly directed their preferences to the Coalition, and this decisively increased the Liberal majority. In later elections, the control of preferences was far tighter. The ALP campaigned as ‘Cain Labor’ with the catchy slogan, ‘You can trust John Cain’. The Anti-Communist Labor Party used the brand ‘Barry– Coleman Labor’ from the names of its Lower and Upper House leaders. The 1955 state election was a disaster for the ALP, the Anti-Communist Labor Party, the Country Party and the Hollway Liberals. Cain Labor had 37 MPs on its election in December 1952, and 25 when the Government fell: it returned with 20 MPs.The Barry–Coleman breakaways started with 155
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 156
A THINKING REED
12 MPs and only one survived, Frank Scully in Richmond. Cain Labor won 32.57 per cent of the vote and Barry–Coleman Labor 12.61 per cent. All four Hollway Liberals lost. The only winner was Henry Bolte and his Liberal Party, which rocketed from 11 MPs in 1952 to 33, an absolute majority of seats, with no need to form a Coalition. Ironically, it was the first State election held on fair electoral boundaries. Thus began a 27-year exile for the Victorian ALP. The Split was deeply complex. After the Split, when Labor Governments had been brought down in Victoria and Queensland, the defectors who became the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) directed their preferences to keep Menzies, Bolte, Bjelke-Petersen and other conservatives in power for decades. The DLP brought a strong note of hysteria into election campaigning (especially its skilful television advertisements), so it was easy to read the whole affair as a clash of cultures with apocalyptic overtones. But it was not quite so clear cut before the event, as Robert Murray argues. He overstates his case and almost invariably gives the benefit of the doubt to the anti-Evatt forces, but was correct to point to the complexity of the issues. The Split involved a mixture of personal hatred, turf wars and religious division. Catholics were deeply divided and some non-Catholics played a prominent role in the DLP. Catholic supporters and opponents of John Wren’s machine found themselves in the breakaway Labor Party. Some defectors, for example Bill Barry and Frank Scully, detested each other. Others had shown little sympathy for the Santamaria program.There were opportunists who thought that anti-Communism would be more potent electorally than anti-Catholicism. Others were ideologues with a taste for martyrdom. Evatt, a non-Catholic, had cultivated Santamaria, while Calwell, a Catholic, detested him (and Evatt). The Movement was a powerful force in the Victorian ALP and had some characteristics of a secret society, which created a strongly adverse reaction, but there were ideological differences within its members: it was not monolithic. Pre-selection victories by Frank Crean in Melbourne Ports in 1951, Pat Kennelly for the Senate in 1953 and Don MacSween for Isaacs in 1954, when the Groupers were running the Victorian branch, have to be set against pre-selection defeats for Kennelly and the veteran Bill Beckett (although his age and senility suggest other reasons) in the Legislative Council, and Bob Holt for the Legislative Assembly. Some who had faithfully followed the Grouper line on the Central Executive, such as Ted Peters, prudently decided to join the forces allied to Bert Evatt and John Cain. 156
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 157
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
After the 1955 State election, Evatt forgave me. Curiously, he began using me as a go-between with the Victorian Executive. He was reluctant to ring Jack Tripovich, the State Secretary, so he would telephone and say, ‘I want you to see Tripovich and tell him . . .’ I was hesitant to say to the great man,‘You are the Party Leader, why don’t you do it yourself.’ On one occasion he asked, ‘Have you seen Calwell lately?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I saw him this afternoon.’‘How did he look? Is he failing?’ On 19 October 1955 Evatt, in responding in the House to the report of the Royal Commission on Espionage, announced that he had written to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian Foreign Minister, inviting him to confirm or deny the genuineness of documents provided by the Petrovs. Not surprisingly, Molotov denied that the USSR ever engaged in spying. The naiveté of Evatt’s action caused incredulity on both sides of the House. To exploit Labor’s divisions, Menzies called a premature election on 10 December 1955 and I was endorsed as candidate for Isaacs. I lived in the electorate, cultivated local branch members and Don MacSween, the candidate in 1954, decided not to recontest. I was much happier running for a Federal seat, because my policy interests were national. Evatt campaigned for me once again, at a packed meeting in Elwood where the crowd was delirious with enthusiasm; but I succeeded in offending Evatt a second time. I thought that the ALP ought to publish a short, punchy campaign biography, setting out Evatt’s extraordinary record of achievement: High Court Justice, Attorney-General, Minister for External Affairs, architect of the United Nations, President of the United Nations General Assembly, international campaigner for the rule of law. So I drafted a 5000-word biographical sketch. To make it lively, I had begun by raising the controversial accusations which were hurled against Evatt, ‘Why did Evatt write the Molotov letter?’, ‘Was Evatt a fellow traveller?’, ‘Why is Evatt such a target of abuse?’ I handed him my typescript (we were in a urinal, as it happened), he glanced at the front page, then tore up the entire document, leaving the pieces as they fell. I took that to be a hostile reaction. The election was a débâcle for Evatt and the ALP, the only satisfaction being that all seven DLP members lost their seats. The Liberals won Ballarat from Bob Joshua and Jim Cairns defeated Stan Keon narrowly in Yarra. Bob Holt won in Darebin, Gordon Bryant in Wills and Hec McIvor in Gellibrand. However, a consolation for the DLP was when Frank McManus won a Senate seat. 157
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 158
A THINKING REED
Liberal support in Isaacs was virtually unchanged but the ALP vote fell from 44.1 per cent to 33.3 per cent, with the DLP gaining 12.2 per cent. It was my second defeat in seven months, and the bitterness of the Split was intensifying. In Victoria the statewide vote was 37.1 per cent for the ALP and 15.8 per cent for the DLP. If preferences had been exchanged, Labor could have won the state comfortably. Labor, which had won 58 House of Representatives seats in 1954, fell back to 47 in 1955.The harsh reality was that DLP preferences went to the Coalition by a 10:1 margin. In Victoria the ALP held only ten House of Representatives seats and this figure was unchanged until 1966, when it fell to 8. Because no DLP candidates stood in New South Wales or Queensland, Labor secured a surprisingly high national vote (44.63 per cent). Nikita Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of the safely dead Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 shocked Australian Communists, strengthened the antiCommunist rhetoric of Menzies’ Government and deepened divisions in the trade unions.The CPA’s immediate reaction was to deny that any such speech had been delivered and to sternly repress any attempt to discuss the issue. It later amended the line, conceded that there had been a ‘cult of the individual’ based on Stalin, but saw the mass killings as a personal aberration, not a systemic failure. The suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Russian forces in October 1956 confirmed that Khrushchev, if not totalitarian, was deeply authoritarian. New South Wales, where Industrial Groupers still ran the ALP machine, avoided a major split. Premier Joe Cahill did not want to follow John Cain’s example. Bill Colbourne, Lloyd Ross and Laurie Short remained with the ALP. Cardinal Norman Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney, was unsympathetic to Santamaria and discouraged direct participation by the Church in politics. The Federal Executive conducted an enquiry into the State Executive, dissolved it, and called a Special Conference in August 1955 to elect a new Executive, in which the pro- and anti-Evatt forces were evenly divided. In June 1956 the Federal Executive intervened again, suspended the State Conference, dismissed the State Executive and appointed a new one. A small minority then broke away and formed a branch of the DLP, while most of the Groupers remained in the ALP. Despite the defection, Labor stayed in office until 1965. The New South Wales branch of the DLP was generally more moderate than Victoria’s; for a time its members included the young academic lawyer William Deane. 158
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 159
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
In Queensland, Vince Gair’s Labor Government was re-elected comfortably in May 1956. Gair was firmly in the anti-Evatt camp and strongly opposed by the AWU and anti-Grouper trade unions. The unions campaigned for three weeks annual leave, and opposed Gair on legislation relating to university appeals and petrol sales. The Central Executive directed Gair to pass legislation on three weeks leave and when he refused expelled him and his strongest supporters from the ALP. In June ALP MPs joined the Opposition in Parliament to defeat Gair on a No Confidence motion, an exact inversion of what had happened in Victoria in April 1955 when John Cain’s Government was defeated by anti-Evatt defectors crossing the floor. In August 1957 a conservative coalition won the election and the ALP was out of power for thirty-two years. Vince Gair then founded the Queensland Labor Party (QLP), which later merged with the DLP, and became a Senator from 1965 to 1974. In August 1957 John Cain Senior died suddenly on holiday in Townsville at the age of 75 (older than he admitted to), after 20 years as State ALP Leader. He had been a dominant figure in the Victorian branch, bringing gravitas, judgment and moderation to the Party. However, his last two years had been painful due to constant conflict with the hardline Central Executive, which was more interested in maintaining trade union control over the Party than in winning State elections. Cain’s death led to a further, dramatic reduction in the significance of the State Parliamentary Party which left policy decisions in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian and dogmatic Executive. In the May 1958 State elections, the ALP defeated Frank Scully in Richmond but lost two seats overall. The control of the Victorian ALP passed first to a broad Left, then as Catholic voters defected to the DLP with the support of the Catholic hierarchy, became hard Left. Moderates such as Kennelly, Davis, Broadby, Monk and Clarey soon left the Executive. Following concerns that Australia’s Catholic bishops were deeply divided over the status of The Movement, a papal commission in Rome examined the situation and in 1957 determined that the organisation should no longer claim to be speaking for the Church. The Movement was wound up and renamed the National Civic Council (NCC), essentially a lay body. In October 1958 Pope Pius XII died and his successor, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, took the name of John XXIII. After a few months the new Pope, the first to have prolonged exposure to television, seemed to be far more open and less authoritarian than his predecessor and many Labor supporters, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, thought 159
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 160
A THINKING REED
that the winds of change in the Vatican might contribute to ending the Labor split. These hopes proved to be illusory. The fiftieth anniversary of the Victorian split was marked by the publication of a book* and an interesting symposium held in the Victorian Legislative Assembly chamber in which surviving veterans from the ALP and DLP met and reminisced over five decades of bitter separation. Inevitably the DLP partisans blamed Evatt, while the ALP supporters blamed Santamaria. Evatt handled the internal tensions of the Party intemperately and his attack on The Movement caused a major revival of sectarian bitterness and fed anti-Catholic prejudice. Santamaria was a divisive figure among Catholics but in Victoria most Catholics in the party organisation, whether they approved of his apocalyptic view of the world or not, took common cause against Evatt. The destruction of the Cain Government was savage and pointless and when members of the Catholic Right defected, the pendulum in the Victorian Party inevitably swung to the Left. The Queensland split was essentially determined by internal factors and Evatt was not a primary cause. Evatt was paranoid, but even paranoids have real enemies. At its most hysterical, the Split was seen as a rerun of the Spanish Civil War: conflict between Communism and Fascism, between Moscow and Rome, damnation and salvation, hell and heaven.
EVATT TO CALWELL When Menzies called an election for 22 November 1958, Evatt still led the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party. I renominated for Isaacs and was unopposed, essentially because our low primary vote in 1955 indicated that the seat was unwinnable.We organised a meeting at the St Kilda Town Hall for 21 October. Evatt was to speak first at the Preston Town Hall and expected to be with us at about 9.15 p.m. When he arrived, to a standing ovation, he launched into his speech. He neglected to mention that at Preston he had pledged to give up the ALP’s leadership if the DLP would commit its second preference votes to Labor. As Robert Murray noted, ‘Evatt seems to have consulted nobody on this remarkable offer, which would have meant the country voting for an unknown Prime Minister and a Labor Party of quite uncertain character’. The DLP rejected the offer out of hand. * Brian Costar, Peter Love & Paul Strangio (eds), The Great Labor Schism. 160
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 161
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Evatt’s St Kilda speech, off the cuff, was of considerable historical interest, a learned discussion of the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six agricultural labourers transported from Dorset to New South Wales in 1834 for having sworn illegal oaths in forming an agricultural union. I found the speech moving, but the town hall audience seemed to be lost. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were not a major issue in the 1958 election, certainly not in Isaacs. Labor’s vote in Isaacs improved by 4 per cent. The Liberal MP, Bill Haworth, had 50.2 per cent of the vote, to the ALP 37.4 per cent and DLP 12.4 per cent. It was my third contest and the reasonable swing was not much consolation. But I was only one of many defeated candidates. Nationally, the ALP’s vote fell to 42.81 per cent, essentially because the DLP was now standing candidates in all States, and overall Labor lost two more seats. In November 1959 I attended the large, controversial Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament in Melbourne, starring the novelist J.B. Priestley. A loose grouping of dissidents, including Stephen Murray-Smith, Ken Gott, Jim Jupp, Philip Knight, Howard Nathan and me, linked with the Fabians, had become convinced that the Congress would be controlled by hardliners. Some sections of the Congress were marked by simple-minded authoritarianism and intolerance of dissent. When Congress proposed a resolution that ‘we claim freedom for every true artist to express and communicate his vision of life’, Stephen moved to add the words:‘We recognise that many writers in a number of countries do not yet have this freedom.’ The amendment was overwhelmingly defeated, because it was interpreted as an unacceptable criticism, however mild, of Eastern Europe. Hardliners on the Victorian Executive had no sympathy for dissenters. Stephen was particularly irritated by fellow travellers who lived comfortable and protected lives in Australia, being outspoken defenders of civil liberties at home but apologists for censorship, persecution, executions and thought police in the USSR, China, Hungary or Cuba. Oddly, Jim Cairns, a libertarian on many issues, was very sensitive about criticising human rights in Eastern Europe. In February 1960 Dr Evatt was manoeuvred out of the ALP’s Federal Leadership and appointed as Chief Justice of New South Wales. He had lost three Federal elections and it was time for him to go. However, his translation to the bench proved tragic. He was suffering from cerebral thrombosis and possibly epilepsy, had a stroke in March 1962 and resigned 161
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 162
A THINKING REED
in October. He retired to his Canberra home and died there in November 1965. His tombstone records only that he was President of the United Nations: there is no reference to the Labor Party. In March, Arthur Calwell* was elected as Leader of the Opposition, defeating Reg Pollard, MHR for Lalor. Edward Gough Whitlam, MHR for Werriwa, became Deputy. Nick McKenna, who represented Tasmania but lived in Sydney, remained Labor’s Senate Leader, and Pat Kennelly became Deputy Senate Leader. I knew Calwell well, saw him often in his Melbourne office and admired his enormous capacity. I was less confident about his judgment. I first met him in 1946 during the Federal election campaign when he was Minister for Immigration and Information, and I used to hear him speaking at street corner meetings. With an enormous vocabulary, an actor’s timing, an impressive capacity to work up the crowd and a sense of humour, he was the last of the great stump orators, a style which went out of fashion in the age of television sleekness and homogeneity. After years as a Victorian public servant and an important machine man and fixer in the ALP machine, he became MHR for Melbourne from 1940 to 1972, serving as Minister for Information 1943–49 and Immigration 1945–49. He was remote from John Curtin but worked closely with Ben Chifley as architect of the massive post-war immigration program which changed the face of the nation. He remained the last great defender of the White Australia Policy. In 1955 Calwell had opposed Federal intervention in Victoria because he foresaw that a split with traditional Catholic Labor voters over the issue of attitudes to Communism might weaken the party permanently. For decades he had been very close to Archbishop Mannix and, as a practising Catholic, the sectarian divisiveness which followed hurt him deeply. As his biographer, Colm Kiernan, noted, Arthur Calwell’s stand in politics ‘was essentially moralistic’ and he was shaped, first by the discrimination against Roman Catholics which he observed as a young man, next by the bloody sectarian divisions in Ireland, later by the savageries of World War I and the needless cruelties imposed by capitalism during the Great Depression. He did not trust intellectuals within the Labor Party and it was ironic that he should have served, with considerable tension in both cases, in the highest offices of the Parliamentary Party as the Deputy of one (Evatt) and with another (Whitlam) as his Deputy. Despite all this, * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 13, p. 341, Graham Freudenberg. 162
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 163
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
he had strong claims to be regarded as an intellectual himself, much as he would have disclaimed the description. Widely read in history, especially American history, literature and science, he wrote extensively and well, essays, occasional pieces, reviews and an autobiography. He had a working knowledge of Mandarin at a time when it was rare for any Australian to speak another language. He talked well and confidently with experts. He had a memory like an elephant and performed innumerable acts of kindness, but he was a good hater too. Pat Kennelly played a vital role in ensuring Whitlam’s election as Deputy Leader. Temperamentally, philosophically and intellectually, Kennelly and Whitlam had little in common. But Kennelly was a shrewd judge of political form and concluded that of all the Caucus members, only Whitlam could become Prime Minister, preferring him over Jim Cairns or Kim Beazley Senior. As he used to say, in his compelling stammer: ‘He . . . he . . . he’s the one!’ Kennelly had long given up on Evatt, and he supported Calwell for the leadership because he felt he had a better chance than Reg Pollard of winning back Labor’s traditional Catholic vote. Whitlam was also supported by a handful of Masons in the Caucus (although not one himself ) and the small ex-service contingent. He may have benefited from being the youngest of the four candidates on offer, although the Caucus was chronologically challenged. Whitlam was the first Labor figure to use television effectively and his striking appearance and debating skills inevitably evoked comparisons with Menzies. I continued as an ALP activist and Conference delegate, increasingly disillusioned with the Victorian branch’s myopia and resistance to new ideas. My greatest frustration was at State Conference because when I looked at the 400 delegates it was hard to see them as a cross-section of Labor supporters in the community, people whose votes we needed to win elections. Where were the women? Where were the non-unionised white-collar workers? Where were the people of non-English-speaking background? Where were the young people? Where were the Catholics? The great majority were trade union officials, most of them working in the same building, who arranged for mutual support on the dominant ticket.There was an overwhelming mood of defensiveness in the chamber, linked with a contempt for parliamentary processes and a lack of contemporary relevance. Conference had a whiff of the 1940s about it. While the VCE called itself Left, on some social issues it was reactionary. It took a very hard line on the White Australia Policy and resisted multiculturalism and affirmative action. 163
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 164
A THINKING REED
In the State election of July 1961 the ALP lost even more seats. Menzies called a Federal election for December 1961, after the Parliament had run its full term. Calwell was a vigorous campaigner who achieved a surprising swing, winning fifteen seats. Labor won a majority of seats in every state except Victoria and Western Australia. Bill Hayden, a policeman from Ipswich, won the Queensland seat of Oxley. I had not been a candidate for pre-selection. Candidates were still chosen by the Central Executive, and since 1958 I had been regarded as a critic of hardline policies and unity tickets in trade unions. The ALP’s inflexible structure was demonstrated by a famous photograph of Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam standing under the street lights outside the Hotel Kingston (now Olims Hotel) in Canberra in March 1963, waiting to be told what a Special Federal Conference had decided about whether the Party could support a projected United States naval communications base at North-West Cape. Leader and Deputy Leader, under the rules, were excluded from the all-male Conference, which met behind locked doors. Bob Menzies memorably dubbed the Federal Conference the ‘thirty-six faceless men’ and he used the phrase damagingly in the election in November that year. In April 1963 Pope John’s encyclical ‘Pacem in Terris’ (‘Peace on Earth’) gave encouraging signs that the Vatican wanted to end the Cold War, opening up dialogue with Communists and other religions. Surely, we hoped, this signalled the end of the DLP? It did no such thing. John XXIII died in June but was followed by a moderate reformer, Paul VI. At the June 1963 Annual Conference I was a candidate for election to the Central Executive and finished as runner up some distance behind, after a clean sweep by the ‘officers’ ticket’. Four months later the ALP preselected me for the marginal seat of Bruce, held for the Liberals by Billy Snedden. Bruce’s boundaries extended from parts of Box Hill down to Westernport, and it had the largest population of any Federal seat. (In 1969 the Bruce electorate was carved up into Holt and parts of Bruce, Flinders and Deakin.) My endorsement was unexpected. Despite being on poor terms with the Victorian Central Executive, there were practical reasons for them to select me. In 1961 Labor had failed to win the Federal election by only one seat, and Victoria was the only state where it made no gains. Pick-a-Box had made me an instant celebrity and I taught in Dandenong, in the centre of Bruce. The Executive, breathing hard, chose several well-known candidates for swinging seats, including Bob Hawke in Corio, Dr Moss Cass in La Trobe and me in Bruce. 164
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 165
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Archbishop Mannix died in November during the election campaign, in his hundredth year. Despite his support for Santamaria, the DLP and the NCC, he had a long radical tradition and had made a strong protest in 1953 about the execution of the Rosenbergs in the United States. I stood in the crowd on 17 March to see Dr Mannix pass in an open car, as banners read, ‘God Love You, Your Grace’s One Hundredth St Patrick’s Day’. His successor, Archbishop Justin Simonds, was known to be an opponent of Santamaria and the NCC. Surprisingly, it made no difference to the DLP’s vote. Television destroyed face-to-face campaigning, where local candidates get out to argue for policy, and party bosses now happily encourage candidates to take vows of silence. In Bruce we held about thirty hall meetings, mostly well attended. It was a gruelling campaign and, unlike Isaacs, there were long distances to be travelled. On the Saturday before election day, I drove at dawn to the centre of Melbourne to pick up newspapers before setting out for Dandenong and a day’s campaigning. As I drove, ABC Radio reported President John Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. This shocking news turned out the lights in the campaign, and Menzies’ appeal for calm and stability was very effective. On election day, 30 November 1963, Hawke, Cass and Jones all lost. Labor made no gains in Victoria and lost ten House of Representatives seats nationally.The impact of television was overwhelming and Kennedy’s murder created a mood of profound sadness and fatalism, that the optimism (exaggerated, as it turned out) created by a young, bright, handsome President had been turned off, and we were back in the world of darkness, fear, pessimism and rule by the gun. From 1963 until 1970 the Victorian ALP Secretary was Bill Hartley, brought in from Western Australia. Hartley’s background was unusual, as he had been educated at St Peter’s College,Adelaide, and the Hale School, Perth, joined the Young Liberals and served in the RAAF. He proved to be extremely hard working and conscientious, but also authoritarian and dogmatic, the complete apparatchik. He worked very hard for the Victorian Central Executive, members of which had, since 1961, been chosen by a group called the Trade Union Defence Committee (TUDC), whose operating methods had an eerie resemblance to the much hated Industrial Groups. In the June 1964 State election Allan Fraser, an experienced Federal MP from New South Wales not particularly sympathetic to the Left, was brought down to Victoria to act as campaign director. The campaign 165
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 166
A THINKING REED
was to be launched by the Opposition Leader, Clive Stoneham, from the Prahran Town Hall, in a speech to be televised live. We sat in the hall, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.The speech had been prepared by the ALP head office, with minimal consultation with Stoneham. He was to read the speech from large sheets of pasteboard on which the text had been written.At the top left of the first sheet his name, CLIVE, had been written in capitals as a cue to avoid confusion. Unfortunately, the curves of the letter ‘C’ had been drawn over-generously, so that the letter resembled an ‘O’. At 8 p.m. the live telecast began. Allan Fraser stood by the first pasteboard sheet, pointing to the name ‘CLIVE’. Our Leader looked baffled, and said nothing. Allan Fraser tapped the name ‘CLIVE’ again. Silence. He tapped a third time. Clive Stoneham smiled, relaxed and mysteriously began his televised election speech with the words,‘Thank you, Olive.’ Worse was to come. The speech was due to run on television for 30 minutes, but Stoneham finished after 25. Inviting questions from the floor was not considered to be a good idea, so Dinny Lovegrove, Deputy Leader and an excellent impromptu speaker, was called on. Unhappily, he reached back to his deep memory as a Trotskyist in the 1930s. He began: We know what this election is all about: the struggle between the rich and the poor. We know who our enemies are: the kind of people who have two cars in the garage, central heating and a sprinkler system in the lawn.And on their walls, they have something that looks as if two cockroaches have been crawling about in Indian ink, a piece of so-called modern art!
It was great rhetoric. Unhappily, Labor lost more seats and it was eighteen years before we won another Victorian election. Not surprisingly, there was increasing unhappiness about how the Victorian ALP was being run. The dissidents fell into several categories. Trades Hall moderates included Mick Jordan, Secretary of the Trades Hall Council, Ken Stone, his Deputy, Bill Evans, Vice President of the ACTU, and various officers of the AWU. The ‘Participants’* were essentially * Leading Participants (and the offices they later held) included Dick McGarvie, QC, Supreme Court judge and Governor of Victoria, Xavier Connor, QC, Federal Court judge, Howard Nathan, QC, Supreme Court judge, Alistair Nicholson, QC, Chief Justice of the Family Court, Peter Heerey, QC, Federal Court judge, Jim Kennan, QC, Minister and State Leader, Frank Costigan, QC, barrister, John Cain, solicitor and Premier, John Button, solicitor, Senator, Minister and author, Michael Duffy, solicitor, MHR and Minister, Barney Cooney, 166
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 167
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
professionals, mostly lawyers, many of them Fabians but few of them women, who wanted the Party to have a broader base and be more open to policy change and were attracted to Gough Whitlam’s political agenda. But they were moderates who refused to challenge fundamentally the culture of the ruling ‘junta’ and they distinguished themselves from more radical critics.They were optimists, too, who persisted against all the evidence in thinking that there could be a negotiated compromise with the Old Guard who ran the Victorian Party. I was in the outer circle of the Participants, regarded with some suspicion because of association with my friends Bono Wiener and Ray Evans, who were outspoken and controversial in their denunciation of the VCE. The VCE’s main aim was not winning elections and passing legislation but preserving membership of the Executive itself and imposing its will on the Party, ‘democratic centralism’ at its worst. I recalled Adlai Stevenson’s variant on Lord Acton’s famous dictum:‘Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely’. Individually, the VCE members were decent people, but collectively they breathed each other’s air and turned away from the wider world. I never considered the VCE as particularly ‘Left’: it was essentially defending a contracting and obsolescent base, like Afrikaaners in South Africa protecting their laager. Immediately after the 1964 State election, I wrote a 4000-word analysis of the national situation in the ALP entitled ‘The Two Labor Parties’. I pointed to striking variations in the ALP primary vote at recent State elections. Three State branches were ‘success oriented’, and three ‘failure oriented’. Labor held government in Tasmania and New South Wales and was only defeated in South Australia by outrageous boundary rigging. In Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria the ALP vote was low, and Victoria’s (36.2 per cent) lowest of all. I wrote: ‘The Victorian ALP seems to be a very toothless old tiger—but the party does excite much good humoured derision . . . There are three main reasons for Labor’s persistent failure, (a) lack of public confidence in evasive or contradictory policies; barrister and Senator, Evan Walker, architect and State Minister, Rees D. (Barney) Williams, secretary of the bank officers’ union, Ralph Renard, solicitor and art dealer, Race Mathews, speech therapist, soon to be Gough Whitlam’s principal adviser, later MHR and State Minister, Tony Lamb, pharmacist and MHR, James Jupp, academic, Bob Ives, lecturer and State MP, Jim Snow, pharmacist and MHR, Ron Kennelly, public servant, John Paterson, bureaucrat, Sheila O’Sullivan, lobbyist, and me. 167
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 168
A THINKING REED
(b) a feeling that the party lacks sufficient competence to govern and (c) the narrowing basis of party support’. I gave thirteen examples where our policies were either evasive or contradictory: our attitudes towards the Communist Party, the Country Party, the DLP, big business, the Roman Catholic Church, middle-class voters, ‘the Socialist objective’, foreign policy, women, politicians, frank internal debate, the principle of non-interference in trade union elections, and how we could have National (centralist) objectives and a Federalist (states’ rights) constitution. I should have added the White Australia Policy. I complained that open criticism of the Party in Victoria was ‘denounced as “McCarthyite” or “Santamaria inspired”’. I urged a greater level of professionalism and suggested that a Shadow Cabinet be set up. The Australian for 22 July 1964 ran a front-page story with the heading ‘Barry Jones Lashes at “Old Tiger” of the ALP’ which quoted, accurately, from my paper. My colleagues in the Participants were angered by the leak, which conflicted with their conciliatory approach within the Victorian branch and asked me to withdraw from their ticket for election to the Executive. The Participants’ ticket in 1964 polled no better than I had in 1963, running as an Independent. Arthur Calwell decided to stand for election to demonstrate his support for the Victorian Executive and he topped the poll, followed by Jim Cairns. In August 1964 an action for my expulsion from the ALP was initiated. The complainant was a suburban journalist, Brian Zouch, a New Zealander, urged on by Paul Court, another Kiwi, a pharmacist who had been ALP candidate for Isaacs in 1963 and developed an intense personal dislike for Rosemary and me, a penalty we paid for having tried to help him. When my branch supported me at a meeting in September attended by five Central Executive members, I was warned that a move to expel me would be made at the next State Conference. The full text of ‘The Two Labor Parties’ appeared in the spring issue of the journal Dissent, edited by Peter Samuel. I was summoned to an acrimonious meeting with the Central Executive in February 1965. It was decided to refer charges against me to the June 1965 Annual Conference, where a five-person committee would be set up. Fortunately, the retiring State President, Bob Holt, was feeling seriously disillusioned with the increasing authoritarianism of the State branch, and the committee he appointed settled on a reprimand only. Between 1965 and 1970 I cut back on my frenetic ALP activity in Victoria, which had proved unproductive and depressing. I devoted more 168
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 169
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
time to writing, academic pursuits, radio, television, arts administration, writing and networking to support Gough Whitlam and campaigning against the death penalty. It was a more effective use of time. In March 1966 Gough Whitlam narrowly survived a move in the Federal Executive to suspend him from membership of the Party for ‘gross disloyalty’, having made a blistering attack on the rigidity of ALP structures, denouncing the Executive as ‘twelve witless men’. Although he failed in a contest to dislodge Calwell, then aged seventy, from the leadership in April, Caucus supported moves for Party reform and for setting up a Shadow Cabinet. The November 1966 election was an electoral disaster for the ALP. Arthur Calwell campaigned passionately against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, which then had broad popular support. President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a barnstorming visit to Australia in October, just before the campaign began, and Harold Holt’s campaign slogan, ‘All the way with LBJ!’, proved to be a winner. Labor lost eleven seats and its national primary vote fell to 39.98 per cent. ALP House of Representatives seats in Victoria fell to eight, with the loss of Batman (where the sitting MP, Captain Sam Benson, disagreed with the VCE on defence issues, was expelled and became an Independent) and Lalor (where Reg Pollard lost narrowly). Calwell was a major figure whose post-war immigration scheme reconstituted Australia and a tough and consistent campaigner against conscription, but on social policy he was an antichange agent. Pauline Hanson has proclaimed him as an inspiration.
WHITLAM: CRASHING THROUGH In February 1967 when Arthur Calwell reluctantly stepped down from the Leadership, Gough Whitlam won on the second ballot, defeating Jim Cairns, Frank Crean, Fred Daly and Kim Beazley Senior. His loyal supporter Lance Barnard then beat Cairns narrowly for the Deputy Leadership. Calwell determined to stay on in Caucus, retiring in December 1972. Whitlam was hard to categorise factionally. In 1960 the Left supported him for the deputy leadership against Ward, despite Ward’s long history of radicalism. In 1968 when Whitlam impulsively resigned and recontested the leadership in protest over Brian Harradine’s exclusion from the National Executive, he was opposed by Cairns and the Left, who feared that he wanted to bring back the DLP, and was re-elected by 38 votes to 169
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 170
A THINKING REED
32. In the period 1967–70, Whitlam was hissed and booed repeatedly at ALP Conferences in Victoria because of his determination to overturn the Left’s rigidity, but between 1975 and 1977 Victoria was his strongest area of support. In April 1967 Henry Bolte won his fifth successive victory in Victoria, receiving the overwhelming majority of the DLP preferences.The demoralised Opposition removed Clive Stoneham and Dinny Lovegrove, replacing them with Clyde Holding and Frank Wilkes. Clyde had been a contemporary of mine at university and I always liked him. He had a good mind, but had become fascinated by how power politics worked and was both appalled and amused at how the old ALP machine in Richmond operated. The conflicts could be seen on his face. But he was an effective debater and unafraid of Bolte. He hated the VCE but was at pains not to break with it publicly. At the Federal Conference in May 1967 some of the reform agenda prepared by Cyril Wyndham was adopted, so that Federal Leaders could attend the Federal Executive and State Leaders the Federal Conference. However, at the Victorian State Conference in June 1967 Gough had been jeered for calling on the VCE to abandon its conviction that constant defeats demonstrated the purity of its principles. As Gough said, ‘Only the impotent are pure’. Nevertheless, a month later Labor won the seat of Corio with an 11 per cent swing in a by-election after Whitlam campaigned full time for weeks for Gordon Scholes, demonstrating that the new leadership had the capacity to win back marginal seats. By July 1969 there had been a significant mood change in the Participants. I challenged Whitlam at a Participants’ meeting to exercise his power by threatening the Federal Executive that if it failed to intervene in Victoria the Party faced extinction. I offended Whitlam by dubbing him ‘the Hamlet of Cabramatta’ (where he then lived) for his past equivocation about Federal intervention, but we soon made up. Many Participants felt that it was time to break away from the ALP and run Independent candidates, a view that I opposed. John Button was among the pessimists. Oddly, some Participants who had considered my criticisms of the Central Executive to be exaggerated were now taking a far tougher line. In the October 1969* Federal election Whitlam recruited some able candidates, including Lionel Bowen, Bill Morrison, Paul Keating, * In the Federal elections of 1955, 1958, 1961 and 1963 the ALP held only 10 Victorian seats, and 8 in 1966. There was a major redistribution in Victoria 170
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 171
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Moss Cass and Barry Cohen, and Labor gained a 7 per cent swing winning 17 more seats, only four short of defeating the increasingly divided Gorton Government. In Victoria, Labor only regained its traditional heartland, winning no Liberal territory. If electorates had been distributed on a basis of ‘one vote = one value’, Whitlam would have won in 1969. In 1970 the Victorian Central Executive openly opposed the Federal ALP’s new policy supporting limited state aid for denominational schools on a needs basis, polled badly at the May State election and suspended Jack Galbally, State Leader in the Upper House, for supporting Federal policy on state aid. This provoked an investigation by the Federal Executive, strongly supported by Gough Whitlam, of the TUDC’s domination of the VCE. Ultimately, the decisive vote was cast by Clyde Cameron, who had become convinced that the VCE was the major factor preventing Labor from winning a Federal election. On 24 September 1970 the Federal Executive resolved ‘that the Victorian Branch of the ALP no longer exists’ and appointed an interim Advisory Council which included Bob Hawke, Jim Cairns, John Button, Xavier Connor, Clyde Holding and the historian Ian Turner. Later John Cain was added. Mick Young and Tom Burns ran the branch as caretakers. Ian Turner, a charismatic former Communist who taught history at Adelaide and Monash universities, was active in the ALP by 1959. He described the Old Executive as ‘exclusivist, authoritarian, bureaucratic, sectarian, dogmatic and politically inept’. He had a gift for understatement. He played a pivotal role in persuading Left unions not to split and form a separate Industrial Labor Party. Gough Whitlam regarded Turner’s role as critically important in keeping Victorian Labor together. In a Special Conference called in Victoria in February 1971, the principle of proportional representation was adopted and later applied right across the Party. It ended the ‘winner-take-all’ situation for the dominant group, but it was a precondition to the institutionalisation of factions. Before the 1970 Federal intervention in Victoria, the VCE’s dominance had been based on a coalition between a hard or ideological Left and a soft for the 1969 election and two safe Labor seats (Darebin and Yarra) were eliminated. Labor won the new seat of Burke, held Corio and regained Batman, Lalor and Maribyrnong, all of which were strengthened for the ALP by redistribution. So, 14 years after the Split, Labor finished only one seat ahead of where it had been in 1955. 171
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 172
A THINKING REED
or opportunist Left, which voted with the hardliners at State Conferences but would then bellyache privately about how badly the State branch was run. After restructuring, the opportunist Left adopted the factional name of ‘Labor Unity’, which gradually drifted towards the Right, and there was a major falling out between former allies. Members of the Participants, surprisingly, found that they had some common ground with former VCE hardliners, that we both took essentially ideological positions. Even people who had once tried to expel me said, grudgingly,‘We always knew where we were with you’ and seemed to trust me. In 1972, as will be explained in Chapter 7, I became the first Participant to win a pre-selection but to the Victorian Legislative Assembly, for me a consolation prize. I was also elected to the Victorian Administrative Committee, successor of the old Central Executive, serving from 1972 to 1974. Long after Federal intervention there were bitter attacks in the Committee on Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for their novels, which had exposed totalitarianism under Lenin and Stalin, still a sensitive issue in parts of the Left. Whitlam’s victory in December 1972 destroyed the political rationale of the DLP, and Bob Santamaria’s strategy to defeat or delay what he saw as the forces of darkness, apocalyptic fears of invasion from the north and Red conquest seemed not just absurd, but mad.Whitlam’s role as an architect of bipartisanship in foreign policy may be his greatest achievement, even ahead of education, law reform and urban affairs. Whitlam’s centralising approach and his desire to consolidate national policies which could, in some cases, override state laws (a view he shared with John Gorton) was reflected in trying to make the ALP a National party rather than a Federal one. It was hoped that the primary loyalty of members would be to the national structure, with a secondary loyalty to the State branch where the member lived.This drive was reflected in 1975 when the ALP renamed Federal Conference, Federal Executive, Federal President and Federal Secretary as ‘National’. Whitlam’s dismissal by the Governor-General in November 1975 and subsequent defeat at the polls is discussed in Chapter 6. Until the 1980s, factional alliances were sometimes unpredictable. In 1969 Bob Hawke was supported by the Left in the contest for President of the ACTU. In 1976 the Left backed Frank Crean against Whitlam for the leadership, while in 1977 the Left supported Clyde Holding against Simon Crean in the pre-selection in Melbourne Ports. In the 1977 leadership challenge by Hayden (with whom he had no basic policy differences), 172
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 173
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
Whitlam was supported by the Left. Whitlam had not changed, but perceptions of him had. In November 1977, before factional fault lines had hardened, I won pre-selection for the safe Federal seat of Lalor, in Melbourne’s west. Whitlam led his last campaign and when Caucus met just before Christmas Bill Hayden became Federal Leader, defeating Lionel Bowen. In 1978 I wrote a paper, ‘Them and Us/Us and Them’, which set out differences between the Liberals and Labor in tabular form. I described the parties as being based on two competing value systems, one taking a competitive view of the economy, with life as a struggle for resources, the other taking a co-operative view. One party equated society with the market, the other with the community. One directed patriotic feeling towards concepts, symbols and institutions of British origin, the other to those of Australian origin.* I set out twenty areas of difference. The list of differences seemed accurate enough at the time, but lost its relevance in the Hawke–Keating era because of the unparalleled degree of political convergence, with both parties deeply committed to market-force economics. It took decades to break down the ALP’s masculine culture. Whitlam, Dunstan, Murphy and Cairns all played a role. For most of its history the ALP had a derisory record in putting women into Parliament. In 1943 Dorothy Tangney, a teacher, was elected to the Senate from Western Australia and she remained there, alone, until her defeat in 1968. In 1974, when Joan Child won Henty, she was the first ALP woman to sit in the House of Representatives, and lost her seat in the 1975 landslide. Reelected in 1980, she became Speaker of the House from 1986 to 1989. Senator Ruth Coleman (Western Australia) and Senator Jean Melzer (Victoria) joined Caucus in 1974, followed by Senator Susan Ryan (ACT) in 1975. Considering that women had been able to vote in Federal elections since 1904, their representation in Caucus had been miserable. Elimination of Communist influence in the trade unions was achieved, not by the Industrial Groups or the DLP, but by Bob Hawke, the charismatic President of the Australian Council of Trades Unions 1970–80, who developed an unprecedented public following and doubled as Federal/ National President of the ALP 1973–78.
* The paper was incorporated in Commonwealth Hansard and published in Henry Mayer & Helen Nelson (eds), Australian Politics. 173
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 174
A THINKING REED
In July 1981, in Melbourne, a special National Conference adopted a new fundamental statement which attempted to bring the ALP’s 1921 ‘socialist objective’ up to date. I was a member of a large committee chaired by Gareth Evans which retained a commitment to ‘the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields’. However, we proposed defining ‘democratic socialism’ as ‘achieving the political and social values of equality, democracy, liberty and social cooperation’. Of the 22 objectives, 14 were essentially economic and the others overlap with liberalism and environmentalism. Few of the economic goals are on the current political agenda. In view of the directions taken by the Hawke Government after 1983, it is striking that the objectives make no reference to adopting market-force economics, deregulation, tariffs, industry restructuring, international competition, quality of education, research, health promotion or community medicine. In September 1981 John Cain, a former Participant, replaced Frank Wilkes as Victoria’s Opposition Leader in a negotiated transition and in the April 1982 election, after twenty-seven years in exile, Labor defeated the Liberal Government. In the 1960s and 1970s, policy reform had been part of a long, agonised process, with changes in immigration, White Australia, Aboriginal affairs, Medibank, foreign policy, education, Constitutional, electoral and law reform. It involved passionate debate, and Party members were heavily involved. As will be discussed in Chapter 10, after 1983 when Labor, under Bob Hawke, began an unprecedented period in office until 1996, policy changes, including 180-degree turns in economic policy, occurred overnight, a top–down process in which ‘true believers’ were told ‘there is no alternative’. While that was probably true, failure to explain, explain, explain hollowed out the ALP’s core. Since then the ALP has generally been in a period of policy vacuum and, in the age of spin doctors, core beliefs are depressingly elusive. In the 1970s, Hawke and Bill Hayden emerged as major figures, then as rivals. The ALP Centre was largely individualistic, based on allegiance to particular personalities—Whitlam, Hayden, Dunstan, Cain, Young—but often influenced by the reformist, incremental, bookish approach of the Fabian Society and by thinkers in the British Labour Party. It was largely professional, including teachers and lawyers, and significantly female. 174
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 175
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
When Bill Hayden founded the Centre-Left faction in February 1984, it had several functions: as a mutual protection group for Hayden and his supporters, an ‘anti-faction faction’ between Left and Right, and as an expression of feeling in the outlying states—Queensland,Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania—against the strength of national unions based in Sydney and Melbourne. I was a member of the Centre Left. The Left became weaker and fragmented and in February 1986 Bill Hartley, who had been a powerful advocate for Libyan and Iraqi links for the Party, was expelled by the National Executive for his persistent attacks on Bob Hawke and John Cain. Ironically, when Bill sought legal representation before the Executive he nominated Dick McGarvie QC who, as a Participant, had been a bitter opponent in his glory days. After the collapse of Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Bob Santamaria decided that global capitalism was more destructive of the values he espoused than Communism had been. In his last years there were pilgrimages or tributes from former enemies on the Left, including Tom Uren, Jim McClelland and Bernie Taft. Clyde Cameron wrote that Santamaria was ‘the only national figure to stand by Labor’s core values’. The Victorian Right was significantly strengthened when four former DLP unions, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), Ironworkers, Carpenters and Joiners, and Clerks, reaffiliated in 1985.
NATIONAL PRESIDENT In May 1991 Senator John Faulkner, an impressive Left performer from New South Wales, later a minister, came to see me in my Parliament House office. I was a backbencher again. He asked if I would be prepared to be a candidate for the Party’s National Presidency, which was being vacated by John Bannon, Premier of South Australia. The anointed candidate of the Right would be Senator Stephen Loosley, Senior National Vice President, formerly General Secretary of the New South Wales State branch. I asked John about my prospects of winning. He thought the vote would be close. There were divisions within the Right over a choice of candidate and uncommitted delegates (not many in that category) were unhappy that the Party was becoming too conservative. He could virtually guarantee a bloc vote from the Left. Unfortunately, my faction, the Centre Left, was divided and I knew that John Button and some others would vote against me. 175
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 176
A THINKING REED
I thought about it for a day or two and agreed to stand. Although our views diverged in many policy areas, I had a high regard for Stephen Loosley. We were both members of Bob Carr’s Chester A. Arthur Society, a supercilious dining club for aficionados of American politics. He was very widely read, extremely hard working, courteous and a lover of the arts. Originally on the Left, he had been recruited for the Right as many ambitious young people had been. I thought he must have felt some crises of conscience working with some of the knee cappers in Sussex Street. Essentially, I stood because I felt uneasy about the growing power of the New South Wales Right. It was pragmatic, not ideological, often close to the big end of town, and maintained its dominance because it had not split in the 1950s. To the Right winning is everything, the policy agenda less important. So the Kennedys attracted excitement and admiration, and the Clintons too, at least in their early years. It included a significant proportion of Catholics, many with a conservative social agenda.* I notoriously lacked the killer instinct and was never regarded as much of a numbers person. It was universally assumed that Loosley would win comfortably, so relatively little pressure was put on uncommitted delegates. Loosley had been endorsed both by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, but on 3 June Keating challenged Hawke for the Party leadership for the first time and lost, creating deep personal divisions. In the ballot for National President at the end of June 1991 at the National Conference at Wrest Point, Hobart, 101 votes were cast: 50 for Loosley and 50 for Jones, with one vote informal. Delegates had been directed to vote with a number ‘1’. The disputed vote had an elegantly drawn Greek ‘’ against my name. Faulkner argued that it was clearly a vote for me and that I should be declared elected. The returning officer rejected this. One alternative was to draw a name from a hat, for which there were at least three precedents. But caution was needed. Hats were hard to find in 1991, and one had to be careful about how many names went into the draw. The other alternative was to have a second ballot. It became clear that if the screws were really applied, I would lose a second round. Three delegates who claimed to have voted for me on the first round told me that in a second they would have to vote for Loosley or suffer for it, and more may have been in that category. So, after consulting with Faulkner, I decided to withdraw and avoid a second ballot, but to make a speech indicating my reasons. The National Conference, managed * Graham Richardson’s book Whatever It Takes is a basic text on the Right. 176
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 177
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
to the nth degree as is the modern custom, proved to be so boring that only the presidential contest attracted much media interest. My speech proved to be quite emotional, and hard to deliver. I made it clear that I did not want to be an instrument of division and that the Party needed cohesion.The speech received a standing ovation and had surprisingly wide and sympathetic media coverage. In June 1992 Stephen Loosley was strongly attacked at the New South Wales State Conference over the failure of a property deal in which the State branch had been involved during his term as General Secretary. He felt so bruised that he resigned as National President. Because I had withdrawn from a contest without rancour twelve months earlier, it seemed like a healing gesture to invite me to succeed him. I happened to be in Zimbabwe, at Victoria Falls, when, unknown to me, he announced his resignation.As I looked out into the swirling mists, I seemed to see Stephen Loosley’s face. It was just like the Wizard of Oz. I thought instinctively, ‘Something has happened to Stephen’. When I flew in to Perth, I turned on ABC Radio National News and heard Bob Hogg, then National Secretary, saying, ‘We are looking for Barry Jones. We think he is in Africa, but when he returns to Australia, we want him to call head office.’ The National Executive installed me as National President on 24 July 1992 and I remained there until my graceful exit on 3 August 2000. I chaired the National Conferences of 1994, 1998 and 2000. I had been delighted when Carmen Lawrence became Premier of Western Australia in February 1990, and Joan Kirner succeeded John Cain as Victorian Premier in August. When the ALP adopted its ‘affirmative action’ policy in 1994, ensuring that at least one third of MPs must be female, it was a great moment for the Party and the high point of my term as President. Just as I had ensured that a woman ( Julia Gillard) would follow me as MP for Lalor, I wanted to be succeeded by the first female National President. I had no vote on the National Executive, but seemed to have a moderating influence in deliberations and was complimented on my skills in chairing conferences. I regarded the post as being somewhere between an industrial chaplain, grief counsellor and ombudsman. I was active in Party committees, toured constantly, listened and encouraged, tried to broker reforms in the South Australian branch, delivered lectures, made representations, acted as a media spokesman, chaired the review of the ALP’s heavy defeat in 1996 and attended funerals. Neal Blewett, not 177
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 178
A THINKING REED
invariably flattering, wrote in his accurate but acidulous A Cabinet Diary (1999): ‘He was resurrected as National President of the ALP, in which position he was both popular and successful’. Gough Whitlam generously described me as the best National President in his experience. Bob Hogg resigned as National Secretary in 1993 to become a consultant and columnist and was succeeded by Gary Gray, who had been a tough and effective Assistant Secretary. I worked closely with Gary, who held the job until 1999, and trusted his judgment, especially his determination to set up a national register of ALP branch members based on names and addresses in the Commonwealth electoral roll to avoid ‘vigorous recruitment’ (a.k.a. ‘branch stacking’). He decided to resign when most state branches resisted the national register, a deeply disturbing decision. In Paris, in my National Presidency capacity and during my UNESCO period, I spent time with officials in the French Socialist Party and came to know Prime Ministers Michel Rocard and Laurent Fabius reasonably well. I saw President Mitterrand at several functions but never met him. The ALP played an important role in training members of the African National Congress (ANC) in electoral proceedings and democratic practice. In April 1994 I flew to South Africa, on the way to Paris for a UNESCO meeting, to observe the election campaign for the first free, multiracial election and talk with ANC officials. Among the official Commonwealth observers were John Cain, Janine Haines, former Democrat leader in the Senate, Philip Ruddock, then regarded as a compassionate Liberal, and Sir Paul Reeves, former Archbishop of Auckland and Governor-General of New Zealand. I spent time with some of them and also had the opportunity to observe Joe Slovo, Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Jacob Zuma at close quarters at a meeting at the Carlton Hotel, Johannesburg, and to participate in a triumph for democracy. The massive defeat of Paul Keating’s government on 2 March 1996 marked the end of an unprecedented 13 years in office for the Federal ALP. Keating gave up the leadership at once and Kim Beazley was elected unopposed to succeed, having no enemies and being regarded as a steady pair of hands. Kim Beazley buried the Keating agenda, in effect, by defining himself negatively,‘I’m not Keating.’ As National President, I chaired a consultative review on the defeat.We received thousands of detailed, considered letters, and our panel held wellattended open meetings in every state and territory.We were impressed by the tough but constructive mood. Our respondents did not make excuses, blame voters for getting it wrong or scapegoat the leadership or Party 178
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 179
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
organisation. I wrote a strong draft report on the post-mortem, which was adopted by the National Executive and published, although in a somewhat softened version. We concluded that after thirteen years, the ‘It’s time’ factor had turned against Labor. Voters in exit polls ranked it first, although it was probably an easy rationalisation for a complex, multi-causal phenomenon. Many respondents thought that we had failed to recognise or address a deepseated mood of community anxiety and grievance about factors with direct impact on families, and there was scepticism about more remote ‘big picture’ issues. In the campaign, John Howard’s assertion that he wanted to make Australians feel more ‘comfortable and relaxed’ about themselves seemed ludicrous to ALP supporters, but he interpreted the public mood very precisely. The Coalition’s slogan ‘For all of us’ had a coded meaning picked up by many alienated Labor voters: where was the stress? On ‘all’ or ‘us’? Labor was punished by a sense of ‘accumulated grievance’, a long, growing feeling that we had switched off and stopped listening. Respondents sometimes cited examples of policy failures in the 1980s, and they had waited, sometimes for a decade or more, before getting even. We misread the 1993 election as a victory for the ‘True Believers’ rather than a reaction against John Hewson’s Fightback! and the GST. Voters were suffering from change fatigue and they felt that we were incapable of saying ‘sorry’ for past errors. (As Prime Minister, John Howard was to make an art form out of refusal to admit mistakes.) Privatisation was controversial. Selling off national icons such as Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank had been unpopular and raised questions about our candour and commitment to public enterprise. Many Labor voters did not believe our promise not to sell Telstra. At Kim Beazley’s request we eliminated a paragraph, headed ‘Loss of National Consensus’, which turned out to be both accurate and prophetic. The paragraph read: Losing the election was the second worst consequence of 2 March.The worst was the realisation that we deluded ourselves that there was a national consensus on issues of race, sexuality, gender and tolerance, and acted accordingly. Regrettably, this is not the case. We failed to recognise the extent of deep-seated racial, ethnic, sexual and gender intolerance in some rural and provincial areas. The Native Title legislation, applauded in the SydneyMelbourne-Canberra triangle, created a backlash in the bush, especially in 179
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 180
A THINKING REED
Queensland.We failed to anticipate this and provided no ‘after sales service’, as Gary Gray put it, to reassure voters wary of social change. ‘Political correctness’ (a term coined by the Right in the US, but now widely used here) was exploited against us in the bush. Essentially, the concept of tolerance and a ‘Fair go’ was travestied. A more inclusive, more sensitive new vocabulary was attacked as rigid, alienating and ridiculed as being ‘politically correct’.
At the January 1998 National Conference in Hobart, Kim Beazley, under increasing pressure from his supporters in the Right to displace me and install a factional warlord, proposed Greg Sword, General Secretary of the National Union of Workers, to take the post. After Faulkner and Anthony Albanese calculated that I would beat Sword in a ballot, I decided to stay on, rather than give way to factional pressure, and Sword withdrew. During the Hawke–Keating years 1983–96, the ALP’s centralising tendency was dominant and with it the concept of a ‘National’ party. However, after Howard’s 1996 victory, the national drive stalled and reversed and with the election of State Labor governments across the continent, real power returned to the state apparatus. Labor became once more a de facto Federal Party, with a tiny secretariat in Canberra dwarfed by the resources available collectively in the states. Factions had increasingly strong regional significance, notably the New South Wales Right. I retired from the House of Representatives in September 1998. Labor polled surprisingly well in the October 1998 Federal election on the GST issue and made sweeping gains in every state except New South Wales, where it picked up only two seats. Support for One Nation, amounting to 8.4 per cent nationally, drained primary votes away from the Coalition as well. In his concession speech on election night, Beazley paid a few words of tribute to Gary Gray as National Campaign Director, with stronger praise for John Della Bosca, State Secretary of the New South Wales branch and a dominant figure in the Right, who had been the State Campaign Director. I found this imbalance both puzzling and troubling. On election night, as National President, I appeared on ABC Television’s panel discussion. I commented that the ALP had made spectacular gains throughout Australia, regaining 16 seats from the Coalition, but had won only two more seats in New South Wales, Lowe and Paterson, starting from an unusually low base. I observed,‘The New South Wales branch will want to find out why it failed to make significant gains in the nation’s most populous state.’ It seemed a reasonable hypothesis, but I could not have been more wrong. Not only did the New South Wales branch of the 180
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 181
FIFTY YEARS HARD LABOR
ALP have no interest in finding out, it fiercely objected to the question being asked. However popular I might have been with voters, the five million Labor needs to win Federal elections, Della Bosca’s strength was with factional warlords, who dominated Conference through the practice of democratic centralism. If there had been a ballot at the 2000 National Conference he might well have defeated me. In May 2000 Beazley announced that I was past my ‘use by date’, said that Della Bosca’s election had been ‘stitched up’ and as a consolation prize offered me the chair of his proposed Knowledge Nation Taskforce. Bob Carr had supported me in 1994 and 1998 and hailed me as a national icon, but now indicated that it was time for me to move on. He described Della Bosca, by then a State Minister, as ‘a political genius’. I found this puzzling. However, Della Bosca was scratched from the contest after an unguarded interview with Maxine McKew in The Bulletin (12 July 2000) when he derided Beazley’s ‘Rollback’ policy on the GST, which was to be a central feature of the 2001 campaign. Greg Sword was then proposed as my successor and I agreed to roll over (but not roll back). My farewell speech as National President at the ALP National Conference in Hobart on 3 August went down well, led to a standing ovation and was flatteringly reported.* Jim Carlton, General Secretary of the Liberal Party in New South Wales before he entered Federal Parliament in 1977, commented: ‘People who join branches are the lonely, the lunatic and the politically ambitious.’ I am relieved that this could never be said of the ALP. I found politics to be a painful process at both macro and micro levels, but as a driven personality (little as my colleagues recognised it) I felt a strong commitment to the Party and to public life generally. I would have felt cowardly to have backed away. I return to the Labor Party after 2000, including my second term as National President, in Chapter 13.
* Donald Horne quoted it extensively in Looking for Leadership. 181
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 182
CHAPTER 6
ﱗ
Faces
I have a compulsive interest in how people set objectives and strive to achieve them, and this became the underlying theme of my Dictionary of World Biography. I was fortunate to have opportunities to meet politicians, scientists, musicians, painters and writers, and to interact with many of them. Some encounters and sightings stand out. When the English philosopher Bertrand Russell lectured at Melbourne University in July 1950 I observed him at close quarters, as an enthusiastic groupie. Although we never spoke, he signed some books for me. His white hair, penetrating eyes, beaky nose, recessive chin and quavering voice left an unforgettable impression.Through his grandfather, Lord John Russell, he was a living link with the 18th century, connecting with a tradition of rational discourse (about which he had written eloquently), going back through Newton to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. John Stuart Mill was his (agnostic) godfather. He had dined with Gladstone. He said: ‘Three passions, simple, but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.’ I have never forgotten his words. As discussed in Chapter 5, in September 1954 in Canberra I first met Clement Attlee, Britain’s Labour Leader 1935–55 and Prime Minister 1945–51. We maintained contact until he died in October 1967, and I never visited Britain without seeing him. Attlee had served in Gallipoli. His modest public persona, devoid of rhetoric or appeals to pride or fear, was derided by Churchill’s followers as 182
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 183
FACES
a nonentity but his reputation among historians and political scientists has risen greatly since his death, and he is generally listed among the greatest of Britain’s peacetime leaders.Attlee offered a sharp contrast to Churchill’s theatrical personality, panache and flamboyant oratory. His parsimony with words became part of his reputation. Attlee had known many great contemporaries—Gandhi, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, de Gaulle, Marshall, Mao, Tito. He concluded that Marshal Tito was the greatest man he had known because he had overcome greater difficulties than the others. Churchill and Roosevelt had come from privileged families and had access to powerful support, Stalin had inherited an apparatus created by Lenin, de Gaulle’s life had probably been saved by his years as prisoner-of-war and he had influential patrons, Marshall’s gifts were recognised by Roosevelt and Truman, Mao had a very strong support group in Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, a disciplined party structure, and the Guomintang was chaotic and fragmented. Attlee recognised that Gandhi’s moral stature was unique but thought that he would have been crushed under totalitarian rule: he had many sympathisers in Britain and his ideas were widely disseminated. Attlee had a very dry humour. He told me that Wellington had detested Nelson, whom he regarded as ‘consumed by vanity’, and that they had met only once, at a urinal in Dover Castle. The composer Percy Grainger, lonely and isolated in his last visit to Australia in 1955, kitted out in his self-made towelling suit, took me round his museum at the University of Melbourne. He showed me masses of his own manuscripts and extensive correspondence with Edvard Grieg, Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius and manuscripts of Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. He demonstrated some of his early machines, which produced random (indeterminate or aleatory) music. He held eccentric beliefs, one being his insistence that the sound produced in acoustic recordings was more faithful than electric recordings produced after 1925. I argued that sound quality was high in the new long-playing (33 rpm) records, but as he insisted that he had never heard one and had no desire to do so, there was little more to be said. On my first visit to New York, in May 1958, in Brentano’s bookshop on Fifth Avenue I heard customers whispering,‘There’s Alma Mahler!’ Indeed, so she was, looking splendid. The legendary widow of Gustav had been a famous beauty whose lovers included the painters Oskar Kokoschka and Gustav Klimt. She also married architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel.Tom Lehrer wrote the song Alma about her long lists of conquests. 183
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 184
A THINKING REED
Walking near the United Nations building on Lower East Side, in January 1961 I met one of my great heroes, the witty, urbane, erudite and unsuccessful Adlai Ewing Stevenson, Democratic candidate for President in 1952 and 1956. The abusive term ‘egg-head’ was first applied to him. When we met, just before Kennedy’s inauguration, he had been nominated as US Ambassador to the United Nations and had reluctantly accepted. He would have preferred being Secretary of State. Stevenson was alone and the absence of a minder or bodyguard surprised me. He wore his habitual rueful expression and I sensed how bruised he had been. I introduced myself, talked about my optimism for the United Nations and asked what his priorities would be. He spoke about his role as Assistant Secretary of State 1944–45, when he had been one of the planners who worked to create the United Nations. He remembered Doc Evatt with profound respect and asked if I knew him. I told Stevenson how much he was admired in Australia. He remarked, ‘I always felt I was running for President of the wrong country.’ Igor Stravinsky’s visit in November 1961 was a great experience. He conducted the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at an unusual venue, the Palais Theatre in St Kilda. He shared the podium with Robert Craft, who wrote extensively on Stravinsky but had been a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. Craft directed Symphonies of wind instruments and Jeu de Cartes and Stravinsky the full ballet La Baiser de la Fée. I never heard our orchestra play better. After the concert, as Rosemary and I walked alongside the huge theatre, a side door opened and Stravinsky, a tiny figure, appeared just in front of us. I would like to have spoken to him but simply froze on the spot. We exchanged three or four letters, but never met. I came close to him again when I laid flowers on his grave on the island of San Michele, at Venice, in 1985. I will never forget the experience, in December 1961, of gazing at Winston Churchill, less than a metre away for at least three minutes as his limousine was blocked by a traffic jam at the Carriage Gates exit from the Houses of Parliament. He stared straight ahead and seemed unaware of my presence. His face was as white as parchment: he looked dead. Graham Sutherland’s powerful portrait, commissioned by Parliament, which Clementine Churchill hated so much that she destroyed it, captured his appearance exactly. In May 1979, after Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister, I attended the State Opening of Parliament at Westminster Hall. I sat next 184
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 185
FACES
to David Lange. Many grandees at the front of the procession had to walk backwards, in the protocol of the time, so that they could keep their eyes on the Queen as she made her stately progress. They included Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten and Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, elderly gents weighed down with decorations and elaborate robes. (Both were dead by the end of the year.) I remarked to David, sotto voce I hope, that Templer had the distinction of being the only Field Marshal to have been wounded in action by a grand piano. (In the Middle East, it had fallen from a truck and he had been wounded by a wood fragment.) David was very tickled by this and often repeated the story. My years as Science Minister gave me access to many outstanding scientists including Peter Medawar, a brilliant immunologist and scathing critic, crippled by a stroke; Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA; Fred Sanger, winner of two Nobel Prizes for Chemistry for his work in determining chemical structures and sequencing; Murray GellMann, a dazzling talker who worked on particle theory and postulated the existence of the ‘quark’; Richard Feynman, gifted artist and bongo-drum player who developed ‘quantum electrodynamics’ and explained the Challenger disaster; Carleton Gajdusek, a force of nature fluent in eleven languages who demonstrated the link between kuru and cannibalism in New Guinea; Max Perutz, who used X-ray diffraction to work out the structure of protein molecules; and Australians Macfarlane Burnet, Mark Oliphant, Frank Fenner, Gus Nossal and Peter Doherty. I had close encounters with the five subjects described below. John Gorton was a completely unexpected Prime Minister with whom I had a long and surprising friendship; Gough Whitlam was mentor and model for half a century; Arthur Koestler inspired me on my greatest crusade but proved appalling at close quarters; Phillip Adams, my closest friend, collaborated on many projects; and Patrick White was a major creative artist, torn by hate and compassion, wracked by painful self-knowledge, who trusted me and shared confidences.
JOHN GREY GORTON I first met John Grey Gorton in February 1950 when he had just taken up his seat in the Senate, representing Victoria. I was in my first year at Melbourne University, and had joined the ALP Club. He had agreed to attend an informal summer school of all the university’s political clubs at 185
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 186
A THINKING REED
a camp in Ocean Grove. Manning Clark, who had become the first Professor of Australian History at the Australian National University, was another guest speaker. John enjoyed the conviviality and the occasional drink so much that he decided to stay on until the conference ended. He was very useful peeling spuds and washing up. He had come without a change of clothes and I drove to Barwon Heads to borrow pyjamas, underpants, a shirt and socks from my Uncle Stan. We maintained contact thereafter. John studied at Brasenose College, Oxford from October 1932, married Bettina Brown from Bangor, Maine in February 1935, completed his studies in the same year and spent time in Spain. He ran an orchard at Mystic Park, between Swan Hill and Kerang, from 1936, joined the RAAF in 1940, flew Hurricanes and survived two major crashes. In 1944 his face had been dramatically reconstructed by the outstanding plastic surgeon B.K. (later Sir Benjamin) Rank after an RAAF plane crash in Milne Bay. Women seemed to be attracted by the battered face. John was a striking figure, tall, slender, with an engaging smile and a larrikin manner, almost invariably smoking. In April 1946 he gave a powerful speech at Mystic Park for a ‘welcome home’ celebration for ex-servicemen in the district, paying tribute to those who did not return. He set out his hopes for post-war reconstruction and the importance of creating ‘a better world in which meanness and poverty, terrorism and hate will have no part’. It is not a speech that could have been delivered by Harold Holt, let alone Bill McMahon. He found himself on the Liberal Party’s Senate ticket for 1949 and was the fifth Senator to be elected from Victoria. Menzies suspected John’s irreverence and kept him out of the Ministry until December 1958. The Senate committee system was primitive then and Coalition backbench Senators were expected to act as a cheer squad, so he always seemed to have time on his hands. He seemed to be aimless when we met in the street, as we often did between 1950 and 1958. As we talked over coffee he expressed his frustration, his desire for a real job and his enthusiasm for reforming Australia, breaking away from conformity and obsequious deference to Britain and the United States. He detested ‘yes men’ and ‘crawlers’ in the Liberal parliamentary party. We talked of his keen interest in Abraham Lincoln, his observation of the Spanish Civil War and his strong opposition to ‘appeasement’ of Hitler at Munich in 1938. We exchanged books on American and Spanish history. In December 1958 Menzies made Gorton Minister for the Navy, last 186
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 187
FACES
in pecking order. Thereafter, a minder was generally in tow when he appeared in Melbourne, so we had less time for socialising. Menzies gave Gorton responsibility for CSIRO in 1962, then made him ‘Minister in charge of Commonwealth Activities in Education and Research under the Prime Minister’ 1963–66, the longest-winded ministerial title in Commonwealth history. Gorton proved to be an effective de facto Minister for Education and Science. As a centralist, he pursued a Commonwealth role in education, an area which constitutionally had been the preserve of the states. He appointed Sir Lenox Hewitt to run the Universities Commission and Sir Ian Wark the Commission on Advanced (i.e. Technical) Education. He administered the new Commonwealth grants for science blocks, laboratories and buildings in schools. Politically, this was a clever move which broke down the traditional opposition to public funding for non-state schools. But it also had a practical impact, giving more educational priority to science and technology. In 1967 he won Cabinet support for the AngloAustralian telescope at Siding Spring. He also had brief terms as Minister for the Interior and Minister for Works. In December 1966 Holt created the Department of Education and Science and John Gorton became its first Minister. In October 1967 Holt promoted him again, to be Government Leader in the Senate. On Sunday 19 December 1967, the day that Holt disappeared in the boiling surf at Portsea, I was flying to Hong Kong, hoping to pick up a visa to the People’s Republic of China so that I could make programs for ‘Talk Back to Barry Jones’ on 3DB, Melbourne. After a day or two in Hong Kong it became clear that I would not receive a visa, even though I had asked my second cousin Ted Hill, then leader of the pro-Beijing Australian Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), for help. I hurried back to Melbourne so that my program could play an active role in the Liberal leadership contest. After Holt disappeared the Governor-General, Lord Casey, immediately commissioned John McEwen, Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Country Party, as Prime Minister. Bill McMahon, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party and Federal Treasurer, might have seemed an obvious choice to succeed Holt. However, on 20 December, McEwen announced that, if McMahon became Liberal Leader, he would take the Country Party out of the Coalition. From Labor’s point of view Bill McMahon would have been an ideal choice, a weak candidate likely to be carved up by Gough Whitlam long before the next Federal election, due in 1969. 187
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 188
A THINKING REED
But with McMahon out of the running, there was also the national interest to consider. There were four contenders: Paul Hasluck, Minister for External Affairs, Leslie Bury, Minister for Labour and National Service, Billy Mackie Snedden, Minister for Immigration, and Senator John Grey Gorton, Minister for Education and Science. Gorton started with several apparent handicaps. To become Prime Minister he would have to find a seat in the House of Representatives and by electing him, Liberals would be admitting to a desperate lack of talent in the Lower House. Sir Henry Bolte, the Victorian Premier, strongly opposed him because he favoured expanding Commonwealth powers at the expense of the states. I consulted my mentor, Senator Pat Kennelly, Labor’s Deputy Leader in the Senate. He had worked closely with Gorton, liked and trusted him and thought Australia deserved not to be saddled with a dud. I thought that Gorton’s sympathy for reform and asserting a distinctive Australian national identity would open up political debate, make the anti-Communist hysteria promoted by the Democratic Labor Party irrelevant, and reduce the impact of states’ rights. I detested Bolte for his role in the hanging of Ronald Ryan in February 1967, and regarded his dislike of Gorton as another justification for backing him. I decided to organise a forum on my radio program, inviting all four candidates to appear. This created a precedent. My first task was to persuade John Gorton to take part in a media contest. I rang him at home in Canberra. Initially, he was uneasy, concerned that his rivals would argue that his direct appeal to the public was insulting to the Liberal Parliamentary Party and would cost him votes. I said, ‘Since Whitlam got up, public involvement in leadership contests is a fact of life.Your potential appeal to voters is your greatest asset.You must demonstrate how you differ from Menzies and Holt, and from Hasluck, your main rival.You must also explain that, Rhodesia aside,* you are not a right winger.’ I had that wrong. Gorton’s right-wing credentials also included support for the Taiwan lobby against Beijing and opposition to excluding South Africa from the Commonwealth. He asked me to suggest the kind of questions I would ask. We worked out a list of questions and answers, a service I did not offer Hasluck, Bury and Snedden. Once Gorton agreed to be interviewed the others fell into line, with varying degrees of reluctance. * He had indicated some sympathy for Ian Smith’s ‘unilateral declaration of independence’ in Rhodesia in 1965. 188
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 189
FACES
Gorton’s interview was broadcast on 29 December. He explained that while Robert Menzies had been ‘British to the boot heels’, he was ‘Australian to the boot heels’. He said that he was ‘slightly to the left of centre within the Liberal Party’. As Ian Hancock wrote: ‘The Gorton performance received a very good run in the press . . . [He] came over as attractive and direct, and as someone who could exploit the growing mood for national self-assertion with which Whitlam had also identified’. Essentially, Paul Hasluck thought that lobbying was improper. Widely read, sensitive, a good historian and poet, he was shy. He gave the impression of being ponderous, deeply uneasy about being interviewed at all, unwilling to commit himself to a change in direction or to set out priorities. Although considered safe, reliable and experienced, he did not sound capable of tackling Whitlam in the House. Sir Robert Menzies lobbied for him privately and Hasluck depended on insider support from the ‘old boy’ network. He detested McMahon and could not count on support from New South Wales. As the posthumous collection of his papers, The Chance of Politics (1997), revealed, he had a sharp eye and a scathing pen when he was writing for himself. Les Bury, a competent but uncharismatic economist, formerly a bureaucrat, made no impact at all.As the only New South Wales candidate, he hoped to receive votes from the McMahon camp. I knew Billy Snedden reasonably well and ran against him in November 1963 as ALP candidate for Bruce. Likeable and well intentioned and on the liberal (small l) end of his Party, he was essentially a lightweight. His claim to be Holt’s ‘heir’ and to have ‘the vital energy of a man on the wavelength of his own era’ sounded ludicrous. John Gorton was so encouraged by the success of our radio interview (conducted by telephone) that he made some television appearances and did well. One of the mythologies perpetuated in some books on the Gorton era was that his ‘Australian to the boot heels’ statement had been made on television. On 9 January 1968 the Liberal Parliamentary Party conducted two ballots for the Leadership. Bury and Snedden were eliminated in the first round and Gorton then defeated Hasluck in the second, probably by 43 votes to 38. It was a victory for the backbenchers.The great majority of Ministers voted for Hasluck but Gorton had a solid bloc of Senators. Hasluck was convinced that McMahon voted for Gorton, but this is uncertain. Malcolm Fraser, who later helped to bring Gorton down, voted for him. 189
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 190
A THINKING REED
John Gorton remained a Senator for his first three weeks as Prime Minister, then resigned from the Senate to contest the by-election for the vacancy in Holt’s seat of Higgins, which he won handsomely on 24 February. For three weeks he was not in either House. After his elevation as Prime Minister, John Gorton went through a period of self-doubt. I wanted him for a major interview on my television program Encounter. He was oddly reluctant. I reminded him that his last interview with me had turned out very well for him, but it took months to persuade him even though I had support from his principal adviser, Tony Eggleton, often called the ‘Maltese Falcon’, and Gorton’s attractive and controversial secretary Ainsley Gotto. In April 1968 Gorton told me, over dinner at The Lodge, that he found there were sixteen major policy areas where he had no experience. After visiting the Western District he had been mobbed by an enthusiastic crowd in Ballarat. He said, ‘Women were holding up their children to see me, reaching out to touch me. I thought, “What do they want of me? Am I up to it?”’ He was uneasy about Australia’s excessive deference to the United States, and about the long-term implications of our military involvement in Vietnam. He did not oppose Americans fighting Communism in Asia per se, but became convinced that they would lose heart, withdraw to Fortress America and leave Australia with serious problems in the region. I asked, ‘Have you thought of developing alternative strategies in the Pacific, in conjunction with Canada? What contact have you had with Trudeau?’ ‘What is it?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘He’s a man, not an it. Pierre Elliott Trudeau.’ ‘All right: you win. Who is he?’ I said,‘Your opposite number in Canada.’ He looked up sharply,‘What happened to [Lester] Pearson?’ ‘He retired.’ ‘When?’ ‘Last week.’ ‘That explains something that happened last week. Tony came in with some messages to Canada for me to sign. That must have been it.’ I said,‘I expect it was.’ Eventually, he agreed to two television interviews on my Encounter program. One was a solo, which went uneventfully, while the second was part of the series Muggeridge in Australia. 190
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 191
FACES
Gorton decided to continue with two of Holt’s initiatives, the Australian Council for the Arts (now the Australia Council) and the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Holt had appointed Dr H.C. (‘Nugget’) Coombs to chair both and, out of respect for Coombs’ immense capacity, Gorton kept him on. But Coombs was an exception. I became heavily involved in setting up the Australian Council for the Arts. John invited me to propose some names and I immodestly suggested myself. We looked at the nominations by his department. He said, ‘Who are the ones that Menzies or Holt would have appointed?’ I put crosses next to a few names. ‘Well,’ he said.‘They’re out to start with.’ When the Council began work in June 1968 I began urging Commonwealth involvement in reviving an Australian feature film industry, strongly encouraged by Phillip Adams, Erwin Rado, Colin Bennett and other members of the ‘Melbourne push’. Gorton became enthusiastic. Growing up in rural Victoria, exposure to film had taught him about the outside world and, unlike Holt, he had little contact with live theatre or music. Seddon Vincent (1908–1964), a Liberal Senator from Western Australia, became one of Gorton’s closest friends. He chaired a Senate committee (1962–63) which recommended Commonwealth investment in film making to provide Australian content for television, reducing overwhelming dependence on American content. Menzies and Holt had failed to act. Gorton wanted to identify distinctive issues which he could claim as his own. Films, television and encouraging Australian performers were obvious (and relatively low-cost) examples. In addition to the Australian Council for the Arts, Gorton appointed me to the Interim Council for a Film and Television School in November 1969. I served on the Australian Film Development Corporation (later reconstituted as the Australian Film Commission) from 1970 to 1975. In 1971 I became Deputy Chair of the ACA. As Prime Minister, Gorton was de facto Minister for the Arts and Aboriginal Affairs, and continued to take a keen interest in our film proposals. He was surprisingly accessible and invariably enthusiastic and, with the ardent backing of Gough Whitlam, began a short period of strong bipartisan support for arts and film. The proposed Australian Film and Television School became a symbol of confidence, optimism and determination to aim at the highest international standards. In the October 1969 election for the House of Representatives the Liberals lost 15 seats, which was seen as a triumph for Gough Whitlam. 191
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 192
A THINKING REED
Gorton faced a leadership challenge from McMahon and David Fairbairn, Minister for National Development, and won comfortably, but Cabinet became increasingly divided. Gorton was isolated, traduced in the press as a romantic maverick with strongly nationalist and centralising tendencies and anathema to the state Liberal machines. But he was also increasingly truculent about criticism. Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ became identified as his theme song, a media proposition which he happily took up. McEwen had second thoughts on his veto of McMahon even before he retired as Country Party Leader and Deputy Prime Minister on 5 February 1971. Gorton’s grip on the Liberal Leadership became tenuous; he was under constant media attack, especially from Kerry Packer’s newspapers and Channel 9, and there was constant and debilitating character assassination and media ‘backgrounding’ by Ministers, notably McMahon. Gorton had a major row with Malcolm Fraser, his Defence Minister, over a dispute between the Army and the Department of Defence on policy issues which had been selectively leaked to newspapers. Gorton had close links to the Army Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Daly, and was communicating directly with him. Fraser suddenly resigned, accusing Gorton of ‘significant disloyalty to a senior Minister’, and in a dramatic speech in the House charged that his ‘obstinacy, impetuous and emotional reactions’ made him unfit to be Prime Minister. It was arranged for two Gorton supporters to propose a vote of confidence in his leadership at a meeting of the Parliamentary Party on 10 March 1971 to flush out opponents, a grave tactical error, and it was agreed that there would be a secret ballot, another misjudgment. The ballot was tied. According to legend, Gorton then exercised a casting vote against himself, but this was not true. Under party rules, an even vote was declared lost. He resigned because a split vote did not provide a sufficient base for continuing. McMahon was then elected as Leader. Gorton, quixotically, contested the Deputy Leadership and won it, defeating Fraser and Fairbairn. By coincidence, I was in Canberra on the morning of his fall and spent much of the day in his office, watching and listening. Gorton served as Minister for Defence for five unhappy months, until McMahon sacked him for writing two newspaper articles (‘I did it my way . . .’) in The Sunday Australian defending his own reputation but by implication attacking McMahon’s. Gorton deeply resented the process of de-Gortonisation. Peter Howson, 192
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 193
FACES
a strong critic of Gorton, had been made Minister for the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts with the mandate to reduce, if not eliminate, policies that Gorton had promoted. When Gorton was relegated to the backbench, he took common cause with Gough Whitlam in raising the issue of the Film and Television School on every opportunity, to keep pressure on McMahon. I recall one weekend at home in Caulfield when Phillip and I wrote major speeches for Gorton and Whitlam. I think I wrote John’s speech and Phillip Gough’s, but it could easily have been the other way round. When the School was established in June 1973, early in the Whitlam Government, I became the foundation Chair. Gorton liked visiting the School and was always a welcome guest. He enjoyed the attention of actresses when he attended the AFI awards. In October 1973 in the House of Representatives John Gorton, then a backbencher, moved a motion to decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting males. Fraser and McMahon abstained. Kim Beazley Senior, Keating and Snedden voted against.Whitlam supported the motion, and it was carried. Gorton resigned from the Liberal Party in 1975, in protest at Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam and appointment of Malcolm Fraser. He stood for the Senate as an Independent candidate for the Australian Capital Territory and lost. In old age, after he remarried, he adopted some far-Right positions, attacking the High Court’s Mabo judgment in 1993 in an interview with George Negus, in which he declared that Aborigines were ‘inferior’ and rejected the concept of native title. In July 1999 he rejoined the Liberal Party and, to my amazement, roundly declared himself as a monarchist before the November 1999 Referendum. I was invited to Gorton’s 90th birthday celebration at the Westin Hotel, Sydney, a very grand occasion.A huge video screen featured a much earlier interview of Gorton by George Negus in which Malcolm Fraser was dumped on, over and over.The film clip was played repeatedly throughout the night. Clearly there was amazing sensitivity about Fraser’s role in Gorton’s fall, thirty years after the event, reflecting even more bitterness than the circumstances of Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975.Alan Jones, doyen of Sydney’s talk-back radio, read Gorton’s 1946 Mystic Park speech, and the impact was palpable. John spoke briefly and bravely, but looked battered and faded and was partly blind. John Howard also spoke. Ingrid Murphy and Don Chipp were present, but not the Frasers or Sonia McMahon. 193
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 194
A THINKING REED
I attended Gorton’s funeral at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney on 31 May 2002. The Whitlams, the Frasers and the Hawkes sat together in the centre, while I was with a group of former Gorton Ministers at the side.A eulogy was delivered by Tom Hughes, QC, who had been Gorton’s Attorney-General. His address was a savage attack on Malcolm Fraser, reviving all the controversial issues of Gorton’s removal from the Prime Ministership in 1971. I was conscious of a rumble of approval around me but had some sympathy for Malcolm, who must have felt ambushed. After the service I ran into Bob Hawke. His eyes were sparkling. ‘Those Liberals! They’re such haters! We’re like Sunday School kids by comparison!’
EDWARD GOUGH WHITLAM In the turbulent 1960s four controversial figures changed the face of the ALP: Gough Whitlam, Don Dunstan, Lionel Murphy and Jim Cairns, but of the quartet Gough proved to be dominant. Whitlam and Dunstan shared a wary respect but operated in different spheres, with a high degree of policy overlap. While Cairns and Murphy shared a deep suspicion of Whitlam, Murphy hoped to be able to transfer to the House of Representatives (as John Gorton had done) and become Leader, so he saw Cairns as a potential rival. On many major issues, such as White Australia, multiculturalism, the death penalty, Aboriginal rights, censorship, affirmative action and gender issues, all four agreed. Cairns and Murphy resisted Whitlam on modernising the Party structure and transforming the Victorian branch. I knew Whitlam best of all, but had a long friendship with Dunstan, spoke at Murphy’s memorial service and succeeded Cairns as MHR for Lalor. I first met Gough Whitlam in September 1954 at the Caucus dinner for Clement Attlee and for fifty years he has been friend, mentor and inspiration. Our interests have overlapped to a high degree. For decades we have talked regularly at length by telephone, and I see him every time I visit Sydney. In April 1942 Gough had married Margaret Dovey, daughter of W.R. Dovey, QC, later a judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court. Their marriage is the longest of any Prime Ministerial couple. He called Margaret ‘my best appointment’. In November 1952 he was elected as MHR for Werriwa at a byelection. When he joined Caucus, it included more veterans of the Boer 194
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 195
FACES
War than of World War II. He made his mark as a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Review (1956–59). The Committee’s important findings, pigeon-holed by Menzies, provided the framework for Whitlam’s plans for constitutional renovation. When Dr Evatt retreated from the Federal Leadership to become Chief Justice of New South Wales in February 1960,Arthur Calwell comfortably defeated Reg Pollard to succeed him. Whitlam was a beneficiary of the bitterness surrounding the contest and won the Deputy Leadership from Eddie Ward by a margin of 38 votes to 34. His period as Deputy Leader, 1960–67, was unhappy both for himself and his Leader, especially as he made it clear that he saw himself as Calwell’s successor and at no distant date, a timetable which the media were happy to exploit.The styles and long-term objectives of Calwell and Whitlam were in sharp contrast, as Evatt’s had been with Calwell’s and to some extent Chifley’s and Evatt’s. Calwell, with his Irish Catholic background, was shaped by the sectarian bitterness of conscription and its aftermath in World War I, the Depression, the Labor split of 1954–55 and the resulting schism in Victoria’s Catholic community, and a decade of difficulty with Evatt. Whitlam was twenty years younger, an urbane humanist, cosmopolitan in style and superbly equipped, it seemed, for dealing with television and the problems associated with the coming of age of the post-war boom babies. Whitlam recognised the need to ‘crash through or crash’ and make the party more open and accessible, especially in the age of television. This opening up also occurred in the Liberal and National parties and much of the credit is Whitlam’s. Clem Lloyd wrote, correctly, that Whitlam brought sophistication of structure and process to the moribund machinery of the Australian Labor Party, which he set out to reform in the early 1960s. This involved a display of raw political courage unwaveringly sustained over a decade, contemptuous of even the most basic tenets of political selfpreservation.The ALP’s successes over twenty-five years were anchored in the bed-rock of the Whitlam-driven reform of the administration and political process . . . Whitlam’s task on entering the cabalistic world of Labor branch politics was to convince a dubious branch membership of his Labor sympathies. His remorseless didacticism aroused incredulity among traditional Laborites steeped in class struggle and militant socialism . . . Whitlam prevailed through a combination of persistence, patience, intelligence, geniality 195
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 196
A THINKING REED
and ubiquity. His opponents had no answer to his vitality, consuming presence and perpetual advocacy.*
Many of his party critics confused style and substance. He looked, and was, a socially upwardly mobile professional. His manner, speech and dress led to mistaken attacks on him as a conservative in part, I suspect, because he bore some resemblance to R.G. Menzies. They were both big men, florid, with white hair and black eyebrows, widely read, devastating parliamentary debaters, effective campaigners and good on television. Whitlam was actually radical, except in economic areas where he was uncomfortable and articulated no clear philosophy. In a television interview with me in 1969, Whitlam said, ‘My style is evolutionary, my substance is revolutionary.’ Whitlam led the Parliamentary Labor Party for a record term from February 1967 to December 1977, 13 months longer than John Curtin. He led seven national campaigns: two for half the Senate (1967; 1970), two for the House of Representatives (1969; 1972), two Double Dissolutions (1974; 1975) and only one ‘normal’ election, for the House of Representatives and half the Senate (1977). Although actively involved in all Whitlam’s seven campaigns, I was a candidate only in the last. After the stifling conformity and paternalism of the Menzies era, Holt made valiant attempts to open up the political agenda by ending White Australia and proposing Constitutional changes which recognised the position of Aborigines, and he received bipartisan support from Labor. After Holt’s sudden exit, Gorton and Whitlam made an interesting contrast between the larrikin and mandarin styles. Whitlam was both effective and disciplined on television and radio. After Gorton’s sacking in March 1971 McMahon, as Prime Minister of a deeply divided Coalition, was apprehensive of Whitlam’s capacity and charisma, and many Liberals expected—even hoped—to lose in 1972. Whitlam was the architect of bipartisanship in foreign affairs and ended demonology in foreign policy, an achievement maintained by Fraser, Hawke and Keating. Whitlam’s visit to China in July 1971 was hailed by Billy McMahon as an act of extraordinary rashness and disloyalty to the American ally, a charge which fell flat when, only weeks later, Richard Nixon announced he would fly to Beijing to meet Mao Zedong. * Michelle Grattan (ed.), Australian Prime Ministers, pp. 327–8, 331. 196
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 197
FACES
In his 1972 policy speech, the ‘It’s Time’ election, Whitlam set out ‘three great aims, to promote equality, to involve the people of Australia in the decision-making process of our land and to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people’. He invoked the ‘touchstone of modern democracy—liberty, equality, fraternity’. Whitlam’s ‘platform’ was by far the widest and most generous approach to policy in Australia’s history and he began a long campaign to explain his ideas years in advance of winning office. He created a new agenda for Australian politics, took the Commonwealth into education and city planning, began dismantling tariffs, pushed law and Constitutional reform, opportunities for women, the arts, the environment and Aborigines. John Stone, Michael Hodgman and some of McMahon’s personal staff were unexpected Whitlam voters in 1972. The Hansard index records Gough Whitlam’s astounding industry. He spoke more and asked or answered more questions on a far wider range of subjects than any Member in the history of the House of Representatives. Working on an average of 72 items in each column of the index, I calculated that in the ten years 1969–78 Whitlam made 11 360 contributions. The highest number was in 1971 (2412 entries) and the lowest in 1978 (580), the year he resigned. The numbers fell in the years of his Prime Ministership because he was limited to answering questions and unable to ask them, which must have been frustrating. The impact of post-industrial change, the oil shock of 1973–74 and the growth of a global economy made the Whitlam Government seem ill prepared. Internationally, it was not Robinson Crusoe on that. During his second term the reform program was carved up by the Senate and the real achievements of the Government were obscured by the impact of the ‘wages explosion’ and a rapid increase in unemployment. With hindsight, it might have been better for Labor to have lost narrowly in 1974, leaving the rapidly deteriorating economy to Billy Snedden. Snedden’s hold on Liberal leadership was tenuous, his party was singularly lacking in ideas and Fraser would have been denied his chance. Whitlam would almost certainly have returned as Prime Minister, with a Menzies-style second coming, in 1977. As Chair of the Australian Film and Television School, I was often in Canberra. On 19 February 1975 I happened to be sitting in the visitors’ seats on the floor of Parliament House when Gough Whitlam made the serious mistake of initiating the destruction of Billy Snedden, the Opposition Leader. When Gough was in full flight, Snedden had interjected 197
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 198
A THINKING REED
‘Woof! Woof!’ Gough’s response was savage and Billy looked foolish and isolated. It was noticeable that Billy’s colleagues were all examining their fingernails, looking at the ceiling or reading: not one intervened to defend him. Barely four weeks later Malcolm Fraser, a much tougher opponent, replaced Snedden. Whitlam dominated Parliament. His verbal skills and his performances in unarmed combat were exceptional. His humour was sharp, often savage, usually erudite. He did not tolerate fools and made his opinions distressingly clear. When he was in a rage, he could be like a force of nature and one could imagine forests and mountains being swept away. He was manifestly uneasy with the handicapped, perhaps reflecting an overwhelming feeling of physical confidence in himself. He felt that, as part of a maturation process, nations needed to develop symbols of their own rather than borrowing someone else’s. The survival of oaths, flags, portraits in public places, crowns and other insignia will be increasingly subject to generational shifts in opinion.The establishment of the Order of Australia to replace Imperial honours had considerable symbolic significance and the Liberals retained it. Whitlam was excited by the arts and film. Gorton had set up some new structures, but Whitlam went much further and was an enthusiastic consumer of high culture. He legislated for the Australian Film and Television School. He also expanded and renamed the Australia Council and revamped Gorton’s Australian Film Development Corporation as the Australian Film Commission. Whitlam wanted the ABC to produce more drama. The Australian film explosion, mercifully of high quality, was a reflection of the rising surge of national confidence which was a factor in Whitlam’s 1972 victory, a feeling which ebbed away for some years after 1975. Whitlam was committed to the concept of information as a precondition to action. He had a passion for information and education, assuming that if only the facts were revealed then prejudice, ignorance and sectional interest would fall away. It did not always happen. Despite his enormous capacity, there were significant gaps in Whitlam’s political repertoire. He had little feeling for economics, labour force analysis (despite his passionate interest in ILO Conventions), sport (a significant weakness in modern politicians), and I found it impossible to engage his interest in science, technology or research. In 1975 the departure of Lionel Murphy (February) and Lance Barnard ( June) had unexpectedly severe consequences for the Government, with 198
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 199
FACES
a loss of a Senate seat and a 17.5 per cent swing against Labor in the Bass by-election. Jim Cairns and Rex Connor were both involved in ‘the Loans Affair’, an attempt to raise $4 billion overseas for major developments in oil and gas. Technically the operation was legal, having been authorised by the Executive Council, but looked distinctly odd when elusive go-betweens were employed to pursue phantom Middle Eastern treasure chests. When the funds failed to eventuate the Government suffered major embarrassment, including a hostile Senate enquiry and unprecedented attacks from both Opposition and the media. Cairns and Connor were both forced to resign from the ministry, and Fraser asserted that the fiasco constituted ‘reprehensible circumstances’ sufficient to justify the Senate Opposition delaying passage of Supply in order to force an early election. As a frustrated Member of the Victorian Parliament I found it hard to concentrate on state issues when the Whitlam Government was passing through a period of exceptional turbulence, and I wished I could have been working with Gough in Canberra. The actions of Governor-General Sir John Kerr in dismissing the Whitlam Government on 11 November 1975, appointing Malcolm Fraser and dissolving both Houses of Parliament, are still controversial 30 years after they happened. On 11 November 1975 with Peter Redlich, then Victorian State ALP President, I was attending a Telecom (later Telstra) presentation about ‘Communications 2000’ at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Hotel. At about 1.30 p.m. Peter passed me a note he had just received to the effect that Kerr had sacked Whitlam, Fraser was Prime Minister and the accuracy of the report had been confirmed. After the initial shock and disbelief, we left the meeting and walked up to Clyde Holding’s office at Parliament House. Everybody in politics remembers the events of that day with crystalline clarity.The oddest feature, to me, is that Peter and I were aware of the sacking earlier than some of Gough’s Ministers, including the Senate Leader, Ken Wriedt. There is no question that Whitlam was ambushed. He took it as axiomatic that Kerr would act only on his advice and not pre-emptively and said so, publicly and often, a tactic which must have infuriated Kerr and strengthened his resolve. The retiring Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, had provided Whitlam with a list of possible successors, including Kim Beazley Senior, Frank Crean, Harold Souter, Ken Myer, Melbourne’s merchant prince, and 199
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 200
A THINKING REED
Sir John Kerr, Chief Justice of New South Wales. After Myer declined Whitlam offered the post to Kerr, and he accepted on condition that he could expect ten years in office and be able to represent Australia at functions overseas as Head of State. It was Whitlam’s worst appointment. I had always worried about the appointment of Kerr. I had only met Kerr once, in 1969, when he unexpectedly joined Jean Battersby and me for drinks in Canberra. I found him alarmingly aggressive, abusive and intemperate. Installed in July 1974, Kerr took an expansionist view of the GovernorGeneral’s powers, interpreting the 1901 Constitution literally. Whitlam offended him by declining to recommend his appointment to the Privy Council or promotion from KCMG (which he already had) to GCMG. I remembered very clearly the contribution that Kerr, a protégé of Evatt, made to an ABC radio documentary prepared by the admirable John Thompson, played when Evatt died in November 1965. Thompson was a very experienced producer whose transcripts often appeared as books. The Evatt program was an exception. ScreenSound told me that the tape was not kept and their transcript is incomplete. The relevant comments are in the missing part of the transcript, so I will have to paraphrase. He said, in effect: Evatt was not a genuinely great man.The essence of a great man is that he acts in a way that nobody has anticipated, and by his action sets off a chain of events that cannot be reversed. Evatt’s personal history was that of an old left liberal and it was always likely that his instincts would lead him to break with Santamaria and split the Labor Party over attitudes to Communism. Evatt would have proved his greatness if he had launched an anti-Communist crusade, out-Santamariaed Santamaria and beaten Menzies at his own game.
Kerr’s words stuck in my head. Then on 11 November 1975 Kerr proved himself to be a genuinely great man, in his own estimation, by acting in a way that was not expected and sacking Whitlam. Years later I asked Gough if he had been aware of Kerr’s contribution to the Evatt program. He said, ‘If only I had known, Comrade, he would never have been appointed.’ Much as the method of removal was disapproved, Australian voters suffered a rush of pragmatism to the head and Labor was heavily defeated in the ensuing election despite a campaign of unparalleled fervour, huge crowds (‘They’d just as soon go to a public hanging,’ Ben Chifley used 200
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 201
FACES
to say) and the unexpected support of Whitlam by John Gorton. Labor’s second massive defeat in 1977 was, in some ways, more demoralising than 1975 and showed that voters had long and unforgiving memories. I entered the House of Representatives at this election. Despite the bitter controversies leading to the Dismissal on 11 November 1975, most elements of the Whitlam platform survived. Australian politics was never the same again after the Whitlam era. He changed the political agenda during his ten years of domination. Australia has evolved, and is still evolving, a political culture of its own, and many elements in it were shaped by Gough Whitlam. He promoted a revolution of rising levels of expectations.Whitlam told the Australian public that it was entitled to expect more of their governments; that governments could and should do more things. If they failed they should be judged harshly, and replaced. He succeeded in this. He was both a beneficiary (in 1972) of sharper scrutiny and increased expectations and also its victim (1975 and 1977). Fraser was both beneficiary (1975) and victim (1983). The election of 1977, when I won the seat of Lalor, was deeply depressing and Labor’s primary vote fell even further. However, I was glad to share some months of Parliamentary experience with Whitlam before his resignation in July 1978. He sat across the aisle from me and it was an extraordinary sight each morning to see him consume the daily Hansard, tearing out pages, making marginal notations, cross-referencing the index until the material was gutted. After he retired, he was a constant source of erudite Questions on Notice during my years as a backbencher. He drafted them by hand and I submitted them to the Clerks for printing on the Notice Paper. Whitlam found fresh fields to conquer as a Research Fellow at the ANU 1978–79, Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard 1979 and Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris 1983–86, in the apostolic succession to Sir John Kerr, who had resigned before taking office. Mark Latham worked as his secretary in Paris. Gough also served on UNESCO’s Executive Board 1985–89: I succeeded him there for the term 1991–95, and spent time with Gough and Margaret in Paris and Venice. Between 1991 and 1999 he and Margaret were tour leaders with International Study Programs (ISP) of Sydney, and he was responsible for ten tours including Europe, Asia and South America in which he lectured about history and archaeology.When he phased out in 1999, ISP asked me to replace him. 201
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 202
A THINKING REED
Gough’s books included The Truth of the Matter (1979), The Whitlam Government 1972–1975 (1985), Abiding Interests (1997) and An Italian Notebook (2002). He received awards from Italy and Greece and has been the outstanding Australian campaigner for the restoration of the Parthenon (a.k.a. Elgin) Marbles to Greece. He is an assiduous attender of celebratory dinners, concerts, opera, film, book launches, lectures and funerals. A Whitlam funeral committee was established and its members included the ALP’s National Secretary ex officio, Johnno Johnson (then President of the New South Wales Legislative Council and a walking repository of Labor history), and family members, to plan a State funeral should the need ever arise. Gary Gray, then National Secretary, recalls that in 1997, after Princess Diana’s death, Gough convened an urgent meeting of the committee. He told Gary,‘I’ve been watching Princess Di’s funeral on television and I’ve had some new ideas . . .’ Gough and Margaret became ‘Living National Treasures’ in 1998 and his personal charisma remains, like his modesty, an enduring trait. His style is imperial and he has a fascination with ancient ruins. He is a compelling orator, remorseless in detail, but funny, erudite and inexhaustible. I very much enjoy our regular telephone conversations, a privilege I share with Sir James Killen, a political opponent but personal admirer. Gough Whitlam has been the subject of more political anecdotes than any other Australian public figure, and my former ministerial colleague Barry Cohen has published five books in which EGW is the central figure. Gough’s political heroes include Ben Chifley and John Curtin, in that order, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and Pierre Trudeau. He admired Chifley’s visionary work in planning post-war reconstruction, even while World War II was still raging, when he worked closely with ‘Nugget’ Coombs. ‘Roosevelt had a great grasp of global strategy and determination to remake the world, but was compromised on racial issues because a strategic part of the Democratic Party’s power base was the segregated South. Churchill’s role was decisive in thwarting Hitler’s ambition to conquer Europe, so I admire him to that extent.’ He maintains a high regard for Clem Attlee as the greatest of Britain’s Labour Prime Ministers, playing a central role in the creation of independent India. His appetite for World Heritage sites is inexhaustible. He and Margaret visited every site in France, Italy and Spain and most in Germany. They were regular attenders at opera, theatre and film in Paris in their UNESCO years and claim to have inspected every major art gallery in France except Lille. 202
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 203
FACES
Gough is very knowledgeable about Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and admires Shakespeare’s versatility and development. He can also be harvested for quotations, as Gough’s books attest. Hamlet is his favourite, but he also enjoys the history plays. His only obvious cultural lacuna is a reluctance to tackle the great novels. He is no Mr Gradgrind but prefers writing based on evidence, not feeling, devouring biographies of Dickens and Tolstoy but not their works. He reads history zealously and with a sharp eye for detail, rebuking me for mis-spelling the name of the Roman Caesar Septimius Severus in my Dictionary of World Biography. He is an operatic devotee, especially for Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro being a special favourite. He enjoys Verdi and Puccini more than Wagner, feeling uncomfortable with the libretti that the composer wrote for his operas. Beethoven, Bach and Brahms are important to him. He particularly admires Italian painting and has travelled extensively to see works by Giotto, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, but is indifferent to Caravaggio. Peter Paul Rubens has a strong appeal because of his exuberance and energy, and he enjoys Rembrandt’s portraits, but I detect a coolness about Vermeer’s domestic subjects. Gerard Terborch’s painting of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia is a favourite, probably because the subject is political. He was moved by Grünewald’s Issenheim altarpiece in Colmar and the Ghent altarpiece by the van Eycks. He chaired the National Gallery of Australia 1987–90, which he established in 1973. As Prime Minister his approval of the purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles had been bitterly attacked, and it became a matter of deep satisfaction that by the end of the 1980s Blue Poles was acknowledged as a 20th century masterwork and its purchase an act of exceptional foresight. He admires Picasso most of modern masters, particularly for his energy and risk taking in old age, and I was delighted when he turned up to hear me lecture on Picasso at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His knowledge and range of interests are encyclopedic. No other Australian Prime Minister has written with such authority on a variety of topics, for example the intermarriage of Italian and Balkan royalty, British royal bastards in Australia or the British honours system. Not only is he prima donna assoluta, but an authentic polymath too. He calls me ‘junior polymath’: the identity of ‘senior polymath’ goes without saying. We have some odd similarities. We are both fascinated by language and have large vocabularies but are essentially monoglot, conspicuously lacking in foreign language fluency. Like Bob Carr, we are both remote from sport. 203
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 204
A THINKING REED
Gough’s energy and enthusiasm is matched by Margaret’s vital but critical contribution, and her frank judgments are indispensable restraints on the maestro’s flights of enthusiasm. In November 2000 I was invited to deliver the Fourth Whitlam Oration in the presence of the Whitlams at Gymea, in the Federal electorate of Cook, south of Sydney, and I prepared an elaborate speech. The organisers made the mistake of inviting Gough to introduce me. Forty minutes on he was still in full flight, ranging across subjects far more interesting than mine. Margaret’s face was a mask of fury. I went to sit by her. ‘Why doesn’t somebody go over there and kill him?’ she said.‘I think that’s a bit tough.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the least you can do is go and stand next to him and shame him into shutting up.’ I went over to the rostrum and stood next to him, arms folded, but it took him ten minutes to wind down. I have made a firm rule never to begin a serious speech after 9.30 at night, and it was getting on for 10.00, so I abandoned any idea of delivering my oration. I said,‘We have listened to a forensic triumph tonight, and I have no intention of competing at this late hour. Please join me in a vote of thanks to our speaker, Gough Whitlam.’ In 2004 Gough and Margaret attended a production in Sydney of August Strindberg’s play The Dance of Death, starring Sir Ian McKellen as Edgar and Frances de la Tour as his tormented wife Alice. Some weeks later, as chair of the Port Arthur Historic Site, I arranged for them to visit and to be driven round in our people mover. Gough sat in front with the driver, and I sat behind with Margaret on my left. Without turning his great trunk, Gough boomed, ‘Is Alice on board?’ ‘I am here, Edgar,’ she responded in a voice of doom. Mark Latham was Whitlam’s protégé, and almost a member of the family. His unexpected election as Leader in December 2003 gave Gough great satisfaction, just as his defeat in the October 2004 elections, withdrawal from public life and publication of the corrosive Latham Diaries (2005) inflicted pain. But Whitlam’s resilience is astounding. He remains energetic and controversial, handling the thirtieth anniversary of the Dismissal (11 November 2005) with aplomb, especially after his reconciliation with Malcolm Fraser. Both show largeness of mind and generosity of spirit.
