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Also by Anne Blair Ted Serong:The life of an Australian Counter-insurgency expert (2002) There to the Bitter End:Ted Serong in Vietnam (2001) Lodge in Vietnam:A Patriot Abroad (1995)
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All photographs courtesy of Bruce Ruxton’s private collection unless otherwise credited. Front cover: Bruce Ruxton in front of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne at dawn on 14 April 1998. (Photo: The Herald & Weekly Times/Mike Keating) Back cover (top): Private Bruce Ruxton on Morotai, Netherlands East Indies, in 1945, before his service as a rifleman in Borneo. (Bottom): Bruce, aged five, at Kew State School. Many thanks to Mark Knight for his permission to reproduce the cartoons which appear on pages 13 and 197.
First published in 2004 Copyright © Anne Blair 2004 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 National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Blair, Anne, 1946 – . Ruxton: a biography Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 222 9. 1. Ruxton, Bruce. 2. Returned Services League of Australia. Victorian Branch – Officials and employees – Bibliography. I. Title. 615.5 Set in 12/14 pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd, Sydney, New South Wales 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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This book is dedicated to David Chandler, generous scholar, and mentor to so many.
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Acknowledgements
This book was written with the support of the National Centre for Australian Studies, where I am an honorary research associate with the Centre, in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, Monash University. Special thanks for their interest and assistance over the years must go to John Arnold, Jenny Hocking and David Dunstan, to Chris Baker, and to Margaret Spier and Jan Field. A generous advance from Allen & Unwin allowed me to employ the services of Judith Gregory as a research assistant. Judy proved to be quite outstanding in locating information and advising on problems of procedure throughout the hectic two years of the preparation of the book. At Allen & Unwin, publisher Ian Bowring was exceptionally helpful throughout the writing process. I wish also to thank Joanne Holliman, Senior Editor at Allen & Unwin, who went well beyond the call of duty in advising me in the re-writing of several sections of the work.Thanks also to Emma Singer of the publishing section. The always enthusiastic and resourceful staff at the State Library of Victoria solved many problems along the way, and
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to take the opportunity to express my ongoing gratitude to them. I would also like to recognise the support given by Terry Worth, and by Maureen Burgess. I wish to thank David Chandler, Andrew J. Ray and Brian Caddell for reading the manuscript and offering suggestions. Many thanks are also due to my friend Pamela Caddell who encouraged the project from the beginning, and who was the first to suggest the image for the cover of the book.Trevor Cooke gave much wise advice. I am grateful to all the people who answered letters and spoke to me on the issues of this story. Thanks also to both Jill and Bruce Ruxton for their hospitality, and most especially to Bruce for recalling details of his life in many, many hours of interview, and for granting me so much of his time. As always, my greatest debt is to James Blair. Without Jim’s support, I could not have started this book, let alone finished it.
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Contents
Acknowledgements Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
In the Reserves Private Ruxton Civvy Street Gains the captaincy Triumph and tragedy Up before the tribunal Contacts Women and combat Little Aussie battler The Vietnam veterans The longest campaign Grand Final
Endnotes Index
6 11 15 27 41 55 73 91 109 121 133 151 161 181 199 202
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Preface
On a summer morning in the gardens of the Civic Centre in Echuca, in January 1989, I caught a glimpse of a side of RSL President Bruce Carlyle Ruxton which I had not previously thought to exist. Ruxton was speaking quietly, and briefly, to a group of elderly men and women.The occasion was the unveiling of a memorial wall naming those from the local area who had served overseas from World War II to Vietnam. Ruxton’s presence was one of simple dignity.‘So,’ I thought,‘this is how you would be, if you stuck to doing your real job.’ It did not occur to me at that time that being the ‘Big Bad Bruce’ beloved of radio and television journalists might also be central to the way Ruxton saw ‘doing his real job’. Twelve years later, a secretary called to ask me to make a time to speak with Mr Ruxton at his office in Bevan Street, Albert Park. Ruxton had written a review of my recently published book, There to the Bitter End:Ted Serong in Vietnam, to appear in Mufti, the Victorian RSL journal in April 2001. We met several times after that. Knowing that no biography had been written, I was interested in that project. I was nervous about embarking on such a controversial subject. I thought a good place to start
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PREFACE
would be to record an oral history. In fact, as Mr Ruxton pointed out, the Australian Archives had recorded several hours on his long service with the RSL the year before. He then turned to the several hundreds of volumes which lined two walls of the office. ‘The life is in those,’ he said. The volumes were clearly the place to start.They contained family memorabilia, including poetry and old photographs, Bruce’s letters home from the war, and all the speeches, correspondence and conference records from his long reign as Victorian RSL president. In addition, the volumes were thick with newspaper reports on every aspect of Ruxton’s public statements and addresses to a variety of audiences, supplied by a commercial cuttings service. The collection would certainly be a superb source of material for a biography, I thought. So I began . . . Anne Blair
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Mark Knight, Herald-Sun, Monday 11 July 1994
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1 In the Reserves
Well before dawn each Saturday morning in the late 1930s, a boy turned up at Jellis’s bakery in Kew Junction. He was there to hitch the horse to the baker’s cart, to load it up and to ride on the baker’s round as the runner, delivering bread on the streets between the Junction and the Yarra Bend Golf Course. Just after noon, he presented the square cane basket full of sweet-smelling loaves to a customer for the last time that day. The boy then got on his bicycle, which he had ridden several hours earlier from the house his parents rented at 20 Molesworth Street, and rode to the Kew Golf Club. He fetched a golf bag from the professional’s shop. Every Saturday afternoon, he caddied for Thomas Spendlove, a city printer. It was the boy’s job to collect the bag from the shop where Spendlove used to leave it and to check that everything was in order. When Spendlove arrived just after one o’clock, the boy was there waiting to hand him his first club so he could tee off. The boy, of course, was the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Bruce Ruxton. In addition to the baker’s round and his caddying, he mowed every lawn in Molesworth Street on the block between Barry and Princes streets. He had already established a minor
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commercial network. He did not, however, spend all his spare time working. He was very sociable. Most of the entertainment available to the boys of the area at that time came from the Scouts. Ruxton was a member of the 1st Kew Troop of Boy Scouts, and its large membership met in the Scout Hall at the bottom of Disraeli Street. As a scout, Bruce made frequent camping trips to the Dandenong Ranges. The Scouts also took him further afield than his native Melbourne.At the end of 1938, he sailed to Sydney for the Scout Jamboree on the Canberra. On the return journey, while still out at sea, he saw smoke from the bushfires which ravaged the countryside of south-eastern Australia in January 1939. He was back in Melbourne on Friday 13th,‘Black Friday’. He recalled that even in Kew the temperature reached 117 degrees. Molesworth Street ran down to the Yarra River. Sunday was the time to be on the river. In the warmer months, the lads whom he had met at the Kew State School spent their time retrieving lost golf balls.They called their system ‘duck-diving’. They couldn’t see the golf balls.They could only feel them.They groped in the mud, then quickly plunged into the water, and out again.They sold the golf balls to the boatman Bill Macaulay, who owned the boathouse on the section of the river they worked. Each golf ball fetched about a shilling, and since it was quite possible to gather about sixty in one day, Bruce often made £3 of a Sunday.This was a considerable sum in the late 1930s. Young Bruce gave most of the golf ball money to his mother. There was enough left over, however, to allow him to purchase a canoe.The canoe took him close to the seamy side of Melbourne life, and even to brushes with the city’s underworld. On one occasion he and his friends discovered a collection of fruit machines which had been dumped in the river. The gambling machines were illegal at the time. They were operated with tokens or sixpenny pieces. Fortunately for Bruce and his mates, the investigating police allowed the lads to keep the silver coins. Later, Bruce discovered not one, but two bodies in the river.The first was a newborn baby. The second he found buoyed up by the current, when the river was high. It became clear at the later inquest, which Bruce attended with interest, that the body was 16
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that of a suicide. The boy reported locating the body to Bill Macaulay, who called the authorities. One member of the group of police who arrived was the father of a Kew State School friend. The policeman looked the enterprising boy over with a twinkle in his eye. He then asked,‘Did you kill him, Bruce?’ Years later, the appeal of Bruce Ruxton to the average member of the ex-services community derived from his image as the typical Aussie battler, an underdog, the great Australian larrikin. Yet in the 1920s, and at the time of Bruce’s birth, the Ruxton family had not been poor. Carlyle Ernest ‘Ern’ Ruxton, as he recorded on the deeds to his house, was a qualified tradesman, a bootmaker. He owned a house at 58 Kooyongkoot Road, Hawthorn, one of the most prestigious streets in Melbourne. He leased and managed two retail shoe shops, one at 190 Bridge Road and the other at 184 Swan Street, Richmond. Ernest Ruxton had married in 1923, for the first time, at the age of forty-two. His bride’s name was Ellie Deverell Prismall, but at the time of the marriage, she was Ellie Deverell Anderson. She was a 28-year-old widow. Ellie Ruxton’s first husband, Albert Anderson, had been killed during World War I, ten months before the armistice. A pilot in the Australian Flying Corps (later the RAAF), he had been shot down at Béthune in northern France, on 6 January 1918. The Prismall family may have been reasonably financially secure. On her marriage certificate, Ellie listed the occupation of her father, William John Prismall, as ‘Engineer’. Ernest Ruxton listed the occupation of his, Henri William Ruxton, as ‘Singing Master’. Ellie and Ernest had both been born in Australia. Bruce Ruxton, who developed a lifelong interest in family history, later located the papers relating to Henri’s burial. He had lived most of his life in Ballarat, having migrated in the 1850s. His son Ernest had been born in Beechworth, but the family had moved to Ballarat when ‘Ern’ was a baby. Bruce’s paternal grandmother had been born on a sailing ship, en route to Australia.The maternal grandfather, Prismall, had migrated from Redding, in England.The maternal grandmother was born in Australia. One branch of the Ruxton family were from County Louth, now in Eire.‘Ruxton’ proved to be an Irish name. In the district 17
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of Ardee, County Louth, a group of family connections maintained a traditional country estate into the 1950s. Bruce Carlyle Ruxton was born on 6 February 1926. His only surviving sibling, Shirley, arrived two years later. The Ruxton’s first child, John Carlyle Ruxton, had died in April 1924, aged two months—the cost of the funeral, furnished by Le Pine & Son of Bridge Road Richmond, was £10.3.6—the baby was buried in the Box Hill General Cemetery. Further evidence of the family’s comparative wealth in the 1920s was that Ernest paid for a plot in the cemetery, to be used in perpetuity by the members of the Ruxton family, at the time of his first son’s burial. Although she had been married in the Holy Trinity Church of England in Kew, Mrs Ruxton was a practising Christian Scientist. Family members recalled Mrs Ruxton as a woman with strongly held opinions, to the point of stubborness, and a way with words and humour. She would have liked to send her son to boarding school, on the grounds of the discipline it instilled. These aspects of his mother may have influenced the adult Bruce. He would become verbal, enormously funny, have a strong need for company and affection, and delight in receiving attention. When Mrs Ruxton eventually told Bruce about her first marriage, while he was still quite young, the boy was shocked. Ellie gave him Albert Anderson’s Flying Corps wings and hat badge. Bruce would later spend a great deal of time piecing together Anderson’s war record, and eventually located his grave in northern France. The children’s early childhood was happy. One of Bruce’s first memories of life at Kooyongkoot Road was that of his father’s pet magpie. His father was a great collector of many things. Ernest Ruxton collected stamps, coins, books and historical papers. By the time he reached secondary school, Bruce had developed the same tendencies. On his entrance forms for Melbourne High School, he listed, after his sporting pursuits, an interest in collecting stamps and coins.After the war, as a married man, he would accumulate several aviaries of birds, both native and exotic. Most famous among these birds would be Charlie, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, to be captured on Bruce’s shoulder 18
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in an award-winning character portrait. Ruxton’s long series of dogs—mostly labradors named ‘Digger’—also began in Kooyongkoot Road. His first dog was ‘Little Ted’, breed unknown. When ‘Little Ted’ was run over in 1944, while Bruce was in the wartime army, Ernest composed a poem: We have laid away to rest—Little Ted. Unashamed we shed some tears for Little Ted. He was faithful, loyal, Kind In his eyes a love Divine. And his equal rarely find,‘Little Ted’! Now he’s missing from the gate, Little Ted. No more waiting, early, late, for ‘Little Ted’. How we’ll miss that daily treat, of whirling tail, and eager feet, as he rushed each one to greet,‘Little Ted’. The Great Depression brought drastic changes for the Ruxton family.As Ernest used to say,‘Shoes are the first things to go.’You don’t replace shoes in hard times. He struggled to pay the leases on the shops. Eventually, he had to let go of both.The family had to move from the Kooyongkoot house to a flat at the rear of a block in Studley Park Road.The flat was near the present Caritas Christi Hospice, and it was from there that Bruce attended kindergarten. He remembered his mother in those and subsequent years as ‘upright and strong. She did well in those hard times.’ But the mood of his father must sometimes have been close to despair. There were two very young children to be provided for. He was fourteen years older than his wife, and she might be expected to live on for many years after him. Ernest Ruxton, in his fifties, must have found his failure bitter, and the likelihood of starting all over again very bleak. How did Bruce fare in his earliest school years? A family friend recalled that at kindergarten, the staff saw him as ‘a born leader’. By the time he was at Central School, the friend remembered that his retiring sister Shirley was often asked: ‘You’re not that 19
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Bruce Ruxton’s sister, are you?’ He talked a lot. He was a livewire. However, he did well in his studies at Kew State School and then at East Kew Central School. At the completion of the Central School curriculum at Kew East, which covered the first two years of the usual secondary program, the lower achieving half of the pupils went on to technical education, or found themselves jobs. The top half of the boys went to district high schools, or on to Melbourne High School, the girls to MacRobertson Girls’. Early in 1939, thirteen-year-old Bruce Ruxton caught a tram from Kew to Bridge Road in Richmond, and then another along Chapel Street, eager to attend his first day at Melbourne High. He was wearing the grey trousers and white shirt which were the uniform of the school. Cheapness was the aim of the dress code. The tie, maroon and green stripes on a black background, the cap, and the even rarer blazer, were not worn at school but on outside formal occasions. For the mission of Melbourne High School was to give equal access to boys from the working and lower middle classes to the opportunities available to those privileged to attend the great public schools.The school had been the vision of the great Australian educational reformer, Frank Tate, who sought to establish a government school every bit as good as any built on endowments and hefty fees. The motto of Melbourne High School was, ‘Honour the work’, which was derived from the longer quotation by a British headmaster, Edward Thring, ‘Honour the work, and the work will honour you’. Bruce responded to the aspirations of the school for its boys by recording grandly on his enrolment forms that his anticipated occupation was ‘analytical chemist’. He was undoubtedly a boisterous pupil. His earliest school report noted that he was ‘Alert and active’, but continued with the remark, ‘Lacking in concentration and balance’. Ruxton quickly joined in the life of the school. His first form master was William ‘Bill’ Woodfull, captain and opening batsman during the 1932–33 ‘Bodyline’ Test cricket series. Bruce played inter-house cricket with the Third Eleven, having been assigned to Como House, one of the four houses of the school. One of his contemporaries was Keith Miller, the future Test cricketer. Bruce was in the Como House swimming team. He played 20
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football and golf, and continued his canoeing interests, now under the discipline of the school’s long-serving sportsmaster,Alexander McKenzie. Room 9 of the school, which could hold 200 people, became a familiar Ruxton venue, where he developed his public speaking skills. He won school colours in swimming, and, as an indication of his future direction, in debating. At the close of his Central School days, Ruxton had sat for a competitive examination and had won a scholarship.This gave him £25 a year. In the Depression, this quite large amount made the difference for the family between Bruce continuing with his education, or his having to seek a job. In spite of his promise— the school recorded his IQ as 116, sixteen points higher than average—at first he did not do well in his academic subjects. Possibly, this slow progress was due to his young age at entry to the Third Form. The school decided that he should repeat Fourth Form. This was not uncommon at Melbourne High School at the time. Of the 400 pupils who had entered in 1939, 80 dropped out, and 30 repeated a year. Ruxton’s marks, especially in science and maths, improved by leaps and bounds as a result of his repeating the year. When he was in Form IIIc, a tradition began which lasted for the whole time he was at the school. Ruxton was chosen by his classmates to write the ‘Form Notes’ for the school magazine. In the second issue of The Unicorn for 1939 we hear Ruxton’s voice for the first time. ‘Captain Durand, though missing for the first month, is back, striding around the class trying in vain to keep the hooligans in order.What a job!’ Only young Ruxton could characterise the hard-working lads of IIIc as ‘hooligans’. He was the form character. Once, in the free half-hour which was form assembly, on a Friday afternoon, Ruxton entertained the boys with a snoring demonstration.The event was so famous that it was reported forty-eight years later in The Old Unicornian, the old boys’ magazine. On that long-ago Friday afternoon, Ruxton had shown ‘a point or two in the art of snoring, throwing in an occasional riotous snort by way of varying the recital’. His schoolmates described him as ‘irrepressible’. In addition to his larrikinism, his classmates also saw Bruce’s leadership potential. In Fifth Form, they elected Ruxton as their 21
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representative on the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). And when his first speech to that serious body brought thunderous applause and unheard-of laughter, they gave him a title. He became ‘our famous orator, Mr Ruxton, MSRC [Member of the SRC]’. The Melbourne High School Students’ Representative Council was more powerful than SRCs usually were. In 1942, the RAAF suggested that the school might join the Air Training Corps, a British Empire-wide organisation. The RAAF had realised that it would need greater numbers of trained people, and training in the schools gave the air force a head start. The Melbourne High Students’ Representative Council got behind the idea, and influenced the school administration to accept the invitation. As a junior member of this strong group, led by the Sixth Form boys and the prefects, the sixteen-year-old Ruxton built on the networking skills he had already demonstrated to establish contacts with people who would soon take up important positions in the community. Leonard Riddiford, the school captain and chairman of the SRC, became a professor of physics, with appointments both in Australia and Britain. David Bradley, SRC secretary, was to be a professor of English Literature. Ben Munday and Bernie Rechter, the Sixth Form representatives were both to have distinguished careers in teaching. In the photograph of the SRC published in The Unicorn in July 1942, Riddiford and Munday appear as grown men. Young Ruxton, uncharacteristically subdued, stares out gravely at his audience. Service in the armed forces was a strong tradition of Melbourne High School. One of the early masters, the later Brigadier-General Sir Walter McNicoll, had set up a School Cadet Corps in 1906–07. Old boys of the school had taken part in the landing at Gallipoli. Young Ruxton would have known that McNicoll, wounded at Gallipoli, led the first Anzac Day march, in 1916. James Hill, the left-leaning principal of the school in Ruxton’s day, had resisted the re-establishment of the Cadet Corps, which had faded out in the 1920s. Hill was a pacifist. Ruxton, being Ruxton, remembered him as a communist. He recalled Hill to the author in 2002 as ‘that communist, 22
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“Piggy” Hill’. He believed that Hill’s interest in the war did not commence until Hitler attacked Russia. Bruce remained very critical of ‘Piggy’ Hill’s lack of interest in Britain’s fate during World War II. The boys themselves were very patriotic. At the beginning of the war, they heard the news that HMS Royal Oak, a battleship, and HMS Courageous, an aircraft carrier, had been sunk in the North Sea. Kenneth Jack, later to be a well-known artist, drew a wispy North Sea on the form room blackboard in coloured chalks. In the curl of a wave he wrote,‘Lest we forget. HMS Royal Oak. HMS Courageous.’ When form master Woodfull entered the room, he made no remark.Woodfull silently wiped the board clean. He then proceeded to call the roll. The war had a direct effect on the students in Bruce’s fifth year, when he was in Form VC1.The Royal Australian Navy took over Melbourne High School in South Yarra, and the senior boys took over Camberwell High. Ken Jack, then VC1 form captain, coined the term ‘the school in exile’ for the boys’ time at Camberwell. A friend of the family described Bruce’s state of mind in those years: ‘He counted the days from the outbreak of war till he could join up.’ One day, during Bruce’s repeated fourth year, Alexander McKenzie, the sportsmaster who also taught geography and geology to 4F, lost patience with his madcap pupil. ‘Stand up, Ruxton,’ ordered McKenzie.‘What are you going to do when you leave here?’ Bruce was instantly on his feet. He had an equally instant answer:‘Join the AIF, Sir. I’m going to join up as an infantry soldier.’ From that time on, as Ruxton recalled to the author in 2002, ‘I couldn’t do anything wrong in McKenzie’s eyes.’ Earlier, Bruce had wanted to join the RAAF, as Ken Jack was eventually to do. Then he found that he was colourblind which made him ineligible for flying. He was undoubtedly disappointed. But joining the army was also in the school tradition. Others who had attended Melbourne High would be in the various units of the army, and army service was appealing, given his enjoyment of 23
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the Scouts. From 1941 onward, Bruce Ruxton was committed to joining the infantry. If Bruce’s attitude to joining up seems more characteristic of Australian volunteers for service in World War I than the more sombre mood of many of those enlisting for World War II, this may have been due to his childhood association with the Long Family. As a child, he had formed a strong attachment to this family, who lived at 17 Redmond Street, Kew. Characteristically, he had met the parents, William and Nora, when he had run into their youngest daughter, Merl, on his bike. Subsequently, he was often with the family for Sunday night picnics on the river. William Trevor Long made a strong impression on the young Bruce. Long was a Trustee of the Yarra Bend National Park and of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Later, when the family moved to Somers, he became a member of the Hastings Council. Long had served with the 7th Infantry Battalion of the First AIF, and been badly wounded at Gallipoli. Mrs Long had in fact been a World War I war bride. Long was a strong member and supporter of the Returned Services League (RSL). He introduced Bruce to a wide range of people, many of them returned servicemen.When World War II broke out,Alan, the Long’s son, immediately joined the AIF. The two girls, Dawn and Merl, joined the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS). Bruce Ruxton turned sixteen in February 1942, and he enlisted as soon as he could after his eighteenth birthday, in February 1944. Despite a legend which persists in some corners of the returned services community, Bruce did not join up at sixteen, and was not in combat overseas at the age of seventeen. On his Attestation Form when he joined up, Ruxton listed his occupation as ‘Pupil Land Surveyor’.After he left school at the end of 1942, he had taken some subjects—forestry and others, three nights a week—at the Working Men’s College, now RMIT. As a boy, Ruxton had undoubtedly responded to people rather than to theory, just as he was to do all his adult life. His best marks were in geography and geology. These were the subjects for which Alexander McKenzie took him, and so it may have been McKenzie who suggested surveying as an occupation. 24
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Ruxton finished his schooling having gained the Leaving Certificate, with passes in four subjects.The Leaving Certificate was the standard qualification for entry to university. ‘Leaving Honours’, the secondary school sixth year, was usually attempted by those aiming to increase their marks, in order to gain a scholarship.The comments on Ruxton’s final report were:‘Takes a prominent part in all class discussions. Very capable speaker. Member of the SRC.’ The assessment seems more relevant for a future in people management, Ruxton’s real career, rather than one in land measurement. He studied surveying in 1943, but on each free evening, he drilled at the Kew Drill Hall. He could hardly wait to get into the war.
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2 Private Ruxton
Bruce Ruxton joined the army as soon after his eighteenth birthday as he could. He took his medical examination on 17 February 1944. His Attestation Form, ‘For Special Forces Raised for Service in Australia or Abroad’, was filled out at the Recruit Reception Depot, Royal Park, on 21 February. His health classification was ‘A1’. He recorded his religion as ‘CS’—Christian Scientist. But the reality of his enlistment must have come home to him on 23 February 1944, when he signed a declaration that he would take charge of disposing of his civilian clothing. He was now in the army, drafted straight from the Royal Park Depot. Bruce Ruxton was in the AIF immediately. His number was VX94379. Recruits usually had to wait a month or two before they received their army number, which was the first step to overseas service. At the outset, Ernest Ruxton must have given his permission for his son to serve overseas. On 21 February 1944, Bruce Ruxton made the declaration, before official witnesses, that he was ‘willing to serve in the Australian Military Forces within or beyond the limits of the Commonwealth’. Ruxton was assigned as a reinforcement to the 2/25th Battalion, 25th Brigade, of the Army’s 7th Division. The need for
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reinforcements in the 2/25th Battalion was a stark reminder of the losses it had suffered in Syria and in the Owen Stanley Range. Initially, he thought he was on his way to the Atherton Tableland. He was, however, to spend many months in and around Brisbane, in various staging camps. In the course of his eighteen months of service in Australia, Ruxton was in fact to be stationed up and down the Queensland coast, from Brisbane to Cooktown in the far north. In late September, Bruce wrote to his family to tell them that he finally had a definite assignment to a company. He was to be attached to the 2nd Australian Field Survey Company. On his enlistment forms, as well as stating that he had a pass in the School Leaving Certificate, he had also listed the technical qualifications he had gained in his land-surveying course at the Working Men’s College. He had passes in forestry and in geometry, Grade I. In army terms, these passes placed him with the surveying corps.The 2nd Survey Company was based at Ingham, 109 kilometres north of Townsville. He was to train at Ingham for three months, and after that he was aware that he could be posted anywhere. ‘Well here I am still in this rotten city [Brisbane],’ he started his letter,‘trying to enjoy my last few days.’ In the course of the week, he had been ‘shifted from Redbank to the Yeerongpilly staging camp’, but ‘after mucking around there for 1/2 a day I was shifted to Woolloongabba’. Then, ‘I hadn’t been in Woolloongabba 24 hours when I was shifted back to Yeerongpilly’.The Woolloongabba camp was on the Brisbane football ground. ‘When I say football ground, don’t think of the MCG. It is only 1/ 2 the size.This camp is the same show as the Randwick racecourse in Sydney.’ He had had his first bad luck.About to go on recreation leave to Ipswich, he had taken his clean clothes to the shower, but he returned to find that his work shorts and the new pants he had just been issued were gone. His gaiters had been stolen, too. Replacements left him ‘penniless’.Then Bruce’s native resourcefulness surfaced.Things could have been worse. At Yeerongpilly, there were ‘all sorts of men from all units waiting different postings, and things have been going off right and left’. He ‘scrounged and salvaged a few dozen milk bottles from around 28
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the lines’, and with the bottle refund of threepence from the canteen, he soon restored his Ipswich fund. He sent home his extra clothes and a cake-tin sent by his mother Ellie. He had decided,‘The lighter you travel the better things are up here.’ Private Ruxton spent some time at the 2/25th Battalion base situated on the Atherton Tableland at Kairi. He volunteered for an engineering course. He read the Kapooka News, the engineers camp magazine. He followed the progress of the war in Europe and the Pacific longingly in Table Tops, a compilation from British and American newspapers, issued free to the troops. By December 1944, he was back at Yeerongpilly.There he received a postal order for the sum of ‘One Pound Ten Shillings’ from Ellie Ruxton on 12 December.The next day he telegraphed his family the news that he had leave and intended to be home in Melbourne for Christmas. However, this was not to be. In April 1945 Ruxton embarked from Townsville on an American ship, the USS Butner. Still attached to the 2nd Australian Survey Company, he was bound for Morotai, in the Halmahera Islands group, then part of Netherlands East Indies. The rest of the 2/25th Battalion did not embark from Queensland until June 1945. Two of Bruce’s letters home described conditions on Morotai. He was assigned to jungle clearance, a necessity for the establishment of a camp. He had just received a letter from his father, and replied with a telegram.The purpose of the telegram was to wish Ernest many happy returns on his birthday, at the end of the month. Bruce commented: ‘You have to send them off early because you don’t know when they will turn up.’ ‘Things are going alright here,’ he wrote in one of his letters, but the heat was terrible. He had to change his clothes every day because of the perspiration. His unit was camped in a coconut plantation, which they were clearing. The plantation had been allowed to run down ‘since the Japs came into the war’. Fresh water was scarce, and what there was of it had to be heavily chlorinated to prevent the spread of disease. In the morning he cleaned his teeth from his water bottle.There were spiders as big as pineapples and coconut crabs. ‘These are huge crabs with terrible pincers.They climb the tall palms and snip the coconuts 29
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off. They then climb down and break them . . . It takes you all your time to cut the husk and inside with an axe,’ he explained ‘so you can imagine what claws they have.’ A month later, he was still clearing jungle from coconut and banana stands. All AIF troops had just been issued with new stretchers, which was ‘just as well, as huge coral rocks are all over the place’. He asked about the precious stones he had been sending to Ernest and Ellie from Queensland. The Ruxton collecting interest was in operation.The stones, he explained, had been from Cooktown and the Cape. He reflected that the Tableland was ‘strictly a farming area . . . I think the North of Queensland holds a lot for the future, but Victoria will do me at present.’ The troops were fed ‘bully beef slop 3 times a day’, so coconuts were a welcome substitute. In spite of the standard complaints about the food, Bruce was in fact thriving. From Morotai he wrote on 25 May 1945, ‘You can imagine what my clothes are like.They have to be chained down at night so they won’t run off.’ On 26 June 1945, USS Tank Landing Ship (LST) 579 left Morotai. Ruxton was aboard, bound for Balikpapan, the Dutch oil port in Borneo, to participate in the last major Australian action against the Japanese of the war. As events turned out, Bruce was not part of the first landing. He was with a reserve brigade, and so his earliest assignment on Borneo was unloading stores from American transport ships. Private Ruxton’s first experience of battle was on the Balikpapan–Samarinda Road. Samarinda was one hundred kilometres north of Balikpapan, and inland, on the Mahakam River. The 2/25th Battalion moved up the left side of the dirt road, in the jungle to the west.The fighting was mainly at night. The Japanese tactic was to attack at night, and under cover of heavy rain.A striking memory of the nineteen-year-old Ruxton was that in the rain, you would fire a rifle and not hear it go off. The night was made even more eerie by the sounds of orangutans moving in the rainforest. From time to time, one of the huge beasts landed on a rotten branch, and crashed to the jungle floor. But that was the least of the problems faced by the unit as 30
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it fought its way north on the Balikpapan–Samarinda road for the rest of the war.The 25th Brigade suffered heavy casualities on its advance north. From the time of his enlistment, Ruxton had been impressed by the toughness of the Queenslanders in his unit. His feeling was that some of them had not been used to wearing boots before they joined the army and had gone barefoot most of their lives. Contrary to the widespread belief that in Queensland Aborigines could not join up, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were more than usually represented in the 2/25th Battalion. They received the same pay and conditions as the others.A section-corporal of Ruxton’s platoon was an Aborigine. He was Bill Ryder, a drover from out beyond Roma.The battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel R. H. Marson, DSO, MID, had also been droving. Marson had driven cattle on the Darling Downs, inland from his native town of Toowoomba. Predictably, his nickname was ‘Drover Dick’.Then there was the platoon sergeant, Spencer MacDonald, from Camp Hill, in Brisbane. He was known as ‘Spinner’ MacDonald. He was the toughest of them all.When Spinner MacDonald heard a rumour that the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima had killed 200,000 Japanese, he responded,‘Shit! Is that all?’ A few weeks after the Japanese unconditional surrender on 15 August 1945, the battalion moved to Samarinda. Nearby, at Sanga Sanga, was the headquarters of the Japanese Army in the area. In Samarinda, the Australians heard the first rumours of widespread Japanese atrocities. The young Private Ruxton had become used to the brown of the Malays as the natural colour of the population.When he saw a European woman on the road, he could hardly believe his eyes. She was obviously terrified. She fled into a shack opening off the street, and he felt that as a member of the liberation force, he should offer help. The woman was cowering in a corner of the shack. Ruxton said, ‘It’s all right. The war is over. I am an Australian soldier.’ But as he quickly realised, the war was not over for the woman, and nothing would ever be right for her again. The woman’s name was Koot. She was Dutch. She had been the wife of the local postmaster, but, as she told Ruxton, the 31
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Japanese had beheaded all the men of the Dutch community at Balikpapan. This had happened only a day or two before. He eventually persuaded her to come out of the shelter she had run to.As he and Mrs Koot, as he thought of her, reached the street, a Japanese soldier came by on a bicycle. Ruxton rammed the butt of his rifle through the spokes of the bicycle wheel, and then hit the Japanese soldier with it. He shouted:‘Now do you believe me? The war is over.’ The next evidence of recent Japanese brutality to come to light was a note written by a group of American airmen. The note, which had somehow reached a member of Ruxton’s platoon, was a statement that the airmen had not surrendered to a legal authority. It was a declaration from beyond the grave that they had been murdered.The officer in charge organised a work party of Japanese prisoners to dig for the bodies.The remains of the American airmen were soon located, and Ruxton watched as the soil fell away. The heads, which had been severed from the bodies, were blindfolded. Gradually, the news that the war was over spread to the slave labourers the Japanese armies had captured on Java and brought to Borneo. The survivors crept into the town. They had been hiding in the forest, but soon they were huddled in the doorways of shops. The Australians, quartered in a Dutch colonial hotel, saved food for these dispossessed people on the street. For some, starvation and illness had progressed too far. A cart went around each morning to pick up bodies.As Ruxton watched the bodies of those who had died during the night being thrown onto the cart, he was reminded of a far-off school lesson. This was like London during the Great Plague.‘The poor devils,’ he thought. The most horrifying revelation for young Ruxton came at Loakoeloe, a settlement not far upstream from Samarinda. He journeyed up the Mahakam River in a small landing craft with a group assigned to investigate an incident there.1 At Loakoeloe, there were several coalmines.The detail took up their picks and started to open the mine shafts.The labour must have seemed hard, but routine, on that hot morning.Then, in one of the holes they began to uncover bodies. They found more and more. Many of the bodies were those of young Malay women. 32
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Each one had been bayoneted to death by departing Japanese soldiers. Some of the dead women were still clutching their babies to their breasts.When the detail had fully opened up the mine shaft, they estimated that the hole contained the bodies of two hundred men, women, and children.This scene was to haunt Ruxton all his life. In October 1945, Lieutenant-Colonel Marson, ‘Drover Dick’, called the battalion out on parade. He had an important announcement to make to the remains of his unit, which was by this time back in Balikpapan. ‘Drover Dick’ informed his men that a new battalion had been formed from the 7th Division, the 65th Battalion.This new battalion would be going to Japan, and he was to be its commanding officer. Who wanted to come to Japan with him? Bruce Ruxton’s first thought was,‘I don’t want to go home yet!’ He had been in the army for almost two years, but he had experienced less than fifteen weeks of overseas service. He would go on to Japan! Private Les Hancock, who was to become Ruxton’s lifelong mate, reacted in almost exactly the same way to Marson’s news. Hancock belonged to the same company of the 2/25th as Ruxton, but served with a different platoon.They had just met at the end of the war. Hancock thought,‘I’ll go on a trip, to Japan!’ It was mainly privates who volunteered to go to Japan, Hancock recalled. The 65th Battalion was to be part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, formed to support the Americans in their occupation of Japan.A few days after Bruce and Les joined up, they left once again for Morotai, this time on a Royal Navy ship, HMS LST 303.Then, to their dismay, there was a fourmonth wait, to the south of the port of Morotai, in the Halmahera Islands. To add to their disappointment at the delay, there seems to have been very little to do. Bruce occupied some of his time on his photograph album. He added to his collection of American pin-up girl aircraft insignia.What did he think of his time in the tropical islands of Halmahera? He was frank: ‘It was bloody awful.’ At last, they were aboard the HMS Glengyle, a Royal Navy 33
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cruiser troopship, bound for Kure, a port on the main Japanese island of Honshu. On the first free day in Kure, Ruxton decided to go in search of a shave in a proper barber’s chair. It was something he enjoyed. Bruce allowing a member of the enemy Japanese to take a razor to his throat struck Les and Desmond ‘Tassie’ McDougall, a third member of their group in Japan, as hilarious. They dramatically stood guard. Of course, there were no problems—all three were to be impressed by the gentleness of the Japanese at home. But Ruxton’s first impression of Japan was of cold, and of the chill wind blowing from Manchuria.The soldiers of the 65th Battalion were still wearing their ‘Jungle Greens’. He developed malaria, and various climate-related illnesses, including dermatitis, infected feet and gastroenteritis, were to dog him through 1946. The real home of the 65th Battalion Australian members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force was to be at Fukuyama, on the inland sea. Fukuyama served as a seaplane base, with a runway into the water. Its situation was very beautiful. Fukuyama was approximately 150 kilometres from Hiroshima. The members of the 65th Battalion seem to have taken a remarkably relaxed attitude to the target of the first atom bomb. With his skill at memorising details, Ruxton noticed that the bomb had flattened the city from the sea to an inland range of mountains, where the destruction stopped.The tramlines were twisted and buckled.The wood and paper houses had burned instantly, but some concrete structures were intact. The young soldiers shopped in the streets of Hiroshima, and swam in the city’s harbour. The assignment for the 65th Battalion, on the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, was to guard trainloads of Koreans who were being transported to the ‘bottom island’, Kyushu. Some of these Koreans had been slaves of the Japanese during the war, and others were more longstanding residents. This second group sometimes resisted deportation. The Australians’ duties began somewhat north of Fukuyama, at Okayama, where they took over from American guards.They then escorted the Korean prisoners south, through an underwater train tunnel between the 34
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islands. Ruxton thought of this trip as the ‘Melbourne–Sydney run’. At Fukuoka, the end point of the run, he had his first experience of the black market. In Fukuoka, Japanese racketeers made enormous sums by forcing the Koreans to accept yen, which had been devalued by inflation, in exchange for their more valuable Korean money. The Australians then took the profits from the Japanese extortionists at rifle point. Ruxton’s own flirtation with the black market in Japan began, strangely enough, while he was in hospital. His spells in hospital were also the time when he replied most fully to letters from Ellie, and from Ernest. In a letter dated 8 July 1946, he was hospitalised, for the third time, with infected feet. He was not really ill, he wrote, and he thought that the hospitalisation was unnecessary—perhaps the doctors did not want him back a fourth time. He had sent three parcels home. The first package contained silk pyjamas and ten serviettes; the second, many photographs; and the third, a pearl ‘on a poor sort of ring’. He now regretted sending the poor pearl ring, he said, because, ‘After I sent it, I got onto a string of pearls, and 7 other large ones.They are beauts, and the real thing. I have had that verified. This Jap is a pearl dealer, and I have been working in with 2 of the nursing sisters.’ He continued enthusiastically, ‘Look out Mum! Because Bruce intends to bring home a kit-bag full!’ As Bruce later explained, he could obtain £5 worth of yen for £1 of Australian money. He had lost track of his numbering system for his packages home, however. He asked Ellie to organise a system of receipts for him. He also needed products to exchange for the pearls, silks, and other trinkets that seemed to be so available to the occupying forces. The perfect product, being light to post as well as scarce and in demand in Japan, was saccharine, the sugar substitute.A family friend later remembered its various members visiting a variety of chemists, each to obtain small quantities of saccharine. Sugar and the substitute were rationed in Australia at that time.When Bruce had the saccharine, the parcels home flowed. After Ruxton had renewed his contract with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force twice, he became more experienced in the choice of his purchases. Or so he thought. 35
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In May 1948, he wrote of a shipment of ‘antiques’:‘I have certificates of well standing to go with them, and they vary in age from 200 years to 1100 years.’The list included:‘One very large vase (old Chinese Cloisonné—this is in the 11 lb parcel), one old Chinese bowl, one very small jade disk, a Buddha from a temple in Tokyo, and a wooden pagoda (no antique).’ Among all his other activities, Ruxton did follow a trade in Japan. At the end of 1947, he completed a six-week course of instruction with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force School of Cookery. He had been declared unfit for guard duty, on account of persistent dermatitis on the tops of his feet. But the school of cookery position had its positive side. As Ruxton told the author, in the BCOF kitchens, ‘You could lay your hands on tins of coffee.These were “blocks of gold”, things to be sold on the black market.’ Bruce did so well on the BCOF cooking course that his instructors recommended him for the future position of Cookin-Charge-of-Kitchen. He was also chosen for further instruction, in a course for NCO (non-commissioned officers) cooks. His report was most encouraging: ‘This man has the ability to became a good NCO, has a retentive memory, and is well conducted.’ Unfortunately, another report was in a different pipeline.While he was attending the School of Cookery in the daytime, Bruce had ‘neglected to obey’ a command of a battalion officer. He was confined to barracks for fourteen days, and £4 was deducted from his pay.The most important consequence of his offence, however, was that his NCO status was taken from him. He had been promoted to the rank of lance-corporal. After the 1947 penalty, awarded on 24 December, he was to remain a private for the rest of his time in the army. Bruce described his day as an army cook in a May 1948 letter home. He had been working in the officers’ mess at Fukuyama, cooking for 22 officers. ‘The work has been solid,’ he wrote, ‘as they have breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning, and dinner at seven in the evening. So I have been working from 5.30 a.m. to 8 at night.Then of course supper. It must be served to the gentlemen at 9.30. Besides the meals and supper, they have cakes or scones at 10.30 and 3.30, then savouries at six o’clock at 36
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night.’ But, he concluded,‘Just the same, although I hated doing it, I did a good job—four courses for the evening meal!’ In addition to stints of hard work, there was also a great deal of free time.The battalion was often assigned to guard duties in Tokyo. It supplied guards to the British embassy, and to the Australian and Canadian legations. The most interesting assignment was to the Imperial Palace.The palace had thirteen gates. The gates were guarded by an American on one, an Australian on the next, then a British soldier, and then a Canadian, and so on, until the whole thirteen were covered. The advantage of guard duty was that the schedule was one day on, then one day off. There was golf in Tokyo, and boating on the inland sea.There was frequent rest and recreation leave. Bruce acquired a taste for Japanese flower arrangements.As he wrote home, the occupation forces commandeered all the best seats at the all-female Japanese operas of the Kobe–Osaka area. But perhaps this last was a cleaned-up account of his activities, for the eyes of his family. It is an important part of the Ruxton legend that he remained a private throughout his army service. He believed that this was what made him understand the mind of the ordinary soldier. The thousands of World War II veterans who adore him agree wholeheartedly. The record should be set straight. Ruxton was a foot soldier in Queensland, from early 1944 until April 1945. On or about 8 April 1945, he was sent from Townsville on an American ship, the USS Butner, bound for Morotai. He saw no combat in New Guinea. He was in Dutch East Indies Borneo, now Indonesian Kalimantan, from late June 1945 to late October. On Borneo he served at Balikpapan, and later at Samarinda, now the capital of Kalimantan. He joined the 65th Australian Infantry Battalion, bound for Japan, on 15 October 1945.The 65th Battalion was stationed in the Halmahera Islands of Morotai during Christmas 1945, and into February 1946. Ruxton served in Japan from late February 1946, until December 1948. Ruxton was indeed an army cook, as his detractors like to point out. He was a cook, however, in Japan, not in Borneo, where he was a rifleman. Bruce fought in the ‘shooting war’ for 50 days. His active service in Australia was 480 days. His active 37
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service overseas comprised 1285 days. He served in the Australian Army for a continuous period of five years. Another allegation sometimes made against Ruxton is that during his army service, he was found guilty several times of conduct prejudicial to military discipline. The record disproves any such ideas. The young larrikin Bruce’s disciplinary charges all took place in Japan.There are two ‘AA40’ charges, on 18 May and 25 May 1948. AA40s deal with ‘Inventory and kit belonging to’, so Ruxton had incorrect or incomplete kit, or he may have lost something, which happened often, at least earlier, in Queensland. He was fined £1 for the first AA40. For the second he was fined £3 and confined to barracks for fourteen days. The tougher penalty was understandable, but the offence itself was not particularly grave. Fifteen months later, he was charged with an AA11 offence. The AA11 charge relates to ‘summary of troops on parade, review or inspection’. Probably he did not present well when on parade.The fine was £3. A possibly suspicious accident occurred when Ruxton, then a cook with the occupation forces, fell down a flight of stairs at midnight in the Japanese city of Fukuyama.This was in January 1948. The investigation into the fall found that there was ‘no evidence of neglect, misconduct, rashness or failure to observe some specific Act or Regulation on the part of any person’. Ruxton had been on duty at the time.The most serious charge, already described, cost Bruce his promotion to the rank of lancecorporal. Private Ruxton returned home to Melbourne in December 1948. At the time of his discharge from the army, which took effect on 13 January 1949, he was three weeks away from his twenty-third birthday. His attitude to his family while he had been away was undoubtedly that his enterprise had helped them out financially during the long period of postwar rationing in Australia. He had thought he was ‘helping out’ when he had spent so much time on the streets and with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. As a family friend remembered, however, Bruce’s decision to 38
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go to Japan was hard on his parents. At 64, Ernest Ruxton was becoming elderly. He was out of work at the end of the war. Ernest Ruxton might reasonably have expected to have his son return home at the end of the fighting, and contribute on a regular basis to the family budget. On the other hand, there is no evidence in Ernest’s or Ellie’s letters to Japan to suggest that they ever complained. As we have seen, while he was in Japan, Ruxton thought of the Japanese in a fairly relaxed way. He used the offensive term ‘Jap’, but that was not unusual for Australians of the time. He certainly did not hate them. Much later, his memory skipped over the impressions he had had of the gentleness of the Japanese at home, and his mind returned to Borneo, and what he had witnessed there. He had been only nineteen when he had seen the brutality of the aftermath of war, rather than the glamour he had expected. The memory of the dead women in the pit at Loakoeloe remained especially vivid. Fifty-seven years later, in his Albert Park office, Ruxton described the sight to the author:‘There were 300 of them. Massacred.They were young Malay girls, bayoneted by the Japanese. Some of them still had babies on the tit!’ It was the bayoneted women, with their dead babies, who remained in Bruce’s memory. An undated and unsourced newspaper cutting in one of his scrapbooks gave the testimony of a survivor of the killings at Loakoeloe. On 30 July 1945, a Japanese officer had ordered the deaths, to deter the local Indonesian revolutionaries, when they gained news of the advance of the AIF 7th Division. The survivor remembered that most of the dead were males. The men had been decapitated, the women bayoneted. At the later war crimes trials, the official total of dead in this massacre was given as 128. The discovery in Loakoeloe had become an obsession for Ruxton.The shock he experienced as a young soldier goes some way to explaining Ruxton’s later attitudes to the Japanese. Unable to forgive the Japanese soldiers responsible for the massacres he had seen in Borneo, he extended his loathing to almost all Japanese in general. On balance, though, had Bruce Ruxton’s service with the 39
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infantry met up to his expectations? ‘Looking back,’ he said, ‘I don’t regret it . . . You meet people. You make friends you never forget.’ He thought further, ‘Friendships made in the infantry are especially strong.’ He returned to the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders he had met in his Queensland unit.‘They were all good soldiers.You had to depend on them—in life and death situations.’ In spite of a persistent belief in Australia that Aborigines could not join the army during World War II, those in Bruce’s unit had equal conditions and equal responsibilities. The later RSL position on what government policy towards Australia’s indigenous people should be, stemmed from this view. There was one Australia, with no separate laws, no separate benefits, and no separate land rights. Ruxton had been strongly aware that in the 2/25th Battalion, there were many who had difficulties in writing. With his Leaving Certificate, he was one of the best educated in the unit. The Queenslanders had been good fighters in the war, but even as a very young man, he said, he had had the sense that they might not do so well in peace time. He felt a sense of responsibility for the less advantaged men he had met in the army. Bruce Ruxton’s way ahead was clear by at least 1949. It would, however, take him several years to find what his true direction was.