ARTHUR KOESTLER I first heard of the Hungarian-British novelist and essayist Arthur Koestler 204
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 205
FACES
at Melbourne High School, when Neville Hofman read me an extract from one of his essays in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945): There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at regular intervals. It is dark and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood. I am off a busy road at no more than ten yards distance. I scream for help but nobody hears me. The crowd walks by, laughing and chatting.
I read his masterpiece Darkness at Noon (1941) at school. Several authors helped to shape my formative years: Hendrik Willem van Loon, author of The Story of Mankind and The Home of Mankind; Bernard Shaw, whose plays and prefaces presented hundreds of new ideas, many cranky but mostly provocative; H.G. Wells, who (before turning depressive himself ) presented a cheerful vision of man as an optimistic systems builder labouring to solve the problems of humanity; Aldous Huxley, witty and perceptive novelist and essayist of encyclopedic range but erratic judgment, whose Brave New World proved to be astonishingly prophetic; George Orwell, whose Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four were protests against manipulation of language and collectivisation; and Arthur Koestler, a contemporary of Orwell who passed through the maelstrom of Europe to bear witness, and whose novel Darkness at Noon is the classic exposé of Communist totalitarianism. Koestler was the only one I encountered face to face, although I corresponded with Shaw and Huxley. After breaking with the Communist Party in 1938, Koestler wrote an explanation of the Moscow purge trials which was confirmed in nearly every detail twenty years later when Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s terror in 1956. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Koestler spent three months as a suspected spy under sentence of death in one of Franco’s prisons, so his interest in death penalty issues was not just academic. Reflections on Hanging (1956), a powerful tract which had a profound influence on the campaign against the death penalty in Britain, was followed by Hanged by the Neck (with C.H. Rolph) in 1961. In August 1962, when Henry Bolte proposed to hang Robert Tait, we set up the Victorian Anti-Hanging Council and Koestler accepted our invitation to be a patron. I exchanged many letters with him about capital punishment and I met him and his third wife, Cynthia Jefferies, at their Georgian house in Montpelier Square, Kensington in 1962, 1965 and 1967. 205
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 206
A THINKING REED
Koestler wrote three interesting but controversial books on scientific themes: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959), The Act of Creation (1964) and The Ghost in the Machine (1967). I persuaded Crawford Productions and Channel Seven to let me invite Arthur Koestler to Australia to take part in three one-hour programs for Encounter, managing to kill several birds with the one stone. But my main aim was to use Koestler as a stimulus encouraging wider public debate on a range of issues. I hoped he would be the first of several stimulating visitors. On 21 November 1968 I met Arthur and Cynthia Koestler at Sydney airport, uncharacteristically clutching a bunch of orchids for Cynthia. We then flew to Melbourne together. It was the last time Koestler left Europe. He agreed, reluctantly, that the first program could concentrate on his political background and his critique of totalitarianism in Darkness at Noon, while the other two would give him an opportunity to expound on his scientific theories, especially in The Ghost in the Machine. He was grumpy about even having one program on his past history. He kept repeating,‘Koestler the man of politics is dead. Koestler the man of science is alive.’ Koestler said he wanted to learn about the history and belief systems of Aborigines so I arranged a lunch on 22 November at the Florentino Restaurant with ‘Nugget’ Coombs, Chair of the Aboriginal Affairs Council.‘Nugget’ suggested further opportunities which were never taken up. We should have arranged meetings with Aborigines so they could speak for themselves, but in 1968 there was a different mindset. David Cesarani’s controversial biography Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998) describes Koestler’s Australian visit at some length, but with frequent inaccuracy. Contrary to Cesarani’s assertion, Koestler was left absolutely free, other than the Coombs lunch, until we recorded the first program on the Friday night. Cesarani wrote: His bad temper showed through in his television encounters with Barry Jones. One reviewer noted that he had no rapport with his interlocutor and seemed to brush off Jones’s questions about his youthful adventures in a bid to get on with what interested him, namely science and the human condition.
The full text of that interview appeared in Quadrant, no. 57, January– February 1969, and seems to read well, although I could hardly claim objectivity. The interview was photographed, superbly, by Athol Shmith, and a powerful portrait appeared on the cover. 206
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 207
FACES
Your question shouldn’t be personal—why did I embrace the Communist faith or heresy, but why did Auden and Isherwood and Malraux and Gide and practically every writer of whom you can think of in the 1930s embrace it? I didn’t know it at the time—one doesn’t make the decision: I am doing this instead of that—the thing grows organically inside one, and without knowing how it has grown, it is there, and afterwards in looking back, you can analyze it, and as far as I can analyze this ideological madness and blindness of the European intelligentsia in the 1930s, there were two basic factors. One was repulsion, the economic depression, real starvation, hunger marches from Germany to San Francisco—all over the world—and while one half of the world went hungry, in the other half pigs were burned, a surplus of food. It seemed total madness. Everybody was repelled, disgusted, revolted, by the state of affairs. The second factor is attraction—Utopia as you call it. And it seems what used to be called the great socialist experiment in Russia, that is somehow Utopia, a solution—so we were repelled and we were attracted, like a magnet is positive and negative . . . [W]e had a very good dialectical training. We were told,‘Comrade, don’t look at things statically, look at them dialectically. Don’t look at this class but look at it in comparison with that class. In Russia, we have many difficulties’— anything, starvation, cholera, it was all described as difficulties—‘you must compare it with how we have developed since the past, with our progress. Don’t try to see starving children, because many more were starving in Czarist days.’ So the censorship was built into your brain. You trained yourself to look at things in this way—‘that will be all right tomorrow. I won’t fret about it now’. I think the Webbs were a little more naive, but I think the majority of the writers had the same trained way of looking at things.
The low point of Koestler’s visit was a disastrous public meeting in Melbourne on 24 November at the Victorian College of Pharmacy, organised by Amnesty. Koestler insisted that he had not known he was expected to give an address and that selling tickets and advertising the function had been a gross breach of faith on my part. Cesarani wrote: Jones, who had an interest in the campaign to abolish capital punishment, . . . tried to get Koestler active in this matter . . . Somehow Jones had failed to make clear to Koestler that he was booked to give a lecture and Koestler in turn made it clear that he was not happy with the arrangements. Unfortunately, Jones failed to transmit this news to the organisers, with dire 207
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 208
A THINKING REED
consequences . . . Faced by this marathon it was understandable that he refused to give a formal lecture to Amnesty, for which in any case he had not prepared. Jones frantically improvised an alternative format for the evening. While over 800 people converged on the hall . . . he called on Sir John Berry [sic], a prominent Melbourne judge, and a handful of academics to man a panel which he himself chaired. Koestler delayed appearing until the last moment and the proceedings started forty-five minutes late . . .
It was an excruciating evening, but Cesarani’s account is full of errors. Before Koestler left London I raised the proposed Amnesty public meeting with him and he agreed to speak on ‘Prisoners of Conscience’, not on capital punishment as Cesarani assumes. Not only did he know it, he had actually prepared the address. I was with him as he unpacked in his suite at the Menzies Hotel, and I saw the typescript with ‘Amnesty International. Prisoners of Conscience. College of Pharmacy, Melbourne. Sunday, 24 November 1968’ on the cover sheet. It was in his suitcase next to some bottles of Chivas Regal. I picked up Koestler at the hotel and took him to dinner with Sir John Vincent Barry,* an eminent criminologist and judge, who was to chair the meeting. At that point he said he had only been expecting a small meeting with a handful of Amnesty officials, not a public meeting. It was sheer perversity for him to deny knowledge of the Amnesty arrangements. It had been on his typed schedule from the outset, including the location of the hall. I could only have strengthened my position by accusing him, privately or publicly, of being a liar, using as my trump card that I had watched him unpack. I had two problems: trying to avoid cancellation of the Amnesty meeting, and ensuring that Koestler would still record two more Encounter programs. J.V. Barry and I negotiated with Koestler. He agreed to make a brief statement and to take part in a panel discussion. I persuaded three academics to form the panel: Professor Roy Douglas Wright, physiologist, Professor Richard Ball, psychiatrist, and Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, political scientist and expert polemicist. Panel members, including me, sat at a low table. Koestler sat on high with J.V. Barry. Audience members lined up to ask questions, mostly of Koestler. He was not noticeably deaf, but he certainly pretended to be on this occasion. After each question he turned to J.V. Barry and asked him to repeat it, * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 13, p. 121, Bernard Teague. 208
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 209
FACES
mouth to ear. He would then rise from his chair, walk slowly to the lectern, answer with a monosyllable or two, then return to his chair and await the next question. After thirty minutes, audience members started drifting to the exit and I wished that I could have been with them. Press reports next day in The Sun, The Age and The Australian were scathing, and after this Koestler never spoke to me again. Nevertheless, as patron of our Anti-Hanging Council, he honoured his commitment to attend a small dinner given in his honour at the University Club and Cynthia came too. He never looked directly at me, or Rosemary. As his eyes swept round the table, when he came to the space occupied by either of us they would rise, scan the ceiling, then come down for the next face. He went out of his way to be disagreeable. He engaged in a brutal cross-examination of council members, one by one, determined to find some intellectual incapacity or character flaw. Mercifully, we both escaped this ordeal. Koestler was particularly harsh with Professor Rod Andrew, the council’s chair. Richard Roderick Andrew (1911–1994), a former student of my old mentor W.A. Osborne with a very distinguished record in World War II, was the foundation Dean of Medicine at Monash University. A suave, good-looking, elegantly dressed member of the Melbourne Club, he looked like a Liberal but appearances can be deceptive. He was a committed member of the ALP and later was a major architect of Medibank under the Whitlam Government. Koestler asked Rod a few questions, and then rounded on him: ‘I understand that you are a doctor of medicine, but judging from the mental capacity you have demonstrated tonight, I wouldn’t trust you to prescribe pills for a dog.’ Rod beamed: ‘I have admired the work of Arthur Koestler for more than thirty years. Nothing that you could say or do tonight could diminish in the slightest degree my admiration and gratitude for the author of Darkness at Noon.’ Koestler was lost for words. He lunched with Bob Santamaria and Sir Charles Spry, the director of ASIO, suggesting that Koestler the man of politics was still alive. Apparently, it was not a happy lunch and Santamaria said that he felt browbeaten. Cesarani quotes what he calls ‘a scorching reproof ’ in a letter Rosemary sent Koestler on the eve of his departure: ‘You remarked at a dinner recently that “the trouble with one’s enemies is that they have lovable characteristics”. Unfortunately, your stay in Melbourne has not been long 209
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 210
A THINKING REED
enough to prove that woolly generalisation true in your case; unless, of course, Mrs Koestler can be classed as a characteristic.’ After the Amnesty fiasco, Koestler persuaded Hector Crawford to let him run the Encounter programs in his own way. I would be allowed to introduce and close them, but Koestler would then interview, or badger, guests as he chose. The second program was billed as a ‘symposium on religion, dogma, personal belief, dissent, the mass media’s influence, &c.’ with Koestler as ‘chairman, mediator and participant’. Speakers included Bob Santamaria, an Anglican spokesman and a studio panel of eight young graduates and students. In the third program he wanted to pursue the theme of The Ghost in the Machine, that an evolutionary flaw in the brain predisposed humans towards self-destruction. His guests were three professors from Melbourne University, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Dick Ball and Keith Bradley, a neurosurgeon. All three had read his book and disagreed with it. Keith Bradley brought along a model with a cross-section of the human brain. No doubt through nervousness, he inadvertently transposed the names of the frontal and temporal lobes. Koestler pounced on the slip savagely. Bradley never recovered, although Ball rallied strongly. Mac Burnet told me, ‘Koestler has a wonderful grasp of facts, but he sees them all as a mass of single instances and does not understand the organic relationship between elements in a system.’ In later years Koestler became a Tory supporter and wrote two books on the paranormal, including coincidence and telepathy. In 1975 after the death penalty was abolished in Victoria I wrote to him, paying tribute to his continuing inspiration, and he wrote a gracious reply with a half-apology for the breakdown of our relations in Melbourne. But I never saw him again. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1976, leukaemia soon followed and drug treatment left him lethargic, depressed, partly immobilised and in constant pain. He was a member of the EXIT voluntary euthanasia society and decided to take his life. Cynthia, twenty-three years younger and in good health, agreed to die with him and they overdosed on barbiturates on 1 March 1983. Cynthia wrote, somewhat ambiguously: ‘I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources’. My association with Koestler was deeply painful, but unforgettable. I still bear the scars. 210
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 211
FACES
PHILLIP ADAMS Phillip Adams, author, critic, broadcaster, film maker, publicist, activist, collector, connoisseur, became my closest friend. He was born in July 1939, a fortnight before John Howard, in the Victorian regional town of Maryborough which Mark Twain had described in 1895 as ‘a railway station with a town attached’. An only child, remote from his parents, we share some resentment about early childhood. His father was a peripatetic Congregational clergyman who became an RAAF and army chaplain, then returned to a ruined marriage. Phillip lived with his mother’s parents on their tiny market garden in East Kew, and attended state schools in East Kew, Yarra Park and Hawthorn West. He left Eltham High School in 1955 with his Leaving Certificate and was never contaminated by exposure to university education. When we met in the 1960s, we both had a burning cause. Mine was the abolition of the death penalty and his was the abolition of censorship. But we supported each other’s cause too. We shared a passion for film and the revival (exhumation, really) of the Australian feature film industry. On 18 October 1965 I delivered an address on ‘The Great Australian Apathy’ at a ‘Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’ (PSA) at Wesley Church in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne run by the Reverend Dr Sir (Clarence) Irving Benson, Kt, CBE, DD, a conservative, controversial and well-connected Methodist. The PSA was a hallowed institution which seemed to have gone on since the time of John Batman, the city’s founder. I was billed as ‘the quiz champion’. The programs were broadcast on 3DB and, due to Sir Irving’s links with the Herald & Weekly Times, addresses were usually reported in The Sun News-Pictorial. I quoted from Patrick White’s essay ‘The Prodigal Son’ (1958), written for Australian Letters, and his first foray into public debate: In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves. It was the exaltation of the ‘average’ that made me panic most . . . 211
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 212
A THINKING REED
The speech generated some comment, and a fan letter from Phillip Adams. I had seen him at film festivals, read his perceptive reviews and knew he was involved in advertising but had never talked to him. He was struck by my observation that in Australia it was easier to win a knighthood for sporting achievements than for intellectual ones, a tactless statement in Sir Irving’s presence given his enthusiasm for Imperial honours. I telephoned Phillip at once and we soon met for lunch, beginning a very productive and close friendship. He had been preoccupied with religious issues from the age of five and began worrying about ‘Who made God?’ He soon broke through the eggshell of his own limited experience and was lost in the stars, brooding about infinity. His mother and stepfather inflicted some psychological damage which made him ‘a very lonely and mildly eccentric kid, without a father or siblings, who survived by reading, reading, reading. Nothing too exalted:William books, Biggles books, Superman comics. But at the age of 13, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath’. What he describes as his ‘big idea’ in his teens was that beauty and ugliness were metaphors for life and death/good and evil and this, linked to ‘an immense fear of death’, led to a compulsion to seek meaning in the universe, that is, meaning outside a divine explanation. He always saw the juxtaposition of two civilisations, the civilisation of life and the civilisation of death, and the culture of beauty and creativity against that of ugliness and self-pity. Phillip would come up with an idea and then seek advice from teachers or librarians to find a book which confirmed it. But he had no personal mentor at that stage, unlike me with W.A. Osborne. He drew great comfort from Arthur Koestler’s Arrow in the Blue because the metaphors in the text were ones he had worked out for himself. Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian had the same effect. Strangely, like Stephen Murray-Smith, David Malouf and me, he began reading Australian books relatively late, in Phillip’s case with Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1954). Phillip joined the Eltham branch of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) at the age of 15, when he was still at school. Politically, he was influenced by the historian Jack Legge, and Stephen Murray-Smith and Ian Turner also encouraged him. He left in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He went straight from school into the advertising firm of Briggs and James, thanks to assistance from Ray and Betty Marginson, and worked with Bruce Petty, Brian Robinson, Fred Schepisi and Wes Walters. A surprising number of ex-Communists found work in advertising agencies and he surmised that the common element was the manipulation of 212
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 213
FACES
the masses. Haughton James, publisher of the quarterly Art in Australia, encouraged Phillip’s interest in painting and sculpture. In Eltham he was also exposed to the artistic colony at Montsalvat founded by the painter Justus Jorgensen. While still at school Phillip had been a projectionist for the CPA at the New Theatre in Flinders Street. His passion for film was even more compelling than mine and he became an habitué of the Savoy Theatre, which showed foreign films. He began writing film reviews both for The Guardian, the CPA weekly, and The Bulletin. He soon became heavily involved in Melbourne’s film culture.The most influential figure (for both of us) was Erwin Rado, founder of the Melbourne Film Society and director of the Melbourne Film Festival. A handsome, elegant Hungarian émigré, Erwin was a gifted pianist and translated Rilke’s poetry into English. He had exceptional taste and knowledge. Phillip was also close to Colin Bennett, The Age’s film critic. Brian Robinson, his best friend, taught film making at Swinburne Technical College (later, University). Phillip never became deeply engaged with serious music, pleading that he had no time for it. This was partly due to his use of dictation, a skill I never mastered, which demanded no distracting sound as he spoke into the microphone. Music was an invariable stimulant for my composition at the typewriter or computer keyboard. He also claims to have never understood poetry. He had some interest in drama, the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare and some moderns, especially Arthur Miller. And yet film, with obvious parallels to theatre, was of obsessive interest. Sport was remote to him and I could relate to that. Food means little to Phillip; it is just fuel and its preparation and consumption essentially a waste of time. He picks up much of his fiction from playing talking books as he drives. Phillip was influenced by Bruce Petty, the cartoonist, and used his work in successful advertising campaigns, such as ‘Life. Be in It’. He became a partner in Monahan Dayman Adams (MDA), the first Australian-owned advertising agency to threaten domination by international companies. He made innumerable television commercials. MDA had a public float, bought the Mojo agency and Phillip decided to take the money and walk. We were both solitary creatures, isolates, despite operating in networks and with audiences. We used to talk endlessly about existential issues, especially belief systems and the unknown. I introduced him to Macfarlane Burnet, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Gorton, Ralph Nader, Patrick White, David Lange and Alger Hiss, and he already knew Gough Whitlam, Jim 213
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 214
A THINKING REED
Cairns and ‘Nugget’ Coombs. He never met Koestler. After John Gorton created the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968, Phillip worked closely with me on the Council’s Film Committee and on the Interim Council for a Film and Television School. In December 1969 the Prime Minister sent us on a six-week tour of film and television schools. It was Phillip’s first overseas experience. We began in Tokyo, then went on to Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin and Prague. We met Peter Coleman, the third member of the team, in Stockholm in January. Peter had refused to visit any Communist country because he thought that his editorials in Quadrant had made him powerful enemies. ‘He thinks Communism might be contagious,’ Phillip observed. In Moscow we visited the major film schools, accompanied by a Sovietprovided interpreter, Vladimir Schmidt, a public servant. He had learned English from a mid-Western lady who migrated to Russia in the 1920s, having developed an unrequited passion for Lenin. Vladimir, who had never left the USSR, spoke with a distinct mid-Western twang. He said his ambition was to visit Minneapolis or Kansas City, ask ‘Where’s the john, Mac?’ and not be detected as a foreigner. Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, who had challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1968, was also staying at the Hotel National.We introduced Vladimir, and McCarthy was amazed by his accent. Vladimir revealed himself as a dissident, a Christian who typed up poetry by politically incorrect writers such as Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Pasternak on fine paper and then bound them, superbly. He was so outspoken that our initial reaction was cautious. Was he an agent provocateur, trying to encourage us to some reckless, anti-Soviet act such as giving him Bibles or hymn books? Ultimately, what convinced me was a discussion about the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Our translator collected pirated LP recordings and it was Horowitz’ transcendentalism that obsessed him: he rejected Emil Gilels, for example, as ‘too correct’. We hired a Hertz car in my name because Phillip had forgotten to organise an international driver’s licence, but he did most of the driving. On one icy night, we drove Vladimir home to the trackless wastes outside Moscow. On our way back to go to the Bolshoi, the car skidded on the ice and ran into the back of a taxi. A crowd soon gathered. Phillip thoughtfully suggested that I should move into the driver’s seat. Somebody rang for the highway police, who may have suspected a major crime. We were then directed to follow the patrol car until I skidded into a snow drift. 214
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 215
FACES
We stopped at a checkpoint, where there was a vigorous debate between the highway police and the people police. An older grizzled officer was obviously saying: ‘They’re foreigners and it’s not worth the trouble worrying about them.’ The younger man was more determined: ‘Regulations are regulations. If we don’t enforce the law, we’ll have chaos.’ Once pushed out of the snow drift we went in convoy to a police station where we were to be interrogated. Part of our problem was that we had no passports: we had submitted them to the Hungarian Embassy for visas. We could hear drunks banging on the cell walls. The prospect of Così fan tutte at the Bolshoi had faded. We waited and waited. At last, an official with gold braid appeared and was briefed on our situation. He made a telephone call, obviously to someone with even more gold braid, seeking advice. He repeated, ‘Touristi Avstraliski . . . touristi Avstraliski . . .’ I decided to intervene with more confidence than I felt: ‘Nyet touristi . . . apparatchiki!’The officer repeated ‘apparatchiki’ and it proved to be the magic password. I had thought of the word as meaning ‘bureaucrats’, but it turned out for the best. They understood us to be Communist Party officials. We were given broad smiles, offered coffee and pointed in the right direction. In Warsaw we met Jerzy Toeplitz, who had been dismissed as Rector of the famous Polish Film School in Lodz.We regarded him as the best available candidate for the directorship of our projected film school. Toeplitz was anxious about possible surveillance in our hotel and preferred that we talk while walking in the street.We walked at length and then, when we returned to the Hotel Bristol, Phillip’s hotel key was not at the reception desk. We raced upstairs and could hear a telephone ringing in his room. We persuaded a housekeeper to open the door and found that everything had been ransacked, notebooks and papers everywhere. We assumed the ringing telephone had been a warning from the lobby for the thieves to clear out because we had returned to the hotel. My room was untouched. The management sent for the police and a slow interrogation took place as Phillip had to answer questions on the form:‘Mother’s name?’,‘Mother’s place of birth?’, ‘Mother’s date of birth?’ Phillip was understandably irritated. ‘While we’re answering these questions, the thieves are getting away . . .’ In Prague we made the serious mistake of wearing our Russian fur hats as we trudged through the icy streets. It was just one year after Soviet tanks had crushed ‘the Prague spring’ and Jan Palach had burned himself to death as a protest. The city was deeply traumatised and systems broke 215
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 216
A THINKING REED
down; lights failed, lifts stopped, air traffic was paralysed. We ran into a group of sullen youths, who closed in on us. ‘Dear Russian brothers . . .’ they kept repeating, and I thought we might be bashed. This time flashing our passports did help and they moved off. At the Prague airport, the power failed and hundreds of people stood around burning improvised paper torches. We knew what the symbolism meant. In Los Angeles we twice lunched at Ma Maison, where we were reliably informed that Orson Welles was an habitué. Regrettably we were there on his days off and missed our chance to see him. Welles was a talismanic figure for both of us—bearded, overweight, frequently frustrated, but always aiming at the universal. At the Huntington Hartford Theatre we saw a powerful production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, played by movie actors including Robert Ryan, Mildred Dunnock and Jim Backus (the voice of Mr McGoo). Phillip and I visited nineteen schools and Peter Coleman about twelve. Phillip then wrote most of the interim report on our travels, and after 35 years it still makes compelling reading. One of our oddest experiences was visiting Columbia College, Los Angeles, which might have been the model for the film school in Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge. The principal gave us a stern warning not to admit Persian students as they were ‘dirty beasts’, and asked us to include it in our report. We did, but without a recommendation to act. After making a documentary on Vietnam, Hearts and Minds, with Bruce Petty, Phillip completed his first feature film, Jack and Jill: A Postscript in 1970. He estimates that it cost $6000 to make. It won the Grand Prix at an international film festival and was the first Australian feature to win an AFI award. He produced The Naked Bunyip (1971), in which I had a small part, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1971), Don’s Party (1975),The Getting of Wisdom (1976) and four other films. After McMahon became Prime Minister in March 1971, Phillip led much of the public campaign to keep the proposed film school on the political agenda. In January 1973, when Gough Whitlam transmuted the Australian Council for the Arts into the Australia Council, Phillip became a foundation member and chair of its Film and Television Board until 1976. He served on the Australian Film Commission 1983–90, chaired the Victorian Council for the Arts 1982–86 and my Commission for the Future 1985–90. Phillip began collecting after I did, but soon far outstripped me. In 1972 he bought a faience amulet of the Egyptian god Horus in Old Bond 216
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 217
FACES
Street. His collection now has 6000 catalogued items, and includes major Etruscan, Egyptian, Roman, Greek and pre-Columbian pieces. His knowledge of archaeology is prodigious. In 1967 Phillip became a columnist for The Age, working closely with Ranald Macdonald, then chief executive who, with Graham Perkin, was trying to propel the paper into the 20th century and prevent a takeover by John Fairfax Ltd which owned The Sydney Morning Herald. When this failed and Ranald left in 1983, Phillip departed with him and became a columnist with The Australian. In 1985 he left Melbourne for Sydney and in his new life bought a country property, complete with mansion, in the Hunter Valley, memorably described in Patrice Newell’s book The River (2003). He became a practical farmer, tractor driver, motorcyclist, carpenter, marksman and conservationist. He ran talk-back programs with station 2UE then transferred to the ABC in 1992 with Late Night Live, an interview and discussion series which in 2007 ran for four nights a week on Radio National. I cannot improve on Eric Beecher’s assessment in the journal The Reader (December 2003): He’s been around the media for decades, he looks more like a priest than a radio jock, he talks proper, he has an amazingly retentive memory, he’s accessibly cerebral, he wears his biases on his skivvy, he polarizes opinion and opinion-makers, he applies historical perspective to his views and discussions, he attracts by far the most significant interview subjects from around the globe to his programme, he probes and banters with them as an equal, he gets himself properly briefed on the detail, he gives his subjects time and space to be discursive and therefore, often, illuminating, he breaks all the rules of talk radio, he is an Australian institution and an international-calibre broadcaster who would distinguish the airwaves of any radio station anywhere. He is Phillip Adams.
He has interviewed ‘around 15,000 of the most interesting people on earth’ but his favourite subjects have been American: the critic Harold Bloom, playwright Arthur Miller, former Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara on the Cuban missile crisis, Henry Kissinger on diplomacy and Studs Terkel, broadcaster and oral historian. He has twenty books to his credit, two based on discussions about ‘Big Questions’ (i.e. God) with the astrophysicist Paul Davies, collections of Australian jokes, a very serious matter, with Patrice Newell, A Billion 217
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 218
A THINKING REED
Voices (1999) on India, and collections of his newspaper columns. His involvement in public causes, such as the asylum seekers, is unparalleled in my experience. His courage and persistence is exceeded only by his determination. I am proud to have worked with him on so many causes.We talk constantly by telephone. My editor commented, ‘You must laugh a lot.’ I said,‘Actually, we groan far more than we laugh.’ In 1998, together with Gough and Margaret Whitlam, we were both elected to the first listing of Australia’s 100 Living National Treasures, organised by the National Trust, which was touching but unexpected.
PATRICK WHITE I appreciated David Marr’s note in the Patrick White Letters (1994) describing me as ‘JONES, BARRY O. (1932– ), thinker, politician and author: the only Labor figure with whom PW never broke’. I had been reading Patrick White since the 1950s but never met him until January 1974. Patrick had been named as Australian of the Year for 1973, after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He did not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, partly because of severe asthma, and sent the painter Sidney Nolan, then a close friend, to represent him and deliver a speech. He declined Gough Whitlam’s invitation to be feted at Parliament House, Canberra. He did much good by stealth. Characteristically, he used his Nobel Prize money to create awards for older Australian writers whose work had not received adequate recognition. So, I was surprised that he accepted the Australia Day award. Walter Smallman, chair of the Australia Day Council (Victoria), telephoned me. ‘We have been told that you are good at handling difficult people and that Patrick White is a very difficult person.’ I said that the second proposition was more accurate than the first and agreed that Patrick was notorious. He continued, ‘Would you be prepared to look after him when he flies down to Melbourne to receive the award? Could you pick him up at the airport, entertain him before and after lunch, and then take him back to the plane?’ I asked,‘But wouldn’t it be better for somebody from the Australia Day Council to do it?’ He said,‘The problem is that none of us has read any of his books except The Shoes of the Fisherman.’* ‘You had better not tell him that,’ I said. * I should not have to explain, but I will. Morris West wrote The Shoes of the Fisherman. 218
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 219
FACES
I agreed to help. The award was to be given at a luncheon at the Melbourne Town Hall. Patrick was to receive a commemorative wooden plaque, then make a speech. I asked Phillip Adams to join me. He was driving a Jaguar in those days, so we drove to the airport and waited for the TAA flight from Sydney. Passengers poured out, but there was no sign of the Australian of the Year. I said to Phillip,‘He’s changed his mind.’Then he appeared: the last passenger to disembark. He complained: ‘They put me in the back row, next to the lavatory.’ The Australia Day Council had only sent him an economy ticket and TAA had not recognised the Australian of the Year or given him an upgrade. Phillip paid for a first-class return to Sydney. Patrick said he needed a drink so we took him to the Wellington Hotel in Flinders Street before walking to the Melbourne Town Hall. The council offered Patrick drinks and savouries before lunch and a chance to meet the Governor of Victoria, Major-General Sir Rohan Delacombe, and his wife. Although Phillip and I were not invited to the drinks and savouries we were told that we could stay for lunch. Patrick told us later, ‘I was so outraged by a remark by the Governor’s wife that I bit too hard on a savoury boat and broke my plate.’ Self-conscious of missing teeth, he held his left hand out in front of his face to shield his mouth for the duration of the speech. It looked bizarre. His speech discomfited his hosts and the 500 guests when he proposed to saw his plaque into three parts, giving them to more deserving recipients—historian Manning Clark, environmentalist Jack Mundey and satirist Barry Humphries. After lunch Phillip went off to a job and I took Patrick to the National Gallery of Victoria. Here I told him the story that became a central element in his novel The Twyborn Affair (1979). I showed him The Arbour (1910), a painting by E. Phillips Fox showing a paterfamilias, a sedate lady in a chair, a red-suited child with a hoop and a pretty girl with a parasol. The pretty girl, I told Patrick, was a man called Herbert Dyce Murphy.* Stephen Murray-Smith had taken Rosemary and me to meet Herbert Dyce Murphy at his house in Mount Martha, near Mornington, in 1968, because I hoped Herbert might appear on my Encounter program. I could envisage a striking opening, with Herbert standing in front of The Arbour, saying: ‘I was the man inside the girl in the picture’ but, conscious of his frailty, I did not press him to appear. * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, p. 637, Stephen Murray-Smith. 219
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 220
A THINKING REED
Herbert had been born in October 1879 at ‘Como’, South Yarra, one of Melbourne’s grandest mansions. His father had leased the property from the Armytage family, which was having a long sojourn in England. His grandfather, Sir Francis Murphy, had been the first Speaker of the Victorian Legislative Assembly 1856–71. Herbert went to Tonbridge School in England, and as a youth sailed twice to the Arctic (1894; 1897)—once on a yacht, once on a whaler. He told us that at Oxford University his acting in female roles had attracted the interest of British Intelligence, and after leaving Brasenose College in 1900 he became a part-time spy in Europe, reporting on the operation of railway systems, for which he had a lifelong passion. He was a cross-dresser at this stage. Herbert said that for some years living as a woman he had shared a house in Richmond-upon-Thames with a retired, but presumably not very inquisitive, sea captain. He stopped writing to his mother.After some months without contact, she sailed to London to search for him. The Murphy family retained its own pew in an Anglican church in London. One Sunday morning, Herbert was attending service dressed in a long skirt, long-sleeved jacket, gloves, veil and hat when he looked up and saw his mother enter the pew. His mother wrote on the order of service:‘Who are you?’ He wrote:‘I am your daughter Edith’. His mother responded:‘I always wanted a beautiful daughter’. This vignette became central in Patrick’s novel, where it appears exactly as I told him. The idea of a mother offering unconditional love to an unusual child had a powerful appeal. He adopted the exotic spelling ‘Eadith’ and Herbert was renamed ‘Eddie’. It turned out later that Stephen had already mentioned the Dyce Murphy story to Patrick at a dinner for Overland magazine, but it did not fully register until he saw the painting. I saw Patrick and his lifelong partner Manoly Lascaris every few months for a decade. On his good days he could be extraordinarily witty, but bitchy with it. He hated V.S. Naipaul for accepting a knighthood, but a more important reason may have been that Naipaul had reviewed The Tree of Man harshly, complaining that White’s prose style was too prolix. He talked about the writers he admired (Homer, Dostoevsky, Gogol and Conrad; Tolstoy and Lawrence up to a point) and those he detested. He conceded that Tolstoy was a great novelist but thought his religious views and avowal of poverty were hypocritical. He had read little of 220
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 221
FACES
Anthony Powell’s novel sequence Dance to the Music of Time and only one of Saul Bellow’s books, Henderson the Rain King. He admired the American critic Edmund Wilson; he also liked the novelist Michael Ondaatje. Patrick was bored by Shakespearean plays based on family disputes, holding up A Winter’s Tale for particular attack. He gave me a lithograph by Stanislaus Rapotec and a number of books, and used me as his go-between with the Australian War Memorial when he wanted to hand over a primitive Ethiopian map that he had picked up in his RAF service. He did most of the cooking at Martin Road and fancied his culinary skills. I was acutely embarrassed when he pressed some fruit cake on me. I dislike fruit cake even at its best, but Patrick’s was not that. It had a Saharan dryness that sucked all moisture from my mouth, and the fruit was like leather. When Patrick looked away, I attempted to take bits of fruit cake out of my mouth and secrete them in a handkerchief in my pants’ pocket. Patrick’s Jack Russell terrier was taking an unhealthy interest in my trousers and I feared detection and expulsion from the house, a fate that had befallen other visitors who failed to appreciate his cooking. In December 1987, as Federal MP for Lalor, I had delivered a commemorative address in Ballarat about Peter Lalor and the Eureka Stockade. The organisers presented me with a large copy, three by two metres, of the Eureka flag which Lalor had unfurled at Bakery Hill 133 years earlier. I was touched, but thought that the flag ought to be displayed prominently rather than being kept at home. I gave it to Patrick, who decided to mark the January 1988 Bicentenary by displaying an Aboriginal flag and my Eureka flag so passersby in Centennial Park could see them both. A few days later hoons tore down both flags and stole them, to Patrick’s outrage. In 1988 I took a series of portraits which Patrick liked. They were published in Overland and the anthology Patrick White Speaks and the ABC used one as an iconic image, widely reproduced when he died. Patrick’s relationship with Sidney Nolan became poisonous after he married Mary Perceval, Arthur Boyd’s sister, soon after his wife Cynthia had died. Nolan painted some deeply wounding images of Patrick as a clown, with Manoly as a dog, together with some offensive verses. I spent a little time with Sid in Melbourne in late July 1990 and he asked if I had seen Patrick lately. He very much regretted his attacks and I asked if he was interested in a rapprochement.‘Well,’ he said,‘we are both getting on and I would like to be reconciled before it is too late.’ With a touch of hubris, I offered to raise the subject with Patrick when I met him next. Patrick 221
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 222
A THINKING REED
could not have been more enraged.‘Manoly,’ he called,‘come here. I want you to hear this. Barry says that Sid Nolan wants to be pals again.’ He turned to me in fury.‘You can tell him NO! NO! NO!’ A few weeks later, on 30 September 1990, Patrick died at home. He had directed that there should be no funeral and hoped that his death could occur without public notice. His ashes were scattered in Centennial Park. Bob Hawke was still Prime Minister. He had been subject to shrill attacks by Patrick. I called the Prime Minister’s office to make sure that an appropriate condolence motion was moved by the Government when the House of Representatives next met. I pointed out that there were precedents for non-Parliamentarians to be given tributes, leaving aside foreign heads of state or government. Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Sir Robert Helpmann and Lloyd Rees had been so honoured. I made a follow-up call to Rod Simms, one of the Prime Minister’s minders. He thought it was unlikely that White would receive a Parliamentary tribute; after all, he had called Bob Hawke ‘a screeching cockatoo’. I threatened to protest vigorously if nothing was done. White’s achievement was unique. ‘Would it,’ I asked, ‘make a difference if I wrote the Prime Minister’s speech of condolence, using appropriate Hawke-speak?’ ‘It might,’ Rod said.‘I’ll get back to you.’ Reluctantly, the Prime Minister’s office agreed and the condolence motion was set down for 9 October. Hansard reported it under the unexciting heading,‘Death of Mr. P.V.M.White’. Bob Hawke moved ‘That this House expresses its deep regret at the death, on Sunday, 30 September 1990, of Patrick White’. He followed my text, with one omission. At the end, I had adapted the usual formula expressing sympathy for bereavement to spouse and family: ‘On behalf of the Government, I convey its deep sympathy to his lifelong companion Manoly Lascaris’. But the words were never uttered. I thought I detected a certain whitening of the prime ministerial knuckles and the speech ended one sentence short. I devoted my Parliamentary tribute* to putting Patrick White in context: He was an innovator long ahead of his time. His play The Ham Funeral was written in 1947, five years before Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and long * Hansard, House of Representatives, 9 October 1990, vol. 173, p. 2406. 222
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 223
FACES
before Berthold Brecht’s works were performed in English. Its successful revival in Sydney in 1989 gave him great satisfaction. It was also televised. He wrote of himself: ‘Always something of a frustrated painter and a composer manqué, I wanted to give my books the textures of music and sensuousness of paint, to convey what . . . Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might have heard’. The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.’ In The Solid Mandala, he quotes the epigraph:‘There is another world, but it is this one.’ He saw ambivalence in everything, especially himself—‘good and evil, body and spirit, joy and suffering, love and hate, life and death, male and female, dream and actuality, time and eternity’ . . . He had a strong feeling for the numinous and a deep, but non-specific, religious sense. He was a complicated mixture of public activist and private recluse. He only became a public intellectual in his 60s. In the first decades after his return to Australia in 1948 he generally voted for Robert Menzies. His judgment of people and issues was usually harsh and not invariably sound.As he wrote: ‘My pursuit of the razor-blade truth has made me a slasher. Not that I don’t love and venerate in several senses—before all, pureness of heart and trustfulness.’ He was not pessimistic about the long term but had a Swiftian fury about those who refused to act here and now to ensure a better future. Four myths about Patrick White should be dispelled: that he was misanthropic, misogynous, humorless and always difficult to read. His fury was reserved for those who lived only for material values and were preoccupied with the short term, who tolerated cruelty, injustice and prejudice. He was generous to causes such as Aboriginal education and the arts, and gave many paintings to the New South Wales Art Gallery. Patrick White was Australia’s King Lear, mostly destructive to those closest to him. As his autobiography Flaws in the Glass demonstrated, his most savage words were reserved for himself. He did not disguise his homosexuality, but preferred the company of women. Manoly Lascaris aside, his inner circle were almost exclusively female. He could be bitter and bitchy but he was also extraordinarily funny with a unique gift for satire and mimicry. Sometimes he laughed so much that he went into paroxysms which must have hurt his lungs. He died of chronic failure of the respiratory system. 223
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 224
A THINKING REED
He anticipated the circumstances of his death, illustrating how pellucid his style could be: Early morning has always been the best time of day. In childhood, gold pouring through the slats as I got up to raid the pantry for crystallised cherries, finish the heel tapes on the supper table, and settle down to the plays of Shakespeare. Now, when I wake, the naked window is washed pale. As I use the eye-drops the first bird-notes are trickling in. Down in the garden, light is a glare. I’m forced to bow my head whether I like it or not; the early mornings of old age are no setting for spiritual pride. Spiderwebs cling like stocking-masks to faces that blunder into them. Dogs point at vanished cats, follow the trail of the night’s possums. At the end of her lead the dog bays and threatens to pull me over in a cataract of light, scents, dew. We collect ourselves as far as it is ever possible. If I were to stage the end I would set it on the upper terrace, not the one moment of any morning, but all that I have ever lived, splintering and coalescing, the washed pane of a false dawn, steamy draperies of Sydney summers, blaring hibiscus trumpets as well as their exhausted phalluses, ground mist tugging at the dry grass of the Centennial steppes, brass bands practising against the heat, horses cantering in circles to an accompaniment of shouted commands, liquid calls of hidden birds, a flirt of finches, skittering of wrens, bulbuls plopping round the stone bath carved by Manoly in the early days at Castle Hill, as though in preparation for the final moments of grace.
I repeated my condolences to Manoly, himself a poet, as the ‘central mandala’ of Patrick’s life and who contributed uniquely to his creativity. I concluded, ‘Patrick has no tombstone, but he might have approved the words of his fellow Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats: On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!’
Normally, I bridle when the label ‘eccentric’ is applied to me, but I was touched by a graceful essay by Tony Wright in The Canberra Times (13 October 1990) about my tribute to Patrick, with the headline, ‘Jones on White: One eccentric giant praises another’. He wrote: 224
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 225
FACES
Barry Jones is one of the reasons some people have not lost all faith in politicians. He’s not much good at backroom deals and public slanging matches. He couldn’t pull the strings in his faction necessary to keep him in the Ministry. But he is a genuine character, brimful of obsessions and delight at all manner of esoterica. He’s also one of the very few genuine intellectuals in Parliament. And so, when Mr Jones rose to speak on the condolence motion on the death of Patrick Victor Martindale White, there was a lovely symmetry in the occasion. Here was one outsider, an Australian giant of sorts, an eccentric, speaking in praise of another outsider, another Australian giant, another eccentric. It was the best speech to the Parliament in months, perhaps years. It was at once funny, informed, erudite and entertaining. There seemed to be a mood to give Mr Jones a standing ovation as he resumed his seat, but sadly, the Parliamentarians checked the urge . . . Fascinating, really, that a Parliament that in the popular imagination is peopled by opportunists and philistines would reserve its highest accolades for artists and intellectuals. It is at times like these that your jaded faith in the system might be revived. And this time, much of the thanks is due to Barry O. Jones, intellectual backbencher.
225
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 226
CHAPTER 7
ﱗ
‘Bump Me Into Parliament’
Bump me into Parliament Bounce me any way you want, Bang me into Parliament, On next election day. Chorus from IWW song by Bill Casey
After Federal intervention in the Victorian ALP in September 1970, which opened up the Party after years of dogmatic Hard Left control, I was able to come in out of the cold, politically. Nevertheless, things did not quite work out as I had hoped. In 1971 Arthur Calwell, aged 75, announced that he would retire from Parliament in 1972 so I sought pre-selection for his Federal seat of Melbourne. I had a high public profile because of Pick-a-Box and was supported by my friends in the Participants. Calwell opposed my candidature on the grounds that I was an intellectual and that the seat should be held by a blue-collar unionist. That was ironic, given that he had been a widely read white-collar senior bureaucrat with a working knowledge of Mandarin.Ted (Urquhart Edward) Innes, Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, a leader of the new Labor Unity faction, later State ALP President in 1972–73, beat me for Melbourne after very strong lobbying for him by Bob Hawke, Clyde Holding and Calwell himself, although I was runnerup on the first ballot. 226
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 227
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
I yearned to be part of the new team under Gough Whitlam which, I anticipated, would win the 1972 Federal election. I campaigned very hard for the nomination and was deeply depressed by the outcome. I envied my friends Tony Lamb, David Mackenzie and Race Mathews for winning Federal seats as part of Whitlam’s team. As I suspected, Ted Innes proved to be a totally ineffective MP, and the Melbourne seat was just thrown away. He served briefly as Shadow Minister for the Australian Capital Territory and in 1983 was defeated for pre-selection by Gerry Hand. Many arms had been twisted in the Melbourne branches to ensure that Innes won pre-selection. When the Member for the State seat of Melbourne, Arthur Clarey, aged 75, announced his retirement, branch members, some with arms still in slings, suggested that I should nominate to succeed him. In April 1972 I became the first member of the Participants to win a pre-selection, defeating a local pharmacist, Bob White. Jack O’Connell, the elderly Member of the Legislative Council for Melbourne Province, died suddenly in April, followed by Arthur Clarey on 9 May, after falling down some stairs, so the ALP faced two by-elections in the same locality. John Button, another Participant, nominated for pre-selection for the Legislative Council seat but faced much stiffer opposition than I had. Party power brokers calculated that one Participant could be tolerated in the State Caucus, two could not. Button was defeated by Ivan Trayling, a marketing manager and Mayor of St Kilda, a beneficiary of an ‘anyone but Button’ coalition. Paradoxically, the intensity of the anti-Button campaign later assisted his successful campaign for a Senate seat. Elected to the Senate in May 1974, he soon fell out with Whitlam and was an early promoter of Bill Hayden for the leadership. At noon on 12 June when nominations for the by-elections closed, Trayling and I were unopposed and declared elected as MPs forthwith. With a Federal election due before the end of 1972, the Liberal Party had no interest in contesting unwinnable by-elections where swings towards Labor might be taken as auguries of victory for Whitlam.Again, I was not even Calwell’s first choice for the State seat. He would have preferred the former MLA for Flemington, Kevin Holland, whose seat had been eliminated in a redistribution, although we worked together amiably after my election. I accepted being a Member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly very much in the spirit of Satan’s words in Milton’s Paradise Lost, that it was 227
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 228
A THINKING REED
‘better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’. I was nearly forty, and being in almost perpetual opposition inside the Victorian ALP had resulted in twenty years of frustration. I had concluded that my prospects of ever being elected to the Commonwealth Parliament were remote. But there were consolations. Melbourne was undoubtedly the most interesting electorate in the whole State, including most of the great institutions, the Parliament, the cathedrals, Melbourne University, the National Gallery, State Library and the museum, the Royal Exhibition Building, the law courts, zoo, department stores and major hospitals, and the suburbs of North Melbourne, Parkville, Flemington, Kensington, Carlton and East Melbourne. I was determined to get the cattle yards and abattoirs removed from Kensington, because transporting animals long distances caused needless suffering and added to traffic congestion. On my election, Parliament was in its long winter recess. Before the House met, Sir Henry Bolte retired in August 1972 after seventeen years as Premier, so I never faced him in the chamber. His successor was Rupert James Hamer, better known, until he was knighted, as Dick. In my five years in State Parliament I observed him closely, with growing admiration. I had not exactly been an enthusiast for Bolte, but he had shown political nous in choosing as his successor somebody so completely different in his political values, lifestyle, intellect and temperament. Bolte recognised that it was time for quality of life issues to be promoted, and Hamer excelled there. Clyde Holding was Leader, Frank Wilkes the Deputy, while Jack Galbally was Leader in the Legislative Council with John Walton as Deputy. Caucus had been demoralised after six successive defeats by Bolte. After Hamer embarked on a reform program, with a strong interest in the environment and the arts, a different kind of demoralisation set in. I looked for an opportunity to open up the Opposition to new ideas. When I delivered my maiden speech in September 1972,* I called for the establishment of an Australian republic, the need for a ‘shock of recognition’ about Australian identity, measures for the reduction of poverty, more money for inner-city schools, resisting freeway construction as a challenge to Melbourne as ‘a community of mixed usage’, democratising the Melbourne City Council, ‘that cosy collection of clubland cronies’, ending the dream of ‘Melbourne unlimited’ which would make the inner city a concrete jungle, and to remove eyesores to the city’s west. * Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 12 September 1972, vol. 308, p. 195. 228
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 229
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
I contrasted the value systems of Labor and the conservatives. Oddly, I did not refer to my passion for abolishing the death penalty. However, I called for law reform generally, then discussed problems which would flow from the post-industrial era, especially employment and education, and the need to redefine work and leisure. I quoted Ivan Illich and the role of schools as sorting machines which ‘leave its brand or caste mark for life’. I rejected ‘the tendency . . . to think of society as being equivalent to the market’. I placed myself ‘very firmly in the vanguard of women’s liberation’. I described myself as a republican and a Christian Socialist and concluded, somewhat pretentiously, with two quotations, the first Immanuel Kant’s concept of the ‘categorical imperative’, the second Blaise Pascal’s words about man’s vulnerability as ‘a thinking reed’. The House was reasonably crowded for my speech, as was the custom for ‘maidens’. My side seemed bored, there was a mixed reaction from the Liberals and the Country Party benches looked blank. When I observed to Phillip Adams that most MPs who heard my address seemed baffled by my speech, he rebuked me. ‘When you talk about Pascal, they think you mean lollies.’ On my election, Members had no offices and no staff in their electorates. Opposition MPs shared rabbit warrens, sometimes two or three to a room, and we could dictate letters to a dedicated group of steno-typists at Parliament House. The Parliamentary Library, an elegant beaux-arts construction, had a limited book stock but an unfailingly helpful staff. I felt isolated in my first year, before my election as a Shadow Minister, although I was close to Val Doube, MLA for Albert Park and President of the Anti-Hanging Committee. I had briefed Jack Galbally as a barrister, and had written speeches on the death penalty for his Legislative Council colleagues when ‘Gal’ had introduced private member’s bills, and enjoyed his company. Doug Elliot, a former vaudeville performer who hosted Channel Seven’s World of Sport, was an encourager, although we appeared to have few common interests. Robert Fordham, a former public servant, was elected as MLA for Footscray and proved to be a valuable addition to Caucus. Then I came in 1972. Tom Roper, elected as MP for Brunswick in 1973, made a significant contribution to policies on education, health and social welfare. I joined a Caucus which had been elected in May 1970. Labor had unexpectedly won four rural seats with Country Party preferences, but most MPs in the all-male Caucus held safe seats, having been pre-selected by the Central Executive which ruled with an iron fist before Federal 229
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 230
A THINKING REED
intervention in September 1970. The largest grouping in Caucus was known as ‘the Shellbacks’. Generally, they were comfortable with being State MPs, which was the best job they had ever had with the best pay and conditions, and had few, if any, aspirations to become Ministers or initiate shining legislative or administrative achievements.They regarded the ALP’s main policy plank as job security, believed in it fervently and saw Parliament as a place to get in out of the rain. Jack Galbally, a dedicated reformer, sought Caucus approval to introduce a private member’s Bill to ban rabbit traps, which he considered morally offensive. This led to cries of protest from three of the four MPs who held rural seats, who complained, ‘Don’t make things hard for us. We’ll lose the rabbit trapper vote.’ The fourth, Esmond Curnow, our youngest MP, who held the seemingly impossible seat of Kara Kara in the bush, said, ‘I think we should support Jack’s Bill as a matter of principle.’ However, in deference to the three protesters, Caucus decided not to endorse banning rabbit traps. When the May 1973 election was held, the rabbit trapper vote proved to be fickle: the three protesters lost their seats, only Esmond Curnow won. This illustrates the danger of burying a broad principle (relieving cruelty to animals) to the special pleading of a small sectional interest (rabbit trappers). Making the best possible speeches seemed to be a worthwhile objective. My psychiatrist friend, Bill McLeod, remembers me telling him that I did not expect my colleagues to pay any attention, but I hoped that some lonely researcher, a century ahead, might read my speeches in Hansard and say,‘He made a serious contribution.’ The Speaker, Sir Vernon Christie, a former engineer who had a tense relationship with Bolte, befriended me. After he retired, he moved to Queensland and joined the ALP so that he could campaign against Joh Bjelke-Petersen, much to my satisfaction. Since 1968 I had been a member of the Australian Council for the Arts and was soon appointed to the interim council for a film and television school and the Australian Film Development Corporation, all Commonwealth bodies. Vernon urged me to get a QC’s opinion about whether these appointments could be interpreted as ‘offices of profit under the Crown’ and lead to my removal from State Parliament. Dick McGarvie provided me with a long, learned opinion, advising that my position was secure because of the notion of a divided Crown, one for the Commonwealth, one for the State. After Dick Hamer won the 1973 State election and Labor lost four 230
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 231
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
more seats, Caucus elected me as a Shadow Minister and Clyde Holding gave me responsibility for Social Welfare and Aboriginal Affairs. I became heavily involved in prison reform, read and discussed widely and made many visits to Pentridge and other gaols. There were few opportunities for overseas travel for State MPs but I was chosen for a study tour to visit prisons and examine how the Ombudsman system operated in Scandinavia. In August and September 1973 I inspected prisons in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Montreal and Mexico City. I visited the Dachau concentration camp, outside Munich, the first to be established by the Nazis in 1933, emerging in deep depression. Although dwarfed by Auschwitz, which I never saw, it had a profound impact. Discussions with officials in Denmark, Sweden and Norway were particularly interesting. In Scandinavia, unlike the Australian states, prison service was part of the bureaucratic mainstream, not a cul-de-sac. Officials in Treasury, Education, Health or Justice all had to spend some time working in prisons. Penal methods were not mere abstractions for them but essential elements in their professional experience. I delivered some long, but closely reasoned, speeches on penal reform, and judging from the number of interjections recorded in Hansard they generated controversy. I called the large metropolitan gaols such as Pentridge monuments to futility. No one is proud of them, yet we seem to be too bereft of spirit or imagination to tear them down.They are the universities of crime; hospitals that infect patients, asylums that induce madness, warehouses of misery . . . To construct a multi-purpose prison around a hard core of recidivists is a foolish way to run a penal institution. It is as silly as putting an infectious diseases ward in the centre of a general hospital . . .
Dick Hamer told me later that my speeches influenced his thinking on prison reform. I had hosted discussions on Aboriginal issues on my television program Encounter in 1968 and came to know Charles Perkins reasonably well. But I was conscious of having seen, let alone talked with, very few Aborigines in Melbourne. Since my appointment to the Australian Council for the Arts I had worked with ‘Nugget’ Coombs, who also chaired the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. I soon developed a good working relationship with Pastor Doug Nicholls and the Aborigines’ Advancement League. 231
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 232
A THINKING REED
Because Parliament House was at the centre of my electorate, I used the Caucus room as a working space and spent time there every weekday, even when the House was not sitting. People with grievances who called in to Parliament House hoping to see a Labor MP were regularly referred to me by attendants, and I built up a heavy case load. On one occasion, a disturbed Albanian pulled a gun on me to indicate his frustration with the Family Law Court. Many young people came in with drug problems, but I could do nothing but refer them to welfare agencies. At the beginning of December 1973 I had an unexpected encounter with Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, who was familiarising himself with the world down under. He was being shown round the empty chamber by Dick Hamer. I remember less of what Reagan said than how he looked. I had never seen fluorescent orange hair before. From June 1973 to November 1975 I served on a Parliamentary Select Committee on Osteopathy, Chiropractic and Naturopathy and hurled myself into studying fringe medicine.The Committee was ably chaired by Roy Ward, a Liberal MLC. We toured Victoria extensively, visited Sydney, brought in witnesses from other States and recorded 3500 pages of evidence. In May 1974 the Premier invited us to report on the use of irradiating equipment. Our enquiry revealed a deep antipathy towards fringe practitioners by medical orthodoxy, but without hard evidence to substantiate it. Many doctors who gave evidence told us that they had heard of serious damage caused by chiropractors or osteopaths, but—with two exceptions—they could not provide specific details. Oddly, we found that some of the most effective chiropractors had a shaky grasp of physiology, could not read X-rays but had extensive experience in massaging footballers. The distinguished surgeon John Jens, Professor Rod Andrew, Dean of Medicine at Monash, and specialists Dr Leon Marshall and Dr H.A. Luke were sympathetic to registering chiropractors and osteopaths because they thought that many doctors had limited knowledge of the back and neck and were over-reliant on prescribing drugs or recommending surgery. Bill McLeod, my psychiatrist friend, suggested reasons for sufferers giving up on orthodox treatment and going for the fringe. Our report included material on herbalism, homoeopathy, Christian Science, acupuncture and X-ray equipment. I wrote much of the report, and our major recommendations about training and registration were adopted in legislation. 232
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 233
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
In October 1973 I made a serious error of judgment in attacking the appointment, at the age of 65, of John Vincent Dillon, the retiring permanent head of the Chief Secretary’s Department, as Victoria’s first Ombudsman. My objection was that Dillon had been an insider’s insider and I suspected that he might be over-indulgent about bureaucratic obfuscation and delays, simply appealing from Caesar to Caesar. I repeated the old canard about it being ‘the weirdest appointment since Caligula made his horse a consul’. I was completely wrong. J.V. Dillon proved to be an exemplary Ombudsman. He knew where all the bodies were buried and could anticipate every strategy for delay and concealment: indeed, he probably devised some of them himself. So, as an insider’s insider, he was merciless about bureaucratic failure and unconscionable delays. I wrote to him and apologised in Parliament for my criticism and he sent me a gracious letter saying how much he appreciated my retraction. He was knighted on his retirement. I was heavily involved in the parliamentary debate on the introduction of fluoridation to Melbourne’s drinking water in November 1973, examined the published evidence carefully and argued strongly for it. Macfarlane Burnet’s advocacy was significant. I opposed proposals that the issue should be put to a referendum, urging Parliament to act courageously even if it was significantly in advance of public opinion. I assumed that fluoridation would be defeated in a referendum, because voters would be asked to form a judgment on something where they had no personal experience and the ‘No’ case would be able to appeal to fear of the unknown. As a parliamentarian, I worked very much in the spirit of Edmund Burke’s celebrated address to the electors of Bristol in 1774, when he said: ‘Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.’ The politician must listen to people. But he/she must not merely follow public opinion: he/she must lead, even if it risks defeat. I was confident that the passage of years would vindicate Parliament’s decision, but if the electors still disagreed they had a sanction. If they voted to defeat pro-fluoride MPs, ultimately the legislation would be repealed. In October 1974 Clyde Holding promoted me to be Shadow Minister for Transport and the Arts. I became passionately involved in transport issues. Increasing use of private motor vehicles had long shaped Melbourne’s development.There were two important recurrent problems: the process of building the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop, a long 233
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 234
A THINKING REED
drawn-out process, and the saga of completing Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge across the lower Yarra. In October 1970 a span had collapsed on the bridge, killing 35 men, and a Royal Commission made major criticisms of the original design by the famous British firm of Freeman Fox. Transport later became an important element in my book Sleepers,Wake! (1982). My involvement in the parliamentary debates in March–April 1975 resulting in the abolition of capital punishment, described in Chapter 3, was a matter of lasting satisfaction. Once it was achieved there was less reason for me to remain in Spring Street, because most of my other policy priorities were national. However, I had been interested in the concept of ‘victimless crimes’ and became convinced that homosexual acts between unrelated consenting adults should be decriminalised. I sought Caucus’ approval to introduce a private member’s Bill to amend the Crimes Act, to bring Victoria into line with the situation in the ACT. Consent was grudgingly given, the Crimes (Sexual Behaviour) Bill was prepared and introduced on 16 October 1975, but no time was found to debate it. In December 1980 Dick Hamer took up the cause and legislation was enacted. As Shadow Arts Minister I served on the boards of the Victorian State Opera and the Australian Ballet School. Hamer handled most Arts issues with great candour, or shrewdness. In 1975 the directorship of the National Gallery of Victoria became vacant on Eric Westbrook’s retirement and the preferred applicant was Bryan Robertson, former director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London and later director of the State Museum of New York. However, some Australian artists, led by Albert Tucker and including Clifton Pugh, disliked Robertson intensely because of past dealings with him in London, indicating that they would attack his appointment publicly. A strong element of homophobia was involved. The Premier asked to see me in my role as Shadow Minister for the Arts. He said that if the Opposition backed the Government the appointment would go ahead, if not the position would be readvertised. He said, ‘I have no secrets on this. Here’s the complete file. Take it home and study it.’ I have never seen references of such quality: Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson,Arthur Boyd. I discussed the problem with Clyde Holding and we agreed to support Robertson’s appointment. However, Robertson was so concerned about the hostility aroused that he declined the Melbourne offer and stayed in New York, with frequent commuting to London. 234
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 235
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
There was an adverse flow-on. Professor John Vaizey, later Lord Vaizey, a British economist with an unusually broad range of interests, including education, was Vice Chancellor designate of Monash University and a close friend of Bryan Robertson. His wife, Marina Vaizey, was a distinguished critic and art historian.Vaizey was so disconcerted by the personal attacks on Robertson, including threatening telephone calls, that he withdrew from the Monash appointment. So we lost not one but three potential contributors to Australia. However, Dick handled the issue with great sensitivity. In my spare time, I wrote Age of Apocalypse for the Macmillan Company of Australia. This was an extensive revision, rewriting and updating of my first book, Decades of Decision 1860– . Published in 1975, it was elegantly presented, with a good selection of photographs, but never reviewed, essentially because it was regarded as a textbook. The book was tightly packed, but it reads well and provided serious analysis of major and continuing world problems. I was particularly pleased with my analysis of Imperialism, Communism, Fascism and the Great Depression. In 1978, updated again, it was reissued as Barry Jones’ Guide to Modern History, subtitled Age of Apocalypse. In the State election of March 1976 the Liberals won their eighth consecutive victory, with their biggest majority. The Legislative Assembly had increased from 73 to 81 members, and Labor picked up three new seats, but we were still behind where we had been in 1970. The Democratic Labor Party, once a powerful blocking force against Labor, had virtually disappeared, but our primary vote barely moved. John Cain won the new seat of Bundoora. I was convinced that after three defeats Clyde Holding should not be returned unopposed for a fourth term. I liked him and enjoyed his company, but felt that he had to go. If voters say ‘No’ three times, they may conclude that you are either deaf or not listening. I went, alone, to visit Clyde at his Richmond home and argued that it was in the Party’s interest for him to give up the leadership. He refused, feeling that he had more to contribute than anybody else in the Caucus, including me. I was not particularly ambitious for the leadership but felt that without a challenger, the Caucus would drift. Reluctantly, I decided to challenge although Val Doube and Jack Galbally warned me against it. I wrote to my Caucus colleagues about my intentions and received a surprisingly warm and, as it turned out, misleading response. My candidature was welcomed in The Age and The Herald and on radio and television. 235
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 236
A THINKING REED
When the new Caucus met a third candidate, Derek Amos, MLA for Morwell, nominated. Derek, a painter and decorator, without any formal education, was a natural parliamentarian and an effective Shadow Minister for Minerals and Energy. In the ballot, Clyde won a small absolute majority, followed by Derek Amos, and I trailed in third place. My failure led to Clyde’s memorable observation, ‘Quiz Kids can’t count . . .’ John Cain was one of my handful of supporters. Cain was immediately elected to the Shadow Cabinet. Clyde made him Shadow Minister for Public Works, a completely pointless task because it was an administrative, not a policy, portfolio. My abortive 1976 challenge had opened up the leadership issue and in June 1977 Clyde resigned and was succeeded by his deputy Frank Wilkes. Robert Fordham became Deputy Leader. I contested the secretaryship of the Parliamentary Labor Party, which ranked third among Assembly Members, and won comfortably, this time defeating Derek Amos. Giving up the leadership encouraged Clyde to look for new options and he set his eye on the Commonwealth Parliament, to which we were both elected in 1977. He thanked me for helping to push him off the edge and after we ceased to be Ministers we sat next to each other for years in the House of Representatives. In September 1976 I published a policy paper, ‘Move People . . . Not Vehicles’, which was widely reported. I lectured on it interminably across Melbourne. My central theme was that Melbourne was divided into ‘transport rich’ areas—largely the suburbs built before 1926, serviced by a radial system of train and tram lines—and ‘transport poor’ areas, the new outer suburbs where commuters travelled long distances to work by road. By 1976 Melbourne was a huge, low density city covering 6133 square kilometres. The 1926 radial system had become inflexible and irrelevant, no longer taking people where they wanted to go. I pointed out that Melbourne had more kilometres of suburban railway track than the Paris Metro, but its radial system only accounted for 6.5 per cent of passenger movements while in Paris the figure was 70 per cent. Melbourne had only five interchanges, all in or near the city centre, while Paris had 124, mostly widely dispersed.The answer, I argued, was to convert Melbourne’s radial system into a grid, by providing circumferential links which would increase interchanges, providing greater flexibility of movement and increasing route choices without necessarily increasing the number of train or tram services. Radial freeways would compound the problem, directing cars from an 236
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 237
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
expanding catchment area to a small central business district. ‘Inner city areas are too valuable to be used as storage areas for cars every day.’ I urged the application of ‘energy analysis’ to public transport, and committed Labor to enforce the first and second laws of thermodynamics. When vehicles, essentially heat engines, competed for space in the inner city, ‘work energy’ was converted into ‘entropy’: heat, noise and pollution. In an enclosed system, as total energy input increases mobility is reduced. My text, essentially, was that in an efficient city-wide transport system the main task was to move people, not vehicles. I initiated several major debates on transport issues in the Parliament and generally scored well. I developed an increasing preoccupation with the West Gate Bridge and tried to understand the reasons for the long delays in its repair and completion, and the extraordinary cost blow out. I called for files under the freedom of information (FOI) legislation and devoted weeks of study to the complex engineering problems involved. I secured valuable technical advice from Professor Paul Grundy, an engineer from Monash University.After the Royal Commission on the collapse of a span on the bridge, the West Gate Bridge Authority had commissioned a new design from a celebrated Scottish engineer, Dr W.A. Fairhurst. In 1972, however, much to Fairhurst’s rage, the authority dumped his plan and substituted a radical new design from Germany, which cost an additional $80 million and took five more years to complete. The Victorian Government was informed neither of the basic design change nor Fairhurst’s dismissal. When Dick Hamer had been the Minister responsible, he defended the new design on the basis that Fairhurst had devised it: in fact Fairhurst was bitterly opposed. Later, Joe Rafferty, the Transport Minister, justified the new design on the grounds that an expert committee of four eminent engineers had endorsed it.The FOI documents made it clear that the committee had never met. Each member was shown a segment of the bridge documentation relating to his expertise and asked to give an endorsement. I forced Joe Rafferty to make a ministerial statement on the West Gate Bridge, then moved an amendment declaring that the statement was misleading and inaccurate and that the Minister had lost the confidence of the House. My speech* lasted for about 90 minutes and was packed with information. The Hansard report included diagrams and tables. It was a classic illustration of the fragmentation of expertise, where lay Ministers * Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 20 September 1977, vol. 333, p. 9691. 237
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 238
A THINKING REED
were lost in an impenetrable forest. However, I probably outsmarted myself. Joe Rafferty’s reply was surprisingly effective, considering that he failed to address any of my arguments. Essentially he told Parliament, ‘It’s all far too complicated. I don’t understand it. Do you?’To add salt to my wounds, my speech was barely reported in The Age, The Sun or on the ABC. I had tried to persuade Creighton Burns, then editor of The Age, to take up the case, but its complexity turned him off. He said, ‘Are you asserting that the bridge is unsafe?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, if you aren’t, then there isn’t a story.’ I thought that ministerial failure to grasp what had happened and misleading Parliament was enough, but Creighton disagreed. I was certainly assiduous. The index to the Victorian Hansard indicates that in 1977 I made 716 interventions, even though I left State Parliament before the end of the year. One night in October 1977, over dinner in Parliament House, I was discussing with colleagues the prospects for pre-selection to the Commonwealth Parliament. Malcolm Fraser had called a premature election, and Jim Cairns and Frank Crean announced that they would not recontest. As I attacked poached bream with hollandaise sauce, I swallowed a bone and had to be rushed to the nearby Eye and Ear Hospital. Conventional methods failed to remove it, due to my notorious propensity for gagging, and I had to be anesthetised and operated on. Next morning, several nurses raised the pre-selection issue and urged me to seek Federal endorsement. So, implausible as it sounds, the fish bone incident became a factor in my decision to move. Clyde Holding announced that he would contest Frank Crean’s seat of Melbourne Ports, and I decided to try for Lalor. In 1977 Lalor, to the west and north-west of Melbourne, included Werribee, Altona, Sunshine, Deer Park, St Albans and much of Keilor. It had the highest percentage of population with a non-English-speaking background of any Commonwealth electorate, with the largest numbers coming from the former Yugoslavia, Malta, Greece, Italy and India. It also had a reputation for playing politics very hard. Two of the councils covering Lalor—Sunshine and Keilor— had been sacked and were being run by administrators. There were bitter internal divisions in the branches, more tribal and personal than factional. Strong local networks, marked by mutual detestation, were united by an even greater dislike of outsiders. Thirteen candidates nominated for pre-selection. Ten were locals. Three were outsiders: Dr Julie Dahlitz, an international lawyer who had 238
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 239
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
worked for the United Nations in Geneva, Dr Gavin Oakley, a Fabian dentist, former candidate for Deakin and brother of the literary critic Barry Oakley, and me. Pre-selection was determined by a panel of 70, comprising 30 delegates elected by ALP branch members in Lalor and 40 chosen, by lot, from the 100 members of the Public Office Selection Committee, a group elected by State Conference.Although I lobbied hard with local branch members, I knew that my best chance of success was in winning support from the 40 central panel members. If pre-selection had been decided by local branch members alone I would have had no chance. Opposition Leader Frank Wilkes encouraged my aspiration to Canberra. So did John Cain and Michael Duffy. Pre-selections occurred in a rush, which posed a problem for me. Under the Commonwealth Electoral Act, Members of a State Parliament were disqualified as candidates unless they had resigned before the writs were issued and nominations opened. Accordingly, I had to resign my State seat of Melbourne before the ALP decided its pre-selection for Lalor. It was a risky undertaking, because if I failed with Lalor I would be out of a job. The conventional wisdom was that I had no chance of winning. Bob Hogg, then Victorian State Secretary, tried to talk me out of the contest because he was convinced that I would lose. Then, some encouragement came from an unexpected corner: Robert Ray, later a Senator and Defence Minister but already a shrewd numbers man in the Labor Unity (Right) faction. He telephoned me and said, ‘I know people are trying to talk you out of running, but I calculate you will win Lalor on the fourth ballot by a margin of three or four votes.’ That was my own estimate. On the night of Thursday 3 November I drove out to the Strathmore home of the Speaker, Sir Kenneth Wheeler, to hand him my resignation from the Victorian Parliament. I had a welcome boost when Julie Dahlitz and Gavin Oakley withdrew in my favour. They soon calculated that they had no chance of winning, but that their continued candidature might lead to my elimination before the final ballot. Jim Cairns had originally wanted to be succeeded by a woman, but when Julie withdrew he backed a branch activist from Altona, Bob Harrison. When Harrison dropped out his support flowed to me, so I was, in effect, Jim Cairns’ third choice. I also had valuable support, behind the scenes, from two State MPs, Gordon Stirling (Altona) and Bill Fogarty (Sunshine), whose electorates were inside Lalor’s boundaries. 239
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 240
A THINKING REED
The official Left candidate, Ian Mill, a teacher and former councillor, was eliminated on the second ballot, and I picked up most of his votes. In the fourth ballot I defeated Jack Arnell, an activist in the Sunshine machine run by ‘Bon’ (Herbert Arthur) Thomas, MLC for Melbourne West 1970–82. Keith Remington, President of the Australian Bank Employees Union, won pre-selection for my State seat, defeating Race Mathews among others. The election held on 10 December 1977 was Gough Whitlam’s last hurrah as Federal Leader and I was proud to be running under his banner. Although Labor picked up two more seats, its primary vote fell to 39.6 per cent, 3 per cent down on the 1975 debacle when voters elected Fraser after the Dismissal. There were six candidates and I won with a tiny absolute majority of primary votes (50.5 per cent), well down on Cairns’ 1975 result (59.3 per cent). The Liberals came second with 28.1 per cent, and the Australian Democrats stood in Lalor for the first time, polling 9.9 per cent. At that time the Commonwealth Electoral Commission did not carry out a full distribution of preferences to determine the ‘two party preferred’ vote, but if preferences had been counted I would have gained about 61 per cent. After the election I took over Jim Cairns’ office in Sunshine. Jim telephoned to ask a favour. His controversial personal assistant Junie Morosi had been on his electoral staff and would suffer a significant loss of superannuation and leave entitlements unless she could remain on the payroll until the beginning of February 1978. Unless I was proposing to appoint new staff before Christmas, would I be prepared to keep her on the books for two months? I swallowed hard and agreed, but on two conditions: that Junie did not turn up for work and that her continued employment was not publicised. Both conditions were met. The Federal electorate of Lalor, created in 1949 when the House of Representatives was enlarged, was named for Peter Lalor, leader of the Eureka Stockade rebellion in Ballarat in 1854, later a Member of the Victorian Parliament and Speaker. His descendants retained the Irish pronunciation of ‘Lawlor’, and ‘Wanted’ posters issued after the Stockade spelled his name that way. I insisted on the traditional pronunciation of Lalor, although I knew that people living in the outer northern suburb of Lalor (not in my electorate) called their area ‘Laylor’. I became the fourth MP for Lalor, and to date (2006) the longest serving. Originally Lalor stretched from Seymour in the north, down to the 240
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 241
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
outskirts of Geelong in the south-west. Because its population expanded so rapidly with the influx of migrants, the electorate went through several radical boundary changes. My office, originally in Sunshine, moved with successive boundary changes to St Albans, then to Deer Park, finally to Werribee. I was exceptionally fortunate with my electoral staff, who carried an enormous load, and Catherine McDonald stayed with me for more than twenty years. Immigration and social security provided the largest number of cases. In my 21 years in the Australian Parliament I served under five Labor Leaders: Whitlam (briefly), Hayden, Hawke, Keating and Beazley, and observed four Prime Ministers: Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard. At my first Federal Caucus meeting on 22 December 1977, Gough Whitlam stepped down as Leader and there was a contest between Bill Hayden and Lionel Bowen. I voted for Hayden, who won by 36 votes to 28. Bowen then defeated Tom Uren for the Deputy Leadership. I was elected as Shadow Minister in 1980, Minister in 1983 and dumped in 1990, events described in Chapter 11. I retired in 1998. Only seven new Labor MHRs were elected in 1977: Neal Blewett, Stewart West, John Brown, Clyde Holding, Brian Howe, Ben Humphreys and me. All became Ministers under Hawke. Doug Everingham and John Dawkins, both defeated in 1975, were re-elected. Gareth Evans was elected to the Senate from Victoria but did not take his seat until July 1978. I chummed up with John Brown, a successful businessman and expert gardener, whose vivacious wife Jan seemed to be a fixture when Parliament was sitting, and I often ate with the Browns. Barry Cohen, who had helped organise the Ralph Nader tour in 1972 was, and remained, a close friend so long as I refrained from any criticism, however mild, of Israel. I was also close to Ben Humphreys. But the first years in Parliament were lonely, and I felt bereaved when Gough left the House in 1978. However, his replacement in Werriwa, John Kerin, was excellent company and a good friend. I had not yet penetrated Ralph Jacobi’s reserves. After nearly 30 years in the ALP, I had few illusions when I joined the Federal Parliament. Matthew Parris, a gifted English journalist who sat as a Tory MP in the House of Commons from 1979 to 1986, wrote: ‘Party discipline belittles you. Your secretary tolerates you. Your constituents pester you. Journalists deride you. Even your local paper ignores you.Your senior colleagues patronize you, your junior colleagues resent you and your equals mistrust you. The parliamentary clerks despise you and the Speaker fails to recognise you’. 241
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 242
A THINKING REED
Fred Daly, a veteran MP who retired in 1975, used to tell the story of a new Member who sat next to him in the House and said, ‘I like to sit here and look across at the enemy.’ Fred told him, ‘Son, you are looking at the Opposition. The enemy is behind you.’ Taking the opportunity to make worthwhile speeches was high on my Parliamentary agenda. In my maiden speech* in the House of Representatives, in February 1978, I spoke of my preoccupations with the ‘Post Industrial Revolution’, as Australia and other Western economies moved away from industrialism towards a service economy in which informationbased work would predominate, issues I later developed in my book Sleepers,Wake! I also set out my argument for dividing the economy into five sectors: extractive, manufacturing and construction, general economic services, information processing and services provided within the home and/or analogous services (food and shelter, care of children and the aged). I warned about the danger of technocracy (my views on fluoridation notwithstanding) when decisions are made by experts and a Parliament composed of generalists may have a contracting role. I quoted Pascal again, on the ‘thinking reed’. I paid tributes to my Labor predecessors in Lalor, Reg Pollard and Jim Cairns. Pollard, a gallant World War I digger, had been a State MLA, then MHR for Ballarat from 1937, and Chifley’s Minister for Commerce and Agriculture, transferring to Lalor when the seat was created in 1949. He lost in 1966 in the savage swing against the ALP over the Vietnam War. Cairns, MHR for Yarra 1955–69, held Lalor from 1969 until 1977. I was especially pleased to be serving in the Parliament with Gough Whitlam: ‘In a land of political pygmies, Gough Whitlam was our Gulliver.’ There were some great characters in the House of Representatives when I was first elected (Gough Whitlam among them), but the numbers were depleted by the time I left. I shared one Parliamentary term with Clyde Cameron (1913– ), Member for Hindmarsh, South Australia, from 1949 until 1980. He left school early, worked as a shearer and soon became an organiser with the Australian Workers’ Union. He read widely and his mother had converted him to Henry George’s ‘single tax’ theory. He was a very impressive performer, a self-trained historian who kept detailed diaries, created a major oral history archive, conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with major figures, including Hasluck, Gorton, Fraser and * Hansard, House of Representatives, 23 February 1978, vol. 108, p. 164. 242
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 243
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
Barwick, and wrote twelve books. The House always filled when he spoke and his mastery of detail was exceptional. He never forgot an injury and repaid with compound interest. He had a deadly wit and implacable concentration. He had a turbulent relationship with Whitlam. As Minister for Labour 1972–74 and Labour and Immigration 1974–75, he refused to accept blame for the wages blow out of 1974 and furiously resisted Gough’s decision to demote him to Minister for Science and Consumer Affairs in June 1975. His declared contempt for the Science Ministry became a significant tribal memory, even in my time. Ultimately, the GovernorGeneral had to be called on to remove him from the Labour portfolio, which created a wretched precedent. In September 1975 Clyde and Gough engaged in a lengthy, scholarly dispute about the correct pronunciation of ‘kilometre’, just before the orchestra tuned up for the last act of Götterdämmerung. Clyde, who insisted on kílo¯-metre, sought advice on the issue from Enoch Powell (who had taught Gough Greek at Sydney University) and was ruled to be correct. Labor’s factions no longer produce Clyde Camerons, to the Party’s cost. Ian McCahon Sinclair (1929– ) was an outstanding Parliamentarian who became MHR for New England in 1963 and retired with me in 1998. His was an uncharacteristically urban face in the Country (later National) Party. From my transition to Canberra in 1977 I always watched him carefully, and later we worked together closely on the Joint Parliamentary Committee for Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, at the Constitutional Convention on the Republic, and some ‘Deliberative Polls’. He was Deputy Leader of the National Country Party from 1971 to 1984, and Leader of the National Party of Australia 1984–89. Under the Fraser Government the three senior Nationals, Doug Anthony, Sinclair and Peter Nixon, were all extremely effective in the House, mastered its forms, knew how to create a rough-house and exploit it. Sinclair began life with significant advantages: affluent, good looking, educated at Knox Grammar and Sydney University, barrister, grazier and State MP. But he suffered some heavy blows. His first wife died of cancer in 1967, leaving three young children. Between September 1979 and August 1980 he faced painful court procedures and stepped down from the Ministry until a jury acquitted him. On the backbench he sat quite close to my seat in Opposition. I was struck by his reserves of inner toughness. He showed great fortitude, betraying few signs of the strain he must have felt. 243
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 244
A THINKING REED
I was pleased to see him raise the Aboriginal flag at Parliament House, an unexpected decision from a National Party Speaker. I always enjoyed spending time with Ian and his wife Rosemary, a former Miss Australia, a committed charity worker and a shrewd, witty observer. In a feature ‘The two of us’ in The Sydney Morning Herald (20 June 1998) he said some kind things about me: I find Barry good fun, essentially, I think because he provokes me. He has views and opinions that tend to make you think. There are times, mind you, when you feel like saying, ‘Listen, Barry, just keep quiet. Let’s go on to the next subject.’ Barry does tend to dominate and direct at times. I can understand that he sometimes irritates people because he does have a very forceful personality. Barry is extraordinarily articulate—he has an idea and an opinion on most subjects. Ninety-nine per cent of the time he’s right and, every once in a while, you’re quite delighted when you can find a flaw in his argument. But when you do, he comes back to you the following day and explains why and how he’d just been slightly out for some reason.
One of the most interesting characters in the House of Representatives during my first term was Bill Yates, the Liberal MP for Holt. He had beaten my friend Max Oldmeadow in 1975 and held the seat again in 1977. Bill was unique among Federal MPs in having been a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom before he arrived in Australia, having held the seat of The Wrekin, Shropshire, from 1955 to 1966. Several Australian MPs made the transition to the House of Commons—Sir George Reid being the best known—but only Bill Yates had reversed the process. He had expert knowledge of the Middle East and some sympathy for Arab causes, and he made powerful enemies by criticising Anthony Eden for precipitating the Suez crisis in 1956. He arrived in Australia with his family in 1967 and won pre-selection for Holt, based on Dandenong, when Labor seemed likely to hold it.Then came the Dismissal in 1975 and a Labor debacle. Bill looked and sounded like an eccentric and he cultivated the impression. His voice sounded very plummy to Australian ears, he wore white seersucker suits, a broad-brimmed hat, and sported his Parliamentary gold pass round his neck. He kept a beehive in the Parliamentary rose garden. But he was well read, shrewd, independent and courageous. After leaving Parliament he moved to the country and completed a PhD at Melbourne 244
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 245
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
University, on ‘The Post War Middle East and the Kennedy–Nasser Letters 1961–63’. The degree was conferred after Bill had turned 83. He and Gough Whitlam hold regular telephone discussions about foreign policy and the deficiencies of John Howard and Alexander Downer. Ralph Jacobi (1928–2002), MP for the South Australian seat of Hawker from 1969 to 1987, was a major inspiration to me and became a strong supporter. Fiercely independent, he refused to join any factional grouping, never sought the limelight or personal advantage and campaigned tirelessly on important causes, many of them seemingly remote from issues that spin doctors regard as central to winning marginal seats. He kept insisting that many of the subjects I raised were beyond him. I did not accept that. Born in Keswick, in inner Adelaide, he left school early. He served as a merchant seaman and married Stella Pill in 1953. They had three sons, Malcolm, Andrew and Colin, and the marriage was very happy. All survived him. He began working as an ALP organiser in 1965, became an Executive Officer of the South Australian Trades and Labor Council, then general secretary of the Australian Government Workers’ Association. In 1968 he easily won pre-selection for the new seat of Hawker. He had a profound knowledge of many subjects: insurance and corporation law, taxation, Antarctica, the Middle East, oil, water, the Murray–Darling Basin, civil rights in the Soviet Union, constitutional reform. A voracious reader, he had a scholarly and practical grasp of problems in the Middle East and was a passionate advocate of equitable water sharing, which he saw as an essential precondition for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. He kept a framed motto on the wall of his office at Old Parliament House:‘Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’, a coinage by the American journalist Finley Peter Dunne. He lived by those words. When politics was held in low esteem and Parliamentarians considered to be far down the food chain, Ralph Jacobi was an exception, known and loved in his electorate and in the Parliament, unknown elsewhere. Caucus decided to have a mid-term election for the party leadership in 1977. Bill Hayden had challenged Gough Whitlam and numbers were tight. Nobody knew how Jacobi would vote, but his vote could determine the result. The Leader decided that some personal lobbying would be appropriate. He went up to Jacobi’s seat in the back row and started to sit next to him. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I want to talk to you.’ ‘Well, you’ve never bloody well wanted to talk to me before. You get back to your seat!’‘What?’‘You get back to your seat!’ This very audible exchange 245
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 246
A THINKING REED
was not lost on the Hayden forces, which then decided that Jacobi must be a good prospect.An emissary went to tell Jacobi that if Hayden became Leader, he would be made a Shadow Minister. ‘In that case,’ said Jacobi, ‘I’m voting for Whitlam.’ Whitlam retained the leadership by a margin of two votes. Without Jacobi it would have been a tie. Michael Duffy and I became very close to Ralph Jacobi. He was deeply conscious of his lack of formal qualifications and some thought he had an abrasive manner. It was actually concealed diffidence. He always called us ‘Duffy’ and ‘Jones’, never by our personal names.We called him ‘Jacobi’ or, quite often, ‘Grumpy’. If either of us proposed walking down to Lake Burley Griffin in the dinner break, he would say, ‘I don’t mind walking with one of you, but I won’t walk with both. If all three of us walk, you two will use words and concepts that I don’t understand and I’ll feel humiliated.’ It sounded like a joke, but he was serious. He invariably kept his voting intentions to himself. On several occasions when we enquired how he proposed to vote in a Caucus ballot he would growl, ‘It’s none of your bloody business.’ He played an indirect role in Bill Hayden’s replacement as Leader by Bob Hawke, although he was not a Hawke partisan. He expressed concern to John Button that often, when he listened to Hayden, he did not understand what he was saying but that, although he often disagreed with him, he did understand Hawke.This proved to be a tipping point in Button’s reluctant decision to persuade Bill to step down. Ralph retired from Parliament in 1987 after lymphatic cancer was diagnosed.A petition to award him the Order of Australia was signed by almost every Member of the House of Representatives and he received an AM. He survived major surgery and had wonderful support from his wife and family. He remained active in community work for years and chaired the Australian Archives. Towards the end of 2001, he telephoned and asked me to do an unpaid speaking engagement for him in Adelaide for which the date was uncertain. However, when I saw him next, he said,‘You’re sacked, Jones! I don’t want any speeches. The family can make its own arrangements about the carcase. My funeral is not a public event. The least said the better.’ In January 2002 Michael Duffy and I flew over to see him in a hospice. He had told his nurses,‘I’m hanging on. Duffy and Jones are coming over to see me.’ Recognising us both, he smiled and held our hands. He died a few hours later. 246
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 247
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
I think of Jacobi often, especially when despairing about the integrity of public life and whether the ALP has lost its way. I can hear his voice: ‘Keep your head down, son, away from the parapet and just keep on doing what you think is right.’ He was a noble, but barely recognised, Australian who honoured the profession of politics. In the October 1980 election, John Mildren won the seat of Ballarat and Michael Duffy defeated Bill Yates in Holt. Both were among my closest confidantes in the Parliament. John Mildren, a Catholic ten days my junior, had been a member of the DLP but saw the error of his ways and, after some years of political abstinence, joined the ALP. He was a senior lecturer at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education and had no factional allegiances. He served as Chair of Caucus from 1983 to 1987. Michael Duffy, six years younger than me, became a powerful figure in Caucus. We had worked together in the ‘Independents’ for many years, later serving on the State ALP’s Administrative Committee. He helped me through some difficult problems. We were strikingly different in temperament and background. A Catholic from Albury educated by the Christian Brothers and at Newman College, Melbourne, he became a solicitor.Apart from his family, his great loves were horse racing, football and cricket. He was a black Irishman, heftily framed, laconic, ironic, unpretentious, unflappable, with cool judgment and utterly reliable. He had ten distinguished years as a Minister from 1983 to 1993, in a variety of portfolios: Communications, Trade Negotiations, and Attorney-General, and was elevated to Cabinet. He was trusted on both sides of the House. The most spectacular new recruit in 1980 was Bob Hawke, who had won pre-selection for Wills when Gordon Bryant retired. His entry changed the dynamics in Caucus dramatically and put Bill Hayden’s leadership under challenge. In 1980 Joan Child (née Olle) (1921– ) was re-elected as Member for Henty, in Melbourne’s outer south-eastern suburbs, and became a welcome addition to Caucus. Born in Melbourne, she left school early, married, had five sons and was widowed in 1963. She joined the ALP in 1964 and supplemented her widow’s pension by working as a house cleaner, then in a factory. She also cared for aged parents. She joined Jim Cairns’ staff, then became a trade union liaison officer. In 1972 she failed to win Henty by a whisker, when DLP preferences ran heavily against her. In 1974 she became the first woman elected for the ALP to the House of Representatives, just 70 years after female suffrage in Federal elections. 247
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 248
A THINKING REED
The Party should have hung its collective head in shame for that. Defeated in 1975, she contested again in 1977 and won in 1980, holding Henty until the seat disappeared through redistribution in 1990. I found her judgment, commitment and integrity very impressive. She became Deputy Speaker in 1983 and the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1986 until 1989. As question time became more gladiatorial, Joan was regarded as being too gentle and dignified to remain as Speaker so Leo McLeay, who had neither characteristic, replaced her. In the course of a 26-year Parliamentary career, I only exercised three conscience votes. The first, in 1975, in the Victorian Parliament, was to abolish the death penalty, and I had no doubts. On the second, in the House of Representatives in 1979, on a motion by a private Member requesting the Government to legislate against the provision of medical benefits for abortion except to protect the life of the mother, I had very real doubts. On the third, in 1996 to overturn the Northern Territory’s euthanasia law, I also had a conflict of beliefs. Stephen Lusher, the National Party MP for Hume, moved his resolution against public funding for elective abortions in March 1979. The legality of abortion was determined by State and Territory law, and the Lusher motion could not override what the States had decided, but the Commonwealth could legislate on medical benefits. In my speech* I indicated that I would vote against the Lusher motion and for an amendment moved by a progressive Liberal, Barry Simon. It seemed absurd that the only all-male lower House in any national parliament in the world should be pontificating about what rights the other sex should have over their reproductive capacity . . . According to the Census returns, the electoral division of Lalor is the most Catholic in Australia, with the highest proportion of migrant families from Europe. Lalor has an unusually high average number of children per family—nearly double the national average. I have received from my constituents hundreds of cards in favour of the Lusher motion and almost none against it. I am a Christian but not a Catholic. Nevertheless, I share the Catholic abhorrence of abortion . . . I hate all violence and killing. I am close to the absolute pacifist position . . . All of us are impaled on the horns of the abortion dilemma . . . I am not certain about my own judgment in this matter and it is because I am uncertain that I am voting to maintain the * Hansard, House of Representatives, 22 March 1979, vol. 113, p. 1105. 248
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 249
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
status quo . . . The Lusher motion attempts to link a moral imperative ‘Thou shalt not abort’, with an economic sanction, ‘Do it at your own cost’ . . . It is an attempt to regulate morality by using market forces.
The Simon amendment declared that medical benefits could be paid for a termination of pregnancy provided that it was performed in accordance with existing State or Territory laws. It was carried by 62 votes to 52 and negated the Lusher motion. I voted with the majority, as did most Labor MPs, but we were joined by Billy McMahon, Ian Macphee, Bob Ellicott, Ian Sinclair and Tony Staley. Malcolm Fraser, John Howard and Philip Ruddock voted with Lusher. Billy Snedden abstained. My voting against the Lusher motion was extensively reported in local papers in Lalor and I was warned of a potential backlash by my heavily Catholic electorate, especially as I had disregarded resolutions carried by meetings throughout the electorate. Ultimately I received about 3000 letters and cards urging me to vote for the Lusher motion and only 15 in opposition. However, in the October 1980 election in Lalor there was a swing to me of 16.8 per cent, the highest recorded in any Australian electorate.The size of the swing confirmed that politics is more of an art than a science. I suspect that abortion and my vote on the Lusher motion played no part in the result, although I have no evidence to prove it either way. I liked to think it confirmed Burke’s dictum (quoted on page 233). ‘Right to Life’ determined to punish Barry Simon for having moved his amendment to the Lusher motion. They defeated him in McMillan in 1980 by directing preferences to the ALP candidate, who won the seat. I have often been asked if as a Member of Parliament I found Party discipline oppressive, and that it forced me to vote against my conscience. I used to answer ‘No’ to both. In a Budget, which might endorse thousands of propositions for spending, there might be many elements I was unhappy about if I had actually separated them out for serious analysis. In practice no MP, however assiduous, had the time to do the necessary work. I generally accepted, on faith, the recommendations of colleagues who had examined the specific areas. In issues related to gambling, for example, I recognised that there were trade-offs—that some colleagues who were uninterested in my obsessions would cast a vote to support me, and that put me under an obligation to do the same for them. In my first term I was constantly trying to raise issues that were not on the political agenda, such as biotechnology, information policy, 249
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 250
A THINKING REED
intergeneration equity, population policy and the arts. Mick Young accused me of making speeches that were essentially editorials and book reviews, and he urged me to launch into polemic and direct attack.There was some truth in his observation. I was the first Australian politician to have recognised the potential of biotechnology and tried to secure government support for it. I remember the look of panic from Phillip Lynch, Minister for Industry in 1978, when I asked him a question without notice about what the government was doing to promote biotechnology. He had never heard the word but flannelled on as if he knew what it meant. One of my most persistent campaigns was for access to tertiary education in Melbourne’s western suburbs, and especially in Lalor. Part of my problem was to be pushing for something for which there was no demonstrated community demand. I was determined to lead, rather than follow. A series of public meetings was held in the Lalor electorate, in St Albans, Sunshine and Werribee, and the results were dismal. Despite extensive letterboxing and putting posters in shop windows, we considered ourselves lucky if ten people turned up to the meetings. A meeting at St Albans attracted five people, of whom three were from my office. The conventional wisdom was that there was no demand, and therefore no point in delivering. I took a different view, that tertiary education was outside the experience of my constituents: most families had never been involved, and it was outside their comfort zone. I anticipated the theme of the film Field of Dreams (1989):‘If you build it, they will come’.And they did. In 1986 the Western Institute was opened and it became part of the Victoria University of Technology in 1990. By 2003 the St Albans campus had 7000 higher education and TAFE students, and the Werribee campus 6000. I maintained my missionary zeal about Australian film. I had been Chair of the Australian Film Institute, the body which organised national film awards, since 1974. In a debate on the Australian Film Commission Amendment Bill I spoke at length,* explaining how the local industry had evolved. I was concerned that after the first fine careless rapture of the early 1970s, Australia’s expanding film industry seemed to be playing it safe. The greatest weakness in Australian films in the 1970s was the failure of nerve. There was a distinct uneasiness about confrontation, a reluctance to explore our own terra incognita. Submissions for film funding dodged the * Hansard, House of Representatives, 13 May 1980, vol. 118, p. 2659. 250
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 251
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
dramatic implications of conflict, for example, within the family. Australia seemed incapable of producing films such as A Doll’s House, Talking to a Stranger, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? or Scenes from a Marriage. After the 1980 election Caucus elected me as a Shadow Minister. Bill Hayden gave me responsibility for Science and Technology, to which he later added Environment.This encouraged my interest in the emerging science of biotechnology because of its potential in medicine and the environment. I tried to persuade my Parliamentary colleagues to share my enthusiasm for biotechnology. I talked to Gus Nossal, Jim Peacock, Jim Pittard and Nancy Millis and they suggested further reading and laboratory visits. I determined to meet Francis Crick (1916–2004), who with James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins had shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine for working out the molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), helping to explain how cells replicate. Crick appealed to me partly because he had been a late developer, an outsider, a lateral thinker. Born in the year that produced Gough Whitlam, Harold Wilson and François Mitterrand, after working on counter measures to acoustic and magnetic mines as a physicist for the Admiralty, he decided to pursue biology after World War II ended. He worked at the Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge with Watson, a former Quiz Kid, and they wrote the famous 1953 paper for Nature proposing a double helical structure for DNA.They beat very impressive competition, notably from Linus Pauling. In 1970 Crick proposed what he called ‘the central dogma of molecular biology’ that DNA determines how cells would grow, that RNA (ribonucleic acid) acts as a transmission line and ‘information’ is passed on to proteins, which change as directed. Crick left Cambridge in 1977 to take up a chair at the Salk Institute at La Jolla, near San Diego, and we met there in February 1981. Crick was a large figure, the size of Gough Whitlam, irreverent, funny and iconoclastic, enormous fun to be with. He was already confident that biotechnology would have a social and economic impact comparable to computing and television. He emphasised that there had been a long period of uncertainty in securing recognition that the Crick–Watson model of recombinant DNA was correct, and that he had only begun to contemplate the economic implications after 1966. At the Salk Institute Crick was concentrating on brain research, trying to understand how perception works, how humans can see in three dimensions and interpret colours. Again, he saw himself as an 251
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 252
A THINKING REED
outsider, having to teach himself some elements of physiology from textbooks. I particularly admired Crick because he broke the rules and drove some insiders mad. I read extensively about Poland’s Solidarity (Solidarno´sc´ ) movement, founded in 1980, and recognised its potential to threaten the hegemony of the Communist Party. I visited Warsaw in November 1981 to meet its leadership. Lech Walesa was out of the country but I talked to Jacek Kuron (1934–2004), regarded as the major intellectual force in Solidarity. He had been a Communist activist but broke with the party in 1964, began organising student and worker demonstrations and was repeatedly gaoled. At the time of my visit there had been a serious crop failure, followed by harsh rationing and long food queues. Kuron wore his trademark jeans and denim jacket. Although a non-believer, he acknowledged the significant assistance that Solidarity had received from Pope John Paul II, whose visits to Poland had generated huge crowds and encouraged opposition to the Communist regime. Kuron was very pessimistic about the Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev, which he described as ‘black with corruption’. A month after we met, he was in prison again. After the Communist regime fell in 1989, Kuron became Minister of Labour. Back home, I was eager to find any encouragement within the Caucus. The American economist Milton Friedman, who with Friedrich von Hayek administered the coup de grâce to Keynesian economics, visited Australia in 1975 when Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister and again during the Hawke years. He addressed a combined meeting of the Caucus economic and social policy committees in April 1981, urging reduced taxes and flexible wages as an incentive to significant job creation. He caused palpable distress among some Labor MPs. Senator Jean Melzer was deeply anguished. ‘For the love of Christ,’ she implored, ‘what about the poor?’ Friedman said, ‘I am afraid that your appeal to Christ is lost on me—I’m Jewish.’ Bill Hayden remembers me interjecting,‘So was Christ, at least on his mother’s side.’ In January 1983 I was co-opted, at short notice, to join a Caucus delegation to Israel, organised by Barry Cohen, MP for Robertson, underwritten by the Israeli Government and some Melbourne business people. One of the delegation had dropped out at the last minute so Barry invited me as a replacement. Having been there twice, I was an unlikely recruit for a familiarisation visit. The group comprised John Brown, Robert Ray, 252
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 253
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
Ros Kelly, Ross Free and Ben Humphreys, and all of us later became ministers. Because I was a late addition, the Israeli chargé invited me to the embassy to see if I had any special requests. I explained that I did not want to upset any existing arrangements, but he insisted that there was some flexibility. I indicated interest in visiting the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot, solar energy research on the Dead Sea, inspecting the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, the Ben Gurion University in the Negev, meeting Israel’s Science Minister and the novelist Amos Oz and hearing the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. When we arrived at Tel Aviv airport, embassy officials handed out little booklets with our itineraries. Barry’s face went puce with fury. He said, ‘This is your fucking program! You’ve taken over! You’ve displaced me as leader! Look at it—Weizmann Institute, solar research, Dead Sea Scrolls, Ben Gurion University, Science Minister, Amos Oz, Israel Philharmonic! It’s all yours! You bastard! I’ll never speak to you again!’ He turned on a hapless official from the embassy. He roared, ‘Where’s my cousin?’ ‘Your cousin?’ the diplomat quavered. ‘Yes,’ Barry shouted. ‘I asked for him to be brought here to meet us.’ ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ ‘Well, go and get him.’ ‘Where do I find him?’ ‘Look him up in the telephone directory! Cohen of Tel Aviv.’ The embassy had arranged for us to meet Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, Leader of the Likud, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with President Sadat of Egypt and, as a younger man, a member of the Stern Gang. I had read a powerful book, The Longest War (1982), by Jacobo Timmerman, a courageous Argentinian publisher who survived torture, emigrated to Israel and wrote a tough analysis of human rights abuses against Palestinians. I tackled Begin directly, quoted a few sentences from The Longest War and invited him to comment. Begin shrugged, stretched out his arms and his voice went an octave higher. ‘So he’s got a pen? So he writes a book? What has that to do with me?’ He refused to be drawn on Timmerman. My colleague John Brown tried again. ‘About the Palestinians.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Have you given any consideration to a final solution?’ The words froze in the air. Only John seemed to miss their significance. Begin was too stunned to respond. We visited the great historic sites: Bethlehem, Jericho, Masada, the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee. At Tiberias we ate at the Lido Galilee, looking across to where Jesus’ disciples fished. I told my colleagues about what seems to be Jesus’ only recorded joke. When Peter asked Jesus if he 253
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 254
A THINKING REED
should pay the temple tax, Jesus directed him (Matthew xvii: 27) to go to the sea, cast a hook, and the first fish he caught would have a piece of money in its mouth: enough to pay the tax for both Jesus and Peter. In the Sea of Galilee the most common species is Tilapia zilli, known as St Peter’s fish, which looks like the Australian John Dory (Zeus faber), a distant relation. Both fish have a round dark spot the size of a coin on each side. Naturally, I ordered St Peter’s fish for lunch. When it arrived, there was a coin inside. My colleagues had a lighter touch than I had expected. Immediately after our return from Israel, Malcolm Fraser dissolved the Parliament, Bob Hawke displaced Bill Hayden in a negotiated coup and we launched into an election campaign, followed by Labor’ s return to power in March 1983. I describe the following years in Chapters 10 and 11. Because of my high public profile, as much due to Pick-a-Box as to my ministerial role, after 1983 I was in demand in election campaigns. I had a cameo role in the film Democracy, about the Federal campaign in the seat of Cook, south of Sydney, during the 1984 election. The director was Graham Chase. Not so well known as Rats in the Ranks, the 1996 film about political infighting in the Leichhardt City Council made by Bob Connelly and Robin Anderson, Democracy gave an accurate picture of tribalism, factions and personal rivalries in Labor politics. The ALP candidate, Peter McIlwaine, belonged to the Left, while Party branches in Cook were dominated by the Right. McIlwaine’s nomination for Cook was regarded as an accident, and significant disloyalty occurred during the campaign. Cinema verité techniques used in Democracy capture some bizarre moments, including a short burst by Bill Hayden (who did not realise he was being recorded) on the subject of loyalty, the rage of campaign organisers when told that instead of a promised visit by Bob Hawke the Party HQ in Sydney would send Barry Jones, the look on Paul Keating’s face when he arrived for a luncheon address to be greeted by an audience of 15 ageing Party faithfuls, and a furious row when McIlwaine sacks a campaign organiser who then rode away with shattered dignity only to have the front wheel of his bicycle fall off. Mysteriously, the film was never shown on television until 29 February 1996, twelve years after it was shot. I would not attribute Labor’s heavy defeat three days later to Democracy alone, but it might have influenced some undecided voters. In the 1980s the House of Representatives began sitting for shorter 254
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 255
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
periods, far less than for the House of Commons in Britain or the United States House of Representatives. The Senate, not being under the control of the Government, generally sat longer. In 1990 we sat for only 38 days, and in 1986 for 79.The House generally met for 9 or 10 days each month in a session. But the days were long and the hours densely packed. I generally arrived about 7.30 a.m. and rarely left before 11.30 p.m. One consolation was that many people worked even harder. On several occasions, I received early morning calls from Justice Michael Kirby:‘Where have you been? I’ve been ringing for nearly two hours!’ Parliamentary proceedings were rather dull, even more so after we moved to New Parliament House in 1988. Speeches were invariably read, usually written by a staff member, and lasted twenty minutes to the dot. The Chamber was mostly deserted and it was rare for a quorum to be called. Lists of speakers were prepared by the Whips and given to the Speaker, who would call Members, in turn, from Government and Opposition. But we knew that we would be on our feet at 9.20 or 9.40 precisely. Generally MPs would saunter into the Chamber a minute or two before they received the call. They failed to engage in discussion, or interjection, or reference to what the previous speaker had said. The rough-house associated with question time was untypical; normally the Chamber was as quiet as a graveyard. Ministers, especially junior ones, were put on a roster to take responsibility for the House as debates droned on and the Chamber was usually deserted, especially when non-controversial bills were being debated. On 25 November 1985 I happened to be on House duty, sitting at the central table, when the bizarre ‘chicken-man’ incident took place. There would have been barely six Members in the House of Representatives as Ray Braithwaite droned on about the Petroleum Revenue Bill and a human-sized chicken entered the Chamber, taking a seat behind me on the Government front bench. I noticed chicken-man’s tiny feet, sticking out from the yellow rubber suit: big for a chook, but small for a human. The Clerk and Serjeant-atArms reacted at once and advanced on chicken-man who fled, squawking, from the Chamber. I recall looking up at the visitors’ gallery and was intrigued that there seemed to be very little reaction. It was as if a child had asked, ‘What do you see down there?’ and a parent had replied, ‘There are half a dozen MPs and an enormous chook, but nothing out of the ordinary.’ Attendants gave chase to chicken-man, who was seen at the end of a long corridor and then disappeared. A strong suspicion attached to Bruce 255
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 256
A THINKING REED
Goodluck, Liberal MP for Franklin, known as ‘the little Tassie battler’. Notorious for giving barnyard impersonations during question time, he presumably wanted to expand his repertoire. It was puzzling that he evaded capture and there was some credibility in the theory that a second chicken-man had been used as a diversion, appearing at the end of a long corridor too far away for chamber officers to apprehend him, giving chicken-man No. 1 the chance to slip into a nearby room and change. Another MP, later a junior minister in the Keating Government, was thought to have been the chicken decoy, confirming that there was more bipartisanship in politics than is often realised. In May 1988, as part of the bicentenary celebration of European settlement, the Queen opened New Parliament House on Capitol Hill, designed by Aldo Giurgola. The event neatly bisected my career in the Australian Parliament, after ten years and five months in the Old (temporary) Parliament House, a low-slung white structure designed by John Smith Murdoch, the first Commonwealth government architect. Malcolm Fraser, whose Government had authorised the project and started construction, came to recognise it as his worst mistake. I attended the ceremonial opening but did not queue up to shake the royal hands. While Old Parliament House has a nostalgic appeal, it was an imperfect, cramped working environment, even if it encouraged collegiality. MPs often had to share offices, with no room for staff. As the number of MPs increased, temporary accommodation had to be built on the side of the building. But it operated on a human scale. Its most appealing feature was that the library and the refreshment rooms were on the main drag, on the ground floor, close to the two Chambers, and inevitably became places where people met and talked, either by arrangement or chance. My friend Evan Walker, one of the few architects to become a Member of Parliament (in Victoria), was asked to comment on the design brief for New Parliament House, Canberra. He said, ‘I recommended that the two chambers should be close together, that the executive should be close to the parliamentarians, that library and refreshment rooms should be centrally placed. The planners adopted my recommendations, except for inserting the word “Not” in each of them.’ New Parliament House, which cost $A1 billion, maximises the separation between the Executive and the backbench, between the Representatives and the Senators, between the individual Members and the centres for collective activity. The corridors, which used to be full of activity, are now deserted: both library and 256
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 257
‘BUMP ME INTO PARLIAMENT’
refreshment rooms are a route march away from the chambers, and Members only go there by appointment. The building is enormous. The ground floor covers an area larger than Homer’s Troy. Each of the 224 Members of Parliament, Senators and Representatives, has his or her own suite, with a refrigerator, shower, washing-up facility, lavatory, couch for a snooze and a choice of paintings from ArtBank. The suites are comfortable and self-contained, so much so that there may be little incentive to leave throughout a long working day. Because of my seniority I had a superbly located suite on the ground floor, close to the House of Representatives Chamber, with fine views and superior ArtBank paintings by Roger Kemp, Paul Partos and Bryan Westwood. Flower-bedecked open spaces gladden the eyes and hearts of visitors on coach tours but distances inhibit personal interactions, even a humble and basic one like sharing a urinal. The Chambers are deserted except at question time because MPs are voting with their feet, keeping away from the Houses which are the ostensible reasons for their presence in Canberra. Oppositions are too spiritless to bother making quorum calls. I thought that the location of the Cabinet Room, four concentric walls away from the sun, air and wind, completely dependent on artificial light and ventilation, was a disturbing metaphor for this lifeless building, so remote from reality. The building has been superbly constructed and the workmanship is of the highest quality. It is predicted that it will last for two hundred years. I fear that this may be true, and it will not make a very interesting ruin. Stylistically, New Parliament House is marked by a proliferation of rhetorical gestures, another example of the elevation of form over function. The site is isolated from the Canberra community, such as it is, placed on what was considered to be the appropriately shaped Capitol Hill, which was then scalped to eliminate every vestige of the original environment. A fundamental question which does not seem to have been asked was: ‘Will Members be using New Parliament House more or less than they used Old Parliament House?’ The correct answer was ‘Much less’. The increased expenditure on New Parliament House occurred at precisely the time that executive government was seeing the Parliament as a confounded nuisance and the Australian legislature was sitting for fewer days than its counterparts in Britain or Canada. Voters could be forgiven for cynicism. 257
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 258
A THINKING REED
The Chinese-born American architect I.M. Pei had been the dominant influence on the judging panel. I had been told that when the international competition was announced, Pei had been lunching with some American architects, including Aldo Giurgola, and he had said, ‘If I was entering the competition, this is what I would do with the site,’ and he drew a circular structure built into the hill on a napkin. Then it was suggested, when the judging panel met, he was drawn to the design that most resembled his original idea.Alas, Pei denied the story in a long lunch with me in New York. He gave a more prosaic explanation. He had been attracted by the view across Lake Burley Griffin, and could imagine the new building, at the top of the hill, growing out of the old Parliament, as if they had an organic relationship. Working life in the Parliament changed dramatically after I was defenestrated as a Minister in April 1990 and returned to being a loyal but frustrated backbencher.
258
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 259
CHAPTER 8
ﱗ
Life of My Mind
Writing this chapter, essentially a conducted tour of my mind, has helped me to isolate the influences that shaped my lonely and obsessive pursuit of knowledge, to get the sequences and proportionality correct. Sometimes I set out lists of influences, as my editor wearily observes, and quote the judgment of others rather than my own. There are recommendations for reading, listening or viewing. Showing off ? Only rarely . . . But I do not quote others out of modesty, just to save time, especially where a writer has distilled years of experience into a few pithy lines. Montaigne—here I go again!—wrote: ‘I quote others to express myself better’. Friends are all too familiar with me reading slabs of material to them over many years. I insist that it is good for them. The action is authentically me.
MUSIC From childhood, music has been my most profound and consistent intellectual and emotional experience. Walter Pater observed: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. Of all the arts, music is the most powerful, dangerous, challenging and exposing. It would be painful to live without it because it is my window into the mysteries of time, existence and experience. But it leaves me vulnerable as often as it elevates me to heights of emotion and understanding. I choose to live with the risk. 259
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 260
A THINKING REED
As I explained in Chapter 2, the film One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) was my introduction to orchestral music. In this tear-jerker, Deanna Durbin persuades Leopold Stokowski to conduct a scratch orchestra of unemployed musicians, but the performances of Mozart, Liszt and Wagner (actually by the Philadelphia Orchestra) were of high quality. My taste for orchestral music was taken much further by Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Disney’s most adventurous film, 120 minutes long, it only recovered the investment as a cult movie in the 1960s. The writer and critic Deems Taylor introduced the film and the music was played by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It began with Stokowski’s own transcription of J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, accompanied by rapidly moving patterns and colour bursts: Disney’s first venture into abstraction.The film included works by Beethoven, Schubert, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Dukas and Stravinsky, accompanied by Disney’s animation. Igor Stravinsky hated the shortened, he thought mutilated, version of The Rite of Spring, with images of erupting volcanoes and rampaging dinosaurs. Stravinsky’s controversial 1913 ballet was more like a Creation of the World than a Rite of Spring, evoking primitive fertility dances. But to an eight year old there could have been no more attractive introduction to Stravinsky’s greatest, most complex, score. Writing more than 60 years later, images from Disney’s Rite of Spring come flashing through my mind as I write. J.M. Coetzee recalls, as a 15-year-old boy in Cape Town in 1955, hearing from the house next door a recording of a harpsichord playing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, although he did not then know what it was. ‘As long as the music lasted, I was frozen, I dared not breathe. I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before . . . Everything changed . . . in a moment of revelation . . . of the greatest significance in my life.’ I know that feeling well. I collected 78 rpm shellac gramophone records from an early age. At Melbourne High School from 1946 I was exposed to a strong musical tradition, some very able student performers, a good collection of records and an enthusiastic music teacher in Raymond Fehmel, who doubled as a church organist in Essendon. Like the broadcaster and critic Neville Cardus, he stimulated a sense of excitement about differences in interpretation. Playing recordings of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 by, say, Toscanini, Mengelberg and Furtwängler demonstrated striking contrasts in rhythm, tempo and emotional intensity, the comparative emphasis on 260
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 261
LIFE OF MY MIND
dynamism or lyricism, concentration on detail or broad architectural sweep.We sang a chorale from J.S. Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers,Wake! (Wachet auf . . .), with gusto. Both music and words stuck in my head and I used the name for my book on technology and the future of work. The school’s set of The Columbia History of Music by Eye and Ear proved to be an inspiration. It consisted of forty 10-inch records with dark-blue labels, in five albums, produced between 1930 and 1938 by Percy Scholes (1877–1958), now best remembered as editor of The Oxford Companion to Music (1938). It exposed me to tantalisingly short excerpts from a great range of music, from plainsong and Palestrina, through baroque, classic and romantic periods, through to Mahler, Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Varèse and Haba. I played the records at lunchtimes or in free periods. At the age of 14 I was profoundly influenced by Tom Burgess, a fellow pupil with a large record collection and many books. He introduced me to the music of Debussy and Ravel and for the first time I listened, consciously, to Debussy’s La mer, Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune, Nocturnes and Images and to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, the String Quartet, the Piano Trio and La valse. The performance of La valse by Pierre Monteux, conducting the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, had great emotional power for me and it was the first set of 78 rpm* recordings that I bought. I heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the first time since Fantasia when Tom played it to me. In my teens I became carried away by transcendentalism, super virtuosity, and experienced awe at what musicians could achieve.The outstanding examples of virtuosity for me were pianist Vladimir Horowitz (1903– 1989) and violinist Jascha Heifetz (1901–1987). Horowitz made his last recording in 1987, Heifetz in 1972. In January 1969 I had a brief and austere lunch with Heifetz in his studio when he was teaching at the Los Angeles Conservatorium.Although a violin, presumably his Guarnerius del Gesù, lay on the grand piano, I lacked the courage to ask him to play a few notes. He told me that, with double stopping, when he played octaves on the violin he always flattened the lower note slightly, because with a perfect octave it might sound like a single note and the effect would be lost on the listener.Years later, I told the story to Paul Keating. He looked very reflective.‘Jeez, Baz, I’d have given my left ball for an experience like that.’
* Long-playing (LP) records at 33 rpm first appeared in Australia in 1949, and I bought my first CD player in Japan in 1983. 261
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 262
A THINKING REED
During adolescence, the pianists Sergei Rachmaninoff, Simon Barere, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Shura Cherkassy, Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels, violinists Nathan Milstein and David Oistrakh and ’cellist Mstislav Rostropovich were added to my canon. Significantly, all were Russian born. I felt privileged to have heard Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin with his unique combination of aristocratic grace and inner fire. Born in Lodz, now in Poland but then in Russia, he travelled constantly and recorded prolifically throughout his long life. Yehudi Menuhin, born in New York of Russian-Jewish parents, was a regular visitor to Australia and I heard him many times, in five countries, always with a sense of exultation. A great violinist, conductor, teacher and citizen of the world, he campaigned passionately for peace and reconciliation. I knew and admired his sister Hephzibah, a great pianist and humanitarian campaigner, who lived in Victoria for eighteen years. My response to music was intensified by my knowledge of musical history, the context in which the composer wrote and the performers’ lives. It was poignant to hear recordings from great artists who died prematurely, the violinist Ginette Neveu, pianist William Kapell, conductor Guido Cantelli, all lost in aircraft crashes; pianist Dinu Lipatti and contralto Kathleen Ferrier, cancer victims; and pianist Noel Mewton Wood, who committed suicide. Lipatti (1917–1950), a Romanian, also a conductor, composer and critic, made relatively few records but all are superb. His performances of Liszt’s Sonetto del Petrarca No. 104 and Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso are unequalled. In the recording of his last concert, in Besançon in September 1950 just weeks before he died of leukaemia, his Bach, Chopin, Mozart and Schubert are exemplary, especially the Chopin waltzes which he plays at break-neck speed and with unusual power. He seems to be saying, ‘If I cannot take risks now, when can I?’ His death, listening to Mozart, was edifying. The English record producer Walter Legge wrote, ‘God lent the world His chosen instrument, whom we called Dinu Lipatti, for too brief a space’. Kathleen Ferrier (1912–1953) had a late vocation, with a tragically brief professional career. She performed Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Bruno Walter, who had conducted its première in 1911, and they recorded it superbly in Vienna in 1952 when she knew she was dying. Her folksongs were haunting. I particularly admired the English singers Alfred Deller (1912–1979) and Janet Baker (1933– ). I knew Alfred well and Janet slightly. Encouraged by the composer Michael Tippett, who had heard him sing in the 262
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 263
LIFE OF MY MIND
choir of Canterbury Cathedral, Alfred took a leading role in reviving the art of the counter-tenor (male alto) after three hundred years of neglect. Alfred had worked for years in the furniture trade, but he was a quick study. A natural baritone, he sang falsetto with amazing breath control and mastery of ornamentation. He devoted himself to the alto repertoire of John Dowland, Henry Purcell (himself an accomplished counter-tenor), Buxtehude, Händel and Bach and made many important recordings. Alan Blyth remarked on ‘Deller’s otherworldly sound, at once ethereal yet strangely sensual’. At Carnegie Hall, New York, in February 1970 I experienced the most exciting concert in my memory, when David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter played three great violin sonatas: Beethoven’s No. 6, Op. 30, No. 1, Brahms’ No. 3, Op. 108 and the Shostakovich Op. 134. Phillip Adams was with me.The Shostakovich Sonata, written for Oistrakh, was mesmerising. I had the illusion that the piano was levitating above the platform. I attended a 70th birthday celebratory concert for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in March 1997 at the Barbican in London. He played Ernst Bloch’s Schelomo and Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote, with Zubin Mehta conducting. In the last variation,‘The death of Don Quixote’, his tremolo became increasingly wobbly and at the last note his head fell forward. It was a supremely touching moment. Later we sang ‘Happy birthday, dear Slava!’ with fervour. Rostropovich recorded all six of Bach’s cello suites, for CD and DVD, at the beautiful basilica in Vézelay in Burgundy, offering access to the sublime at several levels: musical, architectural and philosophical. My most recent passion has been for the Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich (1941– ), born, as was Daniel Barenboim, in Buenos Aires. Like the great Italian Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, she has cancelled many concerts and is increasingly reluctant to appear as a solo artist. Her recordings with Gidon Kremer (violin) and Mischa Maisky (cello) are marked by, as Paul Griffiths wrote, ‘urgent musicality, fierce precision and breathtaking technique’. Ability to access performances of outstanding quality on demand through the CD player is a daily miracle. It makes me eager to share the experience, and reluctant to accept the mediocre or quotidian. Voltaire was correct when he wrote in his Dictionnaire Philosophique: ‘The best is the enemy of the good’ (‘Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien’). Quartet (1949) was a British film based on four short stories by Somerset Maugham. One of them, ‘Among the Alien Corn’, tells the story of a young man, played by 263
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 264
A THINKING REED
Dirk Bogarde, desperate to become a concert pianist despite objections from his father, who wants him to take over the family business. A French pianist (Françoise Rosay) touring England is persuaded to hear the young man play and advise whether he has a future in music. He plays Schubert’s Impromptu D 899, Opus. 90, No. 2, and all the notes are correct. She wishes him well, hopes he will always enjoy playing for recreation but begs him not to even think about music as a career. Bogarde smiles bravely and asks the visitor to play the Impromptu for the family. Immediately the music comes to life. The story rounds off neatly when the young man shoots himself, unable to face the prospect of running the family business with music only as a hobby. The Swedish film Autumn Sonata (1978) was the only one in which Ingmar Bergman directed Ingrid Bergman. Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) is a famous concert pianist, constantly on tour, long estranged from her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullman). After seven years of separation, Eva invites mother to stay and seeks advice about her own playing. She performs Chopin’s Prelude No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 28, quite competently.‘Technique not at all bad,’ says Charlotte. ‘Let’s talk about the conception. Feeling is very far from sentimentality. The Prelude is never ingratiating. It should sound strong: calm, clear and harsh.’ She talks at the keyboard, showing Eva how to do it, changing the colouring, using rubato, varying the pulse. Her interpretation is a revelation, demonstrating, intentionally or not, how shallow Eva’s performance has been, the unbridgeable gap between amateur and professional. The daughter is shattered. Music expands and deepens my emotional range. Some music makes me cry, but often I cannot explain why Piece X has a greater impact than Piece Y. A combination of the composer’s depth and the performer’s virtuosity breaks down my repressions. In Ravel’s Shéhérazade (1903), settings of three poems by Tristan Klingsor, in the first, Asie, the soprano sings: Je voudrais voir des pauvres et des reines; Je voudrais voir des roses et du sang; Je voudrais voir mourir d’amour ou bien de haine, Et puis, m’en revenir plus tard Narrer mon aventure aux curieux de rêves . . . (I would like to see paupers and queens; I would like to see roses and blood; 264
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 265
LIFE OF MY MIND
I would like to see deaths from love or from hate, and then to return later to recount my adventures to those who would know of dreams.)
These are not sentiments I identify with, but I experience a tingling in the spine when I hear them and invariably burst into tears when the soloist hits a high b flat´ on the word ‘haine’ (hate). It is a reaction, both psychological and physiological, partly cognitive, partly the release of endorphins, to the skill of the orchestration, the brilliance of the playing and the quality of the singing. It is ironic that the word ‘hate’ unleashes such emotion. In Ravel’s Ma Mère l’oye (Mother Goose) ballet, I have an identical reaction to the last movement, Le Jardin féerique (Fairy garden), with the sensuous sounds of the divided strings. The Gramophone’s review of a famous recording of this by Pierre Monteux ended,‘If you do not respond to this, you are a lost cause’. It is the same with ‘Der Abschied’ (‘The Farewell’) from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The symphonic song cycle uses poems by Mong Kao Yen and Wang Wei, but the dying Mahler added a final stanza of his own: Die liebe Erde allüberall blüht auf Im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen! Ewig . . . ewig . . . (The dear earth everywhere blossoms In spring and grows green again! Everywhere and forever the distance shines bright and blue! Forever . . . forever . . .)
Mahler’s words follow a sustained crescendo [e´] on the violins, which seems to pass beyond the pain threshold. Sometimes a baritone sings ‘Der Abschied’ and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recorded it very affectingly with Leonard Bernstein. In Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (‘The Resurrection’), when the mezzosoprano begins ‘O glaube, mein Herz, O glaube . . .’ (‘Oh believe, my heart, oh believe . . .’), the heavens seem to open up. Janet Baker’s memorable recording with Leopold Stokowski (1963) has tremendous emotional power. I can add to my lachrymose list ‘Dido’s Lament’ from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the last scene from Janácek’s ˇ The Makropoulos Affair, Prince 265
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 266
A THINKING REED
Gremin’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Evgenyi Onegin, ‘Im Abendrot’ (‘In Twilight’) from Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, Wie lange schon . . . (‘How long have I yearned to have a musician for a lover . . .’) from Hugo Wolf ’s Italian Song Book, ‘The Field Marshal’ from Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, and two songs by Noël Coward:‘Some day I’ll find you . . .’ and ‘I’ll see you again . . .’. All are about loss or longing, or the fear of them. The Sinfonia (arioso) from J.S. Bach’s BWV 156 and the first movement of Violin Concertos by Elgar and Walton and Cello Concertos by Schumann and Elgar generally produce a tearful reaction. For me, the significance of the greatest music lies in the extraordinary complexity, range of permutations and combinations that parallel brain function, producing both beautiful sound and emotional power. The miracle involves a combination of labyrinthine means with a clear and unambiguous message and an inner logic. This is in sharp contrast to primitive and popular music, which depends on simple rhythm and insistent repetition of a single message with avoidance of complexity. In my thirties I concluded that Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) has been the greatest creative artist in Western civilisation, just ahead of Shakespeare and Michelangelo. His output was enormous, with astonishing diversity and consistent originality. His technical facility combined with profound spirituality and mastery of form. Bach conveys a unique sense of the ‘numinous’, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it: ‘indicating the presence of a divinity; spiritual, awe-inspiring’. In 1905 a great study of Bach was published by Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), medical missionary, theologian, organist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. He argued that Bach was not a composer of ‘absolute’ or abstract music, but a poet and mystic whose works were intensely dramatic and pictorial. Jacques Barzun commented: Schweitzer’s demonstration of Bach’s expressive intentions and results remains unassailable . . . Bach’s genius for adapting music to meaning is such that it appears even in works without text or title, we see it, we hear it, in Bach’s suites, concertos, partitas, and even in works where the opportunity would seem minimal, as for instance in the Chaconne for unaccompanied violin.The drama is there, neither poetic nor ‘pictorial’, but visceral.
Bach’s longest work, the Mass in B Minor composed over 35 years, in 25 parts, demonstrates staggering architectural richness and complexity. It was 266
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 267
LIFE OF MY MIND
written for his head, or for the future, not in expectation of a performance. Lutheran churches rejected the Latin Mass and Catholic liturgy did not then permit using an orchestra. But every element has a function. The design is clear. The complexity contributes to a higher level of order, not to chaos. Bach was an inveterate borrower, adapter and transcriber, constantly reworking his own material and borrowing from his contemporaries Vivaldi, Telemann, and Händel. Telemann thought Bach’s sons were superior to their father (and so did they); Händel ignored him. Unlike Mozart, whose music depends on tonal qualities, Bach’s works lend themselves to transcription to an unusual degree because of their architectural form.The famous Toccata with Fugue in D Minor BWV 565 has been transcribed for modern orchestra by Leopold Stokowski, for brass band, solo violin, piano, and sounds equally effective on a baroque organ of Bach’s time or a huge 19th-century Cavaillé-Coll. The Sinfonia from his Easter Oratorio sounds ecstatic, irrespective of whether it is played by a small baroque orchestra using original instruments or a large symphony orchestra with modern instruments. Bach’s longest organ work is the Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, often known as ‘The Wedge’, because in the printed score the notes of the widening intervals in the fugue subject look like a wedge. Its structure, logic and irresistible power seem to compel a sense of divine order. There is an impressive pedal part. John Ritchie, a New Zealand musicologist, observed that ‘for all Bach’s portly figure, he had the hands of Paganini and the feet of Fred Astaire’. Bach was a master of melody, fugue, orchestration and dance forms. He had deep psychological insight with the capacity to capture or create a mood. John Slavin remarked of Bach that ‘not only does he get you in a few bars, but he makes you feel that you have known the music all your life, even when you have never heard it before’. One of his most beautiful works is Cantata No. 78,‘Jesu, der du meine Seele . . .’ (‘Jesus, Thou who my soul . . .’), which contains an outstanding duet for soprano and alto—‘We hasten with feeble but eager steps . . .’— with flute accompaniment and ostinato base in a quasi-madrigal form. I identify with a passage from Frank Kermode’s memoir Not Entitled: From poetry and music I derive the little I know about holiness. They continue to inform me. I am well aware that there are other kinds of holinesses, kinds that I can hopelessly admire, that impel people into action, 267
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 268
A THINKING REED
tending AIDS patients or children dying in poverty; also other kinds that call for silence, a sacrifice almost unimaginable to unholy talkers . . . I know . . . that these holinesses normally have little to do with the kind I have attributed to poetry and music. I can faintly sense a rare coming together of these disparate holinesses in certain Bach cantatas, especially the one known as Actus Tragicus [BWV 106], which begins by assuring us that God’s time is the best, and then urges us to set our houses in order, for we must die and not remain among the living. God is serenely invited to incline us to consider that our days are numbered. What seems to me an especially luminous junction of holinesses occurs in a performance of this cantata in which the soprano,Teresa Stich-Randall, seems to have known, as she sang, not only what the words and the music but what holiness meant.
The recording he identifies has an uncanny luminosity and tenderness, provoking a deep aesthetic reaction which I share with Frank. The Australian sociologist John Carroll wrote that Bach was not only productive and disciplined but that he had an ‘active engagement with the demonic . . . It is as if his entire work is the sublimation of a sustained explosion of unfathomable volcanic passion—yet always kept under rigorous control’. Next to Bach I put Mozart, then Beethoven, followed by Schubert and, reluctantly, Wagner. Parallels and Paradoxes. Explorations in Music and Society is the transcript of conversations between Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian critic Edward Said. Daniel Barenboim argues that J.S. Bach wrote in a God-centred world. ‘Bach’s music was written for the glory of God and uses epic means. A fugue becomes a real construction of a musical building, stone on stone, level on level, for the glory of God or for the church.’ His achievement paralleled the great Cathedral builders of medieval Europe. I find the God of J.S. Bach more challenging and stimulating than the current models offered by Christian churches. With Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven comes a shift: revolution is in the air and music, with its juxtaposition of contrasting elements in sonata form, parallels the social and political development of contemporary society. Figaro prefigures the social conflict of the French Revolution and, as Barenboim and many others argue, Beethoven’s Romanticism was no longer addressed to God but to mere mortals who were reshaping, even reinventing, their world. Edward Said observed, ‘Beethoven, such a revolutionary, makes a tremendous play out of the drama of contrasts [male and 268
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 269
LIFE OF MY MIND
female, active and contemplative] . . . One gets the sense that it’s taking place somewhere actual.’ Wagner moves to a further stage: he can no longer rely on the known world but has to create a new one, peopled by a new kind of human being. Mozart wrote the greatest scenes in the whole operatic repertoire, including the familiar trio from Così fan tutte (‘Soave sia il vento . . .’), the last scene of Don Giovanni, and from The Marriage of Figaro the exhilarating sextet (‘Riconosci in quest’ amplesso’) in the third act. In Figaro’s sublime finale, the theme of reconciliation is compressed to a bare five lines. Psychologically and politically complex, the music and libretti (written by Lorenzo da Ponte) reflect social turbulence in the reign of Emperor Joseph II. I was late to appreciate the glories of Mozart’s Piano Concertos, but when I worked my way through all of them it was a transforming experience. Mozart’s String Quintet in G Minor, K. 516 (two violins, two violas, one cello) conveys moods of deep anguish, a profound meditation on death. The colouring is dark, and the slow movement (which uses mutes for the first time) hushed. The Quintet ends with an optimistic dance movement. The Requiem (K. 626), his last great work, left incomplete, begins with a gut-wrenching introduction of twenty-nine notes, barely fifty seconds long. Cellos and basses open, followed by the mournful sound of a bassoon, soon joined by the lowest register (chalumeau) of a clarinet, ending with four notes, fortissimo, from three trombones. There is exceptional economy and power in those twenty-nine notes, not one wasted. The impact for me is emotional, intellectual but also visceral. So much of Beethoven lets you into the engine-room, to show how his creative processes were worked out, but it is not so with Mozart. As with Raphael, we cannot see how he does it. Unlike Beethoven’s manuscripts, which are obsessively reworked, Mozart’s often suggest creation without struggle or torment. It was no accident that in November 1989 Beethoven’s Choral Symphony was played in Berlin when the wall came down because it stands, as Barenboim writes, for ‘a social affirmation of the human being, with promises of fulfilment, of liberation and brotherhood’. And yet Beethoven speaks to me most powerfully in his last three Piano Sonatas, The Diabelli Variations and the last five String Quartets, written when he was totally deaf, removed from the world and society, beyond struggle. His 269
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 270
A THINKING REED
last works were regarded as difficult and eccentric by his contemporaries. The last movement of Sonata No. 32, Opus 111 (Arietta. Adagio molto semplice e cantabile) is unique: it lacks a conventional melodic line or rhythm, but conveys a transcendental experience, ‘a milky way in tones’, the white light of Heaven. Beethoven’s string quartet No. 15, in A minor, Op. 132, written in 1825, contains his Heiliger Dankgesang (Sacred Song of Thanksgiving), a profound expression of personal experience and conviction. The music begins with an attempt to grapple with the stress of existence, pain and uncertainty, moving through questioning to understanding, to resolution, to affirmation and finally to joy.The last movement has an ecstatic quality, relatively rare in Beethoven. Schubert wrote Europe’s greatest songs, full of drama, pathos and psychological insight, which makes his failure in writing opera deeply perplexing. His piano sonatas, chamber music and symphonies reflect the profound influence of Beethoven; in turn, his music shaped the work of Bruckner and Mahler. The Quintet in C Minor, D 956 (1828), written in the year of his death but unperformed until 1850, is his masterpiece, full of a passionate intensity and symphonic in its range, lyrical, dramatic, tragic, even violent at times. The string quartet is augmented by a second cello. The Adagio is one of the greatest movements in all music: Arthur Rubinstein asked that it be played at his funeral. The Quintet is especially poignant because Schubert faced an early death, while his creative powers were still developing. Few works move me so much. The great 19th-century Romantics, Chopin,Wagner and Mahler aside, generally had less appeal to me than the composers of the 18th and 20th centuries, although I admired Verdi’s Falstaff and Requiem, Brahms’ concertos, chamber music and the German Requiem, Tchaikovsky’s concertos, piano trio and Evgenyi Onegin, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and most of the Bruckner symphonies. Unlike Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert, Wagner was exploitative, manipulative and prejudiced. His racial diatribes and anti-Semitism made a significant contribution to the horrors of the 20th century.* With Wagner, more than any other creative artist, there is ongoing controversy about the validity of distinguishing between an artist and his work. * Dostoevsky was ferociously anti-Semitic too, although his views had no ongoing political influence. (So was Henry Ford.) 270
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 271
LIFE OF MY MIND
Wagner had fascinated me from early adolescence. I began collecting recordings of excerpts from Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs) in my teens, was excited by the singing of Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstadt, and had a superficial familiarity with the libretti. In February 1962 I saw Die Walküre in Vienna, conducted by Karl Böhm, and a Covent Garden production of Siegfried in the late 1960s, conducted by Edward Downes. The first complete recording of The Ring cycle, with George Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and featuring eminent soloists, was released by Decca in December 1968 on 22 long-playing (LP) discs. In 1969 I was reviewing classical records for Newsday, a short-lived Melbourne daily, and they gave me enough space for a major review of Solti’s cycle. I played the set, nearly 15 hours long, twice, some parts many times, and found the experience unsettling and moving. My review reflected this. However, I never attended a complete Ring cycle until November 2004, in Adelaide. The South Australian Opera Company’s production was an astounding experience, which confirmed that I both knew and did not know The Ring. Through reading or watching DVDs one could become an expert in earthquakes or childbirth, but until they are actually experienced all knowledge is theoretical. Few who attended The Ring in Adelaide doubted that it was a life-changing experience. I had no doubts at all. The work, four operas stretched over a week, involves working through gigantic themes: love v. power/wealth, love v. law, man v. nature, being divine v. being human, feeling v. understanding, sexual taboos. Time sped by and I was not conscious of any longueurs. To put things in proportion, a Test match can last for five days and thirty hours of play, twice the length of The Ring (although one can get up and move around at the cricket). Ultimately, the world of the gods is destroyed. Humans have to create a new world. Unfortunately, the theme of Redemption at the end of Götterdämmerung is not as compelling dramatically as earlier parts of the tetralogy. However, attending The Ring made me feel that I needed to see the world in a different way, with a greater sense of urgency and far more courage. The famous arias or choruses by Verdi and Puccini often stand alone, but Wagner is ill served by the performance of excerpts, such as The Ride of the Valkyries, which was so powerful in the film Apocalypse Now.Wagner’s Ring is essentially symphonic and his argument is long and interrelated, with the orchestra playing the role of Freud’s ‘Id’ (instinctive unconscious 271
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 272
A THINKING REED
desires) and sometimes as Greek chorus. He wrote both libretti and music and his psychological insights foreshadowed Freud to an uncanny degree. Wagner was shaped by many influences: Greek, Icelandic and Teutonic mythology, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Grimm’s fairy stories, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, even Buddhism, and he determined to produce his own ‘total art work’ (Gesamtkunstwerk) which combined music, poetry, drama, dance, psychology, metaphor and epic themes, on a Michelangelesque scale. (When Wagner visited the Sistine Chapel, he commented: ‘This is no laughing matter.’) At his Festival Theatre in Bayreuth, Wagner created a new sensory ambience. The listener/observer/participant is placed in the womb-like dark while the orchestral sound, sets and lighting create an emotional world, an all enveloping environment. The Wagnerian style and leitmotiv influenced cinema profoundly.* The Ring raises confronting issues about high culture: the conflict between the masterpiece (complex in form, expensive to deliver and small market) and the bestseller (generally simple and cheap, with huge markets). Arturo Toscanini asserted: ‘In life, democracy. In art, aristocracy.’ My democratic instinct is to promote access to the best there is, in the way that market forces do not provide for. I always understood the distinction between the masterpiece and the bestseller. In an online poll conducted by the BBC in January 2000, respondents voted that the greatest composer of the millennium was Paul McCartney, followed by Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. In a similar poll, voters listed Jesus as No. 10 among humanitarians, well behind Diana, Princess of Wales. I encourage people to break out of their cocoons, to take risks, especially to make difficult choices, to explore the complex and unfamiliar. Jonathan Swift wrote: ‘It was a brave man who first ate an oyster’. An innate sense of inadequacy holds people back from new experiences. Sir Arnold Bax quoted a Scottish sage who said:‘You should make a point of trying every experience once except incest and folk dancing.’
POETRY Poetry is the link between music, theatre and literature, and it is to prose what singing is to speech. I turn to poetry to nourish the spirit and it often * At home, with television and DVD, external distractions such as light, food and drink, conversation and mobile phones dissipate the intensity. 272
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 273
LIFE OF MY MIND
bursts unbidden into my head, reducing me to tears, even when I do not fully understand what the poem means. Much poetry has a piercing quality, a compression of expression and a deepened sensitivity. At school, I discovered Shakespeare’s Sonnets, John Donne and the English metaphysical poets, became preoccupied with their dark music. My favourite modern poets then were T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.B. Yeats. I would recite Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi on any pretext. I wrote many poems, all of them discarded, and experimented with translating French poetry, particularly Paul Verlaine. I developed an early fascination with Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey, the two greatest Greek epics. I first read prose translations by E.V. Rieu (1950) and Robert Graves (1960), but neither compares with the verse translations by Robert Fagles (1990), revelations of astonishing power. The Canadian writer Ian Brown referred to Homer: flashing his talent for describing war through intricate details of its physical cost . . . He was never content to have an arrow hit a soldier if the arrow could hit a soldier in the crotch. Coeranus, an Achaean, didn’t just die: Hector speared him ‘under the jaw and ear, knocking teeth out, shattering roots and all and split his tongue in half ’. There is nothing depersonalized about Homeric combat: it’s the 800 BC version of a videotaped beheading. Throats slashed and gurgling, clean-cut necks, smashed knees, sliced navels, crams of corpses,‘screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath, fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood’ . . . Quentin Tarantino is Walt Disney by comparison.
I postponed John Milton and still do, I must confess, saving him up for my real retirement. Alexander Pope too. Burns, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Blake have their magic,Wordsworth, Byron,Tennyson, Browning and Matthew Arnold only sometimes. Benjamin Britten’s song cycles showed exquisite judgment in his choice of poetry, then provided evocative settings. His poets were Auden, Michelangelo, Cotton, Ben Jonson, Tennyson, Keats, Blake, Shakespeare, Donne, Hardy, Wordsworth, Owen, Shelley, Coleridge and Middleton. Each cycle provoked a powerful emotional response. Britten’s Les Illuminations (1939) was an early but dazzling setting of prose poems by Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891). Rimbaud, a precocious wanderer with a working knowledge of eleven languages, wrote his poetry 273
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 274
A THINKING REED
before the age of twenty, most stimulated by drink, drugs or debauchery. All are fragments, with sharp imagery, economy and evocative phrasing, as shown in ‘Départ’: Assez vu. La vision s’est recontrée à tour les airs. Assez eu. Rumeurs de villes, le soir, et au soleil et toujours. Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. O Rumeurs et Visions! Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs! (Seen enough. The vision was met with everywhere. Had enough. Sounds of towns, evening, in sunlight and always. Known enough. The strictures of life. O Sounds and Visions! Depart in new affection and noise!)
The cycle has a recurrent refrain: J’ai seul le clef de cette parade sauvage. (I alone have the key to this savage parade.)
In Nocturne (1958) Britten set lines from Book X of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, including an hallucinatory memory of the September Massacres (1792) in the French Revolution, with echoes of Dante and Shakespeare, sounding more like William Blake than William Wordsworth. I am uncertain what the passage means, but I cannot deny its power and authenticity, expressing a depth of emotion I often seek. With unextinguish’d taper I kept watch, Reading at intervals; the fear gone by Press’d on me almost like a fear to come; I thought of those September Massacres, Divided from me by a little month, 274
Photo section
22/10/07
12:21 PM
Page 1
My immediate family (from left): Ire, Nana Black,Tui, Rui (my mother) and Claud (my father), 1931. (Author’s collection)
Another family group: (from left) Auntie Edie, BJ, Nana Black, Patsy Hearne, Auntie Alys, Auntie May and Uncle George, 1937. (Author’s collection)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:21 PM
Page 2
The marriage of Alec Black and Ruth Potter at ‘Bethany’, 1904. (Back row from left): 2) Willerton Potter, 3) Marion Black, 5) Alec Black, 6) Edith Potter. (Middle row from left): George Potter, Martha Potter, Ruth Potter, Alice Potter and Mabel Potter. (Author’s collection)
Shanghai Baby, August 1937, by HS Wong. (Author’s collection)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:21 PM
Page 3
Mary Lilian Baels, Princesse de Réthy. (Author’s collection)
Image rights unavailable
Professor WA Osborne, portrait in oils by Scott Pendlebury. (Courtesy of Anne Pendlebury)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:21 PM
Page 4
Image rights unavailable
Pick-a-Box champions, 1962. (Top row from left): Frank Partridge, Bob Hilliard, George Morris. (Second row from left): Barry Jones, Bob Dyer, Dolly Dyer, Frank Fargher. (Third row from left): George Black, Greg Bannerman, Bob Bradford, Ken Eccleston. (Bottom row from left): Pat Nash, Peggy Tyrrell, Leah Andrew. (Listener In, 27 October–2 November 1962)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:21 PM
Page 5
Nineteenth century German poster, Pyramid of Capitalist Systems. (Author’s collection)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:21 PM
Page 6
Image rights unavailable
HV Evatt (left) talks to J Beresford Fowler at the first Chifley Lecture, 1954. Barry Jones is at the rear. (Courtesy of Herald & Weekly Times)
‘No one knows why they do it’, cartoon by Bruce Petty. (The Age, 17 January 2005, courtesy of Bruce Petty)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:21 PM
Page 7
Sir John Grey Gorton, 2001. (Photo by author)
Gough Whitlam, 2002. (Photo by author)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 8
Image rights unavailable
Arthur Koestler by Athol Shmith, 1968. (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria)
Phillip Adams, 2006. (Photo by author)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 9
Patrick White, 1988. (Photo by author)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 10
Section from The Madonna with Canon van der Paele by Jan van Eyck. (Photo by author)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 11
Crucifixion from the Issenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. (Photo by author)
Old Man and his Grandson by Domenico Ghirlandaio. (Photo by author)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 12
David Hockney, multi-image portrait by author, Melbourne, 1996.
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 13
Image rights unavailable
Barry Jones by Mark Strizic, 2 September 2003.
The cover of the first edition of Sleepers,Wake! The sculpture is Atom Piece (1963–64) by Henry Moore. (Author’s collection)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 14
Bob Hawke, 1998. (Photo by author)
The 50th anniversary celebration of UNESCO in Paris (November 1995) was a great occasion attended by Presidents Chirac, Soares, Mubarak, Arafat, Mobutu, Lissouba and many other heads of state. It was addressed by Nobel Prize winners, sung to by Montserrat Caballé, Barbara Henricks and Jean-Michel Jarre. I photographed Yasser Arafat and Catherine Deneuve sitting in the distinguished audience. (Photo by author)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 15
Image rights unavailable
Meeting the Dalai Lama, 1996. (Photograph by David Foote, Department of the House of Representatives)
Image rights unavailable
Haranguing Bill Clinton as John Howard watches, 1996. (Courtesy of Herald & Weekly Times)
Photo section
22/10/07
12:22 PM
Page 16
Image rights unavailable
At the Ring o’Brodgar, Orkney, 2004. (Courtesy Sigurd Towrie)
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 275
LIFE OF MY MIND
And felt and touch’d them, a substantial dread; The rest was conjured up from tragic fictions, And mournful Calendars of true history, Remembrances and dim admonishments. ‘The horse is taught his manage, and the wind Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps, Year follows year, the tide returns again, Day follows day, all things have second birth; The earthquake is not satisfied at once.’ And in such way I wrought upon myself, Until I seem’d to hear a voice that cried To the whole City,‘Sleep no more.’
Two 19th-century solitaries, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), produced strikingly original poems, none published in their lifetime. Dickinson rarely left her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, but she had an intense, turbulent emotional life and read widely and deeply. She wrote 1789 short poems, most during the Civil War. Harold Bloom observed that she ‘teaches the anguish of a sublime transport through pain . . . Dickinson is a master of every negative affect: fury, erotic destitution, a very private knowledge of God’s exile from himself . . . [She is] a sect of one’. Reading her is like making a telephone call to an inner life. I cannot live with You— It would be Life— And Life is over there— Behind the Shelf . . . Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality . . . Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise . . . 275
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 276
A THINKING REED
As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind— Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all . . .
Hopkins, an English Jesuit working in Ireland, experimented with what he called ‘sprung rhythm’, using sequences of stressed syllables instead of alternating between stressed and unstressed syllables. His genius was unrecognised until the 1930s. His best known poem, ‘The Windhover’, has a glorious sweep: I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, o my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
It makes my heart lift. I read Yeats more than any 20th-century poet. I never visit a school without thinking of his ‘Among School Children’: I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, 276
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 277
LIFE OF MY MIND
To study reading-books and histories, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
As Yeats aged, his political and social ideas became madder and wilder, while his poetry became more sharply focused: You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?
THEATRE Laurence Olivier’s film Henry V (1945) was a powerful introduction to Shakespeare, and the combination of language, superb acting, costumes, battle scenes and William Walton’s evocative music made a lasting impression. Its patriotic themes fitted in with excitement and relief as World War II ended. I saw Henry V three times in a month. Sir Laurence and Vivien Leigh, then his wife, made a triumphant visit to Australia in 1948 with the Old Vic Theatre Company. They were in Melbourne for eight weeks (April–May), performing three plays at the Princess Theatre. I queued all night for tickets, paid for by earnings from the Quiz Kids. In Sheridan’s School for Scandal, Olivier directed and played Sir Peter Teazle to Leigh’s Lady Teazle. Cecil Beaton designed the sets and costumes. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, directed by John Burrell, Olivier played Gloucester to Leigh’s Lady Anne. The third play was Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, directed by Olivier who played Mr Antrobus (performed as a parody of John Gielgud, although I did not know it then) to Leigh’s Sabina. She was disturbingly beautiful. Olivier told the press that The Skin of Our Teeth was like a work by Picasso, and references to surrealism and Finnegans Wake were hurled about. I enjoyed it, but the play has not worn well. I found all three performances incredibly exciting. In Richard III, Olivier squirmed to the edge of the proscenium to deliver the opening words, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made 277
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 278
A THINKING REED
glorious summer by this sun of York . . .’ I remember thinking, ‘I will never forget this moment’. I never have. Hamlet (1948), which Olivier directed and in which he played the title role, was my favourite film for years. His virtuosity and emotional range were unparalleled in my experience, and although I saw many great British stage actors including John Gielgud, Charles Laughton, Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Alec Guinness, Ian McKellen, Michael Gambon,Anthony Sher and Derek Jacobi, none matched Olivier’s intensity or projection. On Broadway in 1958, in The Entertainer by John Osborne, Olivier played a faded, exhausted vaudevillian, with George Relph as his father and Brenda de Banzie as his wife. It was the greatest theatre I had been exposed to since Olivier’s Melbourne season in 1948. After forty years I remain transfixed by the emotional power of his Othello in London in 1965. His television films of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (1967), with Olivier as a devious and insanely funny Edgar, and King Lear (1983) were unforgettable. In my youth, some theatrical productions in Melbourne were ambitious but of dubious quality. Jack Beresford Fowler* (1893–1972), a heroic actor manager, produced, directed and promoted many plays which commercial managements would never touch. He had founded the Art Theatre Players in 1925, using a mixture of professionals and amateurs in his productions of Shakespeare, Sheridan, Strindberg, Shaw and some other dramatists whose names did not begin with ‘S’. He was handicapped by almost total deafness, a grating voice and a lisp. His production of Shakespeare’s Richard II, set as a school play, was unforgettable, in the worst sense. JB played John of Gaunt, with his chain-mail jerkin adorned by a huge hearing aid. Mercifully, he was oblivious to the rude catcalls of the student audience. But he gave dramatic opportunities to a generation of performers. A highlight of my matriculation year in 1949 was the house plays. I had a greater passion for film than live theatre, but proposed that Yarra House perform, not a one-act play, but the third act of Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, one of my heroes, then in his 94th year. The 1938 film, directed by Gabriel Pascal, starring Leslie Howard as Henry Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza Doolittle, had been a favourite. I was to direct, modestly casting myself as Professor Henry Higgins, with Ian Collis as * Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 14, p. 206, Peter O’Shaughnessy and Barry Jones. 278
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 279
LIFE OF MY MIND
Eliza and Brian Corless as Mrs Higgins.Act Three included the then scandalous words, from Eliza, ‘Not bloody likely!’ I wrote to GBS in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, telling him of our plans, offering a food parcel as an incentive to reply. (Britain was still subject to food rationing.) I received one of his celebrated blue correspondence cards, containing a printed set of refusals to the requests most frequently asked of him. At the end, in blue ballpoint, he had written: Food parcels quite unnecessary, thank you. I am not starving. Pygmalion should be performed as a whole or not at all. The third act by itself for the sake of NBL is disgraceful, GBS, 30/3/1949.
My matriculation year was the high point of my fascination with Bernard Shaw, and my blazer pocket was invariably stuffed with a volume from the complete Penguin edition of his plays. I particularly enjoyed his Prefaces, even when I disagreed with them, and I admired the way he set out his arguments, however paradoxical and maddening. But even in my teens I knew that his political judgments were extremely erratic, with his misplaced enthusiasm for Stalin and even Mussolini. The theatre I saw in my formative years shaped my taste for life. I saw more Shakespeare than any other playwright, and most of the Shakespearian films were outstanding. Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov were always challenging, rarely disappointing. Shaw lost me by the age of 25, but Wilde’s wit and psychological insight remained compelling. In 1957 I saw the Australian premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot) with Peter O’Shaughnessy and Barry Humphries. Billie Whitelaw was unforgettable in Happy Days and John Hurt unbearably poignant in Krapp’s Last Tape and I saw several Beckett plays in Paris. During a ministerial visit in December 1989, I asked Dr Malcolm Leader at the embassy if he could invite Beckett to dinner. Beckett declined in a graceful handwritten note, dated 4 December, sending me an inscribed copy of Godot. It must have been one of his last letters as he collapsed two days later and died within the month. The theatre of the absurd was rewarding, and I particularly enjoyed Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco. In London I saw one of the first performances of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960), with Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates, and the power and menace of the words was haunting. I saw many of Bertold Brecht’s plays and was exposed to Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams at their peak. 279
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 280
A THINKING REED
LITERATURE: THE GREAT RUSSIANS Literature has been one of my fundamental resources for understanding. My obsession with the unforgiving minute meant that I devoted as much time as possible to great novels, and almost invariably found them rewarding. In the 1950s I embarked systematically on the major Russian novels. I attended Russian classes and loved the liquid sound of the language, especially its poetry. I became fascinated by the sudden, turbulent development of Russian literature, with Aleksandr Pushkin’s dramatic take-off at the beginning of the 19th century.The only comparable period with a similar phenomenon was Elizabethan England. Pushkin was rapidly followed by Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorki. Herzen was a major prose writer, but not a novelist. I hungered for big ideas in novels, and often did not distinguish between the writer and his work, regarding a life story as the most extensive form of creativity. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), two of the greatest novelists who ever lived, were particularly important to me, because their life and work argued out the great issues of religion, history, power, life and death. Close contemporaries, both were obsessed with religion but from different perspectives, mutually suspicious, eyeing each other off from the distance like two old bears.They never met, or claimed not to have, but when Dostoevsky died Tolstoy wept, realising that he was now alone: an exact parallel of what happened with Wagner and Verdi. When Matisse died, although they rarely met, Picasso felt isolated. Having read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment at school, I followed up with The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, then on to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which Freud regarded as the greatest novel ever written, examines murder, conflict and belief, raising confronting questions about the nature of God, good, evil and authority. The three brothers Karamazov hold diverse religious views: Dimitri is passionate and confused, Ivan a rational intellectual and Alexei (Alyosha) saintly and forgiving. I had some empathy with Ivan Karamazov, an intellectual surrounded by people whose interests are remote. I often heard Manning Clark quote the words of Ivan Karamazov:‘I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it has all been for. All religions on earth are built on this 280
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 281
LIFE OF MY MIND
longing, and I am a believer.’ I felt exactly the same. Ivan is sceptical about how far reconciliation and forgiveness extend:‘I want to see with my own eyes the lion lie down with the lamb and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer’. He cannot accept the concept of forgiveness for the torturers of children: ‘I would rather remain with my unavenged indignation, even if I were wrong . . . I do not want harmony, out of love of humanity I do not want it . . . It isn’t God I don’t accept, Alyosha, it’s just his ticket I respectfully return to him.’ In Book V, Ivan reads what he describes as his ‘poem’, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’.The story is set in Seville in the 16th century, at the time of the Counter-Reformation, when the Inquisition is burning heretics. Suddenly the authorities become aware that Jesus is in town, not as a triumphant King of Heaven but essentially as he appeared in Judaea at the time of Herod Antipas and the Roman occupation. He is brought as a prisoner before the aged Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor explains patiently that the Church has developed its own version of the Gospels for almost 1500 years by emphasising three elements—miracle, mystery and authority—and that Jesus’ reappearance would compel the Church to start all over again. The Inquisitor accuses Jesus: ‘Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic . . .’ He points out that the Church has delivered mankind from the torments of free and individual decisions, and this has provided happiness for ‘all the millions of beings, except for the hundred thousand who govern them. For only we, we, who preserve the mystery, only we shall be unhappy’. He urges Jesus to go away. Jesus makes no reply to the Inquisitor’s long argument, except to kiss the old man on the lips as if to say, ‘Your argument is powerful, but love is even stronger’.The Inquisitor says, ‘Go, and do not come back—do not come back at all, ever, ever!’ Jesus disappears. Ivan comments: ‘The kiss burns in his heart, but the old man sticks to his idea’. I identified myself with Pierre Bezhukov in War and Peace and Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina. Both were inquisitive, observers rather than activists, often indecisive, plagued by self-doubt, and the characterisation was vivid. War and Peace, the powerful analysis and characterisation of Russian history between 1805 and 1820, is not just a work of art but a compelling illustration of a ‘time bank’. A slow reader who invests the equivalent of five days to read it draws on Tolstoy’s five years of writing, his genius 281
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 282
A THINKING REED
factored by years of experience and thought. If reading the novel requires too much time commitment, a potential user could devote 373 minutes, barely six hours, to watch and absorb Sergei Bondarchuk’s great film War and Peace (1967). In 1996 I asked John Howard, ‘If I gave you a copy of War and Peace, would you read it?’ He stirred, uneasily. ‘Why would you do that?’ I said, ‘There is a good chance that you will become Prime Minister, and I think you would be a better one if you had read War and Peace’. On that basis, I sent him a copy and he undertook to read it. Years later, I worried, ‘Where would we be now if he hadn’t read it?’ After writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy announced that he was giving up literature. In Confession he wrote that his religious awakening had been influenced by two events, witnessing an execution in France in 1857 and the death of his brother Nikolai in 1860. Tolstoy became obsessed with religious issues, reinvented himself as a prophet and attempted, as George Steiner observed, to redefine ‘the religion of Christ, but purged of dogmas and mysticism, promising not a future bliss, but giving bliss on earth’. The Gospel in Brief (1896) was an attempt to reconcile Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and I treasured an Oxford edition of it in my teens. He was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901 and his family revolted against his attempts to take a vow of poverty and dispose of his assets. He tried to live as a peasant, or at least as a wealthy, famous, gifted nobleman imagined a peasant would live, including working as a cobbler. His estate at Yasnaya Polyana became a place of pilgrimage for disciples from all over the world. In Natal, Mohandas Gandhi set up a Tolstoyan commune and school. Albert Schweitzer’s concept of ‘reverence for life’ was deeply influenced by Tolstoy. Maksim Gorki wrote of Tolstoy:‘I am not an orphan on the earth as long as this man lives on it’. Tolstoy attempted to propagate a rational religion, simple, uncluttered, without hierarchies, institutions or dogma, an approach influenced by Rousseau almost as much as Jesus, while Dostoevsky’s religion, paradoxically for the author of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, was mystical, hermetic, non-rational, deeply national, based on the uniqueness of Mother Russia. He was a political reactionary, too. Steiner wrote: Tolstoy’s gigantic energy, his bearish strength and feats of nervous endurance, the excess in him of every life force are notorious . . . There was something fantastical and oddly blasphemous about his old age . . . Tolstoy’s energies 282
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 283
LIFE OF MY MIND
were such that he could neither imagine nor create in small dimensions . . . Tolstoyan novels close reluctantly as if the pressure of creation, that occult ecstasy that comes of shaping life through language, had not yet been expended.*
Tolstoy had an irrational hatred of King Lear because he was living Lear’s life. In November 1910, having run away from home, Tolstoy collapsed at the railway station at Astapovo, and died in the station master’s cottage. The two books by his bedside were The Brothers Karamazov and Montaigne’s Essays. Tolstoy was buried near his estate at the place where he had searched unavailingly for the green stick containing the secret of universal love. It was the first civil burial ever held in Russia. There was no headstone. In June 1990 I visited his grave, under a grassy mound. It was touching to see a bridal couple, in accordance with local custom, their eyes shiny with innocence, laying a wreath. I wondered how much Tolstoy they had read.
LITERATURE: THE IMPACT OF FRANCE ‘Everyone has two countries, one’s own and France’, wrote Thomas Jefferson, an inveterate francophile. I subscribe to the sentiment. Having spent more time in France than any country except Australia, I feel comfortable there, with a strong, possibly exaggerated, sense of immersion in a second identity. In four decades I visited France forty times, worked in and around UNESCO and the World Heritage system for seven years on and off, visited most of France’s World Heritage sites, and pursued many obsessions, including archaeology, Revolutionary and political history, food, churches and cathedrals, music, art, films and literature. Gustave Flaubert’s Madam Bovary and A Sentimental Education had acute psychological penetration and social analysis. Stendahl’s Scarlet and Black presents the tragic social climber Julien Sorel, executed for a stupid crime of passion, set in a scathing picture of bourgeois society. I consumed all the Balzac novels available in Penguin, some novellas by André Gide and short stories by Guy de Maupassant. Alexandre Dumas did not engage (neither père nor fils), nor Emile Zola, and I preferred Victor Hugo the poet to Hugo the novelist. * George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, p. 21. 283
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 284
A THINKING REED
George Simenon’s novels and short stories were compelling. A recurrent theme was the way in which a crime changes official priorities. An unknown, faceless drifter, ignored and marginalised for years, is found murdered, and suddenly his history, associations and habits become a subject of intense interest. In the early 1960s I had hurled myself on In Search of Lost Time (A la Recherche du temps perdu) or as it was then called Remembrance of Things Past in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, the masterpiece of Marcel Proust (1871–1922). I characterised the main theme of this great novel sequence as time: time factored by self, consciousness, obsession, subjectivity, paradox and aesthetics, especially music and painting. Proust became absorbed in time and the unconscious, exploring the intellect’s capacity to grasp and hold memory, and the superiority of intuition over intellect in assessing reality. Proust’s concept of time, partly influenced by Henri Bergson, was contemporary with, but independent of, theories of time by Henri Poincaré, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. ‘Proustian time’ was a profound innovation, deep or spatial time, moving backwards, forwards and sideways, unlike linear or Newtonian ‘clock’ time. He anticipated my preoccupation with calculating time-use value and promoting effective time management, a social, economic and political issue which should be on our personal, and national, agendas. In part, I saw France through Proust’s eyes and put much energy into persuading or cajoling others to share my enthusiasm. I went on a Proust pilgrimage, visiting Cabourg in Normandy, the original for his resort town of Balbec, and paid my respects at his grave in Père Lachaise, not far from Oscar Wilde. My collection included a four-page letter Proust wrote in January 1915 to Maria de Madrazo, sister of the composer Reynaldo Hahn, in which he wrote, exaggeratedly, about his penury. Proust is more read about than read. Alain de Botton’s brilliant study How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) is an attractive introduction for doubters intimidated by the length and complexity of In Search of Lost Time. I would not claim to have single-handedly made de Botton’s book a bestseller, but I pressed it on many friends. In the 1980s I became an enthusiast for the novelist Georges Perec (1936–1982), a polymath with a phenomenal range of knowledge. W ou le Souvenir d’enfance (1975), translated as W or The Memory of Childhood (1989), presents in alternating chapters an autobiographical account of a young man of uncertain identity whose parents are lost by war, and the story of a totalitarian state devoted to the Olympic ideal. 284
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 285
LIFE OF MY MIND
His masterpiece, La Vie Mode d’Emploi (1978), brilliantly translated by David Bellos as Life A User’s Manual (1987), is an intricate jigsaw of life in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement in Paris. Encyclopedic in range, it can be read, in several ways, as a collection of short stories, but in sequence the work’s architecture is compelling. No modern novel better expresses the tormenting complexity of relationships in urban society, and the chasm between knowledge, experience and understanding. Bellos later wrote Perec’s biography.
ART Exposure to the greatest paintings, sculptures or buildings leaves me feeling breathless, astounded by the power of the works and the genius of the artist.While the riches of the National Gallery of Victoria had excited me as child, adolescent and young adult, I could hardly wait to get away and see the art works of the northern hemisphere. At last, in 1958, I was able to visit major galleries in New York, Washington, London and Paris. Alan Bennett is an essayist and playwright with uncanny self knowledge, sensitivity and insight into human behaviour and complexity. He is also very modest; but Untold Stories (2005), his collection of recent prose, suggests that while he is far ahead of me in sensitivity I have more stamina, persistence, engagement and emotional response to works of art. He wrote, ‘I have to confess that I’ve never had a sensation of rapture, or any physical sensation in fact, standing in front of a painting except maybe aching legs . . . I found that in my unfeelingness I was in distinguished company—Bertrand Russell, for instance’. Well, I experience rapture all the time when exposed to great art, and hundreds of paintings and sculptures produce the oceanic feeling. In May 1996 Bennett and I both visited, independently of course, the Johannes Vermeer exhibition held in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the most comprehensive ever seen, with 28 of his 35 surviving works including the View of Delft (1658–60) which Proust described as ‘the most beautiful painting in the world’. I was too excited to sleep for days, and I recall the visit with joy almost every week and my head remains full of vivid images. It can be uncomfortable having rapture all the time but Alan Bennett’s reaction to the Vermeer exhibition was strikingly minimal. The world’s greatest religious art has such a powerful appeal that I travel extensively to see it, then urge others to share it. The mosaics in Ravenna, the world’s finest, date from the 5th and 6th centuries, executed 285
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 286
A THINKING REED
when the city was ruled from Byzantium.They are found in five buildings, three large churches, a small baptistery and the exquisite Mausoleum of Galla Placida. Most depict scenes from the life of Christ, but the portraits of Justinian and his wife Theodora have a compelling realism and power. The depiction of stars in the midnight-blue sky in the Mausoleum, the beardless Christ, and a variety of birds and animals are transfixing. The Church of St Saviour, now the Kariye Museum, on the outskirts of Istanbul is a restored 14th-century Byzantine church with walls covered by mosaics and frescoes recounting Bible stories. A magnificent Anástasis (Resurrection), a fresco with the risen Christ trampling on the doors of Hell, pulling Adam and Eve from their graves, is one of the world’s masterpieces, breaking with the immobility of the Byzantine artistic tradition. The 38 vivid frescos (1303–05) by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, also illustrate the life of Christ, with fierce urgency, passion and realism, marking a turning point in the history of European art. The paintings mark the beginning of the great revolution in Western art and are magnificently presented. ‘The Age of Van Eyck. Early Netherlandish painting and the European South 1430–1530’, shown in the Groeningenmuseum, Bruges, in 2002, was the most powerful exhibition I ever saw. There were 131 paintings, including 13 by van Eyck and eight by his assistants. Melbourne’s Virgin and Child, although attributed to ‘Assistant of Jan van Eyck’, looked outstanding. I was fascinated by van Eyck’s The Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1436), which I had seen twice before. It dates from the beginning of oil painting which, like printing, reached an unsurpassed peak in the first generation. The Canon commissioned the work and is the biggest figure in it, with three-dimensional representation, almost hyper-realism. He holds a pair of spectacles in his right hand.The folds of the Madonna’s scarlet robe, and the carpet beneath her throne, are shown with photographic precision. And the characterisation is as acute as Rembrandt or Velázquez. The Adoration of the Lamb by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the altarpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, completed in 1432, is a polyptych: opened up there are twelve paintings, dominated by God the Father and The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.When the wings are closed, twelve smaller paintings are seen. Dürer called it ‘stupendous’. One of the art works that moves me most is located in Colmar,Alsace, not far from Strasbourg. This is the Issenheim Altarpiece, painted by the 286
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 287
LIFE OF MY MIND
German Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528), housed in a former Dominican chapel in the Unterlinden Museum. It comprises ten distinct paintings including a strong Annunciation, sublime Angelic Concert, tender Nativity, a harrowing and tormented Crucifixion, luminous Resurrection and a Boschlike Temptation of St Anthony. It is one of the few paintings which can be spoken of in the same breath as the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece or Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Three great Last Judgments have disturbing emotional power, the hallucinatory 15th-century fresco by an unnamed artist in Ste-Cécile Cathedral in Albi, in Languedoc, the altarpiece in the Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune, in Burgundy, by Rogier van der Weyden, and the apocalyptic work of Luca Signorelli in Orvieto Cathedral, which influenced Michelangelo. Michelangelo’s frescos on the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel cover a vast area, and about 300 figures are depicted in an area of 340 square metres. His scenes from Genesis, Creation of the World and Fall of Man are incomparable. His Last Judgment (1536–41), on an adjoining wall, an immense vortex of nearly 400 divine, human and doomed bodies, is even more personal and intense as the painter reveals his sense of the dark abyss beneath a thin layer of civilisation, and the flayed skin of a martyr held by St Bartholomew is a self-portrait. Michelangelo’s contemporaries referred to his terribilità, the quality that inspired awe (a characteristic that he shares with Bach). The greatest paintings, by Piero, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Giorgione, Ghirlandaio, Rembrandt, are not mere decorations on the margin of life. In the Louvre I am invariably moved to tears by An Old Man and his Grandson (c. 1490) by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), a Florentine who influenced Michelangelo. In this tender but realistic work, the old man is disfigured by rhinophyma, but the cherubic child, looking directly at the nose, expresses love and trust. The Spanish artists El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán and Goya have a particular fascination for me because they depict the veneer of civilisation which separates us from savagery, no thicker than the skin which masks the skull. Velázquez’ Las Meninas (Maids of Honour) in Madrid’s Prado Museum was identified by an international panel of experts in 1985 as ‘the world’s greatest painting’. The work has multiple points of view and assumes a direct involvement by observers. Like Bach’s Mass in B Minor, it is complex in form and execution, with a clear inner logic and a simple message: ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Velázquez’ portrait 287
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 288
A THINKING REED
of Pope Innocent X (1650), in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome, has unique psychological insight. Its subject said: ‘troppo vero’. The painting obsessed Francis Bacon for years and his series of ‘Screaming Popes’ reflects the power of Velázquez. Goya’s paintings lacerate. His savage depiction of King Charles IV and his family as criminal imbeciles is all the more amazing considering that his subjects, victims, not only paid for the paintings but hung them on their walls. Saturn devouring his son, a bitter reflection about the inexorable nature of time, is horrifying. 3rd May 1808 in Madrid depicts the mechanisation of murder: the faceless execution squad is a killing machine. Dog half-submerged in the sand shows the tiny head of a terrified dog, with desolate eyes as it faces extinction. Robert Hughes says it ‘illustrates the misery of man in a comfortless world from which God has withdrawn’. I developed a strong interest in English art, especially of J.M.W.Turner, but also Walter Sickert and among more recent artists Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland,Victor Pasmore, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, Frank Auerbach and Bridget Riley. I collected every book in print on the sculptor Henry Moore (1898– 1986), saw many of his monumental abstract sculptures in situ, exchanged letters and spent a memorable day with him at Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, in June 1979. He agreed that I could use either Maquette for Head and Hand (1962) or Atom Piece (1963–64) on the cover of Sleepers,Wake! We shared an enthusiasm for pre-Columbian sculpture. Moore was preoccupied with the psychology of the viewer and he wanted art in public places to stimulate but also mystify. He showed me his collection of skulls and shells which stimulated his thinking about organic forms and let me take photographs of his powerful head. Later I sent him photographs of the bizarre shapes of ventefacts (rocks shaped by wind) that I observed and photographed in Antarctica. My modest skills as a photographer were energised by exposure to the work of David Hockney (1937– ) and this led me to experiment. I long admired his paintings, drawings and lithographs for their distinctive, witty, spare narrative style and he also made a great reputation as a designer of opera sets, beginning with Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1975). In 1982 Hockney developed a technique of photo-collage, or photo-montage, first using a Polaroid camera. He would photograph several images of a subject, each taken from a slightly different position, then lay the prints down in a chess-board configuration, with a narrow margin between each image. 288
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 289
LIFE OF MY MIND
These Polaroid collages produced a variant of Cubism, in which a portrait could show both sides of a face or record changes in expression. Hockney then rapidly moved on to using 35-mm film and developed a new photo-collage technique, which he called ‘joiners’, in which prints were overlaid, but not cut, and laid down according to the focus of interest, not in a predetermined pattern. When Hockney took a rapid series of photographs of a moving subject, such as a person walking, the resulting mosaic conveyed a surprising sense of time and motion, like frozen cinema. He would take hundreds of images of a site such as the Grand Canyon and the effect of subtle changes in light helped create a three-dimensional illusion. Hockney’s ‘joiners’, such as The Brooklyn Bridge, Walking in the Ryoanji Gardens, Kyoto or Pearblossom Highway, stimulated me to rethink how I saw events, objects, buildings. We are conditioned not to observe phenomena as a single subject in a picture frame but as a complex composite of images, some passive, some dynamic, instantly scanned and separately registered by the eye, then synthesised by the brain and interpreted as a unified subject. I experimented with Hockney’s photographic techniques, with portraits, landscapes and buildings. At St Vasily’s Cathedral, just off Red Square, Moscow, I took scores of images, each concentrating on a section of the structure. Creating collages means that the photographer must make compromises, because thirty-six different images will have thirty-six different parallaxes. It was far easier to assemble ‘joiners’ in a long strip, rather than a square or rectangle, because the problem of reconciling parallaxes was much less complex. I was pleased with my ‘joiner’ of South America’s mighty Iguaçu Falls. In October 1996 Hockney was in Melbourne when the Australian Opera was performing Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) for which he had designed the sets. I spent time with him and made a multi-image portrait. He was deeply interested in politics, history, opera and science, so we had much in common. We discussed his hypothesis about rapid and dramatic changes in painting techniques around 1400, in which images, proportionality, light and shadow were rendered more naturalistically. He argued, persuasively, that artists such as van Eyck, Masaccio, Leonardo, Holbein, Caravaggio, Rembrandt,Vermeer and Velázquez used lens (camera obscura) and mirrors to help create their famous masterpieces. Ingres had been among the last to use this technique, 289
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 290
A THINKING REED
and his work overlapped with the development of photography. He pursued his powerful, but controversial, case in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters (2001) and a documentary film for BBC Television. Just as Hockney’s work encouraged me to experiment with photography and sketching, paintings by Howard Hodgkin (1932– ) stimulated an as yet unrealised ambition to hurl myself into working with oil on canvas. Hodgkin was my exact contemporary. Descended from three intellectual dynasties, the Hodgkins, the Huxleys and the Frys, he spent the war years in Long Island then studied at Eton, leaving to attend art school at Camberwell and Bath. He held his first solo exhibition in 1962, taught art until 1972, travelled extensively and became a major collector of Indian miniatures. In 1982 his work was shown in Brisbane, and the Art Gallery of South Australia bought two paintings. A late developer, his reputation grew slowly but steadily and he was past fifty before Robert Hughes and Susan Sontag hailed him as a master. When I saw the exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975 to 1995 at the Hayward Gallery, London, in December 1996 it was a revelation, leaving me with a sense of unbearable lightness of being. I filled a notebook with sketches of his paintings. Hodgkin describes himself as ‘a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations’. Hughes called his paintings ‘feelings declared in colour’. Sontag credits him with ‘the most inventive, sensuously affecting colour repertory of any contemporary painter . . . There is heroism in the vehemence and lack of irony of Hodgkin’s pictures . . . [Their] distinct shapes read like a vocabulary of signals for the circulation, collision and rerouting of desire’. Most of his paintings have evocative, autobiographical titles: Haven’t We Met?, Counting the Days?, Venice Evening, Still Life in a Restaurant, After Visiting David Hockney. I thought of his works as short stories in paint. His style is unmistakable, but he pays homage to Turner, Matisse, Vuillard and Pollock. He paints on board, laying transparent skins of luscious colours which generally sweep across to the edge of his wide frames. I wrote to him and on my next visit to London we lunched, talked and looked at paintings and his collections. We shared some obsessions—travelling and collecting, eating and reading. His knowledge of art history was prodigious. He surprised me by saying that he did not enjoy the act of painting and avoids describing the content of individual works, believing that the emotion is adequately expressed by each painting and too deep 290
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 291
LIFE OF MY MIND
for words. He does not sketch or photograph, relying on memory and deep emotion in working on the subject, and his paintings sometimes take years to complete. Hodgkin’s work gave me a sense of elation and liberation and I determined that, when I left Parliament in 1998 or 1999, painting would be a priority. The New Zealand painter Colin McCahon (1919–1987) developed a posthumous international reputation. I found his unforgettable religious works deeply disturbing, rarely consoling. Largely self-taught, he worked as a labourer, gardener, cleaner, finally as a curator and lecturer. He fought, and lost, a battle against alcoholism. He worked through landscapes towards word paintings, powerful works in which messages, often Biblical or Maori texts, conveyed a desperate inner anguish. His ‘Scared’ series (1976) is especially disquieting. My upsurge of interest in the appreciation and collection of art began in the 1960s and coincided with marriage and extra disposable income from Pick-a-Box. I bought paintings mostly from the auction house of Leonard Joel, then run by his son Graham. Paul Dwyer, Joel’s fine art director, had an uncanny eye and often made useful suggestions about items to bid for. I was able to buy minor but interesting work which had been deaccessioned from the collection of Dr John Joseph Wardell Power, including two oils by Walter Sickert and a Kees van Dongen watercolour. Later I gratefully took advice from the dealers Rudy Komon, Kym Bonython and Joseph Brown. My interests included Aboriginal bark paintings, artefacts from Papua New Guinea and pre-Columbian terracottas. My collection of artefacts was a poor relation of Phillip Adams’ horde but I included medieval manuscripts which left Phillip cold. Fred Williams (1927–1982) befriended me in the 1960s as he was reaching the peak of his astonishing achievement as Australia’s most original landscape painter. He evolved a spare, disturbing, calligraphic style which eliminated all extraneous elements from his landscape subjects. He refined and refined and refined. Even casual art consumers could walk into a gallery anywhere in Australia, see a painting for the first time and say: ‘This is a Fred Williams.’ In the last three or four years of his life his style changed to more expressionist, dramatic, large-scale works. He respected the achievements of Streeton, Roberts and the Heidelberg School but moved far ahead of them. Exceptionally prolific, he worked calmly and methodically on several paintings almost simultaneously, although sometimes two or three years would elapse between the beginning of a work and its final execution. His 291
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 292
A THINKING REED
work gained international exposure, leading to a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1977. Many of his landscapes in the permanent collection at Parliament House, Canberra, encouraged me every day I worked there. Fred and I shared an interest in cultural politics, and he served on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, the Visual Arts Board of the Australian Council for the Arts (later renamed the Australia Council) and became a trustee of the National Gallery of Art in Canberra. We knew Fred and Lyn Williams socially. He liked watching Pick-aBox. Fred was shy but quirky, serious but humorous, and very well informed. Somehow, his reticence made me talk too long and too loudly. But I enjoyed being in his studio in Hawthorn and meeting Lyn and his three daughters. Diagnosed with cancer some months before he died, he worked to the end. It was typical of him that on his last week he attended a meeting of the National Gallery Council in Canberra, visited Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens and died in his sleep. I paid tribute to him in the House of Representatives on 27 April 1982: ‘His death is a blow to those who loved him; his work, which will never die, enriches us all.’ I came to know the painter and etcher Roger Kemp (1908–1987) reasonably well because of a survey of ‘opinion leaders’ conducted by The Australian. A collection of well-known citizens was invited to give short answers to a long series of questions about values. Roger’s views and mine turned out to be identical, at least we rated identically in The Australian’s scoring system. So I telephoned him, we soon met for lunch and I began collecting his works. Born in Bendigo, Roger had studied at the National Gallery in Melbourne, worked in factories for years, then visited London and New York. He was a symbolic expressionist whose large canvases express deep philosophical convictions about man’s role in time, space and the universe. He was also a prolific etcher. It took decades of persistence before his work was recognised, partly due to the enthusiasm of Len French and Patrick McCaughey. He won the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1968 and 1970. Patrick wrote of Roger as ‘mystic, saint and painter . . . who believed that the forms and rhythms his brush configured on the canvass or sheet of paper were the visible forms of the unseen rhythm of the universe, of the physical world’. He talked endlessly, and not always coherently, about his philosophy. In Roger’s work, circles always indicated the divine, straight lines humans and their activity. 292
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 293
LIFE OF MY MIND
Two eminent photographers, Mark Strizic (1928– ) and Wolfgang Sievers (1913–2007), became good friends and I opened several exhibitions of their work. Both were born in Berlin, Mark of Croatian parentage, Wolfgang of German, Dutch, Jewish and French ancestry. Wolfgang arrived in Australia in 1938, Mark in 1950. I first met Mark in 1968 on the publication of Involvement, a handsome production in elephant folio by Sun Books featuring paintings by Clifton Pugh, photographs by Mark Strizic and text by Andrew Grimwade. The subjects of the double portraits included Mac Burnet, Nugget Coombs, Ian Potter, Barry Humphries, Rudy Komon and John Olsen. I hosted a segment on Involvement in my television program Encounter. Mark’s portraits of me are powerful, but suggest a deep melancholy that I try to suppress. Wolfgang Sievers’ father was an art historian, and his mother a writer. He escaped to England in 1938, then migrated to Australia. We met in 1992. Unparalleled as an industrial photographer, he also specialised in landscape, streetscape, architecture and genre scenes. He has taken very few portraits, surprisingly because his great master has been Rembrandt, and the sharp contrast between light and shadow gives his work great depth and drama. The most active nonagenarian I ever met, he devoted his last decades to the causes of peace, justice and tolerance.
RADIO AND TELEVISION Radio and film had been my great informers in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s much of my intellectual stimulus came from Britain or the United States through the media.When radio and television made me a public figure, my ambition was to produce radio or television programs which influenced the way Australians thought about themselves and the world. I succeeded, minimally, with the radio program Talk Back to Barry Jones (1967–68) and the television series Encounter (1968–69). ABC Radio began playing The Goon Show, featuring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, in February 1956 and it became an important part of my life.The three stars brought a manic intensity to their surreal characters, and became role models to a later generation of satirists. The Goons reinforced my love for absurdity, surrealism and word play, continuing a tradition which had begun in English with Laurence Sterne 293
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 294
A THINKING REED
and continued with Lewis Carroll. I could recite great slabs from many programs. Television began in Australia in September 1956 and was transmitted in black and white until March 1975. Three television series had a profound influence. The BBC’s Face to Face, 35 interviews by John Freeman (1915– ), was shown in Australia in the early 1960s. Freeman’s subjects included Tony Hancock, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Reith, Bertrand Russell, Carl Gustav Jung, Edith Sitwell, Stirling Moss, Gilbert Harding and Martin Luther King. Freeman was not seen on camera. The subject was brightly lit, while the interrogator was in darkness. The questioning was intense— some viewers thought it intrusive, and the impact was often cathartic. Freeman’s theme music was the Berlioz overture Les Francs Juges (ominously translated as Judges of the Secret Tribunal ).The standard of interviewing has never been surpassed. David Attenborough, as controller of BBC2, later as director of programs at the BBC but soon to become a celebrity in his own right for his dramatic and sensitive programs on nature, organised and promoted several series of documentaries featuring authoritative presenters, including Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski. The art historian and administrator Sir Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) presented Five Revolutionary Painters (1958) on BBC Television, and the ABC showed it a year later. His potential to inform and influence large audiences through television excited me and I admired his elegance, eloquence, sophistication and sly humour. His thirteen-part series Civilisation:A Personal View (1969) transformed standards in television. Clark, both gifted and seductive, later wrote: ‘When I set about the programs I had in mind Wagner’s ambition to make opera’ with ‘text, spectacle and sound all united’. He presented the great monuments of Western culture. ‘I always based my arguments on things seen—towns, bridges, cloisters, cathedrals, palaces’ but he always considered the visual ‘a point of departure’ rather than ‘a final destination’. The third influential series was The Ascent of Man, 13 programs presented by Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974), a mathematician turned biologist, historian, poet and dramatist, born in Poland but living in England from 1920. The ABC presented it from October 1974. The programs tackled evolutionary biology, the formation of settled communities, development of invention, the conflict between religion and science, Newtonian physics, Darwin and evolution, DNA, neurobiology, computing and artificial intelligence. His exposition was passionate and lucid 294
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 295
LIFE OF MY MIND
and he argued for ‘a democracy of the intellect’. Critics complained that he had a ‘time-bound blindness to the contributions of women’ but his quality of argument was impressive. Well known because of my exposure on Pick-a-Box, I would have abandoned my political ambitions in a flash if I could have presented a series with even a fraction of the range and depth of Clark and Bronowski. Attenborough had appeared in an early series of nature films, Zoo Quest, then between 1975 and 2002 hosted fifteen more, outstanding in quality and with incomparable photography. He had no rivals and few competitors, and it has been speculated that he may be the most travelled human in history. Jacques Cousteau, the French marine explorer, made many underwater films which set high standards, were syndicated by Walt Disney, won Academy Awards in 1957, 1959 and 1965 and provided a valuable model for television. Even in black and white they were compelling and helped to compensate for my bookish remoteness from nature. In Australia, Robert Raymond, from the 1960s, and Dione Gilmour, from the 1970s, produced natural history documentaries of exceptional quality, on shoestring budgets, for the ABC. The United States produced few programs of comparable standard to British television. In the 1970s Leonard Bernstein was an exception, presenting a series of programs on music which were critical and popular successes and were shown in Australia. There were also outstanding dramatic performances from America, including Zero Mostel in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill, Beckett and Williams. Australia’s Robert Hughes featured in a series of programs made overseas, including The Shock of the New (1980), American Visions (1997) and Goya: Crazy Like a Genius (2003). The historian Simon Schama presented several important series, including Landscape and Memory (1995) and A History of Britain (2002). Commercial networks appealed to conspicuous consumption. The search for ratings meant appealing to the lowest common denominator, and programmers tried to avoid the deadly charge of ‘elitism’. The appeal of Clark and Bronowski, even Attenborough, was essentially elitist. Television, even ABC Television, retreated. In the 21st century Australian commercial television promotes Reality TV, such as the ominously named Big Brother with its emphasis on confrontation, bullying and humiliation. The programs rate well. In December 2004, Fear-Factor:All-Girl Edition, at prime time on Channel 9, 295
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 296
A THINKING REED
featured bikini-clad girls, suspended by their ankles, attempting to pick up offal from a conveyor belt with their mouths, for money.
CRITICISM Critics have had a decisive intellectual influence on me, beginning with George Orwell (1903–1950) and Edmund Wilson (1895–1972). I began reading both at Melbourne High School. I admired them as great explainers, addressing a mass of diverse material and trying to make sense of it for a non-expert reader. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946) as soon as it appeared, and that attracted me to his essays, especially ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, ‘A Hanging’, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ and ‘In Defence of P.G.Wodehouse’. I took him as a model and tried to cultivate a plain, lucid writing style. Nineteen Eighty-four was published in 1949 and by the next year Orwell was dead. Edmund Wilson, America’s greatest man of letters for three decades, critic, historian, journalist and novelist of polymathic range, was an even more important influence. Not a great creative writer, his novels are below the second rank, but he became a formidable historian and anthologist. His protagonists compared him to Samuel Johnson, his detractors saw him as repugnant, ill tempered, often drunk and emotionally insensitive. His Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), a collection of short stories with erotic themes, was convicted for obscenity in a New York Court and this generated significant, if prurient, interest across the world. My exact contemporary, John Updike was drawn to Memoirs for the same reason as me, especially the longest story, The Princess with the Golden Hair. Updike commented: ‘Never shocking, and never meant to be, this “memoir” remains the most intelligent attempt by an American male to dramatize sexual behaviour as a function of, rather than a suspension of, personality.’ By the age of 15 I had read several of Wilson’s books, including The Shock of Recognition (1943), an anthology of American literary criticism, and the title, a phrase taken from Herman Melville, has a powerful resonance for me, providing a psychological linkage between the specific and the universal, the immediate to the timeless, the individual to all humanity. The most influential was To the Finland Station (1940), subtitled ‘a study in the writing and acting of history’, a history and interpretation of socialism from the French Revolution to the moment in April 1917 when Lenin, returning from exile to lead the Russian Revolution, arrived 296
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 297
LIFE OF MY MIND
at the Finland Station in Petrograd.The book was an incisive introduction to the ideas of Vico, Michelet, Marx, Bakunin, Renan, Lenin and Trotsky. Wilson’s learning and authority made me feel weak at the knees.When he began to write On the Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955), he concluded that he would have to learn Hebrew to really understand the texts. Well, naturally, wouldn’t everyone? He became fluent in Russian in order to translate Pushkin and to engage in sharp disputes on language with Vladimir Nabokov. His Patriotic Gore (1962) is a magisterial analysis of writings by protagonists in the American Civil War, including Lincoln, Grant, Lee and Sherman. We corresponded, but never met. Another major influence was Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982).A New Yorker, educated at Yale, he began writing for the Partisan Review in the 1930s when it was run by Stalinists, and was at various times a Trotskyist, socialist, pacifist and anarchist before moving right. He ran his own journal, Politics, from 1944 to 1949, wrote for Partisan Review, joined The New Yorker in 1951 and became film critic for Esquire, when it had a distinguished group of writers in 1960. Macdonald, like Wilson, demonstrated the difference between a reviewer, who examines a particular product, whether book or film, and gives a judgment on its value, and a critic, who examines an intellectual context and places Moby Dick or Casablanca within it. Joseph Epstein noted, ‘To read Macdonald on the barbarity of General George S. Patton, the goofy gadgetry of Mortimer J. Adler’s Syntopicon to the Great Books, the depredations upon the King James Bible committed by its new English translators was to hear melodious bells go off and have the sky fill with fireworks’. He made sharp judgments. He said of himself: ‘When I say “no” I’m always right and when I say “yes” I’m almost always wrong.’ His Parodies—An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm—and After (1960) gave me great pleasure and I would read it aloud on the slightest pretext. He argued that parody was ‘an intuitive kind of literary criticism’ and pointed to its use by Shakespeare, Sterne, Keats, Proust and Joyce. He also produced an attractive abridgement (1973) of the four volumes of Aleksandr Herzen’s autobiography My Past and Thoughts. We corresponded and I had two long meetings with him, one at The New Yorker office, the other at the Algonquin Hotel, where many of the New Yorker wits used to hang out. I did not see him at his best. He was drinking heavily and writing little, an extinct volcano. His admirers compare him to Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken as a critic, and I rank him with Pauline Kael and Michael Wood as one of the finest writers on film. 297
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 298
A THINKING REED
Pauline Kael (1919–2001), The New Yorker’s film critic from 1967 to 1991, was given generous space for reviews of films and essays on directors.We talked by telephone and corresponded and I helped to encourage her interest in the revival of Australian films. For years I was a passionate consumer of The New Statesman, airmailed from Britain, the monthly Encounter and The New Yorker. Many of The New Yorker’s long, detailed, meticulously checked articles were later published as books, and it had the world’s best cartoons, impressive reviews, short, witty ‘fillers’ at the end of features and an elegant style. I responded to its warnings about ‘vivid writing’. James Thurber, E.B.White and S.J. Perelman were New Yorker regulars. In February 1963 the first edition of The New York Review of Books appeared. The NYRB began, unexpectedly, when a printers’ strike closed down the major New York newspapers. Oddly, a journal which expressed the finest flower of the American radical tradition began, if not as a strike-breaking exercise, then opportunistically to cater for print-starved intellectuals. The founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, were still there until Epstein died in 2006. The first issue had contributions from an astonishing array of American writers, and some from Britain: poetry from Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren and W.H. Auden and reviews by Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Jonathan Miller, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe and F.W. Dupee. The reviews were of impressive length and deep erudition. The quality of the debate generated in the correspondence pages remains exceptional. The NYRB appears twenty times each year. Its circulation is modest, barely 150 000 copies, but its influence on intellectuals, writers and universities has been immense, especially during the long controversies over the Vietnam War, the first and second Gulf Wars, the aftershock of the Kennedy assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, Gorbachev and the collapse of Communism, Islamic fundamentalism, China, globalisation and American exceptionalism. The NYRB has been particularly strong on the Middle East, South America, American politics, music, Russian and French literature, architecture, sculpture and painting. Sir Frank Kermode (1919– ), doyen of British critics, held chairs in English at Manchester, Bristol, London, Cambridge, Colombia and Harvard. He was co-editor of Encounter in 1966–67, during its CIA period, wittily described in his memoir Not Entitled (1996). Fellow critics 298
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 299
LIFE OF MY MIND
praised Not Entitled for its lucidity, wit, intelligence, economy and honesty, and its incisive picture of an outsider who breached the citadel of Oxbridge but felt deeply uncomfortable as an insider. I had been reading him for years but we did not meet until 1998, in Cambridge, and have maintained close contact ever since. He has astounding breadth, depth and humanity, and remains prolific in his eighties.We share enthusiasm for music, art and literature. I think he has given up on politics.
HISTORY I read voraciously in history from childhood, especially its overlap with politics and biography. At school, Australian history was essentially tacked on as a component of British history, a lineal extension of Alfred and the cakes, Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution. I was far more attracted by the macro than the micro, looking for the universal. It comes as a shock to realise that when Manning Clark (1915–1991) was appointed as a lecturer in Australian history at Melbourne University in 1945 he was Australia’s first, and his chair of Australian history at the Australian National University (1949) was another first. At Dandenong High School and La Trobe University I taught courses on the French Revolution. Every new experience, sensation, image, sound or book read reinforced my enthusiasm for the subject, expanded my range of interests and demonstrated how my mind works. Working on the French Revolution was a powerful factor in my professional development, as teacher, researcher, historian, biographer, politician and public intellectual, at least as much as direct exposure to Australian politics. Most of the elements that constitute modern politics and shaped my life originated in the Revolution. Some of my contemporaries who were attracted to Communism saw in the Russian Revolution what I saw in the French. My first book Decades of Decision 1860– , subtitled A Compendium of Modern History, was commissioned by a Sydney publisher, Horwitz, as a textbook essentially about 19th- and 20th-century history, covering Europe, North America, China, India and Japan, Imperialism, the expansion of science and technology and rising levels of literacy. I wrote quickly but carefully, and the book appeared in 1965, priced at $1.75. It reinforced both my teaching and material for my biographical dictionary, because I wrote concise entries for the major characters. 299
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 300
A THINKING REED
In the Foreword I quoted some compelling sentences by the English historian Lord Acton about moral factors in history: Never debase the moral currency or lower the standard of rectitude, but try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflect on wrong . . . The progress of civilization depends on preserving, at infinite cost, which is infinite loss, the crippled child and the victim of accident, the idiot and the madman, the old and infirm, curable and incurable. This growing domination of disinterested motive, this liberality towards the weak in social life corresponds to that respect for the minority in political life which is the essence of freedom.
Excluded from Cambridge University as a Catholic, John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834–1902) studied in Munich and mastered historical analysis. He became a Liberal MP and supporter of Gladstone, who made him a peer and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Acton is mostly remembered for his maxim,‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. He would have applauded Orwell’s dictum that the falsification of history is the greatest of all crimes because it debases the meaning of human experience.Acton wrote: ‘Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much excusing: truth is ill-served when the strong man with the dagger is followed by the weaker man with the sponge. First, the criminal who slays; then the sophist who defends the slayer’. The duty to hold a balance between liberty, power and responsibility is endless and onerous. Despite the Victorian rhetoric, Acton’s principles have always resonated with me. George Peabody Gooch (1873–1968) was a veteran of the Victorian era whose father had been born in the reign of George III. He had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, then worked with Acton and was a Liberal MP 1906–10. I happily accepted an invitation to visit him at his Buckinghamshire home. His expertise was diplomatic history and biographies of the ‘Enlightened Despots’, including Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great. He had been a prolific writer and Herbert Butterfield wrote a damning summary in the Dictionary of National Biography: ‘He wrote without anguish, with too easy a mind and too easy a memory’. But he talked of Acton as if they had met the day before and I found that 300
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:04 PM
Page 301
LIFE OF MY MIND
stimulating. Owen Chadwick, who befriended me in Cambridge, became the great authority on Acton. I developed a deep interest in the American historian Henry Adams (1838–1918), descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams (but critical of both). Describing himself as a ‘conservative Christian anarchist’ but not a believer, he became preoccupied with the breakdown in Christian unity at the time of the Crusades and the rise of nationalism. One of his two masterworks was Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), a study of symbolism in the architecture of great French 13th-century buildings, packed with information about the transition from Romanesque to Gothic and the struggle to reconcile reason, emotion and faith. Adams had unusual intellectual penetration. He may have been the only American scholar of his time who read Marx carefully and he was perceptive in arguing that the per capita consumption of energy is the most useful index of how a society/economy is organised. Cold, withdrawn, deeply wounded in his private life, he worried about democracy because power fell so easily into unworthy hands. His other masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), is an autobiography written in the third person. Some of his descriptions, for example visiting the Temple of Karnak, had a powerful effect because his emotional reaction had been identical to my own. Alan John Percevale Taylor (1906–1990), always known by the initials A.J.P., was a controversial figure, devastating in debate and with mastery of sources, incisive in style, witty and argumentative in manner, determinedly paradoxical in approach. He was convinced that all progress depended on the activities of trouble-makers and he involved himself with radical causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but Labour suspected him of being a bomb-thrower and never used him. His involvement in television lecturing and popular journalism aroused deep professional prejudice from his peers, despite the strength of his published work. He remained a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1976 but was never given a chair nor offered an honour. His wife asked me to sign a petition to Mrs Thatcher recommending an honour for him but nothing came of it. I suspect that he was not exaggerating when he claimed to be able to read a book and review it before breakfast. He so despised Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War that I was lucky to be invited to his home. In 1962 the first of six substantial volumes in Manning Clark’s A History of Australia appeared, and created controversy from the outset. The series took twenty-five years to complete, written from a universalist, 301
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 302
A THINKING REED
almost Dostoevskian, perspective. I read every word. Clark’s writing was heroic in scale, passionately committed, with the quality of a novel, with huge, flawed, possessed characters. Defenders of the British conservative tradition were aghast. I saw a good deal of Manning in his later years and later served as a patron of Manning Clark House in Canberra. Geoffrey Blainey, a prolific and accomplished economic historian, later turned to broader themes and wrote important analytical works, including The Tyranny of Distance (1966) and The Triumph of the Nomads (1975). I was flattered when he invited me to read the proofs of his A Short History of the World (2000) and make suggestions. When the so-called ‘history wars’ began in the 1980s, Manning Clark’s work was criticised as expressing a ‘black armband’ view about European settlement in Australia, while Blainey was hailed as a conservative supporter of European institutions. I thought that the gap between Clark and Blainey was grossly exaggerated. Paradoxically, Blainey took a serious interest in Aborigines and women’s issues long before Clark. Manning Clark argued passionately at the close of A History of Australia that this generation had a chance to ‘make their own history . . . With the end of the domination by the straiteners, the enlargers of life now have their chance’. Paul Keating took up the analysis, describing the Liberals as ‘punishers and straiteners’, a charge vigorously repudiated by John Howard. Frank Brennan argued that the straiteners ‘appeal to our baser instincts in times of uncertainty, isolation and material acquisitiveness’. I could not have put it better myself.