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3 Civvy Street
In late 1949 Bruce Ruxton arrived at a very strange decision. He decided to apply for a job as a lighthouse keeper. In the year since he had returned from Japan, he had taken some short-term work with the Meteorological Bureau. This involved mapping weather patterns for defence purposes, such as planning airway routes. He had taken up again with the friends of his prewar days, as well as keeping in contact with his now demobbed army mates. He did some voluntary work for the Scouts, but he felt restless. When he saw a position advertised in the newspapers, calling for a relieving lighthouse keeper, Bruce applied. He was accepted—his war experience undoubtedly helped in his selection. He was expected to spend six months as the reliever at the lighthouse on Wilsons Promontory, until the permanent keeper could take up the job, later in the year. Furniture would be supplied but not food, and the pay would be the basic wage. Most lighthouses are isolated, but the one at the southern tip of Wilsons Promontory is especially so.The whole of Wilsons Promontory is a national park, the first to be declared in Victoria.The lighthouse is not far from the 40º south line of latitude—the ‘Roaring Forties’ zone of wind and shipwreck seas.
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Why would the company-loving Bruce Ruxton have applied for such a position? ‘I wanted to get away from my mates,’ he said, ‘from my mates in the pubs.’ As a family friend remembered,‘They had lived like lords in Japan. In the occupation force, they could do anything. He had to take a hold of himself.’ The friend went on:‘It was not that he was deeply into the grog, but his life was all social life. He had to get away from the young fellows at the pub. He had to sort himself out.’ Ruxton spent the first six months of 1950 at the lighthouse. The decision to go there was a turning point. Many of those who met him in his boyhood days, and as a young man, found him to be unfailingly well mannered and polite. His instructors in the army—even Bruce’s ‘tough Queenslanders’—had also noticed these qualities. No one viewed him as unreliable, or likely to waste his life. His friend, Les Hancock, said of this period,‘he had simply had enough’. As Bruce himself later recalled, he had lost the equivalent of £1000 in the poker school in session on the LST which had taken the British Commonwealth Occupation Force volunteers from Balikpapan to Morotai in late 1945. He had paid the debt in Dutch guilders, the local currency at the time. In the Wilsons Promontory decision there is a suggestion of difficulties in adjusting to returning home, and of problems in adjusting to dramatic change quickly. It appears that Ruxton did not want to continue living by his wits, as he had done, when not on duty, in Japan. Rather, he wanted to establish a more honourable, a more serious, course for himself. Ernest, his father, was a Freemason, a member of the Lodge of St Crispin. His son would have known that knights in the Middle Ages prepared themselves for noble missions by periods alone, fasting and praying.There is something very impressive—almost the stuff of legends—in Bruce Ruxton going to a lonely lighthouse ‘to sort himself out’. Bruce had one more pilgrimage to make before he settled down to civilian life in Melbourne. He longed to visit Britain. Like so many other young Australians of the 1950s, he wanted to work in London, to trace his heritage in the British Isles, and to travel in Europe. His savings from his army pay were considerable. 42
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In mid-1946 he had written to his mother Ellie, who helped him keep track of his accounts, that the ‘Grand Total’, by his reckoning, was £196.5.0 (Ellie’s reckoning was £2 less).There had been two further years of army money while he was still in Japan. By this time the family had moved once again, to rented accommodation at 12 Walmer Street, Kew. There was another incentive to go to London. He had recently met a young woman. She was Ruth Proud, and she would eventually become his wife. Bruce had met Ruth on a blind date in Melbourne, when another couple accompanied them. Ruth was tall for those days, at 5 feet 5 inches. She had grey eyes and long brown hair. He thought she was ‘a good looker’. At 22, she was exactly two years younger than him. They discussed Bruce’s idea of going to England, and Ruth said she had always wanted to go there, too. She had relatives there, she said. The trip would be an adventure. Ruth was originally from Cottesloe, in Western Australia. Her father, Ernest Proud, had died some time before she met Bruce, and her mother, Eleanor, was also dead. Consequently, an uncle and an aunt, whose family name was Locke, had been in charge of much of her upbringing.The Lockes owned a furniture chain, which Bruce later described as ‘a mini-Maples’. The Lockes appear to have been quite well off as they paid the expenses of various trips which Ruth made while in Britain. Ruth, whom Bruce admired as ‘a gun stenographer’, was trained as a shorthand typist. Bruce booked a return passage on the Orontes. Ruth booked one-way. When they arrived in London, they found accommodation in different blocks of flats. Respectable people did not live together before they were married in those days. Bruce was in Nightingale Lane, in South London. Ruth’s flat was around the corner. Bruce worked for John Wyeth and Brother, an ethical drug house. First, he was an itinerary clerk. Later, he was a medical detailer, who went around to the various doctors’ surgeries and medical supply companies giving details of the latest products on the market. Always a persuasive talker, he excelled in this job. Ruth’s services as a shorthand typist were very much in demand from the agency for which she worked, 43
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the Brook Street Secretarial Bureau. Bruce sent his father, Ernest, sheets of rare stamps from London, and Ernest returned specimen covers from his collection, in the hope of making a profit on them.At one stage, Bruce had a connection with a stamp dealer who was prepared to appoint him as an agent in Australia. Bruce and Ruth travelled extensively, both together and separately, especially during 1951, their second year away. A family album contains a picture of them riding in the Irish countryside. Ruth was a champion horsewoman in those days. Bruce visited the World War I battlefields of northern France. In VillersBretonneux, a key village for the Australian involvement in the battles of the Somme, Bruce was entertained by the family of the mayor—the schoolchildren of Villers-Bretonneux still celebrate Anzac Day each year, and on that day fly banners thanking Australia for their relief from the Germans in 1918. Characteristically, Bruce maintained his contact with the Villers-Bretonneux family for the rest of his life. He visited northern Africa and Italy, and spent a considerable time in Portugal and Spain, where the living was cheap. In Spain he wrote a lengthy piece entitled ‘A recent look inside Franco’s Madrid’, in which he justified the dictatorship on the grounds that it was anti-communist. What impressed Bruce most, however, was his stay with Ruxton connections in County Louth in Ireland. He may have known already that his paternal grandfather, Henri Ruxton, had gone to Australia from Ardee, County Louth, circa 1850. Or perhaps the collector mentality both he and his father shared turned naturally to family forebears when Bruce was in ‘the old country’. He located a cousin-by-marriage,William ‘Bill’ Filgate. Filgate’s two sisters had both married Ruxtons. The Ruxton family seat was in the area. Filgate invited him to stay at ‘Lisrenny’, Filgate’s ancestral home, in Ardee. Bruce’s letter home describing the visit was filled with awe. ‘Captain Filgate met me at the station in a beautiful car,’ Bruce wrote. He had travelled from Belfast and had to go through customs, as Louth was in Eire.‘The car turned into the grounds of an ancient Lodge House, a 300 year old mansion. The newest garden wall was built in 1766.’ Inside, the walls displayed ‘huge paintings of the family and others, swords, pistols, the prehistoric 44
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antlers of the one-time Irish Elk’. In addition, there were relics from galleons of the Spanish Armada, wrecked off the coast of Ireland.‘The Captain owns many horses, and over 100 hounds. He is master of the Louth County Hunt. His friend, an Indian Army Colonel, was invited for dinner.’After taking sherry in the library, they sat down to a dinner served by butlers and maids. Bruce was impressed that there was no rationing in Eire. Ruth and he had arrived in Ireland on Good Friday. After a rough crossing, they had gone to a public house to clean up. The waiter had offered him a ‘fasting dish’ of some colourless substance. Bruce had asked for a steak and two eggs, whereupon the waiter had theatrically donned a special apron and gloves. The waiter did prepare the steak, however. Captain Filgate’s wife gave Bruce photographs of the Filgate girls and their Ruxton husbands, and a copy of a genealogical chart. Bruce continued:‘I have the whole family tree, going back to 1550. In the tree are Barons,Viscounts, Baronets and Knights, generals!’ The next day they visited Rahanna House, the seat of the Ruxton family. In the afternoon, a Colonel McClintock,‘the son of the famous arctic explorer [Admiral Sir Francis Leopold McClintock]’ took tea at ‘Lisrenny’. Colonel McClintock was a descendant of the William Parkinson Ruxtons. Bruce was amazed: People call me Ruxton as if I was carrying on the family seat. I am treated not as a guest but as a Ruxton. I have met some very famous families, but the Ruxton family must have been the biggest of them all—Members of Parliament, Lord Chief Justices, High Sheriffs of Ireland. Years after Bruce had returned to Melbourne,William Filgate was still corresponding with him. Bruce did not lose touch with his contacts. In a 1955 letter Filgate wrote,‘Dear Ruxton, . . . So you are a fisherman. I have caught a lot of salmon and trout.We had a lovely weir here, but now they have drained it, and ruined it for fishing. I have a trout in a glass case in the hall, caught in this weir, 6 lbs on a dry fly.’A few months later, Filgate confided,‘the wife is still hunting in spite of her years. But I am unable to, since I broke my leg two years ago.’ 45
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Catching trout on a private weir was a long way from Bruce’s experience of line fishing off a bayside pier in Melbourne. So was the English hunt. Bruce, however, clearly delighted in receiving letters such as those from Filgate. It is possible that after his father’s sad time during the Depression, Bruce Ruxton came to attach more significance to ancient status and old honours than most Australians did, in the postwar, post-imperial, period. It seems that the Australian larrikin became an unconscious snob. He loved entertaining anybody with a title, and he loved British decorations and imperial memorabilia. Bruce and Ruth returned to Australia in February 1952, he to Melbourne and she to Fremantle.They were married in Fremantle, in the Wesleyan Church there, on 4 June 1952. Bruce gave his address on the Marriage Certificate as 12 Walmer Street, Kew, and gave his occupation as ‘business representative’.They looked after another couple’s house in Surrey Hills, a Melbourne suburb near Kew, for some time.Then they built in Beaumaris, a Melbourne bayside suburb.They moved into their Beaumaris home in 1956, where they had constructed an aviary, at Ruth’s request. Their only child, Ian Carlyle Ruxton, arrived in 1959. In a photograph from the early 1960s, we see Bruce, Ruth and Ian in the garden at Beaumaris, a smiling postwar suburban family. The black labrador on the grass, it seems, was ‘Digger 1’, the first of the Ruxton Diggers. By the time of Bruce’s return from Japan, Ernest Ruxton had re-established himself in business. He had a trade in stationery, which he ran from the basement of the Fidelity Trustee building, in Market Street, in the centre of Melbourne. It is not clear how Ernest Ruxton, then nearly seventy, had raised the capital to start up. The economy, however, was stronger in 1949 than it had been at the end of the war. Ernest Ruxton’s business would have been directed to meet the stationery needs of expanding companies during the postwar boom. Bruce became a partner with Ernest in the business after his return from London. Father and son then secured a valuable contract from the Commonwealth Government. They were to supply the rubber bands for the use of all government departments. 46
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The rubber came from Malaya. It was this fact that suggested the subjects that Bruce chose to take at the Working Men’s College (RMIT) over the next four years. His studies were government funded, part of a services rehabilitation package. He eventually qualified for a Diploma in Foreign Trade Procedures by picking up subjects intermittently. Much of business in those days was conducted by word-ofmouth contacts through associations such as Rotary. Bruce joined several sporting and social clubs. These memberships gave him business contacts, but also helped him to develop the networks which would make him such an effective fighter for ex-servicemen’s rights later on. He was a lifelong member of Collingwood Football Club. He later gained full membership of the Melbourne Cricket Club. By 1953, he was a Master Mason of the Willsmere Lodge, and his son Ian was enrolled as a cadet member at the Royal Brighton Yacht Club. He joined the Liberal Party and the Victorian Golf Club. He would later be admitted to Melbourne’s most influential club, the Melbourne Club. Bruce had joined the Returned Services League (RSL) in 1948, while still serving with the British and Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, and he was appointed Honorary Secretary of the 2/25th and 2/31st Battalions Association, his unit association, in 1952. He had sensed during his time in the army that some of the men he had so admired as soldiers might have difficulties after the war was over.As he said of his Queensland comrades fifty-eight years after he had enlisted:‘They were good blokes. But they couldn’t do anything else but fight. I was one of the best educated of the battalion, and there were blokes who could not read or write.’ And some of the Queenslanders encountered massive problems. One of them built his own house, from cutting the timber for it to finishing the furniture by hand, and then it burned down. He had not thought to take out insurance. Others found it hard to negotiate with government officials for their correct repatriation benefits and pensions. Bruce took on the difficult job of trying to sort all this out from Melbourne. Having worked in a voluntary capacity on behalf of the men of his 47
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unit for several years—this was the beginning of the two-in-themorning telephone exchanges which were to be a permanent feature of his life as RSL chief—the obvious next step was to seek an official position in the League. There was a new League sub-branch in Beaumaris. Bruce joined in 1956,and four years later,he was the Beaumaris president. He became a member of the local District Board, representing the area RSL sub-branches, in the days when there were 46 District Boards in Victoria. Bruce had the good fortune to serve on the 6th and 7th combined District Board, on which at least six of the members of the State Executive also served. By 1962, he was elected to the State Council of the Victorian Returned Services League,Victorian Branch.The State Council was the ruling body of the RSL when the Annual State Conference was not in session. Bruce was rising rapidly through the hierarchy of the RSL. In 1964, he was elected to the State Executive, the body which performs the day-to-day administration of the League. Meanwhile, the Ruxton family stationery business expanded. Ernest and Bruce had it incorporated as a limited liability company—in the event of liquidation, the shareholders would be obliged to meet the business’s debts only to the extent of the value of their shares—in 1960.They then moved the shop and warehouse to 179–181 Moray Street, South Melbourne. As Ernest reached his late eighties, he and Ellie moved to live in Beaumaris, at 15 Anita Street. Ernest died there in October 1971, aged 91. Ellie had died earlier that year, on Australia Day, 26 January. She was cremated according to her wishes. In his will Ernest had bequeathed his half of the business to Bruce. Bruce proved to be an affable businessman. When in 1965, the Victorian Cross (VC) won by a member of the 2/25th Battalion, Richard Kelliher, for the Lae operation during the campaign in New Guinea, came up for sale in London, Bruce set up an appeal fund to buy it back.The members of the unit association gave this appeal strong support—they were outraged at the rumour that Kelliher’s widow had sold the medal to pay for a new kitchen. The South Melbourne Anglican vicar also contributed to the Kelliher appeal. He was the Reverend William ‘Bill’ Coffey, of 48
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St Luke’s Church, in Dorcas Street, near the Ruxton business. Bruce then instructed one of his staff,‘Give the vicar the foolscap paper he needs for his parish magazine at ten shillings a ream.’ After buying the 500 sheet reams at ten shillings a ream for about four years, Coffey later recounted that the young female assistant he regularly paid said, ‘You’re getting good value here, for the paper costs us 30 shillings a ream.’ Coffey then raised his payment to the equivalent of 30 shillings a ream. It is clear that Ruth and Bruce purchased several blocks of land—on Phillip Island, in the Gippsland Lakes district, at Rye and Mornington on the Port Phillip Bay coast—in the 1950s and 1960s, and then sold those blocks in the 1970s, and later, in the 1980s. They may have been beginning to experience problems with money. Bruce’s club memberships did not come cheaply. In 1974, his fees to the Victorian Golf Club were $282. Bruce remembered reflecting at the time of his father’s death that Guy Fawkes Day was coming up.This proved to be a fatal premonition. In November 1971, just after Ernest Ruxton’s death, a fire broke out at the Moray Street warehouse, caused by children’s Guy Fawkes night firecrackers.The outbreak of the fire was disastrous for the business. Only days before, the warehouse had received a large shipment of rubber bands. The fire caused $250,000 worth of damage.The building, unfortunately, proved to have been underinsured. Bruce felt later that this great setback was the reason the business never fully recovered. General Stationers Pty Ltd encountered difficulties during the 1970s. Bruce’s unpaid career, however, flourished. He was elected RSL state vice president in 1968, and state senior vice president in 1974. League business consumed more and more of his time. Even before he became Victorian RSL president, Ruxton was well on his way to being a national figure.As we have seen, from early on he had followed his father’s interest in collecting coins and stamps. By the time he was senior vice president, he was making regular purchases of coins, medals, and watercolours on military subjects, from various London auction houses, among them the famous Sotheby’s. Early in June 1977, he was looking 49
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through a Sotheby’s auction brochure and saw an Australian Victoria Cross up for sale.The VC had been awarded to LanceCorporal Leonard Keysor (or Keyzor) for his bravery at the battle of Lone Pine. It was the earliest of seven for that battle, and it was the first awarded to a Jewish Australian. Sotheby’s listed the Keysor VC as ‘particularly fine’, because of ‘the story attaching to it’. Keysor had been born in London. He was working in Sydney when war broke out. On 18 August 1914, he enlisted in the AIF, and joined the 1st Battalion. He was at the Gallipoli landing, but he carried out his almost superhuman feat at Lone Pine. On 7 August 1915, he was in a trench when Turkish forces began a series of bombing attacks. On that first day of the three-day battle, he picked up two live bombs and threw them back at the attackers. He quickly became an enemy target, and although wounded, he kept on throwing shells. The next day, he forced his Turkish attackers to abandon their position, so rendering his trench even more dangerous. He was again wounded, but refused a hospitalisation listing. He moved trenches to join another company which had lost its bomb throwers. The members of that company later described him bowling bombs ‘like cricket balls’. He returned Turkish bombs and crude Australian ones, put together on the beach, for all of fifty hours, before he allowed himself to be evacuated. This was quite enough to rivet Ruxton’s attention, but there was more. Keysor was decorated in London by King George V himself on 15 January 1916, and went on to participate in the fighting at Pozières and to survive the gas attack of 1918 at Villers-Bretonneux. Bruce knew how to organise a buy-back campaign for a medal. During his 1965 drive to buy back the Kelliher VC, the then Minister for Defence, Sir Allen Fairhall, had ruled that the department could neither be involved in stopping such a sale, nor in financing the purchase of the decoration. Fairhall had pulled some strings to allow the 2/25th Battalion Association a month’s grace to raise the money. Bruce had then gone into action. He tapped into his business contacts.The most influential of these was Norman Sharp, the proprietor of Norman’s Corner Store, a large retail outlet then situated on the north-west corner 50
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of Russell and Bourke Streets in central Melbourne. Sharp had a related business in Morwell. Bruce had once met him on the road to Morwell driving a truck with an unstable load of drapery, which Bruce had helped him to secure. Norman Sharp had many contacts. Working through their business and club networks, Ruxton and Sharp quickly raised more than enough funds to buy the Kelliher medals, which were presented to the War Memorial the next year. Norman Sharp was Jewish—Ruxton remembered him ‘speaking with an east European accent’. As a gesture of appreciation for Sharp’s role in the saving of the Kelliher VC, Bruce spoke on several occasions to Sharp’s ex-service organisation.This was VAJEX, the Victorian Association of Jewish ExServicemen and Women. These speeches for VAJEX were not Bruce’s first association with the Melbourne Jewish community. He had shared a friendship for many years with Peter Isaacson, the much-decorated RAAF pilot, later publisher of a newspaper chain. Isaacson had served on the Shrine of Remembrance Board of Trustees during all of Bruce’s years as an RSL official and was the board’s president in the 1960s.The Shrine comes under the control of the Anzac Commemoration Council—in effect the RSL—on Anzac Day. The opening move in the Keysor VC campaign, Bruce reasoned, would be to have the National Executive of the RSL request Sotheby’s to delay the auction until a private League bid could be made to its seller. Sir William Keys, then League National Secretary, agreed that such a letter should be written. There was a problem of authorisation for this ploy, however, for no National Executive meeting was scheduled during the next vital weeks.The sale date in the auction brochure was 23 June. On the sixteenth, a London-based reporter for The Herald contacted Sotheby’s, and was told that the firm had not received a letter from Sir William.The enterprising reporter also found out that the seller of the VC—probably the grand-daughter of Keysor and his wife, who had both died in 1951—wished to remain anonymous, and so could not be contacted regarding a private sale. Another setback came when the Australian War Memorial refused to fund the purchase. Officials there stated that it was 51
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illegal to sell war medals in Australia. They reasoned that if the War Memorial provided funds for exhibits, this would drive up the prices of medals sought by rogue collectors. The Victorian RSL senior vice president stated bitterly to the Melbourne Sun that the War Memorial ‘showed little interest in buying the medal’. Ruxton had a new plan. He would make a bid for the VC using the commission agent he used in London for his own sales and purchases of medals.This was Seaby Coins and Medals. In August and September of the previous year, 1976, he had approached Seaby about the sale of his own medals collection. He needed the money to reduce a business overdraft. Just before the London auction issue arose, however, he had sold a property in Waratah Bay, near Wilsons Promontory.The VC was expected to sell for between $7500 and $9500. As Ruxton revealed, he had briefly considered ‘footing the bill’ for the Keysor VC himself. Ruxton spent the day of the sale on the telephone, negotiating between Melbourne, London and Canberra. The auction was to take place at 7.30 p.m., local time. He tried to contact Walter Jona, assistant Health Minister in the Bolte Government, a former president of VAJEX. He struggled to cut a deal with the War Memorial Museum. In spite of Bruce’s many phone calls, Sotheby’s coin expert, Michael Naxton, remained firm that the seller’s name could not be disclosed. The latest news from London was that the VC was now expected to fetch $10,000. Finally, Ruxton secured verbal advice from VAJEX representatives that Jewish ex-servicemen were very supportive of his proposal that they should assist in raising funds for the purchase of the VC. He gained pledges of donations from various RSL sub-branches.As evening approached, he decided on a bold step. Using his own authority alone, he instructed Seaby to buy the medal.Against strong London competition, Sotheby’s war medal expert, Noel Warr, bid for the Keysor VC, on behalf of the RSL. The next day, The Herald reported that the medal had fetched a world record price for a VC. It had sold for £7500 sterling, $11,700 in Australian dollars. Ruxton had taken a risk in making a pre-emptive purchase of the VC, without the necessary funds to meet the costs. 52
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Sotheby’s agreed that they would hold it, on credit, for 28 days. The race was then on to raise the money. Bruce warned, ‘If we fail, the dealer will put the medal back on the market.’The Sun had received donations towards the purchase of the Keysor VC since the first day the paper ran the story. RSL sub-branches raised more than $1000 within hours of the news that the VC had been bought. Acting National RSL President, Sir Colin Hines, agreed to launch a national appeal for funds. He thought $3000–$4000 would be subscribed. The President of VAJEX, Mr Myer Nathan, set up the RSL VC and Historic Medals Trust Fund.This later extended to Sydney, where $1000 was raised.The President of the Federation of Australian Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, George Casper, said to The Australian Jewish News:‘It is our responsibility to assist the RSL, and make sure this medal goes to the National War Memorial collection. Keysor was the first Australian Jew to get the VC.’ The Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies passed a resolution recommending that individuals make donations. Peter Isaacson promoted the RSL campaign in one of his newspapers, The Southern Cross. The amount, plus an extra £400 for the Seaby agent’s commission and insurance, was raised on time. In the August/ September 1977 edition of Parade, the official organ of the Victorian Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, the following announcement from VAJEX President Myer Nathan appeared: ‘I am pleased to report that our pledge to the RSL to raise the sum of $1500, has been met by VAJEX and the community. My sincere thanks go out to our Federal President, George Casper, and Australia, in bringing this project to a successful conclusion.’ The total sum raised by the national federation of Jewish exservicemen and women was $2279.50. Rabbi Lubofsky of the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation thanked Bruce in the Jewish News for organising the campaign. Ruxton suggested that representatives of the Jewish community be invited to present the VC to the War Memorial. National RSL President, Sir William Hall, had other ideas. He saw the affair as a League matter. Sir William arranged for the handing over of Keysor’s medals—there were 53
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four in all—at the opening ceremony of the 62nd RSL National Congress. There, in Canberra, Sir William Hall presented the Keysor VC to Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Daly, chairman of the Australian War Memorial Board of Trustees, in the presence of the Governor-General. The VC was placed on display in the War Memorial Hall of Valour—over the years, Bruce instigated the re-purchase of at least ten VCs and other significant war memorabilia, which the RSL then presented to the War Memorial. In receiving the Keysor medal, Sir Thomas Daly pointed out the dilemma the trustees had over bidding for VCs. If they did, they would not only drive up the prices on the market, but would risk appearing to give approval to their sales. Bruce had already prepared a motion on behalf of the Victorian State Executive, which was debated at the meeting of the RSL National Executive. This called upon the British House of Commons to pass legislation prohibiting the sale of war medals, as was the law in Australia.This arrangement finally came into force in the 1990s. As the Keysor VC campaign gained momentum, the Victorian RSL Executive presented Bruce Ruxton with the RSL Gold Badge and Life Membership of the Victorian Branch of the RSL.The awards were in recognition of his ‘excellent service’ to the veterans community. He was as famous nationally as he was in his home state.There were many in the returned community who would have elected him prime minister at the end of 1977. His ambition was, however, to gain the position he had been moving towards, unconsciously since 1945, and consciously since at least 1962.This was the Victorian RSL state presidency.
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On any Sunday morning, from the last months of 1979 until early 1985, the stationery business at 179–181 Moray Street in South Melbourne was remarkably busy. But those quietly waiting for attention there, on the day of rest, were not chiefly concerned with the purchase of office supplies. They were the wives and widows of returned servicemen who had come to seek the assistance of Bruce Ruxton, the RSL President, in their husbands’ or their own applications for benefits or pensions. Some Sundays, the queue wound out onto the pavement. As Barry Everingham, Ruxton’s public relations adviser during the 1980s, told the author,‘On Monday morning, Bruce would be on the telephone to the government, the Department of Veterans’Affairs. He would be like a terrier’—he would persist doggedly at the official—‘until the woman got her pension’. Everingham added, ‘He really worked for them. But, you know, he could spot a phoney.’ If he sensed that the woman’s claim was dishonest,‘he would simply say,“Get Out!”’ Don Chipp, Bruce’s long-term mate, who loved his company at the cricket and the football, had exactly the same thing to say of Ruxton’s judgment. ‘He is a remarkable judge of character,’ said Chipp.‘He can always pick a phoney.’