THE DICTIONARY OF WORLD BIOGRAPHY In the mid-1950s I had been puzzled that no comprehensive biographical dictionary was available in paperback and I determined to fill the gap. I wrote to Penguin Books in London/Harmondsworth and received a thoughtful and encouraging letter from T.R.S. Glover, a classical scholar and essayist. The two generally available major biographical dictionaries, Chambers’ and Webster’s, both had significant weaknesses. One was too British, with a poor representation of names outside of Europe (a deficiency corrected in recent editions) and the second, while far more comprehensive, offered short entries, little more than concise lists of dates, offices held or works produced, with no interpretation or context provided. Both were heavy and expensive, while I planned a book that students could carry around. 302
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 303
LIFE OF MY MIND
During my time as a draftsman in the Victorian Titles Office, with fellow workers John Landy and John Button, I began to work systematically on collating material for a dictionary of biography. In practice, the TO clerks operated on a daily quota.There was no point in breaking records for processing files because it would simply jam the system, because ‘engrossing’ Certificates of Title was a slow, pre-Gutenberg process. So draftsmen (and they were all men at that time) devoted surplus time to their special interests, such as working out techniques for predicting racehorse form. My speciality was developing lists of names which should be included in a reasonably portable paperback intended to be broader in range than existing hardcover dictionaries. I worked on this project on and off for many years.While largely relying on instinct, I would have backed my own judgment on the choice of names, and their relative length, against all comers. My selections were influenced by my constant reading of biographies, noting how often a name would have multiple references in indexes in a random sample of books about, say, the 20th century. However, I could make an objective check to my judgment by referring to The Biography Index, a cumulative list of biographical material in books and magazines published quarterly by the H.W.Wilson Company, New York. In January 1961 I took masses of typescript to London and arranged a meeting with Penguin Books. Charles Clarke began by asking to see my entry on the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, and this impressed him enough to offer me a contract and a generous advance. Unfortunately, soon after the contract was signed Charles left Penguin for the Tavistock Institute and years of uncertainty and confusion followed. Sir Allen Lane, Penguin’s founder, recruited Sir John Summerscale, formerly Minister (Commercial) to Rio, to be editor-in-chief of reference books. He was an amiable, hospitable man, but not one of Lane’s shrewdest appointments. He had a passion for the Edwardian theatre, lawn tennis and South America. Penguin’s headquarters was in Middlesex, but the reference books section was housed in an oubliette in John Street, Holborn. I thought the people working there had a distinctly P.G.Wodehouse flavour. I was already irritated by proposed lists of additions and omissions, with a disproportionate emphasis on English subjects. I asked Penguin’s reference people if they were familiar with The Biography Index. They had never heard of it. ‘How do you choose which names to include or exclude?’‘We ask chaps.’ To provide an example, a man working in the office was called over to proffer advice. I have always thought of his name as Wotherspoon, but 303
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 304
A THINKING REED
this may be an embellishment. Sir John said, ‘Wothers, old fruit, in a biographical dictionary of about 6000 entries, with some bias towards the 20th century and the English-speaking world, what would you do with the South African novelist Stuart Cloete? In or out?’ Wotherspoon closed his eyes for a few seconds, sucked his lips and blew out his cheeks. ‘I rather think—In.’ ‘There you are,’ said Sir John.‘We ask chaps.’ The strategy adopted by Penguin, they told me, was to break up the work into categories and send my entries out to specialists so that they could add a cachet of legitimacy to the work of an unknown antipodean. Unhappily, because of the years wasted over the project, some experts had died, dropped out or possibly gone mad. Then I was advised that an experienced editor had been brought in to co-ordinate the book. He was M. (for Meredith) Vibart Dixon, former editor-in-chief of Chambers’ Encyclopedia. I looked up Who’s Who and found that he had been born in 1898, educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge and had written The True Facts about the Disputed Frontiers of Europe (1940). We never met or talked on the telephone. Sir John sent me a list of Dixon’s suggested additions and omissions: almost without exception, the additions were British, the proposed omissions non-British. I protested vigorously. Then, in 1967, I was told that Vibart Dixon had died. I was confident about the quality of my research. I had sent drafts to many subjects, inviting comments, and received valuable information from E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Ezra Pound, Oskar Kokoschka, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Noam Chomsky and John Updike. Igor Stravinsky wrote:‘Glad you corrected all those absurd inventions of my so called “biographers” and, not critical, but critinitical reviews in musical periodicals you mention . . . Thanking you very much for all these corrections’. Obsessed about correcting error, I did not necessarily accept everything that my subjects told me. My approach was opinionated and subjective. I set my entries in the broad sweep of history, pointed to relationships between major characters and their times, and challenged errors in other reference books. I was making judgments all the time. I included cross references and a bibliography to encourage discursive reading. Detail in entries often reflected what I was teaching at the time, for example the artists of the Italian Renaissance, or the leaders of the French and Russian Revolutions. When galley proofs started to arrive, unexpectedly, late in 1969, I could hardly believe how much had dropped out. Great bleeding chunks of my 304
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 305
LIFE OF MY MIND
material had been eliminated, especially in the letters B and H, and in particular subject areas. Among composers who had gone missing were Bach, Bartók, Beethoven, Berio, Berlioz, Bernstein, Bizet, Bliss, Bloch, Boulez, Brahms, Britten, Bruckner, Busoni, Buxtehude, Byrd, Händel, Haydn, Hindemith, Hummel and Humperdinck. The writers Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Homer, Horace and Victor Hugo were absent too, as well as violinist Jascha Heifetz and pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Confucius had dropped out. Herodotus too, and Jan Hus. My text’s precision had been transformed to vagueness. Stanley Baldwin, three times Prime Minister of Britain, was described as ‘exercising power’ or ‘taking the helm’ without his office being specified. Somebody had carefully changed the dates of United States presidential terms, so that Eisenhower was described as being President 1952–60, that is, from election to election, instead of 1953–61, from inauguration to inauguration. Only a political illiterate could have done that, I fumed. Many entries, for example Robert Menzies and Nuri es-Said, had rather an empire loyalist flavour. The entry on the tennis star Suzanne Lenglen was almost as long as the one following, on V.I. Lenin. Then Penguin advised a change in plan. They would publish a threevolume Penguin Encyclopedia, and my biographical entries would appear as part of a work which covered places and things as well as people, not in a separate volume. I would be credited as co-author. I rewrote hundreds of new entries, pasting them up on the galleys.Then, after a long pause, an exasperated letter from Penguin to say that the threevolume project had been abandoned, breaking the contract but offering compensation. ‘After a long series of exchanges, it has become clear that your concept of the work’s scope and ours has become irreconcilable.’ This was a stupid assertion. I wrote back at once. Can you provide some specific examples of these irreconcilable differences? If your problem is that I insist Bach, Beethoven, Confucius, Händel, Haydn, Heine, Hemingway, Herodotus, Homer and Hugo should be in, while you insist that they must be excluded, then this is an irreconcilable difference. But if that is the case, then say so.At least that would clarify the matter. But is that what you are saying?
Penguin did not reply. In 1970 Allen Lane died and Penguin Books was bought by the Pearson group, which owned Longmans.Years dragged by. 305
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 306
A THINKING REED
In 1977, just before his sudden death, Rohan Rivett, a courageous journalist, suggested that I write to his old friend Jim Rose, the new Penguin chair, proposing that the project be revived. He had read my correspondence file, thought that Penguin had treated me badly, and sent a covering letter to Rose. Jim Rose replied sympathetically, agreed that the Dictionary of Biography project had been appallingly handled, but concluded that Penguin lacked personnel with expertise in reference works. He sent a cheque in lieu of damages and said I was free to place the book elsewhere. Then, unexpectedly, I received a letter from Peter Dixon, son of the late Vibart. He wanted to revive the project because he was looking for a source of income for his ageing mother. Peter worked as a producer for the BBC, his wife was in children’s publishing and he had very close connections with Macmillan. His proposition was that if he could get Macmillan to publish the dictionary, then we should agree on a 50/50 split of royalties for his mother’s lifetime, after which all royalties would revert to me. I met Peter and his wife at their elegant house in Hammersmith, liked them both and assumed all would go well. I concluded that 50 per cent of something was better than 100 per cent of nothing. He explained that he had a complete set of his father’s galley proofs, from which Macmillan could reset the text. For once the project advanced quickly; but when the first proofs for the Macmillan edition arrived I saw that, once again, many major figures were missing.Vibart Dixon had been dead for a decade, but clearly these major entries, and hundreds of others, had dropped out while he was running the project for Penguin. I felt deeply betrayed. For the second time, hundreds of entries had to be retyped. Peter said that Macmillan had agreed that the book would not go to the printers before I had seen a final set of proofs.Then a late night telephone call from Peter in London: ‘I’m sorry, but there has been a misunderstanding. The material has been printed without your additional entries and is about to go to the binders.’ ‘In that case,’ I said,‘I will ask Macmillan Australia not to distribute the volume here.’ ‘You can’t do that,’ Peter shrieked. ‘Macmillan in the UK is counting on large Australian sales.’ He suggested a compromise—that before the book was bound, a one page addendum would be printed in the back containing a few entries that I considered essential. I proposed George Bush senior,Vice-President of the United States, Hua Guofeng, China’s head of state, François Mitterrand, the French President, Patrick White and Gough Whitlam. 306
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 307
LIFE OF MY MIND
I said to Peter,‘You can’t begin to grasp the embarrassment of publishing a dictionary of biography in Australia bearing my name which excludes White and Whitlam. It will make me a laughing stock and neither of them will ever speak to me again.’ The book was published as ‘Macmillan Dictionary of Biography by Barry Jones and M.V. Dixon’. A biographical note on the authors read, ‘Dixon’s work on the Macmillan Dictionary of Biography was completed before he died in 1967’. This seemed to be self-evident. When the first bound copies arrived in Australia in October 1981 I could not contain my fury. I flew to London immediately and made vigorous protests at Macmillan’s head office. I had an angry exchange with the sales manager, Adrian Same, when I complained about errors and omissions. He said, ‘Frankly, our main interest is in sales. We don’t give a fuck about its level of accuracy. Who cares, other than you?’ I saw an advertisement in a New York trade journal for The Rutledge Dictionary of People by Barry Jones and M.V. Dixon, published by Rutledge Books. I sought legal advice from a New York specialist in publishing law, Harriet Pilpel. She counselled against initiating action for an injunction to prevent publication:‘You would have to post a performance bond in multiples of tens of thousands of dollars.’ I blanched at that and settled for writing a letter of protest to Rutledge Books.They did not acknowledge it. Oddly, the Dictionary received a generous review in the Times Literary Supplement written by Sir William Haley, former Director General of the BBC and editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The TLS printed my letter of protest about favourable treatment of a book which I regarded as a travesty. My response to Haley became a news item in Australia. I wrote a sharp attack on the bungled project which appeared in Private Eye. Another American edition appeared in 1986 without my knowledge, The St Martin’s Press Dictionary of Biography, over the names of Jones and Dixon. Brian Stonier, Chairman of Macmillan Publishers Australia, was sympathetic, and told Macmillan UK that he would only distribute the book in Australia if the volume included a disclaimer by me. Controversy about the publication probably helped its sales. Brian believed in my concept of the dictionary, so he acquired publication rights from Macmillan UK, produced a new edition which restored the deletions, and further editions in 1986 and 1989. However, M.V. Dixon’s name, although printed in a 307
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 308
A THINKING REED
smaller font than mine, remained on the title page, although his contributions had been virtually eliminated. I was careful about the relative balance of entries. Certain categories were automatically included: most Popes, all British sovereigns and Prime Ministers, French kings and Presidents,American Presidents, Prime Ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. I wanted to avoid either including too many Australian entries, or over-reacting and having too few. I had to be selective and tried to balance Australian and Canadian politicians, painters, novelists or poets. Inevitably, Israel and Ireland had and have a disproportionate political and cultural significance, with more representation, say, than the more populous New South Wales and Victoria. My Dictionary had a higher proportion of female entries than Chambers’ or Webster’s but they accounted for less than 15 per cent. I felt that my explanation of ideologies was a strength and I tried to cover my areas of weakness, such as sport, popular music, ballet, ornithology, gardening and 14th-century Islamic tile making. I included some tightly compressed anecdotes and the occasional telling quotation, such as Artur Schnabel’s comment on Mozart’s piano sonatas: ‘Too easy for amateurs: too hard for professionals’. I reported strongly critical views:‘Handsome, imaginative, but superficial and distrusted by his contemporaries (Alanbrooke, Montgomery,Templer, Ismay), Mountbatten’s reputation has declined since his death’. I wrote of Anton Chekhov, ‘His funeral was Chekhovian: the coffin was lost, confused with a general’s and returned to Moscow in an oyster cart’. In the entry on the actor Donald Wolfit, I quoted Clement Freud: ‘John Gielgud was a tour de force, while Wolfit was forced to tour’. I drew attention to contemporary recognition, or lack of it. In the entry on James Joyce, I pointed to the long list of great writers who had failed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature:Tolstoy, Ibsen, Strindberg, James, Hardy, Conrad, Gorki, Proust, Rilke, Musil, Joyce,Woolf, Pound, Brecht, Nabokov, Borges, Malraux, Greene and Auden. In 1994 Michael Wilkinson of Information Australia published a much expanded edition, renamed Dictionary of World Biography, with no reference to M.V. Dixon. There were 8500 entries. Further editions followed in 1996 and 1998, the last being co-published with The Age. I revised interminably, especially after discussions with people such as Isaiah Berlin, Francis Crick, James Watson, Peter Medawar, Max Perutz, Michael Tippett, Karl Popper, Henry Moore, Ernst Gombrich and Benoît Mandelbrot. 308
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 309
LIFE OF MY MIND
Spending time in Egypt, France, Spain and Peru, for example, led to fresh insights and major revisions of many entries and writing new ones. So, much personal experience was compressed into the Dictionary of World Biography. My best entries, I think, were on Homer, Caesar, Jesus, Columbus, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Napoléon, Lincoln, Darwin, Wagner, Marx, Freud, Picasso, Roosevelt and Hitler. What about pop culture? Jerome Kern? Cole Porter? Bing Crosby? Frank Sinatra? Elvis Presley? The Beatles? John Coltrane? Frank Zappa? They were included, partly because universality of recognition, their lasting influence and extensive literature about them conferred ‘classic’ status. Major figures in jazz were there because their virtuosity appealed to me. But I failed to include Perry Como,Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine,The Rolling Stones, The Seekers, Bruce Springsteen, Kylie Minogue, Demi Moore or Johnny O’Keefe. Is being well known the only criterion? I am open to persuasion. Gough Whitlam was my most distinguished and assiduous proofreader and I appreciated his detailed critiques. I am gratified by the number of people, unknown to me, who say that they read the Dictionary for pleasure. I agree with their judgment, but it is nice to hear it.
309
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 310
CHAPTER 9
ﱗ
Sleepers, Wake!
At the beginning of his film Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen tells a story which, he says, illustrates the quintessential sadness of life: Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says: ‘Boy, the food in this place is really terrible’, and the other one says: ‘Yeah, I know—and such small portions’. Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life—full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness and it’s all over much too quickly.
From early childhood I had a stark vision of how technological change could enlarge human capacity or threaten it, so that workers become slaves of the machine, something that Karl Marx had predicted in 1858. Films and wide reading reinforced my preoccupation with the subject, and by the 1970s Australian workers were being displaced by technological change. Politicians and trade union leaders were interested in particular cases, but few had much grasp of the historic global phenomenon. I determined to write a book to fill that gap, and describe the impact of the computer/information revolution on society. I wrote and rewrote Sleepers,Wake!, subtitled Technology and the Future of Work, between early 1979 and October 1981. Published by Oxford University Press in March 1982, it became both critical success and bestseller, going through four editions and 26 reprints in 20 years. Rosemary proposed the title, Sleepers,Wake! The name was taken from 310
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 311
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
J.S. Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Wachet auf! (‘Sleepers, wake! a voice is calling, the watchman on the heights is calling . . .’). It was a challenge, a call to action. By implication,Australians were the sleepers and that made me, immodestly, I admit, the watchman. On publication, Macfarlane Burnet and Manning Clark provided generous comments which were useful in promoting the book.There was no formal launch. It was warmly reviewed in The Australian, The Age and The Economist, but never by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review or The Bulletin. I spoke about Sleepers,Wake! at a sparsely attended and unreported lunch at the National Press Club in Canberra on 22 April. The economist Kenneth Boulding wrote enthusiastic articles in the United States to support my thesis, that the information revolution would transform not only the economy, but politics, society and human experience and capacity. John Kenneth Galbraith read Sleepers, said he agreed with my argument but published nothing. The British sociologist Raymond Williams praised Sleepers warmly. Charles Handy, a prolific Irish writer on economics and social change, quoted Sleepers in several books, and some sentences were immortalised in dictionaries of quotations. After modest success in the first few months, a dramatic event on 27 October 1982 transformed its sales. This was a march on Old Parliament House, Canberra, by steel and coal workers from Wollongong/Port Kembla made redundant by automation which led to a door being broken in and fighting with attendants as the Parliament was invaded. It symbolised a loss of control and was described in the media as a serious challenge to Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition Government. Suddenly technological unemployment was big news. In the following week, ABC Television’s Nationwide, predecessor of the 7.30 Report, produced a threepart series on unemployment and technology. I was interviewed on each of the programs and my book was generously promoted. In its first two years Sleepers went through ten reprints and was translated into Japanese and Swedish, and later into Chinese, Korean and Braille. It was never translated into French or German and was poorly marketed in the United States and Britain. Ultimately it sold about 100 000 copies, the overwhelming majority in Australia. Less than five months after the march on Parliament, Labor won a Federal election, Bob Hawke was Prime Minister and I had become a Minister. However, to my abiding regret Sleepers seemed to have little impact on my Caucus colleagues and even less on the Parliamentary Press Gallery. 311
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 312
A THINKING REED
All the themes in Sleepers had been in my head from early childhood and, as usual, the main sources were films and books and, later, personal contacts. Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) had a great impact on me when I first saw it at the age of eight or nine, with the powerful imagery of the nameless worker as a mere bolt tightener for a machine where, as Marx wrote, ‘capital assimilates living labour into itself ’. Some years later I saw René Clair’s À nous la liberté (1931), an anarchic comedy about the dehumanisation of industrial workers, which appeared before Modern Times and led to a bitter plagiarism suit against Chaplin by Clair. Somehow I had become aware of the satirical play Rossum’s Universal ˇ apek although I do Robots (RUR) (1920) by the Czech dramatist Karel C not recall how, as it was never filmed and the play was not produced in ˇ apek coined the word ‘robot’ and his play Melbourne for decades. C explored how robots could compete with human labour. Some of his themes were taken up in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926). I saw the film Things to Come (1936), based on a novel by H.G.Wells, as a revival. Produced by Alexander Korda and stylishly directed by William Cameron Menzies, with evocative music by Arthur Bliss, it was set in the year 2036 and predicted the destruction of Britain by war, descent into chaos and reconstruction by a scientific elite. I became preoccupied about whether people should be performing repetitive, boring, dangerous, exhausting tasks when machines could do them better, and the problem of trying to balance liberty and security. Simone Weil, who had worked in factories, described the deadening life in which ‘things play the role of men’ in her Oppression and Liberty (translated 1972), which I read closely. I was never a science fiction obsessive, but my selective reading confirmed that many writers in that genre had made plausible descriptions of future technological developments and their impact on life, work and society. Wells, before becoming depressive himself, generally presented a cheerful utopian vision of man as an optimistic systems builder, labouring to solve the problems of humanity. In 1899 he wrote a science fiction novel When the Sleeper Wakes, revised and republished in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes. I was unaware of either title when I planned my book. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), like me an enthusiast for Pascal, was a witty and perceptive novelist and essayist of exceptional range. His Brave New World (1932), a dystopian fable, holds up well after 70 years. Huxley predicted a totalitarian welfare state without war, poverty or crime, with production of test-tube babies, the decline of the family, designer drugs, 312
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 313
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
prolongation of youth, use of subsistence agriculture not for production but to absorb labour, saturation by media and development of a leisure society. He set his fable six hundred years ahead, in the year 632 AF (‘the year of our Ford’) but before his death thought that his prophecies might be fulfilled before 2000. Banned as obscene in Australia in the 1930s, Brave New World proved to be a far more accurate prophecy than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Orwell’s depiction of technology was mechanistic and backward looking, essentially Dickensian. Huxley understood how seductive techniques of persuasion could reinforce compliance. In 632 AF, the five classes in society are taught ‘elementary class consciousness’, Pavlovian conditioning as they sleep. Today, compliance and persuasion occurs while people are awake, largely through the media. Brave New World was a benevolent dictatorship. Huxley wrote before Hitler came to power, Stalin initiated major purges and World War II plunged the world into mass extermination and other brutalities. George Orwell (1903–1950) wrote Nineteen Eighty-four in the aftermath of all three. In Oceania, the Stalinist ‘Big Brother’ stood for state repression, ‘the boot smashing down on the face forever’. Huxley described a population made docile by brainwashing and dumbing down, so that they ‘loved their servitude’. Neil Postman observed: Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think . . . What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.*
Orwell’s vision of 1984 is frequently identified with computerisation— but this is a complete misreading of the book, which was confused on technological matters. Orwell did not appear to have been aware of the significance of computers and the implications of electronic data control for the future. He wrote about data banks, as we now call them, but these were essentially Dickensian, wasteful of paper and human effort: pneumatic tubes pushing round masses of paper, with the residue dropped manually into memory holes in every office, for consignment to the furnaces. He failed * Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. 313
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 314
A THINKING REED
to recognise the implications of rising levels of consumption and the significance of computing which had its first impact during World War II. However, he scored two hits. One was the use of telescreens as an instrument of surveillance and the other that government linguists would create a new language that would make ‘heretical thoughts’ impossible. With ‘management speak’ this has already happened. Another influence on my thinking was James Burnham (1905–1987), an American political philosopher who proved to be an uncannily accurate prophet. At the age of fourteen I first read The Managerial Revolution (1941), subtitled What is happening in the world, as a Reader’s Digest condensation. Burnham argued that capitalism was disappearing but socialism would not replace it. Power would pass into the hands of groups which effectively controlled the means of production (not necessarily the owners); they would be executives, technicians, bureaucrats and the ‘military industrial complex’ (to use Dwight Eisenhower’s telling phrase). These managers would eliminate, or fatally weaken, the old capitalists, crush the working class and seize power themselves. Burnham saw society as inherently hierarchical and regarded democracy as a sham. By 1964 Burnham was excoriating Western liberalism in his Suicide of the West. His works remain significant today as an influence on neoconservatives (‘neo-cons’) in Washington, some of whom began on the hard Left and are now on the hard Right, having been consistent in their fundamentalism, absolutism and refusal to accept alternative points of view or conflicting evidence. Apart from my concerns about technology as a controlling or conditioning force, I was deeply preoccupied by the changing nature of work: the sharp decline in employment in the production of staples and its exponential rise in knowledge generation and in areas which improved the quality of life but were essentially discretionary. In 1957 C. Northcote Parkinson, a conservative, witty English historian and passionate critic of bureaucracy, published Parkinson’s Law. The law, ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available to complete it’, while intended satirically actually expresses a profound truth, that service employment, inevitably low in productivity (hairdressers, dry cleaners or waiters, for example), is capable of soaking up labour because services are consumed repeatedly and have to be provided again. Years later I found that Karl Marx made the same argument in Capital, vol. 1 where he distinguished briefly, but not so wittily, between ‘dense’ and ‘porous’ employment. He referred to 314
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 315
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
the compulsory shortening of the hours of labour. This gives an immense impetus to the development of productivity and the more economic use of the conditions of production . . . The denser hour of the 10-hour working day contains more labour, i.e. expended working power, than the more porous hour of the 12-hour working day.
My interest in information-related issues had been further stimulated by Inventing the Future (1963), written by Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian physicist working in England who developed holography and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971. Gabor regarded Parkinson’s Law as a natural defence mechanism by society against the psychological threat posed by technological advance and the unwelcome prospect of an age of leisure. Curiously, when I lunched with Parkinson in Melbourne in the 1980s he claimed never to have heard of Gabor and was unaware of Marx’s dichotomy. I was attracted by Gabor’s optimistic view of a future in which ‘Mozartian man’ (and woman?) could evolve. I fell upon a collection of papers, Economics of Information and Knowledge (1971), edited by Don Lamberton. He was the first Australian economist to grasp what was happening and I was the first Australian politician. I started talking about information theory in the Victorian Parliament in 1972, partly influenced by Don, although we had not then met. It did us no good at all professionally. We were too far ahead of the pack. I soon learned that political wisdom is shown by those who proclaim the blindingly obvious about ten minutes before everybody else. Bertrand Russell’s important essay,‘In Praise of Idleness’ (1935), anticipated Parkinson when he asked: What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid, the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second is capable of infinite extension . . .
Donald Horne had argued presciently in The Lucky Country (1964) that the sheer abundance of our mineral base and ‘lucky’ elements in our history retarded some aspects of our social, economic and technological development. People in other nations—Swedes, Finns, Israelis, Japanese —had to live by their wits (they starved if they did not). But we always had stuff to dig up and sell and that determined our concept of value. Years later, when I told Donald how much he had influenced the writing 315
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 316
A THINKING REED
of Sleepers, he seemed embarrassed: ‘I’d really forgotten all those technology bits.’ Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting was a powerful influence, comprehensive and compelling, with its careful analysis of long historical trends. Bell had made the familiar transition from socialist to liberal to conservative. I corresponded with Bell and talked to him, but we never met. In Sleepers I proposed a five-sector analysis of the labour force, with a new Quinary Sector covering domestic and quasi-domestic employment (much of it unpaid)—provision of meals, accommodation, laundry and home cleaning, child care, repairs and maintenance, gardening, sexual services.As the two-income family became common, many women transferred from the domestic economy to the market economy, performing similar services for low or insecure wages. I demonstrated that employment in ‘services’ became the largest employment sector in the Australian colonies in the 19th century, long before Britain, the United States, Germany or France. Yoneji Masuda founded the Japan Computer Usage Development Institute (JACUDI) and wrote Social Impact of Computerisation in 1972. It contained a valuable matrix setting out the major differences between pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial societies, and he allowed me to reproduce it in Sleepers, Wake! In Tokyo in July 1978 he introduced me to his translator, Andrew Hughes, who had been my first political mentor in Caulfield in the 1940s. This was a major surprise. In December 1978 Malcolm Fraser had set up a Committee of Inquiry into Technological Change in Australia (CITCA), chaired by Sir Rupert Myers. In 1979 I wrote a long submission,‘Implications of a Post Industrial or Post Service Revolution on the Nature of Work’, and gave evidence before the Committee. I noted that of Australia’s 784 Members of Parliament only one made a submission to CITCA.A four-volume report, Technological Change in Australia, was published in 1980, debated for two hours in the House of Representatives, then largely ignored. It urged rapid adoption of new technology, recommended consultation with unions and a ‘social safety net’ to provide compensation for workers displaced or retrenched. The Fraser Government adopted most of the report, but rejected the social safety net. Because I aspired to make a grand synthesis in Sleepers,Wake! linking politics, history, economics, science, technology, education, the concept of time-use value, psychology and information theory, I hurled myself 316
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 317
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
into reading. I began with John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) and Karl Marx’ major works, Grundrisse (Outlines: 1857–58) and Das Kapital (Capital: four volumes, from 1867, the last published posthumously). When I began writing Sleepers, Keynes’ critique of the classical economists’ dogma that the economy was a self-regulating mechanism was out of fashion. The Keynesian model of government intervention in the economy had been broadly accepted during Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ and in Britain and Australia during World War II. They came under sustained attack from the neo-classicists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, who argued for the primacy of the market. Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in May 1979 destroyed the Keynesian consensus which had dominated British economic policy since the 1940s. Keynes was prophetic in raising the issue of technological unemployment. He argued that ‘mankind is solving its economic problem’ but that ‘the permanent problem of the human race’ will be ‘how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well’. But he also emphasised the need to balance long-run and short-term factors. ‘This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.’ I admired Keynes’ range of expertise and his urbanity. He used to say: ‘If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion. What do you do, sir?’ Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was a tour de force, elegantly written, explaining the transition between small-scale craft production to largescale factory production and the development of markets, which was later called ‘the Industrial Revolution’. His explanation of the division of labour and development of specialisation, while not his own, was compelling, with his celebrated example of pin making. So was his concept of ‘the invisible hand’, the idea that pursuit of self-interest actually promotes the benefit of society. Smith was a far more attractive figure than his hard-faced advocates will admit, not a mere rationaliser of greed. He distinguished between ‘productive labour’, essentially producers of tangible goods and services, and ‘unproductive labour’, in which he includes the army and navy, churchmen, lawyers, men of letters, buffoons and musicians. He was not an advocate of work for work’s sake, and took a position close to the classical Greeks. He urged high wages, that work 317
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 318
A THINKING REED
should be of moderate duration and that education should be generally available. Smith’s disciples ignored his irony and concern for noneconomic ends. Marx wrote 80 years after Smith when the Industrial Revolution was well advanced, when ownership of the means of production depended on capital, creating a large ill-paid industrial proletariat in England. He coined the term ‘alienation’ to describe the condition of the workers. His most original book was Grundrisse, dashed off at great speed as the outline of a vast incomplete work of which Das Kapital was to be a part. First published in Moscow in 1939, its first English translation only appeared in 1973. In Grundrisse Marx quoted from The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties . . ., a pamphlet published in 1821 by an anonymous English radical, probably Thomas Hodgskin: ‘The first indication of real national wealth and prosperity is that people can work less . . . Wealth is liberty— liberty to seek recreation—liberty to enjoy life—liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time [and Marx italicised the words] and nothing more’. This is an elitist view, but it takes a very optimistic view of the human condition. Nearly two centuries later we have not yet grasped the power of the idea. Marx had read Adam Smith carefully and accepted his thesis that there are two basic and fundamentally contradictory forms of employment and time use in society, labour/time saving and labour/time absorbing. Marx dismissed the idea that production and wealth creation could be ends in themselves. His words, in Grundrisse, Notebook V, now appear prescient: Thus the view [in antiquity], in which the human being appears as the aim of production regardless of his limited national, religious and political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, in which production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production.
The idea of the rise of a managerial class began with Marx’ bête noir Andrew Ure, although Marx picked the idea up and expanded it in Capital with his prediction of a white-collared managerial and professional class entirely divorced from the ownership of capital: ‘An orchestra conductor need not own the instruments of his orchestra . . . the capitalist’s work does not originate in the purely capitalist process of production . . . [but] from the social form of the labour process’. * * Karl Marx, Capital, vol. III, pp. 385–8. 318
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 319
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
Both Smith and Marx were far less dogmatic than their followers represent them to be. Marx told his wayward son-in-law, Paul Lafargue,‘What is certain is that I am no Marxist’ (quoted by Engels in a letter to Eduard Bernstein). I was careful not to read Alvin Toffler. His Future Shock (1970) had been a bestseller and I wanted to avoid even an indirect influence from a contemporary working in the same area; but, I did draw on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano (1952) which described a world in which the unskilled were dragooned into a huge ‘Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps’. In writing Sleepers, I was deeply influenced by Ivan Illich, Nikolai Kondratiev and Claude Shannon. Ivan Illich (1926–2002), a controversial social theorist born in Austria but later an American citizen, developed heretical, radical and original ideas about institutions and policies—education, medicine, energy and employment. A polymath fluent in several languages, I met him in Australia and in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he worked for decades. He left the priesthood in 1969 and taught at American universities. His Deschooling Society (1971), Energy and Equity (1973) and Medical Nemesis (1975) all crackled with new ideas, many of them exaggerated and cranky. But they forced readers to think: that children learn more from informal education than from teachers; private motoring wastes scarce resources of space, time and energy; modern medicine creates a disproportionate expenditure on therapeutic treatment, compared to public health. In The Right to Useful Unemployment (1979) he argued that the great majority of employment comprised ‘shadow work’, activity that we come to accept as an inevitable part of modern urban life but which we could do without or perform for ourselves. He was a nomadic figure, an intellectual Don Quixote. A major element in Sleepers was the history of innovation and how it seemed to develop in bursts. The Russian economist Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratiev (1892–1938) proposed an interesting thesis about long waves in economic life which he thought marked the period from 1789 to 1920. Kondratiev, a tragic figure, was liquidated by Stalin and has never been rehabilitated. I tried to reconcile Kondratiev’s long waves with bursts of innovation but, although his thesis is fascinating, they do not fit convincingly. The ‘long waves’ generated an extensive literature and Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets has proposed some modifications of his thesis. 319
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 320
A THINKING REED
Claude Shannon (1916–2001), a mathematician who had worked at the Bell Laboratories, had been co-author with Warren Weaver of The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949). Regarded as the pioneer of information theory, he developed Ludwig Boltzmann’s insight that ‘entropy is missing information’. During World War II he had worked on encryption. His impact on everyday life has been enormous (he should have won a Nobel Prize) but he never achieved public recognition. I visited his house outside Boston in 1981 and he showed me his collection of robotised models, including a maze-solving mechanical mouse and a miraculous juggling machine. After the first draft of Sleepers was well advanced, Oxford University Press received some deeply hostile reports by referees from Melbourne University, whose names I never knew although I read their critiques closely. One comment sticks in my head,‘Jones is not the Australian Marx’. I never thought I was but, perversely, the charge stimulated me. I thought, ‘This is not a trivial accusation’. The referees objected that the book was too broad in scope, too historical for the economists, too economic for the historians, too political for the general reader, was destined to fall between those celebrated stools, would be a publishing disaster and should be buried at the crossroads with a stake through its heart. I was enraged by the narrowness of the reviews, returned my advance to Oxford and tore up the contract. I was confident about the importance of my theme and optimistic about placing the book elsewhere. David Cunningham, Oxford’s Managing Director, asked me to reconsider. After further discussion, I suggested that the book be refereed by a historian with strong economic interests, and proposed Hugh Stretton. David Cunningham agreed at once. Educated at Melbourne, Oxford and Princeton, Hugh had been Professor of History at Adelaide University 1954–68, then demoted himself to Reader so that he could devote himself to applying historical method and lateral thinking to social problems. I knew that his book Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) had been roundly rejected by every academic publisher, so he produced it himself. It became a bestseller and he gave all the royalties to a charity, the Brotherhood of St Laurence. There was a problem about Hugh’s availability because he was about to leave for York University as a visiting professor. Could he find the time to review and/or salvage the book? He could and did. Hugh proposed radical surgery, shortening the book, changing the order of the chapters, avoiding complicated names or technical descriptions, using some diagrams, having fewer long quotations and more 320
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 321
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
summaries, the language less terse and more expansive. He concluded that Sleepers,Wake! was potentially an important book, tackling major issues in an original and deeply thoughtful way, provocatively written, persuasively argued and potentially a bestseller. David speedily accepted Hugh’s report and appointed Sarah Dawson as my editor, later assisted by Louise Sweetland. Assiduous and penetrating, energetic and constructive, their contributions were decisive. While completing Sleepers I spoke interminably, in and out of the Commonwealth Parliament, on the impact of technology on employment and on information theory. Then in July 1979 the ALP’s National Conference in Adelaide set up a New Technology Task Force, a large, representative group chaired by Bob Hogg and with me as secretary, to recommend changes to party policy. I wrote most of the 72-page report which was unanimously adopted by the task force in December 1981. I tried to get the interest and support of John Button, by then Labor’s Senate Leader and a rising star in Caucus, both for the report and the book. He said,‘Mmm. Mmm’ to both, but made no offer to assist. He had already decided that he wanted the Industry portfolio when Labor won office and hoped to achieve reform by cautiously cajoling business leaders. He may have been embarrassed by a radical alternative scenario which predicted that many existing industries would have a short life expectancy. Button and Hayden combined, oddly, with Chris Hurford (then spokesman for Manufacturing Industry) in the Shadow Cabinet to scuttle the report. This was largely because of the growing tension between supporters of Bill Hayden and his challenger Bob Hawke. Neither wanted new controversial policy areas to be opened up. Button persuaded Hayden to push Hurford out of Manufacturing Industry in 1983 and took the job himself. Sleepers had many special features, beginning with historical analysis. I argued that the impact of technology had been to increase productivity in specific areas and, in the medium or long term, to ‘release’ workers who could be used, over a period, to create other forms of work. Historic shifts in labour force trends since the Industrial Revolution occurred in three stages. First was the pre-industrial economy where most people spend most of their time, effort and income in producing or consuming necessities: food, water, shelter and fuel. Pre-industrial societies are also known as subsistence economies or poor countries. Then came the industrialised economy, marked by a rapid increase in the proportion of people living in towns or cities, producing consumer durables, tangible services and urban 321
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 322
A THINKING REED
infrastructures—houses, water supply, roads, railways and cars. The transition from subsistence, where production was consumed within the family or the village, was accompanied by a loss of self-sufficiency and a rise in mutual dependence marked by a rise in employment performing services. A grows the grain, B transports it, C sells it, D makes bread from it, E sells the bread, and so on. Colonial Australia, with its unusual history of urban concentration, was probably the first ‘service based’ economy in the world with service employment outstripping agriculture in the 1860s. The third stage was a post-industrial economy in which employment is dominated by the production of increasingly marginal, discretionary and interdependent services, for example information, eating out, entertainment, leisure activities, tourism, beauty care, bureaucracy à la Parkinson, reflecting a greater variety of artificially stimulated demands designed to improve the ‘quality of life’ and a decline in self-sufficiency due to ‘division of labour’ being taken to extremes. Fewer people make things; far more now perform services. I insisted that science and technology had changed the quality, length and direction of life in the past century far more than politics, education, ideology or religion. Edison, Bell and Ford shaped human experience more broadly and enduringly than Lenin, Hitler and Mao. I thought the conventional three-part classification of the labour force, in which the Primary Sector was agriculture and mining, the Secondary manufacturing and the Tertiary services, was useless, with three quarters of all workers comprising an undifferentiated residual category. I adopted the four-sector classification proposed by the Americans Marc Porat and Edwin Parker in which services were divided into information workers and the rest, but then went further. I proposed a five-sector analysis in which the Quinary sector included domestic and quasi-domestic labour. People found it hard to believe that in the period 1965 to 1982 when 2 060 000 new jobs were created in Australia, not one of them, net, had been in manufacturing. That sector lost 150 000 jobs (–7.3 per cent) in that period. When I talked to groups and invited listeners to calculate what proportion of the labour force worked in factories, most suggested figures between 60 and 70 per cent. When I asked how many had family members who worked in manufacturing, few hands went up. In a conventional four-sector analysis, people working in the collecting, processing or manipulation of information—teachers, office workers, public servants, managers, workers in banking, insurance, communications and media, whose tools of trade were computers or telephones—were the 322
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 323
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
largest employment area, followed by people who carried out basic, routine and repetitive services—cleaning, delivery, retailing, hospitality, tourism—mostly women, often casual and poorly paid. Sleepers identified the problem of redefining ‘labour/time-use value’, and putting it on the political agenda as well as education practice. Time budgeting and self-management of time are central to personal development, from infancy on. Time is the medium in which we live: the only irreplaceable resource. Using it effectively involves setting priorities. But there is a paradox: time management, historically, has been an instrument of external control. We find it extraordinarily difficult to impute a value to our own time. Friedrich Engels, Marx’ collaborator, argued that the clock, not the steam engine, was the central tool of the Industrial Revolution. Imposing discipline by managers in the factory system was essential to Henry Ford’s model of repetitive mass production, where millions worked at producing identical products at a central place. The organisation of factories, schools, public transport, telephones and telegraph depended on the clock. Individual time management should be liberating. In practice, many people feel a psychological inhibition because of self-doubt about judgment. Even more feel uneasy about the passage of time and have a desperate need to desensitise it, ‘killing time’ by alcohol and drug abuse, especially smoking.Television becomes a major activity substitute. Capacity to manage time is the major distinction between those who exercise power and those on whom it is imposed, the ‘Who/Whom?’ question that Lenin often raised. Significant increases in longevity in the West and Japan since World War II are having profound social, economic, political and educational implications, barely addressed by policy makers. For the first time in human history, retirement has become a definite and significant long-term period in most people’s lives. Most people who retire between 50 and 60 can expect probably 30 years of active life, and many more than 40. In 30 years the working lifetime for many males has fallen from 50 to 35 years, at a time of unprecedented increases in longevity. Phil Ruthven argues that a working lifetime of 80 000 hours has been standard since 1800: the quantum is constant, only the distribution of effort has changed. He also estimates that personal involvement in or exposure to media, news and computing will soon exceed the time involved in paid work, if it has not already done so. 323
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 324
A THINKING REED
Since work has been, along with the family, sport/hobbies/learning, one of the major factors in self-definition (‘Who am I?’), being excluded from paid employment when an individual is still physically fit and mentally alert, can cause acute psychological problems when the transition is very abrupt. Much research is being done on problems of physical disability, very little on the need to redefine time-use value for the prematurely retired. People are incredulous to be told that for a male who lives to 85 years the proportion of a total lifetime (including sleeping, leisure and commuting) spent in paid work amounts to barely one seventh. I argued for serious thinking about policies on leisure, adopting the argument of Michael Young and Peter Willmott that work and leisure are inextricably linked, each losing significance in the absence of the other. Sleepers suggested that the concept of ‘one job for life’ was certain to disappear and would be replaced by ‘modular work’, involving several occupational changes in a reduced working life. I was careful not to predict the collapse of work, which had been glumly asserted by many writers on future trends, and thought that service employment had an almost infinite capacity for expansion, while recognising that many of the jobs created would be part time, low paid and often unsatisfying. The Australian colonies began adopting the eight-hour day (8 ⫻ 6 = 48 hours) in the 1850s. The 44-hour week became law in 1927 and the 40-hour week in 1947. Newspapers often predicted that by the year 2000 the working week would have fallen to 28 hours. In 1983 the standard Australian working week was reduced to 38 hours, but since then, taking overtime into account, hours of work for full-time employees has increased sharply. Australia has among the world’s longest working weeks, 42.3 hours (including overtime) for full-time males. Contrary to what some ill-informed critics thought, I never pushed a ‘high-tech’ agenda. I opposed technological determinism. My campaigning against the damming of the Gordon-below-Franklin wild rivers in Tasmania to generate more hydro-electricity demonstrated a conviction that technological decisions had to be made case by case. In my chapter, ‘The Information Explosion: Threats and Opportunities’, I developed the concept of knowledge as a factor of production, but expressed concern that young people might be so mesmerised by computing that they never took their eyes off the screen. The negative aspect of the ‘knowledge economy’ was the obsession with the commercialisation of research. No profit = no research. I quoted T.S. Eliot (in his chorus from ‘The Rock’): 324
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 325
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
I also promoted discussion of gender issues in the labour force, recognising that far more women were in paid, but often insecure, work in my Quinary Sector, with limited capacity to exert leverage about pay and conditions. Duncan Ironmonger’s Households Research Unit at Melbourne University carried out pioneering work on the value of domestic work. I urged development of a National Population Policy so that the implication of demographic changes, such as ageing, was understood in a historic context. I argued that the political process castrated itself in the 1980s: it accepted the mantra that the laws of economics were like the laws of physics or mathematics, that once discovered they were self-evident and had to be adopted: there was nothing to debate. Physics, mathematics and economics simply explain the world as it is. End of story. I convinced myself that the laws of economics had more in common with biology/medicine or psychology or political science, and are shaped by external factors such as a changing environment, natural disasters, drought, famine, disease. The most original part of Sleepers was what I immodestly called Jones’ Laws (an echo of Parkinson’s), but seven, later eight, in number. The most important laws, Numbers 1, 2 and 6, are central to understanding future patterns of employment: 1 Employment levels are culturally determined. (The questions of whether women work, if people should enter the labour force early or late, or do the same work as their parents, have striking national, regional, class and ethnic variations.) Postcodes determine life outcomes far more than technology. 2 Technological innovation tends to reduce aggregate employment in the large-scale production of goods and services, relative to total market size, after reaching maturation, and to increase employment at lower wage rates in areas complementary to those technologically affected. (Historically, mechanised farming created a labour surplus in the cities, the automation of telephone exchanges led to rapid growth, in quasi-domestic service employment, such as fast food.)
325
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 326
A THINKING REED
6 Rising levels of employment depend on increased demands for a diversity of services, many stimulated by education. Over-specialisation and economic dependence in particular regions on a single employment base, inhibits the development of service activity. (Simple societies reduce the range of jobs available while complex societies enlarge them.)
Later I regretted not adding a Law No. 9: ‘Humans ought not to be performing tasks (except by free choice) that machines can do better. Human dignity is destroyed by attempting the impossible, competing with tireless machines which can work 24 hours each day’. I argued that Australia suffered from an ‘inventory problem’, the conspicuous lack of high-value-added brand-name goods and services for which there is international recognition and demand, and pointed to the success of Sweden, Switzerland and Finland, all countries with far lower populations than Australia, in achieving international market penetration of products which sell on reputation rather than price. Where were the Australian equivalents of Philips,Volvo, Saab, Ikea, L.M. Ericsson, Hasselblad, SKF, Orrefors, Nestlé, Roche, Kone or Nokia? We have done well with films, wine, computer software, educational, medical and construction services, but we generally take it for granted that our exports will be high in volume, low in unit value, except where multinational corporations use Australia as a regional base to assemble and export their products. I thought we ought to experiment with a guaranteed income (or guaranteed minimum income) policy, as advocated in the United States by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his book The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973).The use of sophisticated computing techniques would make it possible to target welfare on an individual basis, meeting the precise needs of a beneficiary and eliminating the waste involved in uniform payments on a massive scale. The book’s three dedicatees were Lewis Mumford, American town planner and social philosopher, author of The Myth of the Machine (1967) and The Pentagon of Power (1970), Simon Nora, the French co-author of The Computerisation of Society (1980) and Hugh Stretton. I never met Mumford although I corresponded and talked to him. I dined with Nora several times in Paris. Stretton became a close friend. The cover of Sleepers, Wake! featured Henry Moore’s sculpture Atom Piece (1963–64). This was a model ultimately cast in bronze in an edition of six for a larger work, Nuclear Energy (1965–66), placed at Chicago University on the site of the world’s first ‘atomic pile’ for sustained and 326
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 327
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
controlled nuclear fission.The ambiguity of the image appealed to me.Was it a dome? a skull? a helmet? the triumph of technology? or a harbinger of something sinister? Moore had invited me to his Hertfordshire estate in Much Hadham in June 1979. I gave him a rough outline of the book, asked if we could use his sculpture and he agreed at once, waiving any fee. The third edition’s cover featured a photograph I took in Toronto of a fullsize plaster maquette of Atom Piece. In the fourth edition a lugubrious portrait of me replaced the sculpture: this was not my idea. I hoped for a ringing endorsement of Sleepers by Gough Whitlam, but I was to be disappointed.‘Far too erudite for me, Comrade!’ Shortly after the first edition appeared I received a delegation from Sudbury, Ontario, determined to transform the city, which had been in the centre of a mining district and had become part of Canada’s rustbelt. They wanted to make Sudbury a ‘science city’, with Sleepers,Wake! as a users’ manual. Could I come over to help them? I explained that with an election coming up, I could give some advice from a distance but was unable to become a consultant. Sudbury has worked out very well, although I cannot say how significant Sleepers was in the transformation. Once Sleepers was published, I began thinking of new ideas for future editions. Ironically, the ALP’s 1984 election advertisements on television faithfully reproduced the traditional employment images of the past—steel works, farms, construction, cars and railways, heavy engineering—and no emerging ones: only a few women in clothing factories, no white-collar workers, and nobody in research or teaching. Information theory was a new contribution to Australian political thinking, and it is not yet on the table. No Prime Minister or Opposition Leader has ever proposed a National Information Policy, let alone made a significant contribution to thinking about it. But the impact of the communications and computing revolution has transformed society and its concept of value. In April 1985, in Boston, I met the formidable American physicist Thomas S. Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He proposed the concept of ‘paradigm shifts’, radical changes in perception which transform our understanding of what is going on, such as the Copernican revolution in astronomy, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, recognition of tectonic plates in geology and the neo-classical revival in economics. Paradigms had been implicit in the first edition of Sleepers, but not explicit. 327
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 328
A THINKING REED
In August 1988 the philosopher Sir Karl Popper invited me to visit him at his house in Croydon, ten miles south of London. We had been corresponding about voting systems and after several exchanges I sent him a copy of Sleepers. He showed me his detailed annotations on almost every page. He warned me sternly against appearing to advocate ‘historicism’, a belief in large-scale laws of historical development as propounded by Marx, Spengler and Toynbee. He was scathing about having Lewis Mumford as a dedicatee because he considered him as a ‘historicist’ and I had to agree that the concept of historic inevitability had been an intellectual underpinning for totalitarianism. He was also concerned that an omniscient state might act to induce market distortions. When Popper died in 1994 his library was put up for auction in London and I submitted a bid for the annotated Sleepers. The auction was called off when the Austrian Government bought the entire collection and put it in the Nationalbibliothek. The American social scientist Peter Drucker (1909–2005) was also arguing along similar lines to me, particularly in his later works, emphasising the breakdown in the relationship between the volume/value of labour input (‘the sweat factor’) and output in the past 200 years. Drucker asserted that the emerging post-industrial society is ‘the first in which not everybody does the same work. This is far more than a social change. It is a change in the human condition . . .’. In a knowledge society, having a hundred or a thousand people performing the same task would be pointless. A hundred or a thousand people can and must create a hundred or a thousand different types of production, highly individualised. People will make their own work. It will depend less on being a servant to a master. Knowledge workers themselves are, Drucker says, already the leading (not ruling) class of the knowledge society. This poses particular problems for the unskilled unemployed. Another important influence for later editions of Sleepers was the English historian and social scientist Peter Laslett, who demonstrated the emergence of a new demographic group, ‘the Third Age’, who lived healthily for decades after retirement. As I was rapidly approaching retirement myself, I took up the cause of the Third Age with enthusiasm and worked with Laslett in Cambridge in 2000 and 2001. The most extensively revised material in the fourth edition of Sleepers dealt with education, especially in the context of lifelong learning, with the prospect that people would be living longer, working more hours but for a reduced proportion of total life, that time budgeting and 328
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 329
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
self-management of time would be central to personal autonomy and development, whether societies could be both tolerant and competitive, and the syllabus problem: whether schools could cope with an exponentially increased knowledge base. As schooling became universal during the Industrial Revolution, schools developed as analogues to factories, with teachers as process workers devoted to uniform delivery of material in a process dominated by the clock. In a post-industrial era, individual learning may displace mass tuition, and tools such as the Internet will transform education beyond recognition. I took up Ivan Illich’s argument that children have the greatest brain development and susceptibility to learning between birth and the age of five and yet, leaving aside traditional nurturing at home, many infants are exposed to informal ‘child minding’ arrangements without exposure to systematic education by trained teachers. In 1780 John Adams, later the second President of the United States, wrote to his wife Abigail from Paris: I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Some would think Adams’ view audacious. Even more would think it frivolous; I see it as unusually long sighted. Adams wrote when the Industrial Revolution was at its very dawn, horses and water power were the main sources of energy and most people toiled on farms to keep themselves alive. The idea of a society where necessary work, repetitive drudgery for subsistence, would fall to a very small proportion of total time use must have seemed a piece of visionary raving to Adams’ contemporaries. Now we have the technological capacity to reduce necessary work towards vanishing point. We could then do all the things that Adams hoped for his grandchildren. We could transform our work society into an activity society. We still have very little idea about the extent of human potential. It is about time we found out. But what of those who lack confidence, led up a blind alley by their limited education and work experience, not to mention billions destitute in the Third World? The huge task of exploring human potential has never been taken seriously. Nor has the equally huge task of meeting 329
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 330
A THINKING REED
human needs. It is the supreme blasphemy that neither has ever been attempted. Bill Hayden, as Governor-General, launched the fourth edition of Sleepers in October 1995. As Samuel Johnson said, nobody is on oath for the wording on a tombstone, and the same is true of a book launch. However, I was grateful that he said: At a time when we seemed helpless before forces far greater than ourselves, Sleepers,Wake! helped make sense of the 80s . . . The challenge Barry puts is this: ‘The new technology with its capacity to eliminate boring, exhausting and dangerous work, can open up a vast range of human opportunities—but will we have the courage to grasp them?’ Barry Jones brings to the task [of analysis] his formidable intellectual gifts, his deep personal commitment to human values and social equity, his long years of experience in politics as a Member of Parliament, the Ministry and currently as President of the Labor Party . . . The themes of this seminal book . . . have been put with clarity, compassion and intellectual rigour.
I only regretted that he had not felt able to say similar things when he was still a Minister under Bob Hawke. I annotated the material entitled ‘a political program for survival and enhanced quality of life’ to indicate that of the 64 policy recommendations made in 1982 only 18 had been adopted by 1995. It was a matter of bitter frustration that there was such strong resistance to making science a policy agenda, so that we responded slowly, and passively, to the information revolution and the rise of biotechnology and failed to adopt imaginative strategies which could have strengthened our economy, promoted innovative education, social welfare and trade policies. Sleepers had a major impact, but a slow one, as graduates who had studied it at school and university adjusted to an intellectual environment which was dominated by technology, little of it originating in Australia. Sleepers made me many enemies, in the Parliament, the bureaucracy, media and business, but on balance my judgment has been vindicated by events. It was set as a text in many universities and schools. More than two decades after its publication, I am gratified by the number of people who stop me in the street or write to tell me of the impact Sleepers had on their understanding of changes in society and their own lives. I regard Sleepers as a major achievement, but it was written so long ago that I can read it objectively, because the author seems to be somebody 330
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 331
SLEEPERS, WAKE!
whom I once knew but lost touch with. Often I come across unfamiliar paragraphs and cannot help thinking, ‘The author was very perceptive. I wonder what happened to him?’ In 1984 I said, ‘If there is one message that I would like to see left behind, engraved on my tombstone, it is this: “Employment levels are essentially culturally determined”.’ I still think so.
331
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 332
CHAPTER 10
ﱗ
Inside the Hawke Government HAWKE: THE PERSONA Of Labor’s ten Prime Ministers, Robert James Lee Hawke was by far the longest serving, holding office for eight years, nine months and ten days, the most successful electorally, having won four campaigns, and the one who left the most controversial political legacy for his party. He changed the Australian economy more than any other Prime Minister, transformed how governments operated, and transfigured the political culture, especially in the ALP. Long before he entered Parliament in 1980, Hawke’s extraordinary popularity as Research Officer and Advocate for the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) 1958–69 and President 1970–80 was unprecedented in Australian public life, and something of a mystery, except to himself. An authentic hero of our times, he was an Oxford-educated larrikin, a charismatic character who could hold his own in any company and mix with all classes, wide reader and sports fanatic, populist and elitist, colourful, always comprehensible, with a triumphalist combination of vanity and sexual energy. He was tailor-made for television. He played an anomalous role as President of the ACTU. He led the trade union movement and at the same time emerged as a mediator who settled disputes between industry and labour, a kind of national fireman, hosing down hot spots. His record in applying consensus in dispute resolution was very important, but the inherent ambiguity between the roles of protagonist and umpire deserves serious analysis. 332
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 333
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
George Polites, then Director-General of the Confederation of Australian Industry, was spokesman and negotiator for the employers during Hawke’s leadership of the ACTU. Polites and Hawke liked and trusted each other: neither had any sympathy for the latter-day ‘take no prisoners’ approach in industrial relations, such as the dispute between the Maritime Union of Australia and Patrick’s. Both worked to preserve the national interest. Hawke was a member of the Reserve Bank board 1973–80, a member of a Committee of Inquiry into Australia’s Manufacturing Industry and served on the International Labour Organisation (ILO) governing board in Geneva. In 1979 Hawke delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures on ‘The Resolution of Conflict’. In them he advanced a mildly corporatist view of government, proposing that future Cabinets should include Ministers recruited from outside Parliament on the basis of their experience, expertise and capacity to speak directly for some section of the community—industry, labour, capital, agriculture—without the mediation of a political process, such as a party or an election. Gorton,Whitlam and Fraser were created Companions of the Order of Australia (AC) after serving as Prime Minister; Hawke was awarded his AC in 1979, a measure of his standing in public life. Hawke had been National President of the ALP from 1973 to 1978 (the name having changed from Federal President in 1975), occasionally clashing with Gough Whitlam and Bill Hayden, was elected to the House of Representatives on 18 October 1980 and displaced Hayden as Parliamentary Leader in a bloodless coup on 3 February 1983. Barely a month later he defeated Malcolm Fraser at a general election and was sworn in as Prime Minister on 11 March 1983. After Menzies and Howard, Hawke ranks as Australia’s third longestserving Prime Minister. In Hawke’s time politics was far more volatile, and the electorate and media far more critical. Menzies had the benefit of a shattered Opposition and the free gift of Democratic Labor Party preferences in four of his eight election wins. But Menzies holds a unique distinction: he was the only Prime Minister to have left (in 1966) at a time of his choosing. All the others died, had failing health, were defeated at elections or were pushed out by their colleagues. Bob Hawke did not appear to have grasped this brutal reality in our political history. Hawke’s success transformed Australian politics, demoralised the Opposition and created an unprecedented discipline and professional 333
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 334
A THINKING REED
competence in office. Labor’s victories in 1983, 1984, 1987 and 1990, for which Hawke deserves most of the credit, were in sharp contrast to the world-wide failure of Social Democratic/Labour parties in the 1980s, other than Spain and New Zealand. François Mitterrand won France’s Presidency twice but the Socialist Party was in bad shape. However, Hawke threw away a 25-seat majority in a House of 125 Members by calling a premature election in December 1984, returning with a 16-seat margin in an enlarged House of 148. The 1990 election was relatively close, a nineseat majority, which depended on allocation of Green preferences. He was an outstanding communicator, a masterly advocate, a compelling and fair negotiator, with a great gift for analysing and summarising argument, generally effective on television and radio. His skills in mastering briefs and chairing Cabinet were exceptional. Hawke was the only Australian Prime Minister without extensive parliamentary experience, whose public profile was essentially extraparliamentary and who never faced Parliament as Leader of the Opposition. He was not, and would not claim to have been, a great parliamentary performer, unlike Menzies, Whitlam, Keating and Howard. Hawke often appealed directly to the electorate via television, essentially by-passing the Parliament. Howard, effective in Parliament, uses commercial radio skilfully. Neal Blewett, a Rhodes Scholar himself, observed in a perceptive essay* that after Hawke took up his Rhodes Scholarship in 1953: Oxford left little imprint on him either intellectually or culturally.This was in part the result of Hawke’s pragmatic decision to turn his back on the challenge of that ancient university and to do in Oxford, of all places, a research degree on an aspect of the Australian arbitration system. He thus missed out on Oxford’s distinctive teaching, while his choice of research topic isolated him intellectually from the postgraduate activities of the time. But this decision was typical of Hawke. Learning was for practical purposes, there was no time to waste even among the dreaming spires; he very much personified intelligence in action.
Hawke had little feeling for the uniqueness of institutions. He failed to recognise or appreciate the specific qualities of the Parliament, or for that matter universities, the ABC or CSIRO. * Michelle Grattan (ed). Australian Prime Ministers, p. 383. 334
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 335
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
He was far more comfortable with individuals, practical people rather than peddlers of abstractions, and very much at ease with the corporate world, the big end of town.
HOW GOVERNMENT WORKED I was privileged to be part of the Labor front bench that swept to office with Bob Hawke in March 1983.The first two of Hawke’s four Ministries were unusually capable, probably the ablest in Commonwealth history. Bob Hawke inherited Bill Hayden’s Shadow Ministers, many far closer to Hayden than to himself but who concluded, after the Flinders byelection in December 1982, that Hawke was more likely to beat Malcolm Fraser. Discipline and concentration on policy formulation was important in the Hayden Shadow Ministry. Ralph Willis, Mick Young, Gareth Evans, Kim Beazley, Clyde Holding were close to Hawke and probably gained from direct personal contact, as did later Ministers Robert Ray and Gerry Hand. Michael Duffy shared Hawke’s keen sporting interests but was closer personally than politically. Keating was not close to either Hawke or Hayden. Bowen, Button, Walsh, Grimes and Blewett were skilled and experienced long before their service as Hawke Ministers. These twenty-seven Ministers, eighteen of them graduates, encompassed a great diversity of experience—lawyers, teachers, university academics, union and party officials, state parliamentarians, retailers, an economist, chartered accountant, policeman, meat wholesaler, farmer, locomotive driver, medical practitioner, clergyman, shearer, waterside worker. (Several were in more than one category.) However, there was no necessary correlation between academic achievement and ministerial effectiveness. Keating and Young were uncontaminated by tertiary education, and Walsh had enough exposure to confer lifelong immunity. The Ministry included three Rhodes Scholars—Bob Hawke (1953), Neal Blewett (1957) and Kim Beazley (1973)—and another distinguished Oxford graduate, Gareth Evans. Four of Hawke’s Ministers had served in the Whitlam Government—Hayden, Bowen, Uren and, briefly, Keating. Given more recent arrangements in the ALP about pre-selections for safe seats, it is unlikely that such a spread of talents would be available from the House of Representatives, or the Senate, where endorsement is now generally a reward for factional fidelity. I asked a number of Hawke’s Ministers if they believed that they could have won pre-selection for safe or winnable seats under existing factional arrangements, and received a 335
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 336
A THINKING REED
series of ‘No’s’, from Hayden, Button, Evans, Grimes, Blewett, Dawkins, Kerin, Ryan, Walsh and Duffy. I would have answered ‘No’ too. All of us had a life outside the major factions and won pre-selection against them. It would not be possible now. Hawke’s first major change was to restructure Cabinet government. In 1956 Menzies had divided his Ministry between an inner Cabinet and outer Ministers and this model was followed by Holt, McEwen, Gorton and McMahon. In 1972 Whitlam preferred the Menzies model, but Caucus voted in favour of a full Cabinet of twenty-seven. The first Hawke Government had five additions to the Shadow Ministry: Duffy, Cohen, Holding, Beazley and Howe. Hawke revived Coalition practice with a Cabinet, originally of 13, then expanded to 15, with an outer Ministry of 14 (later reduced to 12). The composition of the first Hawke Cabinet is instructive, demonstrating that factional allegiances were not yet institutionalised. It was the last ‘free vote’ to be held in Caucus: all subsequent ballots have been ‘managed’. Only five Ministers were aligned with the Right (Hawke, Bowen, Willis, Keating, Evans), six—most of them former Hayden supporters—were non-aligned (Button, Hayden, Young, Walsh, Ryan, Scholes), one was a Left-leaning Tasmanian (Grimes) and the Left faction had a single representative (West). A few months later Dawkins (nonaligned, later active in the Centre Left) and Kerin (originally Left, then non-aligned, later reluctantly in the Right) were invited to join the inner sanctum. I was never in Cabinet. In February 1984 Bill Hayden formed the Centre Left faction, sometimes called the ‘Hayden Protection Society’. The Expenditure Review Committee (ERC), a very small group, dominated the Budgetary process and this effectively imposed a system of democratic centralism on financial outlays. The ERC locked in the Cabinet, the Cabinet locked in the full Ministry (which rarely met, in any case) and the Ministry locked in the Caucus. Ultimately, on many sensitive issues such as selling the Commonwealth Bank or Qantas, the Government was able to impose its will on National Conference and the Party generally. Hawke’s appeal was powerful and ultimately persuasive:‘Do you want to destroy the Government by forcing us to break our Budget targets?’, and so on. As Mike Steketee wrote: The authority of Cabinet spilled over into the Ministry and down to Caucus. Science Minister Barry Jones asked Communications Minister Michael Duffy on one occasion after an economic policy announcement following a meeting 336
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 337
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
of the full Ministry: ‘How did that happen?’ ‘It’s purely a matter of numbers’, Duffy replied.‘There’s four of them and only 23 of us’.*
On 14 July (Bastille Day) 1987 domination by Cabinet was further increased with the creation of mega-Departments, in which Ministries such as Education, Trade and Science were abolished and absorbed into larger entities, headed by a Cabinet Minister. Outer Ministers essentially became ‘Ministers assisting’. This major change, coup even, was executed by an Order in Council, signed by the Governor-General, published in the Government Gazette. It was never endorsed by Cabinet or Caucus. In 1990 the structure of executive government was changed once more by appointment of Parliamentary Secretaries. This proved to be a useful extension of Prime Ministerial patronage. Hawke’s governments were free of the bitter personal differences which hurt Whitlam’s administration.And, unlike Whitlam, he had undeviating support from the ACTU leaders Simon Crean and Bill Kelty.
THE NATIONAL CORPORATISM
ECONOMIC SUMMIT: AN EXPERIMENT IN
In April 1983 the Hawke Government convened the National Economic Summit Conference (NESC) in the House of Representatives chamber. It comprised representatives of Commonwealth and State Governments, capital, labour, churches, community interest and welfare groups, all sitting together. The Summit was essentially a stroking exercise, a forum to bring together representatives of vested interests and ask them what they wanted. It also signalled that the Hawke Government was to be open and participatory, willing to work outside the square. Then a compromise was worked out. Unfortunately what NESC participants wanted—more of the same, only more gently—could not be delivered in the face of rapid change in the international economy and Australia’s stark choice of exposure or retreat. It was a corporatist model of decision making and Bob Hawke set great store by it. Its primary purpose was to provide a basis for the Accord on prices and incomes, to create and cement trust between government, * John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre (eds), True Believers, pp. 140, 142. The four would have been Hawke, Dawkins, Walsh and Keating. 337
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 338
A THINKING REED
industry and trade unions. Hawke succeeded remarkably in that. Twenty years later he still referred to the Summit as having established the basis for Australia’s new economic direction. The reality was somewhat different. The Summit produced a Communiqué which was agreed to by every participant except Queensland’s Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The Communiqué endorsed: • • • • • • • • •
Support for a centralised approach to wage fixation (paras 19–23); Wage and dividend restraint (24–26); Government job creation schemes (36); ‘Retaining programs of protection in the current economic climate’ (38); ‘Introduction of new technology . . . to be planned and provided for after full consultation with workers and their unions’ (39); Raising educational retention rates for the young and participation rates at tertiary institutions (45); ‘Stable health system as a matter of urgency’ (48); ‘Creation of a small, independent, representative Economic Planning Advisory Council’ (53–54); and Support for consensus in decision making (54).
There was no reference to the global economy, foreign debt levels, entry of foreign banks, floating the dollar, taxation reform, adopting free-market economics.‘The challenge of Australia’s gravest economic and social crisis in 50 years’ was referred to but without examination of its nature, cause or dimension, let alone proposing solutions. Many of the policy agreements listed in the Communiqué were irrelevant soon after the ink had dried.
HAWKE’S ACHIEVEMENTS In a 2003 interview,* 20 years after becoming Prime Minister, Bob Hawke set out his major achievements: 1 The economic legacy—floating the dollar, entry of foreign banks, reduced protection, coming to grips with the global economy. * Michael Gordon, ‘Bob Hawke on his loves, enduring legacies and life after politics’, The Age, Melbourne, 1 March 2003. 338
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 339
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
2 Bringing Australia together—consensus, not confrontation. 3 International relations—changing Asian and US links. 4 Massive contribution to egalitarianism—education, social security, the social wage. 5 Environment—World Heritage (Tasmania, wet tropics in Queensland, Antarctica). It is a very substantial record.
THE ECONOMIC LEGACY—THATCHER WITH FEELING The centralised, interventionist model of economic management developed by Curtin and Chifley, including centralised wage fixing and an arbitration system, was broadly maintained by Menzies, Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam and Fraser but radically modified by Hawke and Keating. After 1996 Howard went much further. After May 1979 Margaret Thatcher engineered a dramatic improvement in the British economy by selling off state-run industries, taking on the trade unions and eliminating feather bedding. Malcolm Fraser had rejected the Thatcherite model, although his Treasurer, John Howard, became a convert. So did Hawke, Dawkins and Walsh long before 1983, then Keating, Willis and Button after we won office. Labor’s political elite imposed the idea of the new economic direction—the ‘One Big Idea’— top down, starting with the first Budget. It was a paradigm shift in which the economy became the destination, not the vehicle. There was a U-turn between what Labor promised in the March 1983 election campaign and the relatively dry, non-interventionist economic line taken in the 1983–84 Budget. In the election Labor pledged selective support for ‘sunrise industries’, strengthening Australia’s research base, maintaining tariff protection and keeping out foreign banks. Hawke explained in his Memoirs* that he had long been an opponent of tariffs and that Treasury’s very unfavourable projected Budget figures for 1984–85 made a rapid change in Labor’s traditional direction inevitable. The Australian dollar was floated in December 1983, having been artificially high for years, foreign banks were allowed to operate, protection was steadily reduced and Australia came to grips with the implications of a global economy. Government operations contracted. * Bob Hawke, The Hawke Memoirs, pp. 64, 81–2. 339
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 340
A THINKING REED
Bob Hawke was the initial driver of this policy which was welcomed enthusiastically by younger officers in Treasury and Finance. They felt that the Australian economy had been regarded as a patchwork quilt, in which a series of discrete pieces were sewn together so that instead of a single comprehensive policy, there was a mass of exceptions and anomalies, bounties, tariffs, concessions, one for each industry, so that coal, cotton, sugar, wheat, textiles, motor manufacturing, electronics were treated in isolation, with lobbyists (and unions) engaged in applying pressure, much of it political or regional, to ensure maintenance of existing support. This change of direction was a leap of faith, made easier because the Opposition supported the same line, even urging the Government to go further and faster. The media gave general support, but offered little explanation. The new economic direction demonstrated Hawke’s great leadership qualities, discarding some of the sacred tenets of the Labor movement without splitting the Party. The True Believers were uneasy but unwilling to damage the new Government. Failure would have destroyed him and the Government. Only Hawke could have pulled it off because of his influence with the ACTU leadership and the trade unions. He rightly claims to have been the driving force for economic change in 1983–84. However, Keating, a relatively late convert, took the changes even further. Electors felt that they were left out of the loop, with little public or even Parliamentary debate and not much attempt to explain or involve. On impulse, following an interview on talk-back radio, Hawke called another Summit Conference in July 1985, this time on taxation reform. A Goods and Services Tax was rejected, but capital gains and fringe benefits taxes were adopted. Hawke was also the earliest advocate of privatisation of public assets, and income tax rates fell. Emphasis on smaller government and reduced Budget outlays had a serious impact on Commonwealth–State relations. In the early Hawke years, States resented large cuts to payments from general tax revenue as the Commonwealth reduced public sector spending and borrowing. Payment of revenue to the States was the largest and easiest Budget line to cut. To remedy the shortfall, States moved aggressively into gaming, leading to a proliferation of casinos and gambling machines. Introducing enterprise bargaining was a surprising innovation in the Hawke years, with its emphasis on individual contracts and implied repudiation of centralised wage fixing, collectivism and union solidarity. 340
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 341
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
BRINGING AUSTRALIA TOGETHER Hawke’s theme of ‘Recovery, Reconciliation and Reconstruction’ suited the mood of the times, when Australia was suffering from high unemployment, high inflation, a long drought, tragic bushfires and a period of industrial confrontation. Hawke’s appeal to consensus, compromise and finding the middle ground was attractive to voters, and he had natural skills as a campaigner. Hazel Hawke was a warmly supportive partner, popular and widely admired. In the first year of the Hawke Government there were remarkable improvements in national performance without requiring direct government intervention: rains came, seasonal failures in 1982–83 were followed by abundant harvests in 1983–84; in industrial affairs an era of confrontation was replaced by consensus, underpinned by the Prices and Incomes Accord; there was a climate of goodwill and heightened public morale. Improvements in the first year, particularly spectacular rises in employment and falling inflation, helped to create a feeling in Canberra that the economy was a self-correcting mechanism (as the neo-classical economists asserted) and that government’s role was merely to remove impediments and get out of the way of development.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Hawke had developed extensive overseas contacts through his membership of the governing board of the ILO, and foreign policy was high on his political agenda. He was well served by his two Ministers for Foreign Affairs (with Trade added after 1987): Bill Hayden, before his translation to Yarralumla in 1988, and Gareth Evans. His longest-serving Defence Minister Kim Beazley was a protégé, although Hawke baulked at Beazley’s proposal that we send troops to Fiji after the 1987 coup. Hawke was committed to a close relationship with the United States and developed friendships with Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. He attacked David Lange* and the New Zealand Government over their refusal to allow nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships and submarines in New Zealand ports, an action which virtually ended the ANZUS agreement in 1984. * He was irritated when Victoria, under John Cain’s Government, followed New Zealand’s policy. 341
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 342
A THINKING REED
Nevertheless, Hawke simultaneously pursued negotiations for the Closer Economic Relationship with New Zealand and he urged the Americans not to take punitive measures. However, he failed to secure Caucus support for allowing the US to test MX missiles off the Australian coast; this stands out as his only policy defeat inside the Party. Hawke actively promoted freer international trade, regarding open trade arrangements and the securing of international peace and security as inextricably linked. In 1986 John Dawkins as Trade Minister initiated the Cairns Group of 14 agricultural free traders who negotiated within the seven-year Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. Hawke was the architect of Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation in 1989, originally without United States participation. Hawke cultivated good relations with China, although he was deeply distressed by the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and permitted dissident students to stay. Premier Zhao Ziyang of China made an official visit in April 1983, followed by Li Peng in 1988. While Hawke had a warm relationship with the Indian Premier, Rajiv Gandhi, Indonesia was lower in priority and President Suharto did not visit, although we had barely offered a squeak of criticism about the occupation of East Timor. Australia was outspoken in its opposition to the death penalty and torture. Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia was deeply offended when Hawke attacked the hanging of two Australians, Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers, for drug offences in July 1986 as ‘barbaric’. Michael Duffy, as Attorney-General, promoted Australian ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including the protocol for abolition of the death penalty, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We maintained our long-term interest in the Middle East. Hawke was very close to the Jewish community, especially in Melbourne, deeply committed to Israel and its security, and tried to broker a long-term peace settlement in the Middle East. In the Gulf War of January–February 1991, Australia followed the United States’ lead and sent troops to the multinational force, emphasising that we were following the United Nations mandate to use force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
MASSIVE CONTRIBUTION TO EGALITARIANISM The Prices and Incomes Accord, largely negotiated by Ralph Willis, was central to Hawke’s social, economic and welfare policies with its emphasis on the ‘social wage’, the provision of a social safety net, including access to 342
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 343
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
public education, public hospitals and other community facilities as a compensation for not seeking significant wage increases. The Accord was a major factor in keeping inflation rates low for several years.* The ALP’s Committee of Inquiry into the 1996 election defeat found that the Accord, considered a great success in the early Hawke years, turned sour when many workers felt that their living standards were eroding, and were not consoled by tax reductions or the social safety net. Social security was significantly targeted, moving away from middleclass welfare to be based on a needs principle. The Family Assistance Supplement was directed to the children of poor working families. Neal Blewett, as Health Minister, succeeded in establishing the Medicare health scheme, restoring the universal cover that Whitlam and Hayden had legislated for a decade earlier only to have it hacked about during the Fraser years. Blewett also had notable success in directing a public campaign to minimise the impact of HIV/AIDS. Although education was a State responsibility, the Hawke Government can claim credit for a massive increase in school retention rates and participation in higher education. However, while acknowledging Hawke’s commitment to egalitarianism, there is a paradox: in the 1980s, the decade of conspicuous consumption emphasising that ‘greed is good’, the gap between rich and poor in Australia widened significantly. Without Hawke’s ‘social wage’, the gap would have been even wider. In 1986 the Hawke Government proved to be shaky on Aboriginal land rights and equal suffrage for all Parliaments, deferring to pressure from Brian Burke, anxious that either issue could defeat his government in Western Australia. However, Labor set up a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and its report shook, however briefly, public apathy. Hawke raised the political profile of women, with the Affirmative Action Act, Sex Discrimination Act, the Family Assistance Package and ratifying the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women. Many more girls and women had access to education. Child care centres were subsidised, a major change. Susan Ryan, Ros Kelly, Margaret Reynolds and Wendy Fatin served as Ministers, Joan Child was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, Helen Williams became Secretary of the Department of Education, Mary * An Accord was first proposed by Bill Hayden but not taken up by the ACTU. 343
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 344
A THINKING REED
Gaudron was the first woman on the High Court and Elizabeth Evatt the first Chief Justice of the Family Court; several women served as Federal Court Justices. Women were influential in Ministers’ offices and were appointed to Commonwealth boards.
ENVIRONMENT—WORLD HERITAGE Bob Hawke claims credit and satisfaction, rightly, for his work in preserving the Tasmanian wilderness area and the wet tropics in Queensland, and prohibiting mining in Antarctica. In the 1983 election campaign, as Shadow Minister for the Environment, I negotiated a preference deal with the Democrats and environmental groups in return for our pledge to stop the Tasmanian Government from damming the Franklin–Lower Gordon wild rivers, an area which Malcolm Fraser had put on the World Heritage List in 1982. Our stance was unpopular in Tasmania and we held no House of Representatives seats there until 1987. The dams issue was bitter and sometimes violent in Tasmania but helped to win seats on the mainland, and Bob Hawke gave strong leadership. I was heavily involved in the Tasmanian protests, visited the area, gasped at its beauty and discussed strategy with David Bellamy, Bob Brown and Norm Sanders in Strahan. Many protesters remembered the tragic and pointless submersion of Lake Pedder in 1972 for another Tasmanian hydro-electric project. The Hawke Government legislated, using the external affairs power in the Constitution, to protect the Tasmanian wild rivers, and the legislation was upheld by the High Court, a significant extension of Commonwealth power. Under Hawke, four more Australian properties were inscribed on the World Heritage List—Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (1987), Central Eastern Rainforests Reserves (1987), Wet Tropics of Queensland (1988) and Shark Bay, Western Australia (1991). He received strong support from his Environment Ministers, especially Barry Cohen and Graham Richardson, the latter an unlikely but effective choice. Hawke became passionately committed to a mining ban at Coronation Hill, in the Northern Territory, an Aboriginal sacred site, and his Memoirs asserted that he would have resigned if Cabinet had knocked him back. Saving the Antarctic from mining was a major achievement, and all his own work. Gareth Evans and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade thought, at first, that it was mission impossible. But Hawke followed 344
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 345
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
Jacques Cousteau’s advice, lobbied effectively and secured international agreement in June 1991, overcoming objections by the United States, United Kingdom and Japan. In the Arts, there was a failure of nerve and a succession of Ministers without a deep commitment to expanding the range of human experience, seeking the abundant life. An increasingly commercialised film industry lost much of the originality and excitement of the 1970s. All governments are sensitive to criticism. Bob Hawke was often exasperated by sharp questioning by the ABC, and successive boards (even members appointed by Labor) felt that the organisation suffered in the Budget process, especially after 1987. Hawke and Keating were of the same mind. Labor could have legislated to disperse ownership in broadcasting and television, as recommended by Michael Duffy, but failed the test.
HAWKE’S LEGACY: A FAUSTIAN BARGAIN Bob Hawke won four elections in a Faustian bargain which took the ALP in a new direction, responding to the emerging global economy, outflanking the Coalition and moving both the ALP and the whole political process to the Right. The Party also lost, if not its soul, then a clear sense of its core beliefs. Now, with ALP policy overlapping the Coalition agenda, it is hard to define the Party’s core beliefs. The Hawke Government had very substantial achievements, but eight major factors can be identified which have contributed to the debility of the Australian Labor Party nationally (in striking contrast to its clean sweep in the States and Territories): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
displacement of politics by administration; increased role for the bureaucracy; reduced role for the Parliament; marginalisation of policy debate in the ALP; alienation of Labor voters from Party processes; entrenchment of factionalism as a management technique; commodification of education and research; and failure to consult, listen and explain, e.g. on asset sales.
The Hawke Government was efficient, effective and disciplined, and over almost nine years there were few Ministerial blunders or misjudgments. 345
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 346
A THINKING REED
But in an unprecedented term in office for Federal Labor between 1983 and 1996 the Hawke–Keating Governments became remote from their political base. Both Government and Opposition moved to the Right.The politics was pushed out of politics, and replaced by administration. Commitment to market forces displaced a sense of community: with care, we could have had the market tamed by social commitment. Problems were often characterised as technical or financial, rather than moral or ideological. Thus the issue of free university education, a classic aspirational policy from the Whitlam years, was examined in the context of ‘How can we balance the books? How do we apply “user pays” principles?’ However, Hawke came to see free universities as an example of middle-class welfare, involving transfer payments from the poor to the comfortable. In the Hawke years, the bureaucracy played an unprecedented role in policy formulation. The most effective opposition to Labor policy came not from the Coalition in the Parliament but from within the bureaucracy. Policy intervention by the bureaucracy, especially the three co-ordinating Departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and Finance, increased significantly in the Hawke Government and sometimes changed the political agenda by imposing a narrowly economic ideology, often over-riding Party policy. Most departments gave excessive deference to the views of the Department of Finance. It won many engagements by default because agencies which should have argued an alternative view were nervous about being carved up by their bureaucratic peers, and unless they received a big tick in advance were unwilling to submit alternatives to be resolved by Cabinet. (The bureaucracy prefers to settle things in house.) The Hawke Government cultivated excellent relations with the public service, perhaps excessively deferential. Sir Geoffrey Yeend stayed on as Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet until 1986 and John Stone at Treasury until 1984. Few outsiders were brought in, other than Stuart Harris (Foreign Affairs) and Peter Wilenski (in several posts). Over-reliance on the bureaucracy for policy formulation meant that both Government and Party reduced its creative thinking, and when it returned to Opposition in 1996 the party had lost the habit of robust policy formulation and debate. Governments rubber-stamp thousands of decisions every year which emerge from the bureaucratic process when direct political involvement is barely feasible. A high proportion of legislation is initiated and carried 346
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 347
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
through to the stage of Cabinet submission within the bureaucratic process alone. Within Cabinet, the ‘co-ordination’ system, comments from a variety of departments, especially Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and Finance, can determine whether submissions have an easy passage, a difficult one or are defeated. In the Budget-making process, as Ministers became exhausted, bureaucratic inputs were increasingly significant in policy making. ‘Decision pathways’ can determine policy outcomes. If Finance propose a policy, such as the 1986 decision to lift an embargo on exporting uranium to France, which is adopted by the Expenditure Review Committee (ERC), Cabinet is then locked in. Caucus then faces an ultimatum: it must accept a policy it does not like or reject the Budget. But it would be impossible to imagine the uranium decision following a different pathway: Branches→Conference→Caucus→Ministry→ERC. Under Hawke politics was bureaucratised, while under Howard the bureaucracy and armed forces have been politicised, a far more serious situation. Whatever happened to frank and fearless advice? We may have told the occasional porkies, mostly in support of an exaggerated optimism and confidence. But now lies, exaggeration and appeals to fear have become routine, damaging, divisive and destructive to the democratic ethos. The House of Representatives diminished in significance as the Hawke Government edged towards corporatism. In the Hawke years Parliament sat for an average of 61 days a year, falling to 38 days in the election year of 1990. In the British House of Commons the average number of sitting days in a non-election year is 186; in election years sitting days actually increase.We used procedures such as the gag or guillotine far more than in Britain, where party discipline is less rigid and legislation is often amended because of issues raised in debate. The idea of treating debate as if issues mattered would have seemed very threatening to some Hawke Ministers. (Under Howard, sitting days barely increased—to an average of 65.5.) In past decades, significant policy debates at National Conferences have become a rarity and, as numbers of delegates increase, opportunities for sustained debate contract. After an unprecedented period of ALP rule, Party platforms and the process of consultation declined in significance. Traditional policies were often dismissed out of hand as ‘sacred cows’. It is inconceivable that State or National Conferences would have initiated selling off Qantas or the Commonwealth Bank. The decline of the Party reflects the collapse 347
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 348
A THINKING REED
and exhaustion of ideology, generally. It raises the question: ‘Is there any core belief that the ALP will not give up, if asked?’ The political scientist Judith Brett observed: Something has gone seriously wrong with our politics when the leadership of the parties is so isolated from the groups and people they are supposed to represent. Their only real allies are the Canberra press gallery and financial journalists; people such as Paul Kelly who do not seem to find the isolation of the parties’ leadership remarkable, but rather to see it as evidence for the need for the Australian people in general to abandon their ‘sentimental attachments’ to past practice.The role of the leadership thus becomes to cajole, threaten or force the population into submission.*
Allowing for some hyperbole, she makes the point that we have come to accept ‘top down’ policy formation as the norm. ‘Bottom up’ policy making is in retreat. There are some ‘lateral insertions’, direct inputs by powerful lobby groups such as the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Australian Conservation Foundation, Australian Medical Association or National Farmers’ Federation. Greg Holland observed that in the increasingly frequent cycle in which a proposition proceeds from lobbyist→ public servants→Ministers→regulation change, all political scrutiny is completely bypassed. Factionalism became institutionalised as an instrument of internal management in the ALP during the Hawke years, especially after Graham Richardson joined the Caucus in 1983, working with Robert Ray, and the Left began organising to counteract their influence. It has grown steadily ever since. In the 13-year Hawke–Keating era there were fewer serious rows over policy or personalities in the Caucus than during three years of the Whitlam Government. The original Centre Left was a defensive combination of talented individuals which I dubbed ‘the Lonely Hearts Club’ because—as Bill Hayden recorded in his Autobiography—‘nobody loves us’.A squeeze against the Centre Left was soon applied by nationally organised Right and Left factions.
‘DAWKINISATION’ A turning point in the history of Australia’s higher education was the comprehensive reorganisation which was initiated and imposed, after * The Age, 27 February 1993. 348
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 349
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
1987, by John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training. Essentially it involved treating knowledge as a commodity, in which research became a product, and universities trading corporations instead of communities of scholars. ‘Dawkinisation’ may prove to have been the greatest single mistake of the Hawke–Keating Governments. John Sydney Dawkins was a Minister of exceptional energy, capacity and courage, witty, charming, widely read, very good company when not in attack dog mode. Every Department he headed between 1983 and 1993 went through radical change, in striking contrast to his fellow West Australian, Kim Beazley, who held many Ministries in which little changed except the time on the clock. Dawkins came from a privileged background but was deeply committed to Aboriginal land rights and social justice. On economic issues he was a committed free-marketeer, even harder line than Keating, on about the same level as Peter Walsh, another West Australian. Central to Dawkins’ thinking was rejecting the concept of education and research as public goods, asserting that they were private benefits or traded goods to be paid for by beneficiaries (largely drawn from the middle class) and that all values had a cash equivalent. This was absolutely contrary to my philosophy and put me on a collision course with him: Dawkins was to higher education what the then Treasurer Paul Keating was to financial deregulation, and the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was to British politics: the model neo-liberal executive, forcing through a single minded reform crusade with a mix of system planning, market rhetoric and the determination to crush all political opposition. The win-crush ambience of the Dawkins style was heady stuff.*
As Finance Minister he had been the main advocate of the ‘stick’ theory of productivity in research—the setting of ‘efficiency dividends’, so that research agencies had to reduce costs each year. This made sense where finite tasks had to be completed, such as sorting mail, washing dishes or collecting garbage, but not where the task was explaining the universe or building on something unprecedented, as if the Commandments had stopped at eight, Beethoven had confined himself to six symphonies or Michelangelo had been made to choose between the Last Judgment or the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
* Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, The Enterprise University, p. 35. 349
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 350
A THINKING REED
In the Whitlam and Fraser years we used to refer to a ‘binary’ system of tertiary education, that is, ‘universities’ and ‘the others’, comprising specialised institutes of technology and teacher training colleges. Dawkinisation created a single or unitary system, and the name university was applied to the amalgamated bodies so that their numbers increased dramatically. Free tertiary education, a major Whitlam innovation, was abolished and students were obliged to pay a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), which covered part of tuition costs. Despite HECS, total enrolments in higher education rose significantly. However, many working-class and regional areas remain remote from tertiary education. To be fair to Dawkins, he was zealous about increasing access to higher education, faced the prospect of exponential increases in demand for places when increased Budget allocations were likely to be modest, and believed that vocational education should not be a poor relation of the universities. The Dawkins changes, ostensibly egalitarian and democratic in intention, promoted a superficial uniformity in tertiary education, but in practice it reinforced elitism, with research being dominated by ten of our 38 universities. There has been a serious loss of individual expertise and differentiation. Many universities moved away from the universal to the local/regional/commercial, emphasising shortterm job creation, adopting the corporate model of governance, avoiding research into the deepest human issues. With universities increasingly dependent on outside funding, courses that merely attempt to explain the meaning of life are very much at a discount. Who would tackle degrees in philosophy, history or language when glittering prospects await an army of MBAs? Meanwhile, the public intellectual has become an endangered species. In 1987 Dawkins also abolished the Commonwealth Schools Commission and absorbed its functions in the Department of Employment, Education and Training, eliminating an important source of independent advice about education. The Commission, created by Whitlam in 1973, had been retained by Fraser. Science and research (other than medical research) proved to be problem areas under Labor and public expenditure was seriously cut. Officers from Treasury and Finance constantly repeated the mantra ‘Leave it all to the market’. If the market wanted research in electronics, new materials, genetics or biotechnology, then the market should pay for it and Government should abandon its traditional interventionist role. 350
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 351
INSIDE THE HAWKE GOVERNMENT
Nevertheless over Treasury’s objections, Cabinet agreed to a 150 per cent tax deduction for research and development (mainly the latter) and this encouraged corporate investment, increasing aggregate expenditure. Senator John Button, Minister for Industry and Commerce, won with Hawke’s support. As Science Minister 1983–90 I certainly failed to persuade most of my colleagues that science and research needed special treatment; but I was operating against a powerful commitment to the all-knowing invisible hand of the market, as I explain in Chapter 11. Gary Gray shrewdly observed that Labor had failed to provide ‘after sales service’ for its voters. Labor lost the habit of explaining what it was doing and why. Our traditional base did not understand why we were selling national assets and we neglected to tell them: asset stripping passed through the Parliament with minimum debate because the Opposition supported what the Government was doing. When Labor lost, heavily, in March 1996, the Party’s election post-mortem noted a deep sense of ‘accumulated grievance’ because traditional supporters, the True Believers, felt they had been left out of the loop ever since 1983. In 1996 at last they hit back.
STRONGER AUSTRALIA: WEAKER ALP After winning four elections, Hawke became preoccupied with threats to his leadership and lost much of his political instinct. If he had mounted an immediate attack on Fightback! and the GST after John Hewson’s launch in November 1991, there might have been no leadership challenge. He made a fatal mistake by insisting that ‘it was complex and I knew that a good deal of time would be needed to destroy it’. He looked for a technical response from bureaucrats and number-crunchers. Labor politicians were looking for a moral lead—an attack against moving the taxation burden downwards, away from income and towards consumption. The satirist John Clarke pointed out the GST’s inequity in a devastating television segment on A Current Affair before Hawke did. The delay demoralised Caucus. It was this failure of nerve and instinct that ended his leadership prematurely. When Bob Hawke lost the Prime Ministership to Paul Keating by a vote of the Caucus on 20 December 1991, it might have been assumed that the influence of Hawke and his followers were diminished forever. This is not the case. Hawke left office with the country in good shape, but 351
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 352
A THINKING REED
a Party with significant policy deficits, deep factional divisions and the aftershocks of the personal rivalry with Keating. After Howard defeated Keating in March 1996, for some years the lights went out in the Keating camp. Two Hawke supporters took charge of the Opposition, Kim Beazley (Leader) and Gareth Evans (Deputy). In 2001 the leadership passed to Simon Crean, another Hawke protégé. However, at the Centenary Celebrations of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party in 2001, there seemed to be far stronger emotional reaction from the faithful to the failed Keating (one win, one loss) than the successful Hawke (four wins, no losses). Whitlam (two wins, three losses) remained hors concours. Bob Hawke was a great leader, dynamic and complex, with extraordinary energy and exceptional discipline as Prime Minister. He changed Australia’s economy beyond recognition and, with the support of his ERC colleagues, made it capable of meeting international competition. However, despite, or because of, our long period of electoral success the Party seemed to lose its way, moving to the Right and leading to excessive policy overlap with the Coalition. The ALP faces the massive task of reinventing itself, defining what it stands for and repairing the damage caused to Australia since 1996 by the ‘wedge politics’ of John Howard. The Party has been disempowered because Australia’s economic transformation has been co-opted by the Coalition, people who believe in capitalism more than we do. Where do we go now?
352
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 353
CHAPTER 11
ﱗ
Ministering to Science
The sheer complexity of modern science generally repels politicians, bureaucrats and journalists, although surveys suggest that citizens have a high level of interest in astronomy, archaeology, medical research and climate change. When I first started talking up the importance of biotechnology for Australia in 1979, no more than two or three Members in the House of Representatives would have understood what it meant. It was a hard slog throughout the 1980s to raise consciousness about scientific issues. I had not studied science at university, but read deeply in the history and philosophy of science and the stories of great scientists such as Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger and Leo Szilard had a powerful appeal, so my interest was obsessive rather than casual and I wanted to spread it around. Although the print media reported scientific and technological stories and I gave many television interviews, this interest was not shared by Canberra’s press gallery. I was working in a political vacuum. Not being reported by the gallery is a major penalty for politicians everywhere, a form of solitary confinement and a significant disincentive to venturing in that area. Political journalists report conflicts, often based on personalities. And how can electors, in their capacity as viewers, listeners and readers, form judgment on matters of science and technology if the appropriate issues are never raised with them? When I asked Alan Reid, the doyen of political reporters, why The Bulletin never reported what I said, even as a 353
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 354
A THINKING REED
Shadow Minister, he replied, ‘My boy, if I can paraphrase the late Marshal Goering, “When I hear the words science and technology I close up my typewriter”.’ Historically, some senior Ministers were given responsibility for CSIRO and various scientific agencies, among them John Dedman (1941–49), R.G. Casey (1950–60), John Gorton (1962–68) and Malcolm Fraser (1968–69; 1971–72). From 1966 Science was part of the Department of Education. A separate Department of Science was created by Whitlam in 1972, when Bill Morrison became our first Minister for Science, and abolished in 1987 under Hawke, when I retained the title but not the reality. Under the Liberals,Technology had been added to Science in 1980 when the Department of Productivity was abolished, but Hawke gave Technology to Industry in 1984. There was, and is, a strong case for an independent Department of Science to ensure a critical mass of credible, non-fragmented, scientific advice and experience which could advise a Minister, assist in bureaucratic arguments and help to fight within the Budget-making process. In an age of professional super-specialisation, it was important to have shared, but overlapping, experience and language, especially where new issues were coming on the political agenda, such as global warming, demographic change, biotechnology, environmental stress, biodiversity. I hoped that a Science Department would help to shape the political agenda for the long term. In the short term I appeared to have failed, but there is consolation that so many issues I pushed in the 1980s are current now. Failure to produce credible Greenhouse responses or a National Information Policy confirms that fragmentation encourages vested interests and discourages governments from taking a longer view. After Caucus elected me to the Shadow Ministry in November 1980 Bill Hayden gave me responsibility for Science and Technology, succeeding Dr Dick Klugman. I dogged the Minister, David Thomson, for just over two years. David, a brigadier and Military Cross winner who had retired from the army to live in Cairns, won the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt for the National Party in 1975. Honourable, committed and hard-working, he spoke in a husky whisper after a serious attack of Ross River fever damaged his throat. I always seemed to be shouting him down, charging that Government was not doing enough to promote science. David basically agreed with me and I felt he was in the wrong party. We developed an excellent personal relationship which continued long after we both left the Parliament. 354
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 355
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
The publication of Sleepers, Wake! in March 1982 (see Chapter 9) created some interest in the ABC and some newspapers but had very little response in the press gallery, even less in the Parliament, and less still in Caucus. In January 1983 Hayden made me Shadow Minister for the Environment and Conservation as well, with responsibility for negotiating on the Tasmanian dams controversy. I took over from Stewart West. The Liberal Minister was the decent but unmemorable Ian Wilson. I continued in both roles when Bob Hawke took Labor’s leadership. I also had a surprisingly high profile in the 1983 election, both for my leading the Tasmanian dams campaign and negotiating preference deals which helped us win marginal seats, and for my advocacy of ‘sunrise industries’, a new term in Australia but increasingly familiar in Europe and the United States. We named sixteen possibilities, all novel then, most taken for granted now, including biotechnology, personal computers, software, scientific instruments, solar energy cells, medical technologies, industrial ceramics, hydrogen generation and storage. When Labor won in March 1983, I was elected to the Ministry by Caucus. Bob Hawke secured Caucus’ agreement to follow the Coalition practice of dividing his Ministry between an inner Cabinet and outer Ministers. I was under no illusion about my prospects for admission to the inner circle. I expected Bob to offer me the choice of Environment or Science and Technology, because the Canberra press gallery regarded me as having done well in both areas. Doug Anthony, a shrewd judge, thought that the Tasmanian dams had been the most significant policy issue in the election. If given a choice, I would have asked for Environment because of its growing political significance. Barry Cohen became Minister for Home Affairs and the Environment, a comprehensive portfolio including the arts. I was offered no choice. In a crisp two-minute meeting, Bob said that I would be Minister for Science and Technology. Science was a problem area. The Hawke Government had no natural feeling for it, confused science with technology and, following the bureaucratic lead, took a narrowly instrumental view that science is only worth supporting if jobs and financial return can be achieved in the short term. In addition, the scientific constituency was very small, had no union affiliation, and many scientists were suspicious of the black art of politics. Scientific frontiers and the concept of ‘relevance’ change with disconcerting speed and many of my colleagues found it hard to engage. 355
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 356
A THINKING REED
Science was seen as political death valley. Clyde Cameron made this clear in June 1975 when he had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Science Ministry by Gough Whitlam. Only Aboriginal Affairs was more unrewarding. I faced no competition for the post. Hawke’s Cabinet Committee system enabled some junior Ministers, ‘the little kids’ as Michael Duffy called us, to be involved in major decisions. I managed to secure appointment to Cabinet’s Economic Committee but this was, as Hawke noted in his Memoirs,‘stillborn’, effectively displaced by the small but powerful Expenditure Review Committee (ERC), which shaped the Budget. I also served on the Industry and Infrastructure Committee. Called Science and Technology for twenty months until December 1984, the renamed Department of Science continued, until its demise in July 1987, as an umbrella organisation for a number of agencies. First was the Department itself under its Secretary, Dr Greg Tegart, and Deputy Secretary, Dr Roy Green, both able scientists who had become bureaucrats and served me faithfully. The Department co-ordinated Cabinet papers and policy submissions, prepared reports and correspondence and gave me frank and fearless advice. The Department had responsibility for the Bureau of Meteorology, Ionospheric Prediction Service,Antarctic Division,Weights and Measures, Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville, Australian Research Grants Scheme, National Materials Handling Bureau, Government Chemicals Laboratory, Patent Office, Australian Industrial Research and Development Incentives Board (AIRDIB), Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and Genetic Manipulation Advisory Committee. The National Biotechnology Program and the Commission for the Future were soon added. The Defence Science and Technology Organisation was under the Department of Defence. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), deeply conscious of its size and distinguished international reputation, wanted to be independent from the Department and to have direct access to the Minister for Science. I had some sympathy for that view. I admired CSIRO and greatly enjoyed working with it as Shadow Minister and as a member of its Advisory Council for three years and came to know people in many of the Divisions. I remained a committed advocate in seven years as a Minister. In April 1983 the Hawke Government convened the National Economic Summit Conference in the House of Representatives chamber. 356
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 357
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
The Summit comprised representatives of Commonwealth and State Governments, industry, trade unions and various community interest and welfare groups, including churches. It reflected Hawke’s flirtation with corporatism, and his enthusiasm for reaching consensus outside the party political process. I submitted a paper entitled ‘Technology and Australia’s Future’, arguing that Australia was undergoing a paradigm shift away from a traditional, industrial economy to a skill-based, post-industrial one. I pointed to Sweden and the Netherlands as examples of countries with small populations and relatively few natural resources which had developed their expertise. The paper also emphasised the importance of education and skill formation, the need for changing community attitudes and for recognising the development of information-based industries and employment, the negative impact of reliance on tariff protection and our slow rate of technological adaptation in some industries. Twenty years later, the analysis stands up well. In April 1983 it was inflammatory. I achieved the distinction of being specifically ‘disinvited’ from the Summit by Sir Geoffrey Yeend, Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, presumably at the Prime Minister’s direction.The speech was regarded as ‘alarmist’, contrary to the reassuring tone of the Summit and I was told to stay away. The thrust of my argument in the non-delivered speech was endorsed by the report Enterprising Nation, published by the Industry Taskforce on Leadership and Management Skills (the Karpin Committee) in 1995 when Paul Keating was Prime Minister. The Summit Communiqué supported Hawke’s Prices and Incomes Accord, which was its primary aim, and provided comforting reassurance that the Labor Government would not change economic direction. Tariff protection and centralised wage fixation would remain, new technology would be introduced only after consultation with workers, decision making would be based on consensus and Government would set up job creation schemes. There was no reference to the global economy, foreign debt, entry of foreign banks, floating the dollar, taxation reform or the primacy of the market.
THE NEW ECONOMIC DIRECTION The modified Thatcherite economic policy adopted by the Hawke Government meant that my interventionist policies were distinctly out of fashion. My advocacy of ‘sunrise industries’ and the success of Sleepers, 357
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 358
A THINKING REED
Wake! were irritants. My arguments had to be dismissed (and their author marginalised) because they cut across the ‘One Big Idea’. I argued that a special case could be made for supporting biotechnology and computer software. Opponents insisted that my argument was identical to the special pleading for tariff protection by shirt or shoe manufacturers. Before the 1983–84 Budget, John Dawkins, supported by John Button, organised an ambush which singled out my ‘new policy proposals’ such as support for ‘sunrise industries’ as being contrary to the new wave of economic rationalism and structural adjustment, and destroyed them. I was given no warning. The ambush took place at the Cabinet Economic Committee (of which I was a member) in June 1983 when appointment of an interdepartmental committee (IDC) to ‘vet’ my proposals was raised ‘below the line’, that is, without applying the rule about giving ten days prior notice, and adopted. All of my proposed expenditures had been raised—even endorsed—in the 1983 elections. The IDC’s membership was carefully chosen, presumably by Button and Dawkins. Only one member (from my own department) was sympathetic to my proposals. This was a second body blow, coming soon after my exclusion from the Summit. I contemplated resigning as Minister but thought this would give my enemies too easy a victory, and I was reasonably confident of being vindicated in the long term. My approach to developing new industries had been influenced by my involvement in exhuming the Australian feature film industry after 1968. Targeted, limited Commonwealth support helped create a significant international market niche for our films which had given opportunities to directors such as Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong. I resisted using quotas to protect Australian films, preferring to identify and promote talent. Bureaucrats repeated the text ‘Governments cannot pick winners’, but with film we had picked the talent which produced winners. I also saw myself as a disciple of ‘Nugget’ Coombs, a visionary bureaucrat and economist turned central banker with an enthusiasm for new ideas, Hugh Stretton, an economic historian who had helped to save my book Sleepers,Wake! and Peter Karmel, another economist with a gift for nurturing institutions and promoting public policy. My views on selective, discriminatory industry support were detested by Canberra’s mandarins. On balance, publication of Sleepers,Wake! proved 358
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 359
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
to be a barrier to my Ministerial proposals, compounded by its international success and translations. The book raised a problem: the policies advanced had to be examined seriously and adopted, or its thesis had to be ignored and its author marginalised and discredited. The second option was adopted with vigour. In September 1983 I convened a National Technology Conference which brought together 140 representatives of Commonwealth and State governments, industry, CSIRO and the universities. My aim was to create a forum where people with an obvious community of interest could exchange ideas, examine means of encouraging technological development, identify education, training and skill requirements, discuss the future role of research and develop a National Technology Strategy. Significantly, we were refused use of the House of Representatives chamber and had to make do with the Canberra Rex Hotel.A discouragingly high proportion of the attendees had never met before. The Prime Minister opened the Conference. In February 1984 a draft National Technology Strategy was prepared, circulated widely, and secured strong endorsement from industry. We had 8000 letters of support. It would have provided an excellent basis for a comprehensive technology policy. It emphasised five priorities: 1 2 3 4
Raising the skill base. Bridging the gap between research and management. Moving from low to high value-added products. Creating stronger/more appropriate economic infrastructures capable of placing goods and services on a world market 5 Overcoming the problems of overspecialised regional economies. John Button was sceptical about the National Technology Summit and took a decisive role in sabotaging the National Technology Strategy. Bob Hawke went to some pains to tell me privately that my relative lack of political success was because I lacked a ‘patron’ who could push for my ideas in the inner circles of the Cabinet, that John Button should have been that patron, but that he had been careful to distance himself completely from issues that concerned me. A biography of John Button* confirms that he was concerned that the media interest generated by my * Patrick Weller, Dodging Raindrops—John Button: A Labor Life. The index has an entry,‘Relations with Barry Jones’, pp. 209–11. 359
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 360
A THINKING REED
advocacy of new industries made it much harder for him to persuade existing industries such as motor manufacturing, iron and steel, textiles and clothing to adapt to the new economy. After the December 1984 election, ministerial responsibility for Technology was taken from me and given to Senator Button, and I became Minister Assisting the Minister for Industry, Technology and Commerce while retaining the Science portfolio. This demonstrated a new emphasis in technology, away from creation towards use. The National Technology Strategy disappeared into a black hole and copies are hard to find. A major reason for my failure to engage the Hawke Government in taking new directions in science and technology, research and development was that the years from 1983 to 1987 proved to be a period of exaggerated optimism which added credibility to the ‘One Big Idea’, that government should retreat from interventionist policies in industry and leave everything to market forces. A mood of euphoria (‘We can do anything!’) was triggered off in part by the Alan Bond phenomenon, the America’s Cup victory in 1983 by Australia II and Hawke’s ebullience. The lesson learned was that government need not do anything much, except lead the cheer squad.There was a brief period when some investors turned away from blue chip securities and property and invested in science-based companies. When some failed, this contributed to the stock market collapse of July 1987 when $6 billion was wiped off the value of ‘second board’ high technology stocks within days. This was enough to warn institutional investors off the turf:‘We did it once. Never again!’
DOWN SOUTH Phillip Law, Director of the Australian Antarctic Division from 1949 to 1966, had explored 4500 kilometres of Antarctic coastline and was my mentor on polar issues. I saw him often because we both lived in Melbourne, shared interests in film and I had worked with him when he was the Executive Vice President of the Victoria Institute of Colleges. Antarctica was always high on my priorities, although I worried that our heavy financial and physical commitment to rebuilding the Casey, Davis and Mawson bases, a decision made by the Fraser Government, inhibited our capacity for scientific research. Australia claims 42 per cent of Antarctica, far more than any other nation. As Minister I was, in law, Administrator of Australian Antarctic Territory, but I never wore a plumed hat. Visiting our three bases would 360
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 361
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
have required four to seven weeks, depending on the weather, for the round trip, longer if the ship was beset by ice. I could not afford to be away from Australia so long when my Budget proposals were under constant attack. In December 1983 I accepted an invitation by the United States National Science Foundation to visit Antarctica, flying first to Christchurch where the Americans had a forward base. I flew in a C–141 ‘Starlifter’ with two Members of Congress, Jim Jeffords (Vermont), friend of Solzhenitsyn and later a US Senator, and Hal Sawyer (Michigan), two officials and some US Air Force officers from Christchurch to the important base at McMurdo, on the Ross Ice Shelf. Space was at a premium, with no room for a minder to come with me.‘Operation Deep Freeze’ has by far the greatest scientific capacity in Antarctica, but the United States makes no territorial claim and does not recognise the claims of others. McMurdo, the Greater McMurdo Conurbation as the wags called it, was in New Zealand’s territorial claim. James Clark Ross named it for Archibald McMurdo, one of his officers, in 1841. Antarctica’s initial visual impact was profoundly disorienting, especially after nearly five hours in a darkened plane. I could see ultraviolet light tinting the snow. We are so conditioned to brown, green or yellow landscapes and the alternation of night and day that the uniform whiteness and perpetual sunlight seemed shocking. We flew from McMurdo to South Pole in a lumbering Hercules, visited the huge Amundsen-Scott Base, 3000 metres above sea level, and were filmed at the photographic pole, where visitors could drape themselves in their national flag. The temperature was minus 43 degrees Celsius, far colder than when Captain Robert Falcon Scott had been there. By walking briskly round the nearby geographic pole, I consoled myself that the 360-degree circuit brought me, at last, into Australian Antarctic Territory, if only for seconds. On Ross Island we inspected the Cape Evans hut erected by Scott in 1902, a prefabricated wooden structure miraculously preserved by the ice, full of artefacts and tinned food from the time of his fatal expedition in 1911–12. Mt Erebus, Antarctica’s highest volcano, 3794 metres, on Ross Island, was pluming behind. Killer whales (Orcinus orca), up to 10 metres long, were chasing seals onto the sand. Emperor penguins strutted. The sea was black. The sun blazed. No words could express my heart-stopping exhilaration. 361
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 362
A THINKING REED
On another day I observed that Mt Erebus had become completely obscured by white-out, and the only mountain to be seen was the nearby Mt Terror, with a configuration similar to Erebus. An Air New Zealand DC–10 had crashed on Erebus in November 1979, killing all 257 people on board.The crash had been caused by a white-out, when the off-course pilot believed he could see Erebus in the distance just before impact. The McMurdo Dry Valleys is an ice-free area of 4800 square kilometres. High-velocity katabatic winds prevent snow from falling and the landscape resembles Mars. The wind over thousands, probably millions, of years has carved powerful sculptures, ventefacts, from the rock. I photographed scores of them in the Bull Pass and Taylor Valley and sent copies to the sculptor Henry Moore. He was amazed by their stark beauty. We also visited New Zealand’s Scott Base and the beautiful Lake Vanda, a glacier. Later I climbed to the top of Observation Hill, overlooking McMurdo, and slithered much of the way down. Barry Cohen reminded me that in 1984 we made an attempt to persuade Bob Hawke to fly down to Antarctica with the two Barrys. This was robustly rejected as fucking nonsense, a waste of his time, an arsehole of an idea. However, I was delighted that in 2003 he rightly identified his work in securing international agreement to preserve Antarctica from mineral development as one of his greatest achievements. He went on a cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula in the same year. I became increasingly preoccupied with Greenhouse, ozone depletion, Southern Oscillation (El Niño) and marine biota issues, and Antarctica contributed vital information on all four. Drilling long ice cores provided an accurate history of climate change and atmospheric composition for centuries; holes in the ozone layer were first detected by the British Antarctic Survey in 1981; El Niño had a devastating impact on years of drought in Australia; and marine biota was threatened by overfishing. As Minister, my Antarctic priorities were to improve morale, encourage more scientific work, commission an Australian-built ice-breaker, the MV Aurora Australis, which Government would lease from P&O, and ensure that women had opportunities as scientists, medics and officers in charge. I often visited the Antarctic Division’s headquarters at Kingston, talked to the bases by telephone and attended ANARE functions. I commissioned artists to visit Antarctica and encouraged Members of Parliament and Senators to become expeditioners. I was delighted to obtain funding for maps setting out major discoveries found on our transverse expeditions. 362
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 363
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
Losing Antarctica, transferred to Environment in July 1987 following restructuring of Departments, was a bitter blow, but in 1988 when the international Antarctic Place Names Commission approved the naming of Barry Jones Bay (69° 25’ 30.S, 76° 03’ 00.E) in the Larsemann Hills area it cheered me up.
FUNDING CRISES My colleague Susan Ryan* observed that, while she received tough treatment as a Hawke Minister, ‘Barry Jones, our visionary, intellectual and much-loved science minister, used to get a worse going over than I did’. She was right. I told Parliament that the return of Halley’s Comet in March–April 1986 might prove to be the greatest scientific achievement of the Hawke Government. Irony was lost on the press gallery. ‘What on earth did he mean?’ journalists asked colleagues. An important element in the Treasury-Finance mindset was the mantra: ‘Public investment bad, private investment good’. Unhappily, Australian industry, agriculture and mining aside, had scant experience in investing in research and development; and multinational corporations, increasingly significant in the 1980s, understandably carried out their major research at head office in the United States or Japan. In Sweden and the Netherlands, with a long history of international brand names, corporations made a far higher investment than government. In Australia, Government invested more in research than industry. Treasury-Finance thought it would be ‘healthier’ (their word) if Australia cut back its public investment and encouraged industry to fill the gap. Right? Well, wrong actually. The fallacy was in comparing the economic history and corporate culture of countries which had adopted the national model of technology acquisition (United States, Japan) and those that adopted the colonial (or ‘cargo cult’) model (Australia, Canada, New Zealand). If Government R&D investment had been slashed to 0 per cent, the private sector share would have rocketed to 100 per cent, but the effect would have been regressive because only existing industries would have been in a position to invest. We would have cut off our future potential, and the brain drain would have increased exponentially and irreversibly. * Susan Ryan, Catching the Waves, p. 237. 363
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 364
A THINKING REED
The influential company director John Elliott shrewdly pointed out that the Hawke Government was giving a conflicting message on R&D investment: ‘We think you should invest more but we propose to invest less’. There was a massive confusion about percentages. Changing the proportionality was a correct strategy so long as aggregate investment did not fall. My priority was to challenge and change the political, economic and corporate culture, and I hoped the bureaucracy would follow on. In dealing with the bureaucracy, I sometimes felt like an agnostic talking to monks in a closed order. I found Australia’s short-term emphasis on commercialisation particularly maddening because I had been excited by the commitment to long-term ‘blue sky’ research by American corporations such as the Bell Laboratories, IBM and Du Pont. In sharp contrast to the United States, Australian firms showed little interest. So did the bureaucracy. I had recurrent problems with the Department of Finance which, in my experience, was quite ignorant about research and innovation. Bureaucratic methodology and underlying assumptions were not open to scrutiny except in Senate inquiries. Officers sometimes acted like thought police: I objected to the rudeness shown to my officials. I had become used to it in my own case. Finance had its own political and social agenda and its own hit list. Sometimes they would work on the susceptibilities of a sympathetic Minister. Peter Walsh, an able and likeable Minister for Finance from 1984 to 1990, had a robust series of prejudices which he made no attempt to hide. I accused him once of working out a stereotypical enemy: a female environmental scientist working for CSIRO, who used child care facilities, was an occasional patron of the Australian Opera and voted for the Democrats. He commented:‘You left out “a user of the ABC”.’ ‘Disjointed incrementalism’, a useful term coined by the American political scientist Charles Lindblom, refers to the process of segmentation where policy recommendations are made in isolation and not examined in a context where broad priorities are determined. A striking illustration was the discrepancy between treatment for the two major research funding bodies, the Australian Research Grants Committee (ARGC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC). Between 1966 and 1987 the ARGC, with 86 per cent of the ‘post doc’ constituency, received a real increase of 37 per cent, and the NH&MRC, with 14 per cent of the ‘post docs’, 1073 per cent, a discrepancy of 29:1. This had 364
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 365
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
resulted from a long series of incremental decisions taken in isolation. It could never have been justified if a comprehensive review of research funding had examined the two schemes side by side. In addition, the medical lobby was effective and its research priorities were easy to campaign for. The formula ‘Officials have decided’, which appeared in so many coordination comments in Cabinet submissions, could have been read in a variety of ways, as a subversion of the democratic system, displacement of Ministers by bureaucrats, or as a frank recognition that in a system marked by disjointed incrementalism no Minister can be expected to grasp much more than the broad outline of issues. In practice, week by week, month by month, an increasing volume of work passes through the hands and minds of officials. After many small incremental decisions policy evolves, almost by default. Opposition on policy grounds within the bureaucracy is necessarily covert, not overt, and the political agenda (not party political of course, but equally ideological) is not the subject of media scrutiny, of open debate, the right of reply, then open resolution. The failure of press, radio and television to tackle this issue means that voters, viewers of the television series Yes, Minister notwithstanding, have only a vague understanding of how a government works in practice. When advice is provided behind the curtain by Canberra’s ‘invisible college’, not subject to question or analysis, there is no opportunity for confrontation or refutation. In Canberra some bureaucrats appeared to believe: ‘Subjects that I don’t understand can’t be important’. They felt contempt for science, but not the contempt usually associated with familiarity. When Labor adopted economic rationalism, the bureaucracy provided the intellectual fire-power. The Australian bureaucratic mindset had a preference for the immediate, the tangible and the obvious and dislike for the abstract, the complex and the theoretical. While the public servants shaped the policy agenda, and the Party tagged along under Hawke and Keating, the Howard Government politicised the public service, intelligence agencies and even the armed forces to an unprecedented degree. These characteristics became even more alarming when senior public service staff were put on contract, thus reducing the collective memory, with reappointment dependent on telling the Government what it wants to hear instead of providing ‘frank and fearless’ advice. In the early 1980s in comparing, say, Australia and Taiwan, it would have been a reasonable hypothesis to assume that by the year 2000 365
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 366
A THINKING REED
Australia would have been well ahead in information and communication technologies production, given our strong education systems, research history, inventiveness and being plugged into the Englishspeaking world. In fact, Taiwan streaked far ahead. We suffered from a failure of nerve, conventional thinking in the public service, absence of dynamic and compelling leadership in the computing business. Our medical research benefited from outstanding advocates, of whom Sir Gustav Nossal was the best known. But there were no Nossals in computing.
SOME PROBLEM AREAS Failure to persuade the Hawke Government to adopt a National Information Policy, despite its grudging recognition that the world was passing through an Information Revolution, was an area of profound frustration. It was doomed because too many vested interests were involved. An exponential increase in technological capacity, due to the impact of micro-electronics and miniaturisation on computing and communications, had created the potential for a borderless world and a global economy. Recognising that these changes would have social, political and economic implications and attempting co-ordinated responses, rather than fragmented ones, was one of my major preoccupations. Although I had been talking about the concept of an Information Society from the 1970s, and it was a central theme in Sleepers, Wake!, it never seemed to be the right time to get people to listen, and act. The National Conference of the ALP adopted a National Information Policy, drafted by me in 1981, remaining there until Simon Crean, my successor as Minister for Science, removed it in 1991. It was never implemented due to bureaucratic resistance. Unfortunately, issues of territoriality, defending the turf, were involved. Information had implications for a variety of Departments, including Communications and Industry, and all opposed taking a global view, fearing the possibility of loss of control. A National Information Policy was seen at best as empire building by me, at worst as a private obsession. In 1985, after a series of policy seminars, the Department of Science prepared a discussion paper, A National Information Policy for Australia. In December 1986 the document was only published after direct intervention by Ministers Button and Duffy because bureaucrats strongly objected to information flow about information flow. 366
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 367
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
Of the 16 Commonwealth mega-Departments after 1987, three supported a National Information Policy, four were hostile and nine totally indifferent. Issues tended to be defeated by procrastination because in practice they were never fully examined. The Department of Industry equated ‘Information’ with IT, the hardware; the Attorney-General’s Department with intellectual property, patents, copyright and privacy issues; the Department of Communications with telephones, radio, television and program content; Treasury with statistics; Education with education and training; Arts with the National Library, film and arts funding.There was no comprehensive overview, only fragmentation. This remains the case: as a result the Information Revolution, far from encouraging a redistribution of power, has largely reinforced existing structures. The House of Representatives, in the more than 20 years that I was a Member, never had a serious debate about the scope of information policy irrespective of which party was in power. Neither did the Senate. Elements in a comprehensive National Information Policy would have sought to guarantee access and equity in the context of the right to know, industry policy, scientific and technological information, intellectual property law, trans-border data flows, banking, national sovereignty, defence, telecommunications/media, media ownership and control, libraries, archives, public accounting information, social justice, privacy, education, information research, promoting efficient/effective information use, promoting critical evaluation of information, and consumer information. I had a serious difference with Bob Hawke in 1986 over a decision to lift an embargo, imposed in accordance with Party policy, on selling uranium to France, which had not signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Queensland Mines had dug up the uranium but could not export it, and the Australian Government had to pay compensation for the cost of the embargo. Exporting the uranium, in effect, improved the Budget figures by $A132 million. Facing a Budget blowout, the ERC decided to lift the ban. Cabinet agreed but the decision required endorsement by Caucus. The issue was bitterly divisive. In four long discussions, two face to face, two by telephone, Hawke sought to convince me to vote with him in Caucus to lift the embargo, a controversial decision contrary both to the spirit and the letter of Party policy. My objections were political as much as scientific or ethical, that we were repudiating the Party and changing policy on the run for the sake of the $132 million. 367
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 368
A THINKING REED
The reason that Bob devoted so much time to me was that he wanted to ensure that all Ministers outside the Left faction voted with him. He really did not care what the Left did; he saw it as an organisation which had its own discipline and was beyond reason. But while the Left could bind its own Ministers, that did not apply to me. In the end, I stuck to my guns and voted with the Left. At that point he largely wrote me off. He won the Caucus vote, narrowly, and as he wrote in his Memoirs:‘another of the party’s sacred cows was culled from the herd’.* In my chequered career as Minister for Science I had responsibility for the Australian Research Grants Scheme (ARGS), forerunner of the Australian Research Council (ARC), from 1983 to 1987, when the Dawkinisation of tertiary education took away my role in university research. Peter Sheehan was Chair of the Australian Research Grants Committee 1983–85 and Don Aitkin 1986–88. Aitkin also chaired the ARC for Dawkins 1988–90. When I became Minister, some humanities researchers had indicated unwarranted nervousness that having the ARGS administered by the Department of Science would leave them profoundly disadvantaged. They obviously did not know much about my interests because I had a passion for history, archaeology, architecture, literature and music. I had been prepared to defend Professor Sir Peter Platt’s expensive project on the composer Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, although I thought his son, who spied for James I, was more interesting. I had also backed John James’ important analysis of variations in architectural styles during the long construction of Chartres Cathedral. In March 1987 the then Opposition’s Waste Watch Committee, chaired by Senator Michael Baume (the bad Baume, not to be confused with his senatorial cousin Peter, the good Baume), launched a major attack on some ARGS grants. They examined about 1500 grants over a four-year period, concentrating on awards in the humanities.They picked out sixtytwo for attack and were particularly contemptuous of projects with dumb names. Depressingly, no more than five of the shell-shocked researchers attempted any kind of defence. The historic tradition of academic debate had decayed. The most attacked grants were for ‘Motherhood in Ancient Rome’,‘Syntax in Jane Austen’s Novels’ and ‘Techniques of 17th Century Dutch Shipbuilding’. All three could be justified, and none was what it seemed to be. The first examined classical education and how empire * Bob Hawke, The Hawke Memoirs, pp. 378–9. 368
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 369
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
builders were nurtured away from home (‘Hullo, mater! I’m your son Julius’). The second was about cryptography, and only incidentally about Jane Austen. The third documented the project for restoring the Batavia in Fremantle. The Waste Watch attack was taken up with a vengeance by philistine elements in the media, especially talk-back radio. I felt isolated and waited for our 21 Vice Chancellors to ride to my rescue en masse, sabres raised. Instead, they retreated. Obviously, they thought, ‘Let’s not buy into a row that we can’t win. If we say nothing, the fuss will subside’. They maintained an eerie silence. I tried to work up a collective name for Vice Chancellors, perhaps ‘a caution’, ‘a hesitancy’ or, although harder to say, ‘a pusillanimity’. The three co-ordinating Federal Departments (Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury, Finance) learnt a lesson from the ARGS debacle. They observed the failure of the university system to defend itself and drew the conclusion that universities could be attacked safely, because they were unlikely to fight back. Over my bitter objections Cabinet imposed a ‘fine’ of $1 million on ARGS at the suggestion of Stephen Sedgwick, later secretary of the Department of Education, as a penalty for not being street smart and failing to weed out projects with funny names. Fortunately, no criticism was hurled at ARGS support for archaeological excavation at Riversleigh, a World Heritage site in western Queensland. A team led by Michael Archer found an extinct species from a very rare, ancient group of marsupials and named it Yalkaparidon jonesi for me.* Another species, Yalkaparidon coheni, commemorates my colleague Barry Cohen, who also provided funding for the Riversleigh excavations. Both species have a unique dentition, with a V-shaped crown.
PROPHET WITHOUT HONOUR As a Minister low in the food chain I paid a high price for having secured some international recognition, much of it resulting from the success of Sleepers, Wake! In 1984 when one of my speeches was published in the fortnightly collection from the United States Vital Speeches of the Day I was warned that it had not gone down well with colleagues. * M. Archer, S.J. Hand, H. Godthelp, ‘A new order of Tertiary zalambdodent marsupials’, Science 239, 1988, pp. 1528–31; see also Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand, Henk Godthelp, Riversleigh, pp. 94, 222. 369
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 370
A THINKING REED
Among overseas visitors who came to see me on the strength of Sleepers, Wake! was Bill Gates, the young founder and Chief Executive of Microsoft. In 1984 we had a long conversation and I was amazed by his familiarity with the book. I tried to get him appointments to meet Hawke and Keating, but they were not available. Duffy was overseas. Gates saw John Button on a later visit. Deng Xiaoping’s daughter and biographer, Deng Rong, popularly known as ‘Maomao’, saw me in Canberra in 1988. She told me that her father was familiar with Sleepers, Wake! which had just been published in Chinese, and passed on his regards. I struggled to believe it. But in March 1994 her sister Deng Nan, then Vice Chair of the State Science and Technology Commission, met me in Canberra and repeated the same message. Sir John Maddox, editor of Nature, the world’s most influential scientific journal, visited Australia early in 1985, and this led to an important cover story, ‘Science in Australasia’. He profiled me as ‘Minister with his own vision’ but concluded that despite my high public visibility, ‘his enemies abound’ and that ‘he is by everybody’s consent except his own a poor administrator . . . He is almost too open to be a successful politician, and in any case, he is too imaginative’.* Maddox’s observation about ‘enemies’ was accurate, and is preferable to the more frequent dismissal of me as a ‘lovable eccentric’, a lazy cliché often found in the press clippings.The ‘poor administrator’ accusation was put about assiduously, but always anonymously, and never with a specific example of failure being identified, in the media or in Parliament. Nevertheless, the tag stuck. Oddly, when I acted as Minister in some other portfolios, including Health and Environment, and answering letters for Paul Keating, I was thanked for clearing up a backlog of paperwork and making decisions on hard cases. As Minister for Customs from 1988, which was politically sensitive, especially on ‘dumping’, and had a heavy administrative load, I was thought to have done well.The charge also begs the question as to how much administration modern Ministers actually carry out. In practice, bureaucrats do most of the heavy lifting, although I was more interventionist than most. When I was dropped as Minister in 1990 I was replaced by two and a half Ministers, Simon Crean (Science), David Beddall (Small Business and Customs) and Peter Staples (Housing, but also Aged Care). Maddox concluded: * Nature, vol. 316, no. 6025, 18–24 July 1985, pp. 185–208. 370
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 371
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
Single-handedly he has made science and technology into an issue that ordinary people take seriously. Nowhere else, except possibly in India now and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, has the exploitation of science and technology been as proper a subject of polite conversation as it has become in Australia.
My work as Minister and author of Sleepers, Wake! was the subject of major interviews in The Christian Science Monitor, New Scientist, Playboy, and on the BBC, David Frost and Michael Parkinson. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), sometimes known as ‘the rich nations’ club’, has its headquarters in Paris and although not part of the United Nations, operates in parallel with it as an ‘inter-governmental organisation’ or IGO.At the end of 1984 the OECD agreed to undertake a review of Australia’s science and technology policies. The distinguished, independent Examiners sent out in 1985 were James Mullin, an experienced international civil servant from Canada, Lars Malmros, from Sweden, Deputy Chief Executive of Volvo, and Emma Rothschild, an English economic historian who held simultaneous appointments in Boston, Paris and Stockholm.The rapporteur was an Irish OECD official, Agnes Breathnach. The Department of Finance’s submission to the OECD Examiners provided a rare and candid glimpse of the prevailing ideology that the invisible hand of market forces would provide for technologies as and when required, but not in advance of need: Technology, and the R&D necessary to generate and apply technology should in our view, be regarded as simply another input into the production process of goods and services. The supply of that input, and the development of industries that are intensive in the use of that input, should be governed by the market forces that direct the allocation of resources among alternative industrial uses.
The Examiners sympathised with my general policy approach and had read Sleepers, Wake! closely. They supported my attempts to place these issues on the national political agenda but found the attitude of Canberra’s bureaucrats profoundly disturbing. Their report, handed down in March 1986, noted ‘a widespread view of science (and technology) as in some sense external to national life 371
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 372
A THINKING REED
. . . There seemed to us to be less agreement about . . . the central relationships between technology, science and economic well-being . . . in Australia than in any other industrialised countries’. The Examiners remarked, dryly: It would be quixotic, to say the least, for Australia to pursue a purely market policy in a domain where international ‘market imperfections’ (in the shape of a very large-scale support for technological development by all Australia’s major customers and competitors) are of dominating importance. Australia’s own economic development has been shaped to a striking extent by public intervention, both through tariff protection and, in the case of agriculture, through very large investment in research and technology transfer. Australia also appears to be peculiarly vulnerable in the 1980s to ongoing ‘exogenous’ changes in the structure of world expenditure and world trade, notably the continuing compositional shift away from primary commodities and towards ‘knowledgeintensive’ services. We did not form a clear impression of the extent to which the views we have quoted were influential in Canberra: we did feel, however, that familiar arguments about the economic benefits of investment in intellectual and technological ‘infrastructure’ may need to be repeated in Australia.*
The Examiners essentially delivered their warnings too early, even in 1986: politicians, bureaucrats and the financial media did not want to hear them. They noted a strongly anti-intellectual mood in Australia and commented publicly that they heard pronouncements here from a fixed position that were commonplace in Europe and North America ten or fifteen years earlier but not heard there since. They warned that ‘ignorance and arrogance are a particularly dangerous combination’. At a symposium in Canberra after their report was released, the Examiners expressed concern about the narrow rigidity of officers in Treasury and Finance who constantly repeated the mantra, ‘Leave it all to the market’, as if this was the last word on scientific and technological development. Certainly the mindset in Treasury and Finance was that they knew it all. The Report was released and then essentially buried at the crossroads with a stake through its heart. The Australian Financial Review and other serious papers ignored it and it sank without trace. It was never debated in Parliament. My endorsement by the Examiners was actually held against me, just as the success of Sleepers,Wake! had been. * OECD, Reviews of National Science and Technology Policy:Australia, p. 31. 372
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 373
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
The OECD Report did have an impact, but not in Australia. Agnes Breathnach went back to Ireland to become principal adviser to John Bruton, Minister for Industry who later became Leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland. John Bruton told me in Dublin in 1997 that my writings had been a significant influence on his promotion of Ireland’s technological revolution.Agnes’ husband, Sean Aylward, became Chief of Staff to Charles Haughey, Leader of Fianna Fáil, and this helped Bruton’s initiative receive bipartisan support. I visited Indonesia and Malaysia in February 1985 for lengthy discussions with Minister for Research and Technology B.J. Habibie, trained as an aeronautical engineer in Germany, who found me an appreciative audience. He arranged an unscheduled meeting with President Suharto, whom he later succeeded. I also had fruitful discussions, but not on the death penalty, with Premier Dr Mahathir bin Mohammad. In April 1985 I led a delegation to an International Conference on Technological Development and Employment in Venice, held on the southern island of San Giorgio Maggiore, across the Canale della Giudecca, dominated by a great Palladian church. My surprising but welcome deputy leader was Gough Whitlam, then our Ambassador to UNESCO, who took a benign interest in the Conference. With Margaret Whitlam, we spent stimulating hours looking at churches and art works, concluding with a visit to the funeral island of San Michele where I laid flowers on Igor Stravinsky’s grave and we inspected the tombs of Ezra Pound, Sergei Diaghilev, Gordon Craig and Aspasia, Queen of the Hellenes. Gough was quick to point out that Aspasia had died in the year he became Prime Minister, 1972, but concluded that the two events were probably not related. My paper ‘The Information Revolution and its implications for Job Creation’ was well received, and singled out for honourable mention by Jacques Delors, President of the Commission of the European Communities, with whom I later clashed on educational issues at UNESCO. In October 1985 I was invited to attend a Science Summit meeting of the Group of Seven (G–7) major northern industrialised powers at Meach Lake, near Ottawa and to deliver a keynote address to Ministers on ‘Policies for Promoting Promising Technologies and Industries’. This was the only G–7 Summit meeting that Australia had been invited to attend. I was amazed and delighted and felt it was in the national interest. I wrote to the Prime Minister’s office seeking approval for the visit, assuming this would be automatic and the invitation regarded as further confirmation of 373
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 374
A THINKING REED
the Hawke Government’s greater glory. Not a bit of it. My request was smartly rejected. I asked for reconsideration. No, I was told, it was out of the question, I had already been away twice in 1985. Sending me to the G–7 Summit would mean exceeding the annual Ministerial visits quota and this would be politically impossible. Was there a way out? ‘Well,’ said an official from the Prime Minister’s office, ‘you could always take leave and pay your own way to Canada as a private citizen.’ And that is what I did. Ironically, while I flew economy, Greg Tegart, who accompanied me, flew first class at public expense, as was his entitlement. He only had to seek my permission, which I readily gave. No Cabinet member congratulated me on the invitation, or enquired about the visit. I received invitations to address the Asia Society in New York and the New England–Australian Business Council in Boston, both in December 1985. I knew that the Asia Society was a powerful forum and that Bob Hawke and Paul Keating had been delighted to receive invitations. Once more I sought approval for a Ministerial visit, only to be refused. So, once again, I took leave and flew economy at my own expense. I assume that neither Bob nor Paul paid their own way to the Asia Society, but I may be doing them an injustice. In both New York and Boston I spoke on ‘Australia’s Information Revolution—Implications for the Economy and Foreign Investment’. In September 1986 I led a team of bureaucrats and space scientists to China for discussions with the Long March Corporation, which was enthusiastic to secure Telecom (now Telstra) as a customer for launching a satellite by rocket. We inspected the launch site at Xindu in Sichuan. In Chengdu I met the Chinese translators of Sleepers, Wake!, three academics from the University of Western China. They suggested that we should discuss sensitive matters outside the hotel, to avoid bugging devices. They had faced difficulties with censorship but were determined to be faithful to the ideas of the author. The censors were troubled by what seemed to be a religious reference in Sleepers.This turned out to be a joke based on an ambiguity in the word ‘work’, set out at the start of Chapter 4: Q. How many people work in the Vatican? A. About half. ANSWER ATTRIBUTED TO POPE JOHN XXIII
374
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 375
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
I said, ‘If the censors complain, just cut the material out.’ My translators said,‘No.That would not be faithful to the intention of the author.’ I said: ‘But I am the author, and I say you can do it.’ They did not see it my way. When Li Peng, then China’s Premier, made an official visit to Australia in November 1988, I was Minister in attendance and spent days with him. His English was better than he admitted to and he understood the problem at once: he intervened to let the forbidden joke through. Sleepers, Wake! was published in Korean in 1987 on the initiative of a senior bureaucrat, unsurprisingly named Kim, and I was invited to Seoul for a major launch by the Minister for Industry and Science. Our Ambassador had to represent me at the event because permission to attend was refused. In October 1987 I flew to Cairo with Roy Green to sign a science agreement with Egypt, arriving at the airport at 3 a.m. to be met by the Minister for Science and a large entourage, who then initiated a dialogue over tea and biscuits.We then drove straight to Giza to see sunrise over the pyramids and the Sphinx. Later that day I addressed the Egyptian Parliament. Australia was trying to promote an international study of variations in river flows, comparing the Nile, Zambesi, Ganges and Murray–Darling. Despite repeated promises of co-operation, Egypt never provided any information about the Nile, regarding the subject as deeply secret. We then took off for the beautiful heritage city of Dubrovnik where I was to chair the OECD Review of the Yugoslavian Economy. The rapporteur for the Examiners was Agnes Breathnach, last met in Australia in 1986. The central part of the meeting was a question and answer session with the Yugoslavian Prime Minister Branko Mikulic. I was not the only Australian in town. Bob Hawke was in Dubrovnik as part of a European tour and was due to meet his Yugoslav counterpart there. He had a large media contingent with him, including Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan, Mike Steketee, Greg Hywood and Jim Middleton. The Hawke–Mikulic meeting was cut short because, as Mikulic explained, he had an appointment with Barry Jones and the OECD Examiners. This did not go down well with my Prime Minister and it earned me another black mark in the Oval Office. Later in October, in Paris, I chaired a meeting of all OECD’s Science Ministers, or their equivalents. This was during President Reagan’s second term, and the United States representative,William R. Graham, was determined to get our agreement to eliminate special programs of government 375
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 376
A THINKING REED
support for emerging scientific industries such as biotechnology. He wanted everything to be left to the market which, in practice, meant American domination. Assisted by European colleagues, I was able to ensure that no such agreement was reached.After we adjourned, one of the French bureaucrats Jean-Eric Aubert paid me a serious tribute:‘Thanks to your chairing, the meeting was mediocre. If you had not been there, it would have been sinister.’ In 1987, at a Ministerial meeting in Canberra, Japan proposed joint development of what it called a ‘Multi-Function Polis’ (MFP), an unfortunate coinage, to be established in Australia. The idea had begun in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. It was hoped to develop a technologically advanced model community with a variety of purposes, high-tech manufacturing, sophisticated services, demonstrating energy efficiency, modest resource and water use and environmentally benign waste disposal. The MFP would be a centre of leisure, recreation and tourism, a stress-free environment for long-lived Japanese retirees. It was utopian, visionary and mysterious. The Japanese called it ‘a City of the Fifth Sphere’, and nobody knew what that meant. The main reason for Japanese enthusiasm for using Australia was that we had space to experiment on water and waste problems and they did not. Japanese promotional films showed geriatrics beaming at palm-fringed golf courses and beaches. Discussions between Ministers and officials on both sides had a surreal quality. We assumed that the Japanese knew exactly what the MFP was all about and the Japanese assumed the same of the Australians. I had been excluded from the initial MFP discussions and was enlisted as a player only when the project seemed certain to fail. Some Japanese I talked to argued that the MFP should be seen as ‘aspatial’, a sophisticated network of economic, intellectual and leisure activities, essentially ‘software’, rather than a physical complex of buildings. Others pushed for physical development. In July 1988 I went to Tokyo to discuss what support Japanese industry would offer MFP in Australia. I was ushered into the boardroom of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph to meet executives from several corporations. Each had been provided with a copy of the Japanese translation of Sleepers, Wake! They rose and applauded as I entered. I was introduced as the initiator of the MFP concept and invited to explain what I had in mind. It was a rare example of my being lost for words. From 1985, as Science Minister, supported by the Commission for the Future, CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, I had led the charge to 376
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 377
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
raise public awareness of Greenhouse issues and the expanding hole in the ozone layer, with particularly serious implications for Australia. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a late, welcome but unexpected conversion on the importance of ozone depletion and convened the Saving the Ozone Layer Conference to be held in London in March 1989. She was persuaded to do this by the impressively named Sir Crispin Tickell, a senior diplomat and amateur climatologist who ran the conference behind the scenes. There were to be two keynote addresses, one by Senator Al Gore, the other by me. I applied to the Prime Minister’s office for approval to make a Ministerial visit and received a speedy response: no. I notified the United Kingdom’s High Commissioner in Canberra, Sir John Coles, and regretfully declined the invitation. He said, ‘We think you have a very important message to give. Would your Government be embarrassed if we invited you to be our guest?’ I passed on the offer to Bob Hawke’s office which agreed, rather grumpily, that I could attend at Mrs Thatcher’s expense. Prince Charles was to be the after-dinner speaker at a small function for the conference’s delegation leaders and some senior scientists. It was to be held at the British Museum, in the room dominated by a temple from Xanthos, just next to the Elgin Marbles. I had Al Gore on one side, the Prince’s Private Secretary on the other. Within a few minutes, the latter asked about me and why I was at the conference. He tapped a copy of the Prince’s speech: ‘You have no idea how difficult it was to negotiate this with the Department of the Environment. It took four days to settle the text for one particular paragraph.’ After despatching his hors d’oeuvres, he asked, ‘In Australia, what do people think about the family?’ I said,‘Do you mean the family as a social unit?’ ‘Of course not,’ he said, with a touch of asperity, ‘The Family, the Royal Family.’ ‘Well, there is no single response. It depends on individuals. There is respect and affection for the Queen as being hard working and conscientious, even if she is a remote and dysfunctional parent, but there is much less respect or affection for the Duke of Edinburgh.’ ‘Why would there be?’ Charles’ Private Secretary exploded.‘The man’s a hollow shell. There’s no one there.’ I refrained from pursuing my acquaintance about his employer’s family. At last came the Prince’s time to speak. As he read, my companion ticked off each paragraph and looked relieved as he reached the last page 377
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 378
A THINKING REED
of the speech. Then after the text had run out, Prince Charles looked up, smiled, and said,‘Now I want to add a few words of my own.’ ‘Oh my God,’ said my dinner companion. The Prince explained that we should find new ways of exploring the world, beyond knowledge, and that we should go into the jungle and embrace trees, which could tell us things that no one else could. I imagined that it might have been harder negotiating the additions with the Department of the Environment. In November 1989, on my way to an international conference in Israel, I visited the Brazilian rainforests to observe for myself the unprecedented rate of forest clearing, at the rate of a football field every minute, and to meet scientists at Manaus, on the Amazon, to discuss the loss of biodiversity and the implications for increased Greenhouse gas emissions and loss of carbon sinks. Seeing toucans, macaws, humming birds, tapirs and capybaras in the jungle was unforgettable. The Amazonas, more than 10 kilometres wide at Manaus, begins 15 kilometres upstream where the brown flowing Rio Solimões and the black-green Rio Negro meet. Roy Green and I were taken to the confluence by a speedboat which broke down. Our skipper dived into the rivers but could not fix the problem and we had to radio for another craft to rescue us.
SOME PARTIAL WINS I had some partial wins as Science Minister, creating the National Biotechnology Program, the Commission for the Future, the National Science and Technology Centre and the Australia Prize, saving CSIRO from being broken up, securing more funds for the Bureau of Meteorology and the Antarctic Division, promoting Greenhouse and ozone layer issues and persuading the Government to produce the May 1989 Science and Technology Statement. Despite the strong attacks on my new policy proposals in 1983–84, I was able to secure $1 million for a National Biotechnology Program Research Grants Committee, chaired by Bruce Holloway from Monash University. I had been reading about biotechnology assiduously from the mid-1970s and benefited from discussions with Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the double helical structure of DNA, at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, in February 1981. I was optimistic about its prospects for Australia but the investment community, and Government, had no interest for decades. 378
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 379
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
In May 1984 I generated some controversy in the House of Representatives by answering a ‘Dorothy Dixer’ question about the run-down of resources in the Bureau of Meteorology since the mid-1970s. I held up a radar valve, a magnetron, dating from 1942, which was still being used in forecasting equipment. There was a strong media response, and I secured more funds for modern equipment. In February 1985 I persuaded Cabinet, with the support of Bill Hayden and Susan Ryan, to let me create a Commission for the Future. It was not intended as an exercise in fortune telling, as sceptics suggested, but to generate community debate on future policy scenarios, for example, the relative merits of general v. vocational education, of a high v. low population option, the shape of the future job market, the social and economic implications of sharply increased longevity, changing patterns of energy, resource or water use. I also argued against fatalism about the future: outcomes were not inexorable or predetermined, but could be influenced by major policy shifts. I looked to the New Zealand Commission for the Future as a model. It had published a series of short, lively papers, illustrated with cartoons and diagrams, and was so active in stimulating ‘futures’ debate that Robert Muldoon abolished it in 1982. It survived, in privatised form, as the New Zealand Futures Trust. One of its most controversial exercises had been on Defence and Foreign Policy in the Pacific, and the public debate about excluding nuclear ships and submarines from New Zealand ports had been generated by the Commission, not within the Parliament.The debate had a significant impact on their election in 1984 when my friend David Lange defeated Muldoon. I chose Phillip Adams as Foundation Chair of the Australian Commission. This was a political mistake as we were regarded as a double act and the appointment probably compromised perception of the Commission’s independence. We held a catastrophic press conference in Canberra to launch the Commission, making the grave error of responding to ponderous questions with ironic one-liners. Canberra is not a city conspicuous for irony, and the Commission received an ill-deserved pasting in the press coverage. P.P. McGuinness wrote an editorial in the Financial Review headed ‘The Commission for Bullshit’. Some media reaction was not just dismissive or hostile, but venomous. John Howard attacked the Commission and pledged to abolish it. The Commission had a strong Board which chose its own Chief Executive and I refrained from intervening. Rhonda Galbally, a formidable 379
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 380
A THINKING REED
networker who ran the Myer Foundation, was chosen as the first Chief Executive Officer by the Board. Phillip Adams remained as Chair until my demise as a Minister in 1990, when Robyn Williams of the ABC’s Science Unit succeeded him. The Commission for the Future (CFF) was seriously underfunded from the outset and attacked by pragmatists who derided the concept of examining or debating the merits of various long-term scenarios. I wanted the Commission to generate community debate on future related issues— population, environment, education—encouraging diverse views.There was less debate than I had hoped although the CFF commissioned outstanding work on Greenhouse issues and educational futures. The Greenhouse material won a Gold Medal from the United Nations and was widely quoted internationally. Another Commission priority was in coaching scientists to break down their private language and engage in public discourse. The CFF was only a small part of my portfolio but I received more attack on it than all my other responsibilities combined. I was fighting a mood of overwhelming scepticism about the Commission from colleagues, the Opposition and the media. In 1994 the Commission was essentially privatised, transferred to Monash University, and its Vice Chancellor asked John Button to become chairman. As Button had always been profoundly sceptical about the CFF, it was an interesting choice. Peter Hollingworth was a Commission Member 1992–98. Life was pronounced extinct in 1998. I had a partial success in fighting for CSIRO to maintain its autonomy and diversity. In May 1985, over my strong reservations, Cabinet authorised the Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC) to carry out a major review of CSIRO, already one of the most reviewed bodies on the planet. The chair was to be Professor Ralph Slatyer, eminent biologist and skilled political operator. ASTEC showed some interest in following New Zealand’s example where its Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was broken up into ten crown research institutes, organised as private corporations, with fewer scientists and more managers, to serve various client groups. If we had gone down the New Zealand road it would have destroyed CSIRO’s greatest strength, its comprehensiveness, and the intellectual depth of some outstanding scientists. Other specialist areas such as CSIRO’s work in radio astronomy, space science, atmospheric physics or oceanography would have been handed over to the universities, where teaching would have diluted its program delivery. 380
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 381
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
In its report Future Directions for CSIRO ASTEC recommended that CSIRO ‘concentrate primarily on research in support of existing and emerging industry sectors and measures to facilitate the adoption of the practical results of its research’ but did not propose breaking it up. This ensured that CSIRO retained inclusiveness, remaining capable of making a major contribution to the public good and tackling long-term issues without complete dependence on external funding from existing industries. ASTEC recommended major changes to CSIRO’s governance: the appointment of an independent part-time Chair and a Board with power to nominate a Chief Executive, to be approved by Cabinet. These changes were accepted. In 1986 I nominated Neville Wran as Chair and he devoted much time and his formidable intellect to the job while Dr Keith Boardman remained as Chief Executive. There was very little legislation involving science, except for changes in patent law; nearly all activity flowed from the Budget. Much can be achieved by appointments and it was good fun, too. I took great care about recommendations to Cabinet or the Prime Minister about appointments to Commissions, boards and statutory authorities. I strongly opposed appointing board members because they were Labor Party supporters, fellow travellers or donors. I was looking for a wide range of experience and commitment. I tried to appoint women to boards, but it was hard to recruit them, because few were on offer and most deeply overcommitted. Among my appointees to the CSIRO Board were Justice Michael Kirby, Sir Gustav Nossal, Sir Rod Carnegie, Professor Adrienne Clarke, Ralph Ward-Ambler and Dr Kevin Foley, who had been a Liberal MP in Victoria. After a decade as Premier of New South Wales and six years as ALP National President, Neville Wran certainly had political form, but he brought energy, drive and detachment and his appointment to chair CSIRO was generally applauded. When I set up enquiries on difficult issues, I was grateful when Frank Fenner and Rod Andrew agreed to chair the processes. I could claim one original contribution to scientific knowledge, and happily traded on it. In January 1987 I attended the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science Conference at Massey University, Palmerston North. One bright morning, the tea break was held outdoors and I was gazing up to the sky when I noticed a beautiful and unfamiliar meteorological phenomenon, a Turneresque spectrum of colours in a band just above the horizon, in effect a straight rainbow. 381
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 382
A THINKING REED
‘Look!’ I exclaimed. A gaggle of the region’s brightest minds looked up from their tea cups and gazed blankly at where I was pointing. ‘Look at what?’ I concluded that some of them were victims of overspecialisation. Fortunately, I had a camera with me. When I returned to Melbourne, I showed my photographs to John Zillman, Director of the Bureau of Meteorology. ‘Congratulations!’ he said. ‘You have caught a very rare phenomenon, a circumhorizontal arc. Photographs are scarce and yours are better than any I have seen in the literature.’ Assisted by the New Zealand Bureau, together we worked up a paper which became the cover story in the November 1987 edition of Weather (vol. 42, no. 11) published by the Royal Meteorological Society, London. One of the photographs was reproduced in a book recording exceptional natural phenomena. The text pointed out that ‘reports of the circumhorizontal arc (CHA) are rare because it is found low in the sky where it may be obscured by landscape’.* In 1987 King Baudouin of Belgium and his wife Queen Fabiola visited Australia for the first and only time. Deeply earnest and scholarly for a monarch, and anxious too, he had a passion for astronomy, with his own observatory at Laeken, and was a competent astronomical photographer. A major reason for the timing of his visit was to observe Supernova 1987a, the brightest and closest supernova to be observed since the invention of the telescope. It could not be seen in the northern hemisphere. I was understood to be interested in astronomy and to cultivate scholars of whatever rank. So when the Governor-General put on a state dinner, I found myself the only Minister present, seated next to the monarch. We earnestly discussed the stripping of the Amazon rainforest and the history of sinister Belgian depredations in the Congo. I refrained from asking about his stepmother, the Princesse de Réthy, with whom he had a controversial relationship and whom I had adored from a distance as a child.The sky was cloudy that night.What made the dinner unusual was that we had arranged with Government House staff and his minders, that if and when the clouds cleared to give us a view of Supernova 1987a, we would leave the table and rush outside with binoculars. It happened three times during the dinner which must have disconcerted our hosts, Sir Ninian and Lady Stephen, although they were far too polite to show it. * David K. Lynch and William Livingston, Color and Light in Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 382
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 383
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
Among unwelcome guests for the Australian Bicentenary in 1988 were President Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, dictator of Romania, and his wife Elena. Madam Ceaus¸escu, it was said, had been trained as an agricultural scientist, and the Romanian Embassy had let it be known that an honorary doctorate or election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science would be entirely welcome.They arrived in April 1988 and spent some time with their friend and business partner, the mining magnate Lang Hancock. They expressed a wish to visit CSIRO’s Division of Entomology in Canberra, because moth infestation in grain storage was a major problem in Romania. I was given responsibility for looking after them. I read the Joint Intelligence Organisation briefs on the couple with interest. Ceaus¸escu, according to the dossier, had been persuaded by Fidel Castro that the Americans had techniques for poisoning men’s suits and the Romanian leader was careful to wear new clothes every day, to avoid an accumulated dosage. He was also reported to be an enthusiastic fan of Michael Jackson. The couple were believed to have stolen plumbing fixtures when guests of Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. The fact that the Queen created Nicolae Ceaus¸escu an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Bath suggested that somebody in the Royal Family had a sense of the ironic. It also warned that he was deeply apprehensive about any sharp objects. I waited for the Ceaus¸escus outside the Division of Entomology. Two small girls in Romanian folk costume had bouquets of roses for the ruling couple. I checked to see if they had been de-thorned. They had not, so I thought: ‘I’ll bet the Ceaus¸escus reject them’. Sure enough, the Ceaus¸escus examined the roses with practised eye and extended their palms out to refuse the tributes. In the Division an officer explained CSIRO’s work on the pheromones of the warehouse moth (Ephestia cautella): reducing their sex drive would inhibit reproduction rates. The officer had a pipette with a needle at one end, an object which seemed disproportionately large for a moth, which he waved with vigour to emphasise his message. I looked sideways at President Ceaus¸escu. He had turned away with his eyes closed. Obviously the needle was too much for him. Perhaps he imagined it being thrust into his neck: ‘This is for my brother-in-law in Bucharest!’ He was eager to escape from the Division. In December 1989 Nicolae and Elena Ceaus¸escu were executed by firing squad outside Bucharest after an army revolt and a quick, secret trial. 383
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 384
A THINKING REED
They were the only executed people I had talked with: horrible, but still members of our species. My abhorrence of capital punishment was such that I could not condone the executions, although they had butchered thousands of Romanians. When Rajiv Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister, visited for the Bicentenary, the Australian Government was eager to stage an event which demonstrated our collaboration and I was asked to arrange a science agreement, with characteristically low levels of funding. This would provide a photo opportunity involving the two Prime Ministers. I pointed out that we already had a science agreement with India. ‘That’s not a problem,’ Bob Hawke’s office said.‘We’ll sign it again.’ So we did. I recognised that Australia’s marine area, the Exclusive Economic Zone around our coast and islands, was larger than our land area but that marine research was never on our list of priorities. I funded an enquiry into marine industries, science and technology chaired by Professor Ken McKinnon which produced the report Oceans of Wealth (1989). He argued for significant investment in marine science and far more effective coordination between agencies. The Department of Industry showed no interest but much of the report was followed up by my colleague John Kerin, Minister for Primary Industries and Energy.
THE BACK LEGS OF THE HORSE In July 1987, after Bob Hawke’s third election victory, the Department of Science was abolished. I became Minister for Science and Small Business, but the title was more a letterhead filler than an office. I was Deputy in the super-Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce (DITAC) but had no Department of my own, and no public servants directly responsible to me. Essentially I was the back legs of the horse. However, in a letter setting out my duties, Bob Hawke indicated that I would retain responsibility for CSIRO (except for major policy matters), for Customs, although not the ethnological variety, and for Small Business. Major elements of the Department of Science were scattered, CSIRO, AIRDIB and the Commission for the Future to Industry, Technology and Commerce; Meteorology,Antarctica,AIMS and the National Science and Technology Centre to the Department of Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories; the ARGS to the Department of Employment, Education and Training; ANSTO to Primary Industries and Energy and the Patent Office to the Attorney-General. 384
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 385
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
Greg Tegart became Secretary of ASTEC and Roy Green went briefly to DITAC, then to CSIRO as an Institute Director and ultimately as Chief Executive. I was also de facto Minister for the Housing Industry 1987–90, but without title or letterhead, chaired the Construction Council, involving six State Ministers, and had responsibility for the Indicative Planning Council. I became involved in the Joint Venture for More Affordable Housing, a brave attempt, in collaboration with the states, to provide greater variety in housing options, where sites could be subdivided so that the costs of providing water, sewerage, gas, electricity and fencing were shared. The professionalism of lobbyists for the housing and building industry was deeply impressive. Although the offices are not recorded in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Handbook, for some months I performed as Minister Assisting the Treasurer for Prices, checking and signing thousands of letters for Paul Keating, and Minister Assisting the Attorney-General for Consumer Affairs. In January 1988 the historic title of Minister for Customs, once a great office held by Charles Cameron Kingston, Andrew Fisher, Frank Tudor, Stanley Bruce and Gough Whitlam, was revived at my request. I worked closely with the Australian Customs Service and did significant and useful work there, especially on ‘dumping’ and coastal surveillance. I enjoyed Customs, respected its professionalism, and its officers supported me loyally. I persuaded Cabinet to take Coast Watch from the Department of Transport and give it to Customs, also securing extra funds to build more vessels. Both moves proved very successful. In 1988 I also undertook a grand tour of Customs’ outposts of empire in the north and west, and this was good for morale, the officers’ and mine. A National Science and Technology Centre, which incorporated Canberra’s popular Questacon exhibition, had attracted some interest from the Japanese Government as an appropriate Bicentennial gift. (The United States ultimately sponsored the National Maritime Museum in Sydney.) I argued that as Ministers looked out from New Parliament House towards Mount Ainslie, they could see a range of significant monuments: the National Library, the War Memorial, the National Gallery and the Department of Defence. Science and technology was a conspicuous omission. Cabinet reluctantly agreed, partly because rejection would have caused offence to the Japanese. 385
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 386
A THINKING REED
However, when the Science and Technology Centre was completed, I had lost my Department and Graham Richardson was its Minister. Bob Hawke opened it on 23 November 1988, an unforgettable occasion when rain poured down and scientists held an unprecedented protest, waving placards deploring reduced science funding. I felt awkward because I completely supported their protests and had already spoken to the meeting in the late afternoon. Among senior scientists in the crowd I could see Sir Otto Frankel, Sir Mark Oliphant, Sir Rutherford Robertson, Lloyd Evans, Arthur Birch and David Craig. Hazel Hawke told me that as she drove to the opening with the Prime Minister she said to him,‘Barry will be out there demonstrating.’ At the opening, Hawkie showed a high level of enthusiasm for the building and its exhibits. I recall him demonstrating to some bemused Japanese the phenomenon of the persistence of vision. He grabbed me by the arm:‘Do you remember how we had to fight those cunts in Cabinet to get this up?’ I smiled wanly, but wished I could have responded, ‘Which particular cunts did you have in mind?’ Australia had been making a painful transition from being ‘the lucky country’, to use Donald Horne’s famous (but misunderstood) phrase, in which wealth depended on the exploitation of agriculture and minerals, to the clever or intelligent country. The term ‘Clever Country’, sometimes attributed to me, was John Dawkins’ coinage. Bob Hawke used it as a major theme in the 1990 election. I took it to mean that by 1993 no Australian idea would be living in poverty. I had always preferred the term ‘the Intelligent Country’, while recognising that the word was longer and harder to spell. The term ‘clever’ gives the impression of a quick fix or something facile.
PYRRHIC VICTORY AND DEFENESTRATION In one of my worst experiences, in the 1988–89 Budget round, I had to appear before the ERC when I was suffering from a temporary and painful eye complaint, acute photophobia (iritis). I could barely see, let alone read, Budget papers, even with the assistance of a magnifying glass and a powerful flashlight. I must have looked absurd. Bob Hawke told colleagues that mine had been the worst presentation to the ERC he had ever seen, and I do not doubt it. Regrettably, he failed to mention my eye affliction as a possible cause or that I had sought an adjournment, which was refused. 386
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 387
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
The ensuing Budget was particularly harsh on science. Activities carried out by the former Department of Science had been scattered across seven portfolios, so it is hard to make exact comparisons, but in six years since the last Fraser Budget (1982–83) allocations to science had fallen by 21.6 per cent and to CSIRO by 31.3 per cent. I tried to defend the indefensible at a science budget luncheon at CSIRO on 25 August 1988.At question time I was asked if I thought that scientists could have been more successful as advocates. I answered: Scientists have been the wimpiest possible lobbyists in their own cause . . . Politicians are sceptical about research workers and scientists because they cannot impose any sanctions. Think of Archimedes and his celebrated lever. Sometimes scientists tell MPs ‘If you don’t support my projects we’ll . . .’ and the MPs ask, ‘You’ll what?’ The scientists reply ‘We’ll feel terrible’. That doesn’t involve much leverage. Having no leverage makes people vulnerable.
My answer was widely reported as an attack on scientists in general as ‘wimps’, a broad-brush accusation, far wider than the lobbying issue. Nevertheless, it stimulated a far higher level of significant lobbying by scientists, and the strengthening of the Federation of Australian Scientists and Technologists. There was a significant scientific diaspora in my time as Minister. Robert May had left Sydney for Princeton in 1973 but was tempted to return in 1988. Originally a chemical engineer, then a theoretical physicist, and later a mathematical biologist, he decided that London and Oxford had more to offer and by 1995 he was Chief Scientist to the British Government, followed by election as President of the Royal Society in 2000, and the award of a peerage and the Order of Merit. But he told me in London that he had been very sympathetic to my position and regretted not having stayed to help me. In 1988 Peter Doherty, frustrated by his years at the Australian National University, left for the United States. He shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1996 and returned to Australia in 2002. We have worked together and become good friends. Understandably, with both Robert May and Peter Doherty, their attitude seemed to be:‘Poor bastard. He’s doing his best but the forces against him are too strong . . .’ Few nations had Science Ministers until the 1980s, and most of them had a tough time in the context of economic rationalism. My British counterparts shared my anxiety. I was grateful for encouragement offered 387
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 388
A THINKING REED
by the great Solly Zuckerman, an anatomist who worked with monkeys and apes, transferred his skills to politicians, became a networker of consummate skill and Chief Scientist in Britain from 1964 to 1971. He took me under his wing, but when he told me that I was the best informed Science Minister he had ever known I reflected darkly that I did not have much competition: most appointees saw the job as a poisoned chalice. It was never a fast track for promotion. Peter Couchman presented a Four Corners program on ABC Television on Monday 17 October 1988, on the crisis in Australian science, entitled ‘Think Tanks, No Thanks!’ He interviewed me extensively. I made a valiant effort not to breach the principle of Ministerial solidarity, but the case that Australia was falling behind its international competitors was inescapable and I refused to gild the lily, even if it cost me my job. The next day I ran into the Prime Minister in a corridor at New Parliament House. He barked, ‘I need to talk to you,’ and waved me into his office. He told me to sit. He said, ‘I saw Four Corners last night.’ My stomach knotted. I thought,‘He’s certain to sack me’. He went on,‘We’ve gone too far with the cuts to science. We have to do something about it.’ With Hawke’s support Cabinet, meeting in Sydney, authorised me to prepare a submission examining the adequacy of research funding and proposing changes. John Button had not been at the meeting, so I telephoned the Secretary of my host Department (DITAC), Dr David Charles, with my good news. His voice went cold. ‘We try to negotiate all policy matters directly with Treasury and Finance. If we lose their goodwill with a Cabinet submission which questions Government priorities, the situation will be far worse. Your political victory is a real setback for us.’ The famous demonstration by scientists at the opening of the National Science and Technology Centre on 23 November, referred to earlier, reinforced Hawke’s commitment to change, despite vigorous opposition by Treasury and Finance. John Button, John Dawkins and Neal Blewett vehemently opposed the review. They benefited from the existing system and suspected that any additional funds for my programs would be at the expense of theirs. Some weeks later when I saw the Cabinet Submission prepared in my name by DITAC officers I could hardly believe it. Far from criticising Australia’s decline in the international R&D pecking order, it endorsed past Budget decisions and said that we should be continuing our pursuit of the level playing field. On asking for an explanation I was told: ‘We can’t 388
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 389
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
afford to antagonise Treasury and Finance.’ I refused to submit my own submission. At a Centre-Left faction meeting in February 1989, John Dawkins launched into a savage personal attack on me, asserting that the situation in Australia’s research and development was ‘better than ever’, my publicly expressed concerns were ‘fucking garbage’ and that I had raised ‘lunatic propositions’ in Cabinet. I wrote a considered letter expressing concern that the attack was more personal than ideological, deploring the extravagant language and inviting him to specify what the ‘lunatic propositions’ were.Years later he wrote a brief handwritten apology. A Group of Officials (GOO) was set up to work on a new R&D policy. I found them quite intransigent. They flatly refused to include tables or charts comparing Australian R&D performance with other OECD nations, presumably because they proved my case and disproved theirs. During the process leading up to a Science Statement, I learned that the Prime Minister, having decided to create the position of Chief Scientist and Advisor to the Prime Minister on Science and Technology, had offered it to Professor Slatyer. I had not been consulted. It was unthinkable that Hawke could, for example, have appointed a Chief Economist and Economic Advisor without Treasurer Keating’s knowledge and support. I admired Slatyer’s capacity but felt that he was in the ranks of my opponents. On 19 April, sick at heart, I immediately wrote a letter of resignation. I complained about Slatyer’s appointment and added,‘I find the degree of hostility to CSIRO totally unacceptable, as it is inexplicable’. I handed the letter to the Prime Minister’s office in Parliament House the following morning. I then flew to Sydney where I had a commitment. Coincidentally, Hawke was in Sydney too. Hawke’s office tracked me down and I was summoned to meet him in Kirribilli House in the late afternoon.With his customary skill, Bob finessed me into withdrawing the resignation. It was weak of me to give in, but Hawke assured me that the proposed statement strengthened science greatly and was a major win for me. In reality, my attempted resignation sealed my fate and when his fourth Ministry was formed after the 1990 election he did not intervene to save me. On 8 May 1989 the Prime Minister tabled the Science and Technology Ministerial Statement. He took the opportunity ‘to pay tribute to this Minister’s determined and far sighted advocacy’ of scientific issues. I became Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Science and Technology and was given, on his behalf, ‘the day to day responsibility for the 389
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 390
A THINKING REED
development and coordination of science policy across the Government’. Modest additional funding was provided and the Prime Minister’s Science and Engineering Council established. It looked like a victory for me, but of the Pyrrhic variety. My speech, far longer than Hawke’s, pointed out that the statement was the first to consolidate government policy in Science and Technology, and set out a vision for the next five years. I argued ‘the need to avoid two dangerous fallacies: first, that research must be required to meet utilitarian goals; and, secondly, that research for industry is inherently second rate . . . The distinction between “fundamental” and “basic”, and “strategic” and “applied” research, while convenient, is increasingly blurred in practice . . .’.* The Science and Technology Statement provided $390 million in additional outlays over five years and about $600 million in revenue forgone to cover extended tax deductibility for commercial research and development, about $1 billion overall. Although welcome, it did not compensate for cuts in earlier Budgets. Ironically, the major beneficiaries of extra expenditure were Ministers who had vigorously opposed my campaign for increased funding and a comparative examination of research priorities, Button, Dawkins and Blewett. I secured modest increases in my areas of responsibility, including an additional $90 million for CSIRO spread over five years, its right to retain external earnings and the security of triennial funding (similar to the ABC). The Australia Prize, announced in the statement, was my invention, an international award ‘for scientific excellence in promoting the welfare of the peoples of the world’.The prize was worth $250 000 tax free.A committee drawn from the Academy of Science and the Academy of Technological Science and Engineering was to recommend to the Minister a scientific area for which nominations would be sought each year. My model was the Japan Prize, rather than the Nobel Prizes which are awarded in six different disciplines. I hoped that joint awards would promote collaboration between Australians and non-Australians. I wanted distinguished Europeans or Americans to value both the award and the donor nation. When the first Australia Prize was awarded, in April 1990, I had been eliminated as Minister and respectfully declined an invitation to attend the ceremony in Canberra. It would have been too painful. * Hansard, House of Representatives, 8 May 1989, vol. 166, p. 2108. 390
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 391
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
The Howard Government retained the award but in 2002 renamed it ‘The Prime Minister’s Science Prize’ and provided that nominees must be Australian nationals. I was disappointed by the changes. I thought the original name had a ring to it. I wrote to John Howard, pointing out that the world has 120 prime ministers but only one Australia. I asked him, as a self-declared ‘cricket tragic’, ‘If cricketers were offered the choice of playing in the Prime Minister’s XI or the Australian XI, which do you think they would choose?’ His office is normally courteous with correspondence, but I had no reply. The modest success of the Science and Technology Statement contributed directly to my downfall as a Minister. In the ensuing debate, John Howard referred to a ‘Damascus road conversion’ by the Government: Nobody doubts that the Minister has had a longstanding interest in science. I would never take that away from him. He has always talked about it; he has written about it; he has pleaded about it; he has been rebuffed about it; he has been earbashed about it; and at long last, he has a consolidated statement.
He described a ‘celebrated late night session’ with the Prime Minister in which ‘an attempt was made by the Minister to threaten resignation’. I interjected, ‘Not true’, because I never threatened to resign, it was not an ‘attempt’: I did it.And it was not a ‘late night session’. Howard also challenged me to deny that I ‘got an earbashing’ from Walsh and Dawkins. (Whoever was leaking, it was not me.) He went on, ‘Tabling a few documents will not reverse the damage that has been done to science infrastructure over six years of neglect and indifference.’ I could not have put it better myself. Slatyer was an activist Chief Scientist. It was significant that he travelled overseas with the Prime Minister, which I never did. He deserves credit for originating the successful Cooperative Research Centre scheme in 1990. My Ministerial service ended on 4 April 1990, after seven years and 25 days, after being dumped from the Centre-Left (C-L) ticket for the fourth Hawke Government. Between 1983 and 1990, of 27 Ministers in three Hawke Governments, nine had been from the C-L faction. After the 1990 election, due to retirements and defeats, the C-L had only 16 members in Caucus, less than one-seventh of the total. The Right and Left factions combined to force a reduction of C-L Ministers from nine to seven, in effect six plus John Button who, as Leader in the Senate, was 391
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 392
A THINKING REED
untouchable.With the institutionalisation of factions, each group was allocated a ‘quota’ and allowed to pick its own team. South Australia, with six C-L Caucus members, had only one Minister, Neal Blewett. Victoria’s two C-L members, Button and me, were both Ministers. (Two Victorian Independents, Michael Duffy, a Minister, and Neil O’Keefe, did not vote in the C-L faction.) In any case, the ALP lost six Victorian Federal seats in the 1990 election, partly a protest vote against the Cain Government, and the State was regarded as over-represented in the Ministry. I had major problems inside the C-L because Dawkins, Blewett and Walsh were zealous supporters of the Keating line. Button was a moderate Keatingite. All regarded me as a Hawke fellow traveller. The falsity of that belief was demonstrated when Hawke failed to support my candidature. On the morning of the day when the C-L group picked its Ministerial ticket, I calculated that I would survive by a single vote. Then, at noon, a telephone call from Bob Brown, MP for Charlton (not the Senator). ‘Mate,’ he began, and with that word I knew that I was gone. ‘Mate, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to break my promise to vote for you. I’ve been told that if I vote against you and Peter Morris, I can survive as a Minister, and that is my only option.’ I told him that I understood but would honour my commitment to vote for him. In the factional ballot that followed, I was defeated for last place on the reduced C-L ticket by Gordon Bilney, a South Australian, former dentist and High Commissioner to Jamaica. He beat me by one vote.* I received more than 2000 letters expressing sympathy and wishing me well. The following week, when I sought C-L nomination for membership of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, the faction voted me down again. I thought this very petty, so I left. My relations with Hawke were cordial in private but he had never taken science seriously until the forced change of direction in the Science and Technology Statement. The Hawke Memoirs failed to mention it. In one sentence (p. 160) he accorded me the sound of one hand clapping, writing that in my ‘effusive fashion’ I ‘began to give science the prominence it deserves’. Nine of the original 27 Ministers elected in 1983 left before I did, and five more went in 1990 with me. I was the last surviving Minister from * In the fourth Hawke Government the C-L contingent was John Button, John Dawkins, Neal Blewett, Peter Cook, Michael Tate, Bob Brown, Gordon Bilney. 392
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 393
MINISTERING TO SCIENCE
1983 never to have been elevated to Cabinet. Being in a class of one conferred a cachet of exclusiveness, but I could have done without it. I acknowledge having failed to network adequately with my colleagues and with rare exceptions did not cultivate journalists in the press gallery and the ABC. I paid a personal price. More seriously, science paid a price too. After my relegation from the Ministry, I was asked to write the Preface to the Penguin Encyclopedia of Australia (1990). The entry on me, which I did not see before publication, states that as Minister for Science 1983–90, ‘his eccentricities and outspokenness did not make him popular with colleagues’. The eccentricities, as ever, were unspecified. What could they mean: uninvolved with sport? liked chamber music? did not drink? quiz champion? wrote books? In Australia ‘eccentric’ is always pejorative, even when softened by ‘loveable’.
CONSOLATION PRIZES While my seven years as Science Minister seemed like a via dolorosa there were consolations, especially friendship and support from the research community. This was recognised by my election as Fellow of all four Australian Academies: Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE) in 1992, Humanities (FAHA) in 1993, Science (FAA) in 1996 and Social Sciences (FASSA) in 2003. Only three Australian politicians have been elected as FAA, the others being Sir Robert Menzies (1958) and Lord Casey (1966). Oddly, no other Australian has been elected to all four learned Academies. I was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in January 1993 for ‘services to the promotion of science, the arts and film’ rather than to politics, and it was rare for the award to be given to a sitting Member of Parliament. Universities (Macquarie, Wollongong, Southern Cross, Curtin, Melbourne, ANU) made generous awards and the University of Technology, Sydney, recognised my writings with a Doctorate of Letters (DLitt). I was also grateful that so many eminent scientists were prepared to spend so much time in discussion. Interesting positions came to me as the direct result of service as Science Minister: membership of an international think-tank investigating Perestroika for Gorbachev, board membership of CARE Australia, some consulting with the OECD and election as a Visiting Fellow Commoner 393
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 394
A THINKING REED
at Trinity College, Cambridge. Even my nine years as National President of the ALP were related to my Ministerial service, enabling me to continue some contribution to public life.
394
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 395
CHAPTER 12
ﱗ
Backbench Explorations
After being sacked from the Ministry in 1990, I was grateful to be offered more worthwhile opportunities for service. Six were particularly important: Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long Term Strategies, a position which was created for me; representing Australia on the Executive Board of UNESCO in Paris, and on the World Heritage Committee; Chair of the ANZAAS Congress; member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade; and Deputy Chair of the Constitutional Convention (ConCon) on the Republic. The Long Term Strategies (LTS) Committee had twelve members, ALP, Liberal and National, and a small but enthusiastic secretariat.We were given power to determine our own terms of reference and subjects for enquiry, rather than carrying out work requested by a Minister. This proved to be both strength and weakness. I welcomed the flexibility, but it meant that Ministers were irritated if we strayed into their paddocks and had no sense of commitment to our outcomes. However, we produced five substantial reports, all ahead of their time and still relevant. All were adopted unanimously, confirming that when MPs were exposed to new ideas they could reach consensus. But that did not mean that Ministers would adopt our recommendations, especially if we were seen to be invading their turf. My Deputy Chair, Don Dobie, Liberal MP for Cook, was always supportive and helped to shield me from Opposition attack. The first two reports had a common theme,‘Australia as an Information Society’.The first, subtitled ‘Grasping New Paradigms’ (June 1991), set out 395
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 396
A THINKING REED
the concept of information and communications as a transforming technology, and proposed a National Information Policy. The Report found that all the major stakeholders in Government interpreted ‘information’ in completely different ways with no comprehensive overview, only fragmentation. This remains the case. The only State which had developed sophisticated information policies was Queensland due to the ingenuity of Kevin Rudd, then Chief of Staff to the Premier,Wayne Goss. The second, subtitled ‘The Role of Libraries/Information Networks’ (September 1991), examined the failure of successive governments to adopt the recommendations of the report Public Libraries in Australia (1976), commissioned by Gough Whitlam, who set up a committee of enquiry chaired by Alan Horton, Librarian of the University of New South Wales. We emphasised the role of libraries as community facilities which could encourage access and equity and promote democratic practice. The LTS report was a major factor in my receiving the Redmond Barry Award of the Australian Library and Information Association in 1996. The citation quoted from the report’s preface: In singling out libraries for particular attention the Committee has acknowledged the important role they have to play in providing access to information for the Australian people. This access is fundamental to the maintenance of our democracy, the transformation of our economy to that of a clever country and the delivery of social justice to all our citizens . . . This statement bears the clear mark of Barry Jones’ commitment to libraries.
Because of the dysfunctional fragmentation of approaches to information policy, the Keating Government was glacially slow in responding to our reports. From Paris, where I was attending UNESCO, I telephoned John Bell, one of the most sophisticated public servants in Canberra, to see how the process could be speeded up. I offered to write a draft response for the Government. John checked with an interdepartmental committee, and it was agreed that I could write the response to the critical report I had driven provided that my language was vague and I made no specific commitments involving money. My draft response was adopted in principle but effectively pigeon-holed. In the Knowledge Nation Taskforce Report in 2001 I revived the idea of a National Information Policy, but that too was despised and rejected. 396
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 397
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
In April 1992 the LTS Committee published a unanimous report, Expectations of Life: Increasing the Options for the 21st Century (EOL report), in which we considered the social, political and economic implications of sharply increasing longevity in Australia, Europe, North America and Japan. We were strongly influenced by the work of the English demographer and social historian Peter Laslett. His book A Fresh Map of Life argued that a new discrete category in demography, ‘the Third Age’, had developed—people no longer in full-time paid employment but who remained physically and intellectually vigorous for decades before moving to ‘the Fourth Age’, of physical deterioration, dependence and, ultimately, death. Laslett argued that there was a fundamental confusion in public policy caused by treating the Third and Fourth Ages as if they were all dependent. It was essential not to be fearful of the sudden and unprecedented increase in active longevity. The message given in submissions to the Committee was that the major problem about ageing was not the aged themselves but myths and denigratory or disparaging attitudes towards them. The aged were often seen as wasting assets, past their economic use-by date and a burden on others. We calculated that in Australia there were six times as many people in the Third Age as in the Fourth. And yet, policies for the older Australians were essentially horizontal—‘smoothing the pillow’ or ‘easing the passing’ —rather than vertical—to keep older people upright, healthy and independent. We calculated that current Commonwealth expenditure for Fourth Age health is seven times greater than for the Third Age, a differentiation of 42: 1 per capita. It was hard to see a rationale for this. The response of the Department of Health, Housing and Community Services completely lacked imagination. The problem in part was that relevant bureaucrats had expertise in making policies for winding down the aged but could not get their heads around the concept of revving them up. In 2000 and 2001 I was fortunate to be invited to Cambridge to work with Peter Laslett and I discuss this in Chapter 13. The LTS Committee’s most controversial report,‘Australia’s Population “Carrying Capacity”: One Nation—Two Ecologies’, was tabled in Parliament in December 1994. Unanimous, as usual, and anticipating the rise of Hansonism, or something like it, we attempted to head off a divisive debate on immigration by recommending the adoption of a long-term population policy. 397
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 398
A THINKING REED
We argued for an explicit National Population Policy, an ‘eyes open’ approach prospective in nature, looking at where we want to go, relying on an evidentiary base (covering resources, land use, physical and intellectual infrastructure). An implicit, or de facto, population policy is an ‘eyes closed’ approach, essentially retrospective and with the risk of becoming politically opportunistic, following public opinion and responding to billows of fear and misunderstanding, especially around election time. We wrote, ‘Decision makers are stumbling around saying, “We’re not setting out the principles on which we operate.We just make ad hoc decisions year by year”.’ Our report infuriated the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs and its Minister, Nick Bolkus, because we argued for an open transparent approach rather than tackling all the problems in a secretive, bureaucratic process. We said, ‘In population matters, Australia cannot rely on luck and chance factors. It must know where it wants to go’. A National Population Policy would have been an enabling framework for discussion, analysis and community input, about the range of future options for population, taking into account factors such as distribution, composition, skills base, age distribution but without imposing specific, rigid targets such as ‘28.5 million by July 2050’. A factor contributing to the report’s unanimous adoption was that committee members were increasingly concerned that an exaggerated emphasis on immigration in isolation would be divisive, with refugees/asylum seekers becoming scapegoats. This was precisely what happened in 2001. The Committee was concerned about the rise of irrationalism in politics, in which immigration was blamed for every social problem, especially crime, unemployment, pressure on health, social services and the environment. It raised a false or exaggerated dichotomy, as if there could be wilderness, unspoiled rivers and unpolluted beaches or migrants but not both. This gross oversimplification diverts attention away from where it ought to be: on proper resource management, improved waste disposal, energy efficiency and rethinking the real, social cost of water. The Committee concluded that there was no ‘danger’ or ‘crisis’ point beyond which population cannot be supported in the longer term. The greatest threat to environment is not population per se, but population factored by levels of per capita resource use. We discussed Australia’s unique urban concentration, where two thirds of the population live in five cities, and the political, social and economic significance of our two ecologies,‘arid Australia’ and ‘fertile Australia’. 398
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 399
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
The Committee’s last report was ‘The Workforce of the Future’, tabled in June 1995, essentially an examination of the dramatic changes in the world of work since 1974, the year that the ‘golden age of full employment’ ended internationally and a projection of future trends: increased participation by women, casualisation, regional problems, the increase of part-time work, development of a dual labour market (high skills v. low skills) and the variable impact of regional unemployment. I was gratified that many of the arguments that I had been pursuing in Sleepers, Wake! were adopted unanimously by an all-party group. It was ahead of its time and the reports are now seen as part of the conventional wisdom. But they should have been acted on, not just noted, and that was maddening. After the Howard Government was elected in March 1996 the Committee for Long Term Strategies was put to sleep. It was seen as being dependent on my leadership and it would have broken with precedent to have an Opposition MP chair a Committee. In 1990 Gareth Evans asked if I would be interested in running for election to the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in Paris for a four-year, part-time term. Bob Hawke suggested that I resign from the House of Representatives and become Ambassador to UNESCO. The second option was less attractive because I did not want to leave Australia for a three-year stretch. I agreed to Gareth’s proposal and as a first step went to Paris in October–November 1990 and May–June 1991 to familiarise myself with how UNESCO operated (I never quite worked it out), and began lobbying for the election to be held at the forthcoming General Conference. I also did some consulting on science policy for the OECD. In November 1991 I was elected to the Executive Board by the General Conference, after an effective campaign organised by the diplomat Adrian Sever, winning 121 votes out of 151 cast. I was the fifth Australian to be elected to the Board since 1946 and enjoyed being in the apostolic succession to Gough Whitlam at UNESCO. He had been Ambassador, full time, from 1983 to 1986, won election as a Member of the Executive Board for the term 1985 to 1989 and became Vice President of the World Heritage Committee from 1983 to 1989. In 1985 Gough had arranged for Australia and New Zealand to join the AsiaPacific regional grouping in UNESCO. In all the other UN bodies Australia and New Zealand are members of the Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG). 399
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 400
A THINKING REED
Between 1990 and 1997 I spent a total of almost two years in France. After my term on the UNESCO Board 1991–95, I was Vice President of the World Heritage Committee 1995–96 and member of an ad hoc Working Group on the Structure and Function of UNESCO’s General Conference 1996–97, chaired by my friend Torben Krogh of Denmark. I shall always be grateful to Gareth Evans and the Australian taxpayer for making this experience possible. Fortunately, my constituents and ALP members in Lalor took no objection to my absences and the quality of my office staff in Werribee compensated. Voters seemed to accept my argument that I was working for peace in Paris and in the 1993 elections my vote in Lalor increased. From June 1992 I was also National President of the ALP and chaired some executive meetings from Paris by telephone. Mostly, I lived in an apartment in the magnificent Australian Embassy, Harry Seidler’s masterpiece, in the rue Jean Rey near the Seine and across from the Eiffel Tower. Gough Whitlam, who enjoyed the unparalleled view of Paris from the top floor for three years, dubbed it the Palais Seidler. I was fortunate to be supported throughout my term by Anne Siwicki, an Adelaide expatriate who had also worked with Gough. UNESCO’s Director-General from 1987 to 1999 was Dr Federico Mayor Zaragoza. A charismatic Catalan born in 1934, biochemist by training, he ran Granada University, held chairs there and in Madrid, became a scientific bureaucrat in the transition period after Franco’s death, was Deputy Director-General of UNESCO 1978–81, Spain’s Minister for Education and Science 1981–82 and Director of the Institute of the Sciences of Man in Madrid 1983–87. In 1987 he had come from behind as a compromise choice, defeating the incumbent, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow of Sénégal, and a strong Asian candidate from Pakistan. Re-elected in 1993, he cultivated the Arab and francophone African states effectively, flattered shamelessly, played favourites. Immaculate, his hair was like an advertisement for Brylcreem. Mayor had astonishing, often exasperating, fluency in Spanish, French and English and could switch languages effortlessly, in mid-sentence. He was also a widely admired poet. He brought the rhapsodic and incantatory Hispanic style to English and French and his speeches were almost Castrolike in length. However, it was not always clear what point he was trying to make or what action was proposed. Mayor had excellent networking skills and was ambitious to secure a Nobel Peace Prize for UNESCO or himself, not necessarily in that order. He deserved it more than some winners, such as Henry Kissinger and 400
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 401
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
Yasser Arafat. He rounded up some of the usual suspects, providing them with offices at UNESCO’s headquarters: they included Javier Perez de Cuellar, former Secretary-General of the UN, Jacques Delors, retired President of the European Union and Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu from Guatemala. I supported Mayor on his general policy aims while wishing they were more sharply defined, but his evasiveness about administration made me increasingly critical. In the end I suspect that he saw me, wrongly, as being in the enemy camp. Until 1993 Executive Board members were, in theory, elected not as national representatives but in their personal capacities, as scholars, thinkers, writers. Former members included the playwright Archibald MacLeish, psychologist Jean Piaget, philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and poet Pablo Neruda. The system changed under heavy pressure from the Japanese, then UNESCO’s largest financial contributors in the absence of the Americans. Japan insisted that Board members must be direct representatives of national governments, able to commit them to action or, at least, expenditure. For my first two years I was there as me, sitting behind a name tag M. JONES, and for my last two as a national representative behind a name tag AUSTRALIE. The Executive Board had some distinguished members. I was closest to Talat Halman, formerly Turkey’s Ambassador to the United Nations and Minister for Culture, rewarded with a British knighthood (GBE) for having translated Shakespeare’s sonnets. I was told, not by Talat, that the Turkish versions were an improvement on the original. Jean-Pierre Angremy was a member of the Académie française, a highly praised novelist under the pen-name of Pierre-Jean Rémy and (it was whispered) a successful writer of pornography under another name. India’s representatives were a senior diplomat, Natarajan Krishnan, and a novelist, Nina Sibal. Dan Haulica had been an eminent editor and critic in Romania but I found his speeches, essentially interior monologues, completely impenetrable, apart from his obligatory quotations from Paul Valéry. Jorge Edwards Valdes from Chile was a novelist. I felt about UNESCO the same way I do about the ALP or the ABC: I loved it, but it often drove me mad. UNESCO was a valuable training school for francophone Africans and many served in Paris before returning home as politicians, academics and administrators. I was always intrigued by the annual returns 401
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 402
A THINKING REED
presented to the Executive Board setting out the national origins of senior UNESCO staff. Sénégal always scored very well, often with more of its nationals placed in UNESCO than candidates from China or Australia. When I asked the Director-General how the quotas were determined, he said there was a mathematical formula in which population and annual contributions were the major factors. I expressed an interest in mathematical theory and asked him to provide the formula, so that I could understand how Sénégal out-scored China. I never saw it. UNESCO has a global reach and global, almost intergalactic, ambitions but lacks the resources to match. To put things in proportion, UNESCO, aiming to touch the lives of two thirds of the world’s six billion people, had a budget equal to CSIRO and the ABC combined, organisations of major—if threatened—significance in a nation of twenty million. UNESCO attempted far too much, considering its limited budget, and was always trying to extend the bounds of its existing mandate: education, science and culture and, more recently, communications. It also took up important emerging issues, essentially by default: gender, environment, human rights for people working in education, science, culture and communications, peace and development. There was a common view in UNESCO that once a conference had been held on a subject and a report published, the problem was largely solved. However, some conferences were successful, notably the World Conference on Education for All held at Jomtien,Thailand in 1990 which had a tremendous impact in the Arab world and parts of Asia and Africa. The words ‘education for all’ were coded language for ‘education for girls and women’. UNESCO also initiated valuable work on transborder data flows, the human genome project and intellectual property, and Justice Michael Kirby has played an outstanding role in all three areas. While English is one of UNESCO’s six official languages, UNESCOspeak has little relationship to natural language and documentation was often opaque, odd in an organisation which saw education and communication among its core functions. UNESCO routinely passed resolutions deploring slavery and child labour, but the wording was so vague that Mauritania, actively involved in the slave trade, and Pakistan, heavily dependent on child labour, felt able to vote for them. For two years I chaired the mysteriously named UNESCO Committee on Conventions and Recommendations (generally abbreviated as the CRE), its de facto human rights body. I began a strong but unavailing 402
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 403
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
campaign to change the name and adopt the title ‘Human Rights’. No, I was warned, that would never do. In UNESCO, human rights issues could be raised with governments which were in breach, but only if they were not described as human rights: references to ‘breaches of normative standard setting instruments or conventions’ were more diplomatic. I also became involved in some editorial work, first as a consultant with Information Australia, a firm run by a former Herald-Sun journalist, Michael Wilkinson. Who’s Who in Australia had been owned by the Herald & Weekly Times and new editions were published every two or three years. It was poorly edited and promoted, even after it became part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Wilkinson was convinced that Who’s Who in Australia could be far more useful and effectively promoted as an annual publication. Information Australia published editions of my Dictionary of World Biography in 1994, 1996 and 1998. In 2001 Michael sold Information Australia to the English firm Crown Content. I also provided advice for the sixth edition of The Australian Encyclopaedia, edited by Tony Macdougall, published in 1996 in eight volumes by Australian Geographic. I wrote many new biographies, mostly of scientists, artists and politicians, revised and corrected major articles and suggested some stylistic changes. I contributed biographies to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, when Geoffrey Serle and John Ritchie were editors. I accepted appointments as an adjunct professor at Wollongong, Victoria and Monash universities, gave some lectures and conducted occasional seminars for staff. I chaired a review of the Science Faculty in Wollongong. As a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Resources, I was actively involved in writing a major report,‘Genetic manipulation: the threat or the glory?’, tabled in February 1992. The cover featured a handsome painting of ‘The Durham Ox’ by Thomas Flintoff, which hangs in the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. This huge mutant beast from the late 18th century demonstrated that genetic modification was not new and I hoped that we could open up debate about the biotechnological revolution. In September 1993 I was elected chair of the 62nd Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth. Distinguished predecessors included Sir Edgeworth David, Sir Douglas Mawson, Sir John Monash, Sir Macfarlane Burnet and Sir Gustav Nossal. I accepted 403
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 404
A THINKING REED
partly because no other politician had ever held the position.The opening address was to be given by Richard Leakey, the Kenyan palaeontologist, but he had to withdraw after a plane crash when he lost both legs and I imposed on my friend Justice Michael Kirby to deliver an address in his place. He prepared a formidable lecture on the legal challenges involved in genome research, flew over, presented it superbly, then flew back to Sydney on ‘the midnight horror’, so that he could preside over the Court of Appeal in the morning. By the time of my appointment the venerable institution was in decline.ANZAAS had been founded in 1888 and for almost a century was the most important scientific event in Oceania, with researchers using it to release major papers. But by the 1980s, scientists were accustomed to jumping onto a Boeing 747 and racing off to the United States or Europe, where international conferences had become more numerous and specialised. The last ANZAAS Congress was held in Adelaide in 1997 but the organisation still exists to promote dialogue and understanding between the public, science and government. In October 1994 I accepted an unexpected invitation to attend a White House dinner in which Bill Clinton was to hand Nelson Mandela the Hunger Project’s Africa Prize for leadership ‘for the sustainable end of hunger’, an oddly worded citation. I was on my way to a UNESCO Executive Board meeting in Paris and, apart from the flattery, the invitation suited me because I needed to visit the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, for advice on a rare eye condition. Bill Clinton was facing a rough patch politically and the Democrats lost heavily in the November mid-term Congressional elections. Mandela had become President of South Africa in May, and was at the height of his moral power. Although called a White House dinner, there was a huge crowd and the function was held at a major hotel.When Bill Clinton rose to speak he received tepid applause from a largely Washington crowd, and knowing glances were exchanged across the room. Nevertheless, he worked the 1300 people present with consummate skill and a disarming capacity to make every listener feel that the message was directed straight to him or her. He received a standing ovation as he ended. Mandela was cheered rapturously when he rose to accept the award, but he looked deathly tired and his words sounded stiff and lifeless, in striking contrast to the charisma I had observed on television.Applause for Mandela was relatively subdued as he sat down. The Parliament was becoming an increasingly lonely place. My friends 404
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 405
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
in Caucus were departing. Ralph Jacobi left in 1987, Susan Ryan in 1988, Barry Cohen, John Brown, John Mildren and Joan Child in 1990, John Kerin in 1993. In 1996 Gareth Evans decided to attempt a transition from the Senate to the House of Representatives, a necessary precondition for succeeding to the ALP leadership. He concluded that the safe seat of Lalor would suit him and that I should retire in his favour. Under some circumstances I might have obliged, as I liked and admired Gareth and had been grateful when he nominated me as a candidate for election to the Executive Board of UNESCO. But I had not been consulted first and became increasingly annoyed at the drip feeding of stories in the media, that I was either about to give up anyway or that I should, and that if I did not then I would be displaced as National President. The line fed to, and eagerly adopted by, the Canberra press gallery was that Jones was a soft target, with no will to resist. This was a serious mistake. I received overwhelming support from ALP branches and electors in Lalor and decided not to budge. I had already determined that the next Parliament would be my last, but I thought that my role as Chair of the House of Representatives Long Term Strategies Committee was a useful contribution to public policy, and that being MP helped me to be an effective and peripatetic National President. A compromise was offered. If I gave up the safe seat of Lalor to Gareth, I would be nominated for the marginal seat of Bruce which had been strengthened for Labor under redistribution. Why did Gareth not run for Bruce? Not safe enough for him, I was told. I could win it, but he might not. In the end, I dug in. My relationship with Gareth was strained for some time. Michael Duffy was retiring from Holt, a fairly safe seat, in 1996 and ultimately Gareth was pre-selected there. It had not been offered to him at first because another candidate had stitched up support in the local branches and it was feared that Gareth might face a bitter contest. However, a solution was finessed and Gareth made a voyage of inspection to Bruce, winning all hearts despite his expressed concern that the main street of Dandenong lacked the charm of a Tuscan village. Sitting in Opposition facing the triumphant Howard Coalition gave no joy, and the presence of Pauline Hanson was disturbing. I felt that I had stayed on for one term too many. I was disturbed by the rise of the Pauline Hanson One Nation phenomenon.This was partly because I had failed to recognise how many Australians rejected my comfortable assumptions about multiculturalism, 405
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 406
A THINKING REED
high migration levels, some welfare categories and Aboriginal reconciliation. Many were among my Party’s traditional supporters.A strong sense of alienation provoked by rapid economic change and a sense of powerlessness, compounded by a ‘White Australia’ mindset and remembrance of things past, had a strong appeal to at least one million voters, probably far more. The major parties shared responsibility for One Nation’s rise.They had agreed on radical economic and social changes such as globalisation, downsizing, privatisation, eliminating uneconomic services in the bush without letting voters into the secret. Labor in government had failed to provide after-sales service, to explain, explain and explain. Not surprisingly, voters felt marginalised by the political process. Ms Hanson had a very hazy idea of evidence. She coined a valuable term, ‘book facts’, a code word for the evidence, especially statistics, that could be found in books. It was an interesting pre-literate approach. When challenged to provide evidence that one million illegal immigrants were entering Australia each year via New Zealand she snorted:‘But you are just asking for “book facts”. We don’t need “book facts”: we know it is happening.’ To an alarming degree, she appeared to be setting the political agenda. Our Parliamentary system, the two party Westminster model, came under serious threat, and parties differentiated themselves by the degree of overlap with One Nation’s policies. Both Howard and Beazley seemed to be weak in their response to Hansonism, but I misread Howard. His approach was clever, calculated and ruthless. Howard, who had pushed a radical economic agenda even more than Keating, pushed a tough, conservative social agenda which was congenial to Hansonites. He developed a brilliant, but risky, strategy to destroy the Hanson Party but adopt its political agenda. I wrote a speech on Hansonism for Beazley, taking a strong moral position, but he declined to use it. His advisers told him: ‘Say nothing.’ Jeff Kennett denounced Hansonism categorically from the outset and One Nation never had any impact in Victoria. But my home State was probably a special case, and Hansonism was a powerful force in Queensland and in New South Wales, to the west of Sydney. Spin doctors both in Labor and the Coalition saw that winning elections depended on capturing the allegiance of Hansonite sympathisers, who fell into a particular demographic, male rather then female, middle aged, Anglophone background, in trades rather than professions, blue collar and the bush. Someone cruelly described Pauline Hanson as ‘the 406
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 407
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
truck driver’s wet dream’. Attacks on her were often counterproductive, such as deriding her background in running a fish and chip shop, or her lack of formal education. Both accusations actually attracted support to her. I felt distinctly uncomfortable about her presence partly because we had all misread the grass-roots reaction against multiculturism which had elected her. I asked Gareth, ‘How many of your waking hours are devoted to thinking about Pauline Hanson?’ He said,‘About 40 per cent.’ I commented,‘Don’t you think that is excessive?’ I had several meetings with the Dalai Lama, talked at length, exchanged books, talked about ethics, history and spirituality and shared confidences. A full-page photograph was featured in Images of the House: the first hundred years of the House of Representatives 1901–2001, published by the Department of the House of Representatives. In 1996 I became a member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, then chaired by Ian Sinclair. It was challenging and satisfying and we sometimes met three or four times during a sitting week. We had the opportunity to cross-examine diplomats, ministers and officers from many countries, and the briefing material from the Committee secretariat was impressive. When we met a deputation from the United States Congress, I was shocked to learn that only about 15 per cent of Members of the House of Representatives had passports, and barely 40 per cent of Senators. Australian politicians sometimes faced the accusation of being globetrotters at public expense but, Mal Colston notwithstanding, I thought we returned good value to the community. In November 1996 Kevin Andrews, later a Minister, introduced a Private Member’s Bill on Euthanasia Laws. This invoked the Commonwealth Parliament’s power to overturn the Northern Territory’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act (1995), permitting euthanasia. The Andrews Bill had John Howard’s support and Parliamentary time was found to debate and pass it.There was to be a conscience vote. I could see both sides of the euthanasia debate all too clearly and the issue troubled me because I found it impossible to take a dogmatic position.* I regarded the Northern Territory legislation as an unacceptable model, particularly because the territory has limited access to cancer specialists or palliative care and I was worried that, at a time when economic rationalism was the dominant paradigm, the hospital system * Hansard, House of Representatives, 21 November 1996, vol. 210, p. 7326. 407
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 408
A THINKING REED
might come under increasing pressure to speed up the turn-round time for beds, a fear expressed by Aboriginal groups. I had real difficulty with the idea of institutionalising euthanasia by setting up legislative protocols. I quoted the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics (1994) which, after carefully observing practice in the Netherlands, reported that there was a high risk of involuntary euthanasia being applied where terminally ill patients are under a burden of guilt, as well as disease, and felt obliged to relieve and end the suffering of family and friends and the drain on resources. This guilt pressure might prove to be the thin end of the wedge. Gus Nossal, Michael Kirby and Ninian Stephen took a similar line, so I was in good company. On balance I had more confidence in the role of medical practitioners operating under existing moral and ethical constraints within the profession, and with the provision of ‘living wills’ and the appointment of agents, than providing an institutionalised code, supervised by a State or Territory. I supported the Victorian Medical Treatment Act of 1988 which provided for ‘living wills’. I was overseas when the Andrews Bill received its Second Reading, so I did not cast a vote. In effect, I was paired with Ian McLachlan, the Defence Minister: he would have voted against the Bill, I would have voted for it, subject to amendment. However, with the help of Trish Worth, Liberal MP for Adelaide, I was able to arrange to have three amendments, adopting provisions from the Victorian Act, incorporated in the Andrews Bill. This was a reasonable compromise. In December 1996 I was elected as a Parliamentary representative to the Council of the National Library of Australia. Sir Antony Mason, former Chief Justice of the High Court, was chairman until his removal in a mindlessly vindictive act and replacement by Jim Bain, an amiable Sydney stockbroker. Jim had served on many boards but, as he would have modestly admitted, he lacked Tony’s wit and masterly gifts for analysis and synthesis. Other Council members, holdovers from the Keating years, included Rodney Cavalier, a former New South Wales Education Minister, a great book collector and incisive wit, and Graham Freudenberg, the best speech writer of his time, who penned honeyed words for Calwell, Whitlam, Wran, Cain, Hawke, Carr and Latham. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) invited me to become a member of an ‘Eminent Persons’ Group which met in Geneva in December 1996 under the chairmanship of Sir Sonny Ramphal, former 408
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 409
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. The invitation was organised by Dr John Zillman, Australia’s Director of Meteorology, who served as President of the WMO 1995–2003. Our task was to investigate whether the provision of increasingly sophisticated, specialised weather forecasts should be provided as a public good, or subject to market-force discipline and charged for. We also considered the need for national organisations to upgrade their capacity to predict extreme weather events such as tsunamis. We strongly supported maintaining free weather services. In January 1997, as a member of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, I visited Hong Kong to examine the implications of the impending transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China. Ian Sinclair and Peter Nugent were also in the party. We had long discussions with Chris Patten, the retiring Governor, Tung Chee Hwa, Beijing’s replacement for him, Martin Lee, the leading campaigner for human rights, and Christine Loh, a former commodities trader who was an outstanding policy initiator in the Legislative Council. We wrote a comprehensive report about Hong Kong on our return, accurately predicting what would happen. Geoff Walsh, then our Consul-General in Hong Kong, later became the ALP’s National Secretary. (In an earlier life he had been Bob Hawke’s Principal Private Secretary.) Aung San Suu Kyi, Leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma (Myanmar), one of the most admired leaders of our time, is unusual in never having held office. She won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1991 and, like Nelson Mandela, became a role model for millions. In February 1997 Michael Aris, Suu Kyi’s husband, an English academic whose expertise was on Tibetan history and culture, visited Australia to represent her when an honorary doctorate was conferred in absentia by the University of Technology, Sydney, and I rarely heard a more poignant speech. Next month I spent time with Michael and their son Kim at home in Oxford, and we decided that I would visit Myanmar (Burma) in an attempt to meet Suu Kyi at her home in Yangon (Rangoon). We worked on strategies to gain access to her. Michael gave me some personal items and letters. While technically she was not under house arrest in 1997, the military regime in Myanmar made sure that her freedom to move and communicate was limited. Sometimes the telephone system worked, often it did not, and weeks might pass without contact. She was forbidden to have a satellite-based mobile telephone. He was denied a visa for Myanmar. She was free to leave to be with her husband and children but knew that she would be forbidden to return. 409
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 410
A THINKING REED
Our Ambassador had telephoned Suu Kyi well in advance, advising her when I would arrive. Then the line was cut. I set out in the Embassy car, with the Australian flag fluttering, only to find that her street was cordoned off, and we were turned away by soldiers, police and officers of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). A cameraman appeared from behind a bush, photographing me, the First Secretary and the driver, taking our names and asking for details of what we were proposing. An officer assured us that the road was sealed to protect Suu Kyi’s security. The First Secretary suggested that we visit the houses of Suu Kyi’s two Vice Presidents. At the first house there was a posse of soldiers, and a cameraman appeared on queue from behind a bush. The same thing happened at the second house. However, we were able to knock on the door of one house, to be told that both Vice Presidents were at Suu Kyi’s compound for the meeting with Barry Jones. During the day we made two more attempts to reach Suu Kyi, by attempting side roads, but in each case the military, police and a photographer had anticipated us. Finally, we gave up and I flew out of Yangon. Michael died of prostate cancer in Oxford in March 1999, without having seen Suu Kyi again. I was a Parliamentary delegate to an International Conference on Governance for Sustainable Growth and Equity, held in the United Nations Building in New York in July 1997.The conference, organised by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), gave me several opportunities to speak and to make a few enemies, because the vagueness and blandness of many papers presented seemed to waste our time. From mid-1997 Gareth Evans was attempting a major revision of Labor’s existing policies, and I served on a committee with responsibility for Education, Health and Social Welfare chaired by Greg Sword. Gareth was a member of all the Party committees. Our Shadow Minister for Education was Mark Latham, MP for Werriwa, hailed by Gough Whitlam as a future leader. Mark produced a draft education policy, called The Learning Society. My first impressions were not good. It reflected Mark’s enthusiasm for populist solutions for complex problems, confused education and training, and emphasised equity and access at the expense of quality. There were major inconsistencies in the document. It was hard to see how vocationalism should be the basis of lifelong education, when trades were changing at a bewildering speed and people were living far longer. The document pledged that Labor would provide an ‘integrated, seamless, multipurpose 410
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 411
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
system’ in tertiary education, promised that universities would be ‘broadened’, then stated flatly,‘There is no such thing as higher learning’. He thought research funding should be spread more equitably across the entire university and TAFE sector, not concentrated on elite universities.The implication was that research on atom smashing and brain surgery were elitist and had no better claims for public funding than hospitality or hairdressing. Why provide funds for the Australian National University that were not available for a TAFE in western Sydney? The provision of barefoot universities had a noble aspect to it, but the task for Labor (not addressed in the document) was to come to grips with the tension between quality and quantity, raising and spreading. While applauding the democratic spirit which emphasised access and breaking down hierarchy, I doubted if it would win community support. The document was silent on the arts, language, creativity and culture, personal enrichment or self-knowledge. It was also very badly written. Gareth shared my concerns. I showed the draft to Rodney Cavalier at a meeting of the Council of the National Library. At the meeting’s end, he handed me 17 foolscap pages of closely written criticism. Because I did not want to ambush Mark, I wrote to him on 4 June suggesting that we meet to discuss his policy: The reason that I find myself so shocked by the draft is the sharpness of the contrast with your other papers, which demonstrated real intellectual rigour, a product, indeed of ‘the higher learning.’ Part of the Hanson appeal is its attack on elites, on expertise. It is a tricky issue, but I would hate to see us taking the populist line. Let’s aim for the HCF not the LCM! Please, let’s talk.