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It is true that the administration of the Victorian RSL, located in ANZAC House at the top of Collins Street, had a Family and Welfare Section. It is also true that the staff of the Family and Welfare section were the proper people to handle all cases for changes in benefits or applications for pensions. Certainly, Bruce’s independent activities on behalf of ex-servicemen and their wives must have created nightmares for anyone struggling to sort out the records and to keep all the relevant information on the one file. Another thing is equally certain. Anyone who has ever made an application for a pension, gone after a job, tried to change the way something ‘has always been done’, knows the value of a personal champion. Ruxton had been elected Victorian state vice president in 1968, and then state senior vice president in 1974.As we have seen, he was well positioned to become state president by at least 1977. Some observers among RSL office bearers thought that Ruxton would have liked to become Victorian state president in 1974, when Sir William Hall vacated the position to go to Canberra as national president. In the election of 1974, however, it was Colin Keon-Cohen who gained the presidency. Keon-Cohen held it until 1979, when he notified of his impending retirement on the grounds of failing health. In 1974 Keon-Cohen had an obvious senior claim to the leadership. He had served on the State Executive since 1952, as state vice president for many years, and finally, the clincher, as acting state president, in the months before the election. Between 1968 and 1979, Bruce battled on behalf of veterans through the district boards, and from his vice presidential positions. He also established the vast network of contacts he would use for the benefit of returned service people. It was in these years that his outstanding energy became apparent. Bruce’s first networks had been established through work and sport. He gradually extended these. All children growing up in Kew became supporters of Collingwood, or of the Hawthorn football team. Bruce had supported Collingwood for as long as he could remember, and in the 1950s, became a member of the club.Thirty years later, at the start of the match on each afternoon 56
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of Anzac Day, he had the honour of tossing the coin. Bruce’s friend Don Chipp, who had served the last two years of the war in the RAAF, also loved football. He and Chipp, a Carlton supporter, hosted each other at their home grounds when Carlton played Collingwood. At one Carlton–Collingwood match, as Chipp recalled, Bruce—‘Rucko’—was barracking away for his beloved Magpies, when Carlton back-pocket player John Benetti did something which annoyed him. Bruce shouted: ‘You bloody wog, Benetti!’ At this point, a woman sitting in the front row of the members stand—she was there every week— turned around, raised her rolled umbrella and hit Bruce on the head with it.‘I am his mother, and proud of it,’ she exclaimed.The remarkable thing, said Chipp, was that by the end of the match, Benetti’s mother and Ruxton were chatting like old friends. ‘It was that his own nature was inherently forgiving. He could bring the person he had offended around,’ Chipp explained.‘His strength was a preference for humour, over anger.’ In common with Chipp, Ruxton was a member of the Liberal Party. He had joined the Beaumaris branch of the party— the second largest branch in Victoria—when he and Ruth had built in the suburb in the mid-1950s. Chipp confided in Ruxton all through his bitter struggle with Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, which resulted in Chipp’s formation of the Australian Democrats in 1977.An unintended consequence of this upheaval was that Bruce had the ear of the leader of the Democrats, who held the balance of power in Canberra during all the 1980s. More generally, Bruce’s contacts in the Liberal Party meant that he had working relationships with many parliamentarians, some of them future Cabinet ministers. He also knew Malcolm Fraser, whom he had met at functions in Fraser’s home seat of Wannon.When veterans’ issues arose while Fraser was prime minister, Fraser used the Hamilton sub-branch clubrooms to address representatives of the RSL from the whole area, from Portland to Ararat. Bruce would be a constant visitor to the Western District of Victoria, where there were more RSL sub-branches than anywhere else in the state. He and Fraser kept up a warm correspondence in the early years of the 1980s, although later, they disagreed in their attitudes to the white government of South Africa. 57
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On the basis of his work for the retired services community, Ruxton was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) in 1974.The award was announced in the New Year’s Day honours list for 1975.The MBE is the lowest rank of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE), a new order created by King George V in 1917 to be available to all ranks in the community, women included. His MBE extended Bruce’s circle: after its award, he regularly attended Government House, Melbourne, or on occasions lunched with the governor-general of the day. There was a clear signal that Bruce was on his way to the higher honour of the OBE when James Harvey MacGregorDowsett, OBE, contacted him with a request. MacGregorDowsett, who was also a country vice president of the RSL, had set up OBE associations in the various states of Australia. He knew Bruce well. MacGregor-Dowsett asked Bruce to serve as the Honorary Secretary of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (Victorian Association). Bruce seldom refused an invitation to a function, or an offer of an honorary position, no matter how much either added to his workload. He accepted. Ruxton’s OBE was announced in the Queen’s Birthday honours list of 1981. Ruxton’s networks also included his memberships of several clubs. He was a member of the Victorian Golf Club, the Melbourne Cricket Club, and the Green Room Club. He was elected into the prestigious Melbourne Club just after he became Victorian RSL president in 1980. Indeed, it was a navy officer whom he had helped with a repatriation matter, one Commander Henry, who had proposed him for membership of the Melbourne Club. Bruce had at first declined, but Henry had once again approached him, saying that he wished to render this service as an expression of gratitude. The seconder on this occasion was an old friend from the West Brighton Club, Alwynne Rollins, a former Lord Mayor of Melbourne. In the 1950s and 1960s, business contacts were developed in such organisations as Rotary, and it is certain that many customers of General Stationers Pty Ltd purchased their office supplies from Bruce on the basis of an introduction in a social 58
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club. But of all the clubs Bruce joined, the membership he most sought was that of the West Brighton Club. The West Brighton Club was famous for its plain and hearty food. It was also renowned for it post-dinner poetry recitations and its strenuous singing sessions. Bruce was elected a member in January 1978.The West Brighton Club was his favourite venue for entertaining. Among his guests there over the years were Malcolm Fraser, Peter Ross-Edwards (leader of the National Party), Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, and various senior employees and ministers of the Department of Veterans’Affairs. Later, many of the pre-conference dinners before the annual Victorian State RSL Conference were held at the West Brighton Club. Finally, Ruxton had extensive connections in the newspaper world. He had close contacts with the local papers in the Melbourne bayside suburbs, which were his home territory. Denise Gadd, whose writing was published in the SandringhamBrighton Advertiser, the Mordialloc-Chelsea News and the Frankston Standard, often interviewed Bruce regarding his League concerns. It was through publicity in this group of papers that Bruce won his 1978 battle that widows in RSL accommodation, along with RSL sub-branches, should be spared payment of local council rates. Again, Bruce’s campaigns on behalf of the returned community were strongly supported in rural papers.And, eventually, woe betide bureaucrats who refused a serviceman or war widow their pension after one of Bruce’s Monday telephone marathons. Such unfortunates would find themselves denounced in war hero Jack Cannon’s column for the Herald,‘Cannon Shots’, before the week was out. Bruce Ruxton was elected Victorian president of the Returned Services League of Australia, at the 64th Annual State Branch Conference in July 1979.The conference was a great success.This was the first time that the State Congress was held at the New Palais venue, on the seafront esplanade in St Kilda. A record number of delegates attended. Bruce was very popular in the League’s sub-branches. Indeed, Ruxton’s victory was a foregone conclusion. During the month previous to the conference, Sir William Keys, OBE, 59
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MC, National President of the League since the year before, wrote a letter to him in the clear expectation that Bruce was the in-coming state president.‘I very much want your help in doing a lot of things,’ Sir William stated.‘Right at this stage, the matter of overwhelming importance of course is the League’s future. If it is to have a future, then it must change dramatically, to cope with a totally different set of circumstances to which we have been accustomed.’ The immediate future problem for the RSL was declining numbers, as the World War II community faded away. The Vietnam veterans, even if they joined, were numerically far fewer than the ‘World War Twoers’. But the ‘totally different set of circumstances’ of which Sir William was speaking were more challenging still.The League would have to move from its traditional focus on compensation for war injuries to welfare work, including the provision of aged care and nursing homes. For the end-of-decade term 1979–80, Bruce was exactly the right man to re-orientate the League. His age gave him the flexibility to meet the new needs. At 53, he was the youngest of the RSL office bearers. For if members had enlisted, say, at the age of twenty in 1939, they would be 60 in 1979. The uppermost concern of both servicemen and women as they aged, and their families, would be the options for long-term future care, rather than the earlier ones of employment preference and maintenance of pensions. Bruce Ruxton looked youthful. As A.A. ‘Bert’ Stobart,Victorian state vice-president 1981–85, who had worked with Bruce since 1962 on the State Council and the 6th and 7th District Board, recalled: ‘He was perceived as young, virile, vigorous. Ruxton had good support from the State Executive for this reason.’ So vigorous was Ruxton on the eve of his election that he had been arranging a tour of the battlefields of South-East Asia at the same time as the Victorian campaign. He would be absent for the first three weeks of his term, leading a League pilgrimage to Sabah, Sarawak, Java and Balikpapan. In spite of this hitch, his first speech as state president spelled out a new tone for the League’s agenda. 60
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‘We intend to go in harder on Repatriation matters,’ Bruce announced in the July–August 1979 edition of Mufti, the Victorian RSL official journal: I am asking for a full report from our RSL advocates at the Tribunal Centre, where things are not going according to the way in which we think they should.The behaviour of the Tribunals will be of paramount importance, and, if necessary, we will implement a boycott of those Tribunals at which we think justice is not being carried out. The new Victorian president would strike while the iron was hot. On advice from the High Court, the Fraser Government had committed itself to improving repatriation procedures, and 1979 was the key year for its review.The 1920 Repatriation Act, world famous for its generous provisions for veterans, had become complicated by additions over the years.The Act had developed ‘grey areas’ which needed clarification. Ruxton, in particular, was determined to enshrine Dr Herbert V. Evatt’s interpretation of Section 47 of the Act. In 1943 ‘Doc’ Evatt, as attorney-general, had ruled to the effect that any repatriation commission, board, or appeal tribunal should give the applicant for a pension, or a person appealing an earlier rejection of an application, ‘the benefit of any doubt’. The central point of the decision, as Bruce and the Victorian State Executive saw the matter, was that the veteran did not have to produce a watertight legal body of evidence that their disability was war-related.The ‘onus of proof ’ was not on the veteran—the onus of disproof was on the authorities contesting the claim, including the members of an appeal tribunal.The tide of High Court rulings on the meaning of Section 47 seemed to support this interpretation. In 1981, the High Court accepted for the first time the connection between wartime smoking and smoking-related death many years later. In a landmark case, the High Court granted Mrs Nancy Law of Perth a war widow pension after her husband’s death from lung cancer, although the Repatriation Commission had earlier rejected her application. 61
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Given the friendly mood in Canberra towards ex-service pensions, Ruxton launched a 50-page circular, What’s Wrong with the Repatriation System? This went to the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, as well as other members of parliament.The main focus was on war pensions appeals procedures.The Victorian RSL was ‘at war’ with Mr K. Harding, Deputy President of the Repatriation Review Tribunal, the opening page declared. The pension appeal cases of 70 ex-service people had been deferred, because the Victorian RSL had instructed them not to appear before any tribunal chaired by Harding. Further key points of the circular were that the Repatriation Commission should avoid developing procedures where exservicemen had to make their appeals in writing. The average ex-serviceman was reluctant to write a letter stating the grounds of his appeal, Bruce pointed out, and so the sub-branch generally wrote the appeal for him. He also maintained the need for an RSL services representative to be present on all appeal tribunals, concluding that where an appeal was lost without the presence of a service representative, that judgment ‘should be set aside and be heard by a properly constituted Board’. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser quickly replied in writing to What’s Wrong with the Repatriation System? He noted that its points had been discussed widely in Canberra and that he had reviewed them with Senator Tony Messner, the new Minister for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Fraser attended quickly to the issues in the circular relating to inconsistencies in the application of the Repatriation Act. In December 1982, a year and a half after Bruce’s hard-hitting circular, Sir William Keys invited Ruxton to serve on a new panel the Government was forming in Canberra. This was the Advisory Committee on Repatriation Legislation Review. Senator Messner assured the RSL representatives that the purpose of this panel was ‘to provide simplified legislation covering all Repatriation entitlements’. Bruce was tireless in promoting the returned service community’s awareness of rights and of how to go about making claims. He set up the Official RSL Life Insurance Program—‘NO medical examination required, NO health questions asked’—in 62
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conjunction with the well-established, and ‘Australian-owned’, APA Life Assurance Ltd. As he explained in letters addressed personally to each and every member in Victoria, the intention of the scheme was to provide insurance to veterans between 50 and 75,‘ages where life insurance is difficult,if not impossible to obtain’. The message was clear.Veterans must provide for the families they would leave behind. A box advertisement on the cover of every edition of Mufti declared,‘Leave a Will, or leave a Mess.’ From early in his presidency, Ruxton established the habit of going out to RSL sub-branches to explain repatriation matters. He was prepared to travel to the country, where the district people organised large audiences for his visits. Often, Tony Messner accompanied him, and even more frequently, John Peck, Deputy Commissioner for Repatriation, and Derek Volker, the Repatriation Secretary and Chairman. Volker apparently enjoyed these theatrical excursions into the rural areas. On one occasion—thanking Bruce for a night of singing at the West Brighton Club—Volker wrote: ‘Thank you also for the trips to Casterton and Woodhouse-Nareb.Western Victoria is becoming almost a second home!’ People loved to be present when Bruce spoke, and Bruce could hold an audience in the palm of his hand.What follows is a talk he gave to the Buninyong sub-branch Christmas break-up in 1982. Three months before, the National RSL Congress had voted to extend full League membership to anyone who had been in the services for more than six months, regardless of an overseas, or ‘returned’, record. Earlier, in 1979, the Fraser Government had established the right of service people to appeal to the courts against Repatriation Tribunal decisions, ‘when matters of law were involved’. Since Bruce often departed from his typed scripts for speeches, the written records sometimes do not convey the spirit and effect of his delivery. In the case of the Buninyong talk, a reporter from the local radio station took Bruce’s words down, and that transcript can be located because a guest at the break-up was so impressed by the Ruxton speech that he had the whole recorded in the Ballarat Legacy Fortnightly Bulletin for the Christmas edition of 1982. 63
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The reporter for Buninyong’s radio 3BA began his account: ‘The biggest attendance Buninyong RSL has ever had, heard the State President of the RSL, Mr Bruce Ruxton, present a Life Membership Certificate and Badge to Mr Vic Bradley, president of the sub-branch for 15 years . . .’ The President showed his typical charm, as well as formidable political ability, in his introduction. He ‘congratulated the sub-branch on the turnout, and said it equalled some of the larger RSLs’. Bruce then launched into a tale of victories for the returned services community.‘The RSL, particularly in Victoria,’ had had ‘some notable successes with veterans’ applications for pensions in the last 12 months, with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Before that, they had had a hard road. It seemed to claimants that the Department was there to knock them out. But the RSL succeeded, despite libel threats against the Victorian Branch, and the State President.’ Veterans, however, ‘had refused to condone something that was wrong . . . ‘We saw a number of changes about 12 months ago. Derek Volker, 41, took over the leadership of the Department. He was not an ex-serviceman, and there was a furore. But his appointment was the best thing that ever happened. Compassion came back to the Department.’ Volker was in fact present, as the new, compassionate face of the department. Bruce continued: There has been a complete about face. In 1920, when the Commission was formed, the Prime Minister of the day, Billy Hughes, said the attitude to be taken should be one of compassion. Section 47 of the Act gave applicants the benefit of the doubt, but in 1943 this was interpreted in a different way by pseudo justices of the High Court.The AttorneyGeneral in 1943, H.V. Evatt, reinforced what Hughes had originally said.The situation drifted again in the 1950s, but Sir Garfield Barwick [as attorney-general in 1960] gave the same opinion as his two predecessors. In 1979, there was a holocaust in Tribunal centers [sic], and the outgoing chairman was black banned.And I, for one, am grateful to the big fellow from Nareen [Malcolm Fraser] for that! 64
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Younger men, who felt for what ex-servicemen had done for the community took over, and now 86% of applications for pensions are being approved.Twelve months ago, it was 25%. On the first of July 1979, the Act was changed, giving us the right to appeal to the highest courts. Bruce had now reached his central point, the victory of Evatt’s 1943 interpretation of Section 47: It is now Law, and we believe that anyone breaking the law should be charged under the Crimes Act . . . Mrs Nancy Law of Western Australia, whose husband had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese, was assisted to appeal on the grounds that his death was due to smoking [that commenced] while on service. He smoked rubbish, and suffered chronic anxiety. He slowly got worse, developing lung cancer, and died.The High Court said smoking on service, and nerves, caused his death 25 years later. We know that heart troubles follow stress on service, and also, this stress caused many to smoke. Both ‘Weary’ Dunlop and Gus Nossall have said that dysentery suffered on service could cause cancer of the colon in later life, and anyone with this affliction should have their case reopened. Here Bruce paused, and then said,‘Anyone who is on a 100% war pension, and can’t get a job he is suited for, should get a Totally and Permanently Disabled Pension, in my view.’ He then reported that the RSL and the tribunal were on friendly terms, at last, and were working ‘to put the Repatriation Act into plain English’, so that people could understand it: ‘It’s the best deal we’ve ever had!’ And what of the future of the RSL itself? ‘Our base is good to go on into the 21st Century’—the RSL had ‘stood up to knockers for the past 60 to 70 years’—‘When the last of us is dead and buried, statistically there will be lots of women left. And now all the ex-service community is eligible to join the RSL.We are now united in purpose.’ 65
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The local newsman reported that Ruxton was given a standing ovation. In the late 1970s, some people outside, and some even within the League, had been saying that the RSL might have to prepare ‘to die with dignity’. But for those who heard Ruxton at the Buninyong sub-branch, and elsewhere, it must have seemed that the RSL was far from a spent force. Rather, the League might have appeared revitalised, especially by the election of Victorian President Bruce Ruxton in 1979. The signs had been there since the beginning of Bruce’s presidency that, sooner or later, there would be a legal case, for either slander or libel, brought against him.The first warning had come with his criticisms of tribunal head Harding, in What’s Wrong with the Repatriation System? But when the case did arise, the charge was much more serious than libel. It was intimidation of a judge, which carried the penalty of a $1000 fine, or three months’ imprisonment. The problem arose over a war widow’s pension. Each of the three-person tribunals formed to hear appeals against decisions made under the Repatriation Act had one representative nominated by services organisations. During 1983, Bruce had a series of complaints from RSL members assisting veterans with their appeals. The advocates were having trouble, they said, with Mr Desmond Tehan, the services member of one of the Repat appeals tribunals. Bruce himself had given Tehan the job on the appeals tribunal. The situation came to a head for Bruce in September, when Tehan stood out as the only member of his tribunal to oppose the granting of a pension to a widow from Western Australia. Ruxton ‘took off like a rocket’. As he told the author, he decided to ‘lay some pressure’ on Tehan, and wrote a letter containing the following advice. ‘Unfortunately it has come to my notice again that your membership to [sic] the tribunal is not helpful to ex-members.’ My intention is to put the full strength of the RSL on a national basis in opposing your re-nomination to the tribunal.You have left me no other alternative. Under no 66
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circumstances will I put up with an ex-serviceman member voting against two other members against an ex-serviceman. A month later he followed up with a second letter, of which the key words were: ‘We can make life very uncomfortable to a point where we could refuse our clientele to any tribunal on which you are sitting.’At that time, it seemed to Ruxton that he was simply acting in his capacity as the state RSL president. Exactly one year after he wrote the first letter, a summons arrived. Bruce Carlyle Ruxton was to appear in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on the 29th day of November 1984. The charge was that ‘contrary to sub-section 107VZW (d) of the Repatriation Act 1920’, Bruce Ruxton had written two letters ‘to a Member of the Repatriation Review Tribunal seeking to improperly influence that Member in his duties’. The wording of the summons went on to point out that the Repat Tribunal had the same status as a court of law. Bruce was in contempt of court, and he was in the same position as if he had ‘laid pressure’ on a High Court judge. At first Bruce was inclined to play the situation up as theatre. During the RSL National Conference of October 1984, a headline in the Melbourne Herald newspaper announced, ‘Ruxton awaits arrest’. Bruce had indeed been called from the conference for an interview with Federal police on the contempt of court matter. Representatives of the Commonwealth Police Force, however, firmly dismissed any idea that they were about to arrest the Victorian state president of the RSL. Bruce was on familiar terms with the stipendiary magistrate before whom he was to appear.This was Maurice Gerkens, SM. Among several other RSL cases where he had appeared in Gerkens’ court, Bruce had testified before Gerkens the year before, after a group of women had been arrested on Anzac Day, while demonstrating against rape in war. Then, the atmosphere had been favourable to the RSL. Bruce’s friend, Colin ‘Barney’ Campbell, a member of the Repatriation Review Tribunal, called to give evidence regarding the Tehan issue, had known the lawyer who was to act as crown prosecutor for many years. The pros67
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ecutor was Michael Rozenes. It is clear from letters he wrote at the time that Campbell did not foresee trouble from Rozenes. At the suggestion of friends, however, Ruxton spoke to Gerard ‘Gerry’ Nash, QC. Nash was then a professor at Melbourne University. Bruce knew Nash through his contacts in law. Earlier, he had recommended Nash at RSL national headquarters as a person ideally suited to supply the League with opinions on changes to returned service legislation proposed by the Government. Subsequently, the RSL had employed Nash on several projects. Nash had most recently given legal interpretations to the Advisory Committee on Repatriation Legislation Review, also known as ‘the Keys Committee’. He agreed to represent Ruxton in the case. As the hearing opened, the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court was crowded almost beyond its limits. Reporters whispered along one whole wall. League supporters were crammed at the large central table—some country sub-branches had chartered buses to bring members down to the court. When the two charges of ‘seeking to improperly influence’ a tribunal member were read out, Bruce submitted the plea of ‘Not Guilty’. It would soon become clear that Bruce’s ideas of ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ influence differed widely from those of the court. In answer to Maurice Gerkens’ first questions, Ruxton said that Mr Desmond Tehan had ‘contravened’ Section 47 of the Repatriation Act. The section stated, said Ruxton, ‘when it is a lineball, it is the duty of the tribunal’s service member to tip the scales in favour of the ex-service member’. At the mention of Section 47—‘the veterans’ friend’—there were cheers from the large table. None of the vetrans present seem to have been at all disturbed that Bruce had turned the tradition that the veteran must have ‘the benefit of the doubt’ that their illness was war-related into the claim that the services member of a Repat appeals tribunal must always vote in favour of granting the pension. Michael Rozenes, as prosecutor, now began his crossexamination. The RSL wanted a ‘lame duck’ on the tribunal, Rozenes accused. The League wanted an ‘employee to do its bidding’, and if a service member voted independently, the threat 68
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was there that the representative would lose his job, and so his livelihood. Bruce denied that he wanted ‘lame ducks’ on the tribunals. He further denied that he had been ‘vindictive’ against Tehan when he had written the letters. But he said that Tehan had recently ‘done the same thing again . . . That makes me really vindictive.’ Bruce then continued: ‘I am contemplating putting in a charge, because Tehan breached Section 47.’ Rozenes then asked if Ruxton would threaten or charge a judicial body just because it would not do his bidding. He asked if Ruxton would lay a charge against Mr Gerkens. Bruce replied: ‘I wouldn’t lay a charge on his worship. I think he’s a good bloke.’There was laughter from the RSL ranks. Then Desmond Tehan had his chance to explain why he had decided on the wording of his written report in the case of the Western Australian widow’s application. The three members of the tribunal had agreed that there should be two reports supporting the granting of the pension, and one dissenting opinion, Tehan said. He had been chosen as the representative to write the negative report, and he had been assisted in this task by one of the other members of the tribunal, who had legal training. At this point, Mr William Mooney, chairman of another tribunal, and himself a former solicitor, attempted to show why the three members of the appeals tribunal on which Tehan served had adopted their complicated position. Mooney thought that Tehan might have been aware of the opinion that the practice of giving veterans the ‘benefit of the doubt’ under Section 47 was in danger of being overused. In this view, if Section 47 were abused, the Government might react by making drastic changes to the Repatriation Act, and veterans would lose their generous award. The concern was a mainstream one in the RSL—in 1946, National President Sir Eric Millhouse, KC, had warned the national conference, ‘we have never asked more than the nation can afford to pay’— and many League officials of the 1980s agreed with that same cautious view. Mooney said he thought that Tehan, in discussion with the other two tribunal members, had agreed that there should be one report not recommending the war widow pension, and had accepted that the dissenting opinion should come from the RSL representative. 69
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The above interpretation of Tehan’s actions formed the basis for Professor Gerard Nash’s defence of Ruxton. Nash argued that Tehan’s letters in reply to those of the RSL president indicated that Tehan’s dissenting report did not represent a genuine opinion. Mr Tehan, said Nash, had an ulterior, and improper, purpose in writing his report. Professor Nash further explained that Ruxton had written his letters in the first place to instruct the services member of the tribunal on the application of the Repatriation Act. Justice Gerkens considered his decision for two hours. His conclusion was that the evidence was ‘overwhelming’ that Ruxton had intended to intimidate Tehan. Nash then pointed out that the effect of a conviction for his client would be that Bruce Ruxton could no longer serve as president of the Victorian RSL. Under the Companies Code, the principal officer of a corporation could not continue if convicted of an offence, and the RSL was an incorporated body under the code. The court was in recess for a further fifteen minutes, as Maurice Gerkens considered the wording of his sentence. The stipendiary magistrate returned. It was ‘clear from the evidence’, he said, that Mr Ruxton had acted under a ‘misapprehension of the law’, in writing the letters to Tehan. The charges were to be dismissed. Bruce Ruxton, said Gerkens, had a ‘single-minded devotion’ to the concerns of exservicemen and women.‘In that regard, he is a man to be admired and respected,’ the Magistrate said. It would be ‘an injustice and not in the interest of the community’ to keep Mr Ruxton from continuing in his post. Colin ‘Barney’ Campbell, the member of the Repatriation Review Tribunal who was in the court to give evidence, felt that the magistrate, with these words, had given expression to the feelings of everyone—‘with one solitary exception’—in the court. Stipendiary magistrate Gerkens had in fact given two verdicts in the Ruxton intimidation case. He had found Ruxton guilty, as charged, and he had also found that Bruce had acted under a ‘misapprehension of the law’, warranting the dismissal of the charges, and hence no recording of the conviction. This was a generous decision indeed, considering the seriousness of the 70
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offence of contempt of court. It was an even more generous interpretation of what had happened, given that Bruce had been charged under a sub-section of the Repatriation Act, a piece of legislation he knew backwards. Many years later, Gerkens wrote to Ruxton on another matter. His letter included the following: I must say that I remember ‘our case’ as one of the more entertaining moments of my seventeen years as a magistrate. I guess you didn’t see it in quite the same way. I thought it was great to see the kind of support you had from your members.To see them standing room only in that court room when I walked in was something to remember.They were standing up to be counted. Unfortunately, Desmond Tehan died of a heart attack four days after the 1984 court case. Bruce was unrepentant regarding the letters he had written to him. At the conclusion of the first day of the hearing he had said: ‘I have 100,000 out there, most of them sick through the war. I think about them, not about Mr Tehan. If he reduces widows to tears and ruin, we will not tolerate it.’ On learning of Tehan’s death, he told the Sun newspaper,‘If I have to walk over people or crash through brick walls, then that’s what I’ll do.’ At the beginning of 1985, when Ruxton was in his sixth year as state president, he was enjoying enormous success and popularity as the Victorian RSL chief. C. O. ‘Bill’ Harry, Honorary Treasurer of the Victorian Branch of the RSL for 38 years, during the terms of three presidents, commented on Bruce’s achievement.‘He played the job full-bore . . . Bruce made the presidency into a full-time position.’ As Bill Harry went on to explain, ‘the RSL presidency was really only an honorary position’. Sir William Hall, the previous past president, had fitted his work for the League around his full-time employment. He had performed his presidential duties very efficiently. Sir William had held a very senior position in the State Electricity Commission. Bill Harry, also, had occupied a senior position. Neither Harry or Sir William 71
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had had the time to make the number of visits to the sub-branches that Bruce Ruxton did, or to travel so often in the country. ‘Bruce imposed demands upon himself,’ Harry summed up.‘No previous or prior presidents were full-time operators.’ The successes and ‘full-bore’ activity on behalf of the League came at a price.The marriage suffered. Ruth developed arthritis, and could no longer accompany Bruce on visits to sub-branches, as she had earlier. Soon she would be dependent on crutches for even very limited movement. Ruth did not accompany Bruce on his increasingly frequent trips overseas, and his day-to-day hectic schedule left her alone much of the time. Perhaps Ruth felt neglected. It is also possible that Ruxton’s ever more hectic schedules were a response to his wife’s inability to offer him stimulating company. As we have seen earlier, in the case of the Keysor VC purchase, his business discount favours to St Luke’s Church, and his expenditures on military memorabilia, Bruce could be careless, even reckless, where money was concerned. Even before the Tehan intimidation case was heard in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, a petition to close the Ruxton family business was before the Supreme Court. Ruxton remained preocccupied with League concerns.
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5 Triumph and tragedy
On the day after the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Germany by the USSR in World War II,the leading photographs in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, showed the members of the Politburo and the heads of the Armed Forces on the reviewing stand of the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.The leaders were viewing the Victory Parade in Red Square. Below them, goose-stepping units of the Red Army marched by, followed by Russian tanks and Soviet rocket launchers. In the midst of these images of communist power appeared the smiling face of Bruce Ruxton, who was accompanied by other foreign war veterans, all guests of the Government of the USSR. The group, which included a much-decorated East European, stood beside the Kremlin wall on Red Square. Ruxton was in Moscow leading the Australian RSL delegation to the Russian Victory in Europe (VE) celebrations, among representatives of returned service organisations from 57 countries and from several international movements. Pravda reporters had chosen to interview the RSL delegation—although no text was ever published—and included Bruce Ruxton in the photo of overseas veterans in its 10 May 1985 edition.
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Developments at home were far less happy. On the Monday of the same week as the Pravda picture appeared, according to a report in the Weekend Herald of 11–12 May, a debenture holder in the Ruxton family business, General Stationers Pty Ltd, placed the company into receivership. Chartered accountants from the firm of Orr, Martin and Waters were then appointed its receiver-managers. Mr Robert Waters of the accounting company told the paper that he would need ‘a fortnight or so to assess the situation’. The appointment of the receiver-managers was a step in a much longer process. On 4 October of the previous year, Unistat Pty Ltd, stationery manufacturers, had petitioned the Supreme Court to close down the operations of General Stationers. Unistat claimed in the affidavit they placed before the court that, despite many attempts by their accounts department, General Stationers had failed to pay the monies owed to them.There was more.The Commonwealth Department of Taxation had placed on file its intention to appear in petition hearings against General Stationers. The department declared that General Stationers owed unpaid taxes. Another Melbourne company had also filed its intention to appear in the petitions hearings. In all, the documents before the Supreme Court alleged that the Ruxton family business owed more than $47,000. The petition against General Stationers was to be heard before a Supreme Court judge later in the year. Robert Waters, one of the receiver-managers, said that Mr Ruxton ‘was aware of the situation’, but had been committed to go to the USSR. Bruce had not been available for comment. Ruth Ruxton was contacted by the Herald, which reported her as saying that Ernest Ruxton had started the business during the Depression. Ernest Ruxton had worked in the business until he died aged 91. Her son, Ian, was a sales representative with the family company, she said.The paper further reported Ruth as saying that her husband Bruce had worked for the company for ‘about 32 to 33 years’, and had ‘built it up’. The idea of the VE Day visit to Moscow had arisen when the Soviet Committee of War Veterans extended an invitation to the RSL, through the embassy of the USSR in Canberra. The 74
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National President and National Executive had accepted.These officials then appointed a three-person delegation. Bruce Ruxton, OBE, would lead the group.The other members of the delegation were Ron Metcalfe, acting President of the ACT Branch of the League—who also appeared wearing a slouch hat in the background of the Pravda photo—and C.O. ‘Bill’ Harry, OBE, the Honorary Treasurer in Victoria. It may seem strange that the RSL would send a delegation to the USSR, and even more so, that Bruce Ruxton, with his wellknown political views, was prepared to lead it.The League was by tradition an anti-communist organisation. Founded in 1916, as revolution threatened many areas of Europe, its constitution bans communists. From early on, the declaration section of the RSL membership form required the applicant to affirm, ‘I am not a COMMUNIST’ [upper case in the original].The same form was still in use when Bruce retired as Victorian state president in 2002, although the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) had been reduced to meeting in a telephone box many years before. Ruxton himself had a strong record as an anti-communist. He was acknowledged widely as the mover behind the resolution of the State RSL Conference of 1983 which called for a Royal Commission into the Communist Party of Australia. He kept files on suspected communist affiliations among union members working in the state Repatriation hospitals, and from time to time, exchanged information with B.A.‘Bob’ Santamaria, head of the National Civic Council, formerly ‘the Movement’.The RSL, however, regularly sent representatives to international conventions and had hosted a World Veterans Conference in 1975, which included a delegation from the USSR. As for Bruce’s leadership of the League group to Moscow, his name would not have arisen had he indicated that he did not wish to visit the USSR. As befitted his presence at an international gathering, on the documentation for entry into the USSR, Ruxton listed his national position,‘Member, National Executive, Returned Services League’. Before the League delegation’s departure, Michael Willesee contacted Bruce to make arrangements to interview him by satellite in Moscow. The interview was to be broadcast in Australia on The Mike Willesee Show. 75
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The RSL National Executive did not accept a Soviet Government offer to pay their delegates’ fares.The League delegation flew economy class. It seemed to Ruxton, however, that another group had accepted the USSR tickets offer. With his concern for the Communist Party of Australia’s links with Moscow, Bruce was quick to notice on the Aeroflot flight that three Australian trade union officials were travelling first class, and later, that they were escorted through customs with no formalities or delays. As he recorded in his later report for the RSL on the visit, he thought the unionists were members of the Socialist Workers Party. The League group’s first day in Moscow was very full. In the morning, all the international delegates were escorted to the Central Museum of the Armed Forces of the USSR.There they saw, as they had expected, an exhibition depicting the ‘1941–1945 War’. Bruce was very pleased when a Soviet general presented each of the foreign representatives with a 40th Anniversary Victory Medal and an accompanying authentication certificate.After that, the various groups laid wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Bruce found that there was no United States delegation—the American Legion had boycotted the celebrations because of an incident between the US military and Soviet guards in East Germany. The late afternoon brought the centrepiece event.This was the ‘Great Meeting’ the Soviet Committee of War Veterans had arranged for the foreign guests at the Palace of Congress in the Kremlin. Mikhail Gorbachev, then Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the USSR, was to address the meeting. Gorbachev’s speech, titled ‘The Immortal Exploit of the Soviet People’, was an extremely lengthy history of the war on the Eastern Front. Bruce listened to Gorbachev using the interpreting service provided. As he commented later in his written report to the RSL National Executive,‘It was in this speech that Premier Gorbachev slated the United States of America. [This] certainly did not go down too well with the English-speaking delegates at the conference.’ Then came the day of the Victory Parade—Ruxton later described the Red Army’s display of military might as ‘most 76
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frightening, and very enthralling’. Next, the international delegates assembled at the Central House of the Soviet Army for a two-day convention. Ruxton was very experienced at running large meetings with lengthy business agendas. Here, representatives from 57 countries were to speak on the theme of ‘the war of liberation against fascism’. Each was officially allowed ten minutes, but Ruxton noticed that most spoke for half an hour. Ruxton felt that there was very little content in most of the speeches and he was disturbed by the anti-American tone of many of them. The opportunity for a conference of war veterans to pass a resolution on the international situation should not be wasted, he reasoned. On the second day of the War Veterans Convention, Bruce Ruxton, representing Australia, was the first on the list of speakers. Bruce stuck to his allotted ten minutes. He criticised the anti-US tone of some of the previous speakers. Rather than delegates ‘giving repetitious lessons in history’, he said a ‘positive resolution’ should come out of the meeting. He presented the following wording for a motion to the chairman of the convention: That representatives of the veterans organisations of the various countries here assembled in Moscow for the 40th Anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, hereby strongly recommend that an immediate meeting take place between Premier Gorbachev and President Reagan to discuss all difficulties between the USA and the USSR, including disarmament.