I had no reply. Gareth and I then drafted some major amendments which we thought would strengthen the document, and sent Mark a copy. I telephoned Mark and he told me robustly where I could put the amendments. When the policy committee met to adopt the education policy, Mark’s office had put in an apology. He was in Mondragon, in Spain’s Basque territory. All our amendments were incorporated in the platform. In his Latham and Abbott, the columnist Michael Duffy commented: ‘Evans and Jones rewrote Latham’s policy and he accepted the new version without much objection’.* * Michael Duffy, Latham and Abbott, p. 162. 411
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 412
A THINKING REED
Latham remained as Shadow Minister for Education until the October 1998 election. He prepared a very lengthy policy document on education, described by Annabel Crabb as ‘dozens and dozens of pages long’, but not necessarily the document that Gareth and I had amended. It was sharply reduced and rewritten, or ‘butchered’ as Latham wrote in his diary, by Beazley’s office. After the election Latham refused to serve under Beazley again, returning to the backbench. My role as Deputy Chair of the Constitutional Convention on the Republic in February 1998—often known as ConCon—was one of the most interesting involvements in my public life. To deal with the republican issue, John Howard introduced the Constitutional Convention (Election) Bill 1997, providing for a convention with 152 members, half (76) to be directly elected by voters in the States and Territories in a non-compulsory postal ballot, the other half to be appointed. In May 1997 I told the House of Representatives that the legislation was a very cynical exercise . . . programmed to fail. It could be more accurately described as the Constitutional Convention (Impediments to Voting) Bill 1997. It creates an obstacle race, setting up hurdles to actually discourage voting . . . in very sharp contrast to our existing system.Voting is to be voluntary . . . to persuade the community that it is not very important . . . The provisions by implication, exclude non-English speaking voters. None of the material provided will allow for explanation to them. The Prime Minister calls himself a monarchist and he also supports what he calls ‘the existing system’. I am a republican and I also support ‘the existing system’. The problem is that the Prime Minister’s approach could be described as the ‘empty room’ theory of constitutional monarchy in which the qualities of physical absence and political indifference by the monarch are the major assets. If one asked the Prime Minister where the national focus was, he would fling open the doors of an empty room and say, ‘See! There’s nothing there. Isn’t it wonderful? And it works.’ We must be able to have more than the ‘empty room’ theory of constitutional sovereignty.*
John Howard sat through my speech. A few hours later, our paths * Hansard, House of Representatives, 14 May 1997, vol. 213, p. 3529. 412
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 413
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
crossed in the Chamber and I remarked,‘I think my empty room analogy was right on target.’ He said,‘Not far off.’ One afternoon in June 1997 the Prime Minister unexpectedly telephoned me at home to ask if I would be prepared to act as Deputy Chair of ConCon with Ian Sinclair, the longest-serving Federal MP at the time, as Chair. Because I had been so critical of his ConCon proposal, the invitation came as a surprise. When our appointments were announced, they were generally applauded. ConCon was held in the House of Representatives chamber in Old Parliament House, Canberra, over a ten-day period, 2–6 and 8–13 February 1998. When Ian Sinclair opened ConCon there was a palpable mood of excitement in the air. There could be little doubt that the 152 people assembled were the most powerful group in Australia. Proceedings were televised for the entire fortnight and media coverage was flattering. Republicans came to ConCon already deeply split over whether a President should be elected directly by the voters or indirectly chosen through a virtual electoral college of Parliamentarians. On the first day Clem Jones, a direct-election republican, former Lord Mayor of Brisbane, moved a procedural motion to allow the question of whether Australia should become a republic to be determined on the third day of ConCon rather than the final day. This would have had the effect of settling the major issue—whether to be a republic—at an early stage, putting pressure on all delegates to find the best mechanism for implementation. Unfortunately the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) and Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (ACM) opposed Clem’s motion and it was soon defeated on the voices. This had two deplorable results. It meant that the fundamental question was swamped by a subsidiary issue, the mode of election or appointment of a head of state. Second, it marked the beginning of open warfare between the two republican camps. The Republican v. Republican divide became far deeper and more bitter than the Republican v. Monarchist one. If there was a master plan to derail ConCon, by allowing the secondary issue to overwhelm the first, this was when it happened. But the ARM collaborated in the process, so a conspiracy is unlikely. I was appointed as chair of the Resolutions Committee, a representative group of twelve which met in private and proved to be the engine room of ConCon. Daryl Williams, QC, the Attorney-General, and Gareth Evans, QC, agreed to serve as joint rapporteurs. The Committee’s job was 413
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 414
A THINKING REED
to receive reports from the seven working parties set up to consider alternative models for a republic and other relevant submissions. The quality of debate in ConCon was high. It took only about three days to convert 152 delegates with varying backgrounds, relatively few known to each other when we began, to operate as an effective deliberative forum. Some delegates may have thought of ConCon as an alternative Parliament, and the quality of debate was generally higher. There was a whiff of hubris in the air and some enthusiasm for taking on other issues, such as a Bill of Rights and gender equity. Where ConCon differed from Parliament was that the outcome of voting on many propositions was unpredictable, changed by the quality of debate and the evidence produced. At ConCon some delegates urged the codification of a Bill of Rights, but past experience suggested that its chances of adoption by referendum would be extremely remote.* Legislation was a better option.The current proposal for a preamble, harmless and uninspiring in itself, had little chance of success. The republican model adopted, reluctantly, by ConCon was called the ‘Bi-Partisan Appointment of the President’. Promoted by the ARM, it involved a complicated nomination procedure by State Parliaments and other community organisations, a vetting procedure by a community constitutional committee to propose a short list, after which the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader would propose a single nomination to a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and the Senate, which would require a two thirds endorsement. The term of office was to be five years. The Prime Minister would have the right to dismiss the President. Direct election was superficially more attractive, giving voters a sense of ownership of the presidency.The problem was that, if a preferential system was adopted, an elected President could claim a mandate—the support of more than six million voters. This would make him/her inevitably a rival of the Prime Minister, especially if his/her mandate was bigger and/or more recent. In the referendum of November 1999 the ‘Bi-Partisan’ model received 45 per cent of the vote nationally, a high figure for a defeated proposition, but the result was a triumph for ‘No’, exactly what John * In 1988 a referendum to entrench trial by jury and freedom of religion by Constitutional amendment was overwhelmingly defeated despite the Government’s strong support, with ‘Yes’ securing a derisory vote of 30.8 per cent. 414
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 415
BACKBENCH EXPLORATIONS
Howard wanted. Of the 55 per cent ‘No’ vote, I estimate that perhaps 30 per cent were supporters of a monarchy, 10 per cent were direct election republicans, and 15 per cent were simply not interested in the issue and in a non-compulsory poll would not have bothered to vote. ‘Don’t knows’ do not and cannot win elections, but they determine referendum results. Many ardent republicans voted ‘No’ because they hoped this would lead to a more radical model being proposed later. It took real political skill to get people with diametrically opposed views, monarchists and direct election republicans, to work together in a common cause. But it was bizarre to see a coalition of interest between those who thought that a ‘Yes’ vote would lead to too much change and those who thought it would involve too little. The result raised a troubling question for the future, if the republican issue returned to the political agenda. If it was legitimate for supporters of direct election to collaborate with the monarchists to sabotage the bi-partisan model in 1999, would it be acceptable for indirect election supporters to wreck a future referendum (if any) for direct election? If not, why? B.A. Santamaria had a major influence not only on the Australian Labor Party, which I describe in Chapter 5, but also on the Coalition.After the Democratic Labor Party faded into irrelevance, many of its activists joined Liberal Party or National Party branches. Under Menzies, there had only been a few token Catholics in the Coalition Party rooms or the Ministry, but by 1996 they were more numerous. Xavier College had more alumni in the Howard Government (Fischer, Alston, McGauran) than any other school, something that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. When Santamaria died on 25 February 1998 John Howard offered his family a state funeral, an unusual distinction for somebody who had never held public office. The ceremony was to be held at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Tuesday 3 March 1998 and Kim Beazley asked me to attend, representing the Opposition. I had known Bob Santamaria a little and invariably found him courteous and helpful if I wanted to check points of detail, so I willingly agreed. I was invited to fly down to Melbourne in the prime ministerial VIP aircraft with John Howard, Peter Costello, Richard Alston and Brian Harradine.While we flew down, Howard commented that his own family would have agreed with Bob Santamaria on every issue of public policy 415
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 416
A THINKING REED
except one, the Spanish Civil War. Howard said his family, deeply antiCatholic, had been hostile to Franco. Archbishop George Pell delivered a ringing, triumphalist panegyric and Les Carlyon observed in The Age that he would not have been surprised to hear cries of ‘Christus Rex!’ echo across the nave. A notice in the order of service stated that access to the sacraments was restricted to Catholics in a state of grace. However, in special circumstances, the bishop could grant dispensation to allow any participants who wished to communicate. The notice went on, ‘In respect of this service, none of the above applies’. What did that mean? Everybody in? or everybody out? When the faithful lined up to take communion they were joined by figures from the Protestant establishment, including Malcolm Fraser, Bill Wentworth, Jeff Kennett and Sir Robert Southey. John Howard, Peter Costello, Sir Zelman Cowen and I were sitting together, and none of us budged. The Mass was being concelebrated by Archbishop Pell, Cardinal Edward Clancy and Archbishop Sir Frank Little. As Malcolm advanced on Archbishop Pell, he was given the sign of the cross and a flick pass, and the same for Wentworth, Kennett and Southey. On Sunday 30 August 1998 I was driving to Creswick to deliver a John Curtin Oration in his home town. On ABC Radio, I heard a news flash that the Governor-General had agreed to John Howard’s request to call an early election and dissolve the House of Representatives on the following day. After almost 21 years I was no longer a Member of the Australian Parliament. I regretted not having the opportunity to make a valedictory speech summing up what I had learned. That would have to wait for the autobiography. On balance, my Parliamentary years were more fruitful than painful. I can re-read my speeches with satisfaction, because they anticipated important issues and are free of partisan bitterness or personal attack. However, they confirm that I lacked the killer instinct which had disqualified me from higher political office. The American political scientist Harold Lasswell used to classify politicians into three types: the agitator, the administrator and the theorist. I fell, heavily, into the third group. I had expected my last Parliament to run until 1999. Now, aged almost 66, I had to plan personal priorities for my ‘Third Age’.
416
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 417
CHAPTER 13
ﱗ
Beliefs
‘It’s not that I am afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ Woody Allen, Without Feathers (1975)
This chapter proved to be very difficult to write, but it forced me to address my relationship with religion. Australians often seem deeply uneasy about attempting to examine the range and depth of their beliefs. Like most people, other than fundamentalists, I feel shifty and inconclusive on the subject, because of a deep uncertainty about what I believe. That God exists? Probably. That Jesus was a uniquely powerful and charismatic teacher? Yes. That he had a special or even unique relationship with God? Possibly.That the Church is a divine institution? Well, yes and no.That the Bible is infallible? No.That there is a soul, linked to a collective consciousness? Possibly. That there is life, as we know it, after death? Unlikely. If pushed, I generally describe myself as ‘Christian fellow traveller’ or sometimes ‘a northern hemisphere Christian’ because most of my transcendental experiences have been in Europe. I am not confident enough to be an agnostic. I agree with rationality as a principle, but feel uneasy when it turns into dogma or rigid instrumentalism. Habitual mistrust is unattractive and dangerous, especially if linked with fear of difference/fear of the unknown. I am more of an ironist than a rationalist—an isolated position in Australia where irony never took on, except as a form of mockery. 417
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 418
A THINKING REED
It is hard to be precise about my core beliefs. I have serious difficulty with the Apostles’ Creed, because it raises too many unanswerable questions. Paradoxically, doubt takes me away from materialism and certainty. I cannot be satisfied with simple materialist explanations when too many elements fill me with awe or perplexity. Religious issues and philosophy are constantly boiling around in my head. So, ‘Dubito, ergo sum’, as René Descartes should have said. I recognise that many secularists have a commitment to goodness, generosity, truth, justice and courage: they feel no need for a revealed religion. I cannot rule out whole areas of knowledge because I do not understand how to verify or falsify them through knowledge or experience. I would fail at once with quantum theory, for example. My oldest friend Phillip Adams, whose habitual garb could be confused for a priestly garment, proclaims himself as an atheist, but is obsessed with issues of belief. He concluded that I had a divided brain, half devoted to science and the rational, the other to the religious and numinous. The word ‘numinous’, from the Latin numen (deity), is defined as ‘aweinspiring’ or ‘filled with a sense of the presence of divinity’. Rudolf Otto, a German theologian, revived the word in 1917 and it was taken up by Carl Gustav Jung, William Temple and C.S. Lewis. Otto argued that the numinous conveyed a sense of overwhelming, urgent and inexplicable power, the mysterium tremendum. Manning Clark also pursued the numinous. I recognise the numinous when I encounter it, responding by a shuddering in my spine, changed breathing, faster heartbeat, heightened emotion, the lightning strike of imagination, an unexpected sense of familiarity with something completely unknown, places, sights and sounds which transcend the normal and quotidian. This sense, which bursts beyond rationality, often explodes in contact with creativity, music, literature, painting, sculpture—but also with landscape, nature and the night sky. I attended the Methodist Church and Sunday School at Ontario Street, Caulfield, from the age of six, later taught there and ultimately became its superintendent, was a trustee of the church and an occasional lay preacher. My roles in the church owed less to my piety and more to my availability. For a decade I was the only adult male under 60 in the congregation. When Ontario Street closed in 1975 I drifted away from active church membership and when the Uniting Church of Australia was established in June 1977 I became an increasingly problematic camp follower. As a child, my views of the world were shaped by exposure to radio, films and reading, including the Bible and much history, my mother’s 418
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 419
BELIEFS
relatives in Geelong, memories of the Depression, noises off from World War II, the impact of atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and a sense that a new world was being created after 1945, or had to be created if the human race was to survive. My commitment to reform and to ‘the abundant life’, as Jesus put it, had broad religious implications, so politics and religion overlapped. I have been a teacher, lawyer, academic, Labor Member of Parliament, Minister, UNESCO representative, writer and broadcaster. Inevitably, the cynicism and materialism of politics rubbed off. Politics is not an edifying profession, but how many professions are? I became effectively secularised, although not totally. I came to feel that my religious beliefs were superficial, not adequately thought through. I still have deep anxieties about the concept of an omniscient and omnipotent God who allows the cruel deaths of children, natural disasters—or the Holocaust. My presuppositions and prejudices are self-evident. I see myself as an odd combination of citizen, thinker, frustrated artist, historian and politician of the Labor persuasion, although that is increasingly difficult to define these days. My priorities are planetary, not national. I put the planet first, then Homo sapiens sapiens, then other species, and I place national interest (my own or anyone else’s nation) some distance down the list. I have no sense of the tribal, and this caused some difficulties in my political career. I have read the Bible cover-to-cover three times, and the Koran once. I explored Islam, Buddhism and Judaism discursively but did not feel drawn to them. I am not an eclectic or a pantheist. The Jewish god Yahweh became the god of choice for Europe, despite many options on offer, because when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire the Old Testament was brought along with it. Régis Debray in God:An Itinerary (Paris, 2001) has pointed out how late in human development the concept of a single omnipotent God emerged. ‘Why didn’t He appear earlier in the forty thousand years of human religious practices—of burying the dead and believing in an afterlife? Why did he wait for Abraham to make His covenant with (a portion of ) mankind?’ All three of the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, came from the deserts of the Middle East, and Debray speculates that ‘asceticism is antagonistic to woodlands’, and that diversity in environment may lead to creation and worship of a diversity in gods, such as forest, river and sea gods.The desert offers a narrower range of experience. 419
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 420
A THINKING REED
The quatrain: How odd Of God To choose The Jews,
put it succinctly.* Debray links the Old Testament and monotheism with the development of writing. Significantly God gave Moses the Ten Commandments in written form.All three monotheisms are religions ‘of the Book’, or with Christians ‘the Scriptures’, scriptura (written material) in Latin. St John’s Gospel begins with ‘In the beginning was the Word . . .’. I learned about God, like most of my generation, not directly but through Jesus and his disciples. The story of the incarnation of Jesus, ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, at a particular place and time had more impact than reflecting on the eternal and universal. A transforming work in my youth was The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906, translated in 1910) by my early hero Albert Schweitzer, a saintsubstitute for Protestants. In a powerfully argued work, he analysed what had been written about Jesus by 18th- and 19th-century scholars such as David Strauss and Ernest Renan after new methodologies had been developed in linguistics, history and philosophy. It explored why the New Testament was silent about most of Jesus’ life and why Paul wrote so little about him, why the Gospels differ so significantly and how far Jesus was part of the Jewish tradition of charismatic rabbis. Schweitzer ‘found it a cruel task to be honest’. He concluded that the authors whose work he examined all reflected their own personal philosophies, and were shaped by their times, so that liberals explained a liberal Jesus, conservatives a conservative Jesus, many of them enjoying, as he wittily commented, ‘the immortality of revised editions’. Schweitzer also argued that the quest for historicity was comparatively modern. Further, Jesus was speaking to his own time and not to the early 20th century, so that his teaching had to be re-invented to maintain relevance. He also considered that Jesus was ambiguous about his true nature. Ron Rosenbaum noted that Schweitzer believed that many writers were * The author was not Ogden Nash but William Norman Ewer. 420
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 421
BELIEFS
explaining away unresolved elements in [ Jesus’] biography, ones that were discomfiting to the modern sensibility—elements, in particular (from what Schweitzer believed were the earliest sources), that made Jesus look too Jewish, too primitive, too apocalyptic, too resistant to easy assimilation to the ‘rational’ religion, the etherealized spirituality of nineteenth-century liberal German Protestantism.*
Three works by Geza Vermes† (1924– ) helped provide me with some useful maps, late, but not too late, in my spiritual journey. Vermes, first professor of Jewish studies at Oxford, was born in Hungary to a Jewish family. He converted to Christianity, studied in Budapest and Louvain, became a Catholic priest, worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls for a decade, but left the priesthood in 1957 and occupied a middle ground between Christianity and Judaism. He has been a powerful intellectual influence in my thinking about religion for almost two decades, assisting me to examine core beliefs. Jesus the Jew places its subject in the context of Jewish life, history and culture and religion in Palestine under Roman occupation, especially the reformist rabbinical tradition of his time, distinct from Jesus the postcrucifixion Christ and Lord of Christianity as taught by Paul, John and the Church fathers. He described Jesus as unique ‘in profundity of insight and grandeur of character . . . an unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth and of bringing every issue back to the essence of religion, the existential relationship of man and man, and man and God’. The Changing Faces of Jesus analyses the various party lines that were pushed in the New Testament by the letters of St Paul, the Acts of the Apostles and each of the four Gospels. Paul’s writings are the earliest in the New Testament and the doctrine that Christ died for all sinners is his formulation. The anástasis, or resurrection, so often portrayed in the Orthodox tradition, showing Jesus raising Adam from the tomb, relies on the teaching of Paul, not Jesus. He also initiated the idea of ‘models, mediators and intercessors’ between the believer and God. While the early followers of Jesus remained inside the Jewish tradition, insisting on circumcision and kosher food, Paul succeeded in persuading James, John * Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, p. xxiv. † Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew, The Changing Faces of Jesus, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. 421
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 422
A THINKING REED
and Peter to accept that Gentiles did not have to become Jews to follow the teachings of Jesus. Vermes contends that Paul ‘stops short of declaring Jesus divine’, believing that he became ‘Son of God’ only with his resurrection. He acknowledges the astonishing power of Paul’s advocacy, but reminds us of how little he says about Jesus. He calls Paul ‘the most imaginative and creative writer’ in the New Testament, and a ‘brilliantly gifted organiser’. Paul’s description of the Eucharistic meal long predates the Gospel accounts.‘The Acts of the Apostles contains nothing that could possibly be interpreted as pointing to a divine Jesus.’ The concept of life after death comes very late to Jewish teaching and is foreign to the Old Testament.Yet it has been central to Christianity, with its emphasis on the risen Christ and the promise of immortality to believers. Paul cites the Old Testament as an authority for Jesus’ teachings far more than Jesus did himself, as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, written somewhere between 70 and 90 AD. The Synoptic Gospels differ significantly: all three record Peter’s acknowledgment of Jesus as the Christ, but only Matthew recounts Peter being acknowledged as ‘the rock’ upon which Jesus would build his church (ekklesia) (Matthew xvi: 17–19). How could the sources for Mark and Luke have missed it or not thought it worth recording? Only Matthew preserved the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew v–vii). Mark omits the Lord’s Prayer. Vermes argues that St Mark’s Gospel, the shortest, earliest, most abrupt and the least ‘literary’ or ‘doctrinal’, gives the strongest sense of authenticity, presenting the most vivid images of Jesus as a charismatic itinerant teacher, healer and prophet, remote from his family, generous in judgment, loving, patient but with occasional bursts of inconsistency and even crankiness. Mark omits any reference to the virgin birth. Only Mark refers to Jesus expressing anger and irritation and reports criticism of Jesus by his own family: the other Gospels are circumspect. Mark quotes Aramaic words and ‘is the only evangelist who enables us to hear today an occasional and faint echo . . . of Jesus’ own words in his own language’. Mark is modest in his claims for the identity of Jesus and the oldest manuscripts end with the ‘disconcerting picture of three terrified women fleeing from an empty tomb’. Vermes considers St John’s Gospel, the last written, with its emphasis ‘of the actual oneness of Father and Son’, to be remote both from Jewish tradition and from the Synoptic Gospels. It created the concept of the Trinity by personalising the Holy Spirit, and contains about seventy 422
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 423
BELIEFS
hostile references to ‘the Jews’. Vermes concludes that the writer was Hellenistic. Jesus’ teaching was entirely verbal, reflecting the urgency and immediacy of his mission, suggesting that he was not laying down a body of doctrine for future dissemination to a remote audience. The story of the adultress, in John viii, refers to Jesus writing something in the sand, then rubbing it out. The text is regarded as a late addition. In The Authentic Gospel of Jesus Vermes examines every saying and teaching attributed to Jesus, notes and accounts for discrepancies, then makes a judgment as to which elements are likely to be authentic and original, which are authentic but not original, derived from other sources in Judaism and which are editorial insertions, pushing the party (or Church) line. His argument is compelling, persuasive but undogmatic. Vermes contends that ‘Jesus was not exactly the gentle, sugary, meek and mild figure of pious Christian imagination’ but ‘contrary to the didactic style of John and Paul . . . the genuine teaching of Jesus contains nothing abstract, theoretical and speculative . . .’. His vision was concentrated on the ‘somewhat nebulous reality of the divine Kingdom’ and ‘the conviction that the advent of the kingdom was imminent instilled a sense of extreme urgency into the mind of Jesus’. This kingdom was ‘a wholly Jewish issue, involving Jews alone, and requiring an exclusively Jewish solution’. He summarises the religion of Jesus as a particular response to a specific situation by an extraordinary man. Christianity, on the other hand, is the general development of the religion of Jesus by practical people planning for the future in an ordinary time setting . . . The historical Jesus believed in the coming of the Kingdom in his lifetime and this belief furnished the motivation of his eschatological action. However, this belief did not come true.
But, he writes,‘compared with the dynamic religion of Jesus, fully evolved Christianity seems to belong to another world’.Transforming the teaching of Jesus into an international religion, largely the work of St Paul, was a miracle itself.‘The pagans entered in droves, first diluting and soon entirely transforming the Jewish heritage of Jesus.’ Jesus was executed by crucifixion, a Roman punishment, but all four Gospels portray Pontius Pilate as weakly responding to pressure from the Jews. However, only Matthew xxvii: 25 refers to the blood curse, used as a terrible justification for anti-Semitism: ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’. 423
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 424
A THINKING REED
The resurrection, or a belief in resurrection, was the event that impelled the disciples to pursue martyrdom in decades after 30 AD, and it is to me the central unresolved mystery in history. Jesus’ followers in the next generation insisted that there would be an imminent second coming (parousia). Conviction about resurrection enabled his disciples to continue Jesus’ work of charismatic teaching, and in place of a second coming the Church arrived instead. The resurrection of Jesus is the historical event I would most like to have observed, because it would have dispelled some doubts while acknowledging that having evidence reduces the need for faith. The growth of the Church, especially after Constantine institutionalised it as a state religion in 330 AD, resulted in a powerful, complex and dogmatic structure, often deeply anti-Semitic and dismissive of Christianity’s Judaic origins. As John Whale wrote, ‘Constantine . . . turned Christianity from a pacifist and subversive creed into an imperial ideology and a religion of violence’. The scriptures were interpreted, arbitrarily, to meet immediate needs. Huge cathedrals were built on faith, although barely enough materials had been provided in the Gospels for a cottage. The historical appeal of Catholicism remains powerful, and a sense of continuity with apostles and martyrs at times seemed almost overpowering, for example in Jerusalem, Ephesus, Rome and Assisi. In Rome the catacombs, the crypt at St Peter’s Basilica, the churches of San Clemente and Santa Sabina are especially compelling. I speculated that if a priest had offered me a membership form I might have signed up on the spot. The mosaics in Ravenna, with their touching beauty and simplicity, had a similar effect. I was all too aware that the horrors involved in the Crusades, Inquisition, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the mutual dependence of church and state on particular doctrines created a situation where independent thought or the exercise of individual conscience were seen as treason. Martin Luther broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly in northern Europe by appealing to state power and national sentiment and deepseated emotions, including virulent anti-Semitism.Aberrant behaviour was attributed to witchcraft and Satan’s work. I often thought of the long list of people executed for non-conformity, among them More,Tyndale, Servetus, Cranmer, Campion, Bruno, Southwell and the thousands of little old ladies burned or hanged as witches between 1450 and 1750. In Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a prelate in the cathedral expresses horror at the printed Bible, looks from the book to the 424
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 425
BELIEFS
cathedral and exclaims: ‘This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice’. Debray sees this as an illustration of what he calls ‘mediology’, the interaction between technology and culture or between object and belief, in which ‘the printed Bible superseded the cathedral as the defining medium of Christianity’. And without the printed Bible, the Reformation would not have occurred. I seemed to participate in an endless internal debate between writers and thinkers whose approach was essentially secular and those who were obsessed by religion. Two French writers, Montaigne and Pascal, were particularly influential. My scepticism and detachment owes much to Montaigne, introduced to me in childhood by Hendrik Willem van Loon in Van Loon’s Lives. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592), son of a Catholic landowner and a Jewish mother, absorbed the classics, admired Socrates, the Stoics and the Epicureans, was committed to moderation in religion and politics and became Mayor of Bordeaux (1581–85). He worked for decades in his library in a tower on his estate at St Michel de Montaigne, in Périgord, essentially writing about himself, pursuing the question: ‘Que sçais-je?’ (‘What do I know?’) His starting point is his own experience, and he writes on familiar subjects—his house, his towers, his library, his garden, his body, his mind, his travels, occasionally even his family—extracting from them a sense of the universal, but also the infinite and inexplicable, examining the unpredictable ways his mind worked but then projecting his thoughts into speculation about the universe. His Essays broke a long taboo against people writing at length about themselves and it is the first great autobiographical work since St Augustine’s Confessions, but broader, more open and speculative. Montaigne coined the word ‘essay’ (‘essai’ in French, ‘experimenta’ in Latin). He was full of ‘doubts and negations’ and uneasy about the transcendent, which was not for everyday. He insisted: ‘You are not dying because you are ill; you are dying because you are alive’. After 1578 he suffered agonies from kidney stones, which he bore stoically. Harold Bloom refers to his ‘eloquent wisdom of self-acceptance, founded upon profound self-knowledge’. In ‘On Experience’, he comments on the importance of avoiding dogmatism or, in our day, fundamentalism: It is to my inadequacy (so often avowed) that I owe my tendency to moderation, to obeying such beliefs as are laid down for me and a constant cooling 425
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 426
A THINKING REED
and tempering of my opinions as well as a loathing for that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself: it is a mortal enemy of finding out the truth. Just listen to them acting the professor: the very first idiocies which they put forward are couched in the style by which religion and laws are founded: ‘There is nothing more shocking than to see assertion and approval dashing ahead of cognition and perception.’ (Cicero). When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows: its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty . . .*
Montaigne’s work was quoted, even plagiarised, by Shakespeare (Hamlet’s self-reflection owes much to Montaigne), used by Francis Bacon and Robert Burton, challenged by Pascal, absorbed by Montesquieu and Voltaire, an inspiration for Emerson, stimulant for Tolstoy and style model for Proust. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), French mathematician, philosopher and theologian, has fascinated me for years. A prodigy, he invented an early calculating machine in 1647, explained the operations of a vacuum, helped to develop the barometer, pioneered probability theory and differential calculus. The international unit of pressure (Pa) is named for him. In November 1654 he had a profound religious experience, an epiphany, so strong that he could not deny its reality. He recorded his experience in a short Memorial and carried the rolled-up parchment around his neck until he died. Having had one comparable experience, I understand its importance for him without fully understanding it. A solitary figure, he never married and identified himself with a puritanical Catholic sect, the Jansenists. Aldous Huxley described Pascal as ‘one of the strangest and most interesting of men, and certainly, I think, the subtlest and profoundest intellect France ever produced’. Pascal read Montaigne closely and said that he had gained thirty years from the Essays, but reached radically different conclusions. Pascal had a unique combination of mysticism, intensity, scepticism and detachment. His Pensées (Thoughts) is a collection of 993 fragments, written in a two-year period of acute illness between 1656 and 1658, intended to be part of an apologia for Christianity, left incomplete at his death and published in 1669. I have been reading Pensées for decades. * Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, pp. 1211, 1220. 426
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 427
BELIEFS
Pensées is written virtually as a dialogue. As his translator A.J. Krailsheimer notes, ‘He is addressing a person well versed in the social graces, familiar with the world of the great and its pastimes . . . informed about the discoveries of contemporary science, a critic of style and fashion, priding himself as being a hardheaded rationalist’.* It could almost be Montaigne. ‘Pascal did not compose in linear, logical style, but by . . . nuclei, in the order of heart rather than mind . . . [His] converging arguments [are] all directed to the same end but with different starting points’. In complete contrast to Montaigne, Pascal begins with the vastness of space and eternity compared to man’s isolation and impotence, and tries to relate the universal and infinite to the human and particular. If there is order, it is a mystery, comprehended through grace, too complex for a single formula.‘It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it’. He writes of Imagination (No. 44) as the dominant faculty in man, master of error and falsehood, all the more deceptive for not being invariably so . . . Since, however, it is usually false, it gives no indication of its quality, setting the same mark on true and false alike . . . I do not intend to list all the effects of imagination. Everyone knows that the sight of cats, or rats, the crunching of coal, etc., is enough to unhinge reason. The tone of voice influences the wisest of us and alters the force of a speech or poem . . . Love or hate alters the face of justice . . .
His writing is stoic and oddly bracing. Pascal was preoccupied with the problems of boredom, dread and man’s inability ‘to sit still in a room’; it was said of him that he ‘touched God behind the veil of scepticism’. Pensées No. 200 has long had a powerful appeal to me: ‘Man is but a reed, the feeblest in nature, but he is a thinking reed (un roseau pensant).’ I suspect that Pascal’s ‘thinking reed’ is an adaptation of Bacon’s ‘I beseech your Lordships to be merciful to a broken reed’. Many of the Pensées have become proverbial: ‘Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different’; ‘The last act is bloody however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever’; ‘We never do evil so fully and * Blaise Pascal, Pensées, pp. xxii, x. 427
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 428
A THINKING REED
cheerfully as when we do it out of religious conviction’; ‘Men despise religion. They hate it and fear it may be true . . .’; ‘The state of man: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety’; ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of ’; ‘Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason’;‘It is a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river; true on this side of the Pyrenees, false on the other’. When I read him, I often feel a frisson of self-recognition. I visited Pascal’s Jansenist retreat at Port-Royal, near Versailles, and his grave in the beautiful church of St-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris, opposite the Panthéon.
ﱗ
For decades I thought that in politics in the Western world there are essentially only two parties, the party of Hobbes and the party of Locke. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), in Leviathan (1651), articulated the politics of pessimistic self-interest. He saw life as a struggle in which few could win and most would lose, and that the pursuit of self-interest was the major human motivation. He observed, wisely,‘Hell is truth seen too late’. The State existed to keep the extremities of self-interest confined and a limited social contract was necessary, otherwise in a state of nature violence would lead to destruction or enslavement of the incapable where lives, in his famous phrase, would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Thus the State was seen as a necessary evil. Hobbes saw nature as basically hostile and civilisation as a thin wall of protection. He rejected the supernatural and his ethics disputed a religious basis for morality. Hobbes was the forerunner of ‘positivism’, in which law was the command of the sovereign rather than an expression of divine will or natural law. Politicians who put strong emphasis on the importance of order and discipline are essentially Hobbesian. John Locke (1632–1704) set out in his Civil Government (1690) an optimistic individualism, later defined as the politics of liberalism. Where Hobbes took a pessimistic view about human capacity and educability, Locke was optimistic that natural equality was a self-evident truth and his views were reflected in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Locke believed, too, in the ‘social contract’, not merely as a defence against chaos, a preservation of order, but as a self-evident form of co-operation, of the extension of human capacity. Nature was seen as essentially benign: humanity needed little protection. Politicians who are essentially optimistic and see 428
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 429
BELIEFS
the State as an instrument to encourage and protect individual freedoms are Lockeans. Like all generalisations, my formula is oversimplified and obvious objections can be taken. To apply this dichotomy in a religious context, there are many who see God essentially as ‘order’, a guarantee of certainty and stability, continuity and predictability, who rewards and punishes in a uniform way, while others identify God as ‘freedom’, emphasising potential for growth, development, changing the world and creating new experiences. My dichotomy also applies outside politics, for example in literature Dostoevsky was Hobbesian, Tolstoy Lockean. I was drawn to the concept of ‘the categorical imperative’ proposed by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’. Each of us should act as if he or she were virtually legislating for the whole world, so that if six billion of us pollute, then the world will be heavily polluted, if not, then less so. And the same rule applies with violence or hatred, peace and love. Therefore, legislation against violence and cruelty in society has to begin with the individual. Kant also wrote,‘Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’. Nevertheless, Kant’s thinking was both transcendent and secular. Utilitarianism, rationalism, industrialisation, urbanisation, the rise of science and scientific method, capitalism, materialism, a secular culture and the political impact, however attenuated, of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era had a devastating impact on British and European religious belief in the 19th century,* but oddly the United States was an exception, retaining a strong commitment to religion both in private and in public. The American critic Dwight Macdonald wrote (1950) that although he felt no spiritual need for ‘the God hypothesis’ and did not ‘seem to have the knack for religious experience’, he recognised it as ‘a deep and apparently permanent human trait’. He acknowledged that the thinkers he had ‘found most helpful in answering, or at least talking about’ the basic questions of Who am I? What is a good life? How do we know what’s good and bad? were mostly religious. Even self-described atheists or agnostics * Matthew Arnold caught the mood poignantly in his poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867). 429
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 430
A THINKING REED
still operate within the culture shaped by Christianity and its antecedents. It is almost impossible to think outside that context. At Melbourne University in the 1950s I was attracted to Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), one of the most original thinkers of the 19th century, a melancholy Dane who anticipated much of the philosophy of existentialism later popularised by Sartre. Derided as an absurd figure in Copenhagen, an isolate who rejected conventional religion, his scarecrowlike appearance was the subject of hostile cartoons. He had read Pascal closely but did not follow his reasoning: indeed Kierkegaard proposed a revolt against reason. He detested the complacent but dogmatic Danish Lutheran Church and insisted, ‘The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all.There is nothing here to reform’. Enigmatic and paradoxical, Kierkegaard influenced Ibsen, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Auden and our own Sidney Nolan. Kierkegaard was deeply suspicious of mass movements, of universal suffrage, of the media, of crowds, of manipulation. ‘If every single man is not an individual, simply by being human, then everything is lost and it is not worth hearing about great world-shaking historical events. But the world wants to be deceived.’ To Kierkegaard self-knowledge and selfdoubt were synonymous. He wrote, prophetically: Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little talking tube which, say, could be heard over the whole land . . . I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged if it were used . . . On the whole the evil in the daily press consists in its being calculated to make, if possible, the passing moment a thousand or ten thousand times more inflated and important than it really is . . .
He argued that people must choose to live either aesthetically, ethically or religiously. ‘Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forward.’ W.H. Auden noted: ‘The world has changed greatly since Kierkegaard’s time and all too many of his prophetic insights have come to pass. The smug bourgeois Christendom he denounced has crumbled and what is left is an amorphous, despairing mass of displaced persons and paralysed Hamlets’. A major influence since my childhood was Albert Schweitzer, mentioned earlier because of his The Quest of the Historical Jesus. An Alsatian-German, born in Kayserberg, he studied in Strasbourg, Paris 430
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 431
BELIEFS
and Berlin and had an astonishing range of expertise, with doctorates in philosophy, theology, music and medicine. A cousin of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and conductor Charles Munch, he wrote a two-volume life of J.S. Bach (1905), subtitled in French ‘le musician-poète’, produced a complete edition of Bach’s organ music with his teacher Charles-Marie Widor and made important recordings, some still available on CD. He also wrote studies on organ design and on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In 1913, after completing medicine, he went to Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) as a medical missionary. He established a hospital and spent most of his life there, apart from a period when the French held him prisoner during World War I and when he visited Europe and the United States to give concerts and lectures to raise funds. He worked with victims of leprosy, malaria and sleeping sickness. In 1915 he began developing the concept of ‘reverence for life’ (‘Ehrfucht vor dem Leben’) and it became an important element in Civilisation and Ethics (1923). Schweitzer’s idea became a central theme in environmentalism. He also wrote: ‘I want to be the pioneer of a new Renaissance. I want to throw faith in a new humanity like a burning torch into our dark times’. He wrote prolifically, including On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1920) and the autobiographical Out of My Life and Thought (1931). He became familiar to me in an intensely personal way through an extensive literature. He was an early beneficiary of the cult of celebrity. I wrote to him several times explaining why his books had meant so much to me, and received a courteous reply from him and a detailed letter from his assistant Emma Hausknecht. In the early years of the Cold War Schweitzer was often linked with Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell in campaigning against atomic weapons and he won the 1952 Nobel Prize for Peace. His Nobel Prize address is a careful examination of the causes of war and attempts to create organisations which can eliminate the risk of annihilation. He refers to the horrors of World War II, including atomic bombs, fire bombings and displacement of refugees. Bizarrely, he made no reference to Hitler, the Holocaust, the Middle East or Africa. He used his Nobel Prize money to build a leprosarium and died in Lambaréné. Was it possible to be a Christian when the churches were often rigid, authoritarian or hypocritical? I could see why so many of my contemporaries were repelled by religion. Organised religion often taught conformity, subservience and acceptance of the status quo. Slavery was a divisive issue, and in the southern 431
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 432
A THINKING REED
states of the US slave owners had the Bible in one hand and a whip in the other. In the Syllabus Errorum (1864), Pope Pius IX denounced socialism, democracy, science and freedom of conscience, but his successor Leo XIII recognised the rights of labour in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). During World War I, God supported both sides, or at least churches endorsed the carnage on strictly national lines. With Lenin’s seizure of power in the 1917 Russian Revolution, many church leaders happily supported the idea of an anti-Bolshevik crusade, and the Catholic Church collaborated with Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Pavelic. Most Lutherans were fervent in their enthusiasm for Hitler and many adopted the view, promoted by Luther, Wagner and others, that Jesus was not Jewish. Hitler claimed Jesus as the ‘first anti-Semite’ and ‘our greatest Aryan leader’. Contrary to the popular wisdom, many Nazis regarded themselves as Christians. Nazism promoted itself as a ‘third way’ (the expression was actually used) between Communism and capitalism, and emphasised putting the family first. After World War I, mass democracy in Italy and Germany without the restraint of a historic liberal, pluralistic tradition, lacking scepticism, transparency and the separation of power, balancing long-term needs and short-term gratification, led to the rise of authoritarian populism, targeting enemies, fuelled by appeals to fear and resentment. Both Fascism and Nazism were deadly mutations of democratic forms and universal franchise, with some Christian elements, especially the notion of ‘conversion’. In the 20th century, an age of science and democratic practice, institutionalised, even industrialised, cruelty, persecution and destruction have occurred on a scale that would have seemed unimaginable in the 19th, except, perhaps, in the Belgian Congo.Were Stalin and Hitler inheritors of the Enlightenment? In World War II, Pope Pius XII saw Communism as the Church’s greatest enemy and refused to confront the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. However, there were important religious figures who fought against totalitarianism. William Temple (1881–1944), Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 until his sudden death, was a Christian Socialist in the Charles Kingsley tradition who became first president of the World Council of Churches in 1943 and could have been a major force in post-war reconstruction. I found his early death so shocking that, at the age of 12, I had to ask myself what God was doing. He had allowed the Holocaust, the senseless destruction of millions of lives and Temple’s death as well.What was God’s 432
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 433
BELIEFS
master plan? Stalin shrewdly observed that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was an exceptional example of commitment and bravery. Originally a pacifist, influenced by Gandhi, he came to realise that moral leadership might require the use of force and in 1939 he returned to Germany from New York to become a leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. In May 1942 he became part of the conspiracy that led to the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. He was hanged, naked, at Flossenbürg in April 1945, the last month of Hitler’s life. Three other family members implicated in the plot were executed with him. His Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge, first published in 1953, is inspiring. Nazism was the greatest moral crisis that the Church faced, at least since the Reformation, and the Church largely failed, as it had over slavery. I read somewhere that one of the Nazis said before his execution,‘If God existed, we would not.’ I cannot find the citation, so perhaps I made it up. If authentic, it should have been preserved. I was attracted to the ‘social gospel’ promoted by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in his The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943). Some churches were active in campaigning for civil rights in the United States, against apartheid in South Africa, and for peace and against nuclear weapons (although sometimes revealing more anxiety about American weapons than Russian ones). Martin Luther King, adopting Gandhi’s tactics of ‘passive resistance’, emerged as a national figure in 1956. Later the environment entered the social-political-religious agenda and, in Australia, land rights for Aborigines. I studied parts of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, admired the uncompromising rigour of his writing and convinced myself, possibly in a self-serving way, that politics was my mission, socially and ethically. As an adult, working through my religious beliefs was shaped by great events extensively reported by newspapers, radio and, later, television. When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in October 1962, my reaction was absurdly optimistic. There was a publication explosion about its proceedings and I read everything I could find. I saw the Council as a profound political metaphor: the world’s oldest, most patriarchal and dogmatic institution appeared to be opening itself up to debate, self-criticism, reaching out not only to other Christian churches but the wider world. If Rome led, I reasoned, could Moscow’s rigidity hold out? Pope John encouraged a major redistribution of power, 433
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 434
A THINKING REED
with collegial involvement by the bishops in decision making. Pope Paul VI (‘Amletto del Vaticano’) continued much of John’s commitment to openness, but his style was more anguished than convivial. I attended lectures given by Hans Küng (1928– ), a German-Swiss theologian and priest. His Infallible? An Inquiry (1971), On Being a Christian (1974) and Does God Exist? (1980) were models of clarity. He argued that instead of ‘infallibility’ Popes should only claim ‘indefectability’, a general assertion upholding the truth of the Gospel, and be prepared to adopt Karl Popper’s procedure of ‘learning by mistakes, “the method of trial and error”’. Küng lost his teaching licence in 1979 for suggesting that the Church was evolving and Papal infallibility might have some limitations. Jesus, An Experiment in Christology (1974) by Edward Schillebeeckx (1914– ), a courageous Belgian-Dutch Dominican theologian, was an intimidatingly learned work which paralleled Schweitzer’s pioneering study and drew on Thomas Kuhn’s concept of changing paradigms. He argued the need to re-examine Jesus both in his own time and our own. He was cross-examined three times in the Vatican for arguing that ‘the Church was the manifestation of Jesus Christ in communities that meet for worship, rather than in the Vatican’. Pope John Paul II, while charismatic and energetic, also seemed dogmatic and authoritarian, and John XXIII’s collegiality was replaced by a restoration of curial power in the Vatican. The Pope’s candidates were put on a fast track for sainthood and the ‘devil’s advocate’ was abolished. Graham Greene said that in a dream he opened a newspaper to see a headline, ‘John Paul Canonizes Jesus Christ’. He showed extraordinary stamina, with his relentless program of papal visits and great courage in the face of an assassination attempt and debilitating illnesses, but was hostile to a spirit of enquiry or dissent on doctrinal issues, denounced the use of condoms, even in the face of the AIDS crisis, infantilised the bishops and implacably opposed the ordination of women. However, in 1992 he lifted the Inquisition’s sentence on Galileo, played a major role in helping to end Soviet domination of eastern Europe and strongly condemned anti-Semitism, the death penalty and the Iraq war. The decay of mainstream religion has not led to a rise in rationality and enlightened scepticism. Instead the move has been towards fundamentalism, a variety of cults, primitive superstition, confusion and paranoia. Fundamentalism is a relatively modern concept, beginning in the United States in 1909 with the publication of The Fundamentals, four volumes which asserted the inerrancy of Scripture and attacked scientific, rational, 434
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 435
BELIEFS
historical, psychological or other secular explanations of how the world worked. The authoritarian premise in fundamentalism asserts, ‘Since I believe, you must too’.This suggests that the challenges of modern life are not to be worked through, by applying reason and questioning, because the answers have already been laid down, generally in print, and may not be contested. Fundamentalism now has a Muslim counterpart which, like the Christian original, is a reaction to complexity and uncertainty.The more complex the world seems, the more people yearn for simple explanations, a formula which provides the meaning of everything. I regard the Bible as an inspired work, a guidebook or road map, but subject to interpretation. Where there is a conflict or inconsistency between the text and observation, experience or common sense, I feel a categorical imperative to follow my own judgment. Christian fundamentalists see the Bible as a magic artefact, printed if not written in English, read selectively or arbitrarily and regarded as the unshakeable word of God right down to THE END. Fundamentalism and bibliolatry seem to offer cheap grace, a superficial transaction promising lifelong, even post-life, guarantees, just like buying a commercial product such as assurance. Questioning, individual judgment or knowledge are not required, and may be actively discouraged. Fundamentalism is not merely intellectually crippling, it is profoundly contemptuous of Jesus whose teaching is far more profound, universal, stimulating, controversial and compassionate than fundamentalists will concede. Fundamentalism offers a creed without history, without scholarship, without depth, without context, and yet its phenomenal growth confirms that it meets community needs and anxieties far more than mainstream churches. Australia is a strikingly secular society compared to the United States, where religious observance is high and fundamentalist religion is influential in politics, education, health and research, despite the clear separation of Church and State set out in the Constitution. In the United States, 40 per cent of citizens claim to be ‘born again’. Nevertheless, rates of homicide, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion and teen pregnancy are far higher in the ‘Bible belt’ of the US than in secular Australia. ‘Creation science’ has only a marginal market share in Australia, while in the United States it is entrenched as a significant paradigm in some states. Relentless commercialisation and commodification of life has not been inhibited by American religious observance. Religious polarisation is far deeper there than in Australia and the Them v. Us dichotomy more conflicted. 435
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 436
A THINKING REED
In ‘Made in England’ (2003), published as a Quarterly Essay, David Malouf distinguished between the mindset and language of founding fathers in the American colonies and the colonisation of New Holland/ Australia by act of State. The American colonists from the 17th century were ‘passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time . . .’. Slavery was still an open question, and so was the concept of divine-right monarchy. In the late 18th century Australia, originally a convict settlement, tough and pragmatic, lacked a millenarian element, and was overwhelmingly practical in its operations. After the Enlightenment, slavery and absolute monarchy were no longer on the political or social agenda: they had become settled issues.We had no place for a ‘language of the transcendental’. Our religious practices, like so much in Australia, became more suburban than universal. After 2000 the most dynamic political force in the United States was a coalition between evangelical fundamentalism, the neocons (neoconservatives) and corporate power, strongly supported by mass media ownership. This was not Fascism in a European context, but there were disturbing ideological parallels, which Philip Roth took up in his novel The Plot Against America (2004). President George W. Bush claims Jesus as his ‘favourite philosopher’ and believes in infallible Scripture. Bush, unlike his Episcopalian father, is a Southern Methodist, a group which broke away from mainstream Methodists in 1940, strong only in the former slave states. ‘Prosperity Christianity’, while stopping short of insisting that God is American, sees the hand of God in establishing United States hegemony and rejects argument and analysis. It was hard to reconcile ‘Prosperity Christianity’ with Luke xiv: 33: ‘So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple’. Marion Maddox argues that Sociologists of religion have long pointed out that as societies become more secular, religion comes to be seen in increasingly instrumental terms. It becomes less a system of beliefs relating to a cosmic order that makes claims upon us than a toolbox of therapeutic and goal-setting techniques that can be adopted selectively to achieve individual ends . . .*
Churches have sharp differences about the problem of poverty. Whose responsibility is it? Is poverty the result of personal failure in which * Marion Maddox, God Under Howard, p. 187. 436
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 437
BELIEFS
destitution is the penalty for non-performance (the Hobbesian view) or is the pauper the victim of society, which then imposes on society the moral responsibility to provide restitution or support (Lockean).This issue has profound moral implications and there are deep divisions within the churches. The fundamentalist and charismatic churches tend to be bitterly opposed to the ‘welfare state’ while the mainstream churches tend to be supportive. Churches are also deeply divided about the environment, resources and their exploitation. The Judaeo-Christian tradition advanced two different teachings about man’s relationship with nature, each receiving about equal space in the Bible: (a) Man sharing with God transcendence over nature and transforming it, that is, ‘man (or woman) as developer’; but also (b) Man as the good steward and trustee of nature, with a duty to tend the garden for all succeeding generations, or ‘man the conservationist’.The first view contributed to the 19th-century doctrine of material progress in which belief in God was replaced by a belief that science and truth were synonymous, and that technology was the pathway to solving human problems.The second is more sympathetic to sustainability and preserving the environment with lower levels of consumption. I often quote the words of Tim Wirth: ‘The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, and not the other way round’.* The environment is the totality of the world—the planet itself, soil, air, water, biota and minerals. Concerns for the environment cannot be regarded as mere discretionary matters after the economy has taken its share. I define myself as a sceptical Christian fellow traveller of the school of Pascal, a follower of Jesus, hovering on the margins between religious experience and aesthetics: an ecclesiastical voluptuary transformed by the impact of music, architecture, liturgy and text. In January 1966 when I was conducting research on Joseph II in Vienna’s Nationalbibliothek, I had been thinking deeply about Mozart. Nothing very new in that, but I was brooding about the circumstances of his burial in an unmarked communal grave, in conformity with the burial laws of Joseph II, later depicted accurately in the film Amadeus (1984). I knew that the 19th-century memorial erected to Mozart in the Zentralfriedhof, close to the tombs of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, did not mark his burial spot. One day, sitting on a 71 tram, I was overcome by a feeling that I have never had, before or since; I got off and walked, * Tim Wirth, former Democrat Senator from Colorado, became President of the United Nations Foundation. 437
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 438
A THINKING REED
trancelike, down some streets I had never been in, then found myself entering Friedhof St Marx (St Mark’s Cemetery). I walked onto a lawn, stopped, emerged from my trance and thought, ‘This is it. This is where Mozart was tipped into the communal grave, naked in a shroud’. I have never forgotten the feeling but cannot account for it either. I was not conscious of having read about St Marx’ graveyard, so I had no idea where it was. It is concealed from the tramline by a string of car yards. In October 1992, on my sixtieth birthday, I had two powerful numinous experiences. One was in the great octagonal Palatinate Chapel of Aachen Cathedral, consecrated in 805, built for the Emperor Charlemagne in Romanesque style and inspired by his visits to St Vitale in Ravenna, very simple but with some eastern features, including alternating black and white stones in the arches. I felt an overwhelming need to pray, coupled with an out-of-body experience which I cannot rationalise or even explain coherently, except as a brief moment of rapture or possession. The second occurred in the nearby town of Trier, in the Gothic church of St Gangolf in the market square. I walked in to the empty church to hear an organist practising, over and over, Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, one of his supreme achievements. I felt overwhelmed and the structure, logic and irresistible power of the music compelled a sense of divine order.The materialist, sceptical explanation would be that I was simply responding to historical and cultural stimuli. Trier had been one of Constantine’s capitals and the birthplace of St Ambrose and Karl Marx, and its architecture and music were exceptional. On revisiting Trier in 2000, I failed to experience rapture in St Gangolf ’s, probably because the organ was silent. The aesthetic appeal of cathedrals, the great heritage of religious music, painting, sculpture and liturgy all resonate inside me, but apparently only north of the equator. Whenever I arrive in Paris, I make a beeline for the Notre Dame and sit devoutly through Mass, something that would never occur to me in Australia. I have had many numinous moments in Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals, churches or chapels, at Saint Chapelle and St Eustache in Paris, Amiens, Vézelay, at King’s College, Cambridge, Durham, Norwich, Lincoln and Winchester. In France, listening to a Cavaillé-Coll organ generally helps. My pursuit of World Heritage sites has a spiritual dimension, because so many of them expose me to the sublime.The greatest provoke the ‘shock of recognition’, to use Herman Melville’s phrase, helping me relate the specific to the universal, the immediate to the timeless, the individual to all 438
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 439
BELIEFS
humanity. They remind me that we are all tourists, transients on the earth, and we must consider how much mess we will leave behind as we consume planetary resources as if there was no tomorrow. I often feel like Odysseus on a long voyage of discovery, making a connection between me/here/ now and everyone/everywhere/all time, balancing the sublime and unique with the quotidian, recognising the tension between the unique and the universal. It helps me make sense of my own experience, and reinforces a sense of connectedness (‘we are not alone’) with the unfamiliar and remote. I can illustrate this by identifying places which have given me a powerful sense of awe and wonder. In each case I was searching for something, and found it. On the way, the places helped me find myself. Many of my most deeply felt aesthetic, intellectual or spiritual experiences have been in France, and the strangest, most confronting, in Brittany. No place, not even Central Australia or Antarctica, has so challenged my assumptions about a rational, scientific, secular, predictable, materialist, clockwork universe. In Brittany, instead of being in linear time, I sometimes felt I was in a fourth dimension, able to move forward, backwards or sideways and where death was part of the culture.The great alignments of megaliths at Carnac, and tumuli on the island of Gavrinis and at Barnenez, near Morlaix, are of heart-stopping wonder. Visits exposed me to repeated encounters with the sublime. I felt a strange sense of duality, what the Germans might call a Doppelgänger effect, that there was me and a double. The strangeness was paradoxical, largely because the European setting is less challenging or confronting than, say, tribal Africa, the Andes altiplano or remote parts of China. Brittany has superficial similarities with contemporary life in the West, but fundamental differences in values. Japan can provoke comparable experiences. Machu Picchu, the summer palace of the Incas, probably a religious retreat comprising about two hundred buildings, mostly of granite, remarkably preserved, was built in the Cordillera Oriental of the Peruvian Andes after 1460 AD at an elevation of 2450 metres. The stones, cut with exquisite precision, fit together without mortar. Crops were grown on elaborate terraces. The site is surrounded by snow-capped peaks, sheer precipices, a turbulent river and luxuriant vegetation.Abandoned after the Spaniards destroyed the Inca kingdom, it was never found by the invaders and only rediscovered in 1911. Its beauty is incomparable. Visitors feel light-headed, partly due to the lack of oxygen, contributing to a sense of being at the very edge of infinity. The Pyramid of the Soothsayer in Uxmal, Yucatan, barely 38 metres 439
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 440
A THINKING REED
high, built between 700 and 1000 AD and one of the masterpieces of Mayan architecture, is close to several other magnificent structures and surrounded by dense jungle. The pyramid is the fifth structure on the site and human sacrifices were conducted there. The steps to the top, perilously steep, lead to one of the world’s greatest views.The layout of the buildings has an astronomical alignment. The dazzling sight of fireflies at dusk around the pyramid was unforgettable. The Iguaçu Falls, 275 cataracts at the point where Brazil,Argentina and Paraguay meet, is a site of lush, extravagant beauty. The escarpment over which the Iguaçu River plunges for about 65 metres is broken up by rocks and wooded islands.Visitors from the Argentinian side can walk across the cataracts on footways, and touch the surging waters. From the Brazilian side the full glorious panorama is seen, distant from the falls but with rainbows on the spray and swifts racing between water and rockface. Toucans, macaws, parrots and butterflies abound and the falls are surrounded by luxuriant rainforest. The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, part of the largest Egyptian temple, devoted to Amun, was built in the 18th Dynasty and completed about 1250 BC, in the reign of Rameses II. It covers an area of 5150 square metres (slightly more than Notre Dame de Paris) and there are 134 incised papyrus columns, twelve of them 22 metres high, the remainder 15 metres. The temple inspires a sense of awe. Ephesus (Efes), near the Aegean coast of Turkey, has a richer collection of different cultures than any site I ever visited. Originally settled by Ionians, it was occupied by Cimmerians, Lydians and Persians.The Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, thrice destroyed and twice rebuilt, is now marked, poignantly, only by a few broken stones.The Great Theatre, which once held 24 000 spectators, was where Paul debated with the silversmith Alexandros. The façade of the Library of Celsus and the Temple of Hadrian are elegant Roman masterpieces, the Basilica of St John and the baths are built in Byzantine style, and the Isa Bey mosque, begun in 1375, is one of the earliest important Islamic buildings in Turkey. At Ephesus my head was bursting with images of Hellenic, Roman, Christian and Muslim cultures. The Taj Mahal exceeded every expectation when I visited in 1995, thirty years after I first planned to get there. Built in white marble in the Persian style between 1630 and 1653, the workmanship, especially the jewelled inlaid decorations, is exquisite. Surrounded by great gardens, sunrise and sunset at the Taj are unforgettable. I lost any sense of time. 440
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 441
BELIEFS
Orkney, where my most remote ancestor came from, is one of the world’s richest archaeological areas, with about one thousand significant sites, and I deeply regret never having visited until 2004. Four major sites are close together in the West Mainland: the village of Skara Brae (c. 3500 BC), the Standing Stones o’Stenness (c. 3000 BC), Maes Howe (c. 2700 BC) and the Ring o’Brodgar (c. 2500 BC). Maes Howe is one of the finest chambered tombs in Western Europe and the Stenness and Brodgar megaliths are earlier than Stonehenge, or the alignments in Brittany. Skara Brae, a group of ten Neolithic dwellings apparently suddenly abandoned, was excavated in 1927 by an Australian archaeologist,V. Gordon Childe,* and found to be in almost pristine condition, having been covered by sand for more than five thousand years.The Heart of Neolithic Orkney was added to the World Heritage list in 1999. The cathedral of St Magnus in Kirkwall, begun in 1137 when the Norse ruled Orkney, was built by the same masons who constructed Durham, and its red sandstone glows in the sun. Although everything was new to me in Orkney, the oldest of my favourite historic sites, I felt as if I had always known it. If a believer, I am a profoundly sceptical one. The prospect of eternal life is incomprehensible at best, terrifying at worst. How is time measured? Does clock time or solar time have relevance? Can we conceive of a thousand years in heaven let alone a million or a billion? What relationship is there between our heavenly and earthly states? Do we have family and partners there, and companion animals? (Jesus specifically ruled out marriage, but he made no reference to relationships generally.) Are the inhabitants of heaven there as at infancy, maturity or senescence? Do heaven’s residents change, grow or age? Will there be music? Or food? Or mobile telephones? What about exercise, and would it be compulsory? How are the souls arranged, would it be egalitarian, hierarchical or meritocratic? Did Dante get it right? Are souls sorted according to age, language, era or special interests? How would we be engaged? What is the mode of communication? Would there be substitutes for computers or air conditioning? Was the soul/immortality confined to Homo sapiens? What about Neanderthals? Their funeral practices suggested intimations of a future life. What about people who lived before Jesus? Is eternal life only for Christians? Did Gandhi miss out?
* Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 7, p. 636, Jim Allen. Childe also wrote How Labour Governs (1923), the earliest serious analysis of the ALP in power. 441
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 442
A THINKING REED
In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Father Mapple delivers a famous sermon in the Whaleman’s Chapel, New Bedford. The sermon ends: And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—‘O Father! Mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?’
My beliefs and professional experience were enmeshed in overlapping circles—religion/politics/aesthetic/sensory/environmental/humanitarian— and this shaped my life. I am still on the journey.
442
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 443
CHAPTER 14
ﱗ
‘The Third Age’
The English social historian Peter Laslett (1915–2001), with whom I later worked in Cambridge, coined the term ‘The Third Age’ to describe a new demographic category, people who had left the paid workforce, were physically and mentally capable and independent, likely to live to an advanced age before the onset of the ‘Fourth Age’, the period of dependence, decrepitude and death. He was a co-founder of the University of the Third Age (U3A), a movement which spread throughout the world. Modern life expectancy and retirement practice mean that most traditional assumptions about age are wrong. With people living longer and increasing numbers of potential labour force entrants, it becomes urgent to redefine work and activity and adopt diverse approaches to recognise and reward labour/time-use value. Since work and the family have traditionally been the major elements in self-definition (‘Who am I?’), being excluded from paid employment when people are still physically fit and mentally alert can cause acute psychological problems, especially for males (or women without family responsibilities) when the transition is abrupt. The fundamental error is, as Laslett wrote, ‘taking the minority of the problematic elderly, the chronically sick, those who cannot look after themselves, those who have to live in institutions, those about to die, for the whole body of the retired’, confusing the Third Age with the Fourth Age. We need ‘a fresh map of life’. The report of the House of Representatives Long Term Strategies Committee on ‘Expectations of Life: Increasing the 443
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 444
A THINKING REED
Options for the 21st Century’ (1992), to which I contributed much, drew heavily on Laslett’s research. I entered the Third Age at the start of September 1998, aged 65 years and 10 months, on ceasing to be a Member of the Australian House of Representatives, my last full-time paid job. I was then the fifth oldest of 148 Members. My colleague and friend Ian Sinclair, who retired with me after serving in the House from 1963, was the oldest, at 69. My ambition is to spend the longest possible time in the Third Age and the shortest in the Fourth. The increase in Australian longevity in the last 50 years has been unprecedented. Of 32 Ministers who served in the Whitlam Government (1972–75), most of them above middle age on appointment, only fourteen had died by July 2006. Of 63 Ministers in the Hawke–Keating Governments (1983–96), more recent and with a lower average age, only two, Mick Young and Peter Cook, have died. In five generations of family history, I am by far the oldest male in my father’s direct line, and the second oldest in my mother’s. In the 1980s I would not have given myself much of a chance of reaching the century—but at the time of writing I am a real prospect. Many people now living will spend more years in ‘retirement’, however defined, than in paid work. After leaving Parliament, when asked, ‘What are you doing now?’, I soon had a variety of answers—board member, consultant, researcher, writer, public intellectual, ALP National President on and off, even tour guide in Europe and South America. Occasionally, if I said ‘I’m in the Third Age’, respondents looked blank. Before long, I was busier than I had been as a back bencher in Canberra, but not as occupied as the Ministerial years, when I had significant bureaucratic and personal support. In my retirement, I had planned to take up painting, something that I had dreamed of for decades, and to do more writing, perhaps venturing into fiction. I had a contract to write features and book reviews for The Age for about a year. Before long I was involved in consultancies and board memberships, and the dream of a creative life faded and the painting option postponed again.
CAMBRIDGE (NOT MASSACHUSETTS) Life after Parliament began with an invitation from Peter Laslett to deliver a paper at a symposium he was organising at Trinity College, Cambridge, in September 1998 to mark two hundred years since publication of Essay 444
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 445
‘THE THIRD AGE’
on the Principles of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834). Laslett had approved of the Long Term Strategies Committee’s Report ‘Expectations of Life’, and we corresponded but did not meet until 1994 when he visited Australia for discussions with Universities of the Third Age. I took a week off from the election campaign and made a quick dash to Cambridge, staying in a handsome suite at Trinity designed by Christopher Wren. Malthus argued that population tended to increase at a geometric ratio (each generation could double) while the means of subsistence only increased at an arithmetical ratio (incrementally), and that the only constraints to population growth were famine, war, disease, infanticide and what he called the ‘vicious practice’ of contraception. When Malthus wrote, world population was probably 950 million. It has increased 640 per cent since then. He did not anticipate the impact of technology in agriculture, especially food production. Neo-Malthusians have argued that with world population at 6.1 billion and serious problems of water supply, inadequate soil for farming and loss of wood for fuel and building, Malthus’ predictions are starting to look more relevant. Nevertheless, a scenario in which the world copes with a doubling of population, at least in the sense of being able to feed an ultimately stable population, now seems plausible. It is a scenario which says little about other quality-of-life considerations. Peter Laslett proposed to nominate me for election as a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity so that I could work with him on developing policy formulations to address a significant, new demographic era. He worked the numbers, somehow, in the face of fierce competition for limited places and I was duly elected in 1999. Until this unexpected but welcome appointment, I had made only fleeting visits to Cambridge, for a day or two at most, pursuing missions in biotechnology and science policy. Trinity was paradoxical—the largest college, the richest and, certainly in its own view, the most important, with the greatest network of influence, but far from the oldest, being a Royal foundation of Henry VIII (1546) which absorbed the older King’s Hall and Michaelhouse. Its scientific record, from Isaac Newton on, was illustrious. As I was often reminded, Trinity produced 31 Nobel Prize winners (more than France) and 28 members of the Order of Merit (far ahead of any other college). Three of the most influential modern philosophers, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, were Fellows of Trinity. Six British Prime Ministers had studied at Trinity, and one Australian (Stanley Melbourne Bruce). The college had enormous land holdings and owned 445
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 446
A THINKING REED
the container port at Felixstowe. The idea of a university having enough resources to pursue intellectual goals was outside my experience. Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, became Master of Trinity in 1998, a Crown appointment made on Tony Blair’s nomination. Sen made me feel very welcome. His wife, Emma Rothschild, a Fellow of King’s, an old friend, had been part of the 1985 OECD review of Australia’s Science and Technology policies. After arriving in January 2000 during a brief visit to the Netherlands, I fractured my shoulder in an antique shop in Delft, not far from where William the Silent had been assassinated. For two months it was difficult to write or use a computer. Fretting that my productivity would be extraordinarily low, I shared my anxiety with one of the Fellows who responded, sagely, ‘The purpose of a Visiting Fellow Commoner is not to do, but to be!’ I derived comfort from that. I worked with Peter on most days, gave a lecture or two, conducted seminars and gave evidence to a committee of the European Parliament in London. I divided my time between my study, next to Peter’s in Angel Court, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in Trumpington Street and Trinity Library, a masterpiece by Wren. Lunch in the dining hall, built in 1604–05, sitting at high table with other Fellows, was an important ritual. Great Masters* of the past gazed down benignly from their frames—J.J. Thomson, G.M. Trevelyan, E.D. Adrian, R.A. Butler,Alan Hodgkin,Andrew Huxley, Michael Atiyah—but the dominant portrait was a more than life-size painting of Henry VIII. It was an unwritten rule that no seats were reserved and so, depending on when I arrived, I could be sitting next to Amartya Sen, Andrew Huxley (half-brother of Aldous and Julian), Brian Josephson, James Mirrlees or Gary Runciman and become drawn into conversation. I had two periods at Trinity, in 2000 and 2001. In the second, ensconced in Bishop’s Hostel, as well as collaborating with Peter I began to write systematically on this book. Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist confined to a wheelchair by motor neurone disease, courageously delivered a lecture at a fund-raiser for a local school, delivered through his voice synthesiser. He referred to * Noël Annan’s book The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses is an engaging analysis of academic traditions in Oxford and Cambridge, particularly interesting on the intermarriage between great intellectual dynasties such as the Darwins, Huxleys, Hodgkins, Trevelyans, Haldanes, Wedgwoods, Keyneses and Adrians. 446
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 447
‘THE THIRD AGE’
the importance of DNA and there was a touching moment when a child asked him what the letters DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) stood for and Hawking had to admit that the words were not in his synthesiser’s vocabulary. Peter Laslett proposed that I return in 2002 to help him complete a work in progress on the Third Age and public policy, but his health failed seriously in 2001; he had a series of strokes and died on 8 November. There was support for the proposition that I return anyway in 2002, tie up the loose ends in Peter’s book and prepare it for publication. However, his family, unexpectedly, had other ideas and withdrew rights of access to his books and papers. I returned to Cambridge briefly in 2002 and 2004 to catch up with old friends, but without Laslett’s patronage the prospect of returning as a Visiting Fellow is receding. I had made seven short visits to Oxford, but in July 2002 I had the opportunity to explore some colleges for the first time. English literature has a recurrent theme of the ‘secret garden’, where the observer slips through a gate into a world remote from his own experience. I felt this far more in Oxford, a grim industrial town, than in Cambridge, which is built around the colleges. In Oxford, one could step from a road dominated by buses and trucks into a timeless Arcadian landscape. Magdalen’s Deer Park looked like a Turner painting but the scene could have been medieval. So with the Christ Church Meadow and superb gardens in New College. Exposure to New College, Magdalen, Christ Church and Hertford was an epiphany, had a disturbing and transforming quality taking me into a time warp outside previous experience. I could not explain it rationally and expect never to get over it.
PORT ARTHUR HISTORIC SITE MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY In March 1999 the Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon appointed me to the Board of the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (PAHSMA). He had read a speech I delivered in 1998 to senior bureaucrats in which I argued that Tasmania’s history, geography and heritage should be promoted as having international significance. Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula, 90 minutes from Hobart by road, located in a setting of exquisite beauty, operated as a place of secondary punishment from 1830 until 1877. Except for Norfolk Island, it was the most remote penal establishment in the British Empire, established when 447
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 448
A THINKING REED
Britain was passing through a period of rapid population growth, urbanisation and crime. In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes calls Van Diemen’s Land ‘the closest thing to a totalitarian state ever seen in the British Empire’. He argued that George Arthur, who built Port Arthur, was ‘a martinet, not a sadist’ who created a punishment machine, regular and inflexible, ‘cybernetic’, a selfcorrecting mechanism. There was total surveillance, with spies and masses of paper records, preserved in the Black Books. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed an alternative to the ‘bloody code’, creating ‘penitentiaries’ in which prisoners were isolated, hooded, kept in the dark, encouraged to practise silent meditation and to embrace repentance. Port Arthur combined Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, from which all prisoners could be observed from a single point, with Philadelphia’s system of monastic isolation. The Separate Prison at Port Arthur was a perverse adaptation of a humane, well-intentioned concept that went badly, madly, wrong. The poet John Betjeman made a film at Port Arthur in 1971 and described it as ‘the Belsen and Buchenwald of the 1830s’. Port Arthur has Australia’s most significant buildings from the early convict period. However, archaeological work confirms that Port Arthur was not just a gulag but an industrial gulag, including ship-building, metal fabrication, tool-making and flour-milling. On 28 April 1996, a sunny Sunday afternoon at Port Arthur, Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people, the largest recorded massacre by a single civilian gunman in history anywhere. My friend Evan Walker, distinguished architect and Victorian Minister under John Cain, was appointed as Chair of the Port Arthur Management Authority by Tony Rundle’s Liberal State Government in 1997. His role in initiating plans for the site’s future restoration and reviving morale were very important. After Jim Bacon became Premier in September 1998 he took portfolio responsibility for PAHSMA, was a frequent visitor and had a passionate commitment to the site. We persuaded Bacon and his Treasurer, Dr David Crean, to make a major five-year Budget contribution to repair the fabric of Port Arthur, undertake archaeological work and improve important features of the 19th-century penal establishment. The Budget allocation was extended for a further five years after Paul Lennon became Premier. We were fortunate to secure Stephen Large, an experienced Tasmanian public servant, as Chief Executive Officer. 448
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 449
‘THE THIRD AGE’
Due to illness, Evan Walker retired as Chair and Jim Bacon nominated me to succeed him in August 2000. Sharon Sullivan, an archaeologist, formerly Chief Executive of the Australian Heritage Commission, became Deputy Chair. Dr Margaret Scott, poet, novelist and critic, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, author of Port Arthur: A Story of Strength and Courage, a sensitive account of the 1996 massacre, admired for her acid wit on the ABC’s Good News Week, also joined our Board and served until her death in 2005. Wendy Kennedy, who made many successful television programs about tourism, was another active Board member. Our ambition is to gain World Heritage listing for Port Arthur, either as part of a serial nomination with New South Wales, Western Australia, other Tasmanian convict sites and Norfolk Island or on our own. Trying to get three States, Norfolk Island and the Commonwealth to agree on a common strategy is no harder than herding cats, but we had to work on it. Part of the problem has been the turnover in Ministers and Premiers, so the briefing process about the convict sites had to start all over again: Jim Bacon died, Bob Carr, Geoff Gallop and David Kemp retired. The Getty Conservation Institute’s comparative study of four great Heritage sites (2005)—Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, the Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Grosse Ile in Quebec and Port Arthur—should assist in securing World Heritage listing. The shadow of the 1996 massacre still lowered over Port Arthur. The Broad Arrow Café, where so many died, was remodelled, and in 2000 the much-admired Governor-General, Sir William Deane, dedicated a memorial pool. Our Board tried to establish some balance about the massacre, an important, poignant part of Port Arthur’s history. We did not want it to be a suppressed memory; but we did not want to sensationalise the killings so as to increase the pain felt by locals who had been involved in the attack or had lost loved ones. Port Arthur achieved spectacular growth in the numbers of visitors, without making commercial compromises, always emphasising the significance of the heritage experience. In 2005 visitor numbers exceeded 300 000, a great tribute to the work of our staff. Without warning, Jim Bacon was diagnosed as suffering from a brain tumour and lung cancer, resigned as Premier in March 2004 and died in June. One of the most impressive State Premiers I ever met, his role in Tasmania was outstanding, including his role in the transformation of Port Arthur. 449
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 450
A THINKING REED
Port Arthur is an important metaphor for the human condition, and the infinite fragility, precariousness and potential of life—the struggle to preserve value, to recognise diversity, to protect culture/cultures, to promote civilisation and to reject the rule of force, rule by gun or bomb, and those forces of blood lust and revenge that inevitably, understandably, are inside us all.
SITTING ON BOARDS I continued my membership of the CARE Australia Board to which Malcolm Fraser had recruited me in October 1992. He had founded CARE Australia in 1987 and I admired his driving energy as Chair.Within the CARE International family, CARE Australia had responsibility as ‘lead agency’ for some of the world’s most difficult areas, including Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the former Yugoslavia. In April 1999 three of our workers, Steve Pratt, Peter Wallace and Branko Jelen, were arrested as spies on the Croatian border and Malcolm flew to Belgrade to negotiate with Slobodan Milosevic to secure their release. Unlike World Vision, where donors make a sustained contribution to alleviate hardship year after year, CARE responds to emergencies and depends on how deeply the community reacts to images of destruction and starvation on television. Demand cannot be predicted, nor can levels of support. For instance, public response to Rwandan genocide in 1994 had been overwhelming, but before long compassion fatigue had set in and donations dried up for other major disasters.The bulk of CARE Australia’s funding came from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and AusAID with, at last, some increase in corporate philanthropy. Malcolm retired as Chair of CARE Australia in 2001. Sir William Deane succeeded him, but insisted that he would serve only for three years. In October 2004 Tony Eggleton, whom I had known for thirty years, took his place. I was active on the Program Committee of the board for years and became its Chair in 2004. Our country manager for Iraq, Margaret Hassan (née Fitzsimmons) (1944–2004), described by Robert Fisk as ‘brave, tough, honourable’, outraged by the long impact of UN sanctions, was kidnapped in October 2004 by an unknown group. I had met her at CARE debriefing sessions in Canberra. Dublin born, she was married to an Iraqi, had lived in Baghdad since 1972 and held joint British and Iraqi citizenship. Her kidnapping was interpreted as a tactic to discourage the British government from relieving 450
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 451
‘THE THIRD AGE’
United States forces at Fallujah. On videos shown on television she appealed for her life, raising international concern.Then on 17 November a video showed Margaret being shot in the head. Her murder was an act of ghastly, pointless terror, the destruction of a life totally committed to the welfare of Iraqis and peace in the Middle East. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), founded in 1965 as an offshoot of UNESCO’s cultural rescue work, is an international association of architects, town planners, demographers, archaeologists, geographers, historians, conservators, anthropologists and heritage administrators. Under the World Heritage Convention, ICOMOS has responsibility for giving expert advice on nominations for listing of built or cultural sites. In 1976 Australia ICOMOS was founded by David Yencken. It produced the outstanding Burra Charter (1979, later revised in 1988 and 1999) which set out a protocol for the conservation of places of cultural significance, and has been adopted both in Australia and overseas. I was elected to the Executive Committee of Australia ICOMOS in 1998, and had two terms as Vice President, enabling me to continue my interests in the recognition and promotion of heritage. In 1999 I was unexpectedly invited by Dr Roger Shaw, a soil chemist who worked in the Queensland Department of National Development, to become the foundation Chair of a proposed Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for coastal zone, estuary and waterway management. Roger had negotiated with four Queensland universities, with CSIRO and the Brisbane City Council to work collaboratively to tackle problems associated with inappropriate exploitation of the coast, estuaries and waterways, particularly the disposal of waste. I wanted to ensure that the board had independent members, from outside Queensland, so that we could argue from a national perspective and ensure that what we learned in Queensland could be applied across the continent and in Tasmania. I nominated Will Bailey, the retired CEO of the ANZ Banking Group, Roy Green, who had become Chair of the Murray-Darling Commission, and Liz Truswell, formerly Chief Scientist with the Australian Geological Survey and a gifted landscape painter, to be independent Board members. We argued a strong case to the Commonwealth Government and succeeded in receiving significant funding for a seven-year term. Will Bailey succeeded me as Chair in 2002. In 2000 I joined the board of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre after chairing the committee set up to commemorate the centenary of Burnet’s birth 451
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 452
A THINKING REED
in 1899.The organisation was passing through a period of major transition, moving away from cramped and cheerless quarters in the old infectious diseases hospital in Fairfield to a new building shared with the Baker Institute in Prahran, near the Alfred Hospital. There was a name change, from Centre to the Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Infectious Diseases and Public Health. In 2001 John Mills, an American microbiologist, retired as Director and his successor was Steve Wesselingh, an Adelaide-trained microbiologist and infectious diseases specialist. Peter Doherty also served on the Burnet board. Of Melbourne’s medical research institutes with high international reputations, only the Burnet concentrates on infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, and carries out field work. There were obvious parallels to my work with CARE Australia. Family history involved me in eye research. In 1988 my sister Carol Minchin, seven years younger, began to lose some peripheral vision and was diagnosed with acute glaucoma. Her specialist advised,‘If you have it, so will your brother. Tell him to go to an ophthalmologist.’ I was not conscious of any symptoms but I consulted my friend Gerard Crock, who had been Professor of Ophthalmology at Melbourne University. He confirmed that I had glaucoma, but not as acutely as my sister. Later he also diagnosed Fuchs’ endothelial dystrophy, a rare degeneration of the cornea. In October 1994 I visited the Wilmer Institute at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for consultations on Fuchs’, and the condition has stabilised. Gerry Crock’s successor in the Melbourne chair was a former student, Hugh Taylor, who returned in 1990 after thirteen years at Johns Hopkins and founded the Centre for Eye Research Australia (CERA) in Melbourne’s Eye and Ear Hospital. He recruited me to the CERA board and persuaded me to chair Vision 2020 Australia, a local affiliate of an international coalition, organised by the World Health Organisation, of government and private organisations campaigning to eliminate avoidable blindness by 2020. Much of Vision 2020 Australia’s activity is public advocacy, comparable to the QUIT campaign against smoking, or BreastScreen, trying to secure community and individual recognition of how many conditions affecting sight are preventable or treatable. Sight loss rarely presents as trauma: it is slow, incremental and insidious, rarely painful, never infectious, does not immobilise, is generally associated with ageing, leading to an assumption that treatment can be postponed. So eye health slips down the personal 452
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 453
‘THE THIRD AGE’
and national priority list and governments have been agonisingly slow to recognise its significance. But as the population ages, with the incidence of eye disease trebling with each decade of life after the age of 50, vision loss will become an increasingly important and costly issue in public health and social security, contributing to depression and isolation. John Clarke and Bryan Dawe assisted us with an effective public campaign to encourage regular eye-health checks. In 2002 came the most contentious of my board memberships, the Australian Stem Cell Centre (ASCC). After the Howard Government adopted the Backing Australia’s Ability report (2001), it agreed to set up two centres of excellence, one for information and communications technology, the other for biotechnology. Competitive bids were invited and an expert committee decided which group would become a centre of excellence and receive funding. Professor Alan Trounson, Director of the Institute of Reproduction and Development at Monash University, recruited me to his projected board before the bid had been accepted. Trounson was a man of extraordinary passion, drive and capacity not renowned for his tact or delicacy in negotiation. He promised a bumpy ride and his board recruits were under no illusions. We won the bid, due to Alan, but made some powerful enemies in the process. The centre is located in the Monash University Biotechnology Strip Development, and member organisations included the universities of Adelaide, New South Wales and Queensland and several specialist medical research institutes. Stem cells have the capacity to create new cells and tissues which can replace diseased or damaged tissues, and embryonic stem cells have a greater ‘pluripotentiality’ (or ability to do more things) than adult stem cells. In 2002 the Commonwealth Parliament passed the Research Involving Embryos Act and the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act to provide a legislative framework for stem cell research and permitting the use of embryos up to eight weeks after fertilisation. Prime Minister Howard supported national legislation because of concern that divergences in State laws would result in a lack of uniformity. There were strong ethical objections from the Catholic Church and some other groups which regarded the destruction of the embryo in the course of research as murder. Kevin Andrews and Senators Ron Boswell and Brian Harradine were passionate opponents. The legislation was carried on a conscience vote. The Senate vote was particularly interesting because the sharpest division was over gender 453
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 454
A THINKING REED
rather than politics. A small majority of male Senators voted against the legislation, but of 22 female Senators, 19 voted for it and only three against, suggesting that women have fewer inhibitions about the use of embryos than men, perhaps because losing them has been a normal part of their own experience. ASCC developed four platform technologies—embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells, tissue repair technology and immune system modulation. In 2003 Alan stepped down as CEO to concentrate on research and international networking, and was replaced by Dr Hugh Niall, formerly managing director of Biota. In 2004 the Centre was allocated another $57.9 million by the Commonwealth to cover the period from 2006–07 to 2010–11. I chair the Board’s ethics subcommittee, and we partly fund an independent ethics advisory committee which is to raise issues and initiate debate at arm’s length from the ASCC itself. On the ASCC Board my passion was to emphasise our ethical commitment to the relief of human suffering and that our work could help to alleviate terrible diseases such as leukaemia, chronic heart failure and Alzheimer’s disease. It vindicated my early enthusiasm for biotechnology.
KNOWLEDGE NATION TASKFORCE When Kim Beazley indicated that it was time for me to ‘move on’ as National President of the ALP in August 2000, as a consolation prize he appointed me to chair the Knowledge Nation Taskforce, the name ‘Knowledge Nation’ having been suggested by Simon Crean. Beazley had never been an advocate of large-scale policy innovation, so the decision to set up the taskforce appeared to be an anomaly. But the need to develop a Knowledge Nation strategy reflected a mounting frustration from academics concerned that Australia’s research base was becoming internationally uncompetitive. Earlier that month the Government’s Chief Scientist, Dr Robin Batterham, had produced a comprehensive discussion paper for the Howard Government, The Chance to Change, and Labor needed to make a strong response or run the risk of losing a significant part of our constituency. The taskforce, although technically part of the Chifley Research Centre, was organised and administered through Beazley’s office. The coordinator was a Beazley speech-writer, Dr Dennis Glover, a historian with a PhD from King’s College, Cambridge and an authority on the Levellers, 454
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 455
‘THE THIRD AGE’
an interesting choice given Kim’s instinctive conservatism. Beazley’s office selected the taskforce’s members, with minimal involvement by me, but they chose well. We began work towards the end of 2000. Of 22 members, only eight had political form in association with the ALP, as Shadow Ministers, MPs or apparatchiks. Several of the 14 outsiders had been appointed to jobs by the Coalition, suggesting that they were not rusted-on ALP supporters. Members were recruited in a variety of areas—medicine, banking, electronics, teaching, economics, trade and international affairs.They included John McFarlane, CEO of the ANZ Bank; Professor Bob Williamson, Director of the Murdoch Institute at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital; Professor Peter Dixon from Monash University’s Faculty of Business and Commerce; Clem Doherty, former director of McKinsey’s; Russell Bate of Sun Microsystems; Professor Jane Marceau, a specialist on the economics of innovation; Professor Mairéad Browne, an expert on information systems; and Cathy Zoi, who advised Bill Clinton on energy policy. Evan Thornley and Tracey Ellery, who then ran LookSmart, sometimes flew from California to attend meetings. Our insiders included John Brumby, the Victorian Treasurer, and Shadow Ministers Carmen Lawrence, Kevin Rudd, Stephen Smith, Craig Emerson, Kate Lundy, and the Deputy Chair Martyn Evans. Peter Doherty, Gus Nossal, Don Lamberton, Peter Karmel, Jan Fullerton and David Yencken were among many citizens who made valuable submissions to the taskforce. The Report, agreed to unanimously, was a comprehensive policy framework linking those elements in Australia’s society, economy and environment, especially human and physical resources, dependent on the generation, use and exchange of knowledge. Education was a central concern, but the Report emphasised the importance of linkages and the nature of complex systems. We concluded that much important knowledge is locked up in silos and national connections tend to be very weak, compounded by the dispersal of population across a huge continent. We thought that enhanced linkages would be cost effective, returning a far higher return for our existing investment in research.The Report, entitled ‘An Agenda for the Knowledge Nation’, ran to 58 printed pages. It did not propose increased government activity, but argued that government should act creatively as a catalyst, encourager, information and infrastructure provider, major customer and example of world’s best practice. Government could also define and assert the concept of ‘the public good’—that education and health, for example, are not just commercial enterprises 455
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 456
A THINKING REED
determined by market forces. We proposed that government become a change agent in encouraging private sector investment in new knowledgeintensive industries. We considered that Australia had high export potential in five areas: information and communications technology (at least to reduce the trade imbalance if we followed Finland’s example), biotechnology, environment (including waste management and water quality), education and medicine. The Report avoided partisan attack, making only two passing references to the Howard Government, one mildly critical, both in the section on the Arts. At taskforce meetings we sometimes speculated how we would react if the Coalition adopted some, most or all of our recommendations. We thought it was a distinct possibility. The majority welcomed the prospect.The ALP minority indicated that it would swallow hard and smile bravely. If adopted, Knowledge Nation would have been the most comprehensive rethinking of ALP policy since the 1960s. My introduction concluded: The technological revolution and transformation to a Knowledge Nation must be seen as an enlargement of human capacity, not a replacement. Many of our traditional supporters may find the idea intimidating and it will be our task to explain and explain and explain. We must not confuse data with information, information with knowledge, knowledge with wisdom. A Knowledge Nation will break down barriers. It will be inclusive, closing the disturbing gaps between the cities and the bush and between elitist and populist opinion with courage—arguing for a fresh vision of life, an updating of Ben Chifley’s ‘light on the hill’ for the twenty-first century.
At my suggestion, the taskforce adopted a maxim by Talleyrand: ‘Not to choose is to choose’. As it turned out, the Party chose not to choose. Beazley’s office decided to launch Knowledge Nation in July 2001. I told Mike Costello, Beazley’s Chief of Staff, that the launch should emphasise what could be achieved by co-ordinating the nation’s intellectual and infrastructure capabilities in some great project. Knowledge Nation’s first priority was ‘a massive ten-year program to tackle major problems which threaten the nation’s viability, especially in regional and remote areas, such as desertification, soil salinity and acidification, 456
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 457
‘THE THIRD AGE’
pollution of rivers and erosion, coordinating the efforts of all research organisations, bringing the cities and the bush together’. Kim Beazley was proverbial for his caution about public spending and there would be no point in going ahead with Knowledge Nation unless he was prepared to commit large sums, say about $3.5 billion each year for a decade (about 0.7 per cent of Gross Domestic Product) for the remediation of soil and water. Costello agreed that he and Beazley would meet me in Melbourne to debate the issue and see whether Beazley was prepared to make the commitment. We met for dinner at the agreeable Guernica Restaurant in Fitzroy on Wednesday 30 May. The dominant feature of its decor was a large print of Picasso’s grimly passionate Guernica. Beazley, Costello and Jones were joined by Don Watson, formerly Keating’s speech-writer, and his wife, the publisher Hilary McPhee. Watson had been approached as a potential speechwriter for the campaign. Beazley was in fine form. I had never seen him so effervescent. I prepared a thick dossier of briefing material on the ‘massive ten-year program’ and was prepared to forgo dinner—a major sacrifice for me—to win the argument. I handed Beazley and Costello a one-page summary of my argument, emphasising the need for a significant public investment. Beazley read it for about 30 seconds, and smiled.‘That’s fine. I’ll go along with that. Now, you have obviously eaten here before, what do you recommend?’ I handed over my briefing material, but it seemed unnecessary. Time flew. Beazley tucked into the corned beef with gusto and told many funny political stories, some new to me. He seemed unusually confident about the election, whenever it was called. The subject of Knowledge Nation was never mentioned again. About 10.30, Beazley left with Costello. I looked at Don and Hilary. ‘What do you reckon, Comrades?’ Don said, ‘Buggered if I know. There seemed to be no sense of engagement at all.’ Don declined the offer to write Beazley’s policy speech, and I suspect the dinner at Guernica was a major factor in his decision. I pressed Beazley’s office to launch the Report in a rural area affected by drought or desertification. Images would emphasise our determination to use research to bring the city and the bush together. No, I was told, the Report would have to be launched in a major city. Members of the press gallery hated leaving their comfort zone and we would jeopardise their goodwill if we dragged them off to the bush, and get no significant television coverage. That proved to be a serious mistake. 457
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 458
A THINKING REED
It was decided to launch Knowledge Nation at the Victoria University campus at St Albans, once part of my Lalor electorate. I had never been given an opportunity to brief Beazley on the Report’s contents, point to some contentious areas and ensure that he understood them enough to develop appropriate rhetoric. So far as I am aware, there was no briefing about Knowledge Nation for the Party’s head office, Shadow Cabinet, Caucus, the State branches or candidates. The Report had an initial print run of 300 copies. Ultimately, 1000 copies were printed for Australia-wide distribution. There was no strategy for distributing material to trade unions, schools, universities, TAFEs or community groups or for providing follow-up. At the St Albans launch on 2 July, after I spoke, Beazley endorsed our document and, as the ABC reported, ‘staked his political future on a plan for the so-called Knowledge Nation’. Strangely, he never mentioned the ‘massive ten-year program’ about soil and water.At the launch, rebroadcast on the ABC, he said: This is the difference between myself and John Howard. John Howard is around after the next election for the next six months, maybe a year if he wins it. I’m around for the next ten years in Australian politics if I win. At the end of my political career, if I’m successful at the next election and the election subsequently, the way you’ll make a judgment on me as leader of this nation will be on the extent to which we have successfully and in a calm, sensible and scandal-free way put this agenda in place. This is my political future. I’m staking myself on it.
Forty-eight hours later his political future must have changed dramatically because, far from staking it on the Knowledge Nation Taskforce Report, he never referred to it again. Kim may never have understood the ‘soil and water’ emphasis in Knowledge Nation. Perhaps his advisers took the line that proposing ‘a massive ten-year program’ could only be categorised as major expenditure. If he were then challenged about a spending commitment and said, ‘But we will only spend, year by year, what the Budget surplus allows’, then the credibility of the ‘massive program’ would have been shot. We hoped that bipartisan support would be guaranteed on this vital issue, but not one media outlet reported it, Labor never referred to it again and we scored an own goal.The government used the techniques of ‘spin’ to ridicule the taskforce’s Report and they succeeded brilliantly.The attack 458
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 459
‘THE THIRD AGE’
then became the story, not the Report’s contents, and Labor’s failure to defend Knowledge Nation, let alone argue for it. The main attack was on my notorious ‘complexity diagram’ in my introduction, not in the Report itself. The diagram was a ‘mind map’, a schema devised by Tony Buzan in England in 1968 and widely used in schools as a graphic technique to illustrate complex relationships. Our complexity diagram, the most mocked and least understood part of the report, illustrated the most important single element in the document, which was also explained in the text: Knowledge Nation (KN) was a central unifying principle—not an institution—linking together complex, dynamic interactions. The Knowledge Nation Taskforce argued that Labor should try to break down the silos and ensure better information exchanges in a large dispersed continent, compounded by Commonwealth–State turf wars. Policies such as health and education and social welfare and environment have a complex and dynamic interaction: touch one, and the others are all affected.They are not wrapped up discretely, like Christmas presents. Each is mutually interdependent. For example, population and/or age distribution are closely linked. If population remains static, demand for welfare goes up, demand for education goes down. My controversial diagram set out to demonstrate interactions in complex systems, with no suggestion that government could, or should, control them. As H.L. Mencken observed, ‘For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is almost always wrong’. ‘Complex systems’ are increasingly important factors in modern life. Ironically, the Australian Research Council, under the Howard Government, has identified ‘complex systems’ as a priority area for research funding. And discussing complexity is—inevitably—complex. How could it be otherwise? The diagram was repeatedly attacked but nobody, to my knowledge, attacked the proposition that it illustrated. The proposition was never discussed, by the Party or by our critics.Young people, familiar with ‘mind maps’, understood my diagram; journalists and politicians did not.To many columnists and cartoonists the diagram was the beginning and the end of discussion. The attack was initiated by Treasurer Peter Costello, who dismissed our report as ‘Noodle Nation’, and his description of the diagram as ‘spaghetti and meatballs’ had some wit.‘Noodle Nation’ was coined by Brian Loughnane, now the Liberal’s Federal Director, while ‘spaghetti and meatballs’ came from Costello’s media adviser, Nikki Saava. Both scored a direct 459
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 460
A THINKING REED
Telstra/ AP
ABC/ Media
Government
Schools
Welfare
Leisure/Sport Universities ‘Third Age’ Lifelong Learning Banking/ Insurance
TAFE/ Training
Medicine/ Health Trade/ Commerce
KNOWLEDGE NATION
Arts/Creative Industries
CSIRO/ CRCs/ B of M
Defence
Environment Tourism
Communications/ IT and publishing
Infrastructure
Law/ Public Service
Manufacturing/ Construction Mining
Agriculture
The complexity diagram
hit and were enthusiastically taken up by David Kemp, then Education Minister.This clever tactic, a classic example of ‘spin’, meant that the issues raised in the Report were never debated. The Australian obviously thought the diagram was hilarious—and published six cartoons by Peter Nicholson based on it. The Australian’s Matt Price described the complexity diagram as ‘crazy, incomprehensible and infamous’. I thought that ‘infamous’ (‘disgraceful’) was rather strong. Both responses reflected a wilful refusal to even debate the Report:‘Don’t debate the contents, just destroy it’. The advice of the Party’s spin doctors was to ignore the attacks on KN, and let the issue drift for a month or two. It was a fatal misjudgment. By 4 July KN was dead in the water and the Opposition had taken a vow of silence. There was no follow-up strategy on KN in the Beazley office, the Shadow Cabinet, the Caucus or the State branches. If Beazley had devoted 30 minutes—possibly even 20—to defending Knowledge Nation robustly he could have won the moral and intellectual argument, especially if we had called in some of our respected panel members, or outsiders. Offers of help from Peter Doherty, Fiona Stanley, 460
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 461
‘THE THIRD AGE’
Peter Verwer (CEO of the Property Council of Australia), Leith Boully (grazier and member of the ABC Board) and others were not followed up. While I made a major input into Knowledge Nation, it is a serious rewriting of history to suggest that the Report was all my own work, as if the other 21 taskforce members had disappeared into the night. Few commentators recognised the interconnectedness of KN, the heavy emphasis on the environment, on the creative arts, on a national population policy, on demographic changes and the significance of the ‘Third Age’, a national information policy, getting more effective co-ordination in our research institutions, a strategic approach to concentration on research and industry priorities, the emphasis on values, changing the culture, strengthening great national institutions such as the ABC and CSIRO, getting away from a narrow materialist instrumentalism (digging deeper furrows) in education, and redefining the role of government. Only the social scientist Leon Mann, critic Sylvia Lawson and Margo Kingston’s Sydney Morning Herald ‘Web Diary’ defended me in print. Margo called for ‘A nation smart enough to think, not snigger’. In his book From the Suburbs (2003), Mark Latham wrote of Knowledge Nation that the problem was ‘not that the diagram was overambitious or silly’ but ‘it was foolish . . . to think that government can control and plan for this kind of complexity’. The document made no such assertion. The emphasis was far more modest, that government could be a knowledge broker and catalyst to promote links between sectors and get already existing knowledge shared around. There was a second attack, on the term ‘cadastre’—also my proposal— as a provisional, shorthand name for a national knowledge bank which would pool state and national data to provide an accurate picture of Australia’s physical, social and economic condition, indicating strengths and weaknesses in our skills base. I have no idea why commentators were so enraged by this. They never explained. Before the Report was released, some colleagues argued that the mind map would be an easy target and should be dropped, and that the complexity proposition be expressed only in words. I thought that this took an exaggeratedly cynical view of the media. I expected that newspapers, radio and television would encourage serious debate on content, rather than concentrating on presentation/form. I was quite wrong on that. KN was also a victim of ‘wedge politics’, an appeal to the lowest common denominator which marginalised elites: academics, creative artists 461
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 462
A THINKING REED
and other members of the ‘chattering classes’ were stigmatised as pursuing self-interest. Some commentators automatically assumed that KN proposed a revival of ‘big government’, and ignored our careful attempt to redefine and limit its appropriate role. Former Liberal Senator Tsebin Tchen suggested to me that the Howard Government’s reaction to KN in 2001 was a long-delayed payback for Labor’s demolition of John Hewson’s Fightback! package in 1993. This idea is persuasive. Fightback! was a long, complicated, internally consistent document—and Labor’s attack concentrated on two elements: the regressive nature of a flat tax on consumption and Fightback!’s apparent complexity and mass of detail, which lent itself to attack. (‘If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it.’) In a by-election in the Victorian outer metropolitan seat of Aston on 14 July, Labor gained a 3.7 per cent swing but failed to win. KN simply disappeared in that mini-campaign, although it could have been used effectively in Aston. The Greens put out a split ticket because the ALP preference negotiator was unaware that KN had an environment component. The Green candidate told me that if he had known that the environment was central to KN he would have ensured that Green preferences were directed to the ALP. In August I recorded one of Geoffrey Robertson’s Hypotheticals at Channel 7, and Tim Flannery was a fellow panellist. I had the chance to do a burst on KN, much of which was edited out. Tim approached me after the recording and apologised that, until he heard me speak, he had not realised that KN dealt with environment and population. He said,‘I thought it was only about schools and universities.’ Tim was exceptionally acute and well read. If he had not picked up our message, then who had? After the Tampa incident, the ‘children overboard’ affair, and after September 11, 2001, on defence and foreign policy issues Labor and the Coalition appeared to be dancing the tango. If the Prime Minister moved, Labor followed. The high degree of convergence involved in Beazley’s ‘small target’ strategy had two results in the Federal election in November 2001. First, it alienated many voters of even vaguely radical persuasion and made the Greens and even the Democrats seem attractive for a first preference vote. Second, it put an exaggerated emphasis on the role of the leaders. There was a reduction in the tribal appeal of voting Labor or Liberal—the main question became: ‘In dangerous times, who is the stronger Leader?’ Neal Blewett’s A Cabinet Diary (1999) had a sharply etched comment: 462
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 463
‘THE THIRD AGE’
Kim Beazley, Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Labor MP for Swan (WA). A formidable figure, large in body and in mind, Beazley was Churchillian in ambition, vision and vigour and shared with Churchill a fascination with, and an understanding of, geo-politics and grand strategy but he was flawed by a streak of most un-Churchillian timidity.
I was astonished that the Party used the name ‘Kim Beazley’s Knowledge Nation’ as the centrepiece of the election policy launch in Hurstville on Wednesday 31 October, just nine days before the election. This new document bore no resemblance to the taskforce’s Report, confining itself to proposing modest increases in education spending over five years. Oddly, in a table headed ‘Value of Labor’s Commitment to the Knowledge Nation’, projected expenditure for the Knowledge Bank (or cadastre), a central feature of the Report, was listed as $0.0—spread over five years! It was impossible to reconcile the KN Report with Kim’s ‘small target’, no/low spending Budget strategy, with the repeated mantra about no Budget deficits, avoiding controversy on policy, especially education and health, and fighting essentially on terrains chosen by the Government.* Kim Beazley is the most conservative Federal Leader in ALP history. Malcolm Fraser said to me:‘I have only one problem with Beazley. I can’t think of a single issue where he is to the Left of me.’ Kim was not a ‘change agent’, and I doubt if he saw himself as such.That made his establishment of the Knowledge Nation Taskforce, chaired by me, such an anomaly, because if the taskforce was set up to propose major policy commitments, as it did, they either had to be adopted or rejected. Sadly, Kim did both. Kim Beazley’s moving concession speech on election night in 2001 suggested how a moral argument might have been advanced in the campaign. He said,‘There are dark angels in our nature but there are good angels as well.’ He was probably reaching out for Lincoln’s reference to ‘the better angels of our nature’. * The on-line newsletter crikey.com (October 2004) contained a story ‘from a well-placed Labor heavy’ which described KN as being all my own work, and ‘a policy so obscure and obtuse’ that insiders knew it would be a ‘laughing stock’. Only the complexity diagram and the word ‘cadastre’ were given as examples. The report finishes with an anecdote expressing regret by Beazley staffers that they had failed to run me down in a car in a darkened Melbourne street ‘because no jury would have convicted them when the real story came out’. I was disturbed by how much antagonism KN generated. 463
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 464
A THINKING REED
The Pauline Hanson One Nation phenomenon had a debilitating effect on the whole electoral process. Since the outcome of elections was seen as being determined by the one million Australians who had cast Senate votes for One Nation in 1998, both the ALP and the Coalition were reluctant to take courageous moral stands on important issues. The 2001 election became a Dutch auction for cowardice and meanness of spirit.
VICTORIAN SCHOOLS INNOVATION COMMISSION When Mary Delahunty was Victoria’s Minister for Education and Training, and for the Arts, she invited me to chair a new body, the Victorian Schools Innovation Commission (VSIC), to provide advice to her and the Department of Education and Training about encouraging innovation and creativity inside State schools. I did so from November 2001 until August 2005. Theoretically a part-time job, it was almost full-time in practice. No other State or Territory had an equivalent body to VSIC. Although appointed by government, in structure VSIC was a company limited by guarantee. About 60 per cent of its funding came from the State Budget, 40 per cent from philanthropic trusts. VSIC was essentially an independent think-tank, a mixture of insiders and outsiders which examined the big questions in education (or life). VSIC’s board included some remarkable talents, including John Clarke, writer, actor and satirist; Julian Burnside, QC; Sharan Burrow, President of the ACTU; Ellen Koshland, founder of the Education Foundation; David Stokes, former Dean of Science at Deakin University; Philip Bullock, CEO of IBM Australia; and the banker Alister Maitland. Senior members from the Department were added to the board, ex officio. Vivienne White, co-ordinator of the Australian National Schools Network, was recruited from Sydney by the Minister’s office to be our Chief Executive Officer. We had never met but her appointment turned out to be serendipity. I liked her at once, admired her intelligence, energy, experience and earthy directness. We worked well together. Her capacity to persuade philanthropies to fund VSIC projects on creativity, regional problems, school design and adjustment programs for refugee children was exceptional, and all were successful. We were ambitious enough to hope that our programs would be taken up nationally. In February 2002, after a reshuffle, Lynne Kosky became Minister of Education and Training.VSIC was not her creation and she seemed to be remote from it. VSIC lived in a state of creative tension in no-person’s 464
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 465
‘THE THIRD AGE’
land, somewhere between the Minister, who appointed board members, and the Department of Education and Training (DE&T). In the era of the cult of management, education (like health, sport, the environment, law, even politics) is often treated as if all the problems can be solved by generic managers, and that expertise, experience or even serious research are irrelevant or perhaps undesirable. There was a philosophical division between VSIC and DE&T. At VSIC we argued for an open, pluralistic, questioning model in education in which ideas were important and outcomes were uncertain. DE&T took an instrumentalist, rigid, determinist approach in which all outcomes were known, and formulae could be applied to specific problems. DE&T’s corporate culture was defensive and inward looking, uneasy about ideas or controversy. It preferred to seek outside advice from management consultants on contract, where outcomes are predictable (and controllable). In 2003 VSIC organised a ‘Leading Edge Festival’ to celebrate achievements in State schools and we planned to hold a public debate on education. This aroused deep alarm in DE&T and we were directed not to use the word ‘debate’.What on earth could there be to debate in education? I thought that the best illustration of VSIC’s role was that of the yellowbilled oxpecker (Buphagus africanus), the companion bird of the rhino which provides specialist assistance and advice with only a tiny fraction of the rhino’s resources and muscle.The Commission had to be careful about positioning itself. If it was too remote, out of sight from the Department, its work could appear abstract or irrelevant and be ignored. If it was too close, the Department might roll on top. In 1942 Eleanor Roosevelt wrote:‘A democratic form of government, a democratic way of life, presupposes free public education over a long period; it presupposes also an education for personal responsibility that too often is neglected’. The Canadian thinker John Ralston Saul defined public education as ‘the single most important element in the maintenance of a democratic system’. I kept crusading for public education to be an instrument for personal and societal transformation. With the existing mindset, education generally entrenches or reinforces existing abilities or disabilities, advantages or disadvantages. Even where parents have attended State schools themselves, once they choose to send their children to private schools they generally cease to be effective advocates for the State system. Disturbingly, some DE&T officials had voted with their feet in choosing private schools for their offspring. Often they say: ‘I believe in the State system, but Toby and 465
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 466
A THINKING REED
Miranda have special needs, so we send them to private schools.’ Toby and Miranda have already left. Will Jason and Kylie follow? If the State system broke down, the impact on social cohesion would be serious. The strength of a large, comprehensive State system is that it permits/ encourages diversity inside school and social cohesion outside it, rather than cohesion inside school and diversity (often harsh or fragmented) outside it. We wanted to encourage the Department to tackle some major problems in Victorian education. Pre-schooling is part of Victoria’s welfare system, not part of education, at precisely the time when children are most susceptible to learning. Participation in Victorian State schools is strikingly lower than the national average, due to the phenomenon of ‘middle-class flight’. While values are taught, and taught well, in State schools, DE&T is in danger of losing the propaganda battle to the private schools due to its defensiveness. Should we be aiming at mass learning, or individual learning? How do we, individually, impute a value to our own time use? Or is it always conferred, externally, by a superior? What is the relationship between time management and the problems of aggression, substance abuse, boredom, alienation and depression? How do we make some subjects more exciting for teachers and students? These were not issues that DE&T felt comfortable with, or even addressed. The particular attraction of private education (apart from its unspoken appeal to social mobility,‘getting on’ and a reinforcement of social stratification) is asserted to be its commitment to ‘values’, and this is inevitably assumed to be associated with church schools, whether the Catholic system, independent schools or the rapidly growing number of new faithbased schools. The critical assumption, more implied than asserted, is that State education is secular, materialistic, instrumental and uniform, aimed at the lowest common denominator rather than recognising and encouraging individual capacity and diversity. John Howard attacked State schools as being ‘too politically correct’ and ‘values free’. This conceptualisation, that private schools promote values while public schools are weak on values, is based on a misappropriation of the word ‘values’. When private school advocates talk about values, they often refer to a circumscribed set of them: conformity, tradition, security and social power. The public school system promotes values too, but of a different kind, including equality, justice, diversity and tolerance. It is hypocritical not to recognise the distinction between what are in effect ‘gated’ schools, able to exclude potential students doctrinally and 466
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 467
‘THE THIRD AGE’
financially, and ‘open door’ schools which are community based, lacking the power (or desire) to exclude certain categories. VSIC was concerned about potential conflict between State and nonState systems. The State system’s ‘open door’ schools presuppose a society based on co-operation, emphasising mutuality of interest, avoiding segmentation or stratification. ‘Gated’ schools recognise, accept and build on differentiation, competition, segmentation or stratification.The two systems are in a continuum. The businessman John Elliott used to threaten one of his daughters: ‘If you don’t behave, I’ll send you to a high school’. The threat apparently worked. As the State system strengthens, stratification/ segmentation in society will reduce; but if the State system weakens, stratification/segmentation in society must increase. VSIC urged that as a society, we ought to be courageous enough to acknowledge and discuss these issues. In 2006, John Howard expressed satisfaction that State school enrolments had fallen by 22 per cent in his decade as Prime Minister. There was a growing risk that State education in Australia would be seen as a residual system for the poor, not the system of choice.A study in 2004 by the Sydney Morning Herald indicated that more than 70 per cent of parents of State school pupils would opt out if they could afford it, which would be a serious blow to social cohesion. In February 2004 I represented VSIC at a large international conference,‘Crossing Boundaries’, held in Reggio Emilia, in the Italian region of Emilia Romagna. Reggio Emilia’s experiment in pre-school and toddler education was initiated after World War II by Loris Malaguzzi (1920–1994), a charismatic psychologist, teacher, organiser and dramatist, politically on the Left. Malaguzzi was quoted as describing knowledge as ‘a tangle of spaghetti’, and I could identify with that. The Reggio Emilia schools were extremely impressive, suggesting that very small children were capable of surprisingly high levels of abstract reasoning, and I learned a great deal. After leaving Reggio, I went on to the OECD in Paris. In the OECD’s building in La Défense I was struck by a philosophical and physical division between officials. On one side of the corridor were experts who insist that only factors which can be measured precisely (such as literacy, numeracy, height, weight, age) are important. On the other side of the corridor were experts who put more emphasis on creativity, together with imagination, empathy, compassion, musicality, all features which are notoriously hard to measure. The two groups, regrettably, did not talk to each other. In 2005, the Minister announced that there were no plans to change pre-schooling arrangements in Victoria. It was simply ruled out of the 467
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 468
A THINKING REED
education system. Thirteen years at school is long enough. Nothing to discuss. Nothing to debate. End of story, even though imagination, creativity, courage and individuality is shaped in the pre-school years when the capacity to learn (language, for example) is at its highest. Ultimately, the Department persuaded the Minister to get rid of us. VSIC’s appropriation of $1.4 million in an Education Budget of $7 billion was considered to be too high a proportion (0.02 per cent), especially when we kept raising questions that it did not want to think about.We had no warning and I heard the bad news on the wharf at Split in Croatia when I was on leave in June 2005. I probably contributed to VSIC’s problems by sending books to the Minister and the Department’s Secretary and proposing discussions about education issues. We were never able to persuade the Secretary to attend a VSIC meeting and I thought he developed quite a hunted look when our paths crossed. My suggestion that Department directives, written in impenetrable ‘management-speak’, should be accompanied by a plain English translation went down badly. So did my concern about overreliance on management consultants who, anxious to ensure repeat business, told the Department exactly what it wanted to hear. I asked one of the highest-ranking bureaucrats in the Department: ‘In the Department, who will be interested in ideas after the Commission ends?’ The response was immediate, and brutal, delivered, literally, head to head: ‘Wrong question! We’re not into ideas around here. We’re into program delivery.’Treasury and Finance has provided two successive Secretaries of the Department of Education and Training. The chance that an experienced teacher might be appointed to head Treasury is very remote. When researching the history of Victorian State education, I was deeply impressed by the quality of debate when the original Education Act (No. 449) was introduced in the Legislative Assembly in September 1872 and confidently claimed to be ‘altogether a new experiment as regards the British race . . . an example to our progenitors in England’. Just 133 years later, the Victorian Education and Training Reform Act (2006) was a comprehensive consolidation of all educational legislation since 1872. None of its Parliamentary debating attracted any media coverage, and if there are new ideas in the Act they are hard to find. One good result of my sacking as Chair of VSIC was that I could take up appointment as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at Melbourne University, reporting to the charismatic Glyn Davis, who had become Vice-Chancellor in January 2005. I asked for the job description. ‘Making a nuisance of 468
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 469
‘THE THIRD AGE’
yourself on campus,’ he said. I took up my post when the university was riding on a crest, with growing international recognition. The quality of internal debate was in striking contrast to the DE&T (or the ALP).
ALP NATIONAL PRESIDENT (AGAIN) Following Labor’s defeat in 2001 the new Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, nominated Bob Hawke and Neville Wran as a National Committee of Review. After extensive meetings with rank and file Party members throughout Australia, they were impressed by a passionate commitment to change.ALP members wanted ‘bottom-up’ processes to replace the current system of ‘democratic centralism’ where head office, factional leaders and spin doctors make all the important decisions about how the party operates, policy directions and choice of candidates. They attacked ‘the deadening impact of factionalism and the associated phenomenon of branch stacking’ and ‘the cancerous effect this activity has had on the democratic traditions that have been the strength of our Party’. In October 2002 a Special ALP National Conference adopted most of the Hawke–Wran Review, changing the trade union/branch representation ratio at Conferences from 60:40 to 50:50. Ironically, as unionism contracted within the Australian community it increased its power base within the ALP. Simon Crean’s bruising campaign in 2002 to change the trade union/branch representation ratio at Conferences from 60:40 to 50:50 probably cost him his leadership but as more than 60 per cent of delegates at the 2004 National Conference (however chosen) were trade union officials, the rule change had meant little. In practice Right unions and Right branch representatives voted together, and the Left did likewise; there was never a split on union/branch lines. The Special Conference also provided for direct election of the National President by a postal ballot of branch members, the first in the Party’s history. Apprehensive that direct election might create a presidency with moral or intellectual authority, which was outside the direct control or gift of the factions, the office was quickly converted to a troika, a group of three who would share presidential duties, in turn, one year at a time, as President, Senior Vice President and Vice President. They had no specific duties and were denied a vote on the National Executive. It was a deeply cynical exercise, satirised by the media as a ‘rotisserie’. The postal ballot for the national presidency was conducted between mid-October and mid-November 2003. Eleven candidates nominated, 469
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 470
A THINKING REED
seven women and four men. I was an extremely reluctant candidate, the oldest by far and last in the field, having already told journalists I would not be running, giving Carmen Lawrence a strong tactical advantage. I was also the only Victorian candidate to nominate, which suggested that none of the factional warlords believed they could secure a credible vote in an uncontrolled election. Because I had been concerned about the shabby attacks on Simon Crean’s leadership, I ran some risk of being seen as the ‘safe’ or even ‘old guard’ candidate. I rejected any suggestion that my plan was to block Carmen, who had been endorsed by the Left. Under the ‘equal opportunity’ rules both genders had to be represented in the troika. I welcomed Gough Whitlam’s warm endorsement, but nobody could have accused me of campaigning vigorously. Subconsciously I may have been seeking vindication after the Knowledge Nation debacle. I took an uncharacteristically cautious line in talking to members’ forums, where Carmen was more outspoken, although on most policy issues I am to the Left of her position. She reflected the deep ‘piss off ’ factor in the branches more accurately than I did. Ultimately, 18 867 votes, about half of the nominal membership, living or dead, were cast. Carmen Lawrence won the ballot convincingly, with 34.5 per cent of the votes, and I came second, with 28.2 per cent. Warren Mundine, Deputy Mayor of Dubbo, endorsed by the Right, came third, with 12.4 per cent, becoming the first part-Aboriginal to hold national office in the Party. Carmen became the 26th Federal/National President since the position was created in 1915, and the first woman. She deserved to win. Having achieved iconic status as the first female Premier of an Australian State, she had been the victim of a bitter campaign by Richard Court’s Government to destroy her, and had shown principle and courage on the sensitive refugee issue. She was the first declared candidate, had powerful factional endorsement, campaigned hard and became an obvious first choice for many Party members, irrespective of gender. The election demonstrated the high degree of alienation felt by Party members, although its significance was virtually ignored by the commentariat. I estimate that probably 80 per cent of the voters for the ALP’s National Presidency wanted a more radical, generous approach to policy —on refugees, taxation, environment, education, health, redefining the ‘public good’. The ‘Right’ ticket of three, headed by Warren Mundine, who was deeply uncomfortable with some hard Right policies, received 470
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 471
‘THE THIRD AGE’
a total vote of less than 20 per cent, although the Right were regarded as having a stranglehold on the national and state structures. And yet in the indirect election for National Conference delegates, conducted at State Conferences with a complex system of interlocking alliances (‘If you support us on this, we’ll support you on that’), the Right won a dominant position. Branch members detest the factional system, and the warlords dislike the popular vote because they cannot control it or predict the result. The size of the 2004 National Conference was doubled, from two hundred delegates to four hundred, while its length was reduced from five days to three, the average time available for each delegate being less than three minutes. In No. 58 of The Federalist (1788), James Madison had argued, correctly, that as a deliberative body grows larger, the number of people who exercise effective control becomes less. There was a paradox in comparing the election result for the three National Presidents, which demonstrated that factionalism was deeply unpopular (despite the endorsement of Carmen and Warren by Left and Right respectively), and election of the National Executive by 400 Conference delegates, picked by factional tickets, at State Conferences, the overwhelming majority of whom were deeply committed factional warriors. Bill Ludwig, the AWU’s State Secretary in Queensland, topped the poll for election to the National Executive, a result which confirmed that the factions were totally dominant, the democratic vote for the National Presidents was an anomaly. National Conferences are stage-managed media events, not forums for arguing out policy. The 1969 ALP Federal Conference may have been the last one which made a comprehensive contribution to public policy. The Party dropped out of policy making federally between 1983 and 1996, when decisions were adopted top-down by Cabinet and imposed on a reluctant Party (uranium, HECS, selling Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank). Government also developed an excessive reliance on lobbyists and focus groups. After 1996, with Beazley’s ‘small target’ strategy, we never resumed the practice of active policy formulation. The ALP runs the risk of becoming a transactional party rather than a commitment party. The ALP has been privatised and the factions are the majority and minority stakeholders, run by professional managers. Factions become ends in themselves, executive placement agencies, engaging in game playing, tribalism and turf wars. Ideas? Policies? They are of minor significance. 471
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 472
A THINKING REED
Factional warlords essentially operate at the State rather than the National level, because that is where the power and patronage lies. You can’t do much better than scoring eight out of eight in State and Territory elections. The warlords regard themselves as part of a success story. Are they wrong? But if Labor lost office in the States and Territories and had no patronage to dispense, factions would disappear or change dramatically. The fracturing of the Left, and creation of sub-factions, personal fiefdoms, even family businesses, has given the Right a positional advantage which it does not necessarily deserve. Ideology became irrelevant and the property theory of politics took over. The ALP faces the troubling question of how a party with a contracting base could be dynamic and expanding. What incentives can one offer a prospective ALP branch member, other than being recruited into a faction? Influence policy? Help choose MPs? Interesting branch meetings? Making a difference? One would need a black sense of humour to even suggest it. There are now two classes of members, the fast track (insiders) and the impotent (outsiders). Rank and file members are disappearing. But securing a career, getting on, joining the nomenklatura—these are all powerful reasons to join. People once joined the Party because of opposition to the death penalty and Vietnam. Did anyone join because we sold Qantas or were silent on Tampa or David Hicks? Pragmatism is good for factions, bad for community recruitment. Ideology/core beliefs are bad for factions, good for community recruitment. In December 2003 Simon Crean, buffeted by ceaseless attacks inside Caucus and systematic media leaking, and having survived a challenge by Kim Beazley, was tapped on the shoulder by senior colleagues and resigned as Leader. He threw his support behind Mark Latham, Member for Werriwa and a former staffer for Gough Whitlam and Bob Carr. Caucus took a leap in the dark and Latham defeated Beazley by two votes. Dynamic, energetic, opinionated but untried, Latham was a vigorous populist, combining elements of economic rationalism and Hansonism, hostile both to United States adventurism and to refugees. At the 2004 National Conference, held in Sydney at the end of January, Latham made a good impression as Leader and bemused the media by emphasising the importance of reading to small children. While some journalists in the press gallery were cynical, the television response was overwhelmingly favourable and distracted attention from the Party’s chronic policy anorexia. 472
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 473
‘THE THIRD AGE’
However, Labor’s defeat in October 2004 was serious. The ALP lost eight seats and won four, while the Party’s primary vote fell to 37.6 per cent, the lowest figure since 1931 (or 1906 depending on what method of calculation was used). The second worst figure, only slightly better, had been in 2001. Ironically, Latham’s losing primary vote in 2004 was higher than Tony Blair’s winning figure (37 per cent) in September 2005. In 2005 Labor held office in every State and Territory but had been out of National office for nearly a decade. In January 2005 Mark Latham resigned suddenly as Leader, due to a combination of pancreatitis and mounting alienation from his colleagues and the Party. Kim Beazley replaced him unopposed. The Latham Diaries, published by Melbourne University Publishing in September, attacked Beazley savagely. Paradoxically, the attacks strengthened Beazley because their wild exaggeration created sympathy. Latham’s attack on the Party’s culture, while largely accurate, was essentially the rage of Caliban in seeing his own image in the mirror. In New South Wales Latham had been a consistent beneficiary of the factional system that he turned on so savagely, and his claims of conspiracy were overdrawn. The most damaging part of the book was the Introduction where he wrote: ‘If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there’, misattributing it to Lewis Carroll. As usual, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe had it absolutely right in their satirical segment on the ABC’s 7.30 Report (22 September 2005): INTERVIEWER: Mr Latham, when did you first realise they were all against you? MARK LATHAM: When they made me leader of the Labor Party. INTERVIEWER: And who did that? MARK LATHAM: They all did. The whole bloody lot of them—they all got together, all of them, literally all of them and they ganged up on me.They made me the bloody leader of the Labor Party.
There has been a failure to recognise (and I was slow not to grasp it) that the move towards making the ALP a National Party (strong centre, weak periphery, national or centralising goals) has gone into reverse. Labor is, as in 1916 or 1926, essentially a Federal Party (weak centre, strong periphery, patronage and preferment machines in States and Territories). Public funding of national election campaigns has helped to conceal this central weakness. 473
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 474
A THINKING REED
Under John Howard, the Liberal Party now has a strong centre, weak periphery and centralising goals. The States are now seen as a sideshow, of only marginal interest. All their efforts, skills and recruitment are concentrated on the national agenda. Ours are not. As I became National President again Australia had gone through a major political realignment—important but not clearly recognised.The central issue was: would it be permanent? In Victoria, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory the ALP won a plurality of votes in both national and State/Territory elections. But in the other four States, there was a striking gap between Labor’s high State vote and its low national vote. Is a permanent realignment taking place? In my Presidential year (January 2005–January 2006) I tried to discourage the prevailing obsession with the politics of personality which had been so destructive during Simon Crean’s embattled leadership and following Latham’s toxic outbursts. The Latham crisis and its aftermath was traumatic and I talked to hundreds of branch members and unhappy supporters. In one ten-day period in November I handled 800 e-mails of complaint about our reluctance to tackle moral issues as tactfully and constructively as I could. In a National Press Club speech, I argued passionately about excessive control by factional warlords but it was asking too much to expect them to relax control. I was careful not to criticise Beazley either publicly or privately and emphasised that he could win in 2007. I was deeply sceptical about the ‘small target’ strategy, urged Labor to take the electorate seriously and not assume that it only wakes up from political torpor six weeks from polling day. I asked for a commitment to democracy, both outside and inside the Party. Control by factional warlords had never been stronger. Increasing factional control was described as ‘renewal’, while complaining about it was dismissed as ‘navel gazing’.
ﱗ
So in my Third Age, I feel more passionately engaged in public discourse than ever before, conscious that time is running out, but determined to invest content and meaning into the unforgiving minute, to give and receive love, preserve the planet, promote understanding and rationality, enlarge the range of aesthetic experience and give meaning to democratic participation. 474
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 475
CHAPTER 15
ﱗ
Years of Exile: 1979, 1989, 2001
Dramatic events in 1979, 1989 and 2001 transformed history, politics and economics throughout the world. They changed Australia beyond recognition and, with it, the Australian Labor Party. My political beliefs were challenged, if not destroyed, and I began to feel like an exile, a stranger, even when I held public office with high national recognition. The values I believed in were deeply compromised. In 1979, support for economic intervention by government collapsed and free markets became the preferred economic, social and political model in the West. Community assets were sold off and private benefit displaced public good as a policy objective. In Iran, overthrow of the Shah marked the revival of Islamic fundamentalism as a political and ideological force. China buried Mao Zedong’s ideology when ‘paramount leader’ Deng Xiaoping closed the communes, toured the United States, proposed an ‘open door’ economic policy and invited multinational corporations to invest. In 1989 when the Communist system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union imploded, one economic model was left standing in the world: triumphant capitalism and the doubtful assumption that it always promoted democracy. All values became economic and all goals material. ‘Left’ politics was deemed obsolete and the lack of an alternative model of society drained politics of idealism, replacing it with a narrow commitment to economic self-advancement. After 2001 fears of terrorism, and emphasis on national security and 475
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 476
A THINKING REED
patriotism, dethroned reason, elevated the irrational, debased democratic practice, perhaps permanently, so that the rule of law was disposable, truth, evidence and analysis became marginal, or irrelevant, leading to the concept of ‘the new normal’ in the United States, and in Australia fear that arguing an alternative point of view would be electoral suicide. As I was writing the last chapter of this book I felt the cumulative effect of these changes in the year 2005, the annus ignominiosis. Reason seemed to have been abandoned in high public policy, leadership failed, political parties gave up even a pretence of commitment to principle, the politics of greed was morally bankrupt. The political process has been deformed, Parliaments have lost much of their moral authority, the public service has adopted the cult of managerialism and been increasingly politicised, universities have become trading corporations, the media is preoccupied with infotainment, while lobbying and use of consultants ensures that vested interest is more influential than community interest. Public debate is dominated by the black arts of ‘spin’, so that ‘framing’ the debate becomes central. Appeals to emotion, especially fear and gullibility, and to immediate economic or cultural self-interest (‘wedge politics’) are exploited cynically and ruthlessly. Establishing the truth of a complex proposition (evolution, stem cell research, climate change, going to war in Iraq, industrial relations changes) is less significant than how simple arguments, essentially propaganda, can be sold. Unilateralism had failed, terrorism was spreading and the great problems of poverty, disease, famine and climate change were ignored. However, private charities and nongovernment organisations continued to do noble work in responding to natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami (December 2004) and the Kashmir–Pakistan earthquake (October 2005). In 1979 I was an Opposition back bencher in Canberra, 1989 was my last full year as Minister of Science and in 2001 and 2005, although out of Parliament, I was still active in public life. I had grown up believing that a liberal, democratic, pluralist, secular state could be an instrument of freedom and enlightenment, providing opportunities for education, health, housing, access to services, eliminating squalor, neglect, ignorance, fear and intolerance, that it would be committed to community benefit, public purposes above the immediate, material or commercial. In my adolescence, I benefited from the concept of ‘the public good’: free education, free access to the public library, museum and National Gallery, low-cost public transport, publicly owned electricity, gas, water and sewerage services, police and security, ABC radio and concerts. 476
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 477
YEARS OF EXILE
Alan Bennett, an almost exact contemporary, had the same experience in the city of Leeds, and felt that comparisons with 15th-century Florence or Venice were not too fanciful. I wanted later generations to share my advantages and have more. My life has been absorbed, even obsessed, by political history, the stage on which the human drama is acted out: making decisions about war and peace, life and death, about the quality of life, the relative importance of individuality, freedom and risk compared with collectivity, security and order. To me, political history included economics, sociology, culture and both the realm of the personal and the collective. I can recall a few periods of high, probably excessive, optimism about politics: the immediate post-war years (1945–48) before the Cold War set in, the early 1960s when John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII seemed to be opening up the world, and the early 1970s when Gough Whitlam and Pierre Trudeau showed that middle-sized powers could provide courageous and imaginative leadership. In the 1970s I hoped that my political career would pursue and expand the benign intervention of government. Helping to revive the Australian film industry had demonstrated how government could act creatively. Relying on the local market could not have succeeded, when the distribution industry was dominated by American capital and American product. Literature and the arts generally, and research, would be limited by reliance on a small domestic base. I was attracted to the Swedish model, with an innovative autonomous culture and high technological innovation, and hoped for years that it could be applied in Australia. A clean environment depended on government setting standards. The interventionist theories of John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) had been the dominant economic paradigm of governments in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand since the 1930s. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ had adopted Keynesian ‘demand management’ to overcome the problems of the Great Depression and the economy in World War II. Churchill’s wartime Coalition was Keynesian, followed by Clement Attlee’s Labour Government. In the 1950s Churchill’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, R.A. Butler, pursued a similar line to Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell, and the convergence was often called ‘Butskellism’, or ‘the Attleean settlement’. In Australia, Keynes’ theories had bipartisan support from John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Gough Whitlam, and from Robert Menzies through to Malcolm Fraser. Bert Kelly (1912–1997), Liberal MP for Wakefield 1958–77 and a junior Minister (for Works, then the Navy) 477
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 478
A THINKING REED
from 1967 to 1969, fought a lonely campaign against Keynes’ ideas and suffered for it. His ‘Modest Member’ column in The Australian Financial Review was influential, to some extent on Bill McMahon but particularly on John Howard and Jim Carlton (later Fraser’s Health Minister and CEO of the Red Cross). In 1974 the Keynesian economic model suddenly ran out of steam when the ‘golden age of full employment’ ended in the West. Governments lost their nerve, unable to explain, let alone tackle, a new phenomenon, ‘stagflation’, a combination of rising unemployment and rising inflation (in the Keynesian model you could have one or the other, not both) and coping with the ‘oil shock’ of 1973–74. Adam Smith’s theory of free trade, updated by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, and ‘monetarism’ as proposed by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School rapidly became the dominant economic and social paradigms in the West. Economic liberalism asserted that markets were far more effective and efficient than governments as sorting mechanisms, that capitalism was essentially self-regulating and governments should disengage from economic intervention as far as politically possible. Monetarism emphasised the need to control money supply to maintain price stability. Whitlam’s last Treasurer, Bill Hayden, having read and understood Friedman, was a more cautious Keynesian than his predecessor Jim Cairns on macroeconomic issues. His 1975 Budget, ironically, the one blocked by the Senate, was sensitive to money supply issues. My Parliamentary colleague Dick Klugman told Friedman, when he visited Canberra in 1981, that Hayden had produced ‘the world’s first Friedmanite Budget’. Neither Friedman nor Hayden dissented.
ﱗ
The English writer Francis Wheen argued: Although 1979 may not have the same historical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when the world was jolted by a violent reaction to the complacency of the existing order. Two events from that year can both now be recognised as harbingers of a new era: the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, and the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories in Britain.* * Francis Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, pp. 6–9. 478
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 479
YEARS OF EXILE
He pointed to the philosopher Roger Scruton’s concern about a counterrevolution ‘which puts our entire tradition of learning in question . . . Reason is now on the retreat, both as an ideal and as a reality’, a repudiation of the principles of the 18th-century Enlightenment in which ‘despite their quarrelsome diversity’ most thinkers ‘shared certain intellectual traits—an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as the infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry and persecution, a commitment to free enquiry, a belief . . . that knowledge is indeed power’.* The second half of the 18th century eliminated trials and executions for witchcraft and heresy, restricted imposition of the death penalty, proscribed torture, began rational treatment of the insane and ended the slave trade, promoted religious toleration, including emancipation of the Jews, and the systematic organisation and propagation of knowledge through encyclopedias and dictionaries. ‘Enlightenment’ has lost its historic meaning and is now often used in the context of self-awareness cults, feng shui, the transforming power of crystals, mysticism, the Rosicrucians and ‘new age’ religions. The Islamic revolution, marked by Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah in February 1979, attacked Western materialism, democratic pluralism, modernity, scientific method, the concept of progress and imposed a theocracy and Shariah law, including strict observance of Islamic principles, traditions and punishments, such as stoning and amputation. Iran held US embassy staff hostage in Teheran for 444 days (1979–80), effectively destroying Jimmy Carter’s presidency and assisting the election of Ronald Reagan. Iran’s leaders regarded Saddam Hussein as an apostate, and in the bitter Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) the Americans assisted Saddam, providing him with weapons of mass destruction. Margaret Thatcher’s victory in May 1979 repudiated bipartisan support for Keynesian economic policy, replacing it with market fundamentalism. She also attacked ‘the public sphere’ (such as public education or public health), and emphasised ‘the private sphere’, marking the end of a generation of consensus politics. The Thatcherite position had been foreshadowed in 1976 when Prime Minister James Callaghan had warned the Labour Party Conference that the ‘cosy world of full employment and deficit spending’ had gone forever. * Roger Scruton, ‘Whatever Happened to Reason?’, City Journal (New York), vol. 9, no. 2, Spring 1999. 479
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 480
A THINKING REED
Callaghan’s Government had a ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–79, racked by strikes and the breakdown of services, with inflation and unemployment both at 17 per cent, growth rate at 0.5 per cent and no new ideas, then lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. Despite all this, Mrs Thatcher only won the May 1979 election narrowly with her uncompromising manifesto promising to roll back the State, limit trade union power and cut immigration. By chance, I was present with David Lange at the ceremonial opening of Parliament later that month and heard the Queen’s speech setting out the new direction of her Government. Mrs Thatcher urged a commitment to ‘Victorian values’, insisting that the ‘nanny state’, a coinage by the Tory politician Iain Macleod, was too intrusive and all encompassing. Individuals should make their own choices about education and health; lower taxes would stimulate economic activity and reduce unemployment. Public assets would be sold off. Government would contract out to private consultants for policy advice and not rely exclusively on public servants. As a result, expertise was fragmented and replaced by managerialism, and the use of ‘management-speak’. She promised to eliminate ‘feather bedding’ and phase out tariffs. Schools and hospitals, even prisons, were to be run as trading enterprises. The change occurred with little public debate; as the acronym TINA put it, ‘There is no alternative’. She described her supporters as ‘dries’ and her opponents as ‘wets’. Far from being a traditional noblesse oblige Tory, and with a notably peremptory manner, her supporters called her ‘the Iron Lady’. Mrs Thatcher notoriously remarked (to Women’s Own magazine in October 1987): There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after our neighbour . . . There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.
She was only half right. She asserted that individual interest was the most powerful motivator for activity, but increasing preoccupation with the immediate and material had a crowding-out effect on community values and the concept of ‘the public good’. She was the most ideologically driven Prime Minister Britain ever had, until Tony Blair.When one of her 480
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 481
YEARS OF EXILE
advisers chided her for disregarding the facts, she responded, ‘The facts. The facts . . . I have been elected to change the facts!’* Four fundamentalist elements that Khomeini and Thatcher shared were a conviction of infallibility, scepticism about ‘progress’, a commitment to absolutes and an invoking of the Manichean contest between Good and Evil. Ronald Reagan described the USSR and its allies as an ‘evil empire’ in 1983 and George W. Bush dubbed Iraq, Iran and North Korea as ‘the axis of evil’ in 2002. Ronald Reagan was elected as President of the United States in November 1980, after a primary campaign in which George Bush senior accused him of promoting ‘voodoo economics’. He had a remarkable gift for simplifying complex issues with a few homely phrases and was able to sugar coat some of the anti-welfare measures taken by his administration. His recurrent theme, expressed in his first inaugural address, was that ‘Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem’. Reagan adopted similar policies to Mrs Thatcher, with whom he worked closely. He said, ‘What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.’ However, despite his free-market rhetoric and devotion to ‘supply side economics’, his promises to increase defence spending, cut taxes and simultaneously balance the Budget led to unprecedented increases in public debt. Reagan, a much-loved figure, escaped serious criticism despite the revelation that many of his decisions were influenced by his wife’s astrologer. The climate of economic opinion in governing circles changed dramatically in the West after 1979. François Mitterrand had been elected as President of France in May 1981 at the head of a Socialist–Communist alliance, on a ‘maximalist’ program, promising major social changes and the nationalisation of some industries. Less than two years later, he also made a 180-degree turn, adopting free-market economics and destroying the ideological rationale of the Socialist and Communist parties. Despite adoption of the market economy, the four Communist Ministers clung on to office. He also reached an accommodation with Catholics by providing support for church schools. In Australia, Hawke, Hayden and Howard recognised the significance of the repudiation of Keynes but Malcolm Fraser resisted. The Fraser Government was deeply divided on economic policy, with the Prime Minister, essentially a mercantilist, rejecting both Thatcherism and the lady * Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p. 298. 481
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 482
A THINKING REED
herself. His last Treasurer, John Howard, a late convert to Thatcherism, advocated free markets, smaller government, reduced taxes and a spot of union bashing. Elements of Thatcherism were adopted in Australia by Bob Hawke’s Labor Government in 1983. Hawke had become convinced that Keynesianism was intellectually exhausted, past interventionist policies had generally failed, a global, borderless, market was evolving rapidly and Australia’s economy had to respond. The sclerotic economy Labor inherited from Malcolm Fraser could not have continued in its rigidity and protectionism. The ALP underwent a U-turn when the Government in which I was a Minister redefined the role of the State in the economy and society. It was an extraordinary achievement for Hawke to take the ALP in a direction it deeply distrusted without splitting the Party. After 1984 in New Zealand, Finance Minister Roger Douglas pursued the same line in David Lange’s Government, with even more rigour. Within a decade, defeat of Keynes’ position across the world was so complete that ‘market-force economics’ was hailed as a self-evident truth and had become oddly exempt from serious critical analysis. The market assumed God-like qualities, invisible but all-knowing and all-powerful. When writing Sleepers, Wake! in 1979–81, I worried about the implications of adopting economics as the dominant intellectual paradigm, and its impact on non-material values as if nothing else mattered. Protagonists of ‘economic rationalism’, a term coined by the Australian Michael Pusey, argued that market choice is more democratic and personal than political choice through elections, because individual consumers make decisions and exercise judgments every day. But, inevitably, the public domain contracted, education, health and childcare were regarded as commodities to be traded rather than elements of the public good, universities fell into the hands of accountants and auditors, research was judged by the potential for economic return and in the arts bestsellers displaced the masterpiece. Language became deformed. Citizens, passengers, patients, patrons, audiences, taxpayers, even students, all became ‘customers’ or ‘clients’, as if the trading nexus was the most important defining element in life.Values were commercialised, all with a dollar equivalent. Essentially, the ‘nation-state’ was transformed into a ‘market-state’. The cult of management became a dominant factor in public life, exactly as James Burnham had predicted in The Managerial Revolution (1941), taking up a prophetic insight by Marx. In Britain in the Thatcher era, and in Australia, after 1983, there was a growing conviction that 482
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 483
YEARS OF EXILE
relying on specialist knowledge and experience might create serious distortions in policy making, and that generic managers, usually accountants or economists, would provide a more detached view. As a result, expertise was fragmented, otherwise health specialists would push health issues, educators education, scientists science and so on. At its most brutal, the argument was put that there are no health, education, transport, environment or media problems, only management problems: get the management right, and all the other problems will disappear. Coupled with the managerial dogma was the reluctance of senior public servants to give what used to be called ‘frank and fearless’ advice. Generic managers promoted the use of ‘management-speak’, a coded alternative to natural language. It helped protect insiders from open enquiry. A consultant has been defined as somebody to whom you lend your watch, then ask him to tell you the time. Consultants, eager for repeat business, provide government with exactly the answers that they want to receive. Lobbyists, many of them former politicians or bureaucrats, are part of the decision-making inner circle. In the United Kingdom, crises in the privatised rail services, mad cow disease (BSE), foot and mouth disease (FMD), ignorance about the Middle East are now recognised as having been exacerbated by the hollowing out of expertise: relevant departments have more managers, very few experts, industries are self-regulated, accountability, responsibility and transparency have declined. At a Conversazione at the Melbourne University Law School (October 2005), I heard Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court make a powerful attack on using expert advice in political decision making. He accused Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration of having begun to subvert the democratic process by relying on the advice of experts. In a democratic society, where there is a conflict between experts and Joe Sixpack (the judge’s term, not mine) on subjects such as abortion, stem cell research, the Middle East and the burning of witches, the outcome must depend on democratic, majoritarian decisions, not on expert knowledge. He expressed no view as to whether justices of the Supreme Court of the United States should be displaced by Joe Sixpack and his friends. As the Western world moved towards media saturation, advertising, public relations and psychological manipulation became increasingly important, transforming how politics operated. In 1977 Saul Bellow referred to ‘spin’ (as in ‘to spin a yarn’) as a technique for deception. The 483
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 484
A THINKING REED
term ‘spin doctors’, describing experts who developed techniques for manipulating how a message was delivered and received, came into common use during the Reagan–Mondale presidential debates in the year 1984, an irony that George Orwell would have noted. The Latin terms suppressio veri and suggestio falsi confirm that ‘spin’ has historic antecedents: Caesar was a pioneer. By the 1980s the use of advertising techniques and promotion to determine election outcomes was destructive of the whole political process, damaging democracy by destroying the role of Socratic dialogue, the need to set out a case, examine the contrary evidence and list options. ‘Wedge politics’, a further development of spin, an extreme public relations technique combining misinformation and propaganda, was developed and encouraged in the United States by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior. The term was coined by Lee Atwater (1951–1991), a brilliant Republican strategist who worked for the elder Bush. ‘Wedge politics’ is essentially the old technique of ‘divide and rule’, persuading the poor and defenceless to defer to the interests of the rich and powerful rather than making common cause with each other. Adolf Hitler did not use the term but he developed the concept. He used democratic forms, the will of a majority, in an oppressive way, without the restraint of a historic liberal, pluralistic tradition, lacking scepticism, transparency and the separation of power. The essence of contemporary ‘wedge politics’ is finding a natural fault line in society then driving a wedge into it, widening the gap between the larger and smaller segments, appealing to a majority group in an electionwinning strategy, even at the cost of creating or perpetuating deep divisions in society (‘it’s us versus them’) by marginalising or denigrating minorities. It was used with devastating effect against the Democrat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential election. Practitioners of ‘wedge politics’ would target their message to English speakers v. cultural minorities, Europeans v. non-Europeans, homeowners v. the homeless, the secure v. the dispossessed, non-unionists v. unionists, heterosexuals v. homosexuals, popular opinion v. elite opinion, so that minorities such as Muslims, refugees, intellectuals, cultural elites can be dismissed as irrelevant or alien to mainstream society. John Howard has been strikingly effective in using ‘wedge politics’. Before his early death from a brain tumour, Atwater converted to Catholicism and apologised to Dukakis and some other victims. ‘Wedge politics’ has been perfected and taken much further by Karl Rove, known to Washington insiders as ‘Bush’s brain’. 484
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 485
YEARS OF EXILE
Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff (Scribe, 2004) describes ‘wedge politics’ and ‘dog whistle politics’ in the US, the technique of using coded words aimed at a specific audience. He also analyses the importance of ‘framing’ issues, getting in first and choosing the vocabulary on a sensitive issue, such as ‘law and order’ rather than ‘denial of human rights’,‘homeland security’ not ‘repression’, ‘tax relief ’ not ‘adequate funding for public schools’, ‘rendition’ not ‘outsourced torture’, ‘the chattering classes’ not ‘intellectuals’.The American Right has been particularly skilful at ‘framing’ and John Howard has been adept in refining it in Australia. Don Watson defined ‘dog whistling’ as ‘a message pitched in a way that only some voters recognise it’, often a coded appeal to fear and prejudice.* For decades, politics has been reported as a subset of the entertainment industry, in which it is assumed that the audience looks for instant responses and suffers from short-term memory loss. Politics is treated as a sporting contest, with its violence, personality clashes, tribalism and quick outcomes.An alternative model is politics as theatre or drama.The besetting fault of much media reporting is trivialisation, exaggerated stereotyping, playing off personalities and a general ‘dumbing down’. This encourages the view that there is no point in raising serious issues months or years before an election. This has the effect of reinforcing the status quo, strengthening the government’s grip on the agenda.
ﱗ
The second transforming year in my political experience was 1989. The events of 1989, just 200 years after the French Revolution, led to a sudden and dramatic redefinition of politics. The American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama hailed the defeat of Communism as ‘the end of history’.† Capitalism and democracy, Western style, had converged and become triumphant, class struggle had ended, there was only one model on offer to the world and the struggles of history were now over. His optimism soon proved to be exaggerated.The unfolding Islamic revolution, the practice of ‘jihad’ and the attack on Western values took history in a different direction. In October 1978 the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla,Archbishop of Krakow, as Pope, taking the title of John Paul II, had profound political * Don Watson, Weasel Words, p. 107. † Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. 485
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 486
A THINKING REED
significance. His support for the Solidarity movement in his native Poland greatly weakened the authority of the Communist state, made pluralism a distinct possibility and contributed to the downfall of the Soviet system generally. Mikhail Gorbachev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985, was maintaining much of the command economy but encouraging political reform, promoting Glasnost (openness to new ideas, a word coined by Aleksandr Herzen) and Perestroika (restructuring). In Eastern Europe there was a sudden collapse in the authority of Communist parties because Gorbachev refused to use army and police to maintain authoritarian rule, and he repudiated the ‘Brehznev doctrine’ which asserted Russia’s right to impose its will on satellites. Demolition of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 caused a chain reaction leading to German unification, the ‘velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, the overthrow and execution of the Ceaus¸escus in Romania. The Soviet collapse had many causes, including structural failure in the command economies, the courage of a new generation of leaders, notably Gorbachev, who wanted major political changes, and a cultural and technological revolution which brought down walls everywhere, both physical (in Berlin) and psychological.The computer/communications revolution made censorship and control of information flows irrelevant and unenforceable. The breakdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine in April 1986, a rigid system lacking adequate feedback mechanisms, was profoundly symbolic.The fall of South Africa’s apartheid regime after F.W. de Klerk introduced reforms in 1989 demonstrated the same phenomenon. In their enthusiasm to defeat the Soviet system, Thatcher and Reagan adopted some surprising allies and contradictory tactics.The United States supported the Taliban and mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and al Qaida was an early beneficiary. It also supplied weapons of mass destruction to Iraq to use against Iran. However, Mrs Thatcher seemed to be in the Iranian camp, notoriously failing to offer sympathy or support for Salman Rushdie, who had been put under a fatwah by Khomeini for having written Satanic Verses (1988). Her reluctance was, in part, no doubt because she was satirised (like Khomeini himself ) in Rushdie’s novel. In the United States Pat Buchanan, powerful spokesman for the religious right, supported the fatwah. President Reagan, relying on instinct, not reason, became convinced, contrary to the advice of his military and intelligence advisers, that the 486
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 487
YEARS OF EXILE
Soviet system was lurching towards a sudden collapse, and he had a simple formulation about the Cold War:‘We win. They lose’. Reagan’s second term had ended in January 1989, when George Bush senior succeeded. Mrs Thatcher still held office in Britain, rather tenuously, but opposition to her imperious style was growing. Reagan– Thatcher partisans credited their policies, especially increases in defence spending, with applying irresistible pressure which destroyed ‘the evil empire’. While China was dismantling its rigid central planning mechanisms and inviting investment from multinational corporations, described as ‘market force socialism’, the Communist Party maintained its political monopoly. Student-led demonstrators occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing from mid-April 1989, to commemorate the death of the reformer Hu Yaobang, and refused to disperse.The government declared martial law in May and on 3–4 June, Deng Xiaoping sent in the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) to crush the demonstrations, leaving at least 2500 dead and 10 000 injured. Widely seen on television, the massacre was condemned internationally—but not by corporations, which saw China as a growing economic opportunity. China soon began promoting a new slogan: ‘Making money is glorious’. George Steiner observed: The millions who poured westward through the broken Berlin Wall, the young of Budapest, Sofia, Prague or Moscow, are not inebriate with some abstract passion for freedom, for social justice, for the flowering of culture. It is a TV-revolution we are witnessing, a rush towards the ‘California-promise’ that America has offered to the common man on this tired earth . . . Hence the paradox: as the US declines into its own ‘pursuit of happiness’, the packaged promise, the bright after-glow of that pursuit becomes essential in Eastern Europe and very probably, in the post-medieval, Asiatic morass of the Soviet Union. What will step into the turbulent vacuum? Fundamentalist religion is clawing at our doors.*
I was invited to join an international think tank, led by Ralph Nader, to work on Perestroika in the Soviet Union in June 1990. The other ten members were Americans with a range of expertise: economics, * ‘The State of Europe: Christmas Eve 1989’, Granta, no. 30, Winter 1990. 487
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 488
A THINKING REED
planning, law, public health. Gorbachev and the Communist Party still ruled, but with steadily diminishing moral authority. We expected to be examining infrastructure in the Soviet Union, schools, hospitals, markets and laboratories, noting areas where they had broken down and making suggestions. Our group was used as a sounding board, literally as auditors, so that politicians, bureaucrats, trade unionists, economists, scientists, students and journalists could try out their ideas on privatisation, economic rents and the fine line between democratic practice and populism. Our counsel was not sought on education or the explosive issues of nationality and race. Was it the best or worst of times to be in Moscow? We felt that Paris must have been like this when the French Revolution broke out in July 1789. Nobody talked of anything but politics and economics. Value systems, national and personal aspirations, redefining humanity and society no less, were being argued out in a crisis atmosphere. There was no time for philosophical analysis and calm discussion in seminars held around the samovar. Many of the people we met could not grasp how a free market worked. In discussions with trade union leaders we argued that the price of bread ought to reflect the cost of production, overcoming the absurdity of farmers feeding loaves to livestock because it was cheaper than feeding them with grain.The unionists said,‘We accept that the price of bread should not be subsidised, but only if wages are increased as compensation.’ The think tank’s visit was far too late. There was no market share for ‘reform communism’, a contradiction in terms, in Russia or Eastern Europe. If the choice was between an authoritarian regime and an open society, citizens had no interest in a half-and-half mixture. Gorbachev, like Alexander Dubcek’s ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968, failed to create a popular democratic constituency, a role which Boris Yeltsin took up. By December 1991 the USSR had been dissolved and the Communist Party collapsed. Free market forces predominated, supported by an indigenous Mafia. The Communist Party shrank to irrelevance and conservative, authoritarian and nationalist interests were in the ascendant. The distinction between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, first used in the French Revolution and later developed by Marx, started to disappear. The Australian Labor Party, like other social democratic parties, needed to redefine itself. The term ‘third way’ came into common use. When the Swedish Social Democrats referred to a ‘third way’, they meant an intermediate 488
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 489
YEARS OF EXILE
position between the command economy and authoritarian politics of the Soviet Union (loosely described as ‘the Left’) and the capitalist, competitive, materialist, market-driven system of the United States (‘the Right’). The collapse of ideology also sapped politics of idealism, and as the historian Perry Anderson noted, ‘The gap created by the resulting compression of the political spectrum . . . picked up increasing numbers of disgruntled voters’, including Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia. In a lecture at Monash University in September 1990 I identified a new phase in political history, marked by ideological exhaustion in the Western world, in countries with a liberal democratic tradition. The sudden rejection of Marxist ideology in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has provoked intense debate about political systems and pursuit of the just society, a debate which may be short-lived and replaced by a sterile and narrow pursuit of consumption.
The terms ‘globalisation’ and ‘global economy’ only became current after 1989: ending of the Cold War, coupled with the computer and communications revolutions, helped to create a borderless world. The growth of electronic commerce and banking, and tourism, limited the power of national governments to control activity inside their borders and contributed to the spread of HIV/AIDS, drugs and pornography. Globalisation may appear threatening when decisions that change millions of lives are made remotely by faceless, nameless authorities and when political capacity through democratic procedures in the nation-state become ineffectual or irrelevant. It is not surprising when angry, damaged or impotent individuals embrace tribalism or fundamentalism, whether religious, cultural or ethnic. John Ralston Saul, Canadian novelist and philosopher, shrewdly observed that ‘Western civilization properly began two-and-a-half millennia ago, when thinkers such as Solon and Socrates broke the Homeric myth according to which the Gods and Destiny rule all’.* He argues that all ideologies invoke ‘the totems of inevitability’, redefining gods and destiny in appropriate contemporary language. In Homeric myth, human destiny, like earthquakes, fire, famine, flood, was beyond the capacity of communities to prevent or change. Socrates * John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, p. 53. 489
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 490
A THINKING REED
argued that humans could shape their destiny, but they had to understand the problems and work out ways of solving them.The Communist experiment represented the Socratic approach taken to the ultimate, that organised human activity could change the outcome of history.The collapse of command economies in the years 1989–91 contributed to a loss of faith in the role or relevance of government everywhere. The current minimalist view of what governments can achieve has a distinctly Homeric quality, that the truth is out there, determined by impersonal forces such as the market.This contributes to a widespread feeling of alienation and powerlessness and social democratic parties generally have failed, so far, to provide a coherent alternative view. The demise of Communism, the end of the Cold War and the pervasiveness of a global economy meant that Western capitalism was the only model left standing. Gordon Gecko’s credo in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987)—‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit’—drove entrepreneurs in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, but also a new class in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. It repeated the passionate devotion to selfishness, individualism and laissez-faire capitalism which Ayn Rand (1905–1982) argued for in her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). The end of the Cold War was followed by a sudden upsurge of democracy in South America and Africa. In April 1994 I was fortunate to observe the campaign in South Africa culminating in Nelson Mandela’s election as President. While the fall of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes was welcome, I worried that a new set of oppressions and corruptions would emerge. Corruption, warlordism and exploitation sometimes replaced the old authoritarian regimes. The United States’ sudden victory in the Cold War had unanticipated consequences in the United States. Fear of the Communist system and concern about Soviet atomic weaponry had been a unifying national factor. When the external enemy collapsed, it seemed essential to find new enemies, either outside or inside. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, resulting in the first Gulf War, came just as Japan was shaping up as the big enemy, as reading of Western newspapers in 1991 confirms. Many Americans, conditioned by the robust simplicities of external confrontation, looked for new enemies (or demons?), mostly within, and this was marked by a rise in religious fundamentalism, cults and armed militias and identification of ‘the other’ as ‘the enemy’, leading 490
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 491
YEARS OF EXILE
to fear and loathing about diversity. There was also a loss of confidence/ faith in the legitimacy of government, even democratically elected ones, and attacks on political correctness. The term ‘political correctness’ (often abbreviated as ‘PC’) was first used by the hard Left in Eastern Europe in the 1940s. Academic wits, as in The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook (1992), used it to satirise the use of euphemism and technical jargon to disguise or soften meaning—‘vertically challenged’ for ‘short’,‘visually challenged’ for ‘blind’, ‘economically marginalised’ for ‘poor’, ‘processing’ for ‘animal slaughter’, ‘substance abuse’ for ‘drug addiction’, ‘energetic disassembly’ for ‘explosion’ and ‘border rectification’ for ‘invasion’. In the literature it is not always easy to distinguish between satire, critique and outrage. It was essentially George Orwell’s concept of ‘doublespeak’. It was no coincidence that attacks on PC began after Communism collapsed in 1989–91. It precisely filled the gap in political abuse after the word ‘Communist’ and distinctions between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ became irrelevant. President Bush senior first spoke of PC in 1991 and it was soon taken up by the hard Right. Conservatives complained about imposing racial quotas in universities and radical changes to curriculum content, excluding textbooks expressing racial or discriminatory stereotyping or the views of ‘dead white males’. Soon political correctness became a term of abuse, used against people who supported affirmative action, advocated gender neutral language, opposed racial or religious stereotyping or intolerance, wanted smoke-free workplaces and put the environment high on the political agenda. The PC controversy was imported to Australia quite suddenly and enthusiastically promoted by radio talk-back shock jocks, especially in Sydney. It was asserted that powerful elites sought to deny citizens freedom of speech, including their divine right to use discriminatory language. Pauline Hanson exploited the issue and both major parties failed to challenge her about it. John Howard acquiesced, or even encouraged, attacks on PC, as if tolerance had been an aberration. Concepts and policies need vigorous discussion, but just as we discourage people from shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded place, we must recognise how words can cause irreversible damage. As the Left/Right/Centre distinction diminished, it became increasingly difficult for the parties of the Left generally, including the ALP, to define themselves or to be rooted in a set of moral precepts. When Tony Blair became Leader of the British Labour Party in July 491
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 492
A THINKING REED
1994 he immediately began using the term ‘New Labour’, describing himself as a protagonist of ‘the Third Way’, between Thatcherism on the Right and the Attleean settlement of ‘Old Labour’ on the Left. Thatcherism had dynamic force as the prevailing economic model, while the Attleean settlement had become a museum piece, a nostalgic relic. New Labour looks Thatcherite to me. Bizarrely, one of Blair’s objections to adopting the proposed European Constitution was that its fundamental rights charter expressly preserves the right to strike.The rise of Blairism was a consequence of intellectual collapse by the Left: Blair filled a vacuum. Blair, like Lord Palmerston and Margaret Thatcher, won three consecutive elections. Blair appeals to the political middle ground and has outflanked the Tories, leaving lifelong Labour voters grinding their teeth with rage and frustration. Cabinet itself has become less significant than the Prime Minister’s office at No. 10 Downing Street. ‘Spin doctors’, essentially courtiers, tell the prince what they think he wants to know, and then promote a selective version of the facts through the media. With ‘spinning’, the major preoccupation is how to sell a proposition (‘Iraq has chemical and biological weapons which could be activated within 45 minutes’): its truth is irrelevant. Ministers are surrounded by ‘minders’ who shield them from reality and independent or critical expertise. Journalists are increasingly ‘embedded’, not just in a war zone but with their increasing dependence on news sources in government for selective leaking. Blair uses the language of seduction rather than advocacy based on evidence. Patronage is bestowed and received lavishly. Traditional Labour culture has been marginalised. He calls himself ‘an emotional guy’, emphasising feelings over rational analysis, promoted the cult of Diana, Princess of Wales, and engages in ‘new age’ rituals. He has also become an unlikely soul-mate of George W. Bush, friend of Silvio Berlusconi and shameless recipient of favours from rich celebrities. Gary Runciman wrote: ‘Future historians are, I suspect, more likely to depict [Blair] as sanctimonious and self-deceiving than as self-consciously amoral and ruthlessly cunning.’ I found it easier to understand Bush than Blair. Bush was following a predictably populist, conservative, fundamentalist, super-patriotic strategy, but Blair as Prime Minister of a New Labour government overturned all Labour’s traditional beliefs. He completed Margaret Thatcher’s work of destroying Old Labour. He illustrated the problem of the barrister as advocate, that it is not necessary for him/her to believe what is said to persuade a jury. 492
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 493
YEARS OF EXILE
I dropped out of competitive debating at an early stage because I felt uneasy about arguing for propositions in which I did not believe or which were trivial. In debating, winning was everything, the truth of a proposition, or arguing a complex case, were less significant. No concessions were to be made to the other side’s argument: it had to be rejected totally. I changed my Parliamentary style after a few years, because debating wins often seemed hollow and cheap. Blair also exhibited narcissism of a high degree.‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?’ He could see his hero in the reflection. He had an astonishing capacity to escape condemnation. His speeches were word music. He is enthralled by himself. He threw away his potential to influence Bush, apparently intoxicated by power and proximity to the White House.* New Labour is deeply suspicious of professional expertise and an independent media, deeply committed to the cult of managerialism, management-speak and consumerism. Nevertheless, Blair’s defenders point to his Government’s achievements in health, education, urban renewal, some aspects of welfare, reforming the House of Lords, abolishing fox hunting, support for the Kyoto Protocol and promoting international debt forgiveness. New Labour is influenced by the American political strategist Dick Morris, who won his reputation managing Bill Clinton’s successful campaign for the Presidency in 1992. His book The New Prince (1999) is subtitled Machiavelli updated for the twenty-first century. He devised the concept of ‘triangulation’, in which candidates insist that they are above or between Left and Right in the political spectrum, emphasise immediate self-interest, avoid any public commitment to ethical or ideological causes and never show courage in tackling unpopular issues. Pragmatism is everything. Morris had a spectacular falling out with Clinton and he came to regard George W. Bush as a moderate, pursuing ‘third way’ policies in the Republican Party. Morris has ‘third way’ supporters in the Australian Labor Party as well. Mark Latham declared Morris to be ‘a political genius . . . with dazzling insights’, and Morris said Latham had ‘a wonderfully penetrating, inventive mind’. Morris is much admired by Labor’s new breed of apparatchiks who see the ALP as a company engaged in asset swaps, or sporting contests, and are determined to cut the ideology (that is, the politics) out of politics. They insist, ‘Don’t mention the war, or refugees, or aborigines, the ABC, * James Naughtie, The Accidental American:Tony Blair and the Presidency. 493
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 494
A THINKING REED
the environment, race riots or David Hicks. Just concentrate on bread and butter issues.’ The message must be safe, simple, bland. Keep away from controversy. Moral issues are passé and vote losers. Don’t raise issues that elites or minorities would approve. I have ten objections to Morris’ triangulation theory: it is obsessively short term, remorselessly opportunistic, emphases selling a product above everything else, preoccupied with technique and not content, penalises courage, encourages social apathy, eliminates conscience, derides vision or complexity, puts winning elections ahead of solving problems and sees office as an end in itself: ‘Winning is everything’. In addition, it can fail spectacularly when a candidate, such as John Kerry, desperately seeking the middle ground, seems weak. Spin doctors, polling and focus groups can tell candidates what is popular; they cannot tell them what is right. John Howard has often been successful when he adopts unpopular positions and argues fiercely for them, winning grudging respect.‘Triangulation’, in practice, reinforces the status quo and is unduly deferential to the rich and powerful and to vested interest. Advocates of the ‘small target’ strategy inside the ALP see John Howard’s successful campaign in the March 1996 election as a model. After returning (as Beazley also did later) to his party’s leadership unopposed, Howard’s low-keyed assertion that he wanted to make Australians feel more ‘comfortable and relaxed’ about themselves seemed ludicrous to ALP supporters. Nevertheless, after thirteen years of ALP government, Howard interpreted the public mood accurately and was careful to avoid a confrontationist agenda, sounding like a moderate, promising that his Government would pursue high ethical standards. Howard’s emphasis was domestic, and defiantly suburban, essentially the view from Earlwood. ‘Small target’ proponents argue that Oppositions don’t win elections, Governments lose them and that Labor should avoid making itself the issue. This is a weak argument. Labor, unfortunately, has become an issue federally, and the only times we have won nationally from Opposition, in 1972 and 1983, were when we had a strong alternative vision of Australia and argued it passionately.
ﱗ
The third transforming year that reinforced my sense of exile was 2001, when politics dropped out of politics and paranoia broke the spirit of political Oppositions. 494
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 495
YEARS OF EXILE
The September 11 attacks by al Qaida on the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, causing nearly 3000 deaths, was mass murder. These cruelly calculated acts of terror provoked understandable outrage, but then led to a deluded attack on the wrong target. These cataclysmic events impelled governments to react instinctively rather than rationally, reducing the role of evidence, analysis and enlightened scepticism in policy formulation. Usama bin Laden declared war on Western materialist values, and the United States and its allies used their material/military strength to retaliate. Since most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi nationals, as was Usama, Saudi Arabia, where they were recruited and financed, might have been a logical target for retaliation but the US never considered the option.The first target was the Taliban in Afghanistan, a plausible choice, because terrorists were trained there by al Qaida. But the main target, irrationally, was Saddam Hussein’s brutal and secular regime in Iraq, old enemies of bin Laden and al Qaida. The events of 2001 and the misleadingly described ‘war on terror’ in Iraq became allegories in which I struggled to find truth, meaning and understanding. They were not external to me, but inside my head. I felt that I would never see things in the same way again, just as the dropping of the atomic bombs and revelations about the Holocaust changed me as a teenager. We all dread the unknown, darkness, death, mutilation, pain, loss, but fear, however instinctive as a defence mechanism, can destroy judgment. The events of September 2001 took the world to the edge of a void, creating a Manichaean sense of fear and loathing. September 11 raised haunting questions about the human condition, values, good and evil, power, our incapacity to negotiate outcomes, to balance self-interest and the interest of others, to reconcile the immediate and the long term, examining evidence to seek out the truth. Once again, it transformed the way the world operated, and the prevailing commitment to the irrational on both sides challenged my values profoundly. The Australian sociologist John Carroll wrote: The West was always going to defeat communist societies, for that was a war of competing materialisms—over who could generate the most wealth—a battle fought within capitalism’s field of strength. The West’s metaphysical nerve, the nucleus of its vulnerability, was quite another matter, now exposed to the hot knife gouging into raw tissue . . . 495
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 496
A THINKING REED
One month on from September 11, Usama released a speech decreeing that his terrorist war was that of the ‘camp of belief ’ pitted against the ‘camp of disbelief ’. This speech—in its precision of rhetoric, its poetic mobilisation of theology combined with moral invective, its potency of image—struck the raw nerve of the West like nothing since Martin Luther.*
In this view, the ‘camp of disbelief ’ was preoccupied with materialism and terrified of death; the ‘camp of belief ’ was certain of salvation and indifferent to death. Usama declared that Allah had ‘elevated the skies without pillars’, a chilling reference to the twin towers. His catalogue of grievances against the West included the Crusades, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 and the creation of Israel. On September 11 John Howard had been in power for five years,Tony Blair for four, and George W. Bush was in the first year of his first term. The attack on the United States occurred as Australia faced intense domestic controversy on refugees. Between 1947 when Labor began Australia’s mass migration program and 1996 when Howard won office, there was generally bipartisanship on immigration and refugees. No leader of a major party in that period (and there were 16 of them) ever raised the race card except John Howard in his first term as Liberal Leader. With the Middle East in turmoil in 2001, there were unprecedented numbers of refugees internationally, but Australia seemed to be protected by geographical remoteness. It seemed implausible that the entry of 4000 asylum seekers from the Middle East could have threatened Australia’s security. Malcolm Fraser gave refuge to more than 20 000 Vietnamese a year in the 1980s and Bob Hawke allowed 20 000 Chinese to remain in 1989. Neither decision aroused controversy, because there was bipartisan political support. In 2001, refugees—nameless, faceless, stateless, homeless, without a voice—were denounced as possible terrorists, with rarely a shred of evidence, arriving on leaky boats without possessions and accompanied by wives and children. They were far more likely to be victims of terrorism and dictatorship than their agents. Terrorists, in the American experience, entered by aircraft, with visas and Green Cards, or in Britain were born and educated there. On 26 August 2001 the Norwegian ship Tampa made history when it rescued 438 people, men, women and children, mostly Afghans, from a * John Carroll, The Wreck of Western Culture, pp. 256, 259. 496
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 497
YEARS OF EXILE
sinking ship on course for Australia from Indonesia. Tampa tried to take them to Christmas Island, the nearest landfall, only to face a six-day standoff because of the Australian Government’s refusal to let them land. Tampa was then instructed to take the refugees to Nauru, where they were held in detention, thus beginning the so-called ‘Pacific solution’ for refugees. Refugees on the Tampa were not to be photographed, named or in any way personalised as men, women or children; they were to remain as a nameless, faceless, genderless collective threat, victims of oppression who were depicted both as amorphous mass and potential terrorists. Tampa’s rescue of boat people occurred just 16 days before al Qaida’s attacks on New York and Washington, an event which profoundly destabilised Australia and contributed to panicky, but understandable, overreactions to fear. Just after the campaign for the November election began, the Government claimed (8 October 2001) that asylum seekers on a vessel code-named SIEV 4 (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel No. 4) had threatened to throw children overboard to force the RAN to take them to Australia, and produced photographs which seemed to support the claim. Naval personnel disagreed. This confirmed John Howard’s conviction that we did not want ‘those kinds of people’ in Australia. A 2002 Senate enquiry (‘A Certain Maritime Incident’) demonstrated the ‘children overboard’ claim to be completely unsubstantiated. On 19 October 2001, 353 boat people, including 146 children, drowned when a vessel described as SIEV X (X=‘unknown’) sank inside international waters south of Sumatra. Despite intense surveillance to our north, there was no attempt to save them.* There were no more voyages by asylum seekers until January 2006, when refugees from West Papua landed at Mapoon. The Government may have assumed that the loss of SIEV X, however regrettable, turned out to be in the national interest. Tampa, 9/11, ‘children overboard’ and even SIEV X proved to be bankable political assets for the Prime Minister, especially when the Opposition, fearful of a patriotic backlash, chose to adopt an ultracautious approach and declined to pursue the Government. It was not Labor’s finest hour. Fear of difference has been compounded by terrorism and other horrors, before and after September 11, 2001. Appeals to fear are quick, easy and dirty, while rebuilding confidence is hard, complex and long * David Marr & Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory. 497
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 498
A THINKING REED
term. Words are bullets—or chain saws—and damage caused quickly may take years to repair, if ever. The demonising of refugees in the 2001 campaign hit ‘the electorate’s political G spot’, as Geoffrey Barker put it in the Financial Review. Howard’s handling was both masterly and ruthless, with his populist clarion call,‘We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ Some aspects of the post 9/11 world were baffling.The Americans had been victims of an ‘asymmetrical war’ on 9/11 and did not know how to respond appropriately. Understandably shocked by the 2001 attacks, they had a deep psychological need to retaliate, somewhere, preferably against a state, and Afghanistan, it seemed, was not enough. They were instinctively drawn to a traditional war, state v. state, even if in the case of Iraq it was a weak and failing one. After 2001 I never doubted that the United States would invade Iraq. I felt more threatened by al Qaida and its allies than by Iraq because its sphere of operations was wider, more random and not predictable: Nairobi and Dar es Salaam one day, New York and Washington another, then Madrid, Bali and London. Some apologists for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq argued that Bush and Donald Rumsfeld should not be judged too harshly for concentrating on the wrong target because their reaction has to be seen through the ‘prism’ of their own experience. If not a moving, elusive target, then a fixed one. If not Usama, then Saddam, if not al Qaida then why not Iraq? They showed ‘moral clarity’, even if they punished the wrong enemy. The Oxford political scientist Timothy Garton Ash points out that the United States is not just a superpower but a hyperpower, with an annual expenditure on armaments more than the next fifteen nations combined. That would seem to confer a slight comparative advantage to the United States. But what state power is being armed against? Avishai Margalit, Professor of Philosophy at Hebrew University, wrote: Terror as propaganda-by-action counts on one thing: the overreaction of its victims. Out of anger and frustration the victims will respond by punishing bystanders, who will react by becoming more radical in their feelings and more susceptible to recruitment. Fighting terror is a delicate matter, and there is little sign that it has been understood in Washington . . . But the last thing one should do is fall for ‘the fallacy of the instrument’, namely to use the instrument you know how to use just because it is the only instrument you know how to use.* * ‘The Wrong War’, New York Review of Books, March 13, 2003. 498
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 499
YEARS OF EXILE
Westerners find it virtually impossible to put themselves inside the head of a suicide bomber, whether kamikaze or mujahadeen, or even of our own warriors, although we judge them by different standards. Terrorist, freedom fighter, patriot: are the terms synonymous? Who are the suicide bombers? Most are fundamentalist but some are highly trained professionals, others educated young people, making calculated, lethal statements about political dispossession. In Iraq, suicide bombers are a new phenomenon, imported at first, then home grown. As John le Carré wrote in The Times (15 January 2003): The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Usama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams . . . How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center.
Primary justification for war against Iraq was asserted to be its possession of weapons of mass destruction; links between Iraq and al Qaida over September 11; Iraq’s immediate threats to its neighbours, the region and the United States; and its failure to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions on ‘proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’. A fifth justification, ‘regime change’, was specifically repudiated by Tony Blair and John Howard before fighting began. The most troubling aspect of Bush’s and Blair’s reaction to September 2001 was a lack of elementary curiosity. They never asked, ‘Why has this happened? What are the deep causes?’, and were preoccupied with effects at the expense of causes. Intellectually, Bush never leaves home. He takes home with him: it’s Texas everywhere. In the United States, Britain and Australia intelligence agencies failed spectacularly to predict acts of terrorism, and they became convenient scapegoats for government mistakes. Lack of foreign language expertise in the CIA, State Department and Defense Department cost the United States, and the cause of world peace, dearly. During the 1990s, Arab speakers were weeded out of important agencies and replaced by MBAs, people generally lacking in experience or understanding of cultures other than their own. With limited local or expert knowledge, not enough scepticism, they were expected to provide ideological support for government, which misread or exaggerated their findings. Inevitably they placed 499
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 500
A THINKING REED
excessive reliance on tainted sources of information, men in suits who spoke English, refugees or exiles from Iraq who had a message to sell and sold it. There has been a civil war within the Muslim world: fundamentalists v. modernisers. Fundamentalists supported the Shariah law, denounced infidels such as Saddam, opposed tolerance of other belief systems, refused co-operation with the United States (= the Great Satan) or the West, and supported war to annihilate Israel. Modernisers acknowledge the significance of scientific, technological and social change and are prepared to co-operate with the West and recognise Israel, provided there is a land settlement with the Palestinians. Bush and Usama shared a major objective: they wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein. In practice, Bush became an effective recruiter for al Qaida. The bin Laden strategy appears to be to attack liberal, democratic, secular, sceptical pluralistic values in the West, promote fundamentalist, authoritarian, patriarchal values, deny the right to dissent in an emergency and displace information flow (exposure to the new) by propaganda (reinforcing the familiar), and spin. It also involves an attack on rational discourse based on analysis and evidence, uniting the Islamic world, both secularists and fundamentalists, against the West and destroying the socialist, infidel Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The strategy opposes the international rule of law as an instrument for protecting human rights, weakens the moral and intellectual authority of the United States, promotes the assumption that its policies are driven by a determination to control the Middle East’s oil and provokes the United States to present the most intimidating aspects of hegemonic power:‘Do it our way, or else . . .’,‘See things our way, or else . . .’. It also created a deep division between the English-speaking world v. the rest, and increases pressure on Israel. If this strategy was crafted by Usama bin Laden, then George W. Bush seems to be following it step by step. In the Islamic world the extent of US hegemony/domination has become in itself a cause of outrage/provocation. It makes no sense to argue that the best way that the US can defend itself against terror is to spend more on armaments and increase the degree of asymmetry. Islamic fascists may be losing the battle but winning the war. Who is writing the script? With attacks on tolerance, pluralism, scepticism, civil liberties, open society and the rule of law, they are succeeding in all. 500
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 501
YEARS OF EXILE
Writing about 9/11, the American essayist and novelist Joan Didion deplored the oversimplification and infantilisation of debate in the United States, with heavy emphasis on ‘effects’ and the need to ‘take action’, and virtually no analysis of ‘causes’: Inquiry into the nature of the enemy we faced, in other words, was to be interpreted as sympathy for that enemy. The final allowable word on those who attacked us was to be that they were ‘evildoers,’ or ‘wrongdoers,’ peculiar constructions which served to suggest that those who used them were transmitting messages from some ultimate authority. This was a year in which it would come to seem as if we had been plunged at one fell stroke into a premodern world. The possibilities of the Enlightenment vanished. We had suddenly been asked to accept—and were in fact accepting—a kind of reasoning so extremely fragile that it might have been based on the promised return of the cargo gods.*
Deformation of language and meaning and convergence between advertising slogans and public information is deliberate, not coincidental. Nor was the repeating of phrases, just a few words (‘They hate freedom!’, ‘The American people are safer!’), over and over. Despite the exponential increases in public education and access to information in the past century, the quality of political debate appears to have become increasingly unsophisticated, appealing to the lowest common denominator of understanding, in sharp contrast to the subtle and nuanced words used by Abraham Lincoln nearly 150 years ago. On 27 February 1860, Lincoln delivered a very complex speech about slavery and its political implications at the Cooper Union in New York City.† It was his first speech in New York and its impact was dramatic. He concluded with the words, which may seem anachronistic now, ‘Let us have faith that right makes might . . .’. Four New York newspapers published the full text, all 7500 words, and it was reprinted in hundreds of different formats. The speech rapidly transformed Lincoln from being merely a Mid-Western ‘favourite son’ to a national figure, and was a major factor in securing him the Republican nomination for President in May. * Joan Didion, ‘Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History’, New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003. † Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President. 501
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 502
A THINKING REED
In 1860 the technology was primitive but the ideas in Lincoln’s speech were profound and sophisticated. In 2000 the technology was sophisticated but the ideas uttered by the presidential candidates were primitive and over-simplified; it would be easier to imagine a mantra, such as ‘We have made America stronger’, being repeated a hundred times than to have a complex argument presented once. Bush’s central message was essentially an inversion of Lincoln: ‘Might makes right. If we can do it, we must’. On 21 October 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney, in justifying use of Executive power to restrict civil liberties, limit access to courts, restrict debate and cripple Freedom of Information legislation told The Washington Post: ‘Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life, part of a “new normalcy”[sic] that reflects an understanding of the world as it is’. In the United States, writers are now adopting, and some promoting, the term the ‘new normal’. In this view the ‘old normal’, where decisions might have been based on evidence, analysis, reason and judgment, using techniques refined by the Enlightenment of the 18th century, had come to an end on 9/11. The ‘new normal’ depends on instant decisions based on ‘gut’, ‘instinct’ and ‘faith’. Increasingly, policies have to be ‘faith based’. On 28 June 2006, the Google search engine listed 615 000 000 citations of the ‘new normal’, but the term has had virtually no currency or recognition outside the United States. To quote Joan Didion again: The ‘new normal’ required that we adopt a ‘new paradigm’ which in turn required, according to an internal White House memo signed by President Bush, ‘new thinking in the law of war’, in other words a reconsideration of the Geneva Convention’s prohibitions against torture. ‘Torture’ . . . had become ‘extreme interrogation’, which under the ‘new paradigm’ could be justified when the information obtained by interrogation failed to tally with the information required by policy . . . The word ‘truth’ . . . had been redefined, the empirical method abandoned: ‘the truth’ was now whatever we needed it to be, the confirmation of those propositions or policies in which we ‘believed in our hearts’, or had ‘faith’ . . . It was now possible to ‘believe’ in one proposition or another on the basis of no evidence that it was so . . . as if the existence of weapons [of mass destruction] was a doctrinal point on the order of transubstantiation . . . ‘I do not believe we should change our course because I believe in it’, 502
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 503
YEARS OF EXILE
Tony Blair was saying by September 2003. ‘I carry on doing the job because I believe in what I am doing.’*
The Bush administration is encouraging ‘faith-based’ schools, charities, prisoner rehabilitation and even national parks (the last promoting the creationist explanation that God formed the Grand Canyon in six days). Francis Wheen reminds us that in 1800 the US Presidential election was a contest between John Adams, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Thomas Jefferson, president of the American Philosophical Society. In the 2000 contest the contenders, George W. Bush and Al Gore, were both ‘born-agains’, and Gore sported a sign on his desk which read ‘WWJD?’ (‘What would Jesus do?’).† It is ironic that the United States, with the world’s greatest universities and an unequalled record of scientific achievement, should have an enormous anti-science constituency. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans consider Genesis to be the final authority on the creation of the world, a significant minority are doubtful about a heliocentric universe, 40 per cent believe that angels exist and 75 per cent reject Darwin’s theory of evolution.‡ Australia has been shaped by a tradition of scepticism, irony, a suspicion of ‘tall poppies’ and of reckless exaggeration (except in sport). US claims about ‘manifest destiny’ and a God-given right to be regarded as the world’s leader make most Australians profoundly uneasy. American politicians rarely admit to having no religious belief, but in Australia claiming to know God’s will would be a major vote loser. In an era of ‘Twin Fundamentalisms’, Christian and Islamic, when proponents insist ‘I am carrying out God’s will’, God does not intervene to confirm which view is correct. One of the disturbing questions of the 21st century is why the United States, with its sophisticated knowledge base in research, industry, arts, literature and music should have such a primitive, fundamentalist attitude to politics, religion and understanding the outside world. Both Bush and Blair are sympathetic to creation science and intelligent design being included in the syllabus of public schools.
* Joan Didion,‘Politics in the “New Normal”America’, New York Review of Books, October 21, 2004. † Wheen, op. cit., p. 106. ‡ James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation, passim. 503
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 504
A THINKING REED
Fundamentalist rhetoric in the United States contributed to a radical simplification of foreign policy as the struggle between forces of light v. forces of darkness. Peter Singer drew attention to Bush’s use of the word ‘evil’ as a noun 914 times over two years in speeches made as President, raising ‘the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world’.* The significance of the invocation of EVIL is that it avoids the need for evidence, analysis, thought or working through complexity. The forces of anti-Christ are easier to attack if personalised, as they have been in the United States for generations: Hitler,Tojo, Stalin, Mao, the two Kims, Ho, Castro, Gaddafi, Aideed, Khomeini, Saddam. Bush has far more in common with Usama bin Laden than he has with me: both are on a divine mission, fundamentalist, punitive, monocultural, prefer faith over evidence, believe in pre-emptive strikes and that necessity overrides the rule of law, manipulate fear, confuse revenge with justice, lack scepticism or intellectual detachment, are prepared to rewrite history, anti-scientific in mindset, resistant to ideas, surround themselves with unquestioning enthusiasts and never ask, ‘What if I am wrong?’ The central justification for war against Iraq had been the existence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs) and their alleged threat to world peace. Failure of Hans Blix and his UN inspection team to find what wasn’t there aroused fury in Washington and Whitehall. For the United States, invading Iraq was a ‘faith based’ decision, not ‘evidence based’, but for Australia it was neither, determined by fear of offending the White House. Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspection team and Secretary-General Kofi Annan were attempting to verify whether the WMDs existed and were useable. Blix’s reputation was traduced viciously: essentially he was deemed anachronistic in insisting on evidence, operating under the ‘old normal’, an approach which 9/11 had made obsolete. The great mystery was why, since Iraq had no useable WMDs, Saddam not only refused to co-operate with UN Weapons Inspectors, but expelled them in 1998. It was presumably a matter of saving face, but the decision cost him everything. Blix suggested that, paradoxically, Saddam might have been more believable if he had said, ‘We have 150 WMDs, and here they are’ rather than, ‘We have destroyed them all, so there are none’, even though the second proposition was correct. * Peter Singer, The President of Good & Evil, p. 2. 504
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 505
YEARS OF EXILE
Under the ‘new normal’, a belief that the WMDs existed was enough and the priority was for immediate action, not for understanding or judgement. Control of Iraq’s huge oil reserves, which would have been a completely rational (but not morally uplifting) reason for invasion, was never mentioned. If Iraq had been the world’s greatest producer of broccoli, Saddam, for all his hideous cruelty, would not have been disturbed. After the invasion, WMDs were displaced by ‘regime change’ as the ex post facto justification for war, and confident assertions about their existence were heard no more.Then WMDs became irrelevant, and discussing them, ultimately, a source of irritation: ‘Why mention them? We can’t rewrite history’. The WMD fiasco was a textbook example of retrospective judgement. Bush said,‘I’m not a textbook player. I’m a gut player’, and he refers to his ‘instincts’, which are often ‘visceral’. He rarely brings up evidence, or his knowledge or experience. Failure to explain coherently and avoiding complexity may have a powerful electoral appeal to voters who feel threatened and confused anyway. Bush’s dyslexia may actually add to his political appeal. In 2002, the President claimed that Iraq had a fleet of unmanned aircraft with the capacity to strike US cities, but the fleet mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps they will turn up in somebody’s shed. Australia’s leaders should be asking (but are not): ‘On what evidence are decisions affecting life and death made? How far does fear, much of it rational, some of it not, influence judgment?’ Saddam Hussein: a brutal, sadistic dictator? Iraq: a rogue state? Yes to both propositions. But Saddam’s scope was limited as the dictator of a failing state, and Iraq was caricatured as if it was a superpower which threatened the world. In January 1991 I voted, reluctantly, in Parliament to support Australian participation in the first Gulf War, because the United Nations had endorsed military action against Iraq. I told Parliament that one of my main concerns was a failure to recognise the West’s complicity in building up Saddam Hussein’s power. We have helped to construct a demonology [in which] Saddam only became a monster on 2 August 1990. The evidence suggests that he was a monster long before that, a practitioner of genocide and chemical warfare, a user of torture and murder, both in his personal and professional capacities. 505
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 506
A THINKING REED
To a significant degree, he was our monster . . . We looked palely aside when he applied his own final solution to the Kurds. Many children died there. We took refuge in the explanation,‘Not our problem’.*
After 1991, Saddam’s power to make an impact was high in his immediate region, nonexistent outside. Many of Saddam’s worst crimes dated from the period when Iraq was a client state of the US, encouraged to make war on Iran. And why was 2003 judged to be the year to displace him, rather than 1989, 1991 or 1998? We were accomplices to the airbrushing of history, in a way that Stalin and Mao would have recognised and endorsed. Bernard-Henri Lévy commented: In recent history, hatred of America has been one of the main links between the three totalitarianisms—fascism, communism and Islamism. So, antiAmericanism is a structuring passion, not a mere surface feature, that shapes the worst perversities of our time. It is a deep current that must be resisted: its appearance on a wide scale is very dangerous . . . We face a complex war against terrorism, Islamic fascism and the enemies of democracy and modernity. This war has to be conducted in the right way. In this war, Iraq is hardly the enemy to strike first’.†
I tried to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. I assumed that he was far more intelligent than his image suggested, a clever, anti-elitist appeal. Although a graduate of Yale and the Harvard Business School, he chose to project a cowboy image, which appealed in much of the US but sold badly outside. As le Carré pointed out, one could fall into the trap of thinking that a family which included two Presidents, two Governors, a US Senator, a CIA Director and oil company executives was elitist. Bush’s invocation of the Crusades was not an accident. It was not coincidental that Bush is a born-again Southern Methodist, Blair a born-again Anglo-Catholic, and John Howard made the transition up from Methodism (a battlers’ creed?) to Anglicanism, admittedly of the Sydney (low church) variety. I doubted if Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, who opposed invading Iraq, were born-again anythings. John Howard’s position was interesting. He happened to be in Washington on 9/11 and this reinforced his instinctive decision to join George W. Bush’s Coalition of the Willing in a war on terror, even if fighting * Hansard, House of Representatives, 22 January 1991, vol. 175, p. 116. † Bernard-Henri Lévy, interview in New Perspectives Quarterly, 4 February 2003. 506
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 507
YEARS OF EXILE
Afghanistan was a mere precursor to invading Iraq. Bush called him ‘Australia’s man of steel’. I doubt if he believed much that the Americans told him about possible al Qaida–Iraq links or weapons of mass destruction. He pursued his own line of dogged Hobbesian pessimism, reflecting a conviction that Australia’s position in South-East Asia and the Pacific would become increasingly exposed and the United States was the only power with the capacity to protect us. There is no guarantee that the Americans would come to our aid, especially if they were involved somewhere else; but if we fail to dance to their tune, they would certainly abandon us. He stuck to his instincts, even when polling in Australia indicated a profound scepticism about the President’s war plans and his rejection of the United Nations. He also calculated, accurately, that Australia’s Labor Opposition would not lay a glove on him. Australia’s decision to join the Coalition of the Willing, made long before fighting began, had nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with the American alliance. None of the processes leading to a commitment to intervene was transparent, contested or properly analysed.The Australian media, the ABC excepted, was either passive or a cheer squad. Since the Sudan War in 1884, Australia has always been prepared to fight overseas if asked, showing, as Peter Conrad noted, ‘our obsequious reliability’. Americans can hardly believe our docility. Since childhood, I had been an enthusiast for the idea of collective security and the use of international treaties and organisations, such as the United Nations, because small nations such as Australia could not defeat a major threat on their own. The concept of unilateralism, that power itself is a sufficient justification for a national to act pre-emptively, was profoundly disturbing. If the United States can do anything it wants now, can China claim the same privilege in twenty years? Cynicism and double standards about the United Nations troubled me profoundly; in 2003 it was marginalised because the Security Council did not vote for war, but in 2004 Australia’s Foreign Minister could claim with straight face that the major reason for invading Iraq was to reinforce the authority of the United Nations. Both Bush and Blair came under sustained political attack domestically but Howard escaped unscathed, playing on fear like Heifetz played the violin, appealing, skilfully and with apparent conviction, to the worst elements of our individual and national character, elements that we prefer to keep hidden but lurking there all the same: meanness, insecurity, fear, greed, materialism, envy, intolerance of others, philistinism. 507
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 508
A THINKING REED
It could be said in Howard’s favour that he shows some caution over religious issues and has declined to follow George W. Bush in embracing fundamentalism. He is opposed to the death penalty, at least in Australia, has shown some interest in science, given valuable support to stem cell research and is cautious about abortion. Howard handled the December 2004 tsunami crisis far better than Bush or Blair. He perfected the idea that compassion is an Australian export, but not an import. We were prepared to fight for the Iraqis, whether they liked it or not, or sell them wheat at a premium price, but we would not let them come here as refugees. Nor would we admit refugees from Aceh whose habitat had been swept into the ocean. Howard’s Government routinely practises the politics of denial (‘it never happened’), amnesia (‘I don’t know anything about it; it was before my time’) and nostalgia (‘it was better in the old days’). Howard succeeded in destroying Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party electorally, but adopted much of its agenda and secured much of its vote. His words could give comfort to people with a racial prejudice, while he could deny that he was racist himself. Labor seemed to be a passive, but appalled, onlooker. Howard uses the monarchy as a screen for what is, in effect, an increasingly authoritarian quasi-presidential system, in which the Governor-General is little more than an ornamental stage prop. In the new politics it is axiomatic that political leaders never accept blame when disasters occur and never express regret. Political accountability has become an obsolete concept. Nowadays, politicians can always explain that others failed to inform them, and so they escape judgment. ‘It was not my fault . . .’ Sometimes amnesia is to blame. If politicians have been correct in their judgments, they expect to be rewarded. And if they have been wrong, they do not expect to be punished. They assert that when times are difficult voters should support courage and determination, coded language for an inability to see light at the end of the tunnel. Howard has succeeded in convincing the electorate—and much of the ALP—that appeals to immediate economic self-interest is the only valid subject of an election, everything else is peripheral and the ‘moral agenda’ is passé or irrelevant. He takes a very tough line on the ‘history wars’ and there is an all-pervasive meanness in much of his policy formulation. I sometimes speculated about whether Howard was a closet Marxist, because he shared with the late Karl an apparent conviction that all values were material. 508
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 509
YEARS OF EXILE
Despite his ‘relaxed and comfortable’ assurance in the 1996 election John Howard has, in a decade as Prime Minister, been the most radical change agent in our history. Howard’s objective is to destroy the last elements of the Whitlam agenda, to create a deference state in which the rich and powerful are unconstrained, in which the weak and defenceless fend for themselves, all values are commercial and national institutions are weakened or compromised. Instead of a moral and intellectual agenda, we have a shopping list.