Bruce may have been able to carry a motion in this style through a state or national conference of the RSL. In Moscow, however, he was outfoxed by the communist chairman. The final resolution of the convention was to the effect that ‘all the delegates present wanted world peace’.The chairman read out the wording of this statement after the meeting was closed, when no delegate could suggest a change. Outwardly, Ruxton presented an open and genial face during his time in the USSR.The chairman of the War Veterans Convention was surprised and touched when Bruce presented him with 77
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a Digger’s slouch hat.The communist chairman appeared to have recovered from his earlier offence at Bruce’s criticisms. Bruce made a collection of Russian stamps. He went on to accumulate receipts to the equivalent of $300 at the Moscow Beriozka Department Store, probably for presentation items and gifts. The satellite interview with Mike Willesee, for which Ruxton attended the Soviet TV studios, was broadcast in Australia on The Mike Willesee Show while he was still in Moscow. Bruce said he was proud to lead the contingent of Australian Diggers invited to the USSR as official guests. He continued that his visit to Russia ‘wasn’t in conflict with his views about setting up a Royal Commission into the Australian Communist Party’. Shortly after the Willesee broadcast, on 14 May, the Melbourne Sun newspaper reported statements Ruxton had made in another interview from Moscow, this time with Radio 3DB. The Australians had been warmly greeted by the ordinary people in the streets, Bruce said. ‘Moscow’s an education to the Australian . . . I notice in the Metro, the great system of underground here, the young people get off their seats to let an adult sit down.’ He continued that he had gained a strong impression that the Russian people did not want another war.‘It’s always the ordinary person in the street that fights wars,’ Bruce explained. ‘I think all of us have got to hammer our politicians about war.’ The RSL leader’s public praise of life in the USSR was the last straw for Gareth Evans, then Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs. He contacted Senator Robert Ray, who prepared a Dorothy Dixer for the Senate Question Time session scheduled for that evening. The report appeared in the Hansard of the Australian Senate for 14 May 1985, under the heading ‘UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS’. Senator Robert Ray asked Senator Evans the following question: I direct my question to the Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs. Is it true that, following his glowing comments and statements about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Victorian President of the Returned Services League, Mr Ruxton, has applied for political asylum in that country? 78
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Senator Gareth Evans replied: ‘I presume that Senator Ray’s question is a reference to the reports this morning of Mr Ruxton’s impression, as I recall it, of the friendliness and peaceloving character of the Russian people and the politeness of Russian youth.’ Evans continued: If those reports are accurate, it would appear that Mr Ruxton’s conversion in Moscow is of the same order of significance as Paul’s on the road to Damascus, and rivalled in recent history, perhaps, only by the conversion of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen on his trip a few years ago to China. It is extraordinary what messianic totalitarians seem to find in common with each other when they embark upon travels of this kind. I do not know whether it is the case that Mr Ruxton has sought asylum in the Soviet Union, or whether, if he did, he was doing so primarily in order to destroy the credibility of the Soviet ex-servicemen’s organisation or whether it was to take advantage of the anti-capitalist sentiment in the context of those responsible for crashed family companies. But one way or another, I simply respond to Senator Ray by saying that if Mr Ruxton has sought asylum in the Soviet Union, a great many Australians will be profoundly hoping that he does not get knocked back. At the close of the proceedings against General Stationers, the Victorian RSL presidency quite literally became Ruxton’s full-time job. Bruce began to travel even more than previously. Overseas, he visited Malaysia or Indonesia at least once a year, and he accepted ever more frequent invitations to speak in Victorian country towns. Indeed, his speaking engagements eventually took up more than 90 per cent of his time. His high profile, and his views on issues from multiculturalism to politics in South Africa, exposed him to hate mail and his family to personal abuse. Less than nine weeks after his return from Moscow, Ruxton told the Sun newspaper that he was about to leave for Malaysia on what he called,‘a pilgrimage of the soul’. He was leading an 79
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RSL tour of 52 ex-service men and women to Sabah, in East Malaysia, for the dedication of a monument to those who died on the march from Sandakan to Ranau, in then British North Borneo, during the last months of World War II. Accompanying the RSL tour were three of the four Australians who had survived the massacre at Ranau.They were Keith Botterill, Owen Campbell and Nelson Short.As the Sabah Times reported, Richard Braithwaite, the fourth survivor, then seriously ill in Brisbane, had ‘sent Mr Ruxton a cheque for $100 to help pay for his old comrades’ plane fares’. Ruxton’s fascination with the battlefields of the Pacific War appears to have arisen from his unfinished business with the conflict in which he had served for four months, most of this time after the shooting war was over.An early example of this interest was his assistance to the New Guinea State RSL in building a memorial primary school to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the capture of Lae. The story reflects many aspects of Bruce’s involvement in projects, and of his personal style. He served as honorary secretary of the 2/25th Battalion Association, and was later made patron of the 2/25th and 2/31st Battalions Association. Bruce loved honours, but he also carried out his unpaid duties superbly.The 2/25th Battalion fought in the Owen Stanley Range in 1942. After winding up an appeal to bring back a VC to Australia in 1965, Bruce had found that $680 was left. Bruce felt an empathy for the people of PNG. When the PNG RSL president pointed out that a soldier settlement of veterans who had fought alongside the Australians had no school, Bruce set to work. The District Inspector of the PNG Department of Education estimated that a primary school could be built for $3000, so Bruce organised a drive to raise the necessary funds. Consequently, the school was built, and 20th Century Fox made a film about the project for distribution as a support short film to features in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. The first Borneo tours were to the battle sites in Indonesian Kalimantan, with a focus on Balikpapan. Ruxton came to know the leading generals of the Indonesian Army well, and he persuaded the commanding officer at Balikpapan to refurbish the war memorial there. Later, his interest broadened from his own 80
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area of service to North Borneo, by then the Malaysian state of Sabah, where the Australian Army’s 9th Division had fought, and through which the tragic march from Sandakan had taken place. Bruce had an abiding interest in the Sandakan death march, on which the Japanese had forced 1800 Australian and 750 British soldiers 400 kilometres at bayonet point, then killed almost all of the survivors. He collected any article published on the story and wrote the forward to Don Wall’s 1988 work, Sandakan Under Nippon:The Last March. The ‘Return to Borneo’ RSL tours were organised by Belmore Tours, a Melbourne company.As the escort of the tours, Bruce’s passage was free. As the years went by, he visited Kalimantan or Sabah as the guest of either the Indonesian Army or the Malaysian Government, flying first class. June Healy, who had become deputy national secretary of the RSL in 1981, the first woman to fill the post, shared Ruxton’s concern with overseas war memorials, war graves and the welfare of old soldiers. Ruxton quickly noticed Healy’s organising abilities and recruited her to run his Borneo tours. Healy, who served as the administrator on the 1985 RSL tour—Bruce was ‘up front’, doing the talking and explaining the history—recalled earlier trips to Balikpapan: ‘Bruce was made very welcome. Generals of the army were there, outriders, chief ministers.The Veterans Legion of the Republic of Indonesia honoured him with their veterans’ medal.’ Ruxton was awarded the Legiun Veteran Republik Indonesia (LVRI) veterans’ medal in 1989, at a reception held in Jakarta to mark the occasion. Healy found Kalimantan a delightful destination.The hotels were beautiful, she said, the exchange rate good, the people gentle.The Indonesian military had even discovered Bruce’s passion for lamingtons, the cubes of sponge cake covered in chocolate icing and desiccated coconut. On one visit to Balikpapan, Healy recalled, the RSL tour was welcomed with a feast of ‘lamingtons and warm beer’. In Sabah, Ruxton knew all the chief ministers—Healy noticed that when in South-East Asia, he remembered the names, positions, and politics of every official he met. Eventually, Bruce persuaded the local government to meet RSL contributions on 81
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a dollar-for-dollar basis to raise $100,000 to convert the site of the Sandakan POW camp into the Sandakan War Memorial Park, opened in 1991. Ruxton worked a sixteen-hour-day in these years. By 1986, in addition to his office at ANZAC House in Collins Street, he also had a terrace house office in Bevan Street, Albert Park, a few streets from his former South Melbourne warehouse.The reverse side of his personal card was a map showing ex-servicemen the main public transport routes to 49 Bevan Street, Bruce’s second office. He worked from there in the morning, and at ANZAC House in the afternoon. As he told the author, ‘I couldn’t be at ANZAC House all day.’ Ruxton paid the rent on the Albert Park single-storey terrace, and the RSL rented the next house in the row.This latter was for storage of League files, but over the years it was filled with Bruce’s personal collections. His basic income was his pension, which commenced at age 60, as for all returned soldiers. Later, he had the occasional paid speaking engagement. The RSL met the expenses of his work for the League, secretarial staff, a car and a chauffeur, mail-outs and printing. One reason for Ruxton’s long working day was that he refused to unlist his home phone number. Another is that he accepted all invitations to speak, for the National Party, at Rotary, at local council meetings, on the basis that all publicity kept veterans’ issues before the Government’s attention. He attended even the most insignificant of RSL functions. The saying grew that ‘Bruce Ruxton would attend the opening of an envelope.’ It was the right of his League clients, according to Ruxton, to ring him at all times. This must have been a great solace to veterans, who, as they aged, often developed anxiety neuroses arising from their war experiences. Bruce listened and counselled. He made light of the strain. As he once told the story, a veteran rang at 2.45 a.m.‘Do you know what time it is?’ asked Bruce.The veteran replied,‘Oh, it’s 2.45, but it’s all right. I’ve got a rug around me, and I’ve got the radiator on.’ As a close friend recalled: ‘He certainly did work a sixteenhour-day. No matter how late he went to bed, he would be up at 82
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6.30 a.m., and go out to the beach to walk the dogs. He had his RSL car and chauffeur. He would work in the back of the car when he was going to Warrnambool, Bendigo, Swan Hill.’ Bruce also worked out his speeches as he walked with the dogs on the Beaumaris beach. June Healy commented on Ruxton’s enduring energy. Healy, who took up the position of president of the War Widows’ Guild after her retirement as RSL deputy national president in 1995, said she had ‘been accused of the same kind of energy’ as Bruce.‘Your energy keeps on,’ said Healy,‘your urge to get things done keeps on.’ David Ford, who served with Ruxton on the Board of Trustees of the Shrine of Remembrance—another honorary position of the Victorian RSL president—commented, too, on Ruxton’s energy levels. Ford said: ‘He really did Go, Go, Go. I would meet him coming in at the Melbourne airport, and he would be off to Swan Hill for a dinner.’ Ford continued: He had great support in the country areas. He was a great man for the average soldier. He would be at the bar, have a beer with you. People find him attractive because he says things they would like to say, but do not dare. After he had been president three or four years, they just accepted that he was the President. ‘Ruxton on the Attack: Swan Hill a genuine Australian identity’ blared the leading headline of The Guardian, the Swan Hill and regional newspaper, on Monday 1 August 1988. ‘Controversial Victorian branch president of the Returned Services League Mr Bruce Ruxton on Thursday night slammed Federal Government immigration policies.’ Ruxton was skilled in targeting the concerns of his audience. Sometimes his focus was nationalism, sometimes mateship. He always spoke to traditional Australian values.‘People of his generation had four precepts,’ he said.‘One: Fear God.Two: Honour the Crown.Three: Love Australia. Four: Help distressed mates and their families.’ ‘We were lucky in one way in having gone to war and served our country,’ he often urged. ‘You’ve given more than others, so you’re lucky.’ 83
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He had visited Swan Hill to address the local branch of the National Party, formerly the Country Party; by this time, Ruxton had moved his support from the Liberal Party to the National Party, believing that the Liberals had drifted too close to the socialist policies of the ALP.‘My problem is with the capital cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Perth,’ Bruce told his country audience.‘In this sense it is nice to come to places like Swan Hill, but it’s obvious that the non-European migrant problem will flow to here sooner or later.’ He spoke for the ‘old Aussies’, he said, emphasising that all his opinions were RSL policy. ‘We believe skilled labour should be coming from places like Britain, Ireland and Europe.We don’t believe the majority of people from Asian and other backgrounds will ever blend into Australian society.’ He did not always mention Europe as a possible source of migrants, but Swan Hill was an Italian centre. Bruce continued: ‘The Italians have played a vital part in the build-up of Australia’s rural strength.’ The non-European migrants, however, were coming ‘from countries where there is little or no respect for human dignity or human rights.’ And for his World War II audience, he referred to these regions as, ‘countries which are under Nazi or Fascist rule.’ The sub-editor for The Guardian placed in bold type the statement: ‘Mr Ruxton said he was not a believer in a multicultural Australian society.’ In Nathalia, again in the north of Victoria, Ruxton had spoken to the Concerned Citizens’ Group on a proposal to place the Shire of Nathalia under the City of Shepparton. His message was anti-Canberra.As the Shepparton News reported him as saying in July 1985: ‘It is a socialist theme to amalgamate and eventually have regional councils . . . This means that the Government in Canberra will be dealing direct with regional councils and bypassing the State Governments.That is what it’s all about. No one knows more about the people and the wants of a town like Nathalia than the Shire of Nathalia, which is in the main street,’ Bruce thundered. ‘And it is up to you people to fight it tooth and nail.’ Then he would be speaking in Bendigo in central Victoria, or in Warrnambool, on the southern coast.August 1988 found him in the town of Werribee, twenty kilometres west of Melbourne, 84
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for the opening of the extensions to the RSL Club there. Ruxton’s talk ranged over many issues. Of Australia’s defence forces:‘Their morale is about as low as it was in 1788.’ On South Africa:‘If a black, marxist, thug government of the likes of Oliver Tambo, who is part of a terrorist group that would pale [sic] the IRA and the PLO, took over South Africa, then the Cape of Good Hope would become the Cape of No Hope.’ On the Hawke Labor Government:‘This government, which is running the greatest country in the world, recently took a 91-year-old man, who fought for this country in the Great War, to court over his TPI pension, if you don’t mind.’ To a heckler who wanted more regarding the Vietnam War Veterans, Ruxton retorted, ‘Sit down, son, your fly’s undone.’ The microphone and sound system broke down, but this did not stop Bruce from delivering his message.‘I get more upset by the migrant cheats and liars who rip off the workers’ compensation system’, he said. ‘I tell you what, they may not speak English when they come out here, but they know the Workers’ Compensation Act backwards, forwards and sideways, before they come to Australia.’ He told his captivated listeners that public speaking and presentations took up 98 per cent of his time. He was referring to his unpaid engagements.‘It’s the minority viewpoint which is being ram-rodded over the majority these days, and the vast majority of people agree with RSL attitudes.’ A young newspaperman, Neil Branch, recording the event for the Werribee Banner, was amazed by Ruxton’s theatrical performance. He noticed that when Ruxton came to unveil the plaque commemorating the opening of the new extensions, many in the audience appeared to have forgotten that this was the purpose of the gathering. They had been enthralled by Bruce’s opinions. Bruce had spent the first five minutes of his speech praising the RSL club manager, Eric Burgess, for getting the building project completed on time. A photograph accompanying the Werribee Banner article showed Ruxton and Burgess with their arms raised in a triumphant embrace. The young reporter thought they looked more like victorious political candidates than veterans of World War II. ‘After the ceremony, Mr Ruxton 85
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mingled casually with RSL patrons,’ Neil Branch reported. ‘He laughed, he listened, he lingered, he downed an ale or two.’ Bruce loved to speed. Throughout his presidency, the League supplied him with a driver. He often drove himself, however, especially on country highways.The RSL paid fines imposed on the League driver, when she was driving the RSL car. In June 1987, he was on his way to the Yarrawonga-Mulwala RSL subbranch, a favourite destination, on the Murray River border of Victoria. Just south of Shepparton, as he hurtled along the Goulburn Valley Highway, a police speedometer registered an embarrassing fact. The police detail, near Arcadia, had recorded his speed as 140 kilometres per hour. The RSL chief had to appear before a magistrate in Shepparton. He was represented by a solicitor, Mr Basil Smith Tierney. The court was told that Ruxton had five prior convictions for speeding, all of them during his term as RSL president. Bruce pleaded guilty to the latest charge.Tierney said that Ruxton had been travelling to Mulwala on business. He said that his client had been driving at 100 kilometres per hour—the uppermost point of the speed limit in those days—but had occasionally accelerated to 140 in order to pass trucks. Then Ruxton’s solicitor produced an extraordinary defence. Tierney said that because of his work for the community, Ruxton was worthy of another chance. He recommended a bond rather than a conviction, so that Bruce could continue with his RSL duties.The Shepparton magistrate ordered Bruce to pay $300 to the Poor Box. Why was the repeat-offence penalty for speeding so light? Why indeed did he often escape any penalty for speeding? A senior RSL official who served many years on the State Executive with Ruxton contributed to an explanation. Bruce was popular in areas such as Shepparton. ‘The copper would be a digger’s son,’ the RSL representative explained.‘He got away.’ Back in 1971, when Ruxton was State RSL vice-president, he had lost his driving licence for six months, as he had explained in an August 1971 letter to Howard Vinning, then RSL deputy national secretary. He was indeed given lenient penalties when he 86
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exceeded the speed limit subsequently. But Bruce didn’t always ‘get away’. In December 1984, June Healy met Bruce at the Melbourne airport, in order to drive him to Bendigo. He was to face a hearing there regarding a speeding charge, and was about to lose his licence. He had been recorded at 145 kilometres per hour. Nothing could be done to save the situation this time, because when Bruce was speeding near Bendigo, he had passed the magistrate who was to preside over his case. During September and early October 1988, Ruxton was once again overseas. At the invitation of Channel 9, he was in Hong Kong for a debate on Chinese immigration to Australia, to be broadcast on the 60 Minutes program. At home, at 24 Glenwood Avenue, Beaumaris, Ruth Ruxton often took abusive phone calls meant for Bruce. Like him, she usually answered the door without checking who was calling— the security door of the porch was always propped open for the Ruxton cats. Ruth was alone in the house, accompanied only by her labrador,Victoria, and a recently adopted bitzer. Bruce must have departed from his usual habit of naming his dogs ‘Digger’, because this new addition was a stray. The bitzer received the name ‘Bert’, for Albert, Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, in a family joke referring to Ruth’s aged dog,Vicky. Ruth’s arthritis had steadily worsened. By this time, moving about was difficult, and she relied on two half crutches which gave support to her arms. On the Saturday night of 1 October, the dogs were barking a lot. Ruth was nervous. On Monday afternoon, 3 October, she answered a knock on the front door.A man in his twenties, wearing jeans, shouted that he hated Bruce Ruxton and tried to force his way into the house.Victoria bailed him up.The intruder yelled ‘slut’ at Ruth and punched her in the shoulder. He then fled. Ruth fell, unconscious, to the floor of the porch.At least 30 minutes passed before she could crawl to the phone and call the police. Mrs Ruxton’s doctor confined her to bed for a week. She could not lift her right arm. During this time, Ruxton returned. For once, he refused to answer journalists’ telephone calls. ‘I am not commenting,’ was all he would say. 87
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When Denise Gadd of the Leader chain of newspapers interviewed her two weeks after the attack, Ruth looked tired and frail, older than her 60 years. Gadd was impressed by Ruth’s courage and self-possession. She gave Mrs Ruxton several openings to end the interview, but she persevered with her answers. At one point Gadd asked if she would prefer her husband at home more often. Ruth replied:‘A doctor once said Bruce was a manic workaholic. He’ll just keep going on and on.’ Denise Gadd’s profile of Ruth Ruxton was published in the Mordialloc-Chelsea Standard News on 18 October 1988. While Gadd was at Glenwood Avenue, Ruth had answered a phone call. ‘I’m in a sticky situation,’ said the caller, ‘and Mr Ruxton is the only person who can help me.’ ‘I’m sorry, he’s away,’ Ruth told her.The woman rang off, disappointed. As Bruce revealed in an interview with Woman’s Day published in the magazine on 7 March 1989, he had departed on an overseas trip shortly after the attack upon his wife. He told Woman’s Day that during the October of the previous year, he ‘went to South-East Asia’ on a work assignment. Apparently Ruth was loyal to Bruce to the last. She was annoyed at Woman’s Day for publishing an article about her in which the main caption read: ‘Ruth Ruxton now lives a life of fear because of her husband Bruce’s stand on immigration’. Woman’s Day quoted Ruth as saying: ‘Bruce thinks I panic too much. He says I’ve cried wolf too many times, but I’ve only called the police three times, whenever there has been any trouble.’ The magazine further quoted her as saying: ‘We should have an unlisted number, but Bruce won’t hear of it. He likes to be available to his RSL veterans.’ The article appeared on 8 November 1988. Ruth Ruxton told Denise Gadd during the October interview with her that Woman’s Day had sent her a large arrangement of flowers, and ‘two days later they conned me into an interview’. Ruth did not recover from the assault at her front door. As she said several times afterwards, ‘My nerves have just gone to pieces.’ She was eventually admitted to Sandringham Hospital, where she remained in intensive care for fourteen days. The immediate problem was a perforated bowel—possibly related to 88
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years of alcohol abuse. She developed breathing problems and died on 29 December 1988. Many of the large number of condolence notices which appeared in the newspapers were actually tributes to Bruce from the many RSL organisations on which he served. Ruth had withdrawn from most official duties as the League chief ’s wife during the 1960s. One group of notices, however, may indicate that she continued some charitable work of her own during her long retirement.These were from the members of the Victorian Blinded Soldiers Association, who saluted her as ‘A lady at all times’. Ruth Ruxton had been elected a Life Governor of the Victorian Association for the Blind in September 1973. The funeral service for Mrs Ruxton was held at the St Michael and All Angels’ Anglican Church in Beaumaris. The church held 300 comfortably, but 100 more chairs had to be brought from an adjoining hall. A further hundred people remained outside, in the driveway and on the street. Among the mourners were Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, Don Chipp and the former State National Party leader, Peter Ross-Edwards.Also present was Dame Pattie Menzies, who at 90 had felt moved to come. Several times during the service, Bruce seemed on the verge of breaking down. He controlled himself with great difficulty. He and Ruth had shared their lives for over thirty-eight years, they had done so much together, and they had had so very much in common. Bruce resolved to move heaven and earth to prosecute his wife’s attacker, and finally had the satisfaction of seeing him in court. As 1989 commenced, Bruce Ruxton entered his tenth year as Victorian RSL chief. Photographs taken at Ruth’s funeral and afterwards show Bruce as devastated by his wife’s death. Undoubtedly he had contributed to Ruth’s variety of disabilities by his long and frequent absences. Undoubtedly his chosen manner of carrying out his work for the League had led to the attack upon her. After Ruth’s death, however, Bruce felt a dreadful loneliness. As he said to Woman’s Day in the interview published on 7 March 1989,‘I miss Ruth . . . I don’t think Ruth had a happy life.’ 89
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He told the magazine of his anguish at cleaning the cupboards of his wife’s possessions, particularly of her clothes. ‘It’s lonely to go home,’ he said. His motto became ‘Life must go on’.‘There is always lots of work to do,’ he explained.‘So I do it.’ Ruxton insisted on answering personally in longhand all of the more than 3000 cards and notes, which poured into his Bevan Street office.Women he had never met reached out to him in his grief—several widows wrote long confessional letters to him, describing their own reactions to the death of a beloved husband. Bruce now began to work an eighteen-hour day. He had plenty of issues to occupy him, including a proposal that Australia be officially represented at the funeral of the Japanese wartime leader, Emperor Hiro Hito. In Ruth Ruxton’s own interview with Woman’s Day, she had attempted to explain her husband’s extreme views.‘He didn’t tell me about it,’ she said, ‘but friends of his have.’These friends had said that the wartime atrocities Bruce had witnessed had made him bitter. ‘I think that affected him,’ she said. Woman’s Day noted that Ruth ‘admitted that Bruce can “put his foot in his mouth occasionally”,’ but denied that he was a racist.‘The laughable thing is that we have had a Malaysian boy living with us for the past two years . . . An Indian boy came over on an RSL scholarship and stayed with us. Our son Ian has a friend who is Japanese, and considers this to be his second home.’ Ruth Ruxton’s statement about her husband poses the next question to be addressed.Was Bruce Ruxton a racist?
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6 Up before the tribunal
As Sir William Keys, National President of the RSL from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, often complained of Bruce Ruxton, it was not what Ruxton said, but the way he said it.This was an entirely true description of Ruxton’s involvement in the Asian immigration debate of the 1980s and in the debate over homosexuals in the armed forces of the 1990s. In March 1984, the historian Geoffrey Blainey, speaking to the Warrnambool Rotary Club, remarked that the proportion of Asian people in the immigration intake had risen recently and warned against a backlash. Blainey continued, saying that the postwar immigration mix had been very successful and that it might be in everybody’s interest to cut back the numbers of Asians entering the country. As an editor for The Age newspaper remarked shortly afterwards, all of Blainey’s statements in the Warrnambool speech were true.The question of Asian immigration was an emotional one, however, and journalists and radio commentators seized upon the possibilities of controversy in the topic. Four years into the immigration debate, the journalist Max Harris, writing for The Australian on 14 May 1988, described why one man appeared to be at its centre.That man was Bruce Ruxton.
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Max Harris wrote that the media had ‘created’ Bruce Ruxton as the ‘great stereotypical red-neck Australian’. They had done this, Harris argued, to have a figure who would supply outrageous copy to maintain the Asian debate as a mine of sensationalism.The press could and would use the media-invented Bruce Ruxton as the voice of the ‘silent majority’. Meanwhile, said Harris, the ‘other’ Bruce Ruxton was a genuinely nice and kindly person, a ‘good bloke’ of the old school. Harris maintained that ‘Bruce Ruxton 1’ had learned to play up to the role of ‘Bruce Ruxton 2’, the media-creation, with his natural skills as a performer. Accurate as Harris’s comments on how the press go about beating up stories may have been, he was wrong as to the time at which Bruce Ruxton had become a controversial public figure. In his article, Harris, who had fallen for the Ern Malley hoax in 1944, may be viewed more accurately as having identified the approximate time when the press took to using Ruxton as ‘Mr-Dial-a-Quote’. As Ruxton swiftly replied to Harris via a letter to The Australian, published on 2 June 1988,‘The media had no part in inventing me—I was there all the time . . . Max Harris has got it so wrong that for once in my life I’m almost speechless,’ Ruxton declared splendidly. ‘Leaving aside his offensive implication that I’m racist,’ he continued: The big difference between me and other people who emerge into what is called the public eye is that I’m beholden to the members of the Victorian branch of the RSL and when I speak I do so on behalf of them. I speak for no silent group, majority or minority, I speak for thousands of ordinary, brave, no-frills men and women who thought enough of their country to get off their backsides and do something about what they happened to believe in.When I speak, I do so not only on behalf of my members but within the guidelines set down by the majority of members. The letter raises two questions. When did Ruxton start speaking out on public issues and were his statements always 92
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in accordance with RSL official policy? Ruxton’s own answer to the first question is this. Shortly after he was elected Victorian state president of the RSL, in July 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten was brutally assassinated, in fact blown to pieces on the family yacht by an IRA bomb.The world was moved by the October 1979 funeral, when Mountbatten’s faithful old horse Dolly led the procession with her master’s empty boots draped from her saddle. Given his great admiration for the Royal Family, Ruxton was deeply affected by the murder. He had the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Victorian Association approve the wording of a letter of condolence he wrote to Queen Elizabeth on behalf of her Australian imperial supporters. Then, during a visit to Sydney, he was watching television when a John Murray made the statement to the nation at large that he, Murray,‘hoped the Queen would be next’. Murray was from Cheltenham, in the heart of Ruxton’s home territory. He was a self-declared supporter of the IRA.1 Ruxton waited for the press to denounce Murray.There was no protest. After a week had passed, he contacted the Sunday Press, a paper then published jointly by The Age and the HeraldSun at The Age office, and enlisted the aid of the editor, Jack Cannon, a war hero and an old friend. Cannon took up the case. The Murray story was on the front page in the next edition of the Press, and it dominated the poster placards outside the news agencies that Sunday. Ruxton’s stance on Murray was extremely popular among ex-servicemen. His unit, the 2/25th Battalion, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in its next newsletter. The 25 Brigade News of December 1979 declared that beyond congratulating him on gaining the state presidency of the RSL,‘we were particularly impressed by his attitude to a certain John Murray. “Rucko” said: “If Murray could be hanged in this State there would be many of the members of the RSL willing to pull the lever—including me.”You are so bloody right Bruce.’ After that, as Ruxton recalled, the issues of the 1980s—immigration, multiculturalism,Aboriginal land rights—presented themselves to the RSL membership as matters of concern. With the success of the press protest against Murray, whom Ruxton forever after called,‘that bloody little Irish runt’, Ruxton believed he was 93
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in command of a new technique for swaying public opinion. As Victorian state president, he had at his fingertips the means of publicising RSL policy positions.As he explained to the author in a December 2001 interview,the reasoning behind some of his most exaggerated statements was that it was difficult to gain publicity for the ex-service community’s concerns. If he could ‘grab attention’, then he could place veterans’ needs and RSL policies before the public, and so force the Government to take notice. Of course, Bruce Ruxton had been a prominent figure in public policy forums long before 1979. He had appeared at rallies and on university campuses defending Australian participation in the Vietnam War during the 1960s. Many of these appearances had been well before he had been elected state vice president, in 1968. During the 1966 election, after Sir Robert Menzies retired as Australian prime minister, Ruxton authorised public advertisements urging the electorate to use their votes to continue the worldwide struggle against communism. One of these, published in The Age on 21 November 1966, commanded, ‘S.O.S.— Support Our Soldiers. It is your patriotic duty to direct your vote to one of the political parties dedicated to the defeat of Comunism in Vietnam.’The ads announced that they were ‘inserted on behalf of Australian Patriots Unlimited’.The address provided was 179 Moray Street, South Melbourne, that of the Ruxton family business. It seems clear, then, that later in his life Ruxton remembered his career of speaking out on all manner of issues as having started with the John Murray case, since that was his most spectacular experience of using the media to make a point he saw as having national importance. And were the things that Ruxton said in accordance with RSL policy? The answer in regard to immigration, multiculturalism and on Aboriginal land rights is ‘Yes’. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, beyond technical matters relating to the Repatriation Act and veterans’ entitlements, immigration was the most important general area of concern for the RSL. In December 1978, Mufti, the Victorian RSL newspaper, reported ‘lively debate’ on the issue of immigration at the National Conference. Since this debate occurred before his election as Victorian president, we may safely say that at that time it was the 94
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national body leading the formation of policy, not Ruxton.At the RSL Victorian Branch Annual Conference of 1980, the ‘Immigration Policy of the RSL’ was the first item on the agenda for open forum discussion, and during the 1981 conference, Ruxton leaked to the press the news that he had received abusive letters when the delegates had debated the revival of the White Australia policy. By 1983, the agenda of the 68th Annual Victorian RSL State Conference had added to its central statement on the migrant intake two new areas of concern.These were multiculturalism and the development of Asian enclaves.The central statement was that the Australian immigration policy ‘should seek the proper development and enhancement of the Nation, consistent with the recognition of our Anglo-Saxon heritage and traditions’.Accordingly,‘the overriding philosophy of immigration to Australia is that at all times it remains predominantly British, Irish or European in origin’. The new elements by 1983 were ‘That the Commonwealth Government make every effort to integrate migrants into the traditional Australian society and that the promotion of multiculturalism be stopped.’ In other words, the policy should be assimilation. Migrants should speak English. Naturalisation should be promoted, and new arrivals taking out Australian citizenship would swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Further, as the Waverley RSL sub-branch submitted, the Commonwealth should ensure that ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever is an Asian Colony permitted to be developed in Australia.’ The concern of many ex-service people who fought in World War II to preserve the postwar mix in the migrant intake is not particularly surprising.Their belief that Australia was part of the mighty British Empire had been formed when they were at school, and where they adapted to later changes, they remained firmly convinced that a Westminster parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy was the ideal form of government.Their views on the desirable population balance developed during the postwar immigration boom, when the policy was essentially White Australia, with an emphasis on assimilation of migrant differences to the British–Australian way of life they had fought to defend. 95
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At the end of the war, Ruxton, in common with his friend Les Hancock, with whom he had served in Borneo, had felt free enough from family responsibilities to volunteer as members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force going to Japan. After leaving Japan in 1949, Ruxton had gone on to work in Britain and to tour in Europe for a further three years. In 1952, as other World War II ex-servicemen had done earlier, he returned home to the responsibilities of a family man, of running a business, and then of office in a powerful organisation. He had formed his vision of Australia, its ideal politics and ideal population mix, in the period when he had assumed his adult civilian responsibilities. His views on British Australia, and some of the vocabulary in which he was to continue to express these views, came from the period during which Arthur Calwell, speaking in parliament as immigration minister, could make the statement that ‘two Wongs don’t make a White’. Most of Ruxton’s views on immigration during the 1980s were in accord with RSL policy. It was the characteristic Ruxton style, and it was his freedom in the use of statistics which made what he said so controversial.As might be expected, some of his most spectacular public clashes were with Al Grassby, Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam Government. It was Grassby who had formally abolished the White Australia policy. Although the ‘policy’ had been effectively at an end since the 1967 legislation to admit selected Asians and Africans, the formal declaration that it was over ushered in a whole range of reforms.These included the setting up of ethnic radio stations, telephone interpreter services, and the substitution of an affirmation of loyalty for the Oath of Allegiance to the Queen in citizenship ceremonies. Under the Fraser Government, Grassby was Commissioner for Community Relations, in charge of investigating complaints of racial discrimination. He was a staunch republican. As the child of an Irish mother and a Spanish father,Al Jaime Grassby himself personified multiculturalism. He was also a former journalist. He could produce the telling phrase and play to a crowd almost as well as Ruxton himself. At the invitation of the Deakin University Students Association Council, Ruxton and Grassby met in debate at the Geelong 96
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campus. It was May 1983, several weeks before the Annual State RSL Conference.The title of the forum was ‘The continuation and development of the Post-War Asian Immigration Program is essential for Australia Yes/No’. Ruxton opened his address by declaring that he was not a person who wore a hood and a white sheet some nights of the week.This was a reference to an earlier Grassby accusation that the RSL was allied with the Ku Klux Klan—which Grassby had had to withdraw on the grounds that since this could not be proved it was libellous. Ruxton continued that the RSL was not racist, but merely reflected the views of a wide cross-section of the Australian public. He proceeded to the hard-line statement that there should be an end to Asian immigration. Full stop.The Victorian Branch of the RSL’s official policy was that Australia should accept only English, Irish and Caucasian migrants. This drew gasps from the audience. Ruxton countered by saying that he was more certain that the RSL National Congress would follow the Victorian lead on the Asian intake than he was sure of many in the audience getting their degrees. Then it was Grassby’s turn. Grassby began with the statement that denying people from Asia the right to migrate to Australia was the equivalent of saying that Australians were a master race. He argued that any limits on the population intake should apply to all ethnic backgrounds equally, and that skin colour should be irrelevant. Grassby pointed out the benefits to Australia derived from Asian immigration, from hard-working and well-educated people to the improvement in the variety of the food. Finally, he maintained that the ‘master race’ mentality of the RSL would destroy the country. Ruxton then produced his figures.The 1981 federal census, he said, showed that 12.5 per cent of Australia’s population had been born in South-East Asia, and predicted that that figure would rise to 25 per cent by the year 2001. He declared that in recent years, up to a third of migrants had come from Asia, and this included boatloads of Vietnamese, who had ‘hoodwinked immigration officials’ to get into Australia.When a young Asian man queried these figures, Ruxton replied,‘If I were the Immigration Minister, you wouldn’t have got into the country!’ 97
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‘I wish I could be as sure of winning Tattslotto on Saturday night as I am about a referendum of Australians saying “No” to a 33 per cent Asian intake to this country,’ Ruxton bellowed, then, raising his arms, he came to his central point.‘I’m one of the few Australians who has the guts to take a stance on immigration. The reason the rest are silent is because they are suffering from an Anglo-Saxon guilt complex.’ Who won the Deakin immigration debate? The Geelong Advertiser of 13 May 1983 devoted 75 per cent of its front-page cover of the event to what Ruxton had said, and his reception by the crowd. Ruxton always supplied good copy.As the reporter for the Advertiser noted, however, Grassby had ‘drawn fire from the older members of the audience, while Mr Ruxton had upset Deakin’s younger brigade’. Astute as the Advertiser’s reporter had been in reading the reception Ruxton and Grassby had received, a more weighty assessment was to come.Two Deakin academics had been in the audience. They were Frank Campbell and Alan Johnston, both lecturers in Australian Studies at the university. As they pointed out in a letter to the Geelong Advertiser in response to its report, the 1981 census actually stated that 2.54 per cent of the Australian population had been born in Asia. Ruxton, they wrote, must have been confused by another statistic in the census.This was the finding that of the population of Australia who were foreign born, 12.4 per cent of this group had been born in Asia.And even this figure was artificially inflated, said Johnston and Campbell, since 1981 represented the peak of the intake of refugees from Vietnam. They had attempted to have Ruxton defend his figures, but he repeated his original stance, they said, and the debate had ‘closed with him waving the census print-out in the air’.The academics noted that projections into the twentyfirst century put the percentage of Asians in the Australian population of 2001 at three to five per cent. They ended by noting that they were unsure if Ruxton simply could not interpret census figures, or was deliberately misleading people in order to stir up racial divisions in the country. What had most probably happened is indicated in Johnston and Campbell’s account of Ruxton’s refusal to defend his figures, 98
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and his reliance on the effect of ‘waving the census print-out in the air’. According to many accounts, and some from associates who admired him deeply, Ruxton often ran on emotion rather than reason. Many of his friends noted that he was charismatic, rather than articulate, in his relationship with an audience. Barry Everingham, Ruxton’s public relations manager for ten years, often found that in relation to his advice to Ruxton,‘he refused to follow a train of logic.You could not advise him. He created chaos if he was opposed.’ Ruxton was not interested in stirring up racial divisions in the country. Rather, his stance on the immigration mix sprang from a desire to avert such disharmony. It is probable that Ruxton had misread the 1981 census on Asian immigration in the first place, and then, with the stubbornness, or determination, that was his major strength in his campaigns on behalf of veterans, and his Achilles heel in relation to analysis of evidence, he had refused, ever, to review his interpretation. Despite their radically different views on immigration, and their diametrically opposed party politics, Grassby and Ruxton enjoyed good relations. On the second anniversary of multicultural television, Ruxton had featured on an interview panel with Grassby. He said he didn’t watch much television, but then went on in the typical Ruxton manner of saying something predictably Ruxtonian, but unexpected as well. His view was that the role of an ethnic language station ‘might be expected to integrate ethnic communities with the broader Australian community’. Later, in 1984, he appeared with Grassby in the sixpart series The Migrant Experience, produced by the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, and shown on the ethnic language station Channel 0/28. When Grassby received an Order of Australia in the New Year honours list of 1985, Ruxton sent a note of congratulations. In a postscript he wrote,‘I nearly addressed you as “Dear Albert”, as it sounds more Anglo-Saxon than Al.’ Grassby wrote back,‘It is always heart warming to hear from old friends, colleagues and comrades in arms, and your message was especially appreciated. PS, I was tempted to address you as “comrade” but wasn’t sure it was appropriate!’
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Some of Ruxton’s harshest criticisms of Asians migrating to Australia were reserved for the Vietnamese. As a longstanding friend explained Ruxton’s attitude to the Vietnamese community,‘The culture bothered him. Vietnam had been at war for centuries. There was the long struggle against the French. Children had been born in war conditions, been brought up in war conditions. There was an acceptance of killing, death, cheating. He believed that many of them had the morals of occupation and survival. The problem was that they might go against our laws.’ The idea that the Vietnamese would not assimilate into the Australian community certainly explains part of Ruxton’s opposition to their entry in numbers to the country. The idea that people of Chinese and Vietnamese descent from Vietnam could form a ‘fifth column’ in a host country may explain why RSL conference motions on limiting non-European migration were often linked to questions of defence.There was also the bread and butter issue of jobs. Ruxton was quite clear on this in a letter to The Age, published on 20 December 1982, at the beginning of his campaign to limit Asian migration. ‘These Vietnamese migrants seem to be taking over the jobs that Australians should be doing, including in the Commonwealth defence factories and the fruit producing industry,’ he wrote. ‘These are the views of the RSL State Executive which met on 9 December 1982. I can assure the Prime Minister that I have the unanimous support of the State Executive in my stand to stop or limit immigration, particularly from South-East Asia.’ According to Ruxton, the Australian Government should adopt the RSL policy on immigration, and that policy was that the migrant intake should be Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and European. He was concerned over cases where British ex-servicemen, having lived for long periods in Australia, had returned to Britain, and had then been refused re-entry, whereas Vietnamese people with dubious claims to refugee status who had arrived by boat had been allowed to stay. In 1984 he took up the case of an Australian woman who had served with the RAAF during World War II. She was Janet Leonard. In 1974 Leonard had married Jack Doggan, of Dutch nationality, and accepted Netherlands citizenship. The pair had separated in 1981, and 100
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Leonard had returned to Australia for her sister’s wedding two years later. During 1983 she had been refused permanent resident status, and in spite of her parents’ many applications to the Immigration Department, they had been unable to overturn this decision. As a last resort, the family had turned to Ruxton, who succeeded in having the decision reversed.Within 21 days of the application to Bruce Ruxton, Janet Leonard had her permanent residency status. Yet Ruxton could be sympathetic to the plight of Vietnamese refugees. In September 1988 he visited Hong Kong on a Channel 9-sponsored trip to take part in an episode of A Current Affair, debating Asian immigration. Ruxton was shocked by the conditions he saw in the refugee camps. As he said to a Melbourne Sun reporter, who quoted Bruce’s words in an article published in the paper on 15 September 1988, ‘It’s an absolute scandal.This is a British Crown colony.’ He said that at the Sham Shui Po Camp, recent arrivals were locked in ‘dog boxes’, and families with young and newborn children lived in two-tiered ply-board cubicles with poor sanitation and no exercise facilities. ‘These are decent human beings, but they are being treated like animals,’ he continued. ‘It’s inhumane and it’s a disgrace to see people being forced to live like this in a civilised society.’ But Ruxton also stood firm. What he had seen in Hong Kong had not changed his view about the need to limit Australia’s intake of Asian migrants, including refugees.‘I believe Australia has done its share for the refugees. On a pro-rata basis, we have taken more than any other country.’ Regarding Vietnamese immigration, Ruxton was in fact consistent, although he could be emotional, outrageous and outspoken. His focus was always on the percentage of Vietnamese in ‘the balanced mix’.When in 1988 the Maribyrnong sub-branch of the RSL approached the Salvation Army to have one of their clergymen read the lesson on Anzac Day, the man who accepted was Lieutenant Xuyen Tam Po.‘Sam’ Po had arrived in Australia by boat from Vietnam in 1978. Lieutenant Po’s Salvation Army superiors had felt compelled to point out to the Maribyrnong sub-branch secretary, Frank Smith, that Po was Asian. Smith replied,‘We don’t give a damn what he is.We’re not bigoted.’ 101
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Representatives of the media, of course, contacted Bruce Ruxton for an opinion. For an interview published in The Age on 2 April 1988, Ruxton said he had met Lieutenant Po and ‘thought he was a fine young man.The Salvation Army does a lot of good for some of our down-and-out veterans. I congratulate Maribyrnong-Maidstone sub-branch on their choice . . . People misunderstood [the attitude of] the RSL,’ Ruxton claimed. ‘We just say that this country should remain European.’ If we may return to an incident from the RSL Victorian Branch Annual Conference which followed the 1983 Deakin University debate on immigration, we will see how Ruxton’s use of the press to publicise veterans’ causes could be a two-edged sword.The incident involved the well-respected Wellington Lee, a Melbourne businessman of Chinese descent.A speaker to the first of the conference’s motions on immigration said that he did not believe that Chinese and Vietnamese assimilated to the Australian community. Lee burst out that the Chinese had been in Australia since the 1850s, when his great-grandfather had arrived. ‘They have been among the most respected citizens,’ he stated. Ruxton, who kept tight discipline at conferences in the interests of finishing on time, ruled Lee out of order, on the grounds that he could speak only on behalf of a sub-branch, not as an individual. Next day, 8 July 1983, the front-page headline of The Age was ‘RSL gags Chinese community leader’. Further down in the fine print, however, it became clear that Ruxton had told Lee that the speaker Lee objected to was talking about the Chinese in Vietnam. ‘Wellington,’ he had said, ‘I don’t think anyone in this room knocks the Australian Chinese.’ Lee had then gone on to speak to a motion in favour of knowledge of English being made mandatory before citizenship could be granted, on behalf of his sub-branch, South Hawthorn. Lee’s speech had been ‘followed by sustained applause’, the paper reported. Wellington Lee said at the 1983 RSL State Conference,‘You fellows are not racist. I’ve served with you, thousands of you, and I’m very proud to be a member of the RSL.’ Most of the people who held senior office in the RSL with Ruxton and who were interviewed for this book stated that Bruce Ruxton was not racist.They pointed out that Ruth and Bruce Ruxton had often 102
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had boys from South-East Asian countries staying in their home. In fact, when Ruxton’s only son, Ian, was a boarder at Geelong Grammar, his best friend was Makato Nakayama from Japan. Makato’s father had written to Ruxton to ask him to act as his son’s ‘foster father’ while the boy was in Australia. Ruxton accepted, and Makato spent one summer break and many weekends with the Ruxtons.As an adult, he returned from Japan to stay with them. In 1971, Ruxton led a pilgrimage to Kota Kinabalu, a key site of the Sandakan death march. On that trip he had met the father of a Malaysian boy, Derek Perkins, and the boy had subsequently travelled to Australia on an RSL Jubilee Fund scholarship to study electronic engineering. Derek Perkins stayed with the Ruxtons during most of his studies.The same hospitality was extended to Diljit Singh, the son of an Sikh officer, Chint Singh, who had served in the British Army in India. Bruce would later sponsor the migration of Ghurkha families to Australia, on the basis that of all the Asian groups, the Ghurkhas were the most thoroughly British in their culture and legal traditions.There were also guests from Papua New Guinea, such as Nombie Berakie, President of the Native Ex-Servicemen’s Association at Lae, who visited Australia for Anzac Day in 1969. Ruxton’s memorabilia collection contains many cards from young people of Indian and Chinese descent, where he is addressed as ‘Uncle Bruce’. The definition of ‘racism’ changed in Australia between the end of the war to the end of the twentieth century.The emphasis has changed from focus on actions which would have been considered bigoted, to language deemed discriminatory. Bruce Ruxton certainly used discriminatory language often. He rejoiced in being ‘politically incorrect’, or his own word,‘naughty’.When it came to ex-services communities in Australia and internationally, however, he appears to have been relatively colourblind. Many of those who had most cause to consider whether or not Ruxton was a racist did not think him one. Dino De Marchi, a founding member of the RSL Italian sub-branch, later to be one of Bruce’s most serious challengers for the state RSL presidency, had the following to say in an interview with the author on 5 May 2003. ‘I don’t think, really, that he is a racist. I don’t 103
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think he is a bigot. It’s just that the media portray him that way, and he didn’t really correct that.’ Ruxton is also notorious for his stance on homosexuality. Ruxton’s most famous outburst regarding the gay community was this:‘I don’t know where all these queers and poofters have come from. I don’t remember one single poofter in World War II.’ The time was April 1982, and Ruxton was speaking out against the suggestion of gay ex-servicemen that they should march together as a group on Anzac Day. Ruxton’s ruling, also RSL policy, was that everyone in the Anzac Day parade should march with their unit. Part of the explanation for Ruxton’s public statements against the gay and lesbian communities was his concern that in the 1980s minority groups had ‘taken the centre stage’. This development, in his view, meant that mainstream opinions and beliefs received less attention than minority concerns. The point was central to the after-dinner speech he gave to Lodges and Rotary Clubs, appearing by arrangement of the Joan Saxton Speakers’ Agency. Ruxton spoke on the topic ‘Australia’s Rich Heritage: What are you going to do about it?’ For each appearance he received between $1000 and $3000—the Joan Saxton bookings started in early 1990. Earlier, Ruxton had begun to monitor Victorian State Government grants to minority groups. His point was that the Government never offered the RSL money for its welfare work. Being Ruxton, he used his contacts in the countryside and in the media to publicise figures of grants, whose source was not disclosed. On 30 October 1985, Max O’Halloran, President of the Bendigo RSL sub-branch, published the contents of a circular Ruxton sent to all members of the Victorian State Parliament in his regular column for the Bendigo Advertiser.‘Why didn’t the RSL receive a government grant under the job promotion scheme?’ asked O’Halloran. He went on to give a list of organisations which had received grants,‘of which many of them have no right to be recognised in this country’. The list included ‘Pax Christi—$79,808—grant to assist the activities of this antiAmerican “peace” group’ and, ‘Gay Publications Collective— $70,762—general purposes grant’. 104
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Jack Cannon, in his regular column for the Herald, ‘Cannon Shots’, went even further in revealing the hand of Ruxton at work.‘The Victorian RSL will seek a major grant from the State Department of Employment and Training to employ a team to do welfare work in the large ex-service community,’ wrote Cannon.‘State president, Bruce Ruxton, said such a grant could hardly be refused in view of the subsidies the government has given to “extreme left, pacifist and poofter” groups under the guise of unemployment relief.’ Cannon also noted the grant to ‘The Gay Publications Co-Operative [publishers of Outrage]— $71,000’. Cannon may have rounded the figures supplied up to the nearest thousand in the interests of neatness. The issue of the gay community once again drew Ruxton’s attention, and drew the media to Ruxton in 1992. On 24 November of that year, the Federal Government lifted its former ban on the employment of declared homosexuals in the armed forces. Ruxton had long been on record at RSL conferences against the changes to the Department of Defence policy. He quickly supplied the expected copy. He painted a vivid picture of the dangers of two gay pilots in the cockpit of an F-111. ‘Imagine,’ he quipped, ‘they might establish the first “five-milehigh” male club.’ Ruxton later told Peter Olszewski, managing editor of Australian Playboy, in a long and reflective interview for the magazine published in April 1988, ‘I did get rather facetious about the first five-mile-high male club, you know.’ Many letters in reply to the initial statement had pointed out that two gay men in charge of a plane would behave the same way as a heterosexual pair. That is, they would behave professionally. In his Playboy interview, Ruxton returned to his stance on homosexuals in World War II. This time he limited his claim to the statement that ‘very few homosexuals were sighted in the war and if they surfaced they were out’. He believed that the question was one of discipline. He felt that parents would object to gay instructors,‘almost certainly’ resulting in a fall in recruitment to armed forces careers. He worried about the problems of HIV-infected blood.As he stated to the author,‘In battle there is no time for HIV-checks.’ 105
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The gay community responded to Ruxton in its own style. In the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras of 1993, a key float featured a fivemetre-high effigy of Bruce Ruxton.The float was sponsored by ‘Veterans Against Discrimination’.The figure had Ruxton’s head and trademark centrally parted hair plastered in place with Californian Poppy. He was looking back over his shoulder. The curvaceous body of the effigy was dressed in a gold lamé swimsuit, in imitation of the famous World War II poster pin-up of Betty Grable. As always, Ruxton turned around a potentially bitter situation using humour. Shortly after the Sydney Mardi Gras, he gave an interview to Chris Beck of The Age, for Beck’s ‘On the Couch’ column of July 1993. In the accompanying picture, Bruce appeared with his pet white cockatoo, Charlie, on his shoulder. Ruxton said of homosexuality:‘It goes against every grain in my body. But one has got to accept it. It doesn’t mean that I like it. I think it is abhorrent. Abhorrent is the word.’ He continued: ‘I think they have a lot to answer for, particularly with AIDS. They are talking about heterosexuals now passing it on. But you’ve got to get back to the root of the evil. Bloody disgraceful.’ He paused—‘It’s going to be hard to stop, isn’t it, unless you shoot them all. And I don’t think we’ll be doing that.’ In a sudden change of tone, he continued, ‘And as I’m their patron because I led the Mardi Gras in Sydney, I’ve got to think of that.’ In the opinion of his longstanding friend Don Chipp, Ruxton was not homophobic. His outrageous statements, however, Chipp said, ‘went down well in the Moe RSL club’. Ruxton’s views on homosexuality were those of his generation. They also reflected RSL policy on homosexuals in the armed forces. As Major-General W. B. ‘Digger’ James, later to be RSL National President, wrote in a faxed letter of 24 November 1992 to the Hon. Ben Humphreys, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, on hearing of the Cabinet decision, I write to convey to you my complete and utter disgust at the decision your ALP Cabinet has made in deciding to allow AS A DELIBERATE POLICY that homosexuals 106
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may serve in the armed forces of our country.Your Government has been given the best advice by the Military leaders and yet it persists in putting at risk the health of our troops for generations to come. Everyday when I put on my artificial leg and walk around I will remember that I was the lucky one, for I received safe and pure blood after being critically wounded in the battlefield of Korea. Clearly, your Government is seeking support of the ‘gay lobby’ to win election.
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7 Contacts
Of all the friendships Bruce Ruxton was to form in the course of his service as Victorian RSL president, perhaps his relationship with Germaine Greer was the most unexpected. Ruxton was at his office in ANZAC House, sometime in early 1982, when an unusual call came through.The speaker was Irvin Rockman, then Melbourne Lord Mayor. Rockman said that he had a friend with him, and that she had ‘trouble with her father’, an ex-serviceman. Could Ruxton help? Ruxton replied,‘Yes, sure.Any time.’ Within ten minutes of their call, Germaine Greer and Irvin Rockman were in the ANZAC House office. Ruxton, somewhat taken aback to have in his presence the leading feminist asking his advice, quickly assessed the facts of the situation. Greer had found on a return to Australia that her father was in special accommodation in Mentone, near the family home. Greer was less than pleased with the care he was receiving. Ruxton knew the Mentone institution. ‘It was crook,’ he told the author. ‘They were all stupid in that home, and if everyone around you is stupid, you end up stupid too.’ He quickly arranged a place for Mr Greer at RSL Park in Frankston, where Greer’s health and outlook rapidly improved. Later, after Reg Greer succumbed to
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a stroke, Ruxton used his influence to have him settled at the Mt Eliza Geriatric Centre, where the RSL had two representatives on the board of management. When Greer found that her father’s wartime experiences had finally developed into an anxiety neurosis, she had not thought of applying to the RSL for help.As she told Michael Parkinson in an interview which took place shortly after her father was admitted to RSL Park, she had assumed that the RSL was so lost in its reactionary dreams that it would not be capable of carrying out its welfare tasks. She had, instead, gone to the top among her Melbourne contacts and spoken to Irvin Rockman, the Lord Mayor. Rockman, knowing the ex-service League’s real strengths, drove her straight to Ruxton. Greer was generous in making her change of heart public. She announced of her father to Michael Parkinson,‘The RSL took him in; no questions asked, when every other agency could find no time for him.’ She was even more gracious to Ruxton himself. ‘I can never thank you enough for your prompt and no-nonsense response to my appeal,’ she wrote in April 1982. Greer then bridged the gap between her own 1960s generation and that of the 1930s and 1940s in writing, ‘It is not easy for an ex-flower child to admit that she has been deeply impressed by the RSL, but I’m admitting it.’ The exchanges between the feminist and the RSL chief might have been expected to end with the thankyou letters. But they didn’t. In December 1986, Greer returned to Melbourne. Her father had died a short while before in the Mt Eliza Centre, and she intended to find out about his background, which had long been a mystery to her. She rang Ruxton: ‘I’m in Australia, out at Richmond. Where are you going to take me to lunch?’ Ruxton asked her where she would like to go.‘Anywhere.A pub will do,’ Greer replied. Ruxton decided to take her to the Railway Hotel in South Melbourne. His unit group, the 2/25th and 2/31st Battalions Association, had met there on Anzac Day since the war. In addition, he shared a strong friendship with Mollie Davies, the proprietor. Mollie Davies, Irish, Catholic, generous of spirit, at that time a widow, held her court at the Saturday evening meal in the dining room. Ruxton was often present. 110
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To reach the dining room, it was necessary to go through the public bar. Greer, in her early forties, was the tall, sexy, selfconfident woman she had been when she first hit the headlines with her Female Eunuch in 1971.The public bar, at lunchtime, was packed. Construction site workers, waterside workers, police and some of the local office population, all took a noisy break there. As Greer entered the bar, total silence fell. When Greer passed into the dining room, Mollie Davies paused, and looked up from what she was doing.A feminist in her dining room, and on Bruce Ruxton’s arm! ‘Mollie almost had a heart attack,’ Ruxton recalled.‘I don’t think she liked her much’. Subsequently, Greer and Ruxton kept up a lively correspondence. He sent her cuttings when articles critical of her, or her writings, appeared in the Australian papers. She sent him autographed copies of books, including one on the great river journeys of the world, for which she had written a chapter on the Rio Sao Francisco in Brazil. He helped her with information for her 1989 book, Daddy,We Hardly Knew You. She appeared in an interview, televised from Britain, for his 2002 edition of This Is Your Life. On the Ruxton Life, Greer said, ‘I’ll never forget you, what you did for me and my dad when we were in trouble. I know what drives you.What drives you is called loyalty.’1 It was surprising enough that Greer cared for Ruxton—the copy of Daddy she sent him is dedicated ‘For Bruce with love and thanks’—but she had, after all, met him in the course of his RSL duties. It is even more surprising to find that the La Trobe University Professor of Sociology sent Ruxton an essay he had written for the political and literary journal, Quadrant, for Ruxton’s files.The academic was Claudio Veliz, Professor of Sociology and Dean of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe. Veliz was an expert on the history of Chile and on South American politics.The piece he sent to Ruxton, however, was on Geoffrey Blainey and the Asian immigration debate. Veliz defended Blainey’s right to warn against a possible backlash if Asian immigration continued at the 1984 rate. Ruxton, in his own highly unacademic style, called anyone who criticised Blainey a ‘Pinkie’.Veliz’s warm letters to Ruxton suggest that he 111
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found him a breath of fresh air when the universities were filled with concern for ‘political correctness’ in dealing with racism and sexism. In December 1983, Professor Claudio Veliz invited Ruxton to La Trobe to speak to a seminar on the sociology of culture.The seminars took the form of luncheons.They were also known as the conversazione. Other speakers in the program included Sir Gustav Nossal, the scientist and immunologist who had assisted Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet with the research which won Burnet the Nobel Prize, Leonard French, the artist, Dame Phyllis Frost, and the socialite Sheila Scotter. Barry Jones, the Pick-a-Box champion of the 1960s and later a parliamentarian and Cabinet minister, also spoke to the seminar. Who better to speak on Australian culture than Bruce Ruxton? Veliz and Ruxton remained friends, and Ruxton spoke at several later conversaziones. When Veliz took up a scholarly position at Boston University, he remained in touch. It was Veliz who introduced Ruxton to the British historian, Robert Rhodes-James, who would visit Australia twice, as the guest of the RSL and of La Trobe University. Sir Robert Rhodes-James was the conservative member for Cambridge, in the British House of Commons. His knighthood had been bestowed by the British Prime Minister, John Major. Rhodes-James was the author of a book on the Gallipoli campaign, which challenged the Australian tradition that the British commanders in the Dardanelles had been incompetent, and so thrown away the lives of Australian soldiers. Ruxton was deeply impressed by Rhodes-James’s revision of the history to include the sacrifices of British, French and Ghurkha troops on the one hand, and of the Turks, on the other. He himself read war histories every night before he slept, and regularly reviewed new releases. Rhodes-James was highly accomplished. He had gained first class honours at Oxford, where his tutor had been Baron Alan Bullock, a well-known historian who had often appeared on British television during the 1950s. Four decades later, Bullock was still writing. He published his celebrated study of tyranny, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives in 1991. Rhodes-James himself had 112
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gone on to write biographies of Anthony Eden and of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort. Rhodes-James’s first visit to Australia was to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. Rhodes-James represented Britain at the Melbourne Dawn Service and in the Anzac Day parade, and was widely honoured and entertained by RSL members in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. Rhodes-James’s contacts within Buckingham Palace were always interesting to Ruxton. Bruce was fascinated by Princess Diana, from the 1981 fairytale wedding onward. Fourteen years later, he listened with growing horror to Diana’s televised interview in which she confessed to her adultery with James Hewitt. He immediately responded to media telephone calls with the statement that the Princess should not have gone public. ‘Let’s face it,’ said Ruxton, ‘the royals have been in and out of one another’s beds for 1000 years. Goodness me, they’ve survived executions, revolutions, murder, madness. I think one had syphilis, if you don’t mind.’ At that time, Rhodes-James was writing a book on the life of King George VI, Queen Elizabeth’s father. Shortly after the Princess Diana interview, Ruxton received a letter from Rhodes-James, dated 22 November 1995, in which RhodesJames described how he had just had ‘the privilege of an hour and a half with the Queen at Buckingham Palace’, discussing his work on King George VI, the day after her daughter-in-law’s interview was televised worldwide.The Queen’s granting of the interview, Rhodes-James wrote, ‘was remarkably kind of her, considering the events of the previous evening’. During the following year, Rhodes-James began a plan to include an episode on Australia in his forthcoming television series, British Civilisation. His idea was to use Geoffrey Blainey as his adviser, and to make a return trip to Australia. He had often stayed with the Blaineys at their home in East Melbourne. Rhodes-James’s biography of George VI was about to come out. It was to be titled A Spirit Undaunted.At his request, Her Majesty the Queen Mother had supplied a favourite photograph of her husband for the cover. Ruxton offered to arrange a double book launch for Rhodes-James at ANZAC House. The books to be 113
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launched were a reissued version Rhodes-James’s Gallipoli and the King George VI biography. In common with many of the other British knights and lords who visited Australia during Ruxton’s period as Victorian RSL president, Rhodes-James appears to have used his RSL contacts much to his own advantage. RSL staff found that the British visitors expected them to arrange everything for their visits in detail from ANZAC House,from the major service Bruce provided of upgrading their international flight seats from economy to business class to the dry-cleaning of their clothes. The British lords simply assumed that the RSL would accept the costs of their telephone calls and faxed letters. The Rhodes-James book launch and reception, first booked for 22 April 1999, had to be rescheduled several times. RhodesJames and his wife Angela wished to spend more time in Adelaide than in Melbourne. This meant that the book launch had to dovetail with the Anzac Day Dawn Service, which Rhodes-James also wished to attend. The book launch finally took place on 26 April.The guests included representatives of the Turkish Veterans’Association from Ankara; Lord and Lady Slim—although Sir William’s father was more famous for having commanded the Fourteenth British Army in Burma, he had also fought in the Dardanelles alongside an uncle of Rhodes-James; the British Consul-General; and Professor and Mrs Blainey. Rhodes-James had attended the Anzac Day Dawn Service the day before, as he had wished to do, taking breakfast at Government House afterwards. Other British aristocrats visited Australia as guests of the RSL. Among them was Major-General the Earl Cathcart, Deputy Grand President of the British Commonwealth ExServices League, who came in 1982.The Earl Haig, a descendant of the World War I General Haig, visited Australia from Scotland in 1986, accompanied by his wife.The Third Earl Kitchener, the grand-nephew of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, whose face had graced the famous World War I recruitment poster, was entertained by the League in 1989. Large receptions were held for the visitors, and Bruce took each of the earls to lunch at the Railway Hotel, where they met Mollie Davies. 114
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His OBE introduced Ruxton to a wide range of contacts. One of his most regular British correspondents was Major-General Sir Peter Gillett, a Knight of the Order. Sir Peter and his wife lived in rooms in the Mary Tudor Tower of Windsor Castle. On the occasion of the marriage between Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew in July 1986, Sir Peter wrote to Ruxton that he had been ‘fortunate enough to be on duty in Westminster Abbey for yesterday’s Royal Wedding’. Ruxton sent Gillett a case of Foster’s beer each Christmas. The Foster’s appears to have been much appreciated. Gillett had an interest in the OBE Associations in the various states of Australia, and in the RSL, having been introduced at the Perth RSL headquarters on a visit to that city.The association may have been summed up by the following note from Gillett at the end of 1983.‘My dear Bruce,’ Gillett wrote, using the salutation of the Order,‘It was great talking to you earlier this year when I visited Australia briefly. You have always been a splendid contact and “link-man” as far as the various associations are concerned, for which I am particularly grateful.’ Some of the flavour of the OBEs’ relations with each other, and their contacts with the diplomatic corps, is conveyed by the following telegram. Allegedly, the cable was sent in 1943 by Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, the British Ambassador in Moscow, to Lord Pembroke of the Foreign Office, London. Bruce Ruxton’s copy came to him from a fellow OBE.The sender wrote in his cover note that the cable ‘was released recently under the Freedom of Information Act, or something like that . . . !’ The telegram, written on an old-fashioned typewriter, read: My Dear Reggie, In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that 115
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God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt. We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that. Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, H M Ambassador. Many of the contacts Ruxton made were through his membership of the West Brighton Club, in Middle Brighton, a bayside suburb of Melbourne not far from his Beaumaris home. Ruxton was made a member of the West Brighton Club in 1978, shortly before he was elected RSL state president.Through the club, Ruxton became acquainted with former Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies, in his final years. Ruxton was a member of the Liberal Party and held Menzies in great esteem. When Menzies died in 1978, Ruxton and fellow Brighton Club member, Keith Mattingly, presented the club with framed enlargements of photographs recording Sir Robert’s life. Especially after Sir Robert’s death, Ruxton became a firm friend of Dame Pattie Menzies.They exchanged Christmas cards each year. In 1989, Ruxton joined forces with Sir Paul Hasluck in organising a dinner to celebrate her life. Dame Pattie confided her fears and doubts to Ruxton, when she was debating whether or not to enter a retirement village in 1993. Before that, she often took flights from Canberra to attend at the West Brighton Club on ‘Ladies Days’. In turn, when Ruxton was in Canberra, he often invited her out to a meal. On one occasion, he invited her out to a MacDonald’s. Heather Menzies, Dame Pattie’s daughter, later told the following story to Ruxton.‘I was there when you phoned that day, Bruce. Mother got off the phone and asked me, “Oh, Dear.What should I wear?” ’ Another frequent guest of Bruce Ruxton at the West Brighton Club was Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop. Sir Edward was to gain the status of an Australian folk hero in his final years. During the war, when Lieutenant-Colonel Dunlop and his surgical team were prisoners of the Japanese on Java, Wing-Commander W. T. H. 116
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‘Nick’ Nichols, the senior ranking officer in the camp, had appointed Dunlop commander of all the Commonwealth and English-speaking units in prison. Nichols’s reasoning was that, in the bitter conditions of the Japanese POW camps, the natural choice for leader was a doctor and healer. Nichols’s choice, which went against all precedents and military conventions, proved inspirational. The story of how the prisoners of the Japanese on Java organised study programs and lectures in the classics in order to retain their sanity is well known. Even better known are ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s subsequent efforts on behalf of the sick and malnourished prisoners forced to work on the Japanese Burma– Thailand Railway. Ruxton admired Dunlop greatly. When Lady Sue Ebury visited Melbourne from Hong Kong in 1987, he decided to do all he could to promote her biography, Weary: The Life of Sir Edward Dunlop. He included Ebury in the official party for the commemoration of Remembrance Day, and she emerged from the Shrine on his arm. Her inclusion as an honoured guest of the official party, and her photograph in the Herald-Sun, had proved very effective in spreading the news of her book, Ebury wrote to Ruxton. She continued, ‘A number of kind and helpful people have been in touch with names and telephone numbers, thanks to your excellent publicity.’ When ‘Weary’ Dunlop died on 2 July 1993, a state funeral was scheduled at St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Melbourne.This was to take place on 12 July.Three days before the state funeral, the Ex-Prisoner of War and Relatives Association held a commemorative service for him at the Toorak Uniting Church. Sir Edward had been their patron.The Toorak church had been his own church, two doors from his home, where he had married his wife Helen after his return from the war. Ruxton was to lead the mourners in paying their tributes. Bill Griffiths, the blind and handless soldier Dunlop had saved from a Japanese bayonet at Bandoeng on Java, had flown in from Britain. In February 1942, when Griffiths had been a lance-corporal, blinded, his face shattered, his hands amputated, and one leg broken, the Japanese captain in charge had taken the sudden decision that all disabled prisoners should be killed. He motioned 117
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to the guards with their bayonets. Dunlop had stepped in front of Griffiths and faced down the Japanese commander. Griffiths had never seen the man he described at the service as his ‘saviour’. Nine hundred others packed the church. As Ruxton read the eulogy, he was a model of both dignity and warmth. He told of how, when ‘Weary’ was in his midseventies, and still a practising surgeon, he had seen walking towards his car that a person had broken into it. In fact, the thief had stolen Sir Edward’s medical instruments. Dunlop ran after the man, caught him, and knocked him unconscious. His humanity had then taken over. ‘Weary’ had put the thief into his car, and driven him to Casualty at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.Then, as befitted the man Ruxton described as ‘a true Australian, born of the land at Sheepwash Creek near Benalla’, he read a tribute from a country newspaper, the Bairnsdale Advertiser. He concluded,‘As the honourable Tom Uren said earlier this week,“We will never forget him” .’ At the state funeral, braving a chilling wind and showers of rain, an estimated 10,000 people stood in the streets outside the cathedral and along St Kilda Road to the Shrine. Ken Peterson, of TNT Security, later credited Ruxton with the idea that the public should salute the war hero by lining St Kilda Road. Ruxton himself thought he had simply put out a number of media releases regarding the funeral. Inside St Paul’s, former Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen presented the eulogy, which was broadcast to the people outside. Sir Edward’s two sons, John and Alexander, and his two grandsons, broke with protocol to walk behind the coffin on its passage to the Shrine, before a family funeral. Among the mourners in the cathedral was the Japanese Ambassador, Mr Kasutoshi Hasegawa. Bruce Ruxton served on the committee which chose the design for the statue of Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop which is now in St Kilda Road, opposite the old Prince Henry’s Hospital. He thought the site was perfect, as the diggers would march past ‘Weary’ on Anzac Day. Bruce would have liked to see ‘Weary’ Dunlop portrayed in a ragged shirt with his trademark battered stethoscope. He thought the best statue group was that including the walking 118
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wounded, now in the Dunlop memorial at Benalla. Dame Beryl Beaurepaire, however, had the deciding vote on the Melbourne work.The winning design for the Melbourne site has Sir Edward in a suit, with a Flanders red poppy in the lapel. Two years after ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s death, Ruxton became godfather to his new grandson, Edward Dunlop. Dr Alexander Dunlop and his fiancée Amanda had married shortly after Sir Edward’s death. Ruxton was very emotional at the christening, recalling ‘Weary’ in the grandson’s face. He managed to quip, however,‘A lot of people have called me a godfather in the past, but not in the same sense as this, I think.’ A monument to Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop in his home town of Benalla bears the words ‘Compassion’ and ‘Forgiveness’ on two sides of its plinth. Dunlop forgave his Japanese captors. It was one of Ruxton’s blind spots that he could never forgive the Japanese for the massacres of which he had found evidence in Borneo.
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8 Women and combat
In May 1993, Ita Buttrose’s international magazine for women, Ita, published an interview with Bruce Ruxton by Dorian Wild. The piece was titled ‘Bruce Ruxton: Women and Me’. In this, Ruxton was quoted as saying, ‘But I’m a widower now, and I have had a relationship’. The relationship he was referring to was almost certainly that which he enjoyed with Maisie Crowson, during 1989 and 1991. Crowson is portrayed in the illustrations section of this book as a youthful member of the British Navy, in a photograph taken nearly twenty years before her association with Ruxton. Many women found Bruce attractive.The attraction is partly explained by the power he wielded over so many years, and the energy he generated around him. He was a leader, and people follow leaders. His ability to remember names, individual details, personal tastes and interests caused delight and admiration in men. It especially endeared him to women. He could be kind, generous and thoughtful. In spite of his media image as an outspoken larrikin, he had the impeccable manners of an earlier and more chivalrous age. The author considers that he had a strong need for physical affection. Bruce inspired a fierce loyalty in the
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many female secretaries who served him over the years. He had pronounced views on what women should be like. On the one hand, he disliked feminists who publicly fought for feminist causes. On the other hand, he knew, and admired, many powerful women. As with so much else about Ruxton’s personality, his relations with women could be surprising, and sometimes contained out-and-out contradictions. Some eleven months after the death of his first wife, Bruce was introduced to the vital and fun-loving Maisie Crowson, then an employee of the South African embassy in Canberra. It seems likely that the two met through David Tothill, the Republic of South Africa Ambassador to Australia. Crowson was originally from England, although she had spent many years in Australia. As she told Bruce, she had been stationed with the Royal Navy in Belgium during 1971. She was probably in her late thirties or early forties when she met Bruce. Bruce referred to her as ‘The Cutie from Canberra’, and his ‘Little Pommie Gal’. She visited him in Melbourne, and she loved to travel with him through the Victorian countryside, applauding his ability to make speeches without notes. He bought her pottery at the famous works in Bendigo. She met his mates at the various RSL clubs, and later remembered them by name. They seem to have had much in common.They walked his dogs on the Beaumaris beach, although Crowson, as she sometimes said, was more a ‘feline’ than a ‘canine’ person, and later wrote cards addressed from herself, as well as from her cat. She disliked the Labor Party, Bob Hawke and Gareth Evans, as much as he. After Canberra, Crowson went to Honiara, in the Solomon Islands, where she had a job with the Australian High Commission. She returned to Melbourne on leave in 1991 and was Bruce’s guest on Anzac Day. He introduced her to his secretaries at one of his offices, but she found them judgmental. She joked that they must have been jealous of her. Eventually, Crowson gained a post at the Australian Permanent Mission in Geneva. In an indication that she had decided that her long-term future was not with Bruce, she had accepted a three-year assignment in Geneva, with the possibility of an extension for a fourth. Bruce wrote several letters, asking often 122
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when she would return to Australia. She invited him to tour in Europe, but explained that her paid leave from Geneva would be to London, and that the Mission would not pay for the longer journey to Canberra or Melbourne. Finally, in early 1992, during a visit to England, Crowson was reunited with an old family friend. He was a farmer, who knew her father. Long ago, two of their grandfathers had farmed adjacent plots.There had apparently been talk of a marriage some thirteen years before, but for some reason this had failed to take place. Crowson communicated that she could not miss her second chance with the man she had seemed destined to marry. Crowson offered Bruce a continuing association on the basis of friendship. She enquired about his new dog, once again named Digger.They continued to write to each other for a further two or three years. Right at the beginning of her correspondence with Ruxton, in October 1989, Maisie Crowson had spoken of a severe downturn in Bruce’s health. She sent her best wishes for his speedy recovery. He had been digging in the garden at Glenwood Avenue, when he felt a bite on his ankle. He had thought nothing much of it. He had watched some television, and then gone to bed. When he woke, he was surprised to find a number of people in the bedroom.There was Helen Finnigan, his secretary at Bevan Street. Helen may have come, he thought groggily, because she had become worried when he had not turned up at the office. Lawrie Black, his mate from Blackrock was there. So was Dr Bob Gardiner, his local medical officer. It seems that Black had failed to raise Bruce, come to the house, sized up that there had been a medical crisis, and called Gardiner. The bite would have been a minor condition, had Ruxton consented to stay in bed. Bruce, however, predictably, would not do as he was told. Bruce insisted on going to work at the office. Eventually he did have to take to bed, with his leg elevated.Ten days later, he was admitted to Linacre Hospital in Hampton for a further fourteen days. Dr Struan Sutherland from the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories later identified the culprit as the common white tail spider. Sutherland, however, during the long 123
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period of ongoing after-affects, could provide no antidote. Bruce suffered deep tissue inflammation, and dramatic blistering broke out on his lower leg. One newspaper headline announced, ‘Ruxton bitten by White Tail Spider—Spider died in Agony’. A Melbourne Sun journalist managed to get through the hospital switchboard to Bruce.What was the RSL chief ’s opinion of white tail spiders? Said Bruce, ‘I would not wish one on a Japanese war criminal, and you can quote me on that.’ Many papers did ‘quote him on that’, including the Australasian Post on 9 December 1989, two months after the bite. The spider bite appears to have had serious implications. When RSL senior officials visited Bruce in hospital, they noticed that the injury seemed more severe than a mere bite. Some of them also looked at the medical chart over the bed, and read the word DIABETES. Previously, it had not been common knowledge among RSL office holders that Bruce suffered from adult onset diabetes. During the first ten years of Ruxton’s terms as Victorian RSL President, he had had no serious challenger for the position. He was strong. He was decisive. He could control a meeting superbly. Part way into the later thirteen years of Bruce’s term, powerful League members would consider, for the first time, the possibility of someone seriously contesting against the longstanding chief for the leadership. The health problems went back some years.There was a heart attack scare in October 1984. Earlier, in May 1982, he had been admitted to the Linacre Hospital with a thrombosis (clot) in the leg. In his hospital bed, he was photographed working with ‘Nappy’ Ollington, the two-up champion, on a plan to open a state-run two-up stadium in time for the legalisation of casinos in Victoria. During that hospitalisation, the Altona RSL sub-branch sent a get-well cable which read,‘Bruce, you may have a clot in your body but please do not forget you are needed to remove the clot from the system.’ Bruce Ruxton was a difficult patient. As one of his close friends remembered, he would always discharge himself from the hospital too soon,‘and go and do what he wanted to do’. Once, 124
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travelling the countryside in March 1992, Bruce, then 66, developed pneumonia. He was confined in hospital to rest, and his staff cancelled all his speaking engagements. Bruce, however, who had fallen ill on 21 March, was sitting up writing thankyou notes for the get-well cards he received in hospital on 27 March, and was out addressing a gathering of the XLI Institute of the TNT security organisation, in Melbourne, six days later on 2 April. Faye Anderson, Ruxton’s longest serving executive assistant, recalled Bruce’s attitude to ill health. Concentrating, he would say:‘You’ve got to get your head right’. As spinal problems, long accepted as a war disability, worsened in the late 1980s and 1990s, he would state that he did not want to attend any ‘ologists’. Given his punishing sixteen and even eighteen-hour daily work schedules, Bruce appears to have considered himself immune to ill health.Where diet was concerned, he apparently thought himself invincible. Controlling Bruce’s diet was a constant problem.Anderson believed that she was the only member of his staff who could make him eat properly. She recalled one struggle in particular. Bruce had arrived at ANZAC House from his Albert Park office with a bar of chocolate in his hand. From time to time, he would stare at it longingly. ‘Eat it, and you will die!’ she declared. Ruxton liked to employ women as his staff. In May 1993, when Dorian Wild interviewed him for the Ita article, ‘Women and me’,Wild had Bruce photographed with all his female staff. There were five assistants in all.Wild was surprised to find that of the three secretaries who worked with Ruxton at ANZAC House—Faye Anderson, Yvonne Delilkhan and Judi Mitra— Delilkhan was Sri Lankan and Mitra was of Anglo-Indian descent. On the colour issue,Wild quoted Bruce as saying:‘The colour thing doesn’t worry me.You can’t point a finger at me that way. Neither I nor the RSL has said there should be no more Asian migrants. We just reckon the ratio of them coming into Australia is incorrect and we stick to that.’The RSL administration had employed Mitra and Delilkhan because they were the best people for the job.‘A few people have said that I employed them as a smokescreen,’ Ruxton said to Wild, ‘but I’m not like 125
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that.’ In the author’s view, this comment rings true. Bruce was straightforward, not prone to sophisticated games of duplicity. He considered Delilkhan and Mitra both ‘gun shorthand typists’. Perhaps it is revealing that both the Asian women had been trained in the systems of the old British imperial public service. C.O. ‘Bill’ Harry,Victorian RSL Honorary Treasurer during all of the Ruxton presidency, commented on his staffing arrangements.‘He had a considerable staff,’ said Harry,‘in excess of what other presidents had. It was the only way Bruce knew how to do it. A former staff member explained what Bruce’s ‘way to do it’ meant on a daily basis. The foundation of Ruxton’s procedure was the daily itinerary. This was incredibly detailed. It included official meetings, such as those of the RSL State Executive, the Shrine of Remembrance Trust and of the many League committees on which Bruce served. And, of course, consultations with veterans had to be scheduled. It also detailed matters of times and transport for visits to League sub-branches and talks in the countryside. The itinerary also included engagements such as those arranged through the Joan Saxton Speakers’ Agency—Bruce’s standard topic was ‘Australia’s Rich Heritage: What Are You Going To Do About it?’—appointments with journalists and slots on talkback radio, where these last were scheduled and scripted not just to the minute, but sometimes down to the second. Bruce, however, did not always read the itinerary. He would then telephone Anderson from his car phone:‘Jesus, girl, I don’t know where I’m going!’ He would ring her outside of working hours if he had misplaced his wallet, his glasses, his passport. He could phone her at home on Saturday, complaining, ‘No one bloody tells me anything.’ Yet this working relationship was also a caring relationship. At Bruce’s last Victorian RSL conference in 2002,Anderson was in attendance as an observer. She was no longer in the employ of the League. She saw Bruce searching for his spectacles. She was very moved. She had always made sure that his glasses were cleaned, and safely in his top pocket when he was about to attend his engagements. She felt a strong urge to go up to the front of the auditorium, and find Bruce’s glasses for him. 126
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The volume of outgoing mail from the two offices was phenomenal. Not only were there the circulars to politicians on veterans’issues,but ANZAC House also printed the unit newsletter for the 2/25th and 2/33rd Battalions Association, invitation lists, speeches for the Joan Saxton Agency engagements and materials for various organisations to which he belonged. It was not unusual for Bruce to send out more than a thousand cards at Christmas. Dinner bookings had to be suddenly arranged. Bruce sometimes invited twelve to fifteen people to join him at the Melbourne Club after the Anzac Day or Remembrance Day reception at ANZAC House. Airline tickets had to be upgraded to business class. Bruce would unexpectedly refuse ‘to travel cattle class’. He often instructed his staff to upgrade the air tickets of his overseas guests from economy to business class. He stopped travelling Ansett when the company dropped the Australian flag from its logo. What, then, did the other members of the Victorian State Executive say about these irregular expenses? Some muttered, but they did not protest.As several former members of the Victorian State Executive told the author regarding the costs of Ruxton’s method of doing his job as state president of the League, ‘You need to understand.The RSL was dying, before Bruce.’ Life at the RSL president’s two offices could resemble an organised chaos. Bruce sometimes arrived at Bevan Street hefting sacks of birdseed, having made an early morning trip to the South Melbourne market.The seed was to feed his large collection of exotic and native birds in the extensive aviary at Glenwood Avenue. Often, the phones rang hot with reporters in search of a one-liner. The author was in the Bevan Street office one morning when a journalist rang to ask whether the Government should pay for Viagra for veterans.‘Yes, of course,’ barked Ruxton, ‘I could do with some right now myself.’ Bruce hated public holidays, disliked his staff being absent on leave, even in cases of serious illness, and had a fine disregard for their rostered lunch breaks.Yet, at other times he kept them from their work all afternoon, while he told his latest jokes, or his stories from Borneo and the occupation of Japan. 127
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The chief could be a bully. He could pretend to be helpless. In this mood, he put his head on his chest, and said, ‘Nobody does anything for me. I’ll just have to do it myself.’The inevitable response was that whoever was nearby leapt to do whatever ‘it’ was. The younger women spoke of him as ‘Father’ when they heard him approach. On one occasion, he called his secretaries to Linacre Hospital, where he dictated letters from behind an oxygen mask, in which circumstances he was almost impossible to hear. The boss, however, sometimes did not read the letters his staff typed before he signed them. In his defence it must be said that on many days there were 60 letters, produced by two typists sitting along the side of his long desk at ANZAC House while he dictated from the head of the table. But it was only when he read the letter copies later that he discovered any mistakes. By then it was too late to rectify the error, but this logic did not prevent Bruce from tirades of blame. Such explosions could sometimes be heard through the nine-inch thick walls of ANZAC House. Yet all visitors to the offices noticed how intensely loyal the secretaries were. Helen Finnigan had worked for Ruxton for 25 years when her second son was born. Her first son, John, had been born when she was working for Bruce in the Ruxton family business, General Stationers. Finnigan was unmarried at the birth of John, and she remained unmarried when her second boy arrived. As Finnigan told the Daily Mirror for a story published on 16 February 1987, when her little boy had been born, ‘I asked Bruce if he’d mind if I called him “Carlyle”, and he said he’d be delighted.’ For a time the baby gurgled in his pusher beside Bruce’s desk at Bevan Street, along with the labrador. Finnigan continued to work for Ruxton after her later marriage. Nancy Herman, who worked for Ruxton as his driver until her death in 1995, described her employer to Dorian Wild in the following words: ‘He’s the kindest person I know. People don’t realise just how kind he is. If anyone came to him in any sort of trouble he would help them. He helps so many people in ways that are not known.’ From time to time, a World War II veteran would die at home during the night, and his widow, not knowing who to turn to, 128
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would ring Bruce in the small hours of the morning. In spite of everything else on his schedule, Bruce would promptly attend to such matters as medical certification of the death. On more than one occasion, he made the arrangements for the funeral, and delivered the eulogy in person. Ruxton’s dealings with his staff of women fitted a traditional mould. This was the old-fashioned pattern of the relationship between a prestigious and successful man and a younger and much less powerful female assistant. It was especially prevalent in the medical profession until the 1970s. The paradox of Bruce’s women employees was that they were all strong and talented, and generally had had previous careers before joining the RSL staff. Bruce could, and did, work well with women in a position of power, even in areas usually the domain of men. He enjoyed a good working relationship with Senator Jocelyn Newman when she was Liberal Shadow Minister for Veterans’Affairs in the 1990s, and with Jocelyn McGirr as deputy chairman of the Repatriation Commission. After the New South Wales Government legalised the traditional Anzac Day two-up game, Joan Kirner, as leader of the ALP in Victoria, became Bruce’s ally on this issue. In 1990, as Victorian premier, Kirner legalised the Anzac Day two-up games for the first time in his home state. Two years later, Kirner honoured Ruxton with a Victorian Achiever Award. Bruce also liked and admired publisher Ita Buttrose. He participated with her in February 1992 on a panel discussing Australia’s problems, arranged by the Joan Saxton Speakers’Agency, before the annual Congress of the West Australian Branch of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He thought that Ita Buttrose would have made a good prime minister. Bruce considered both Kirner and Buttrose ‘very feminine’. Ruxton’s alliance with French Consul-General to Victoria, Isabelle Costa de Beauregard, surprised journalist Fiona Whitlock when she wrote a feature on Costa de Beauregard, published in The Age on 1 August 1997. But Whitlock may have been thinking of Bruce’s media image, rather than the Bruce Ruxton Professor Claudio Veliz had invited to speak at the La Trobe 129
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University seminar on the sociology of culture, or the Ruxton who collected Wedgewood china.The elegant Frenchwoman and the RSL leader cooperated well to honour Australians who had died in France in two world wars, in ceremonies at both VillersBretonneux in northern France, and in Melbourne. As Ruxton said to the Herald-Sun in an interview published in that paper’s ‘Exposé’ segment on 7 January 1995, he was ‘dead against feminists as feminists’. He remained ‘dead against’ the admission of women to the armed forces for combat duties. During the ‘silly season’ of December 1983, he quipped to an Age journalist:‘How would you be, lined up with a woman for a bayonet charge? If she was a good sort it would put you off the charge.’Ten years later, in 1993, when an Australian Defence Forces review was considering the admission of women to combat roles, Bruce held the line. He did not believe that women lacked courage—he was a friend and admirer of Nancy Wake, the Australian member of the French Resistance in World War II—his objection to females in combat had to do with their ability to carry heavy packs as he had done in the infantry. He was quoted in The Age as saying that ‘Women are different.They just haven’t got the strength of a male—never have had.’ He continued, saying that the defence forces were trying to be ‘politically correct’ in considering admitting women into the battle lines, and that defence leaders ‘had succumbed to pressures from hard-line feminists’. Although he was aware of the dreadful consequences of the ‘backyard abortions’ which had been practised when he was a young man, Bruce remained against liberalisation of abortion laws. He announced from time to time that those unborn Australian babies lost each year could have supplied the larger population the RSL considered necessary, rather than immigration, especially from Asia. Ruxton’s special anger was reserved for the group of women who, from time to time in the early 1980s, attempted to lay wreaths on Anzac Day for females injured, assaulted and killed in wars. The group was known as Women Against Rape in War. He said of the group to journalists, more than once, ‘Confucius say, if rape inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.’ In a more serious 130
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mood, he claimed that civilian deaths and rape were in fact commemorated on Anzac Day. He called the Women Against Rape in War ‘rabble-rousers’ and said that they were probably ‘communist inspired’. He declared they were ‘just out to disrupt’, and he did not believe that their motives were sincere. On one occasion, he told an Age reporter:‘When I looked at them on the television, I wondered how rape would be possible.’