ﱗ
In 2005, a year of shame, the political process I had believed in all my life was in crisis. Despite this, I had a stubborn determination in my eighth decade to keep fighting to restore courage, principle, generosity, understanding and vision to politics. The cumulative impact of the response to September 11, 2001 had become a grotesque parody/inversion of what politics should be about, a serious challenge to my lifetime commitment to public life. My beliefs and political practice were trashed, traduced or overturned. Conscience, accountability, rationality, the rule of law, understanding, compassion, have either been devalued, derided or abandoned. Loss of trust in leaders, institutions and the evaluation of knowledge diminishes us all and reduces us to a world of incoherence, blind instinct and night terrors. Before the 2004 Presidential elections I made a glum prediction that bin Laden would intervene to help Bush’s campaign because a second term for George W. Bush would reinforce al Qaida’s apocalyptic view of the world. He did that with his televised address on 29 October. Since World War II the political heartland/homeland in the United States has moved South and West. Many factors contribute: demography, climate, lifestyle, ageing. The American Civil War is not yet over, but this time the Confederates seem to be winning. No US President has been elected from the North since John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts in 1960.* Southern values now dominate US politics. Emphasis on American patriotism, exceptionalism and the export of democracy, United States style, overlooks the complexity and ambiguity of national history, a * Since 1960, Presidents have only been elected from the South (Texas ⫻ 3, Georgia and Arkansas) and the West (California ⫻ 2). 509
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 510
A THINKING REED
half-slave state 1789–1865, de jure segregated state 1865–1954 and a de facto one from 1954. In 2004 George W. Bush’s defeat of Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts was significant, but not overwhelming. Bush, with 51 per cent of the popular vote, won the Old Confederacy and the heartland of Middle America, areas which are historically isolationist, morally conservative, with strong fundamentalist and evangelical churches, committed to gun ownership and the death penalty. Kerry, with 48 per cent, won the Pacific coast, the north-east, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Simon Schama, eminent Anglo-American historian, incandescent with fury, argued that the United States was now deeply split between ‘Worldly America’, which Kerry won by a landslide, and ‘Godly America’, which George W. Bush won overwhelmingly. Worldly America is ‘pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical’ while Godly America is ‘mythic, messianic, conversionary’.Worldly America engages with the world and is nourished by it, while Godly America turns its back on that dangerous, promiscuous, impure world . . . If Worldly America is a city, a street and a port, Godly America is at its heart . . . a church, a farm and a barracks, places that are walled, fenced and consecrated. Worldly America is about finding civil ways to share crowded space . . . Godly America is about making over space in its image.*
The Cambridge political philosopher David Runciman points to the familiar phenomenon of a leader who rules by generating fear of the unknown, rooted in some iconic catastrophe to which such fear can be related.The ‘war on terror’ was ideal for this purpose, a war that had no enemy and could thus never be won, a war that need never end. As in George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty-four, such a war empowers a leader to fight any battle he chooses, and to require any sacrifice, since he can declare the existence of the State to be at risk.†
Was I the only person to comment on the similarity between Usama and Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein? * ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, The Guardian, Nov. 5, 2004. † Simon Jenkins, reviewing David Runciman’s The Politics of Good Intentions in The Times Literary Supplement, February 24, 2006. 510
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 511
YEARS OF EXILE
In Nineteen eighty-four the rulers of Oceania propose three central mantras: ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’ In the 2004 Presidential election, ignorance proved to be a powerful campaigning tool. Complexity could be ignored. Only one point of view needed to be considered. There was no room for doubt. Under the ‘old normal’ before September 11, 2001, I assumed that our side, the democracies, never began wars (although, as in Vietnam, they were prepared to intervene in existing colonial struggles), even when our opponents were brutal and corrupt and when a pre-emptive strike might have been to our strategic advantage. This assumption no longer applies, and the moral basis for action is now displaced by sheer opportunism and adventurism. Torture is now routinely justified instead of being outlawed. The arguments ‘We only torture in a good cause’ and ‘If they can do it, so can we . . .’ should have been dismissed out of hand, but were not. We should have asked: ‘How are torturers recruited? Self-selection? Going with the flow? Does the Eichmann defence of “superior orders” apply?’ The rule of law, presumption of innocence, access to courts and legal representation can all be withdrawn at will. Violence and sexual humiliation of prisoners was routinely carried out by American military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison, itself a dark memorial to Saddam’s abuses, until media disclosures forced a change in practice. Moving prospective torturees to a jurisdiction beyond the reach of US courts is coyly described as ‘rendition’ or ‘extraordinary rendition’, meaning ‘outsourced, privatised torture’. Freedom of Information requests are refused and ‘plausible deniability’ becomes the norm. Albert Camus wrote:‘Man’s greatness lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself ’.* What happened to the rule of law? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? Constitutional guarantees? They only apply when convenient. There are no absolutes. The ‘new normal’ is pre-modern in its rejection of objective evidence. Glaucon’s argument in favour of the rule of force that Socrates dismissed so convincingly in Plato’s Republic is current again. The Salem witch-trials provoked Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953). Will ‘faith based’ politics stimulate a new generation of playwrights and essayists, or will they all be employed as spin doctors? * ‘The Night of Truth’, in Combat, Paris, 25 August 1944. 511
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 512
A THINKING REED
We live in an era of instinctive, reactive and ill-informed leaders and followers, marked by contempt for truth, living by the dictum that ‘the end justifies the means’. It hardly matters whether that view is driven by cynicism or ideology. Francis Fukuyama, who became an inspiration to American neoconservatives with his thesis on ‘the end of history’, came to repudiate his admirers. He argued that, through a combination of ignorance and incompetence, they assumed that Communism’s sudden collapse in 1989 would be a model for an equally sudden collapse of Islamic fundamentalism after which democracy, American style, introduced by military force, would emerge as a default position in the Middle East.*
ﱗ
My life has been shaped by an overwhelming drive for knowledge about the past and working to create a better world. What caused World Wars I and II and the Great Depression? Why did Nazism and Stalinism achieve such power? How can terrible events be prevented? My priorities have been to dig up as much evidence as possible in the shortest time and I was obsessed about getting things right. I tried to apply Karl Popper’s test of ‘falsifiability’, that proponents of a hypothesis must be able to propose a protocol for testing, leading to confirmation or refutation. I worried about ‘group think’, or ‘echo chamber politics’, only seeking views from people with the same mindset, always pleased to confirm what a superior wants to hear. Weakening democratic structures to defend freedom made no sense. Sixty years after World War II ended Stalin is irrelevant, but Hitler’s example is alive and growing, the ‘soft Fascism’ that Philip Roth described in his novel The Plot against America (2004). Hitler, A Film from Germany (Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, 1977), directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, is more than seven hours long, and therefore rarely exhibited. The American critic Susan Sontag called it ‘possibly the greatest film ever made’. The film argues that Hitler is not merely an Austrian-German figure, but a universal archetype who expresses feelings of rage, impotence, resentment and the demonisation of enemies, and that most of us have a touch of Hitler in us, the main reason for our continuing fascination and horror. (Few of us have a touch of Stalin.) Hitler and his henchmen appear in the film, sometimes as actors, * Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons. 512
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 513
YEARS OF EXILE
sometimes as puppets.Towards the close an aged Hitler, as a ventriloquist’s dummy, accompanied by music from Götterdämmerung, embarks on a monologue:‘No one before me has changed the West as thoroughly as we have . . . I know what to say and do for the masses. I am the school of the successful democrat . . .’ He insists that since World War II his ideology has become more powerful than ever. Racism, nationalism, militarism, religious hatred, democratic populism, suppression of dissent, contempt for expert or critical opinion, appeals to the irrational, using propaganda, resolving problems by violence, promoting fear of difference, attacking organised labour, weakening the rule of law, using torture and execution, have never been so widespread.‘So long as Wagner’s music is played, I will not be forgotten . . . Everything is going to plan after all. And we did win . . .’* I recognise that my capacity and commitment to understand another point of view, to grasp the case against some course of action, to avoid oversimplification and comprehend complexity and a commitment to act rationally would be disabling factors in contemporary politics. We have to ask why things happen, why hatred and violence is an instinctive reaction, and use analysis and reason to pursue peace and security. The cycle of eye for eye, tooth for tooth will lead to a blind and toothless world. Even if it leads to some delay, there must be examination of alternative explanations and room for scepticism and irony, even after sudden tragedy. Promotion and marketing became increasingly important elements in government after I left it. Cosy relationships between government and media proprietors and the invocation of patriotism made critical analysis seem almost subversive. Ideology was far more important than principle. In the mass media, with the rise of ‘infotainment’ and increasing reliance on advertising and ‘life-style’ promotion, opinion is displacing reportage. We used to speak of the ‘30-second sound-bite’ in television news, then it was reduced to 15, later to seven. Disturbing information, such as the number of civilian dead in Iraq, is suppressed. When things are going badly, the cheer squad shouts louder than ever, waving the flag and blowing whistles. Candid analysis or loyal dissent is unacceptable. Loyalty, even if incompetent, is much preferred. A disturbing change in my lifetime has been co-option of the public service to promote the Government’s political agenda. Historically, a great * Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Hitler, a Film from Germany, pp. 201–8. 513
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 514
A THINKING REED
strength in Australia’s public service was that its outstanding figures, including Sir Arthur Tange, Sir Roland Wilson, Sir John Crawford and Dr H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, gave frank and fearless advice to both Labor and Coalition Governments. Now Department heads are often appointed on contract, after advice from consultancy firms, with the clear (even if unwritten) assumption that reappointment or promotion will depend on their skills in defending the Government position when it comes under attack, or telling the Government what it wants to hear. John Howard often claims to be a disciple of Menzies, but it is certainly not true in public service areas. When Menzies became Prime Minister again in December 1949 he retained most of Chifley’s senior advisers. When colleagues urged Menzies to remove Coombs, he replied, ‘I have any number of people around me who will tell me what they think I want to hear. I need to have access to people who will tell me the opposite.’ Arthur Fadden, his Treasurer, took the same view. Menzies’ career demonstrates the democratic paradox that contemporary judgment is often overturned by historical judgment. In politics, timing is everything. Menzies won seven straight elections—but his political program (White Australia, support for South Africa’s apartheid regime, high tariffs, Suez, Vietnam, remoteness from Asia, the white Commonwealth) was anachronistic even in his lifetime, as he came to recognise himself. Bert Evatt lost elections in 1954, 1955 and 1958 and suffered from serious errors of judgment—but decades later his platform retains contemporary relevance/resonance. Labor lost spectacularly in 1966 over Vietnam, recovered well on the same issue in 1969, and won office in 1972. Who was right/wrong—and when? The death penalty controversy did not prevent Henry Bolte winning elections in 1967 and 1970—but there is bipartisan commitment against capital punishment in all our Parliaments. Despite Whitlam’s landslide defeat in 1975, much of his agenda survived under Fraser. Labor’s position in the Tasmanian dams controversy, deeply unpopular in Tasmania in 1983, is now uncontested. Joh Bjelke-Petersen strode Queensland like a colossus, but two decades after he left office his politics seem both deluded and corrupt.* * It was the good fortune of the British Conservative Party that all their great historic campaigns failed—for the Corn Laws and the veto of the House of Lords, against Catholic and Jewish emancipation, manhood suffrage, Home Rule for Ireland and votes for women. Paradoxically, in the 20th century, under universal suffrage, the Tories held office for longer than Labor and the Liberals combined. 514
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 515
YEARS OF EXILE
Historically there has never been a time when incumbency has counted for so much and Oppositions for so little.The ‘majoritarian’ view (‘Well, we won, didn’t we?’) is based on a ‘winner take all’ philosophy, an assertion that an elected government can claim a mandate for anything it wants—present or future, including retrospective justification, including issues that were not specifically put before the electorate such as invading Iraq in 2003. ‘Winner take all’ has strong support from the corporate sector and much of the media. Institutions which represent a countervailing force or attempt to express an alternative point of view to government, such as the courts, trade unions and professional associations, universities and CSIRO and the ABC, are routinely denigrated, denied any claims to validity, legitimacy or the right to be consulted. Government is unrestrained in its appointment of like-minded zealots to boards such as the ABC or CSIRO, and in its adulation of the rich and powerful (the memorial service for Kerry Packer being an egregious example). Increasingly, legislation excludes ministerial actions from judicial review. Labor was little more than an appalled spectator to all this. Oppositions, seeing themselves as ‘Governments-in-exile’, no longer practice the concept of opposition and it might be easier to describe them as Acquiescences. It was hard to identify a single Opposition in Australia in 2005 which was a credible threat to Government, partly because both sides of politics have lost faith in using Parliament as a forum where ideas can be challenged and argued out at length and in depth. Democracy is threatened by the gross imbalance in intellectual and organisational firepower available to governments and oppositions. I calculate that the resources available to the National ALP, including head office staff and policy advisers in Shadow Ministers’ offices, adds up to 95 people, while the Government can call on policy and promotional support from thousands of professionals in departments. Resources available to governments, including huge advertising expenditure, enables them to undertake almost permanent campaigning. On major issues it is depressingly common to hear the mantra,‘There is no alternative’ (TINA). The task of government and its advisers is to find a formula, or sales pitch, try it out on focus groups, call in consultants, put a spin on it and use all the propaganda resources that our taxes can provide to sell it. The concept of the dialectic, or the Socratic dialogue, where an argument is proposed, supporting evidence led, a contrary position put, then examined rigorously and a conclusion or 515
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 516
A THINKING REED
verdict reached, is now confined to the law courts, or royal commissions. It has dropped out of politics. Economics, which used to be a subject of heated debate, is now a matter of assertion, although Hugh Stretton, John Mathews, John Quiggin and Kenneth Davidson maintain a lonely and courageous dissent. The first question that should have been debated in 2001 on the refugee issue was: ‘Would entry of up to 4000 refugees from the Middle East in 2001 have a greater or lesser impact on Australia than 20 000 Vietnamese in 1981 or 20 000 Chinese in 1989?’ But that question was never asked. Instead the TINA formula was adopted and framed not to ask a question but to make an assertion:‘Australia is under threat of invasion’. The Opposition convinced itself that a compassionate policy on refugees would be a vote loser, especially in Queensland and Western Australia, and chose to accept that the refugees were a threat to national security. The issue then became, ‘Who would be tougher on refugees? Howard or Beazley?’ (Beazley observed that there was not ‘a cigarette paper of difference’ between his position and Howard’s on security issues.) If the Opposition fails to put a strong alternative case on a contentious issue such as refugees, the media can then say, ‘The Government has achieved consensus so there is no issue to write about’. There is another practical objection: if both parties are competing for the middle ground, with the Opposition refusing to argue an alternative policy, there will be an immediate advantage for the incumbent, unless the Government is in crisis, especially if it has more resources and a stronger leader. Oppositions have been driven by fear. Kim Beazley has some admirable qualities but nobody is going to accuse him of being a risk taker, a change agent or pursuing any issue that a public opinion poll or focus group tells him might be unpopular. The Olympic Games in Sydney in September 2000 probably represented the high point of Australian confidence and optimism, but within a year this had been replaced by a pervasive mood of fear and insecurity. In October 2001 John Howard said: The challenges that Australia now faces in relation to border protection include people smuggling, often organised on an international scale; internationally controlled rings of illegal drug traffickers; well organised and resourced terrorist groups; transnational crime syndicates; the relatively new phenomenon of sophisticated cyber crime; new outbreaks of old health challenges such as tuberculosis; outbreaks of foot and mouth and other potentially 516
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 517
YEARS OF EXILE
devastating diseases; threats to native wild life, and illegal fishing operations in Australian waters.*
He shrewdly pictured Fortress Australia as surrounded by a comprehensive range of horrors, for which the only defence was to vote for the Coalition. In Australia the Westminster system is in disarray. Parliaments only sit for brief periods, with overwhelming executive control and Party discipline, and Ministers surrounded by a fire wall of political advisers whose job is to create a potential defence of ‘plausible deniability’ on embarrassing issues, based on the text, ‘Don’t ask! Don’t tell!’ Ministers could then inform the Commonwealth Parliament,‘It never occurred to me that it was odd for Iraq to be buying wheat from Australia at a higher price than they could get it from the US and Canada. I’m fundamentally lacking in curiosity but I follow orders faithfully. That’s why I am a Minister’. Compared to Great Britain, the Australian Parliament has far more rigid party discipline. Members rarely, if ever, cross the floor, discussion is guillotined or gagged, debates never change the result of a vote (except in the rare debates on matters of conscience), public service evidence to Parliamentary Committees is subject to Ministerial directives, Committees face impossibly tight deadlines and as the number of MPs increases, sitting time decreases. The House of Representatives then becomes little more than an electoral college to choose the Executive. Three of Blair’s anti-terror laws were defeated in the House of Commons, even after suicide bombing attacks in London in July 2005; it has not harmed his Government and demonstrates that Parliaments can still work as deliberative bodies. The Australian Parliament has lost much of its moral authority, the public service has been increasingly politicised, and lobbying ensures that vested interest has far more influence than community interest.The use of ‘dirt files’, while not new, is now pursued more avidly in the context of the new brutalism in politics: ‘Win at all costs! Take no prisoners!’ Australian critics or whistle blowers are routinely dumped on, a technique reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s ‘enemies list’. A culture of vindictiveness is poisoning public life. Public servants who turned whistle blowers or gave evidence to Parliamentary Committees that ran contrary to the government’s line were traduced and victimised.† * Quoted by Don Watson in Weasel Words, p. 48. † They included Rod Barton, Mike Scrafton, Andrew Wilkie, Colonel Lance Collins and Tony Kevin. 517
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 518
A THINKING REED
In August 2004 forty-three former Australian military chiefs and senior diplomats issued a statement entitled ‘Truth in Government’ attacking the Howard Government for joining the US invasion of Iraq ‘on the basis of false assumptions and the deception of the Australian people’, especially about WMD. Their intervention was dismissed, contemptuously, as if they had no right to comment, and their experience/expertise was worthless.* Senator John Faulkner made a powerful but depressing point that all his investigative work in Senate Select Committees on issues on which the Government was indefensible, such as the ‘children overboard’ incident, and SIEV X, appeared to make no public impact. Australia had a more cynical reaction than the United States or Britain: ‘So what? Who cares? All politicians lie’. In national politics, serial lying has become standard operating procedure. Newspoll found that while a majority of Australian voters thought they had been lied to about Iraq, this had no impact on voting intention. Media response was more cynical and amused than critical. And yet the whole basis of democratic practice is trust. The Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) exhibited a culture of brutal insensitivity and indifference in its detention and deportation of two Australian nationals, foreign born, with health problems, Cornelia Rau and Vivienne Alvarez Solon. Officers demonstrated an institutionalised cruelty that would have passed unnoticed in an authoritarian state but which Philip Ruddock, despite his Amnesty credentials, must have endorsed as Minister for Immigration. Ultimately, it was disclosed that DIMIA had deported hundreds of nationals in crashing ignorance. Was it a Freudian slip when Philip Ruddock referred to Shayan Badraie, a child traumatised in the Woomera Detention Centre, as ‘it’? The suspension of the rule of law for refugees held in administrative detention was indefensible. The High Court ruled (4–3) that detention imposed by ministerial discretion, even if for a lifetime, was not appealable.† I felt even worse that the judgment was based on legislation introduced by the Keating Government. Detainees held in Nauru, as part of ‘the Pacific solution’, were denied access to the jurisdiction of Australian courts. * Signatories included General Peter Gration and Admiral Alan Beaumont, both former chiefs of the Australian Defence Force, former Defence Department secretary Paul Barratt, former Foreign Affairs Department secretaries Alan Renouf and Richard Woolcott and former Prime Minister’s Department secretary John Menadue. † See Al-Kateb v. Godwin, [2004] HCA 37, August 2004. 518
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 519
YEARS OF EXILE
I could not get my head around the concept of two Australian nationals, David Hicks and Mahmoud Habib, being arraigned before a United States military commission created by Presidential decree for unspecified offences, extra-territorial and retrospective, allegedly committed as ‘enemy combatants’ in Afghanistan when it was ruled by the Taliban. These Australian nationals had been kidnapped by a Northern Alliance warlord, sold to the US Special Forces in December 2001 for $1000, tortured or abused in client states and ultimately taken to a place, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, deemed to be beyond the reach of US and international law. Howard had already declared Hicks guilty of unspecified offences, and now wants him to be convicted of something (almost anything will do) by some tribunal, anywhere but Australia. Trials by military commissions in Guantánamo Bay would have allowed the use of prosecution evidence extracted by torture. It worried Amnesty International and senior American lawyers, and eight of nine Western governments secured the return of their nationals being held by the Americans.Australia was the exception; it did not even ask. Of almost 500 detainees, after four years detention, only nine have been charged with specific offences. Habib’s case was dropped due to lack of evidence and he was returned to Australia. Of 700 original detainees held at Guantánamo, Hicks was the only Caucasian. His refusal to confess to committing any crime generated fury on the part of his captors. That Hicks could not be tried for offences against Australian law was actually used as a justification for leaving him in American hands. Even after the Red Cross and US military prosecutors made damning criticisms, the Hicks case did not disturb the Howard Government. It did not seem to worry Kim Beazley either, even after the US Supreme Court declared the proposed military commissions illegal in June 2006, in breach both of the US Constitution and the Geneva Convention. The Howard Government remained fervent in its support of the Bush Administration. It was difficult to conceive a situation where John Howard and Alexander Downer could protest to the Bush Administration about anything. The central issue in the Hicks case is the right to protection of the rule of law. It is not a Left or Right question. It is a fundamental tenet in a free society. Was Ivan Milat entitled to it? Certainly. Martin Bryant? Yes. Bradley John Murdoch? Yes. What about David Hicks? I hope so. I would like to see Australia make an absolute commitment to the rule of law, habeas corpus, presumption of innocence and total opposition to the use of torture. I hope we will say these things, soon. Hicks is the Australian Dreyfus. 519
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 520
A THINKING REED
Howard has been particularly skilful at ‘framing’ issues, for example ‘counter-terrorist’ legislation (a.k.a.‘infringement of civil liberties’), so that any objection to his suspension of the rule of law, or even criticism of the Hicks case, is denounced as anti-American or un-Australian. If Howard sets the agenda, and Labor acquiesces, the prospect of opening up an argument disappears. Framing can shape community discourse and understanding. People who try to kill themselves at the Baxter Detention Centre might deserve sympathy if their actions are called ‘suicide attempts’, but not if defined as ‘attention-seeking incidents’. Framing determines if we refer to ‘refugees’ or ‘queue jumpers’, ‘academics’ or ‘bleeding hearts’, ‘accountability’ or ‘playing the blame game’, ‘security’ or ‘rigidity’, ‘insecurity’ or ‘flexibility’, ‘strategic withdrawal’ or ‘cutting and running’, ‘reform’ or ‘change’, ‘scientific consensus’ or ‘group-think’. ‘Moving on’/‘closure’ means ‘don’t discuss it’. Australia’s draconian Anti-Terrorism Act No. 2 (2005), passed by the Senate after less than six hours debate, is harsher than comparable legislation in the US and UK, and imposes heavy penalties on committing, participating, recruiting, supporting, advocating or justifying acts of terror. What about analysing terrorism? Conducting research? Attempting to explain or understand? Where is the line to be drawn? There are legitimate fears that the laws might inhibit research or reportage. Children can be held in secret preventative detention—and it is an offence (maximum penalty five years imprisonment) for a parent to tell a spouse that their child was being held. Jesus, as a person of Middle Eastern appearance, might well be detained under the Act. Liberal dissidents Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan showed courage in arguing for amendments, including a reduced sunset clause (from ten to five years) and Malcolm Fraser made a passionate defence of civil liberties. Kim Beazley thought parts of the law could have been stronger. The quality of public debate has been compromised, partly through media indifference and the systematic denuding of the ABC, but also through the retreat of the public intellectual.We have more paid academics than at any time in history, but across the nation, regrettably, they have fallen silent. In universities and research institutions, professional activity and workloads have increased appreciably, and contribution to public debate is discouraged. The term ‘academic’ is routinely used in a denigratory way— to mean remote, pedantic, impractical or irrelevant. The only consolation is that in the medium to long term it is elite opinion that wins out. 520
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 521
YEARS OF EXILE
The year 2005 was the warmest on record, and five of the hottest years have been in a single decade. There is convincing evidence that Arctic sea ice and Greenland’s ice sheets are melting at an unprecedented rate, that permafrost is thawing in Siberia with the probability of dramatic increases in methane emissions, that increased microbial activity in Europe is releasing carbon stored in the soil. Will this bring the world to a tipping point beyond which what Margaret Thatcher called ‘a massive experiment with the system of this planet’ is irreversible? Not all the causes of and linkages in climate change are clear and we now speak of the higher incidence of ‘extreme weather events’, including warming, cooling, drought, floods, cyclones and hurricanes. The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change (1997) has now been ratified by 160 nations and came into force in February 2005. In the West the only states which have refused to sign or ratify are the United States, Australia, Monaco and Liechtenstein. There are significant issues of ongoing controversy about evidence. ‘Holocaust deniers’, such as David Irving, challenge the historicity of the extermination of six million Jews in the Final Solution, citing the lack of a paper trail of documents. The tobacco industry and retailers vigorously contest the linkage between smoking and lung cancer, despite overwhelming clinical evidence, pointing out that some heavily smoking people, Greek males for example, have long life expectancy. Despite scientific consensus, the United States and Australia are alone in the developed world in refusing to accept that human activity contributes to climate change, with more extreme weather events, both heating and cooling, and more severe hurricanes. Australia’s per capita contribution to Greenhouse gas emissions is now No. 1 in the world, but in absolute terms the US is the greatest polluter, although China is catching up. Australia, like the United States, is now marginalising, ignoring, silencing or punishing climate scientists whose research confirms the need for strong international action to curb rising levels of Greenhouse gases. With its heavy emphasis on coal and on energy intensive industries such as aluminium smelting, in annual per capita rates of CO2 emissions, Australia ranks first (27.9 tonnes) in the world. We have a bone-headed conviction that our prosperity depends on increasing energy throughputs and that energy efficiency must be resisted at all costs. Having been arguing about Greenhouse issues since 1985, I feel a strong sense of frustration at our inadequate policy responses. Government says to its science advisers,‘Tell us the truth, but only if it is what we want to hear’. 521
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 522
A THINKING REED
I adapted Blaise Pascal’s celebrated ‘wager’* about the existence of God to Greenhouse issues: If we take action and disaster is avoided, there will be a massive saving of human suffering. If we take action and the problem corrects itself, little is lost and we benefit from a cleaner environment. If we do not act, and there is a global disaster then massive suffering will have been aggravated by stupidity. If we take no action and no disaster results, the outcome will be due to luck alone, like an idiot winning the lottery.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin and Khrushchev endorsed research by the botanist Trofim Lysenko which argued that environment shaped genetic characteristics and ‘Lysenkoism’ was seen as a scientific validation of Marxism. Lysenko’s critics were disgraced and some died in labour camps. This state control of scientific outcomes was much derided in the West. But now we practise our own form of ‘soft Lysenkoism’, with climate scientists silenced and threatened if they do not produce ‘agreed science’, the line which endorses the Howard Government’s rejection of concerns about human impact on climate due to irresistible pressure by lobbyists. CSIRO’s Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research, a world leader for decades, has been scaled down, and departing scientists contribute to a significant brain drain: it is not one of the organisation’s ‘National Research Flagships’. Public investment in alternative energy has been stripped. Energy efficiency is no longer on the agenda, and perhaps it never was. Renewables have a low priority. In November 2001, Vice President Cheney proposed that if there was ‘a one per cent chance’ that a security threat was real then ‘we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.’† This means that a great deal of energy is expended pursuing phantoms and planted rumours, while deep analysis of data or seeking plausible evidence is disregarded. But ‘the one per cent rule’ does not apply to climate change and global warming, which * Blaise Pascal, Pensées, pp. 121–5. † Ron Suskind, The One Percent Rule. 522
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 523
YEARS OF EXILE
also have profound security implications: even a 99 per cent likelihood is not enough. President George Bush senior once asserted that ‘the American way of life was non negotiable’. I thinks he meant that the United States, with 4.6 per cent of the world’s population has a God-given right to consume 40 per cent of the world’s non-renewable resources in perpetuity.Access to cheap oil is a dominant, perhaps the dominant, factor in US foreign and domestic policy goals. It explains why Europe ratified the Kyoto Protocol and the US did not. I am maddened by the double standard—many politicians and commentators who argue that there is inadequate scientific data about the Greenhouse effect are precisely those who argued that the evidence about Iraq’s WMDs was conclusive. (Blair is an exception—he argued for both.) However, the US would not be a plausible or desirable model of resource consumption for India or China. If it was, we would soon need a new planet. The American environmental writer John McPhee calculated that the average American has the daily calorific intake (food and fuel) of a sperm whale. As he pointed out, the biota cannot sustain many sperm whales.
ﱗ
On 1 November (All Saints’ Day) 1755, Lisbon was largely destroyed by a huge earthquake, followed by a tsunami. It is estimated that 90 000 people were killed in Portugal and about 10 000 in Morocco. The earthquake struck at 9.20 a.m. when people were in church. The Lisbon earthquake was a major stimulus to Enlightenment thinking and Voltaire began to ask, ‘Can this be the best of all possible worlds?’ In Candide (1760), Candide and Dr Pangloss observe the earthquake from a ship in the harbour, see the good die and the wicked survive. Candide asks about God’s power and His involvement in human affairs, whether Nature is a benign force, the problem of evil, the role of human reason, life as a game of chance and the folly of optimism. None of Dr Pangloss’ explanations are convincing. After Lisbon, Pangloss and Candide go on to observe a long series of horrors and injustices. The Enlightenment put great emphasis on investigating, understanding, explaining, refining and defining the world and its natural phenomena, which underlay the achievements of Franklin, Cook, Lavoisier, Laplace, Jefferson, Whitney and Humboldt and the writers Hume, Johnson and 523
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 524
A THINKING REED
Gibbon. The earthquake also contributed to increasingly secular thinking among Europe’s rulers, especially the Enlightened Despots, and inspired Immanuel Kant to attempt to comprehend its enormity and whether God had a role. Explanation and exploration were open questions. ‘Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!’ had been proclaimed as the great objectives of the French Revolution in 1789. Barely two hundred years later, liberty was being defined in a narrow and restricted way—as freedom to exploit and consume, but only within a society which was comfortable with itself, and liberty could be withdrawn arbitrarily from those considered to pose a real—or even a hypothetical—threat. Parties of the Left no longer espoused egalitarianism. As Gary Runciman argued,* in Britain—and Australia too—the profile of the distribution of wealth had changed from being the shape of a pyramid, in which the poorest made up the largest part of society, to a diamond, in which perhaps less than 20 per cent were below the poverty line, and that if Labour/Labor’s historic goal had been to bring people out of poverty for most voters this had already occurred and new social objectives would have to be identified and pursued. Fraternity was also a contested element, and was limited to the familiar and culturally comfortable, not to ‘the Other’, to refugees or Aboriginies, and perceived rights given to minorities provoking a serious backlash with mainstream voters. By 2006, ‘Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!’ had been displaced by ‘Materialism! Self-interest! Exclusion!’ The linguistic divide brings a wall of incomprehension between us and ‘the Other’, who are then speedily transmuted into ‘the Enemy’.† Fear of difference, of other cultures, races, religions, a turbulent climate of suspicion and intolerance increases the probability of ceaseless escalation, an unending cycle of violence, terror, reprisal, retribution and blood lust.This cycle has dominated the Middle East, much of the Balkans, parts of Africa and Ireland for decades, in some cases centuries. Despite the radical transformation of public and political life since 1979 I struggle on, trying to find value and meaning and to promote the abundant life for others.
* ‘What happened to the Labour Party?’W. G. Runciman, London Review of Books, 22 June 2006. † Hannah Arendt wrote about the concept of ‘othering’ in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Books, 1963. 524
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 525
YEARS OF EXILE
I want to redefine and promote strong belief systems.The open society, rational politics and a sceptical media have been largely crippled by 2001 and its aftermath. It is both difficult and painful to persuade citizens that they have an obligation to participate fully in the way their countries are run, and an even higher obligation as humans, to contribute to the common concerns of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens. Terrorism will continue to damage open societies until we understand how to eliminate its causes and we will not be safe so long as we pursue politics that strengthen the cause of martyrdom. Our prevailing policy line in the West is that terrorism has no cause—it is a baffling phenomenon, beyond rational analysis, an epidemic, a manifestation of evil, not seen as a political reaction, to be resolved, or even understood, by rational processes. Since terrorism is random, irrational and causeless, then negotiation is out of the question. The threat, pervasive, permanent and unpredictable is seen as totally unrelated to cause, hence the insistence of the Spanish and British Prime Ministers that terrorist attacks in Madrid and in London were not payback against participation in the Iraq war. Contrary to the popular stereotype, some suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots are not religious fanatics, brain-washed zombies, but are shaped more by political commitment than religious zeal, well educated, with some experience of the outside world (e.g. Hamburg, Leeds, Florida), committed to murder/suicide on the issue of dispossession and land rights. Vaclav Havel, dramatist and former Czech President, referred to a ‘loss of transcendence’, the decline of an over-arching belief system which makes sense of the contemporary world, contributing to the rise of cults committed to a conspiratorial or apocalyptic view with members seeing themselves as victims, leading to an absolute commitment to a cause or leader including, all too often, the use of killing and terror as ideological instruments. I was inconceivably lucky to be born in remote, safe, democratic, pluralistic, open, improvisatory Australia, far from the killing fields of Europe, Asia or Africa. I think constantly of my contemporaries in Germany who finished up in the fighting line in the last months of World War II. If I had been born German, would my family have resisted the prevailing ideology, like the inspiring Sophie Scholl? I doubt it. It is essential not to confuse democratic forms with the democratic ethos: remember that Jesus lost a vote to Barabbas and Hitler came first in two free elections in 1932. I am committed to democracy but recognise 525
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 526
A THINKING REED
that democratic processes often produce inflammatory results; witness the success of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, Hamas in Palestine, the Shiites in Iraq and Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, I want the political process to be revived. This will not just depend on Parliament, political parties and voting.There must be a balancing process with countervailing forces and creative involvement by intermediate bodies, for example, business groups and trades unionists, churches, environmentalists, a fearless judiciary, universities and other research communities, stronger and more diverse media. Reviving politics will involve encouraging knowledge, curiosity, understanding, scepticism and transparency. It will also require a revolution in education to redefine non-economic values and a critical spirit, with heavier emphasis on history, philosophy and language, as well as the skills needed for vocations. The effective working of democracy depends on trust between the major sectors which make up a diverse society. Howard’s long campaign to weaken, if not destroy, trade unions has an obsessive quality, asserting the myth that unions exercise a stranglehold on the economy and cripple business enterprise. Unions have steadily contracted as a proportion of the labour force since 1954 and even under Labor Governments their influence on policy had been in long term decline. At best, trade unions are a countervailing influence, contributing to some degree of social and economic balance between capital and labour, offering advice and protection to the unskilled and semi-skilled, enabling workers in dangerous industries such as mining and (formerly) asbestos processing to negotiate with corporate power. Many non-unionists were apprehensive that the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act 2005 weakened their bargaining capacity if corporate power, backed by Government, was unrestrained. Strengthening the strong, weakening the weak would inevitably have an impact on those in the middle. In July 2006, President Bush vetoed a Bill providing funding for embryonic stem cell research. It was his first veto. However, in ‘signing statements’ he has insisted on his right to ignore more than 750 laws enacted since 2001, in the interests of national security, indicating that he will interpret the law as he sees it, rather than following the intention of the legislature.This radical approach asserts the concept of a ‘unitary executive’ which in time of emergency can override legislation and limit the authority of the courts, for example in the case of torture or wiretapping. This represents a fundamental repudiation of the democratic, rational vision that Jefferson and Madison promoted. 526
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 527
YEARS OF EXILE
I reassure myself by remembering the words of my hero Franklin D. Roosevelt in his First Inaugural Address on 4 March 1933: ‘So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself —nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’ We must reject fear as a driving force for public policy, commit ourselves to rationality and courage, insisting that politics is about ideas and values, not a product to be sold. Courage is a high priority.* Unilateralism and neo-con advocacy of ‘American exceptionalism’, having manifestly failed, may prove to be mere transitional phases.We must promote fresh initiatives for international co-operation and understanding, promoting generosity and searching for understanding, leading to collaborative attempts to preserve the world and its people. We must address the problems of famine, poverty, dispossession and diseases, trying to address the causes of terrorism, rather than obsessively concentrating on symptoms. Our species is infinitely complex, infinitely precious, infinitely vulnerable, infinitely destructive, but also infinitely capable of the sublime and transcendent. We must continue to aspire to the universal, to explore the galaxy, to explain mysteries, of which humans are the most perplexing. Australia, and my Party too, must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and ‘telling truth to power’. As he lay dying, Tolstoy reaffirmed his commitment to rationality: ‘Even in the valley of the shadow of death two plus two does not make six.’ When Primo Levi was a prisoner in Auschwitz, he broke off an icicle and sucked it to relieve his thirst, until a guard knocked it out of his hand. ‘Warum?’ (‘Why?’), he asked. The guard replied, ‘Hier ist kein Warum’ (‘Here is no why’). In too many of our public acts, there is no ‘Why?’ Our blind adoption of irrational policies, supine and unquestioning acquiescence to anything the US proposes is potentially destructive. Our democratic society depends on insisting on answers to the ‘Why?’ questions. The optimistic note on which I hoped to end A Thinking Reed, with autumnal light glinting on the leaves and hills of the landscape ahead, has eluded me. Howard’s victory in 2004 could be explained rationally but Bush’s win was more worrying, suggesting that the world had moved into a post-rational era. * In 2004 Russ Feingold, a Democrat, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2002 and against all appropriations for the Iraq War, was re-elected in Wisconsin with 56 per cent of the vote. John Kerry won just 50 per cent of the vote in Wisconsin.Voters recognised courage and were prepared to vote for it. 527
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 528
A THINKING REED
I live in the spirit of Beckett’s words: It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know. I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know.You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.*
* Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable. 528
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 529
Afterword
As I was correcting the proofs, Rosemary Hanbury, the unseen presence in so many of these chapters, died suddenly. Intellectually and aesthetically we converged but temperamentally we could hardly have been more different. I seemed to be an incurable optimist compared with her tough pessimism, and as I strove for the universal and theoretical, she concentrated on the immediate and specific. Despite that, she was my Siamese twin and for decades our relationship, later marriage, was at various times rewarding, inescapable and painful. But its centrality in both our lives was unquestionable. When she died, part of me died too.
529
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 530
‘The Second Coming’
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? W.B.Yeats (1919)
530
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 531
Lists
HEROES OF OUR TIME Mohandas Gandhi Andre Trocmé Dietrich Bonhoeffer Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop Simone Weil Raoul Wallenberg Nelson Mandela Sophie Scholl Mikhail Gorbachev Andrei Sakharov Desmond Tutu Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso) Margaret Hassan Aung San Suu Kyi GREAT MUSIC Motets, Josquin des Prez Masses, William Byrd Vespers, Claudio Monteverdi Messiah, G.F. Händel Mass in B Minor BWV 232, J.S. Bach St Matthew Passion BWV 244, Bach Easter Oratorio BWV 249, Bach Prelude and Fugue in E Minor BWV 548, Bach The ‘Nelson’ Mass, F. J. Haydn 531
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 532
A THINKING REED
String Quintet in G Minor K 516, W. A. Mozart Symphony No. 41 in C Major K 551, Mozart Requiem K 626, Mozart Piano Sonata No. 32, op. 111, Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 9, op. 125, Beethoven String Quartet No. 15, op. 132, Beethoven String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, Franz Schubert Requiem, Giuseppe Verdi Piano Concerto No. 2, op. 83, Johannes Brahms Symphony No. 7, Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection), Gustav Mahler Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler Images, Claude Debussy The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky La Valse, Maurice Ravel Violin Concerto, Alban Berg Concerto for Orchestra, Béla Bartók Symphony No. 13 (Babiy Yar), Dimitri Shostakovich Sinfonia, Luciano Berio FAVOURITE OPERAS Dido and Aeneas (1689), Henry Purcell Julius Caesar (1724), G.F. Händel Marriage of Figaro (1786), W.A. Mozart Don Giovanni (1787), Mozart Così fan tutte (1790), Mozart The Magic Flute (1791), Mozart Fidelio (1805), Ludwig van Beethoven Tristan and Isolde (1865), Richard Wagner Don Carlos (1867), Giuseppe Verdi Boris Godunov (1869), Modest Mussorgsky The Ring (cycle) (1874), Wagner Carmen (1875), Georges Bizet Evgenyi Onegin (1878), Piotr Tchaikovsky Falstaff (1893),Verdi La Bohème (1896), Giacomo Puccini Der Rosenkavalier (1910), Richard Strauss The Makropoulos Case (1925), Leo˘s Janá˘cek Lulu (1935), Alban Berg 532
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 533
LISTS
FAVOURITE FILMS Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, American, 1941) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, American, 1942) Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, British, 1948) The Third Man (Carol Reed, British, 1949) Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira, Japanese, 1951) Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, Swedish, 1957) Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, American, 1957) North by North-West (Alfred Hitchcock, American, 1959) The Leopard (Luigi Visconti, Italian-French, 1963) The Train (John Frankenheimer, American, 1965) War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, Russian, 1967) Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, French, 1967) Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, French-Italian, 1972) Nashville (Robert Altman, American, 1975) Hitler, a Film from Germany (Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, German, 1977) The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, German, 1979) Mephisto (István Szábo, Hungarian, 1981) Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, Canadian, 1990) Burnt by the Sun (Mikhail Mikhalkov, Russia, 1994) Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, American, 2003)
GREAT NOVELS The Iliad (c. 750 BC), Homer (Robert Fagles translation) The Odyssey (c. 740 BC), Homer (Fagles) The Tale of Genji (c. 1020), Murasaki Shikibu Don Quixote (1605), Miguel de Cervantes Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert Bleak House (1859), Charles Dickens Crime and Punishment (1866), Fyodor Dostoevsky War and Peace (1869), Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1876), Tolstoy The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoevsky In Search of Lost Time (1922), Marcel Proust Ulysses (1922), James Joyce The Man Without Qualities (1942), Robert Musil 533
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 534
A THINKING REED
Doctor Zhivago (1957), Boris Pasternak The Tin Drum (1959), Günter Grass The First Circle (1967), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon Life A User’s Manual (1987), Georges Perec AUSTRALIAN NOVELS The Man Who Loved Children (1940), Christina Stead Power Without Glory (1950), Frank Hardy The Tree of Man (1954), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Twyborn Affair (1979), Patrick White Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), Thomas Keneally Monkey Grip (1977), Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), Helen Garner Homesickness (1980), Holden’s Performance (1987), Eucalyptus (1998), Murray Bail Bliss (1981), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Jack Maggs (1998), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Peter Carey Kisses of the Enemy (1987), The Grisly Wife (1994), The Day We Had Hitler Home (2000), Rodney Hall The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), David Malouf Cloudstreet (1991), Dirt Music (2001), Tim Winton Grand Days (1993), Frank Moorhouse The Great Fire (2004), Shirley Hazzard Slow Man (2005), J.M. Coetzee FAVOURITE PAINTINGS Lamentation, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (c. 1305), Giotto Ghent Altarpiece (1425–32), Hubert and Jan van Eyck Madonna and Canon van der Paele (c. 1436), Jan van Eyck The Descent from the Cross (c. 1435), Rogier van der Weyden The Resurrection (c. 1460), Piero della Francesco Man of Sorrows in the arms of the Virgin (1479), Hans Memling St Francis in the Wilderness (c. 1480), Giovanni Bellini An Old Man and his Grandson (c. 1490), Domenico Ghirlandaio The School of Athens (1509), Raphael The Creation of the World and Fall of Man (1508–12), Michelangelo Crucifixion Issenheim Altarpiece (c. 1514), Matthias Grünewald Last Judgment (1537–41), Michelangelo 534
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 535
LISTS
The Burial of Count Orgaz (c. 1586), El Greco Pope Innocent X (1650), Diego de Velázquez Las Meninas (Maids of Honour) (1656),Velázquez The Night Watch (1642), Rembrandt van Rijn Self portraits (1661, 1662, 1669 x 3), Rembrandt View of Delft (c. 1661), Jan Vermeer Gilles (1721), Antoine Watteau Saturn devouring his son (1824), Francisco Goya The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons (1835), J.M.W. Turner The ‘Fighting Téméraire’Tugged to her Last Berth (1839), Turner Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845), Turner The Creation of the World (1866), Gustave Courbet Mont Sainte Victoire (1898 and 1900), Paul Cézanne Big Bathers (1905), Cézanne The Starry Night (1889),Vincent van Gogh Dr Guichet’s Garden in Auvers (1890), van Gogh ‘La Danse’ with Nasturtiums (1912), Henri Matisse The Twittering Machine (1922), Paul Klee Ad Parnassum (1932), Klee Death and Fire (1940), Klee Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Pablo Picasso Guernica (1937), Picasso Self portrait (1972), Picasso Study after Velazquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), Francis Bacon White Flag (1955), Jasper Johns Night and Day (1999), Howard Hodgkin GREATEST SITES VISITED Historic sanctuary of Machu Picchu, Peru* Iguaçu/Iguazú Falls, Brazil/Argentina* Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Amazonian jungle, Brazil* Uxmal,Yucatan, Mexico* Grand Canyon, United States* Rocky Mountains Parks, Canada* Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, India* The Great Wall, China* Historic monuments of Ancient Kyoto, Japan* Historic areas of Istanbul, Turkey* 535
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 536
A THINKING REED
Ephesus, Turkey Göreme National Park and Rock Sites of Cappadocia, Turkey* Mycenae and Tiryns, Greece* Acropolis and Parthenon, Athens, Greece* Santorini (Thera), Greece Historic Centre of Rome, Italy* Venice and its Lagoon, Italy* Early Christian monuments in Ravenna, Italy* Historic centre of Córdoba, Spain* Roman monuments, Trier, Germany* Victoria Falls (Mosi-oa-Tunya), Zimbabwe* Pyramids at Giza and Saqqara, Egypt* Luxor/Karnak, Egypt* Petra, archaeological park, Jordan* Newgrange, Neolithic passage grave, Ireland* Stonehenge and Avebury, megaliths, England* Heart of Neolithic Orkney, Scotland* Winchester Cathedral, England Borobudur temple compounds, Java, Indonesia* Angkor Wat temple compounds, Cambodia* Antarctica, ice free valleys Kakadu National Park, Australia* Great Barrier Reef, Australia* Uluru (Ayer’s Rock), Australia * Tasman Peninsula (including Port Arthur), Australia Sydney Harbour, Australia FRENCH SITES Paris, banks of the Seine* Vézelay, church and hill* Saint-Germain-en-Laye, chateau, church and terraces Gavrinis, Neolithic tumulus, Brittany Barnenez, Neolithic burial cairn, Brittany Carnac, Neolithic alignments, Brittany St-Thégonnec, parish close, Brittany Pech-Merle, decorated grotto,Vézère Valley* * World Heritage listing. I have visited all of these sites. I have not yet been to Pagan (Burma/Myanmar). 536
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 537
LISTS
Arles, Roman and Romanesque monuments* Pont du Gard, Roman aqueduct* Beaune, Hotel de Dieu Fontenay, Cistercian abbey* Nancy, three public squares* Colmar, historic town Rocamadour, medieval shrine Ronchamps, Chapelle Notre Dame-du-Haut Amiens, Gothic cathedral*
537
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 538
Bibliography
Adams, Phillip A Billion Voices (Penguin Books, Melbourne 1999) Adams, Phillip and Paul Davies The Big Questions (Penguin Books, Melbourne 1996) Adams, Phillip and Patrice Newell The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes (Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1994) Altmann, Carol After Port Arthur (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006) Annan, Noël The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (HarperCollins, London, 1999) Archer, Michael, Suzanne J. Hand and Henk Godthelp Riversleigh (Reed Books, Sydney, 1991) Arendt, Hannah Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [1963] (Penguin Books, London, 1994) Australian Dictionary of Biography, 16 volumes (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962ff ) Australian Labor Party New Technology Task Force Report and Recommendations (ALP, Melbourne, 1981) Australian Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) Barenboim, Daniel and Edward W. Said Parallels and Paradoxes. Explorations in Music and Society (Bloomsbury, London, 2003) Barzun, Jacques From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (HarperCollins, New York, 2000) Beard, Henry and Christopher Cerf The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook (Villard, New York, 1992) 538
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 539
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beccaria, Cesare On Crimes and Punishments [1764] (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995) Beckett, Samuel The Unnamable [1953, translated 1958] (Picador, London, 1979) Bell, Daniel The Coming of Post-Industrial Society:A Venture in Social Forecasting (Heinemann, London, 1974) Bennett, Alan Untold Stories (Faber, London, 2005) Blewett, Neal A Cabinet Diary (Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1999) Bloom, Harold. Genius:A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (Warner Books, New York, 2002) Bobbitt, Philip The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (Allen Lane, London, 2002) Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Letters and Papers from Prison (Macmillan, London, 1953) Brett, Judith Relaxed and Comfortable:The Liberal Party’s Australia Quarterly Essay 19 (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2005) Bronowski, Jacob The Ascent of Man (BBC, London, 1974) Burnham, James The Managerial Revolution: What is happening in the world (John Day, New York, 1941) Burns, Creighton The Tait Case (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962) Burnside, Julian Word Watching (Scribe, Melbourne, 2004) Button, John Beyond Belief:What Future for Labor? Quarterly Essay 6 (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2002) Carroll, John The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited (Scribe, Melbourne, 2004) Cesarani, David Arthur Koestler:The Homeless Mind (The Free Press, New York, 1998) Childe, V. Gordon How Labour Governs (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1923, 2nd edition 1964) Clark, C.M.H. A History of Australia, 6 volumes (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962–87) Clark, Kenneth Civilisation (John Murray, London, 1973) Coetzee, John Michael Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999 (Secker & Warburg, London, 2001) Costar, Brian, Peter Love and Paul Strangio (eds) The Great Labor Schism: A Retrospective (Scribe, Melbourne, 2005) de Botton, Alain Kiss & Tell (Macmillan, London, 1995) ——How Proust Can Change Your Life (Picador, London, 1997) 539
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 540
A THINKING REED
Debray, Régis God:An Itinerary (Verso, London, 2004) Dessaix, Robert And So Forth (Macmillan, Sydney, 1998) Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov [1880] (Vintage Books, London, 2004) Duffy, Michael Latham and Abbott (Random House, Sydney, 2004) Duncan, Bruce Crusade or Conspiracy? (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001) Ellis, Bob Goodbye Jerusalem: Night thoughts of a Labor outsider (Vintage, Sydney, 1997) ——Goodbye Babylon: Further journeys in time and politics (Viking, Melbourne, 2002) Faulkner, John and Stuart Macintyre (eds) True Believers (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001) Fisk, Robert The Great War for Civilisation (Fourth Estate, London, 2005) Freeman, John Face to Face, Interviews from the BBC Series (BBC Books, London, 1989) Fukuyama, Francis The End of History and the Last Man (The Free Press, New York, 1992) ——After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (Profile Books, New York, 2006) Gabor, Dennis Inventing the Future (Secker and Warburg, London, 1963) Galbally, Rhonda Just Passions: The Personal is Political (Pluto Press, Melbourne, 2004) Gebhardt, Peter British Bulldog (Melbourne Press, Melbourne, 1996) Gladwell, Malcolm The Tipping Point (Little Brown and Co., New York, 2000) Good Weekend The two of us (Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2002) Gorz,André Farewell to the Working Class:An Essay in Post-Industrial Socialism (Pluto Press, London, 1982) Grattan, Michelle (ed.) Australian Prime Ministers (New Holland, Sydney, 2000) Grimwade,Andrew Involvement:The Portraits of Clifton Pugh & Mark Strizic (Sun Books, Melbourne, 1968) Hancock, Ian John Gorton: he did it his way (Hodder, Sydney, 2002) Hardy, Frank Power Without Glory [1950] (Vintage, Sydney, 2000) Hasluck, Paul The Chance of Politics (Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1997) Hawke, Bob The Hawke Memoirs (Heinemann, Melbourne, 1994) Hayden, Bill Hayden:An Autobiography (Collins, Sydney, 1996) Healey, Denis The Time of My Life (Penguin Books, London, 1990) Hennessy, Peter The Prime Minister (Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, London, 2000) 540
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 541
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Herzen,Aleksandr My Past and Thoughts [1852–55] (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999) Heywood, Michael The Ern Malley Affair (University of Queensland Press, Brisbane 1993) Hockney, David Secret Knowledge (Thames & Hudson, London, 2001) Hogben, Lancelot Interglossa (Pelican Books, London, 1943) Hollander, Paul Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (Oxford University Press, 1981) Holzer, Harold Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004) Horne, Donald The Lucky Country (Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1964) ——Looking for Leadership: Australia in the Howard Years (Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2001) House of Representatives Images of the House: the first Hundred Years: House of Representatives 1901–2001 (Canberra, 2002) Howson, Peter The Life of Politics: the Howson Diaries, edited by Don Aitkin (Viking Press, Melbourne, 1984) Hughes, Robert The Fatal Shore (Viking, London, 1987) Humphries, Barry My Life as Me (Viking Press, Melbourne, 2002) Huxley, Aldous Brave New World [1932] (Penguin Books, London, 1994) Illich, Ivan Deschooling Society (Boyars, London, 1971) ——Energy and Equity (Boyars, London, 1973) ——The Right to Useful Unemployment (Boyars, London, 1979) Inglis, Kenneth Stanley The Stuart Case [1961] (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, revised edition, 2002) ——This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932–83 (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983) Jones, Barry Decades of Decision 1860– (Horwitz Publications, Inc, Sydney, 1965) ——(ed.) The Penalty is Death: Capital Punishment in the twentieth century (Sun Books, Melbourne, 1968) ——The Age of Apocalypse (Macmillan, Melbourne, 1975) ——Dictionary of World Biography (Information Australia/The Age, Melbourne, 1998) ——Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work [1982] (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1999) ——Coming to the Party (Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2006) Jones, Barry and M.V. Dixon The Macmillan Dictionary of Biography (The Macmillan Press, London, 1981) 541
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 542
A THINKING REED
Kermode, Frank Not Entitled:A Memoir (HarperCollins, London, 1996) Keynes, John Maynard The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Macmillan, London, 1936) Knowledge Nation Taskforce An Agenda for the Knowledge Nation (Chifley Research Centre, Sydney, 2001) Koestler, Arthur Darkness at Noon [1941] (Penguin Books, London, 1975) Koestler, Arthur and C.H. Rolph Hanged by the Neck (Penguin Books, London, 1961) Kuhn,Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962] (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970) Küng, Hans On Being a Christian [1974] (Doubleday, New York, 1976) Lacour-Gayet, Robert Histoire de l’Australia (Fayard, Paris, 1973) Lakoff, George Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate (Scribe, Melbourne, 2004) Lamberton, Don (ed.) Economics of Information and Knowledge (Penguin Books, London, 1971) Lange, David My Life (Viking, Auckland, 2005) Laslett, Peter A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age [1989] (Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 1996) Latham, Mark From the Suburbs (Pluto Press, Sydney, 2003) ——The Latham Diaries (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005) Levi, Primo Survival in Auschwitz [1958] (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996) Long Term Strategies, Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee for Australia as an Information Society: Grasping New Paradigms (Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1991) ——The Role of Libraries/Information Networks (AGPS, Canberra, 1991) ——Expectations of Life: Increasing the Options for the 21st Century (AGPS, Canberra, 1992) ——Australia’s Population ‘Carrying Capacity’: One Nation–Two Ecologies (AGPS, Canberra, 1994) ——The Workforce of the Future (AGPS, Canberra, 1995) Lynch, David K. and William Livingston Color and Light in Nature (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995) Macdonald, Dwight The Responsibility of Peoples (Victor Gollancz, Ltd, London, 1957) ——Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm – and After (Random House, New York, 1960) ——Against the American Grain (Random House, New York, 1962) 542
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 543
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McLaren, John Free Radicals (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2003) McLuhan, Marshall The Medium is the Massage (Bantam Books, New York, 1967) McMullin, Ross The Light on the Hill (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991) Mackersey, Ian Jean Batten:The Garbo of the Skies (Macdonald, London, 1990) Maddox, Marion God Under Howard (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005) Malouf, David Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance Quarterly Essay 12 (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2003) Marginson, Simon and Mark Considine, The Enterprise University (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2001) Marr, David Patrick White:A Life (Random House, Sydney, 1991) ——(ed.) Patrick White Letters (Random House, Sydney, 1994) Marr, David and Marian Wilkinson Dark Victory (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003) Marx, Karl Grundrisse [1857–58] (Penguin, London, 1973) ——Das Kapital (Capital) [1867–83] (Penguin, London, 1976) Maslow,Abraham H. Motivation and Personality (Harper & Row, New York, 1970) Mayer, Henry and Helen Nelson (eds) Australian Politics: A Fifth Reader (Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980) Montaigne, Michel de The Complete Essays [1572–92] (translated by M.A. Screech) (Penguin, London, 1987) Morone, James A. Hellfire Nation (Yale University Press, 2003) Morris, Dick The New Prince: Machiavelli Updated for the Twenty-first Century (Renaissance Books, New York, 1999) Muggeridge, Malcolm A Third Testament (Collins and BBC, London, 1977) Murray, Robert The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties (Cheshire, Melbourne, 1970, revised 1984) Murray-Smith, Stephen Sitting on Penguins: People and Politics in Australian Antarctica (Hutchinson, Sydney, 1988) Myers, Sir Rupert et al. Technological Change in Australia, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Technological Change in Australia (CITCA), 4 vols (Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1980) Naughtie, James The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency (Macmillan, London, 2004) Niebuhr, Reinhold The Nature and Destiny of Man [1943] (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1964) 543
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 544
A THINKING REED
Nora, Simon and Alain Minc L’informatisation de la société, 5 vols (La Documentation Française, Paris, 1978). Volume 1 translated as The Computerisation of Society (MIT Press, Boston, 1980) Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Reviews of National Science and Technology Policy: Australia (OECD, Paris, 1985) Orwell, George Nineteen eighty-four [1949] (Penguin, London, 1992) ——‘Politics and the English Language’ [1946] in Essays (Penguin, London, 2000) Parkinson, C. Northcote Parkinson’s Law, or The Pursuit of Progress (John Murray, London, 1958) Parris, Matthew Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics (Viking, London, 2002) Pascal, Blaise Pensées (translated by A.J. Krailsheimer) (Penguin, London, 1966) Philips, Kevin American Theocracy (Viking, New York, 2006) Porat, Marc Uri The Information Economy (US Department of Commerce, Washington, 1977) Postman, Neil Amusing Ourselves to Death (Heinemann, London, 1986) Richards, Mike The Hanged Man:The Life & Death of Ronald Ryan (Scribe, Melbourne, 2002) Richardson, Graham Whatever It Takes (Bantam, Sydney, 1994) Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler (Macmillan, London, 1998) Roth, Philip The Plot Against America (Jonathan Cape, London, 2004) Runciman, David The Politics of Good Intentions. History, fear and hypocrisy in the New World Order (Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2006) Ryan, Susan Catching the Waves: Life in and out of politics (HarperCollins, Sydney, 1999) Ryan, Susan and Troy Bramston (eds) The Hawke Government: A Critical Retrospective (Pluto Press, Sydney, 1983) Saul, John Ralston The Doubter’s Companion (Penguin Books, London, 1995) ——The Unconscious Civilization (Penguin Books, Toronto, 1997) Schillebeeckx, Edward Jesus,An Experiment in Christology [1974] (Crossroad, New York, 1981) Schweitzer, Albert J.S. Bach [1905] 2 vols (A.&C. Black, London, 1955) ——Out of my Life and Thought [1931] (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1998) 544
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 545
BIBLIOGRAPHY
——The Quest of the Historical Jesus [1906] (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2001) Sexton, Christopher Burnet: A Life (2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1999) Singer, Peter The President of Good & Evil (Text, Melbourne, 2004) Stargardt, A.W. (ed.) Things Worth Fighting For (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1952) Steigmann-Gall, Richard The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003) Steiner, George Tolstoy or Dostoevsky [1958] (Penguin, London, 1967) Stretton, Hugh Australia Fair (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005) Strunk,William, Jr and E.B.White The Elements of Style [1959] (Longman, New York, 2000) Suskind, Ron The One Percent Rule (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006) Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen Hitler, a Film from Germany (Farrer, Strauss and Giroux., Inc., New York, 1982) Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace [1869] (Penguin Books, London, 2005) Van Loon, Hendrik Willem The Story of Mankind (Harrap, London, 1921) ——The Home of Mankind (Harrap, London, 1933) ——Van Loon’s Lives (Harrap, London, 1943) Vermes, Geza Jesus the Jew (Collins, London, 1973) ——The Changing Faces of Jesus (Penguin, London, 2000) ——The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (Penguin/Allen Lane, London, 2003) Victorian Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) Warhaft, Sally (ed.) Well May We say . . . The Speeches that Made Australia (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2004) Watson, Don Death Sentence:The Decay of Public Language (Knopf, Sydney, 2003) ——Weasel Words (Knopf, Sydney, 2004) Weller, Patrick Dodging Raindrops—John Button: A Labor Life (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999) West, Andrew and Rachel Morris Bob Carr: a self-made man (HarperCollins, Sydney, 2003) Wheatcroft, Geoffrey The Strange Death of Tory England (Allen Lane, London, 2005) Wheen, Francis How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (Fourth Estate, London, 2004) Whitlam, (Edward) Gough The Whitlam Government 1972–1975 (Viking, Melbourne, 1985) 545
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 546
A THINKING REED
——Abiding Interests (University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1997) Wilson, Edmund To the Finland Station. A Study in the Writing and Acting of History [1940] (NYRB, New York, 2003) ——(ed.) The Shock of Recognition [1943] (The Modern Library, New York, 1955) Wright, Ronald A Short History of Progress (Text, Melbourne, 2005)
546
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 547
Acknowledgments
A Thinking Reed was commissioned by John Iremonger (1944–2002), and we worked closely on early drafts, until one week before he died. I was deeply grateful for his encouragement. John arranged for Louise Sweetland, who had worked with me on Sleepers, Wake!, to succeed him as editor. Her persistence, integrity and energy has been outstanding. Wendy Sutherland, a legendary figure in editing, has worked with me closely in the final phase and we both enjoyed the experience. Rebecca Kaiser and Patrick Gallagher managed the project from Sydney with tact, persistence and encouragement and I am deeply in their debt.
547
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 548
Index
ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, formerly Commission) 18, 31–2, 39, 43, 54, 58, 108–9, 127–8, 217, 293–4, 311, 333–4, 345, 380, 458, 476, 520 Aboriginal rights 194, 196, 231, 343, 406, 433 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron 167, 300 Adams, Henry 301 Adams, John 301, 329, 503 Adams, Phillip Andrew 47, 127, 191–3, 211–19, 229, 291, 379–80, 418 Afghanistan 486, 495, 498, 507, 519 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 526 Aitkin, Don 368 al-Qaida 486, 495, 497–500, 507, 509 Allen, Woody 310, 417 Altman, Robert 113 Amos, Derek 236 Anderson, Don 67–8 Anderson, Perry 489 Andrew, Leah (née Hollings) 115, 119 Andrew, Prof. Rod (Richard Roderick) 85, 105, 209, 232, 381 Andrews, Kevin James 407–8, 453 Andrews, Norman 81, 89 Annan, Kofi 504 Annan, Nöel, Baron Annan 446 Antarctica 339, 344–5, 360–3 Anthony, (John) Douglas 93, 122, 243, 355 Anti-Hanging Committee (Victorian) 85–6, 90–2, 205, 209, 229
Archibald Prize 59 Arendt, Hannah 524 Argerich, Martha 263 Aris, Michael 409–10 Arnold, Matthew 273, 429 Attenborough, Sir David Frederick 294–5 Attlee, Clement Richard, 1st Earl Attlee 6, 64–5, 135, 149–50, 182–3, 202, 477 Atwater, Lee 484 Auden, W.H. (Wystan Hugh) 273, 430 Aung San Suu Kyi 409–10 Austen, Jane 369 Australia Council 198, 216, 292 Australia Prize 378, 390; see also ‘Prime Minister’s Science Prize’ Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) 403–4 Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament (1959) 161 Australian Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) 23, 187 Australian Council for the Arts (now Australia Council) 191, 214 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) 166, 332–3, 340, 348 Australian Democrats 240 Australian Film and Television School 193, 198 Australian Film Commission 191, 198, 216
548
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 549
INDEX
Australian Film Development Corporation 191 Australian Labor Party (ALP) 78–84, 132, Chapter 5 passim, 225–6, 239, 245, 247, 254, 321, 335–6, 340, 343, 345–7, 348, 352, 368, 389, 391–2, 394, 400, 405, 468–74 Australian Medical Association 348 Australian Republican Movement (ARM) 413–14 Australian Research Grants Committee (ARGC) 364 Australian Research Grants Scheme (ARGS) 368–9 Australian Science and Technology Council (ASTEC) 380–1 Australian Stem Cell Centre (ASCC) 453–4 Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) 146, 159, 166, 242 Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (ACM) 413 Bach, Johann Sebastian 90, 260–3, 266–8, 270, 272, 305, 309, 431, 438, 532 Bacon, Francis 288, 426–7, 536 Bacon, Jim 98, 447–9 Baels, Mary Lilian, Princess de Réthy 58, 382 Bailey, Will(oughby) 451 Baker, Dame Janet 262, 265 Bali bombing 100, 498, 525 ‘Bali nine’ 99, 102 Ball, Richard 208, 210 Banks, Norman Tyrrell 104 Barenboim, Daniel 263, 268 Barlow, Kevin 97, 342 Barnard, Lance 169, 198 Barry, Bill 153, 155–6 Barry, Jack 110, 112 Barry, Sir John Vincent 84, 208 Batterham, Dr Robin John 454 Battersby, Dr Jean (née Robertson) 200 Baudouin, King of Belgium 382 Baume, Michael 368 Baume, Peter 368 Bax, Sir Arnold Edward Trevor 272 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 18, 31, 39, 57, 104, 110, 127, 272, 290, 294, 307, 371 Beat the Brains [quiz program] 109–10, 127
Beazley, Kim Christian 70, 128, 178, 335, 341, 352, 406, 412, 457–8, 460–3, 471, 474, 494, 516, 519, 520 Beazley, Kim Sr 152, 169, 193, 199 Beccaria, Cesar 83–4, 87, 92 Beckett, Samuel 222, 279, 295, 528 Beckett, William James 138, 156 Beethoven, Ludwig van 7, 260, 263, 268–70, 305, 533 Begin, Menachem 253 Bell, Daniel 316 Bennett, Alan 70, 285, 477 Bennett, Colin 191, 213 Bentham, Jeremy 131, 448 Bergman, Ingmar 264 Berio, Luciano 305 Berlin, Sir Isaiah 133–4, 308 Bernstein, Leonard 265, 295, 305 ‘Bethany’ 14, 17–20, 23, 32, 41, 46 biotechnology 250–1, 378, 403, 453–4 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh 156, 338, 514 Black, Alexander James 9, 11–13, 15, 25–7 Black, Marion (née McConnon) 16, 25–6 Black, Ruth Millicent (née Potter)(‘Nana’) 4, 9–11, 13–17, 19, 21–2, 27, 29–30, 32–3, 38, 50, 57, 61, 63, 70, 73, 119 Blainey, Geoffrey Norman 302 Blair, Tony 446, 472, 480, 491–3, 499, 503, 506–8, 517, 523 Blewett, Neal 241, 334, 335, 343, 388, 390, 392, 462–3 Blix, Hans 504 Bloch, Ernst 263, 305 Block, Peter 95 Bloom, Harold 275, 425 Boardman, Dr (Norman) Keith 381 Bogarde, Sir Dirk 264 Bolte, Sir Henry Edward 84–5, 87–8, 90–2, 96, 123, 153, 156, 170, 188, 205, 514 Bondarchuk, Sergei Fyodorovich 282, 534 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 75, 433, 532 Bonython, Kym 291 Boulding, Kenneth 311 Boulez, Pierre 305 Bourke, Jack 138, 143 Bowen, Lionel Frost 170, 173, 241, 335–6 Bracks, Steve 98 Bradman, Sir Donald George 34, 67, 128 Brahms, Johannes 183, 263, 270, 305, 533 Breathnach, Agnes 371, 373, 375 Brett, Judith 348
549
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 550
A THINKING REED
British Israel World Federation (BIWF) 16–17, 57 British Labour Party 132, 134, 174 Brittany 3, 439, 441 Britten, Benjamin, Baron Britten 273–4, 305 Broadby, Reg 152, 159 Bronowski, Jacob 294–5 Brosnan, Father John 78, 90, 92 Brown, Bob (Robert John) 392 Brown, John Joseph 121, 241, 252–3, 405 Brownlee, John Donald Mackenzie 14 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne 10, 39, 445 Bruckner, Anton 270, 305, 533 Bruton, John 373 Bryant, Martin 98, 448, 519 Burke, Edmund 116, 233 Burnet, Sir (Frank) Macfarlane 105, 128, 185, 210, 213, 222, 233, 293, 311, 403 Burnham, James 314, 482 Burns, Creighton 85, 110, 238 Burnside, Julian 464 Burrow, Sharan 464 Bush, George Herbert Walker 306, 436, 481, 484, 487, 491, 523 Bush, George W(alker) 436, 481, 484, 492–3, 498–500, 502–11, 526–7 Butler, Richard Austen, Baron Butler 446, 477 Button, John Norman 70, 128, 166, 170, 171, 175, 227, 246, 321, 336, 351, 358–60, 366, 380, 388, 390, 391–2 Buxtehude, Dietrich 263, 305 Bye, Alfred 51, 77–8 Caesar, Julius 309, 484 Cahill, Joe 78, 158 Cain, John Jr 146, 171, 174, 177–8, 235–6 Cain, John Sr 69, 79, 82, 139, 144, 145, 150, 152–3, 154, 155–6, 159–60, 166 Cairns, Jim (James Ford) 157, 161, 169, 171, 173, 194, 199, 238–9, 240, 242, 478 Calwell, Arthur Augustus 69, 82, 92, 143, 156, 162–3, 164, 169, 195, 226 Cambridge University 445–7 Cameron, Clyde Robert 171, 175, 242–3, 356 Campbell, John 96 Camus, Albert 76–7, 511 Capek, Karel 312 capital punishment see death penalty capitalism 131, 475, 485
Cardus, Sir Neville 54, 260 CARE Australia 393, 450, 452 Carlton, Jim (James Joseph) 181, 478 Carr, Bob (Robert John) 176, 181, 203, 449 Carroll, John 268, 495–6 Casey, Richard Gardiner, Baron Casey of Berwick 115, 187, 354, 393 Cass, Dr Moss 164–5, 171 Cavaillé-Coll, Aristide 267, 438 Cavalier, Rodney Mark 408, 411 Ceaus¸escu, Elena 383–4 Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae 383–4 censorship 194, 211 Chadwick, Owen 301 Chambers, Brian 97–8, 342 Chaplin, Sir Charles Spencer 48, 312 Charles, Prince of Wales 377–8 Chekhov, Anton 279–80, 308 Cheney, Dick 502, 522 Chifley, Ben (Joseph Benedict) 26, 69, 106, 128, 129, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141–3, 146, 162, 202, 339, 456, 477 Child, (Gloria) Joan Liles (née Olle) 173, 247–8, 343, 405 Childe,V(ere) Gordon 441 ‘children overboard’ 497, 518 China 100, 149, 196, 342, 487, 536 Chipp, Don 93, 122, 193 Chopin, Frédéric 262, 264, 270 Christie, Sir Vernon 230 Churchill, Sir Winston Spencer 47, 64, 80, 124, 135, 139, 183–4, 202, 477 civil liberties 500, 520 Clair, René 312 Clarey, Percy James 152, 159 Clark, (Charles) Manning (Hope) 186, 219, 280, 299, 301–2, 311, 418 Clark, Kenneth, Baron Clark 294–5 Clarke, John 351, 453, 464, 473 Clayton, Robert 81, 89 climate change 521–3; see also Greenhouse issues Clinton, Bill 404, 455, 493 Coetzee, J.M. (John Michael) 46, 99, 260, 534 Cohen, Barry 171, 202, 241, 252–3, 344, 355, 369, 405 Colbourne, Bill 152, 158 Cold War 135, 140, 142, 151, 164, 477, 486–7, 489–90 Coleman, Les 153, 156 Coleman, Peter 214, 216
550
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 551
INDEX
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 273 Commission for the Future 216, 376, 379–80 communism, Australia 137, 139–60 Communist Party of Australia (CPA) 139–40, 143–5, 158, 212 complexity diagram, Knowledge Nation report 460 Conlon, Alf(red Austin Joseph) 59, 96 Connor, Xavier 166, 171 Constitutional Convention (ConCon) 395, 412–14 Cook, Bill (William Glanville) 109 Cook, Peter 392, 444 Coombs, H.C. (‘Nugget’) 26, 191, 202, 206, 231, 293, 358 Córdoba, Spain 5, 537 Costello, Michael 456–7 Costello, Peter 415–16, 459 Country Party 122, 138–9, 243 Cousteau, Jacques 295, 345 Cowan, Bert 37–8, 54 Cowen, Sir Zelman 85, 109, 119, 416 Crawford, Hector William 126, 206, 210 Crean, Frank 156, 169, 172, 199, 238 Crean, Simon Findlay 70, 128, 172, 337, 352, 366, 370, 454, 469, 472, 474 Crick, Francis 185, 251–2, 308, 378 Crock, Gerard 452 CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) 105, 334, 354, 356, 359, 378, 380, 381, 384, 387, 389–90, 451, 522 Curtin, Elsie (née Needham) 18 Curtin, John 18, 24, 64, 96, 128, 137, 339, 477 Dahlitz, Dr Julie 238–9 Dalai Lama 407 Daly, Fred 169, 242 Dandenong High School (DHS) 86–7, 90, 119, 123 Dante Alighieri 7, 274, 441 Darwin, Charles Robert 7, 46, 131, 309, 353, 503 Davey, Jack 110, 114 Davis, Prof. Glyn Conrad 468 Davis, H.O. (‘Bramah’) 146, 152, 159 Dawe, Bryan 453, 473 Dawkins, John Sydney 128, 241, 336, 339, 342, 348–51, 358, 386, 388–92 de Botton, Alain 25, 284
Deane, Sir William Patrick 85, 158, 449–50 Dearnley, Dr Ralph 123, 127 Dease, John 107–8 death penalty Chapter 3 passim, 194, 342, 479 Debray, Régis 419–20, 425 Debussy, Claude 261 Delahunty, Mary Elizabeth 464 Delius, Frederick 14, 183 Della Bosca, John Joseph 180–1 Deller, Alfred 90, 262–3 Delors, Jacques 373, 401 Democratic Labor Party (DLP) 156–60, 164–5, 172, 235 Deng Xiaoping 370, 475, 487 Dickens, Charles 131 Dickinson, Emily 275–6 Dictionary of World Biography [Jones, Barry] 6, 182, 203, 302–9, 403 Didion, Joan 501–3 Dillon, Sir John Vincent 233 Disney, Walt(er Elias) 260, 295 Dixon, Brian James 95 Dixon, M.Vibart 304, 307–8 Dixon, Peter 306–7, 455 Dixon, Sir Owen 86–7, 91 Dobell, Sir William 59–60 Dobie, (James) Don(ald Mathieson) 395 Doherty, Peter Charles 185, 387, 452, 455, 460 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 69, 270, 280–2, 429 Doube,Val(entine Joseph) 86, 90, 229, 235 Downer, Alexander 519 Drucker, Peter 328 Duffy, Michael (writer) 411 Duffy, Michael John 166, 246–7, 336–7, 342, 356, 366, 392, 405 Dulux Show,The [quiz program] 110 Dunlop, Sir Edward (‘Weary’) 105, 532 Dunstan, Sir Albert Arthur 56, 79 Dunstan, Don(ald Arthur) 84, 173, 194 Dyer, Bob 110, 113–16, 118–19, 122–4, 126–7 Dyer, Dolly (née McLean) 113–15, 127 Eggleton, Tony 190, 450 Ehrlich, Paul 48–9 Einstein, Albert 7, 353, 431 Einstein Factor,The 128 El Greco 287 Elgar, Edward 183, 266
551
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 552
A THINKING REED
Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns) 273, 324 Elizabeth II, Queen 147–8, 256, 383 employment, theories of 321–31, 399 Encounter 190, 206, 210, 219, 231, 293 Enlightenment, The 134, 432, 436, 479, 501–2, 523–4 Enright, Dan 110–12 Ephesus (Efes), Turkey 440 euthanasia 407–8 Evans, Gareth John 128, 174, 335, 341, 344, 352, 399, 405, 407, 410–11 Evatt, Dr Herbert Vere 52, 65, 82, 128, 137, 143–51, 156–62, 195, 200, 514 Eyck, Hubert van 286, 535 Eyck, Jan van 7, 286, 289, 535 Fabian socialism 131–2, 135 Fabian Society 131, 161, 167, 174 factions (ALP) 136, 152, 166–7, 169, 171–3, 175, 180–1, 225–6, 239, 245, 247, 254, 335–6, 348, 368, 389, 391–2, 469–74 Fadden, Sir Arthur William 147, 514 Fagles, Robert 273 Fairhurst, Dr W.A. 237 Faulkner, John Philip 145, 175, 337, 518 Federal elections 1946 69, 138 1949 137, 140 1951 142 1954 147–8 1955 157, 170 1958 160–1, 170 1961 164, 170 1963 128, 165, 170 1966 169–70 1969 170–1, 191 1972 172, 197 1975 200–1 1977 108, 196, 201, 238, 240–1 1983 254, 311, 333 1984 334 1996 174, 178–80, 343 1998 180, 416 2001 462–4 2004 472, 527 Fehmel, Raymond 260 Feingold, Russ(ell Dana) 527 Fenner, Frank John 185, 381 Ferrabosco, Alfonso, the Elder 368 Ferrabosco, Alfonso, the Younger 368 Ferrier, Kathleen Mary 262 Feynman, Richard Philips 185
film industry 250–1, 345, 358, 477 Flannery, Tim 462 Flaubert, Gustave 283, 534 Ford, Henry 270, 322–3 Fordham, Robert 229, 236 ‘Fourth Age’ 397, 443–4 Fowler, Jack Beresford 278 France 263, 438, 439 Franco, Francisco 99, 205, 400, 416, 432 Fraser, (John) Malcolm 93, 110, 189, 192–4, 196, 198, 199, 204, 249, 256, 311, 316, 333, 339, 344, 354, 416, 450, 477, 481, 496, 520 free markets 475–82, 490 Freeman, John 294 Freemasons 152, 163 French Revolution 130, 268, 274, 296, 299, 429, 485, 488, 524 Freud, Sigmund 271–2, 280, 284, 309 Friedman, Milton 252, 317, 478 Fukuyama, Francis 485, 512 fundamentalism Christian 434–7, 503–4, 506, 508, 510 Islamic 435, 479, 499–500, 503, 512 Gabor, Dennis 315 Gair,Vince 152, 159 Gaitskell, Hugh Todd Naylor 149, 477 Gajdusek, (Daniel) Carleton 185 Galbally, Jack (John William) 84, 171, 228–30, 235 Galbally, Rhonda (née Samuel) 379–80 Galbraith, John Kenneth 311 Galileo Galilei 7, 434 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 133, 135, 183, 282, 433, 532 Gandhi, Rajiv 342, 384 Gates, Bill 370 Geelong 8–10, 13–14, 17–18, 20–3, 25, 27–30, 32–3, 37–8, 40–3, 48, 50–1, 54, 56–7, 60, 62–3, 70, 73, 103, 134, 241, 419 gender issues 325, 343–4, 362, 402, 434, 470 Georgiou, Petro 520 Ghent Altarpiece [Hubert and Jan van Eyck] 203, 286–7 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 287 Giblin, Lyndhurst Falkiner 26 Giblin, Thomas 25–6 Gillard, Julia Eileen 177 Gillies, Ian 123, 127 Gilroy, Norman, Cardinal, Archbishop of Sydney 144, 158
552
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 553
INDEX
Giotto di Bondone 286 Giurgola, Aldo 256, 258 global warming 521–3; see also Greenhouse issues ‘globalisation’ 489–90 Gombrich, Sir Ernst Hans 308 Gooch, George Peabody 300 Goodluck, Bruce 255–6 Goodwin, Richard N. 111–12 Goon Show,The 293 Goossens, Sir Eugene 143 Gorbachev, Mikkhail Sergeivich 393, 486, 488 Gore, Al(bert) 377, 503 Gorki, Maksim 280, 282 Gorton, Sir John Grey 93, 172, 185–94, 201, 213, 333, 339, 354 Gott, Ken 140, 161 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de 287 Grainger, Percy Aldridge 183 Grattan, Michelle 196, 334, 375 Gray, Gary 178, 180, 202, 351 Green, Dr Roy Montague 356, 375, 378, 385, 451 Greene, Graham 304, 434 Greenhouse issues 354, 362, 377–8, 380, 521, 523 Grimwade, Sir Andrew 293 Grounds, Roy 86, 106 Groupers see ‘Industrial Groups, The’ Grünewald, Matthias 287 GST (Goods and Servies Tax) 179–81, 351 Gulf War (1991) 342, 490, 505 Guy, Athol 95 Halman, Talat 401 Hamer, Sir Rupert James (‘Dick’) 84, 93, 95, 144, 228, 230, 232, 234–5, 237 Hamilton, Charles a.k.a. Frank Richards 43–4 Hanbury, Rosemary 86, 108–9, 119, 124, 138, 168, 209, 219, 310, 529 Hancock, Keith Jackson 67, 148, 153 Hand, Gerry 227, 335 Händel, George Frideric 263, 267, 305 Hanson, Pauline Lee 169, 405–7, 464, 489, 491, 508 Hardy, Frank 36, 138, 535 Hardy, Thomas 76, 273 Harradine, Brian 169, 415, 453 Harris, Max 59
Hartley, Bill (William Henry) 165, 175 Hasluck, Sir Paul Meerna Caedwalla 82, 188–9, 199 Hassan, Margaret (née Fitzsimmons) 450–1, 532 Hastings, Warren 116–18 Hawke, Bob (Robert James Lee) 70, 98, 128, 164–5, 171, 172–3, 174, 176, 222, 226, 246–7, 254, 311, 321, Chapter 10 passim, 362, 366–7, 469, 481–2; see also Hawke government Hawke government 196, Chapter 10 passim, 354, 355–60, 363–5, 371–2, 378, 384–9, 391, 444, 482, 496 Hawke, Hazel 341, 386 Haworth, Sir William Crawford 138, 161 Hayden, Bill (William George) 128, 164, 172–3, 175, 227, 241, 245–6, 254, 321, 330, 335, 336, 341, 343, 348, 379, 478, 481 Haydn, Joseph 268, 305 Hayek, Friedrich von 317, 478 Hearne, Alice (‘Alys’) Ida Octavia (née Potter) 10, 15, 21 Hearne, Oswald Charles 10, 15, 54 Heifetz, Jascha 261, 305, 507 Herald, Herbert 20, 36 Herald, Tui Barbara (née Black) 13, 19–21, 36, 39 Herring, Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Francis 96–7 Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich 133–4, 280, 297, 486 Hewson, John Robert 179, 351, 462 Hicks, David 472, 494, 519–20 Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) 350, 471 Hill, Levinia (‘Aunt Levine’)(née Trickey) 4, 23 Hill, Ted (Edward Fowler) 23–4, 187 Hilliard, Bob 115, 119, 126 Hindemith, Paul 261, 305 Hiss, Alger 6, 65, 213 Hitchcock, Alfred 48 Hitler, Adolf 39, 47, 49, 64, 75, 133, 309, 322, 432–3, 484, 512–13, 525 HIV/AIDS 343, 434, 452, 489 Hobbes, Thomas 428, 437, 507 Hockney, David 288–90 Hodgkin, Sir Howard 290–1, 536 Hodson, George 88, 90 Hogben, Lancelot 61
553
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 554
A THINKING REED
Hogg, Bob 177–8, 239, 321 Holding, (Allan) Clyde 153, 170, 171–2, 199, 226, 228, 233, 234, 235–6, 238, 241, 335 Holland, Greg 348 Hollingworth, Archbishop Peter John 380 Hollway, Thomas Tuke 80, 153–5 Holt, Harold Edward 169, 187, 196, 339 Holt, Robert Wilfred 147, 152, 156–7, 168 Homer 7, 257, 273, 305, 309, 489–90, 534 homosexuality, decriminalisation 193, 234 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 273, 275–6 Horne, Donald Richmond 181, 315–16, 386 Horowitz,Vladimir 214, 261, 305 Howard government 365, 391, 415, 453–4, 456, 458–60, 462, 496–8, 506–7, 508, 513–14, 516–17, 518–22 Howard, John Winston 110, 179, 249, 334, 339, 378, 406, 407, 412, 414–15, 416, 453, 478, 481, 482, 484–5, 494, 506, 507–8, 509, 519, 520, 526; see also Howard government Howe, Brian Leslie 68, 241 Hughes, Andrew Arthur 11, 39, 56–7, 316 Hughes, William Morris (‘Billy’) 137, 144, 146 Hughes, Robert Studley Forrest 288, 290, 295, 448 Hugo,Victor 283, 305, 424 Hull, Cordell 39 Humphreys, Ben 241, 253 Humphries, ( John) Barry 8–9, 69, 106–7, 219, 279, 293 ‘Huntley’ 14–15, 17, 20, 32–3, 50 Huxley, Aldous Leonard 205, 312–13, 426 Ibsen, Henrik 279, 295, 430 ICOMOS see International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Illich, Ivan Denisovich 319, 329 ‘Industrial Groups, The’ 141–2, 144, 146–8, 152–3, 158–9 Information Australia 308, 403 Information, Please [quiz program] 11, 61, 104, 106, 109 ‘Information Revolution’ 242, 249, 310–11, 315, 324, 327, 330, 357, 366–7, 373–4, 395–6, 486 infotainment 112, 476, 513 Inglis, Kenneth Stanley 39, 67–8, 84 Innes, Ted (Urquhart Edward) 226–7
Interim Council for a Film and Television School 191, 214 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) 451 International Labour Organisation (ILO) 333, 341 Ionesco, Eugene 279, 295 Iran 475, 478–9, 481, 506, 526 Iraq 102, 342, 434, 450–1, 479, 481, 495, 498–500, 504–8, 513, 515, 518, 523, 526 Israel 16, 57, 241, 245, 252–3, 342, 500 Istanbul 286 Jacobi, Ralph 241, 245–7, 405 Janácˇek, Leosˇ 265 Jansen, Grace 123 Jefferson, Thomas 283, 503, 526 Jesus Christ 3, 7, 16, 57, 73, 101, 134, 253–4, 272, 282, 286, 309, 417, 419–24, 432, 434–7, 441, 525 John XXIII, Pope 159, 164, 433–4, 477 John Paul II, Pope 100, 252, 434, 485–6 Johnson, Lyndon Baines 169 Johnson, Samuel 25, 106, 296 Jones, Claud Edward 4, 9–11, 24, 28–32, 34–8, 51, 55–6, 61, 65, 68–70 Jones, Clem 413 Jones, Martha Jane (née Gerring) 9, 11, 24, 43 Jones, Owen 9, 11, 24–5 Jones, Rosemary see Hanbury, Rosemary Jones, Ruth Marion (née Black) 4, 9, 19, 21, 28–32, 34–40, 42, 49–51, 55, 57, 61–2, 64, 70, 119 Joseph II, Emperor 87, 269, 437 Joshua, Robert 153, 157 Joyce, James 77, 308 Jung, Carl Gustav 284, 303, 418 Junior Information [quiz program] 61, 103–4 Jupp, Jim 161, 167 Kael, Pauline 297–8 Kafka, Franz 76, 430 Kant, Immanuel 229, 429, 431, 524 Karmel, Peter 358, 455 Karnak, Egypt 440 Keating government 178, 196, 357, 396, 444, 518 Keating, Paul John 70, 128, 146, 170, 176, 193, 254, 261, 302, 334, 335, 336, 339, 351, 392; see also Keating government
554
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 555
INDEX
Kelly, Bert (Charles Robert) 477–8 Kelly, Ned 78 Kelty, Bill 337 Kemp, David 449, 460 Kemp, Roger 257, 292 Keneally, Thomas Michael 129 Kennedy, Graham 68, 108, 115 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 165, 477 Kennelly, Pat(rick John) 143, 145, 146, 152, 156, 159, 162, 163 Kennett, Jeff(rey Gibb) 406, 416 Keon, Stan(dish Michael) 144, 150, 153 Kerin, John Charles 128, 241, 336, 384, 405 Kermode, Sir Frank 267, 298 Kerr, Sir John Robert 59, 193, 199, 200 Kerry, John 494, 510, 527 Keynes, John Maynard, 1st Baron Keynes 26, 317, 477–9, 482 Khomeini, Ruhollah 478–9, 481, 486 Khruschev, Nikita 139, 149, 158, 205, 522 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye 430 Killen, Sir (Denis) James 93, 202 Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard 76 Kirby, Justice Michael Donald 255, 381, 402, 404, 408 Kirkwall, Orkney 26, 441 Kivikoski, Esko 124–5 Knowledge Nation Taskforce 181, 396, 454–64 Koestler, Arthur 83, 86, 94, 135, 204–10 Koestler, Cynthia (née Jefferies) 205–6, 209–10 Kolakowski, Leszek 135–6 Kondratiev, Nikolai Dimitrievich 319 Kuhn, Thomas S. 327, 434 Kuron, Jacek 252 ‘Labor Unity’ 172, 239 Lalor, Federal electorate 171, 173, 201, 238–40, 400, 405 Lalor, Peter 221, 240 Lamb, Tony 56, 167, 227 Lamberton, Don 315, 455 Lane, Allen 303, 305 Lang, John Thomas ( Jack) 137, 146 Lange, David Russell 185, 213, 341, 480, 482 Larkin, Philip 71 Lascaris, Manoly 220, 223–4 Laslett, (Thomas) Peter Ruffell 328, 397, 443–7
Latham, Sir John Greig 105, 142, 148–9 Latham, Mark William 201, 204, 410–12, 461, 472–4, 493 Law, Phillip Garth 360 Lawrence, Carmen Mary 177, 455, 470–1 Le Carré, John 499, 506 Lee, Jean 81, 89 Leigh,Vivien 277 Lenin,Vladimir Ilich 134, 172, 183, 322–3, 432 Leo XIII, Pope 132, 432 Leonardo da Vinci 7, 287, 289 Leonski, Edward 51, 79 Léopold III, King 58 ‘Levellers’ 131, 454 Levi, Primo 527 Li Peng 342, 375 Liberal Party, Fightback! 179, 351, 462 Liberal–Country Coalition 138 Lincoln, Abraham 131, 309, 501–2 Lipatti, Dinu 262 Liszt, Franz (Ferenc) 183, 260, 262 Locke, John 428–9, 437 London Underground bombing 498, 525 Long Term Strategies, Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee for 395, 397–9, 405, 443–5 Loosley, Stephen 175–7 Lorimer,Virgilius Vogel 15–16 Lovegrove, Dinny (Denis) 141, 145, 152–3, 166, 170 Lovely, Louise (née Carbasse) 37–8 LTS Committee see Long Term Strategies, Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee for Lusher, Stephen 248–9 Lyons, Joseph Aloysius 43, 137 Macdonald, Dwight 297–8, 429–30 Machu Picchu 439, 536 Macintyre, Stuart 145, 337 MacSween, Don(ald Roffey) 148, 152, 156–7 Maddox, Sir John 370–1 Madison, James 471 Madrid bombing 498, 525 Mahathir bin Mohamad, Dr 98, 342, 373 Mahler, Alma (née Schindler) 183 Mahler, Gustav 183, 261–2, 265, 270, 533 Malaguzzi, Loris 467 Malouf, David 436, 535
555
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 556
A THINKING REED
Malthus, Thomas Robert 444–5 managerialism 476, 480, 482–3 Mandela, Nelson 404, 490, 532 Mandelbrot, Benoît 308 Mann, E.A.(Edward Alexander) (‘The Watchman’) 11, 39 Mannix, Archbishop Daniel 83, 137, 141, 144, 162, 165 Mao Zedong 135, 149, 183, 322, 475 Marr, David 218, 497 Marx, Karl Heinrich 131–3, 309–10, 312, 314–15, 317–19, 438, 482, 488 Marxism 131, 134 Mathews, (Charles) Race (Thorson) 167, 227, 240 Matisse, Henri 290 Maugham, W(illiam) Somerset 263 May, Robert, Baron May of Oxford 387 Mayor Zaragoza, Federico 400–1 McCahon, Colin 291 McCance, Norman 38, 52, 58 McCarthy, Eugene Joseph 214 McCaughey, Patrick 292 McConnon, Abigail 25–6 McCutcheon, Andrew 70 McDonald, Sir John Gladstone Black 79, 139 McEwen, Sir John 187, 192 McGarvie, Dick (Richard Elgin) 85, 166, 175, 230 McLeod, William Robert 230, 232 McMahon, Sir William 93, 187–8, 192, 193, 196, 249, 339, 478 McManus, Frank 153, 157 McNicoll, Sir Walter Ramsay 13 Medawar, Sir Peter Brian 185, 308 media ownership 345, 436 Medibank 174, 209 Melbourne High School (MHS) 66–8 Melbourne, State electorate 227–39 Melbourne University 104–5, 140, 143–4, 148–9, 182, 468 Melchior, Lauritz 69, 271 Melville, Herman 125, 296, 438, 442, 534 Melzer, Jean 173, 252 Memling, Hans 64, 535 Mencken, Henry Louis 297, 459 Menuhin, Hephzibah 262 Menuhin,Yehudi 262 Menzies, Sir Robert Gordon 47, 57, 69, 82, 84, 128, 138, 140–4, 147, 156, 158, 333, 334, 339, 393, 477, 514
Methodism 131, 134 Michelangelo Buonarroti 7, 266, 273, 287, 309 Mildren, John 247, 405 Miller, Dora M. 36–7 Milligan, Spike (Terence Alan) 293 Milton, John 227, 273 Minchin, Carol Ann (née Jones) 4, 10, 15, 47, 50, 452 Mitchell, Robert Philip Lemon 86, 120 Mitterrand, François 306, 334, 481 Monash, Sir John 63–4, 105 Monk, Albert 152, 159 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 46, 102, 259, 283, 425–7 Monteux, Pierre 261, 265 Moore, Henry Spencer 288, 308, 326–7 Moraitis, Spiro 52, 68 Morone, James A 101, 503 Morosi, Junie 240 Morris, Dick (William) 131, 493–4 Morrison, Bill 170, 354 Mountbatten of Burma, Admiral of the Fleet Earl 117, 185, 308 ‘Movement, The’ 140–1, 144, 147, 151, 153, 156, 159–60 Moylan, Judi 520 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 5, 7, 14, 260, 262, 267–70, 272, 308–9, 437–8 Muggeridge, (Thomas) Malcolm 213 Mullens, Jack 144, 150 ‘Multi-Function Polis’ (MFP) 376 multiculturalism 194, 405, 407 Mumford, Lewis 326, 328 Mundine, Warren 470–1 Murdoch, Rupert 84, 142, 403 Murphy, Lionel Keith 93, 194, 198 Murray, Robert 141, 151, 156, 160 Murray-Smith, Stephen 85, 109–10, 127, 133, 140, 145, 161, 212, 219 Mussolini, Benito 279, 432 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich 260, 266, 533 Myer, Kenneth Baillieu 199–200 Myers, Rupert 316 Nader, Ralph 213, 241, 487 Nathan, Howard 161, 166 National Civic Council (NCC) 159, 165 National Economic Summit Conference (NESC) 337–8, 356–7 National Party 137, 243–4
556
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 557
INDEX
National Science and Technology Centre 378, 385–6 Native Title legislation 179–80 ‘New Labour’ 492–3 ‘new normal, the’ 476, 502, 505, 511; see also ‘old normal, the’ New York Review of Books 298 Nietzsche, Friedrich 122, 430 Nixon, Richard Millhous 149, 196, 484, 517 Nolan, Sir Sidney Robert 54, 59, 78, 221–2, 430 Nossal, Sir Gustav Joseph Victor 185, 251, 366, 381, 403, 408, 455 numinous, the 418, 438–9 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 371–3, 375, 393, 399 oil politics 500, 505, 523 ‘old normal, the’ 502, 504, 511 Oliphant, Mark 65, 185 Olivier, Laurence, Baron Olivier 71, 277–8, 534 One Nation 180, 405–7, 464, 489, 508 Opas, Philip 88, 90–2 Orkney, Scotland 441 Orwell, George 43–4, 77, 135, 205, 296, 313–14, 484, 491, 510–11 Osama bin Laden see Usama bin Laden Osborne, Prof. William Alexander 4, 6, 11, 40, 61, 104–9, 117, 209 Otto, Rudolf 418 Oxford University 447 Packer, Kerry 192, 515 Page, Sir Earle 122 Parkinson, C. Northcote 314–15, 322 ‘Participants, The’ 166–8, 170, 172, 174–5, 227 Partridge, Frank John 120–3 Pascal, Blaise xiii, 102, 229, 242, 312, 425–8, 430, 437, 522 Pasternak, Boris 172, 214 Pater, Walter 259 Paterson, Jan 86, 91 Paterson, Robert 88, 90 Patrick, Dr Alison (née Hamer) 87 Paul VI, Pope 164 Peacock, Andrew Sharp 93 Peacock, Jim 251 Pei, I.M. (Ieoh Ming) 258
Pell, George, Cardinal 416 Penn, Henri 11, 70 Perec, Georges 4, 284–5, 535 Perutz, Max Ferdinand 185, 308 Petrov, Evdokia 147, 149, 157 Petrov,Vladimir 147, 149, 157 Petty, Bruce 212–13, 216 Picasso, Pablo 309, 536 Pick-a-Box 20, 86–7, 103–29, 291, 295 Pius IX, Pope 432 Pius XII, Pope 159, 432 Polites, George 333 ‘political correctness’ 180, 466, 491 Pollard, Reg(inald Thomas) 162–3, 195, 242 Pollock, Jackson 203, 290 Pope, Alexander 273 Popper, Sir Karl Raimund 133, 308, 328, 434, 512 Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (PAHSMA) 98, 447–50 Port Arthur, Tasmania 98, 537 Postman, Neil 112, 313 Potter, Edith Anna (‘Auntie Edie’) 4, 11, 14, 16–21, 30, 32–3, 38, 41, 46, 57, 61, 73 Potter, George Edward Tertius 16, 18, 21, 30 Potter, Gwen 10, 21, 30 Potter, Hughie 18, 21, 33 Potter, Martha Andrews (née Huntley) 22–3 Potter, May (née Meakin) 21, 30 Potter, Willerton 22–3, 33 Potter, Willerton (‘Wit’) 21, 30 Pound, Ezra Loomis 304 Power, Dr John Joseph Wardell 291 preferences 155–6, 158, 160, 249, 334, 462 Prices and Incomes Accord 341–3, 357 ‘Prime Minister’s Science Prize’ 391 Proust, Marcel 28, 284 ‘public good’ 475–6, 480, 482 public libraries 396, 476 public schools 465–7 public service, politicisation of 365, 513–14, 517 Puccini, Giacomo 271 Purcell, Henry 90, 263, 265, 533 Qantas 336, 347, 471 Quiz Kids,The [quiz program] 107–8 Quiz Show 111–12
557
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 558
A THINKING REED
Rado, Erwin 191, 213 Rafferty, Joe (Joseph Anstice) 237–8 Ramsay, Major-General Sir Alan Hollick 66–7 Raphael 7, 287 Ravel, Maurice Joseph 261–2, 264–5 Ravenna 5, 285, 424, 438 Ray, Robert 239, 252, 335, 348 Reagan, Ronald Wilson 232, 479, 481, 484, 486 Redford, Robert 111 Redlich, Peter Joseph 68, 199 refugees 450, 496–8, 516, 518, 520 Reggio Emilia, Italy 467 religions 419–25, 429, 431–7, 441 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn 7, 287, 289 republic referendum 414–15 Richards, Mike 89, 98 Richardson, Graham 176, 344, 348, 386 Richter, Sviatoslav Teofilovich 262–3 Rilke, Rainer Maria 213, 308, 430 Rimbaud, Arthur 273 Ritchie, John 267, 403 Rivett, Rohan Deakin 84, 109, 120 Robertson, Bryan 234–5 Robson, Lilian 49–50, 60, 64, 70 Rolph, C.H. 83, 94 Roman monuments, Trier, Germany 537 Rome, Italy 424, 537 Roncalli, Cardinal Angelo see John XXIII, Pope Roosevelt, Eleanor 465 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 11, 31, 39, 58, 64, 133, 135, 139, 183, 202, 309, 307, 477, 483, 527 Rosenberg, Ethyl 82–3, 165 Rosenberg, Julius 82–3, 165 Ross, Lloyd 152, 158 Rostropovich, Mstislav Leopoldovich 262–3 Roth, Philip 436, 512 Rothschild, Emma 371, 446 Rubinstein, Arthur 262, 270 Rudd, Kevin Michael 396, 455 Ruddock, Philip Maxwell 178, 249, 518 Rumsfeld, Donald 498 Runciman, David 510 Runciman, Gary (Walter Garrison), Viscount 492, 524 Rushdie, Salman 486 Russell, Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd Earl Russell 182, 212, 285, 315, 431, 445
Ryan, John 85, 90–1 Ryan, Ronald Joseph 84, 88–92, 94, 98–9, 123, 188 Ryan, Susan Maree 173, 336, 343, 363, 379, 405 Saddam Hussein 100, 102, 479, 490, 495, 498–500, 504–6, 511 Said, Edward W(adie) 268–9 Sambell, Geoffrey 85, 91 Santamaria, Bob (Bartholomew Augustine) 141, 144, 147, 151, 156, 158, 160, 165, 172, 175, 209–10, 415–16 Saul, John Ralston 465, 489 Saving the Ozone Layer Conference 377–8 Scalia, Antonin 483 Schama, Simon 295, 510 Schepsi, Fred 212, 358 Schmidt,Vladimir 214 Scholes, Gordon 170, 336 Scholl, Sophie 525, 532 Schubert, Franz Peter 260, 262, 264, 268, 270 Schweitzer, Albert 11, 58, 266, 420–1, 430–1, 434 Scott, David Horace Ford 86, 91 Scully, Frank 156, 159 Seidler, Harry 400 Sellin, Thorsten 92, 94–5 Sen, Amartya 446 September 11, 2001 attacks 495, 497–9, 501–2, 504, 506, 509, 511 Shakespeare, William 7, 110, 203, 213, 221, 238, 266, 273–4, 278–9, 283, 295, 309, 426 Shannon, Claude 319–20 Shaw, George Bernard 205, 278–9 Shmith, Athol 206 Short, Laurie 152, 158 Sibelius, Jean 125 Sickert, Walter Richard 288, 291 SIEV 4 controversy 497 SIEV X sinking 497, 518 Sievers, Wolfgang 293 Simenon, George 284 Simon, Barry 248–9 Sinclair, Ian McCahon 93, 234–4, 249, 407, 409, 413, 444 Singer, Peter Albert David 504 slavery 100–1, 130, 402, 431, 433, 436, 479, 501 Slayter, Prof. Ralph Owen 380, 389, 391
558
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 559
INDEX
Sleepers,Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work [Jones, Barry] 242, 310–31, 357–9, 366, 369–72, 374–6, 399, 482 Slovo, Joe 178 Smith, Adam 317–19, 478 Smith, John Sommerville 116 Smith, Joshua 59 Smith, Thomas Weetman 81 Snedden, Sir Billy Mackie 93, 128, 164, 188–9, 193, 197–8, 249 Socrates 489–90, 511, 515 Solidarity (Solidarno´s´c) movement 252, 486 Solti, Sir Georg 271 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 172, 534 Song Jian 45 Sontag, Susan 290, 512 Southey, Sir Robert John 416 Soviet collapse 486–9, 512 Spanish Civil War 139, 205 ‘spin’ 458, 460, 476, 483–5, 492, 515 Stalin, Josef Vissarionovich 47, 75, 80, 134–5, 139–40, 158, 172, 183, 205, 432, 512, 522 Stargardt, Alfred Wolfgang 143 Starke, Sir John Erskine 85, 88–9, 91 Steiner, George 282–3, 487 Steketee, Mike 336, 375 stem cell research 453–4, 476, 483, 508, 526 Stempel, Herb 111–12, 123 Stephen, Sir Ninian 382, 408 Stevenson, Adlai Ewing 135, 167, 184 Stokowski, Leopold 48, 260, 265, 267 Stone, John 197, 346 Stone, Ken 86, 166 Stoneham, Clive Philip 86, 166, 170 Stonier, Brian 307 Strauss, Richard 263, 266, 289 Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorovich 184, 260–1, 288, 304, 373 Stretton, Hugh 320–1, 326, 516 Strizic, Mark 293 Stuart, Rupert Max 84–5, 89 Sturdee, Lieutenant-General, Sir Vernon Ashton Hobart 97 Suharto 342, 373 suicide bombers 499, 525 Summerscale, Sir John 303–4 ‘sunrise industries’ 339, 355, 357–8 Swift, Jonathan 25, 272 Sword, Greg 180–1, 410
Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen 512–13, 534 Taft, Bernie 24, 175 Tait, Robert Peter 85–9, 91, 123, 205 Tampa incident 462, 472, 496–7 Tasmania 26, 98, 324, 339, 344, 355, 447–9, 514 Taylor, Alan John Percevale 301 Taylor, Hugh Ringland 452 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 260, 265–6, 270 Tegart, Dr Greg (William John McGregor) 356, 374, 385 Temple, Frederick, Archbishop of Canterbury 58 Temple, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 11, 57–8, 418, 432 Templer, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Walter Robert 185, 308 terrorism 186, 475–6, 495–7, 499, 506, 516, 520, 525, 527 tertiary education 250, 348–51, 368, 410–11, 482 Thatcher, Margaret Hilda (née Roberts), Baroness Thatcher 184, 317, 339, 377, 478–82, 486–7, 492, 521 ‘Third Age’ 328, 397, 443–4, 447 ‘third way’ 488–9, 492–3 Thomas, Irene 123, 127 Thompson, John 200 Thompson, Lindsay Hamilton Simpson 94 Thomson, David 354 Tiananmen Square massacre 342, 487 Tic-Tac-Dough [quiz show] 110–11, 113 Tickell, Sir Crispin 377 TINA [‘There is no alternative’] 480, 515 Tippett, Sir Michael 262, 308 Titian 60, 287 Toeplitz, Jerzy 215 Tolstoy, Leo Nikolaievich, Count 75, 124, 220–1, 280–3, 426, 429, 527, 534 torture 83, 281, 342, 479, 485, 502, 505, 511, 519, 526 Toscanini, Arturo 260, 272 trade unionism 151, 469, 526 ‘triangulation’ theory 493–4 Trounson, Prof. Alan Osborne 453–4 Troy 257 Truman, Harry 65, 135 tsunami (2004) 476, 508 Tucker, Albert 54, 59, 79, 234 Turner, Ian Alexander Hamilton 140, 171, 212, 290
559
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 560
A THINKING REED
Turner, Joseph Mallord William 288,536 Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park 344 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) 65, 283, 373, 399, 401–3 United Nations Security Council 499, 507 United States of America 87–8, 99–100, 435–6, 479, 486, 495, 498, 503–6, 509–10, 518 University of the Third Age (U3A) 443 Updike, John 296, 304 uranium 367, 471 Uren, Tom 175, 241, 335 Usama bin Laden 495–6, 498–500, 504, 509–10 Ustinov, Peter 132 Uxmal,Yucatan, Mexico 439–40 Vaizey, John, Baron Vaizey 235 Vaizey, Marina 235 Van Doren, Charles 111–12, 123 Van Loon, Hendrik Willem 44–6, 60, 205, 425 Van Nguyen Tuong 99–100, 102 Veidt, Conrad 48 Velázquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva 287–9 Venice and its Lagoon, Italy 537 Verdi, Giuseppe 270–1 Vermeer, Johannes 7, 285, 289 Vermes, Geza 421–3 Victorian Schools Innovation Commission (VSIC) 464–8 Voltaire 83, 87, 263, 426 Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard 3, 50, 60, 69, 260, 268, 270–2, 309, 432, 513 Walker, (David) Stanley 15, 17, 19–20, 29, 41, 50, 186 Walker, Evan Herbert 70, 167, 256, 448–9 Walker, Helen 20, 50 Walker, Iris Willerton (née Black) 13–15, 17, 19–20, 29, 40, 43, 50 Walsh, Peter 336, 339, 349, 364, 391 Walton, Sir William Turner 266, 277 ‘war on terror’ 495, 506 Ward, Eddie 146, 195 Watson, Don 457, 485, 517 Watson, James Dewey 251, 308 ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs) 504–5, 507, 518, 523
Webb, Beatrice 131 Webb, Sidney 131 ‘wedge politics’ 461–2, 476, 484–5 Weil, Simone 312, 532 Welles, (George) Orson 216 Wells, H.G. (Herbert George) 43–4, 60, 133, 205, 312 West Gate Bridge 234, 237 West, Stewart 241, 336, 355 Weyden, Rogier van der 287, 535 Whale, John 424 Wheen, Francis 478–9, 503 White Australia Policy 143, 162–3, 168, 174, 194, 196 White, Patrick Victor Martindale 124, 211, 213, 218–25, 306–7, 535 White,Vivienne 464 Whitlam, (Edward) Gough 70, 84, 93, 128–9, 136, 149, 162–3, 169–70, 171, 172, 173, 191, 194–204, 218, 240, 241, 243, 245–6, 306–9, 327, 333, 334, 339, 350, 373, 396, 399, 410, 444, 477 Whitlam, Margaret Elaine (née Dovey) 194, 201, 202, 204, 218, 373 Wiener, Bono 127, 167 Wilde, Oscar 76–7, 106, 279, 284 Wilkes, Frank 170, 228, 236, 239 Wilkinson, Michael 308, 403 Williams, Fred(erick Ronald) 291–2 Williams, Robyn 380 Williams, Tennessee 279, 295 Willis, Ralph 70, 335–6, 339, 342 Wilson, Edmund 296–7 Winchester, Jim 123, 128 Wirth, Tim(othy Endicott) 437 Wodehouse, P.G. (Pelham Grenville) 44, 304 Woodfull, William Maldon 67 Wordsworth, William 273–4 World Heritage areas 202, 339, 344, 369, 438, 441, 449, 536–7 World Heritage Committee 395, 399–400 World War I 8, 14, 19, 40, 44, 77, 136, 162, 432 World War II 30, 47, 51, 80, 96, 121, 132, 139–40, 202, 317, 323, 419, 431–3, 477, 509, 512–13, 525 Wran, Neville Kenneth 78, 107, 381, 469 Wren, John 36, 138, 145, 156 Wright, Prof. Sir Roy Douglas (‘Pansy’) 105
560
Think Reed Paperback version
22/10/07
12:05 PM
Page 561
INDEX
Wright, Ronald 99 Wright, Tony 224–5 Yates, Bill 244–5, 247 Yeats, William Butler 224, 273, 276, 530 Yeend, Sir Geoffrey 346, 357 Yencken, David 451, 455
Young, Mick (Michael Jerome) 171, 250, 324, 335–6, 444 Young, William 53 Zhou Enlai 149, 183 Zillman, Dr John William 382, 409 Zuckerman, Solly, Baron Zuckerman 388
561