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In October 1988, Senator John Button, Minister for Industry, Technology and Commerce, and leader of the Government in the Senate, wrote to Bruce Ruxton. ‘Dear Bruce,’ Button opened, ‘Thank you for your letter and enclosures (undated) addressed to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. I agree with the RSL motto, The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.That is why I am keeping my eye on you.’ What Button had responded to was a League method of lobbying on repatriation issues, which Bruce had developed to its extreme. He kept up a steady stream of mail to anyone with power in relation to veterans’ benefits. He bombarded politicians with packages of newspaper cuttings and circulars he put together.They always responded in writing. He never forgot to send a Christmas card, a letter of congratulations on an honour received, or a note of condolence on a family tragedy. It was RSL policy to have positions on a range of nonveterans’ issues, such as immigration, multiculturalism, Australia’s relations with Japan and with South Africa, and on Aboriginal land rights. As we have seen, Bruce was in line with League policies on most issues, but he spoke more often, and more
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loudly, than any other ex-services representative. In order to remind the public of the sacrifices veterans made in war and their ongoing contribution to Australian society, he wrote regular columns for Melbourne’s most sensationalist papers, the Toorak Times and Truth. Ruxton became famous for his ‘one-liners’.They kept him in the news. Beyond that appeal, however, during the 1980s and early 1990s the power of his media presence was that he gave expression to issues of great concern to older Australians. He spoke of ideals largely suppressed by the political parties in that period.As he liked to claim, the RSL, not the Government, stood for ‘what 80 out of 100 Australians believe’. Eventually, Bruce Ruxton became so famous that companies hired him to appear in their advertising campaigns. Journalists, of course, contacted him for quotations on any news story at all. On hearing the news of the death of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito in January 1989, and of the Australian Government’s intention to send a representative to the funeral, Bruce Ruxton had some controversial things to say. Hirohito was ‘The world’s Number One war criminal’.The Emperor, Bruce claimed,‘made Adolf Hitler look like a Sunday school teacher . . . The RSL won’t be sending a wreath. If we did, it would be poison ivy.’ Soon after the press reported these statements, Ruxton received three threatening phone calls.The first went as follows: ‘Bruce Ruxton?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘RSL?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You insulted the Emperor.You will die for this.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you insulted the Emperor.’ To a second threat a few minutes after the first, Bruce replied, ‘Taxan warui.’ He later said that this was a wartime phrase meaning ‘You’re no bloody good.’There was a third call.
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‘I’ll send a Ninja round to you.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘A Japanese assassin.’ ‘This call is being taped,’ Bruce warned.The caller quickly hung up. Ruxton described the circumstances of the hate messages to Michael Ryan of the Sunday Press, who telephoned shortly afterwards regarding a Japanese flag flying on Phillip Island. He had been at his home desk, Bruce said, answering some of the 3000 letters of condolence on the death of his wife, Ruth, when the threats had come through. A photograph accompanying Michael Ryan’s article, published in the Sunday Press on 15 January 1989, showed Bruce standing on the bottom rail of locked metal gates, inside the walls of his Glenwood Avenue property. Outside the gates were two uniformed police, both restraining large dogs on short leashes. Two unarmed brothers, Ralph and Percy Lanciana, martial arts specialists who ran a security company, looked even more menacing. Michael Ryan had arranged for their presence. As Ralph Lanciana said to the Press, ‘I disagree with some of his opinions, but Bruce Ruxton fought for the right to speak out [about] what he believes.’ Whether the threatening calls had been from an offended Japanese, or had been a hoax, was never established. Police cars made regular patrols around the Ruxton family home and neighbouring streets for some time. Other tempers were tried by the idea of Australian representation at the Hirohito funeral, to be held on 24 February in Tokyo. Sir William Keys, the immediate past national president of the RSL, signed a condolence book for the Emperor at the Japanese embassy in Canberra. Sir William’s message was that the past was the past, and Australia must look to the future of trade and security ties in an Asian common market. To all this Bruce replied that if he had presented his condolences,‘I would have been given the boot’ by Victorian RSL members. He claimed that Australia was bowing to the demands of the Japanese trade dollar and he asked rhetorically:‘Do they expect us to drop our trousers over this?’ 135
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The Herald of 11 January 1989 reported Sir William as saying of Ruxton, ‘I don’t take him too seriously and I think most people would think of him as a joke. The young people of the RSL who will take over the League in the future should not have to be bogged down by this kind of talk.’ It was Bruce, however, who had gauged the public mood, both within and outside the returned services community. Brigadier Alf Garland, who had been elected RSL national president in July 1987, said that Sir William’s action in signing the condolence book was ‘obscene’. In a piece published in the Weekend Australian for 14–15 January 1989, historian Geoffrey Blainey observed that it would have been correct for Australia to send a courteous message to Tokyo on the death of the Japanese Emperor. In Blainey’s opinion, however, Prime Minister R. J. Hawke’s official note praising Hirohito as ‘the symbol and focus of the nation, [who] played a crucial role as Japan emerged from the ashes of war to establish itself as a force for stability in our region [emphasis added]’ was outright ‘kowtowing’ to Japan in the name of trade. Blainey also found it ‘very strange’ that Hawke had chosen to try some elderly Europeans in Australia for war crimes, but ignored the Japanese. ‘As Australia suffered more through Hirohito than through Hitler, and as far more atrocities were committed by the Japanese than by the Germans against Australian service personnel, his decision seems to reflect a strange amnesia.’ From the other side of politics, trade unionist John Halfpenny condemned Hirohito as ‘a notorious and unrepentant war criminal’. As a columnist for the business-orientated The Australian Financial Review observed on 12 January 1989, under the heading ‘Bartering the truth in the name of trade’:‘There’s an irresistible feeling that the reaction of Messrs Ruxton and Halfpenny is the honest one.’ On 18 August 1989, readers of The Age opened their morning paper to a remarkable sight. There, taking up a whole page, was a picture of Bruce Ruxton rather furtively eating rice from a bowl with a pair of chopsticks. No explanation was given. In a later edition of the paper, the photograph carried the caption,‘There’s usually more to most stories than meets the eye’. 136
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Bruce had been approached by a marketing firm to do the still photo and a video clip.The film was made on Little Collins Street one Saturday morning. Bruce later had difficulty recalling what he had been paid for the job—$10,000—but he did remember gagging on mouthful after mouthful of rice as the photographer made tape after tape of the action. The weekend immediately after the Ruxton photo saw the launch of three Sunday papers, the Sunday Sun, Sunday Herald, and the Sunday Age.The new Sunday Age entered a very competitive market. Its editors were aiming for a fresh new image, lighter and more popular than the weekday Age’s serious tone.There was really nothing more original for an opening campaign than a picture of Bruce Ruxton, long so volubly opposed to Asian immigration, eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks. The Age achieved its publicity aim. During the next year, the McCann–Erickson advertising firm awarded the Ruxton picture a ‘highly commended’ rating in a national competition. Everyone knew about the bowl of rice image. At the pregame luncheon at VFL Park for the 1989 elimination final, television commentator Mike Williamson served as the MC.As Williamson welcomed the guests, he singled out Ruxton and assured him that he wouldn’t be ‘getting a bowl of rice for lunch’. Over the years, Bruce continued with his campaign against the rate of Asian immigration, reserving a special venom for the issues of Japanese investment in Australia and Japanese tourism. Of a 1995 government initiative to do away with visas for Japanese tourists, he wrote in a letter published in the Herald on 30 October 1995: If we did away with the system that controls their coming and going to and from this country we would find that the majority would come and few would go.This is not what World War II was all about. Admittedly we have sold the country to them, but we don’t want them here running it. Yet so quirky and complex a character was Ruxton that he formed a warm and enduring friendship with a Japanese man, a diplomat representing Japan in Australia, no less. This was 137
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Yasunori ‘Ken’ Kikuchi, who arrived in Melbourne in 1992 as Consul-General for Japan. Kikuchi was quickly added to Bruce’s list of those who received circulars, and the Consul-General responded by attending many RSL functions. Kikuchi went on to become the Japanese Ambassador in Fiji, but his children stayed in Australia for their schooling. He and Bruce remained in touch. When his diplomatic postings in the Pacific were completed in 1996, Kikuchi applied for permanent residency in Australia. Bruce wrote him a glowing reference in support of his application.This succeeded.As a start to his new life in Australia, MajorGeneral David McLachlan and Ruxton hosted Kikuchi to a lunch at the Melbourne Club. Their aim was to put the now Japanese-Australian at his ease with the membership. Perhaps it was not so strange, after all, that Bruce Ruxton became friends with Ken Kikuchi.After all, Kikuchi, by educating his children in Australia and seeking permanent residency status for his family, was emulating Bruce’s own love for the country. When colourful newspaper proprietor Jack Pacholli invited Ruxton to write a weekly column for his Toorak Times, Bruce agreed. Pacholli made his offer in July 1981. According to Lawrence Money, in an article for the series ‘Larrikins at Large’, which was published in the Herald in August 1989, Pacholli had been declared bankrupt in New South Wales in October 1957, and the bankruptcy remained undischarged in October 1981. A dog was named as the head of Pacholli’s company for some years until the law in Victoria was changed. None of this worried Bruce Ruxton. Ruxton thought that Pacholli, a fourth-generation Australian, did a good job exposing injustices and political scandals in his papers.The Toorak Times had a large circulation. A column would ‘serve to get the message over’, as he told the author. Surprisingly, Ruxton did not receive any money for his Toorak Times articles. The weekly articles appeared even more frequently, because they were republished in other papers of Pacholli’s chain, which circulated in the Melbourne suburbs. Bruce gave his views on any 138
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topical subject. He wrote columns titled ‘The Australian Flag’, ‘The Key Battles of World War I’, ‘Why We Don’t Need More Vietnamese’,‘Why We Should Play Sport with South Africa’ and ‘The Commonwealth and World-Wide Activities of the RSL’. Later, he rejoiced at the fall of the Soviet Union, and deplored the suggestion that gay prisoners should have conjugal rights.The key focus, however, was always the prevailing government’s stance on veterans’ entitlements.As Sir Richard Kingsland, then Secretary of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and Chairman of the Repatriation Commission, once remarked in a 1981 reply to a Ruxton article criticising the Veterans’ Affairs Department, Bruce would certainly have ‘the last word, in his column’. The Toorak Times seemed doomed to fold at the beginning of 1984. In January, the Supreme Court issued a writ against the paper over its coverage of the Costigan Royal Commission into the activities of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers’ Union. Some outlets refused to accept the paper. Pacholli announced, however, that ‘One area the writ won’t be able to stop distribution is the RSL clubs, not while Bruce Ruxton continues to write for us.’ Shortly after the Costigan Commission writ, Pacholli published a full-page photo of Ruxton on the front of the Toorak Times. The caption read ‘Private Bruce Ruxton, 21-years of age’. Private Ruxton had finally become the representative of all ‘Little Aussie Battlers’. The image was from Bruce’s time in Japan. It showed him at attention, on guard duty. During the late 1980s, Ruxton also wrote a column for Truth, the Melbourne paper famous for its focus on political and sex scandals.When the pieces started, one reader wrote:‘I find it demeans your paper to have Bruce Ruxton as a columnist. At a time when racism causes enough harm to society, I object to such a spokesman as Bruce Ruxton getting an airing in your paper.’This was balanced in the same edition by a letter from a person purporting to be a member of ‘the silent majority’, who wrote: ‘Bruce, you’re more in touch with the sentiments of the people than governments can ever hope to be.’ A Truth editor reported that ‘for every reader who says get rid of Bruce Ruxton—one even wrote “shoot Ruxton”—there are dozens who plead for more of him’. 139
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Ruxton’s outspoken columns, of course, led to a steady stream of lawsuits, both against him, and by RSL lawyers on his behalf. Joan Coxsedge, feminist, anti-conscription campaigner, anti-nuclear activist, founding member of the Committee for the Abolition of Political Police, and Labor member of the Victorian Legislative Council, was one of the few people from the Left to ever have a legal victory over Bruce Ruxton. Coxsedge published a radical newsletter, Hard Facts for Hard Times, which she wrote and distributed herself. In one edition, Coxsedge had publicised the address of Harvey Barnett, the Director-General of the Australian Security and Intelligence Agency (ASIO). As a consequence, Ruxton accused her of treason. Coxsedge, however, knew the 1979 ASIO Act inside out.The legislation did not give the Director-General the same protection it provided for ASIO’s other employees. The Director-General’s address could be published. In an out-of-court settlement, lawyers representing Ruxton offered Coxsedge $2000 compensation which she accepted. According to Coxsedge, the RSL lawyers wanted her to sign a secrecy agreement, but she refused to accept any such clause in the settlement contract. Of her win over Bruce, Coxsedge commented:‘I never hated him.We were two strongly opinionated people on opposite sides. He was using the same methods for rightist causes as I was for leftist causes.’ Another of Ruxton’s longstanding concerns was Australia’s relationship with South Africa. Since the Hawke Labor Government had introduced sanctions against South Africa in 1983, in an effort to hasten the end of the apartheid regime there, Bruce had been campaigning.At the annual RSL National Conference, he had promoted resolutions against the new government policy of welcoming black immigration from Africa. The Victorian branch of the League strongly opposed economic sanctions and sporting boycotts against the administration in Pretoria, on the grounds that Australia and South Africa were traditional allies, with strategic interests in common.The RSL’s position was that change in South Africa should come through dialogue, not through the isolation of the country. 140
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In his columns for the Truth and Toorak Times, Bruce editorialised against the dangerous closeness of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to the African National Congress (ANC), an organisation committed to armed overthrow of apartheid.When Archbishop Tutu visited Australia in January 1987, the press were eager for a Ruxton quote. Bruce did not disappoint. He described the Nobel peace prize winner as ‘breathing hatred’ and accused him of being ‘A Witchdoctor dressed up in Archbishop’s clothes’. Archdeacon Stanley Moss, vicar at St John’s Anglican Church in Toorak, reacted to this outburst by banning the Anzac Day service scheduled to take place there in April. Other clergymen, however, were less condemning. As an editor for the Messenger, a Catholic family monthly, wrote in the March 1987 edition,‘Mr Ruxton is undoubtedly right in describing the African National Congress (ANC) as a terrorist organisation. I wonder how Archbishop Tutu can persist in lending his support to this odious body.’ When Oliver Tambo, then ANC President, visited Australia in March 1987, Channel 9 made sure that Bruce Ruxton was in the audience when the station interviewed him.The TV broadcast went out to a national audience on Nine’s Midday Show. As The Australian reported on 31 March, there was this exchange between Ruxton and Tambo: Ruxton: Mr Tambo’s a terrorist masquerading as a suave black South African gentleman. I’m suggesting that Mr Tambo tell the people of Australia about his very close links with the Soviet Union and the South African Communist Party—already 19 in his executive of 30 are devout communists. When he takes over the southern end of the African continent you will find one black Marxist one-party government. Apartheid will be a Sunday school picnic by comparison. Tambo: Mr Ruxton I . . . I am pleased to meet you. Ruxton:Well, I’m not pleased to meet you, Oliver. Former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, then chairman of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons’ Group on South Africa, 141
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invited Tambo to stay at his Victorian property, Nareen. Fraser supported Tambo’s efforts to publicise the ANC’s case against apartheid internationally, and favoured Australian sanctions against the regime in Pretoria. In a public statement to the Canberra Times, Fraser urged his friend, Bruce Ruxton, to visit South Africa and judge for himself the conditions in which the black population lived. The RSL had extensive links with veterans’ organisations overseas. Shortly after Tambo’s visit to Australia, Major-General Neil Webster, chairman of the Council of Military Veterans’ Organisations of the Republic of South Africa, extended an invitation to the RSL. Bruce Ruxton and James Hall, League President in Western Australia, were to attend the South African Legion Annual Congress.The visit would take thirteen days.The Australians were to arrive in Pretoria, be briefed on intelligence matters at Defence Headquarters, fly to Port Elizabeth for the conference and various ceremonial dinners, travel to Cape Town, then return to Pretoria to inspect areas of military operations, and experience the game reserves. Into this schedule was squeezed an escorted morning visit to the Crossroads squatter camp and a new Coloured township in Cape Town, and an afternoon excursion to the Alexandra black township in Pretoria. On 16 September 1987, the Sydney Daily Telegraph published a statement by ‘controversial RSL chief Bruce Ruxton’, made from his hotel room in Cape Town. He was halfway through his visit to South Africa. Ruxton had seen that there were actually some good areas in Soweto, but his observations shocked some sections of opinion in Australia. Less publicised, and so less criticised, was the meeting Ruxton and Hall had on 17 September with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Chief Minister of KwaZulu, and President of the Inkatha Freedom Party.The Zulu leader told Hall and Ruxton that he was against armed struggle. Apartheid would be ended, Buthelezi said, by negotiation and dialogue, not by sanctions.After his return from South Africa, Ruxton kept up a steady correspondence with Buthelezi. He sent packages of cuttings from the Australian press, most especially when Foreign Minister Gareth Evans favoured the ANC leadership over Inkatha. 142
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At the 1988 RSL National Congress in Canberra, Ruxton met South Africa’s newly arrived Ambassador to Australia, David Tothill. Representing the Government in Pretoria, Tothill’s position was that economic sanctions hurt the black population more than the white.Tothill was quickly on Ruxton’s mailing list, and the diplomat, in response, valued his RSL contact.When the South African embassy sponsored a two-day seminar in February 1990,‘Australian Perceptions of South Africa’, Bruce was present in Canberra as the guest of the Ambassador. Sir Charles Court, long a friend through the League, was also there. Court spoke to the gathering as a frequent visitor to South Africa. Several months later, Sir Charles wrote to Bruce regarding Nelson Mandela. Speaking of Mandela as the future leader of South Africa, Sir Charles pointed out that although Mandela, then head of the ANC, appeared a moderate to the West, in power he would be dominated by the communists in his organisation. ‘It sends a shiver down one’s spine,’ Court wrote,‘when you think of these people getting control of South Africa and its armed forces.’ During Nelson Mandela’s visit to Australia in October 1988, Bruce wrote in his Toorak Times column:‘Mandela is just another commo lawyer, who believes that a one party Marxist state is democracy.’ When the African leader arrived in Melbourne, six members of a group calling themselves the Aboriginal Provisional Government were waiting for him at the airport.They were there to protest against Mandela’s failure to speak out on the plight of Aborigines in Australia—Mandela had taken the position that it would be a breach of protocol to comment on an internal matter. The leader of the provisional Aboriginal government, which had waited in vain to meet Nelson Mandela, was Tasmania’s black activist, Michael Mansell. Bruce Ruxton had some strong views on the direction government policy was taking on the Aboriginal question during the 1980s. During his visit to South Africa, in the press interview he gave from his hotel room in Cape Town, Bruce had stated that Australia’s Aboriginal policy was as racist as Pretoria’s apartheid regime.‘The Government has already given 15 per cent of Australia away to the Aboriginals. It’s outrageous. We owe the Aboriginals nothing. Whatever happened in 1778 143
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has bugger all to do with 1984.’ Ruxton continued, in an interview with Denise Gadd, published in the Frankston Standard in November 1984,‘There is only one Australia, black or white, full stop. It might be necessary to lift them up the rungs of the ladder, but there’s no way we should have separate laws for one and not the other.’ The content, if not the expression, of what Bruce was saying was RSL national policy. From the beginning of the 1980s, the League position had been that Aborigines should have full citizenship rights, but that there should be no special privileges in regard to land rights. The Victorian branch often put motions before the national conference to the effect that separate land rights for Aborigines would be disastrous for northern defence. Ruxton’s first major appearance on the land rights issue was at Warrnambool in June 1984.A Victorian Government proposal was to pass control of the former Aboriginal reserves in the area to the local Koori communities.The fear in the settler community was that other land would be acquired.This threat seemed borne out by the government purchase of the Field family farm to establish an Aboriginal tourist park at Lake Condah, near Hamilton. The League of Rights organised a protest rally. The principal speakers were Eric Butler of the League of Rights and RSL President, Bruce Ruxton. Aborigines from the nearby Framlingham settlement occupied the first two rows of the hall. Bruce embarked on a lengthy speech, which included this provocative sentence: ‘It is about time that the Australian electorate rebelled at this insidious, indignant and corrupt way of giving our country away to people who have no intention of paying land tax, rates, or for any services which of course will all be at the taxpayers’ expense.’ On sale at the rally was Geoffrey McDonald’s Red Over Black, a League of Rights publication which claimed that communists led and funded the Aboriginal land rights campaign. Bruce Ruxton had written the foreword to the work. The Age of 7 June 1984 reported Bruce’s further statement: ‘The men and women of this nation who fought tooth and nail for this land have no intention of seeing it passed over to movements of dubious backgrounds in the name of land rights.’ 144
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The Kooris in the audience groaned at the ‘communist’ slur, and later told the Herald that they had not been allowed to put their point of view to the meeting. Bruce also condemned the World Council of Churches,‘that God-like organisation controlled and run by Atheist Communists from the Eastern bloc and Third World Countries’, for commenting on Aboriginal rights in Australia. Later, Ruxton accused Melbourne Archbishop David Penman of having ‘fallen into the trap of not separating Church from State’. The Sydney Morning Herald of 26 September 1984 reported Bruce as saying: The Archbishop seems to forget that less than 10 per cent of his flock attend church services on Sunday. I for one would think that empty pews should concern him more than the wholesale handing over of immense tracts of land to people who probably don’t want them, and certainly won’t know what to do with them. His adoption of leftist causes does him no credit in the eyes of the community. Dr Penman replied:‘To many fair-minded Australians, Bruce Ruxton’s prejudices are an embarrassment.’ There was more to come at the 1988 National RSL Conference.As the Canberra Times reported on 9 September 1988, Bruce Ruxton, as Victorian RSL president, had successfully moved the following motion: ‘That the Government amend the definition of Aborigine to eliminate the part-whites who are making a racket out of being so-called Aborigines at an enormous cost to the taxpayer.’ Bruce had gone on to say, ‘Most Australians are concerned about so-called Aborigines in radical movements, in particular the likes of Mansell.’ Michael Mansell at the time was in Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi had agreed to his establishing an Aboriginal base within the country’s borders. Bruce continued: ‘If Michael Mansell is an Aborigine, then he was dipped in white flour.’ Incoming RSL National President, Brigadier Alf Garland, said to journalists at the congress that ‘the Government should check the Aboriginality of some people claiming to be Abori145
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gines, and receiving government benefits’. He also said: ‘At the present time, anybody who comes in and makes an affirmation that they are an Aborigine can be regarded as being an Aborigine, and nobody makes a check. Is that a fair go?’ Several other papers confirmed the wording of the Ruxton motion on Aboriginal matters, and of the Ruxton and Garland statements. Although Garland had refused to be drawn on the method the Government should use in determining Aboriginality, journalists seized on the idea that he had recommended blood tests. Head of the Aboriginal Affairs Department, Charles Perkins, exploded: ‘No RSL bastard is going to have my genealogy examined to suit his purposes.’ Some papers reported that Perkins, the first Aborigine to graduate from a university, had gone on to say that Bruce Ruxton ‘should be deported’. A rally of sixty, led by Perkins, stormed RSL headquarters in Canberra. Channel 9 televised the following confrontation on 10 September: Perkins: Retract that motion today, Bruce. Otherwise, you’re going to have problems with us right around Australia, your RSL mob . . . my father was . . . Ruxton: Don’t threaten me. I’m telling you, don’t you bloody threaten me . . . Perkins: And who do you think you are? You’re a stupid old man, and you should wake up to yourself. It was Bruce who finally put an end to the ‘blood test’ controversy. In October 1988, in a letter published in The Australian, he pointed out that Brigadier Alf Garland had not called for the blood sampling of Aborigines. ‘He and I merely asked that “Aboriginal” be defined. Is a person with one eighth,Aboriginal, or one sixteenth, or half or quarter? Is an Aboriginal one who says he or she is, one, merely because they want to be one?’ Damage had been done. As The Australian Financial Review observed in its ‘National Affairs’ column on 12 September 1988, ‘The outcome of the RSL National Congress last week and the League’s apparent swing to the Right have raised questions about 146
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its continuing effectiveness as a lobby organisation after years of successfully influencing government decisions under the leadership of former national president, Sir William Keys.’The column continued that, in an interview with The Australian Financial Review,Veterans’Affairs Minister, Ben Humphreys, had ‘distanced himself ’ from the National Congress motions, and ‘played down’ the importance of the RSL leadership. Humphreys intended to communicate directly with the rank and file of the RSL, bypassing its leaders. He also planned to contact a wide spectrum of returned service groups. The paper quoted Humphreys as saying that the RSL was not the biggest veterans’ organisation.That title, he was quoted as saying, belonged to the Australian Veterans and Defence Services Council. Ruxton continued his controversial statements on Aboriginal issues. At a League conference in Ipswich, Queensland, he said that if Aborigines wished to go ahead with Mabo-style land rights claims, white Australians should bill them for saving their lives during World War II. He later admitted that the remark ‘may have been facetious’. A month later, he invited Hugh Morgan, chairman of Western Mining, to speak at the 1993 Victorian RSL State Conference. Morgan said of the High Court’s recent Mabo decision on land rights, that the ruling had plunged the country into a ‘legal, political and constitutional crisis’, and ‘irredeemably tainted’Australia’s development. If there was fear in rural areas over government acquisition of land for Aboriginal development, there was also real concern among the best informed of the community over the consequences of land rights legislation. In November 1997, Sir James Balderstone, business leader, grazier, a former director of AMP and then of the Westpac Bank, sent his friend Bruce Ruxton a map of claims before the Native Title Claim Tribunal. Sir James was worried that the Wilsons Promontory claim would alienate the waterways there, a concern of many other settler farmers and landowners. Sir James’s best information was that there were ‘about 667 claims lodged so far, covering 80% of Australia’. But Bruce had only admiration for individual Aboriginal 147
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veterans. When the Victorian State Library mounted an exhibition honouring the Aboriginal contribution in both world wars, he attended with Koori leader, Reg Saunders. Saunders had been the first Aborigine to be commissioned as an army officer. The appointment had had to be specially referred to General [later Field Marshal] Sir Thomas Blamey, for at that time, Saunders did not have the vote, and so was not the equal of the men he would command. Saunders and Ruxton were photographed sharing a laugh.‘It’s a good idea, and it’s a beaut exhibition,’ Bruce said. In 1990, he took up the cause of Aborigines who had served in guerrilla units and in coastal patrols in northern Australia during the war. He appeared in a documentary shown on Channel 7 in April, No Bugles, No Drums, saying that it would offend his sense of justice if the families of the forgotten black soldiers were not compensated. Even the animosity Charles Perkins appeared to show towards Ruxton turned out to be mainly theatre. In November 1989, Perkins wrote to Ruxton to decline an invitation to an RSL function. ‘Kind of you to send me an invitation,’ he said. ‘As you know my father was a Returned Soldier, and I have his medals in my possession. He fought under another name to mine.’The father’s name was Conelly—Perkins was the mother’s name. Perkins continued,‘Best wishes, mate, and I hope you win the Melbourne Cup.’ Bruce’s own record on securing pensions and other entitlements for Aboriginal veterans could not be faulted. His work on behalf of the returned service community had started with the soldiers of his own Queensland unit, many of whom were Aborigines. It is appropriate that a Koori should have the last word on this matter. In March 1995, a Koori woman wrote from Echuca to thank Bruce for a letter he had written to the family on the death of her uncle in Queensland, a member of Bruce’s unit. The woman concluded: Our people fought to protect this country and we are very proud of that fact. I would like to thank you for all the support you have given Mother over the years. And in particular, I would like to express my gratitude to you for 148
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recognising the contribution of Aboriginal soldiers to this great country. As with so many other issues, Ruxton’s position on Aboriginal policy had both bright, and dark, aspects. One group within the returned services community wondered why the RSL had a policy on Aboriginal affairs at all. They were affronted, specifically, that the League paid research staff to assemble material for the formation of such a position statement, when they themselves struggled, without financial support, to gather evidence linking their disabilities to chemical sprays used in South-East Asia.1 The group was the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia.
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10 The Vietnam veterans
Tim McCombe, National President of the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia (VVAA), was angry with the RSL.The two previous presidents of the VVAA had often been angry with the RSL, but on this occasion, McCombe was reacting to the resolutions on Aboriginal policy passed at the League’s 1988 National Congress. In a letter which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 September, he argued that any veterans’ association should concern itself solely with veterans’ benefits: ‘Other matters, such as Australian immigration policy,Aboriginal land rights, homosexuality, multiculturalism, the power of unions or communism, would split the community of war veterans into warring factions . . . Yet this is precisely what the RSL national leadership does . . . Some of these leaders are at great pains to parade their personal, political, and moral hobbyhorses, using the RSL as their public parade ground.’ The next edition of Debrief, the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia quarterly journal, published Bruce Ruxton’s reply to the McCombe letter. Bruce wrote: The RSL, and the Victorian Branch in particular, has bent over backwards to do the right thing by the Vietnam
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Veterans’ Association and even recently I note that we are going to distribute your national magazine to our SubBranches. I suppose it is the old adage,‘How to win friends and influence people’—just keep attacking them! . . . I want to put my viewpoint to you and perhaps rather bluntly as I have not done so before, but the Vietnam Veterans’ Association is a broken down organisation that has very few financial members and it has had some radical pro-left leaders in the past which I assume now must include you. Bruce went on to say, ‘the majority of the Vietnam veterans are members of the RSL and they are now taking on the roles of leaders within the organisation’. His point was demonstrated by Brigadier Alf Garland, the then National RSL President, and by Peter Young, the League’s National Secretary. Bruce’s brother-in-law, John Warr, had also served in Vietnam. Warr, whom Bruce had met fleetingly in Japan, had married Shirley Ruxton in 1951. In 1965, after service in Japan and Korea, John Warr had been appointed Commanding Officer of the 5th Battalion,The Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), with the rank of lieutenantcolonel. During his time in Phuoc Tuy province, 1966 and 1967, Warr had had the two onerous duties of being the first commanding officer to have national servicemen in battle in Vietnam, and of bearing the responsibility of the first death of a national serviceman. He had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Peter Young had been in Vietnam even earlier, serving with the first contingent of Australian soldiers posted there. He had arrived in South Vietnam in July 1962, a member of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. On that early tour of duty, the first of two,Young had served in an intelligence capacity in the dangerous tri-border area.1 The widespread belief that the RSL had rejected the Vietnam ex-servicemen on their return home made Ruxton annoyed. ‘Some secretaries of individual RSL clubs may have banned Vietnam vets,’ he conceded in February 2003,‘but they had had no right to do this.’ Earlier,World War I veterans, who held the 152
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top positions in the League, had charged that the World War II returnees, then young, and wanting power,‘had not been in a real war’. So too, some ‘World War Twoers’ derided the Vietnam returnees. Bruce viewed this common charge that the Vietnam veterans ‘hadn’t been in a real war’ as ‘most unfair’. Peter Young and John Warr, he said,‘had certainly been in a war’. Part of the friction between the RSL and the VVAA must be understood in terms of a generation gap. It was Bruce Ruxton, more than any other senior RSL official, who served as the intermediary between the World War II generation and the Vietnam generation. It was Ruxton who had provided the Vietnam veterans with their first Melbourne forum, to announce their concerns about Agent Orange. By the end of the 1970s, some soldiers who had served in the war in Asia had begun to assemble evidence relating to their ongoing health problems, and particularly to the possible causes of birth defects in their children.The difficulty lay in establishing a medical link between the defoliant, Agent Orange, used in Vietnam and their problems. Also, they initially had to prove that Australians had actually served in areas where the chemical cocktail had been sprayed. Eight years earlier, Ruxton had offered those concerned the use of RSL facilities. He invited them to hold a press conference, at ANZAC House, which, at 4 Collins Street, was strategically close to the Victorian parliamentary buildings.At the time, the veterans who claimed to have been adversely affected by Agent Orange had no association, but were led unofficially by Bernard Szapiel, who had served with the 3rd Battalion of the RAR (Royal Australian Regiment) in 1967, and Holt McMinn, a former member of the SAS (Special Air Service) Regiment. The press conference took place on a Saturday night, in January 1980. Ruxton had made the boardroom at ANZAC House available. Hundreds of ex-service people and their families turned up.The boardroom was packed. Bruce later remembered the heat and glare of the television cameras—he had made sure that every TV station and news group was represented.2 At this meeting, those present including Bernard Szapiel decided to organise nationally.This decision to create a separate 153
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group was not a particularly unusual step: the veterans of each previous war had formed their own specific organisations. The terms of a constitution were discussed, and the name, the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia (VVAA), was put forward. Holt McMinn was elected president of the VVAA later that year. Two years later, on 23 June 1982, Ruxton opened Melbourne’s first Vietnam Veterans Counselling Centre. Speaking on a talkback radio program in November, Phillip ‘Phill’Thompson, who had replaced McMinn as leader of the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia in March 1981, claimed that the RSL had taken credit for establishing the help centre, when that credit really belonged to the VVAA. Bruce countered this charge by pointing out that the League had borne the costs of monitoring the progress of the Agent Orange group action in the United States.The VVAA had paid nothing, he said, towards provision of this service. He continued:‘Everyone is bending over backwards to help these veterans, but they have not used the system available to us [also meaning “available to them”].’ What Bruce was referring to was the RSL lobbying system. This included the method he himself pursued so vigorously: putting together dossiers on issues of concern, and mailing them to ministers and members of parliament.The recipients always responded in writing and, more often than might have been expected, government ministers undertook to follow up a specific case. Members on the opposition benches regularly pledged to work on changing their party’s repatriation policy. ‘The system’ also included the League’s ability to focus the media on a veterans’ affairs issue, and not least Bruce’s own expertise in grabbing headlines. There was a related technique for individuals and subbranches to lobby for a cause. As Bruce often explained, ‘In Canberra, parliamentarians are ten metres tall, but in their own constituencies, they are only one metre tall.’ A parliamentarian must be made to give an answer on his own home ground. Veterans, then, should write letters to their member’s own local paper—not the Sun—since that was the proven method for getting a response. Even better, they should take their concerns to the sub-branch secretary, who would write the letter. During any major RSL campaign, the League state or national executive 154
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designed form letters for the sub-branches, which could be forwarded to the local press. The point of Ruxton’s reply, as RSL chief, to the VVAA leader, was that the question of who had done the spadework in organising the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Centre was irrelevant. RSL representation at its opening would ensure media publicity for the Vietnam ex-service community’s cause. Regarding the Agent Orange case in the United States, the League had indeed financed an investigation. During 1980, the national executive of the League had sent the RSL national solicitor, John Button, to New York and elsewhere. At considerable cost to the RSL, in the region of $100,000, Button had studied the American evidence on the effects of Agent Orange. The medical link between the Asian veterans’ and their families’ problems, however, could never be satisfactorily established. The difference in approach to compensation between the VVAA and the RSL was one of strategy. The VVAA wanted the League to press for a Royal Commission into the effects of Agent Orange. The RSL answered that Australia had the best repatriation system in the world, and that all the Vietnam veterans’ treatment, health, and family support needs would be covered by the existing Repatriation Act. Eventually, Ruxton, Sir William Keys, as national RSL president, and General Tim Vincent, formerly commander of the Australian Task Force in Vietnam and long-time chairman of the League’s Defence Committee, did put their authority behind the campaign for a Royal Commission. The Evatt Royal Commission into the effects of Agent Orange was convened in 1983. It brought down its results two years later.The Royal Commission found, on the evidence available at that time, that there was no case to answer. The VVAA rejected this result and pressed for further investigations. June Healy, the Deputy National Secretary of the RSL from 1981 to 1995, and later National President of the War Widows’ Guild, was at a loss to understand why some members of the VVAA claimed that the RSL did not support their cause. Healy, whose husband, John Healy, had served in South Vietnam at the 155
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rank of captain with the first group of the Australian Army Training Team, knew that there were real problems with the use of chemicals during the war. She had seen deformed infants brought to Vietnamese orphanages and many people with chemical-related conditions. In a March 2003 interview, Healy told the author that the League had provided a small office for the VVAA administration at RSL headquarters in Canberra. The VVAA had the use of a free telephone and a teletype machine, the forerunner of the facsimile (Fax) machine.When he was in Canberra, Healy said, Phill Thompson had often stayed at the house of Peter Young, the RSL National Secretary. Healy thought that the problem with some VVAA members’ accounts of the League’s treatment of them derived from the fact that they were sick and frustrated. They ‘were focussed on one area’. As Healy put the matter, the RSL could not focus its resources in one area of concern.The League had responsibility for the whole spectrum of the ex-service community’s welfare, including the needs of wives, war widows, dependants and the next generation. In Healy’s analysis, Vietnam veterans made a mistake in attributing all their problems to Agent Orange. In South Vietnam, she said,‘many, many, chemicals had been in use’: the rubber plantation, near where the Australian Task Force had been stationed in Phuoc Tuy province, was sprayed to kill mosquitoes, and the trees subsequently lost all their leaves. It was a tactical mistake, said Healy,‘to focus only on Agent Orange’. Ruxton himself did not take as kindly a view of the VVAA leader as June Healy.‘He bit the hand that fed him,’ Ruxton said of Thompson. At the time, Ruxton was reading to the author from a February 2003 letter to him from Peter Young, in which Young confirmed that he had paid, personally, ‘many of his air fares’ for Phill Thompson’s journeys from his home in New South Wales to Canberra.The RSL also contributed to the costs of these journeys. Yet despite the accusations against the League from the VVAA group, Bruce Ruxton fought hard for the veterans of Australia’s Asian involvement. In March 1992, he once again put the resources of the RSL at their disposal. He became the patron 156
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of Nui Dat House, an emergency accommodation centre for Vietnam veterans. The VVAA had initiated this project. The centre was close to Melbourne’s General Repatriation Hospital, which was located in the suburb of Heidelberg. Its purpose was to provide residential accommodation for those receiving outpatient treatment or counselling at the Heidelberg Hospital, or for those who were homeless as a result of a crisis. Nui Dat House was opened by the Federal Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Ben Humphreys, and the entertainer and Vietnam veteran Normie Rowe.At the outset, the facilities were quite modest. Nui Dat House was a three-bedroom suburban dwelling.The clue to the value of Bruce Ruxton’s patronage was in the funding arrangements. The Federal Government had provided funds for equipment, and the Victorian State Government paid the lease on the property. Ongoing funding would depend on the veteran community and on corporate sponsorship. As we have seen, Ruxton’s fund-raising abilities were phenomenal. During the 1990s, he would become increasingly adept at gaining funds from corporate bodies. During 1998, Ruxton played a leading role in resolving a long-running question of the award of medals to Vietnam veterans who had fought in the other ranks. Mrs Bronwyn Bishop, as Minister for Defence Industry, Science and Personnel, inherited the problem of what to do about those who had been recommended for decorations, but not received them. In Vietnam, a quota system had restricted the number of medals and commendations that commanding officers could issue. The solution was an End of War List. This had not been made after Australia’s withdrawal from Vietnam, as had been the case in other wars. The Vietnam End of War List included 59 veterans nominated for acts of gallantry, and nineteen nominated for meritorious service.The British honours, such as the Military Medal, could no longer be used. The RSL objected to one suggested solution, which was to award one or other of the newly created Australian civilian honours. An award for bravery on operations could not be a civilian honour, the League maintained. 157
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Australian military awards were not exactly equivalent to the imperial honours. Bishop had the dilemma that a lower award than that recommended would snub the new recipient, but that an award at too high a level would devalue decorations long treasured by Australians who had won awards in Vietnam and in other conflicts. It seemed to some that Bishop’s solution was to award officers a Medal for Gallantry where they had been recommended for an imperial Military Medal, but to give the diggers so recommended a commendation, not a gallantry medal.3 Ruxton went in to bat for the Vietnam diggers. He met with Bishop, an old friend, in an effort to cut through the complications. He then went right to the top. On 2 April he wrote to the Prime Minister, John Howard. He initiated a media campaign. On 18 March 1998, the Canberra Times quoted Bruce in vintage form: ‘We’ll keep on punching, we’ll keep up the pressure because it’s crazy. It’s not right because they are awarding one thing to officers and another to other ranks. It’s just another knock for the Vietnam vets.’ On 1 May, Prime Minister Howard wrote a long statement to Ruxton, replying to the RSL leader’s earlier letter. In this Howard explained the processes of consultation and investigation his government had embarked upon, in order to resolve the problems arising from the End of War List. The problem of the rank-based awards, he said, had been recognised. A newly created Australian Active Service Medal 1945–1975 should eliminate the discrimination, the Prime Minister wrote. Twenty-six years after the last Australian soldiers left South Vietnam, former private John Burridge had received the news that the Military Medal his commanding officer had recommended him for 29 years earlier, for acts of bravery in the face of an enemy advance on 8 May 1969, would not be awarded. Instead, he would receive only a written commendation. Burridge, who had fought in Vietnam as a national serviceman, had felt the insult keenly. He and four other veterans in the same position made a pact to refuse the downgraded awards. This awkward situation was averted. Bruce Ruxton became the champion of the Vietnam veterans so long denied their medals. 158
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Eventually, former private John Burridge received the Medal for Gallantry (MG). Once again, Ruxton had invoked the ‘RSL system’ of contacts and networking on behalf of Vietnam veterans. Earlier, in their preparations for the 1987 Victorian ‘Welcome Home’ Parade,Vietnam veterans had encountered difficulties in compiling a list of relatives of the deceased. Bruce gave the organisers of the march space in Mufti, the quarterly newspaper of the Victorian RSL, for a community announcement. Family members were instructed to call ANZAC House, where a very senior official was in charge of compiling a list of the relatives. In Ruxton’s view, much of the talk of conflict between the RSL and the veterans of the Vietnam war was a media beat-up. ‘The Press took up this issue,’ he told the author in May 2002. ‘They like to have a go at the RSL.’ Later, in July 2003, he said:‘There are a few disgruntled Vietnam veterans.There are some who didn’t get what they wanted. They are very grasping, very selfish.They think they are the only ones who went to a war.’ Ruxton wondered about the reality of post-traumatic stress disorder.‘Shouldn’t every one who served in World War I have had it?’ he suggested. Sadly, it seems that VVAA leader Phill Thompson did suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Thompson died by his own hand on 23 November 1986.
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11 The longest campaign
Early on the morning of 23 April 1990, Bruce Ruxton arrived atVictoria’s huge Repatriation hospital complex. He was there at the invitation of Dr William ‘Bill’Adam, executive director of the Repatriation General Hospital, Heidelberg, to be guest speaker at the hospital’s Anzac Day service.The service marked an important commemoration. This was the 75th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli. Ruxton had made his own pilgrimage to Gallipoli three years before. He later described his experience to reporter Denise Gadd for the Mordialloc-Chelsea Standard News: ‘It’s incredible to be up there on the ridges, where the fighting was, with only a few people.A stiff wind whistles through the pine trees. It’s eerie, and seems to bring everything alive. Makes you feel that you’re there with them.’ He was moved greatly when he read the words of Ataturk, inscribed on the Turkish memorial at Anzac Cove: ‘There is no difference between the Johnnys and the Mehmets to us, where they lie side by side in this country of ours . . . After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.’To Gadd, he reflected that three countries had been born on 25 April 1915: the new Turkey,Australia and New Zealand.
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At the Heidelberg Repat Hospital, Bruce’s presence was a source of consolation for those veterans who had applied for the commemorative tour to Gallipoli, organised by the Department of Veterans’Affairs, but who had failed to be selected. Several permanent patients came down from the wards to hear Bruce speak. Fourteen Gallipoli veterans were in the audience of three hundred. Four World War I widows were also present. The mood was emotional at the open-air service,as Bruce described the exploits of the Anzacs, and wreaths were laid for those who had not returned. Ruxton served as the RSL representative on the board of the Heidelberg hospital, and had been involved with the Repatriation General Hospital all through his term as president of the League in Victoria.The struggle against the Federal Government’s longterm program to transfer the Repat hospitals to the Australian states would be the longest campaign fought by the RSL during Ruxton’s term, and also presents some of the darker aspects of his leadership. Bruce believed it was important to keep ailing veterans together in their own hospitals, and that the Heidelberg complex provided care superior to that available in any state-run facility. Repatriation had been a Federal Government responsibility since the setting up of the Repatiation Commission in 1920, and so it was an article of faith with Ruxton that the money for veterans’ care must be from the Commonwealth. Since most people find systems for procedures difficult to understand, and feel especially powerless in dealing with medical officials, when they had worries over relatives’ treatment in the Heidelberg Hospital, they went to Bruce. Earlier, wives and widows of returned servicemen had brought their pension claims to him of a Sunday morning at the Ruxton warehouse, believing that the League chief could do more for them than the welfare section at ANZAC House. Relatives of Repat patients thought the same way in relation to the hospital administration.They took their problems to Bruce Ruxton. As Dr Bill Adam, executive director at Heidelberg in the late 1980s and the 1990s, wrote in January 2003: ‘In regard to hospital issues, what impressed me most was that Bruce was supportive, and very fair to the hospital, when dealing with complaints from veterans or their families. 162
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He always gave the hospital the opportunity to respond to complaints before making judgement.’ Not only was Bruce the champion of Repat patients and their relatives, he was also the patron of the Story Writing and Art Project for veterans and defence widows.This project had been developed by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, in Victoria, to provide an outlet for the creative talents of disabled veterans and of their wives. Bruce presented the prizes annually at the Heidelberg Hospital. As Bruce said,‘there were always plenty of prizes’—in 1990, over sixty prizes in nine different sections. Sir Edmund Herring, commander of the Australian forces in New Guinea during World War II, had been the first patron of the Story Writing and Art Project.There had only been two patrons, and Ruxton became the second. He opened up the project to all members of the returned services community. At the beginning of the Ruxton RSL presidency, the competition had been sponsored by Ampol Petroleum, General Motors Holden, and G. J. Coles and Company. No reader will be surprised to learn that ten years later, almost every hospital supply company, including wheelchair, anaesthetics and medical alarm suppliers, a vast range of veterans associations, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Safeway Supermarkets, were all contributing to the prizes. Ruxton had gained the Victorian RSL presidency when the looming problem for the League was the provision of aged care for veterans of World War II. As we have seen, he was highly skilled in operating his networks for fundraising purposes.Added to that, he had the extraordinary gift of making the seemingly depressing task of raising money for a project such as a nursing home into an exciting event. For example, in 1973, as state vice president, he had launched a campaign to raise the $156,000 necessary to gain a government subsidy of four times that amount for a 60-bed geriatric hospital in Frankston. He had enlisted the support of Stan Edwards, then President of the Sebastopol RSL sub-branch. Bruce announced the fundraising program at a Sebastopol sub-branch smoke night where he went on to tell the assembled veterans that the Australian flag should stay the same, because ‘104,000 servicemen died under that flag.’ 163
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The campaign was successful. A photograph taken fourteen years later shows Stan Edwards, still Sebastopol branch president, sharing a joke with Bruce Ruxton and war hero Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop at a function held at Craigs Royal Hotel in Ballarat. Edwards is the central figure in the photo, reproduced in the illustrations section of the book.Working with Bruce was energising. It was fun. It also brought enormous prestige. In the years immediately after World War II, veterans would have found the idea that the Commonwealth Government could contemplate disbanding the Repatriation hospital system almost unthinkable. Yet hints that the unthinkable might become a reality began shortly after the election of the Hawke Labor Government in March 1983. In December that year, the phones rang hot at ANZAC House as members of the returned service community anxiously enquired about a startling press rumour.Was it true that Senator Arthur Geitzelt, then Minister for Veterans’Affairs, had suggested that the department be merged with the proposed new Aged Care Department? The Victorian RSL State Executive met. Bruce fired off an urgent telegram to Geitzelt, asking for an explanation.The issue disappeared. Almost four years later, delegates to the RSL National Congress cautiously congratulated themselves that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs was the only department unaffected by the Hawke Government’s re-structure of the public service.1 By that time, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs was Ben Humphreys. The guarded optimism of the 1987 National Congress quickly proved misplaced. The economy experienced a downturn. The foreign debt grew astronomically. Treasurer Paul Keating’s 1985 bid to supplement the Federal Government’s financial base with the introduction of a consumption tax (later the GST) had failed.The members of the Hawke Cabinet would have examined the figures. One item in the budget had always been large: the bill for veterans’ entitlements. It must have been clear that this expense would blow out as the returned community aged. There were special purpose pensions, more beds would be needed in the Repatriation hospitals for the World 164
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War II aged, and the Vietnam veterans were displaying horrific rates of attrition, morbidity and mortality.There had been reports recommending the sense of rationalising services duplicated by Commonwealth Repat hospitals and state-run hospitals. In Victoria, for example, the June 1985 Brand Report had found veterans’ services dispersed and overlapping in the Heidelberg area, and that the Repat could rationalise its services with those provided by the nearby Austin Hospital. In spite of these warning signs, the news that the Government intended to integrate the Repatriation hospitals with the state hospital system hit Bruce Ruxton like a bolt of lightning. On 25 May 1988,Veterans’Affairs Minister Ben Humphreys had announced that veterans would not be targeted in any proposed budget cuts. Ruxton told of the revelation of the pending integration of the State and Commonwealth hospitals in his 1988 President’s Report. The 25 May announcement had been ‘good news, and therefore it was most incredible that the Minister should visit the National Executive of the RSL on the 4th June, some ten days later, and announce that the Repatriation hospitals would no longer be Repatriation hospitals by July 1993.’2 Ruxton described the scene: ‘Before a stunned Executive he [Humphreys] went further to say that Heidelberg could go by 1990.’ Bruce continued: ‘The public servant employed by DVA to integrate the Repatriation hospitals with the States, made a rather amazing announcement to the June meeting of the National Executive, when he said the Commonwealth would give the States extra money so as to give the veteran priority in the State system.’ He then wrote with his characteristic vigour: ‘The Victorian Branch of the RSL will resist to the bitter end the integration of Heidelberg, Macleod and Bundoora into the Victorian Department of Health.’ By the time the annual RSL National Report was published, the Government’s dates for integration of the hospitals were closer to their eventual calendar. The newly elected national leader, Brigadier Alf Garland, reported in his National President’s Report for 1988 that integration was scheduled to take place by 1 July 1995.3 Ruxton had been taken by surprise at the announcement to the June 1988 meeting of the RSL National Executive that 165
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the Federal Government was about to transfer responsibility for veterans’ health to the Australian states. He had come, however, somewhat earlier to distrust the Hawke Labor Government in its relations with the services community. Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition Government had established an Advisory Committee on Repatriation Legislation Review in 1982, which continued under Labor. The committee had been known as the ‘Keys Committee’, since Sir William Keys, as RSL national president, was its chair. Bruce had served for five years on the Keys Committee as an RSL nominee, along with Mrs Billie Hughes, then National President of the War Widows’ Guild of Australia; a Legacy representative, Admiral Guy Griffiths for the Australian Veterans’ Defence Services Council; and Wal Newington, then national president of the TPI (Totally and Permanently Incapacitated) Association, who later became New South Wales RSL president. The terms of the Keys Committee were that the RSL could examine any changes to veterans’ legislation.This was also a longstanding traditional right of the RSL. Before the new Act, the Veterans’ Entitlements Act of 1986, became law, the League’s representatives examined the wording. But when the Act came into operation, the RSL senior officials found to their horror that radical changes had been made to conventions once held to be rights.Veterans were no longer able to claim reimbursement for medical expenses incurred to support an application for a benefit. Claims made 40 years after war service were more likely to be disallowed than before. Worse, the old convention that the veteran should have the benefit of the doubt in proof that a disability was caused by wartime service—the famous Section 47—had disappeared. Section 47 had been replaced by Clause 119, which required that a ‘reasonable hypothesis’ that the war had caused the condition must be demonstrated by the claimant or their advocate. What had happened? As Ruxton told the author in July 2003, the members of the Victorian RSL State Executive had read the new Act and compared it with the old Act. They had done this themselves.They had not had lawyers read the Act for them—the same process may have taken place with the other 166
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State Executives.The new legislation had then been accepted at the RSL State Conferences, and then the National Congress. When the flaws in the Veterans’ Entitlements Act had become clear, there had been remits (recommendations) to the State Conference and then RSL National Congress of the following year, calling for the Government to review the new Repat legislation. But by then, too much time had passed.The recommendations to the Government failed to produce changes, or in Bruce’s words,‘they just knocked it back’. According to Ruxton, in regard to the Keys Committee and the Veterans’ Entitlements Act, the RSL had been ‘Conned by tricky Government lawyers’. He used the same expression when discussing the matter with the author in 2003. Bruce was not going to be ‘conned’ once again. By July 1989, Ruxton was ready to go to war with the Government over the Repatriation hospitals. He made his most explicit statement of what he intended when he opened the fifty-sixth RSL Women’s Council of Victoria. The president claimed that veterans and families had recently lost nineteen major services through government cutbacks. He then strongly condemned the recommendation that the Repatriation hospitals be integrated into the state system. He issued the challenge the RSL system of lobbying made possible: ‘We are now going to start punishing MPs and lobbying them.’ The National Executive would fight a campaign against integration. In Victoria, Ruxton set up a special committee under the auspices of the State Branch Executive.This was known in RSL circles as the Hospital Integration Committee. The chairman of the Hospital Integration Committee, chosen for the position by Ruxton, was Dino De Marchi, a veteran of the Vietnam War. He had served in Vietnam with both the 3rd and 1st Special Air Services (SAS) Squadron, in Nui Dat, during 1966 and 1967. He had joined the RSL shortly after his return, and when the Italian sub-branch was formed, he became its delegate to the League State Conference. De Marchi was a member of the State Executive, appointed in 1983 for a variety of reasons, including the fact that he was a lawyer. This appointment gave balance to the Executive: De Marchi was the first Vietnam veteran to serve on a committee 167
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consisting mainly of World War II veterans. He was a long term member of the Defence Force, a valued member of committees on defence. The legal issue was the need for an opinion on the Discharged Servicemen’s Preference Act, under which veterans of Korea and Vietnam were not entitled to some of the generous benefits available to those who had returned from World War II.Veterans’ legislation was becoming more technical and complex—as time went on, the services of professional lawyers would be essential in producing expert opinions. In the mid-1980s, Ruxton must have been impressed by De Marchi. He had made sure that De Marchi was a member of the working party set up to establish the Sir Edward Dunlop Medical Research Foundation, in collaboration with ‘Weary’ Dunlop, and Bruce himself. De Marchi, who later became chairman of the Foundation, had nothing but praise for Bruce in the early days of their relationship. Of their work for the Medical Research Foundation he said that Ruxton ‘gave me all the support I needed to get that off the ground. It might not have got off the ground, without that support’.4 The vice chairman of the Hospital Integration Committee, at its inception, was Frederick ‘Fred’ Cullen, the long-time President of the Ivanhoe RSL sub-branch. In view of what was to happen, it may be important that De Marchi was also a member of the Ivanhoe RSL, and later to serve as its vice president and senior vice president. Ivanhoe was a powerful sub-branch. The branch was very active at State Conference. Its membership was exceptionally skilled in finance, administration and the law. At one stage, its members included a county court judge. Its building was a mansion, built by a local timber merchant in a style once popular in Bavaria, and fitted out with dense and magnificent woodwork. The sub-branch had not installed poker machines to raise funds. Instead, it hired out its ballroom for functions. In a competition to identify the likely source of a challenger for the state presidency, Ivanhoe would have to rate highly. Cullen was an advocate on the Veterans’ Review Board, as well as secretary of the 4th Australian Field Regiment Association. After the war, Cullen had attended Melbourne University under 168
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the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, and gained three degrees in commerce, arts and public administration. When he retired from a senior government position supervising mining legislation, in 1982, Ruxton had invited him to join the State Executive. Bruce himself took pride in having remained a private in the war and was wary of formally qualified people. For Ruxton, Cullen may have represented what he called ‘an over-educated egg-head’.An even more likely explanation for what was to follow was that Fred Cullen from time to time expressed his concern over such matters as the cost to the League of Bruce’s two offices and five secretaries, and of such matters as the several thousands a year laid out for the public relations services of Barry Everingham. It was well known among senior League members that the president liked to have obedient people on the State Executive. After the first abrupt announcement to the June 1988 meeting of the National RSL Executive that the Repatriation hospitals would be integrated into the state health systems, the Government gave a series of reassurances to the League. For Victoria, Ruxton regarded a speech Prime Minister Hawke made at the Heidelberg Repat Hospital on 24 April 1989 as the key statement. The most important points of Hawke’s undertaking were, first, that ‘No Repatriation general hospital will be transferred to a State until a satisfactory agreement has been reached on matters such as priority of access and quality of health care for veterans and war widows’. And second, that ‘No final decision will be taken if the RSL has reasonable cause for dissatisfaction with the proposed arrangements’. The State Executive and members of the Hospital Integration Committee were not reassured. As they pointed out in a major cover story for Mufti, ‘Hands Off Our Hospitals’, the Government only had to regard the RSL’s ‘reasons for dissatisfaction’ as unreasonable, to ride roughshod over them. Bruce’s voice was clear in the conclusion to the article. Using the motto of the 2/25th Battalion, he declared ‘What we have we hold’. The RSL’s first coup was that the powerful Australian Medical Association (AMA) supported the League view that the 169
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Repat hospitals provided the best facilities for care of the services community, and that they were the centres of specialist knowledge in treatment of veterans. Indeed, Mr Stephen Clark, to be elevated to President of the AMA in 1992, was a founding member of the Integration Committee. Other members of the committee were Dr Allan Zimet, an oncologist (cancer specialist), and President of the Repatriation Department Medical Officers’ Association; Dr Sol Rose, a former Executive Director at the Heidelberg Hospital; and J.A. ‘Jack’ Knight, Chairman of the RSL Veterans’Affairs Committee. Dr Ken Millar, Director of Surgery at Heidelberg, joined later, at Ruxton’s invitation. Bruce used his Toorak Times column to spread news of the terms of the protest throughout the suburbs, via the Toorak Times chain of papers. For example, he argued in an article for the Ivanhoe Heidelberg Diamond Valley Northerner, published on 21 March 1990, that care for veterans was a Commonwealth responsibility under the Australian Constitution. Most of the rest of the text of the piece was exactly the same as the earlier ‘Hands Off Our Hospitals’ Mufti manifesto. Bruce added the dire warning, however, that in a meeting with the Victorian Health Minister in December 1989, Mrs Caroline Hogg had told him that the Victorian state hospital system was in no position to guarantee ‘priority of access’ to veterans. They would have to enter the state hospital as private patients, he quoted Hogg as saying, and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs would have to pay their fees. In the countryside, Bruce’s contacts such as Bendigo RSL President, Max O’Halloran, publicised Ruxton’s message. In his column in the Bendigo Advertiser of 7 March 1990, O’Halloran advised his readers of the League strategy. Before the next Federal election, he wrote:‘The RSL will be asking every candidate for their position in regards to the veteran community.’ Mufti printed a very straightforward petition, in which veterans were asked to answer the question: ‘Do you wish the integration of our Repatriation Hospitals into the Victorian State Health System?’ by ticking a YES/NO box. ANZAC House received 3500 replies on this. Veterans collected signatures to witness their opposition to the loss of ‘Our Hospital’, under 170
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wording of the terms of a protest letter supplied in Mufti. The RSL ‘system’ was in full swing. After a very strong initial campaign against the integration of the Heidelberg Hospital, there were signs that the outcome might be a foregone conclusion. As Ruxton and the other authors of ‘Hands Off Our Hospitals’ had pointed out, government discussions on the matter had reached an advanced stage before any ex-service organisations had been consulted. There were also signs that De Marchi himself had lost favour with Ruxton.5 The issue may have concerned the RSL tradition of non-payment for representation of veterans. Commonwealth legal aid was available to those making claims before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the highest tier of the claims procedure. De Marchi was one of the several lawyers who specialised in claims before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and so he could, unjustly, attract suspicion from the old school of profiting from his work on behalf of veterans. De Marchi, of course, when working in his professional capacity, was entitled to receive Government monies for representing veterans in court, and the payments were considerably less than his usual fee for the work performed. The RSL State Executive often met at Yarrawonga, a riverside town in Ruxton’s favourite area of Victoria. On one occasion at Yarrawonga, De Marchi and Fred Cullen, then vice-chairman of the Hospital Integration Committee, were working together on the League’s ‘Statement of Minimum Requirements’ for veterans in the case of integration.At the time, the government’s proposal was that the Repat hospital be amalgamated with the Austin Hospital. When Ruxton heard of this collaboration, he said to Cullen: ‘I wouldn’t associate with him; it wouldn’t do you any good.’ Developments moved swiftly.At the meeting of the Hospital Integration Committee which took place on 16 July 1992, Bruce Ruxton became its chairman.6 The decision that Ruxton was to chair the committee had been taken at the meeting of the State Executive held seven days earlier. The reason recorded in the minutes of the meeting for the change in its leadership was a 171
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recognition of the importance of coordination. Henceforth, ‘Decisions and responses on integration should come from the State President or his delegate, after due and full consideration by the Hospital Integration Sub-Committee and the State Executive.’ There were several reasons why having the state president head the Committee, and be its spokesman, made good sense. There was a need for coordination of responses to government representatives and for consistency in public statements. Rumours of what was about to happen and the consequences for veterans’ health and entitlements were running rife in the services community. Staff at the Heidelberg Hospital were uncertain of their future, morale suffered and some even resigned. After the state president took over as chairman of the Hospital Integration Committee, the committee did not meet for ten months. De Marchi’s name does not appear in the list of those present at the 16 July 1992 meeting, or under the ‘present’ heading of the minutes of a subsequent meeting on 18 February 1994. At that time, the RSL State President in Victoria had the right to co-opt three people onto the State Executive. Each year, the members of the RSL State Executive cast their votes on the future of these nominees. In one year’s ballot, De Marchi’s special appointment to the State Executive was not renewed. As De Marchi pointed out to the author, Ruxton would not have had the time to chair meetings of the Hospital Integration Committee, even if he had wanted to do so. It is also possible, in the author’s view, that Bruce accepted integration as inevitable, and so turned his back on the committee. ‘I never went with Integration. I never capitulated,’ said Ruxton to the author in September 2003. But memory plays tricks over time. Con Sciacca, Minister for Veterans’Affairs in the Keating Government from 25 March 1994 to 11 March 1996, had the following recollection. By the time Sciacca was the minister, Bruce had ‘resigned himself ’ to integration.When Con Sciacca had first met Bruce Ruxton in March or April 1994, he remembered, Bruce had ‘accepted integration as a fait accompli’.7 In the opinion of Dr William ‘Bill’ Adam, who had first met Ruxton in 1988, when he was appointed acting executive director of the Repatriation General Hospital, Heidelberg: 172
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In regard to the transfer of the hospital to the State, Bruce was opposed to it initially, and then it gathered his reluctant acceptance. His concerns were the impact of any changes on veterans and given the uncertainties of the outcomes for veterans right up until near the transfer date I considered his concerns reasonable.8 As Sciacca further explained, the Commonwealth decision on the hospitals had been taken before his time as minister, possibly in the period of his predecessor, Ben Humphreys. The process by which the Commonwealth Government negotiated to integrate the Heidelberg Hospital with the Austin Hospital, however, is not the issue here. Nor is the method by which the Federal Government excluded the RSL from consultation, if indeed it deliberately did so. The question here is the RSL’s position on integration, and the position Ruxton took on the issue in his public statements. The Sunday Age of 6 March 1994 quoted Bruce Ruxton, in his capacity as Victorian state president of the RSL, as having said that: Although the RSL now accepted the integration plan ‘it would not accept any move to transform the Repat into a general hospital or force veterans into the general hospital system’.The paper further quoted Ruxton as saying,‘The Repat had two options as far as the RSL was concerned— to merge with the Austin Hospital or continue as a standalone military hospital.’ Dr Sol Rose, the former executive director of the Heidelberg Repat, and member of the Hospital Integration Committee, wrote to the RSL leader two days later.9 His central point was that: I thought at the last meeting of the Integration subcommittee it was accepted that amalgamation with Austin was not an option as far as the RSL was concerned. 173
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Rose also wrote,‘I hope you were misquoted in the Sunday Age of 6 March 1994. Heidelberg ceased to be a Military hospital when it was handed over to Repat and became the Repatriation General Hospital. It has remained a general hospital with priority of access to eligible war veterans and war widows. Since it became a teaching hospital of the University of Melbourne civilians are admitted on a “spare capacity” basis.’ Some twenty years before, the decision had been taken to admit community patients to Heidelberg, to give the staff variety in their nursing and training experiences.The civilians provided a wider range of age and variety of ailments than the veterans.The difficulty in retaining staff where the patients were of the same age and suffered similar conditions had been one of the arguments successive Commonwealth governments had levelled against stand-alone Repat hospitals. Ruxton himself had fought the hospital board on the question of the community patients, arguing that Heidelberg was taking in too large a percentage of them. Rose went on to comment on a recent statement by the Hon. Marie Tehan,Victorian Minister for Health, that hospitals would henceforth have to earn their own funds for capital works. He asked Bruce: ‘Would you agree that Heidelberg becomes the means to earn money to rebuild Austin?’ The minutes of the Hospital Integration Committee meeting held at ANZAC House on 18 February 1994 state that, on the issue of the Rehabilitation General Hospital–Austin Hospital amalgamation proposal, the committee had agreed ‘Amalgamation as such was not favoured.’10 The minutes went on to relate: ‘Heidelberg is prepared to work with the RSL to ensure that minimum requirements are met and to preserve a hospital culture which understands veterans’ needs.’ To be fair, the situation was not clear-cut. Those in attendance at the 18 February 1994 meeting of the Hospital Integration Committee did not take the position that the RSL would never accept amalgamation of the two hospitals. They stated that some rationalisation of services between the two hospitals, already in progress, should continue. There were benefits, for example, in combining facilities for cardiac surgery and services for cancer patients, they recorded. More generally, it 174
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was felt, there was no point in running two huge laundries. A paper written by Fred Cullen in association with Graeme Houghton, CEO at the Austin, ‘Proposal for Association between Austin and Heidelberg Repatriation Hospitals’, had been accepted by the Victorian RSL State Executive. This, the committee members agreed, ‘may nevertheless prove a valuable “fall back” position some time in the future [emphasis added]’. Ruxton issued his next statement on the Victorian RSL’s stance on integration in a 25 May 1994 circular to all subbranches.11 The central points came at the end:‘At the National Congress held in Canberra last week, every state voted against integration except NSW and, therefore, I wish to make it quite clear this is now the current RSL National Policy.’The president continued that the NSW Conference appeared to have supported integration,‘but there is a tag on the motion passed, and that is provided that all the concerns of the RSL are answered properly by the government’. This would also be the Victorian position: ‘If the government concedes to the fall back position that we have in Victoria and that is attached, we see nothing wrong with integration.’ Within weeks of Ruxton’s 25 May circular, integration was a reality. On 10 June 1994, Con Sciacca, as Federal Minister for Veterans’Affairs, and Victorian Minister for Health, Marie Tehan, announced that the Federal and Victorian governments had reached an agreement. The Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital would be amalgamated into the state public system from 1 July 1995. The process would involve a payment of $500 million, Sciacca advised,‘to guarantee the rights of veterans to access high quality services in Victorian hospitals’. Sydney’s Concord Repat had been integrated into the NSW state system in July 1993. The process ran smoothly. The Hobart Repat was also integrated during 1993. The State Government in Western Australia refused to accept the Hollywood Repatriation Hospital, which was eventually taken over by a private company, Ramsay Health Care. The Queensland Government refused to take Greenslopes, which also went to Ramsay Health Care. 175
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Eventually, in Victoria, representatives of the Commonwealth and State governments declared their commitment to meeting the RSL’s ‘Statement of Minimum Requirements’. This agreement, renamed the ‘Record of Ongoing Commitments to Veterans and War Widows’ was signed on 1 January 1995. Bruce Ruxton, for the RSL, and Brian Flynn, Deputy Commissioner, Victoria, Department of Veterans’Affairs, issued a joint statement restating the terms of the Commonwealth–State–RSL agreement. Heidelberg Hospital moved to the state system at the same time. It was amalgamated with the Austin Hospital, to be known as the Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre (ARMC) on 1 April 1995. The main terms of the agreement signed between the Commonwealth,Victorian State Government and the RSL on 1 January 1995 were as follows. The Victorian Government pledged to ensure that, ‘Heidelberg continues as a major centre of excellence, maintaining its role as an acute care teaching institution linked to the University of Melbourne’. That, ‘the hospital continues to be available to entitled veterans and war widows, irrespective of their place of residence’. That ‘special veterans services’, such as outpatient, psychiatric and psycho-geriatric services, be maintained, and that the word ‘Repatriation’ remain in the name. In addition to these undertakings, as explained in the press statement Bruce Ruxton and Brian Flynn had made on the eve of integration,‘Entitled veterans and war widows’ would be able to go to any public hospital. If no public hospital could meet their need within a ‘reasonable time’ they would be treated, at government expense, at a private hospital.This last was the new Repatriation Private Patient Scheme. To monitor the workings of the Repatriation Private Patient Scheme, a ‘watchdog’ body was set up. Both Dr Sol Rose and Fred Cullen, along with representatives of other veterans’ organisations, were members of this Victorian Treatment Monitoring Committee. They both maintained that the RSL rank and file had not been consulted on the merger of the Heidelberg and the Austin hospitals and that the veteran community had not agreed to it. 176
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Cullen frequently placed his criticisms of the Repatriation Private Patient Scheme before the League membership in the form of motions at RSL State Conferences. In 1995, for example, Resolution 10, from Ivanhoe sub-branch, called for the Scheme to be administered more flexibly.The explanation was that the Monitoring Committee had received complaints about waiting times, failures to meet emergencies at weekends and elective surgery procedures delayed. Cullen’s Resolution 11, moreover, was ‘That the so-called Repatriation Private Patient Scheme (RPPS) be renamed as it is not a “dinkum” private patient scheme’. Ruxton, who chaired the State Conference, was not, in his own words, prepared ‘to put up with bullshit’. During 1997, Fred Cullen found himself dropped as Chairman of the Public Affairs Sub-committee of the State Executive. It had been one of his functions to draft major correspondence for Ruxton. He received an instruction that he was not to represent Bruce at other subbranches, at meetings, or to speak on his behalf. He was dropped as Chairman of the Veterans’Affairs Sub-committee.12 Eventually, he was moved off the Treatment Monitoring Committee. When Cullen was re-elected to the State Executive in July 1997, he went to see Ruxton about the cancellations of his other positions. Bruce conveyed the impression that he did not know why these changes had happened.The president did not mention impending developments. In late August, a series of disciplinary charges arrived in the mail.13 Cullen was to appear before the State Branch Ethics Committee, chaired by Major-General David McLachlan, AO, on 29 September 1997. The hearing was to take place in the Boardroom at ANZAC House. The first three items in the ‘Notice of Disciplinary Hearing’ Cullen received—they were termed ‘charges’—concerned breaches of the rules in relation to Ivanhoe RSL sub-branch elections.The fourth and the final charges concerned two occasions when Cullen had spoken at a District Board meeting on a currently contentious issue. This was the idea, opposed by Ivanhoe, that RSL sub-branches should seek legal incorporation with their social clubs as protection against damages claims arising from the RSL club activities. 177
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The hearing at ANZAC House ran for three days. During that time, more than one member of the Ethics Committee spoke to Cullen, saying ‘We don’t know why we’ve got this’. If the first three charges were to be preferred, the usual procedure would be that they came from the Ivanhoe Committee. Items such as the fourth and fifth charges, if they arose, would more usually be handled by the District Board. Cullen was suspended from holding office in the RSL for five years, to be transferred to the Miscellaneous List. He consulted a barrister.The barrister told Cullen he should take his case to the Supreme Court, where he would almost certainly be awarded substantial financial damages.This course, Cullen thought, would compromise the image of the League itself. Under the rules, he could appeal to the National Appeals Tribunal against the conduct of the State Branch Ethics Committee. This was the course he chose to take.The case was heard in Canberra on 30 March 1998. The National Appeals Tribunal found that Cullen had had ‘just cause to complain against the Ethics Committee for the manner in which it conducted its hearing’ and ‘especially of the penalties involved’.14 The National Tribunal annulled the penalties, and refunded the $400 deposit he had had to produce before the hearing could take place. Cullen’s travel expenses for the Canberra visit were reimbursed, but the State Branch declined to pay the outstanding bill of $2000 he had incurred in seeking legal advice. In such cases, the Victorian RSL rules were that no legal representation could be used. Cullen stayed on the State Executive until June 1998.After that, he was not re-elected to the Victorian RSL State Executive. In his Christmas card to Bruce Ruxton at the end of 1998 Reg ‘Sparrer’ Bailey, from Cooma, conveyed the usual cordial greetings, and then suggested:‘Now get off Cullen’s back.’ Bruce replied, thanking Bailey for his kind thoughts, and then wrote: ‘However, to tell me to “Now get off Cullen’s back” I find both intimidating and rude.’ He continued: Mr Cullen, through no action of mine, was charged by members of his Sub-branch for alleged offences within that Sub-branch. At no stage was I involved. I did not know 178
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what the charges were; I did not know when the hearings were being held; and I had nothing to do with the final result.15 To this Bailey replied on 17 January 1999: ‘My only comment would be to express surprise at the assertion that the matter was handled internally by the Ivanhoe Sub-branch, whereas I understand that it was an Ethics Committee hearing, and I wouldn’t think that such a hearing would not attract the interest of H/Q [emphasis added].’ In the final outcome, integration delivered more gains to the veteran community than losses. The old tradition was that the centralised hospitals provided a supportive community for sick veterans. But the days when the doctors themselves had backgrounds in the armed services had long passed, as had the days when matrons had kept up patient morale by running the wards on military lines.The benefit of the new system was that returned servicemen could be treated locally. Elderly wives who could not drive were no longer forced to travel long distances to centralised Repat facilities, and veterans could stay near their families when they were ill.The standard of care remained high.The Australian Repatriation system remained one of the best in the world. Eventually, after several changes in the name of the hospital complex, which remained under one management, the Heidelberg Hospital regained its old familiar name. From April 2003, it was once again known as the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. In Ruxton’s own view the struggle had been a success. The Federal Government had made the Victorian Repatriation hospital its first target in its integration campaign, but the Heidelberg Repat complex had been the last one in the nation to undergo amalgamation. As Fred Cullen once said to the author of this book, ‘He [Bruce Ruxton] was a wonderful man for the RSL. He kept the organisation on the map. He made it into an important welfare organisation.’The author agrees with this judgment. Bruce had, however, treated the members of the Hospital Integration Committee, after their lengthy service on this and other League bodies, with scant regard. He had taken the pragmatic course on 179
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a major political issue, as the leader of a great organisation must eventually do. In taking the course he did on integration, however, he had dealt rather carelessly with the truth, had not shown loyalty and had tarnished his own reputation for integrity. Some time after his position on the RSL State Executive was not renewed, Dino De Marchi decided to stand as a candidate against Ruxton in a League contest for the leadership. He and several others reasoned that it was time ‘to give the Sub-branches an alternative’, and to ‘see if they wanted to take it’. Losing his position on the State Executive, however, deprived De Marchi of an important power base. In spite of his impressive record of work for veterans, under the legal aid provisions of an increasingly technical appeals procedure, he was not elected.The day before the results of the 1997 RSL election were declared, the Herald-Sun quoted State RSL Senior Vice President, Brigadier Keith Rossi, as saying that he had nominated for the position of Victorian League president:‘To provide an alternative to the other candidate for members who wanted a change’. Rossi was also quoted as saying that he did not expect to be elected. If elected president, he was further reported to have said that he ‘would immediately look for a younger man to take his place’. The effect of Rossi’s candidature was to divide the votes for an ‘alternative leadership’. Bruce Ruxton was returned as State RSL president.The day before that victory, Bruce had said to the Herald-Sun:‘I pity the poor devil that beats me—this is a sevenday-a-week job, 16 hours a day.’ He said he wanted to stay ‘in charge’ to do battle against the republicans in the unfolding debate over the Australian Constitution. Bruce told the paper:‘I want to hang around for the republic debate—some people might say I’m too old, but I’ve got a few charges left in me.’
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12 Grand Final
Bruce Ruxton met his future wife Jill on Norfolk Island. The League often had reunions on the South Pacific island offshore from New South Wales, where the main inhabitants were descendants of the Bounty mutineers. Bruce became a frequent guest at Government House as Tony Messner, the former Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, would eventually become the Norfolk Island Administrator. Bruce had flown up to join an RSL group tour after the Anzac Day ceremonies in Melbourne. It was April 1994. Unbeknown to Ruxton, several months before, Jill McMahon had consulted a Queensland travel agent about a holiday. The agent suggested that Jill, widow of a World War II veteran, go to Norfolk Island, and advised that she should join the RSL group tour.The agent had added the rider,‘I hope you’re not allergic to Bruce Ruxton?’ Members of the RSL tour put their heads together. On Bruce’s arrival on the island, he was given a Suzuki mini. The group was about to depart for a clifftop fish fry in the tropical evening.The mates said to Jill:‘Will you go with Bruce in his car?’ The sun was low in the sky, there was a barrel of beer; there was the sound and smell of fish frying.They sat looking out over
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the Pacific Ocean. Bruce found Jill charming, and he found himself unexpectedly looking forward to the coming days.As he told Sunday Magazine for an article published on 17 March 1996, he asked:‘Are you a widow?’‘Yes,’ she replied.‘Well,’ said Bruce. ‘I’m a widower.You’d better watch out.’ Jill McMahon had been born Marguerite Jill Carmody, in Sydney. She married James Leonard McMahon, who had served with the 8th Australian Infantry Brigade, December 1941– December 1945, two years of this time in the AIF on overseas duties. They had been in business in Sydney at the beginning of the marriage. While in Sydney, they had begun to breed Arab horses. In the late 1960s, the family had moved inland to Comboyne, to take up dairy farming. Apart from her many duties as a farmer’s wife during the Comboyne years, Jill was also an accomplished artist. She had studied painting at evening classes in Sydney, and she also sculpted. She favoured experimental styles over traditional portrayals—Bruce’s taste leaned to military subjects and landscapes, so few of Jill’s pictures appeared on their walls after they were married. For many years Jill had drawn a cartoon strip for the Wingham Chronicle. From her first marriage, Jill had two daughters,Vanessa, born in 1963, and Fiona, 1966. After a long illness, James McMahon had died at the beginning of 1992. Shortly after that sad loss, her daughters grown up, Jill moved to Tewantin, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The attraction between Bruce and Jill is clear in the first photograph of them together, which appears in the illustrations section of this book. In interviews for the papers, Bruce often referred to this portrait as ‘My Favourite Picture’.The photo was taken by Bruce’s close friend, Wally Werrett, in May 1994 at Werrett’s home at Frankston, a Melbourne outer suburb. For Bruce’s sixty-ninth birthday, Jill sent him a card which said: ‘For years I waited for a REFINED, DIGNIFIED, HIGHMINDED person to come into my life . . . but then I met YOU! And you’re different . . .’ He rang her often to say he loved her. He sent her gifts, particularly pearls, his old favourite from Japan. 182
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They travelled together to England in July 1995, where they were entertained in style by Bruce’s contacts there, and dined at the House of Lords. But eventually the distance between Melbourne and Tewantin became too great to sustain the relationship. Jill rang to break it off. As Bruce told the Herald-Sun for an article published on 23 December 1995, ‘That stirred me up. The old dog moved like a flash of lightning. I took the first plane up there and claimed her. Now she wants to join me in the fast lane for a while.’ Jill agreed to live in Melbourne. They became officially engaged to be married in January 1996. At the time of the engagement, Jill was sixty-two. Bruce would be seventy within a few weeks. As Bruce’s seventieth birthday approached, publisher Peter Isaacson wrote a column for his paper, the Southern Cross, devoted to Ruxton. The piece, published on 14 February 1996, set out with the words: ‘The splendid work he has done for ex-service men and women in Victoria is unequalled.’ One only has to be with Bruce as the ranks of Anzac Day marchers pass the dais which he shares with the Governor, civic leaders and senior officers of the armed services to appreciate his popularity.As they pass the dais, just before saluting the cenotaph and the eternal flame, the marchers ignore the rest of the VIPs and one after another call out to Bruce Ruxton or gesticulate to him. ‘Why has Bruce become so popular?’ Isaacson continued. ‘The reason is not hard to find. Bruce Ruxton is primarily a kind man, humane and tolerant. But in his endeavour to be all things to all men and all women, he sometimes lapses into the intolerances that were manifest in Australia during his formative years.’ His great interest, in fact his only interest, has been to serve those who enlisted in the armed services. In writing of ‘lapses into intolerances’, Isaacson, chairman of the Shrine of Remembrance Trustees, may have been thinking of an incident of four years earlier.The Shrine was desperately in need of repairs. Ruxton, who was a trustee on the board of the Shrine by virtue of his position as State President of the RSL, had an idea to raise funds. 183
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Bruce,American baseball cap on backwards, boogied his way among the refuse and graffiti of a back street in Collingwood, recording ‘The Ruxton Techno Rap’, for sale to the public.The record included these lines: There’s a nip in the air, and its 42 degrees, my name is Bruce Ruxton, and I’ll do as I please. Of Prime Minister Paul Keating: Our Gucci clad social vulture/ he’ll swap our beer and barbies/ for some exotic culture . . . Of Republicans and Asian immigrants: Go on, replace our flag, with the rising sun, You’ve sold our soul to Asia, and its only just begun . . . Unless you have some bias, like our very new Australians, Of which a very high proportion, seem to be newly settled Asians. One journalist noted that the Ruxton Rap Gang—supplied by Baron Production Records—all looked ‘ethnic’, but ‘none looked Asian’. Isaacson had been ‘appalled’ by the ‘Ruxton Rap’. But, as he said to the author in a January 2003 interview Bruce had ‘done it in good faith, for a good reason’. A vastly contrasting side of Bruce Ruxton had been at work several months earlier. At that time he had written to historian and former Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, KG, GCMG, GCVO, explaining that:
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On a recent visit to Borneo I noticed a grave of a Sapper L.N. Hasluck from Western Australia in the Labuan War Cemetery, which is situated off the coast of Sabah. It seems that he may be a relative of yours . . . I note that he died on the 6th April 1944, which meant that he very likely was a POW in the infamous Sandakan POW camp. Bruce enclosed photos of the tombstone. Within days Sir Paul replied,‘Dear Mr Ruxton,’ It was very kind and thoughtful of you to send me the photographs of the grave in the Labuan War Cemetery. Sapper L.N. Hasluck was my brother. He served in the 2/6 Field Park Co of the Engineers, having worked before the war in the Australian Railway Workshops, and became a prisoner of war on the fall of Singapore . . . As Remembrance Day 1996 approached, Peter Isaacson once again devoted a column to Ruxton, under the title,‘A man who lives for others’. In this he wrote: I have known many presidents of the RSL, from the redoubtable Sir George Holland through to Bruce Ruxton. Energetic and self-sacrificing in their cause as most of them were, none has fought longer and harder for ex-service people (whether they be RSL members or not) than Bruce Ruxton. Sir George Holland KBE, MM, was state president of the League in Victoria from 1929 to 1951. As Ruxton liked to say, Holland had been ‘twenty-two years in office’. He was referring to the Victorian leadership. Holland had also gone on to be national RSL president from 1950 to 1960. Isaacson told the author in 2003 that he thought that Bruce’s reputation with ‘the non-services community and their dependants’ had been affected by his relations with quote-seeking journalists. Regarding Bruce’s achievements in fostering interest 185
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in ex-service people in the community, in Remembrance Day and in Anzac Day, Ruxton as Victorian RSL President was as ‘Good as Holland’. To celebrate Bruce’s seventieth a group of Ruxton’s friends, chief among them Lawrie Black, his mate from Black Rock, Les Hancock, his wartime pal, and Wally Werrett organised a luncheon at the Beaumaris Ex-Services Club. Among the two hundred well-wishers present were men and women from all levels of society. The master of ceremonies was Colonel Don Fenwick, Monsignor Francis Lyons, AM, said the Grace and the Honourable Vernon Wilcox, CBE, QC, proposed the first toast. Sir James and Lady Balderstone were in the official party, as were Con Sciacca, Minister for Veterans’Affairs, and Wilson Tuckey, the shadow minister. Con Sciacca considered Bruce a good friend. As he told the author in February 2003, at first he had viewed the RSL leader as ‘a nice piece of work’. Seen from an ALP point of view, Ruxton’s public statements on Aborigines, minorities and Asians had not made a working relationship seem very promising. Sciacca had been born in Italy.When Paul Keating asked him to take up the position of Veterans’Affairs minister, Sciacca had said to the Prime Minister, ‘How are the Diggers going to cop a Dago?’ At their first meeting, Sciacca introduced himself saying, ‘I’m Con Sciacca, the new minister.’ Bruce had replied simply, ‘Minister’.They had then worked in unison for the two years of the appointment. Ruxton once said to John Howard, then Leader of the Opposition, ‘John, you could do worse than have Sciacca in your party.’ Bruce had nominated Sciacca for Life Membership of the RSL, an honour awarded him the year before.To the author, Sciacca said of Ruxton:‘If he’s your friend, he’ll carry you on his shoulders for 1000 miles.’ Kelvin Glare, the former Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, and Graham Sinclair, then Assistant Commissioner of Police, were at the lunch, as was Martin Clemens, CBE, MC, MA. For the preceding ten years, Ruxton had been on the committee of SOLO (Supporters of Law and Order Limited), an organisation 186
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concerned with promoting respect for law and order, of which Clemens was the chairman. SOLO had strong police support, and its patron was the incumbent Governor of Victoria. Major-General David McLachlan, a fellow member of the Beaumaris RSL sub-branch, was there. David McLachlan and his wife Louise were close friends of Bruce. Sir Rupert Hamer, Senator Jocelyn Newman, Peter Ross-Edwards, Don Chipp and his wife Idun were also present. So were Wellington Lee, and the writer, Patsy Adam-Smith, who had accompanied Ruxton on the 1985 pilgrimage to Ranau and the Sandakan POW camp. Lawrie Black, OAM, made the testimonial presentation and read a poem containing the following lines: There’ll always be Bruce Ruxton While there’s an RSL Wherever there’s a cause to fight Our Brucie fights like hell These sentiments had been supported the month before in a letter from the son of a woman for whom Ruxton had gained a war widow pension, after she had been denied the benefit for ten years.The son said that his mother had found Bruce’s ‘gruff courtesy’ uplifting. He offered himself as a friend for life, to be always available and to render any assistance. There were also tributes from overseas. An Indonesian journalist sent a translation of a profile of Bruce published in Bisnis Indonesia on 18 November 1995. The journalist had written that the RSL leader had done more than anyone else to keep the ‘ever sensitive and fragile relationship between Indonesia and Australia’, especially in view of the problem over East Timor. The newspaperman had met Ruxton in 1989, when he had been awarded his Indonesian Veterans’ Legion medal, in recognition of the good relations between Australian and Indonesian ex-service organisations. Bruce listed the names and addresses from the many, many birthday cards he received. He checked the signature book recorded at the luncheon. He then sent out thankyou notes to each of the senders. 187
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Jill McMahon and Bruce Ruxton were married at St James’ Old Cathedral, Melbourne’s oldest church, on 16 April 1996. Jill had chosen the Old Cathedral as the place for their marriage when Bruce had taken her to the OBE Association annual service there. For the marriage ceremony, Jill wore a pale blue jacket with a matching lace skirt. Her daughter Fiona met her at the church, accompanied by the celebrant, the Reverend Don Meadows. Fiona had herself been married the previous Sunday. As the couple emerged from the ceremony, they ducked to make their way though a guard of honour formed by six Ghurkha soldiers. Bruce had worked from the 1980s to bring Ghurkhas to Australia, because of their loyalty to the British and the dominions.When Hong Kong was about to be handed over to China, his aim had been to bring those remaining on the island to Australia as full citizens. In this he had succeeded, and several of these soldiers had taken up positions in Australian local government and in the armed forces.The Ghurkhas at the door of St James’ Old Cathedral wore their traditional topi hats and their decorations. They formed a ceremonial arch with their kukri dagger-swords. The reception was held at the Naval and Military Club in Little Collins Street. Among those who sent wedding congratulations were Peter Gration, then chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial. Bill Hayden had sent his congratulations on the union earlier. For the first seven years after their marriage, Jill and Bruce Ruxton lived at the Glenwood Avenue house in Beaumaris. Jill retained a house in Tewantin, near Noosa. During the 1980s, Ruxton’s views on maintaining the Australian flag, on the need to preserve the existing Constitution and on the value of the Royal Family to the country were well publicised. The RSL position on the monarchy was that allegiance to the Crown and common law was the only protection Australia had against corrupt government. On this topic, Bruce gave addresses to RSL sub-branches, wrote volumes of letters, spoke on talkback radio and appeared on television. He was on the set of Channel 9’s Midday Show when a brawl broke out between presenter Ron 188
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Casey and entertainer and Vietnam veteran, Normie Rowe. Casey was arguing for republicanism, Rowe against.An exasperated Rowe finally punched Casey. The next day, Ruxton said to AAP Australia, from Rockhampton, Queensland, ‘As for Ron Casey, he deserved a good punch on the nose. He certainly did not do his cause any good.’ He continued: ‘We have enough problems to fix up without arguing and fighting over whether Australia should become a republic.’ He also said to the news syndicate that ‘the RSL would do all it could to prevent the Federal Government from spending taxpayers’ money to educate children about republicanism’. At the invitation of principals and student SRCs, he gave many addresses in secondary schools—to a packed audience at the Bendigo RSL sub-branch on 14 July 1991, Bruce said that he had spoken to approximately twenty-four schools on the Australian Constitution during the previous year. The question of Australia becoming a republic was firmly upon the political agenda after Paul Keating became prime minister. Keating began to speak of changes to the flag—in 1993, Ruxton as the leading member of the Anzac Day Commemoration Council granted permission that Australian flags be carried on the march, the first time for thirty years, to mark veterans’ resistance to change in the national symbol. During the Queen’s visit to open Sydney’s 150th birthday celebrations, Keating’s wife, Annita, declined to curtsy to her. The media bombarded Ruxton with requests for comments. Bruce obliged.Author Donald Horne suggested that the Queen was not the person to open the Sydney celebration. Bruce replied:‘It is well known that he carries a chip upon his shoulder, and the fact that he vents his spleen on a lady who has absolutely no right of reply shows just what sort of person he really is.’ Earlier, Nobel Prize novelist Patrick White had referred to the Prince and Princess of Wales, in Australia for the Bicentenary, as ‘royal goons’. Bruce began, and continued, to refer to White as, ‘That tired old tart from Sydney, the greatest exponent of the Queen’s English in Australia, that none of the Queen’s subjects in Australia can understand.’ 189
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Was republicanism illegal under the Constitution? In July 1991 Ruxton wrote to New South Wales Attorney-General, Peter Collins, pointing out that under the NSW Crimes Act of 1900, people who formed groups to promote republicanism were deemed guilty of treason. The penalty then had been life imprisonment, Bruce wrote, and the Act may never have been repealed. Author Tom Keneally was highly amused by Ruxton’s subsequent attempts to have him arrested. In Melbourne at one point to launch his book, Our Republic, Keneally noted an oftenrepeated claim that ‘the republican movement is made up of Irish Fenians’.The claim was deduced, he said, from the Irish names of some of those involved: Paul Keating, Keneally and Australian newspaper editor Paul Kelly.The debate does seem to have stirred up the sectarian tensions of an earlier Australia. When Prime Minister Keating, speaking in Parliament, criticised Britain on its support of Australia in the Asia-Pacific war theatre during World War II, Alf Garland as RSL national president reacted angrily. In a program broadcast on British television’s BBC 2 on 3 May 1992, Garland appeared saying, ‘Mr Keating is what one would call an Irish republican bigot. His background is Irish republican.’ Ruxton also reacted angrily. He wrote a long letter, dated 3 April 1992, to PM Keating at Parliament House, outlining the difficulties Britain had faced in 1942, and correcting some of Keating’s factual errors.This letter he tabled at the Victorian RSL State Conference. Although these words do not appear in the typed text of the speech for the League conference, the Geelong Advertiser of 1 July 1993 quoted Bruce as having said of the Federal Government at that meeting:‘One would have thought that these strong anti-British, anti-Queen, anti-monarchy, antiflag policies were the constitution of the IRA.’ The differences between the RSL national president and the prime minister came to a head in 1993 with a question in Parliament. Shortly after Paul Keating had become prime minister, Alf Garland had called upon him. Ruxton, who regarded Garland as the best national leader of the League he had worked with, apparently was also present. 190
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Garland was a veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. As one very senior RSL official told the author,‘Alf Garland was a warrior. He saw the way to handle the Government as being to fight the Government.’ During that first meeting with PM Keating, Bruce recalled to the author in October 2003 that ‘I thought that Alf was about to hit the Prime Minister.’ On 26 May 1993,Tim Fischer, leader of the National Party, directed a question without notice to the Prime Minister. Fischer asked if it was true that when Alf Garland had offered him an Australian flag at the Sydney Town Hall, Keating had said: ‘No good giving it to me, give it back to one of your Pommy mates.’ Mr Keating replied that Garland’s act in presenting the flag to him had been political and inappropriate, when the occasion was a reception to honour the United States Secretary of Defense. He went on to say:‘When Mr Garland came to see me not long after I became Prime Minister and we had the celebration of the various commemorative events during 1992, after 50 years— the fall of Singapore, the battle of Kokoda, et cetera—one of his requests to me was to pay for him to visit the United Kingdom to go to some ceremony that he said was important to him.’ He then continued:‘The fact is that Mr Garland comes from that area of the RSL where people think the only place you can really hold [your head] up high is walking down Whitehall [the London thoroughfare between Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament].’ In other quarters, the RSL was seen as a powerful lobby which must be courted. In a letter of 22 June 1992, John Hewson, then Leader of the Opposition, had replied to one from Ruxton, stating in his conclusion, ‘You can be assured that the Coalition parties will continue to get our national priorities right, and to emphasise that a constitutional monarch is consistent with our values and aspirations as a nation.’ Academic and writer Leonie Kramer, in forming her monarchist group,‘Leadership Beyond Politics’, also sought the support of the League. As the Constitutional Convention of 1998 approached, Bruce was not lost for words.As he often said, The debate on the republic has degenerated into a vicious, ugly argument conducted by rabid packs of over-educated 191
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opportunists, grant-funded bludgers, pseudo academics and professional ethnics of all races, all of them scavenging like frothing hyenas to take over this country, which the Japanese couldn’t do in 1942. In the election for delegates, Bruce led the ‘Safeguard the People’ group. On 22 November 1997, a full-page advertisement in the Herald-Sun appeared under this heading: ‘Why change? Australia is ALREADY a proud and independent sovereign nation. Vote No to un-necessary change.’ He opened his first speech to the Convention in its second week with these words. ‘We are now in the second week of this Constitutional Convention, costing those pay who tax—and I emphasise those who pay tax—millions of dollars. Even the republican movement in New South Wales has been recorded as saying,“Thanks to the courage of Australians, this is the best country in the world”. So why this convention and why this drive to become a republic?’ In his column for The Weekend Australian of 9 June 1990, Max Harris had described Bruce Ruxton as ‘the last’ of a ‘national stereotype’. He had gone on to explain, ‘I have nothing against Ruxton’s views on anything and everything. Indeed, if anything, I envy him his certitudes.’ Harris had then written, ‘I hereby declare him a national treasure.’ In the debate over the republic, however, Ruxton had still been able to capture a mood widespread among the Australian people. In the referendum on the republic, the majority of voters appear to have agreed with Bruce’s oft-quoted advice:‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Many of those he had helped had long expected that Bruce Ruxton would be honoured with an AO (Order of Australia).An offer eventually arrived.A letter of 27 March 1997 from Government House in Canberra informed Bruce that he ‘was being considered for appointment as a Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia’. The announcement was to be made in the Queen’s Birthday honours list, on 9 June 1997.The citation was simply, and appropriately worded: ‘For service to the welfare of the ex-service community.’ Bruce was duly invested as an AM, Her Majesty the 192
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Queen having been advised of the appointment. A further letter from Government House had informed Ruxton that after his award had been made public, he would be entitled to use the initials ‘AM, OBE’ after his name. Earlier, in common with many of his generation who had received British honours, Bruce had been somewhat unhappy with the idea that the initials of Australian awards were to come before those of imperial awards. People of his generation sometimes wondered if the precedence of the Australian decorations devalued their British honours. World War II veterans were used to another convention in regard to imperial awards.When British regulations had applied in Australia, foreign decorations could not be accepted. The exception had been for a gallantry honour awarded by an ally in time of war, subject to the approval of the British sovereign. It may have come as something of a surprise to Bruce’s contemporaries that when he was offered a French decoration, he accepted. In September 1997, the French Ambassador to Australia, Dominique Girard, wrote to inform Bruce that by the decision of the President of France, he had been awarded the decoration of Chevalier dans L’Ordre du Mérite. Girard explained that the general order, the Order of Merit, had been founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1963. The Order was awarded ‘for distinguished achievement in official, civic or military office’. Only Frenchmen could become members of the Order, but ‘the insignia of the Order’ could be conferred ‘on foreigners as a mark of respect’. During the next year, Ruxton learned that the students of the secondary school in Villers-Bretonneux had compiled a history of Australian soldiers’ sacrifices in the liberation of their village during World War I. In his usual courteous manner, he wrote a letter of congratulations to the school principal, and this was read out to the assembled students and staff. His relationship with the Villers-Bretonneux population had continued since 1951. Much to Bruce’s surprise, a new letter from Dominique Girard arrived informing him that he had been awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de L’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur. Girard advised that the Governor-General of Australia had granted approval for him 193
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to accept, and to wear, this honour. He could not, however, use this purely honorary title on official documents. The French Consul-General, Rollon Mouchel-Blaisot, presented Bruce Ruxton with his Legion of Honour at the annual RSL State Conference of 1999.At the conference, held at the Caulfield Racecourse, Bruce was elected Victorian RSL president for the twentieth time. Among the many congratulatory letters on his French decoration Bruce received was one from Kim Beazley, then Leader of the Opposition. Beazley wrote: ‘Of course, I cannot let the occasion go by without reflecting on the fact that the Legion of Honour is one of the world’s great republican, as against imperial, honours. Congratulations on receiving a marvellous award.’ As the years went by, Ruxton mellowed somewhat.At a meeting of the British Commonwealth Ex-Services League which took place in Cape Town, South Africa, in early 1996 he appeared in the group photograph with Nelson Mandela. He was reconciled with Archbishop David Penman, through the efforts of Penman’s wife Jean. When Penman died, Jean Penman sent Ruxton a volume of her husband’s sermons in acknowledgement of his message of sympathy. In August 2000 Ruxton was once again in South Africa, on an RSL tour of the Boer War battle sites. He was very pleased when David Tothill, the former Ambassador to Australia, made a special trip to meet him.Then disaster struck. Bruce contracted viral pneumonia. He was hospitalised in a very serious state—two other members of the tour died of the same condition. Bruce discharged himself from the hospital in South Africa and had his staff arrange a flight for him back to Melbourne. Jill Ruxton, then in Queensland, received a call from Bruce saying that he would be arriving in Melbourne about midnight. Jill telephoned Lawrie Black. She asked Lawrie to pick up Bruce at the airport rather than allowing him to go to his office, as he almost certainly intended to do. Black rang Dr Bob Gardiner, Bruce’s local doctor who by then had retired from practice. Gardiner agreed that as an old mate of Bruce’s, he would accompany Black.The two men then drove out to Tullamarine Airport. 194
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Bruce was really too ill to stand up to his two mates.They steered him to the car, strapped him in, drove him home and put him to bed. The affects of the pneumonia persisted. It became clear that it was time to retire.The RSL organised a retirement dinner and fundraiser, which took place at Melbourne’s Crown Casino on 22 March 2002. Eight hundred people attended this ‘Tribute to a Great Australian’. Among those who honoured Bruce with their presence were the Governor of Victoria, John Landy, Peter Costello, who represented the Prime Minister, and the Premier of Victoria, the Honourable Steve Bracks. The master of ceremonies was Tony Charlton, strongly supported by Eddie McGuire, television personality and president of Collingwood Football Club. An edition of This is your Life had been arranged for filming at the function, and the appearance of the witnesses for the program took Bruce completely by surprise. The first guest to appear for the film was the Chief of the Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove,AC, MC. Cosgrove saluted Bruce as a ‘True blue Australian’, with a ‘heart as big as the outback’. After Ruxton’s retirement at the Victorian RSL State Conference of 2002, the League showed how much it valued his long un-salaried contribution by continuing to pay for the services of a secretary at the Bevan Street office. Eventually, Bruce and Jill purchased a four-bedroom house in Tewantin, where they took up residence in August 2003. Ruxton’s achievement had been to lead an important community organisation. By his own personality, ability, and countless hours of work, he had kept the RSL a strong force in Australian political life, during the 23 years when it might otherwise have faded to a largely social network.The Victorian League had stood out over the RSLs in other states under his leadership. Public life in Australia is duller without his presence. Bruce’s last official duty for the League was to preside over the eighty-seventh RSL State Annual Conference, in June 2002. At this meeting Major-General David McLachlan was elected his successor. The conference was opened by Victoria’s former premier, the Honourable Jeff Kennett. 195
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When Kennett came to Ruxton’s contribution to the League and public life in Australia, he began: ‘Bruce is a little man with a very big heart and a very big mouth.And I can say, in the nicest way possible, he has used both very very effectively.’ When the conference had settled down after that opening, Kennett continued: ‘He has never flinched, he has never ducked for cover and importantly, he has provided the RSL with consistency of leadership and consistency of attitude. When he spoke, you knew where the RSL was.You may not like it, but you knew that the line was not going to change tomorrow.’ Kennett concluded his tribute with the following undeniable statement: ‘There are countless families whose lives have been changed in a way that has improved the quality of their life for whom there is no photograph, there is no picture and there is no press reporting.And it is the silent beneficiaries of your leadership who to me are the most important.’
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Mark Knight, Herald-Sun, Monday 6 December 1999
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Endnotes
CHAPTER 2 1 The discovery of the bodies, in a mineshaft at Kampong Loakoeloe, is mentioned in the unit history, Allan W. Draydon, Men of Courage: A History of the 2/25 Australian Infantry Battalion, 1940–1945, published by the 2/25 Australian Infantry Battalion Association, 2000, p. 275.The date given for the incident is 14 October 1945. CHAPTER 6 1 Bruce Ruxton interviewed by Terry Colhoun, 19, 20, 21, 25 September 2000, ‘RSL Project’, TRC 4627, National Library of Australia Oral History Collection. CHAPTER 7 1 The book is Germaine Greer, Daddy,We Hardly Knew You, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1989, where her application to Bruce Ruxton regarding Reg Greer is mentioned on p. 4. CHAPTER 9 1 Ambrose Crowe, The Battle After the War: The Story of Australia’s Vietnam Veterans, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1999, p. 59.
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CHAPTER 10 1 Peter Young’s earliest assignments in South Vietnam are discussed in Anne Blair, There to the Bitter End:Ted Serong in Vietnam, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2001, p. 31 and p. 159. For John Healy’s 1962 assignment in South Vietnam (mentioned below), see Blair, There to the Bitter End, pp. 27–30. 2 See also,Ambrose Crowe, The Battle After the War:The Story of Australia’s Vietnam Veterans, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1999, p. 23. 3 The problems of the Vietnam End of War List were explained to the House of Representatives by Mr Laurie Ferguson, the Member for Reid, on 23 March 1988, and Ferguson’s speech is recorded in the Hansard of that date. CHAPTER 11 1 Report of Victorian Branch Delegates to the 72nd National Congress of the Returned Services League of Australia, held at Surfers Paradise, Queensland, 31 August to 4 September, 1987, pp. 2–3. 2 Quotes, Victorian Branch RSL 1988 President’s Report, pp. 13–14. 3 National President’s Report, 73rd RSL Annual Report 1988, p. 10. 4 Author’s interview with Dino De Marchi, Melbourne, 5 May 2003. 5 Author’s interview with Frederick A. Cullen, Melbourne, 10 October 2003. 6 ‘Minutes of the Meeting of the Hospital Integration Committee held Tuesday 16 July, 1992’, sighted by author 10 October 2003, Cullen Papers, Melbourne. Quote, ‘Business Arising’, Point 2. De Marchi not recorded as present: minutes of Hospital Integration Committee, 16 July 1992, and minutes of Hospital Integration Committee, held at ANZAC House, 18 February 1994. 7 Author’s telephone interview with Con Sciacca, Melbourne–Canberra, 11 September 2003. 8 Dr Bill Adam letter to author, 27 January 2003. 200
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ENDNOTES
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12 13
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Dr Sol Rose to Mr B. C. Ruxton, OBE, State President, RSL, 8 March, 1994, copy sighted by author 10 October 2003, Melbourne, Cullen Papers. Hospital Integration Committee Minutes of Meeting held at ANZAC House Friday 18 February, 1994, sighted by author 10 October 2003, Melbourne, Cullen Papers. Quotes, Item 2,‘RGH (H) / Austin Amalgamation Proposal’, Para 1 and Para 5.Those in attendance were Mr B. C. Ruxton (Chairman), F. A. Cullen, J. A. C. Knight, Dr Sol Rose, Mr Ken Millar, and Dr Allan Zimet. Apologies: Mr Stephen Clark. ‘To the President and Committee: All Sub Branches in Victoria. Re: Integration of Hospitals’, 25 May 1994. Returned & Services League of Australia (Victorian Branch) Inc. circular from ANZAC House, 4 Collins Street, Melbourne. Signed by B. C. Ruxton, State President. Author interview with Fred Cullen, Melbourne, 30 September 2003. John P. A. Deighton, Brigadier, State Secretary, to Mr F. A. Cullen, OAM, sighted by author on 10 October 2003, Melbourne, Cullen Papers.The two-page ‘Notice of Disciplinary Hearing’, discussed below, accompanied the letter. Letter, P. R. Phillips, National President,The Returned & Service League of Australia Limited, National Headquarters, to Mr F.A. Cullen, OAM, 15 April 1998, [cc:Victorian Branch RSL] sighted by author, Melbourne, 10 October 2003, Cullen Papers. B. C. Ruxton to S. Bailey, Cooma, 23 December 1998, and reply, Reg ‘Sparrer’ Bailey to Mr B. Ruxton, 17 January 1999.Author’s copies, Cullen Papers.
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Index
2/25th and 2/31st Battalions Association, 50, 80, 93, 110, 127 BCR appointed honorary secretary of, 47 2/25th Battalion, 25th Brigade, 7th Division, 27–9, 30–33, 40 2nd Australian Field Survey Company, BCR assigned to, 28–9 65th Battalion, 7th Division, in Japan, 33–40 passim Aborigines, Aboriginal Provisional Government, 143 and RSL, 40 BCR praised for work on behalf of, 148 in AIF, 31, 40 Adam, Dr William ‘Bill’, 161, 162–3, 172–3 Adam-Smith, Patsy, 187 African National Congress (ANC), 141, 143 Agent Orange, 153–6 Altona RSL sub-branch, 124 American Legion, 76 Anderson, Albert (first husband of Ellie Ruxton), 17 Anderson, Faye, 125, 126 Anzac Day, 57, 127, 130–1, 141, 183 75th anniversary of landing at Gallipoli, 161–2 Australian flags carried at, 189 mentioned, 22, 67, 186 RSL policy re marching formations, 104
ANZAC House, 56, 82, 113, 177–8 and mail-outs, 127–8 and Vietnam veterans’ welcome home parade, 159 BCR’s staff at, 125–6 hosts press conference for VVAA, 153–4 Appeals Tribunal (National), 178 Arcadia,Victoria, 86 Ardee, County Louth, Eire, 44–6 Asian immigration debate, see immigration, Ataturk, 161 Atherton Tableland, 28–9 Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre (ARMC), 176 Austin Hospital, 171, 173 Australian Archives, RSL Oral History project, 12 Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, 152, 156 Australian Flying Corps, see also RAAF, 17 Australian Imperial Forces (AIF), 24, 27 BCR’s first assignments in, 27–9 Australian Labor Party (ALP), 84 Australian Medical Association (AMA), 169–70 Australian Patriots Unlimited, 94 Australian Security Intelligence Agency (ASIO), 140 Australian Veterans and Defence Services Council, 147 Australian War Memorial, 51–4
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INDEX Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS), 24 Bailey, Reg ‘Sparrer’, 178–9 Balderstone, Sir James, 186 and Aboriginal native title claims, 147 Balikpapan, 30–3 passim, 37, 60 war memorial, 80 Barnett, Harvey, 140 Baron Production Records, 184 Barwick, Sir Garfield, 64 Beaumaris RSL sub–branch, 48, 186–7 Beaurepaire, Dame Beryl, 119 Beazley, Kim, 194 Beck, Chris, 106 Belmore Tours (RSL tours), 81 Benalla, 118–9 Bendigo RSL sub-branch, 83–4, 87, 104, 122, 170, 189 Benetti, John, 57 Berakie, Nombie, 103 Beriozka Department Store, Moscow, 78 Bethune, northern France, 17 Bevan Street, Albert Park (office), 82 birthday lunch, Beaumaris RSL Club, 186–7 Bishop, Bronwyn, 157–8 Bjelke-Petersen, Sir Joh, 79 Black, Lawrie, 123, 186–7, 194 Blainey, Geoffrey, 91, 111, 113–4 and funeral of Hiro Hito, 136 Blamey, Sir Thomas, 148 Botterill, Keith, 80 Boy Scouts, 1st Kew Troop, 16 and BCR post–war, 41 Bracks, Steve, 195 Bradley, David, 22 Bradley,Vic (president Buninyong RSL sub–branch), 64 Braithwaite, Richard, 80 Branch, Neil, 85–6 Brand Report (on Victorian hospitals), 165 British Commonwealth Ex-Services League, 194 British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), 33–40 passim, 42 Bullock, Alan, 112 Bundoora hospital, 165 Buninyong RSL sub-branch, BCR’s Christmas 1982 speech to, 63–6 Burgess, Eric, 85 Burridge, John, 158–9 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, 142 Butler, Eric, 144 Button, John (Australian senator), 133 Button, John (RSL national solicitor), 156 Buttrose, Ita, 121 Cadet Corps, Melbourne High School, 22 Calwell, Arthur, 96
Campbell, Colin ‘Barney’, 67–8, 70 Campbell, Frank, 98 Campbell, Owen, 80 Cannon, Jack, 59, 93, 105 Cape Town, South Africa, 142, 194 Casey, Ron, 188–9 Casper, George, 53 Cathcart, the Earl, 114 census, Federal , 98–9 Charlton,Tony, 195 Chipp, Don, 55, 57, 89, 106, 187 Clark, Stephen (surgeon), 170 Clause 119,Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986, 166 Clemens, Martin, 186–7 Clerk Kerr, Sir Archibald, 115–6 Coffey, Reverend William ‘Bill’, 48–9 Collingwood Football Club, 47, 56–7, 195 Collingwood,Victoria, 184 Collins, Peter, 190 Comboyne, New South Wales, 182 Committee for the Abolition of Political Police, 140 communism, 75–8, 141, 143 allegations re Aborigines, 144–5 and Vietnam War, 94 Concord Repatriation hospital, 175 Constitutional Convention (1998), 191–2 conversazione (seminar on the sociology of culture), 112, 130 Cosgrove, Peter, 195 Costello, Peter, 195 Costigan Royal Commission, 139 Council of Military Veterans’ Organisations (South Africa), 142 County Louth, Eire, BCR’s 1951 visit to, 44–5 Ruxton ancestors, 17–18 court cases, 66–71, 86 Court, Sir Charles, 143 Coxsedge, Joan, 140 Craigs Royal Hotel, Ballarat, 164 Crown Casino, Melbourne, 195 Crowson, Maisie, 121–3 Cullen, Frederick ‘Fred’, 168–9, 171, 175–7, 179 Daly, Sir Thomas, 54 Davies, Molly, 110–1, 114 De Beauregard, Isabelle Costa, 129–30 De Marchi, Dino, 103–4, 167–8, 171–2, 180 Deakin University Students Association Council, 96 Delilkhan,Yvonne, 125–6 Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 55, 62–5, 170, 176 and Aged Care Department, 164 mentioned, 139 diabetes, 124
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RUXTON : A BIOGRAPHY Diana, Princess of Wales, 113, 189 Discharged Servicemen’s Preference Act, 168 Dunlop, Amanda, 119 Dunlop, Dr Alexander, 119 Dunlop, Edward, BCR godfather to, 119 Dunlop, Sir Edward ‘Weary’, 65, 89 funeral of, 116–9 mentioned, 59, 164 Ebury, Lady Sue, 117 Echuca,Victoria, 11, 148 Edwards,‘Stan’, Sebastapol RSL sub–branch President, 163–4 Ethics Committee (Victorian State Branch), 177–8, 179 Evans, Gareth, 78–9, 122, 142 Evatt Royal Commission (re Agent Orange), 155 Evatt, Herbert V., 61, 64–5 Everingham, Barry, 55, 99, 169 Fairhall, Sir Allen, 50 Federation of Australian Jewish ExServicemen and Women, 53 feminism, 130–1 BCR and, 122 Fenwick, Don, 186 Field family (and Aboriginal tourist park), 144 Filgate,William ‘Bill’, 44–6 Finnigan, Carlyle, 128 Finnigan, Helen, 123, 128 Finnigan, John, 128 Fischer,Tim, 191 Flynn, Brian, 176 Ford, David, 83 Framlingham (Aboriginal settlement), 144 Frankston Hospital (geriatric), 163 Fraser, Malcolm, 57, 59, 141–2 and Keys Committee, 166 and repatriation legislation, 61–4 French honours, 193–4 French, Leonard, 112 Frost, Dame Phyllis, 112 Fukuoka, Japan, 34–5 Fukuyama, 65th Battalion base in Japan, 34–6, 38 Gadd, Denise, 59, 88, 144, 161 Gallipoli, 22, 24, 50, 112 BCR describes his visit to , 161 Gardiner, Robert ‘Bob’, 123, 194 Garland, Brigadier Alf, 152, 165 and funeral of Hiro Hito, 136 and Paul Keating, 190–1 and rights of Aborigines, 145–6 Gay community in Australia , 104–7 Geitzelt, Senator Arthur, 164 General Stationers, Ruxton family business,
46–9, 55, 58, 74, 79 Gerkens, Maurice , 67–71 Ghurkha community in Australia, 103, 188 Gillett, Sir Peter, 115 Girard, Dominique, 193–4 Glare, Kelvin, 186 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 76–7 Grable, Betty, image of BCR , 106 Grassby,‘Al’ Jaime, 96–9 Gration, Peter, 188 Greenslopes Repatriation hospital, 175 Greer, Germaine, 109–11 Greer, Reg , 109 Griffiths, Admiral Guy, 166 Griffiths,‘Bill’ (former POW), 117–8 Haig, the Earl, 114 Halfpenny, John, 136 Hall, James, 142 Hall, Sir William, 53, 56, 71 Hamer, Sir Rupert, 187 Hamilton,Victoria, 144 Hancock, Les, 33, 42, 96, 186 Harris, Max, 91–2, 192 Harry, C.O.‘Bill’, 71, 75, 126 Hasegawa, Kasutoshi, 118 Hasluck, L.N., 185 Hasluck, Sir Paul, 116, 184–5 Hawke, R.J.‘Bob’, 85, 122, 140 and funeral of Hiro Hito, 136 and Repat hospitals, 164–9 Hayden, Bill, 188 Healy, John, 155–6 Healy, June, 81, 83, 87 relations with VVAA, 155–6 Herman, Nancy, 128 Herring, Sir Edmund, 163 Hewson, John, 191 Hill, James, 22–3 Hines, Sir Colin, 53 Hiro Hito, 90 death and funeral of, 134 Hiroshima, 31, 34 HMS Courageous, 23 HMS Glengyle, 33 HMS LST 303, 33 HMS Royal Oak, 23 Hobart Repatriation hospital, 175 Hogg, Caroline, 170 Holland, Sir George, 185–6 Hollywood Repatriation hospital, 175 homosexuality, see Gay community in Australia, 104–7 Hong Kong , refugee camps on, 101 Hong Kong, 87, 188 Honiara, Solomon Islands, 122 Horne, Donald, 189 Hospital Integration Committee, RSL, BCR becomes chairman of, 171–2
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INDEX establishment of, 167–70 Houghton, Graeme, 175 Howard, John, 158, 186 Hughes, Billie (president War Widows’ Guild), 166 Hughes,William ‘Billy’, 64 Humphreys, Ben , 106, 157, 164 and integration of Repat hospitals, 165, 173 critical of BCR and Alf Garland, 147
Keysor, Leonard (VC recipient), 50–4 mentioned, 72 Kikuchi,‘Ken’, 138 King George V, 50 King George VI, 113–4 Kingsland, Sir Richard, 139 Kirner, Joan, 129 Kitchener, the Third Earl, 114 Knight, J.A.‘Jack’, 170 Koot, wife of Dutch colonial official, 31–2 Kramer, Leonie, 191
immigration, 83, 88, 91, 93–101 passim, 111, 130 and ad with BCR eating rice, 136–7 and RSL staffing arrangements, 125–6 and Ruxton Techno Rap, 184 imperial honours, 46, 193–4 Indonesia, and East Timor, 187 RSL tours to, 79–82 passim Inkatha Freedom Party, 142 Institute of Multicultural Affairs, 99 integration of Repat hospitals into State systems, 165–76 passim Ipswich, Queensland, 147 Isaacson, Peter, 51, 53, 183–5 Italian RSL sub-branch, 103, 167 itinerary (BCR appointment diary), 126 Ivanhoe RSL sub-branch, 168, 177–9 Jack, Kenneth, 23 James,W.B.‘Digger’, 106–7 Japan, British occupation forces in, 34–40 Japan, post-war black market in, 35–6 Japanese Army in World War II, 65, 90, 117–8 and massacre at Loakoeloe, Borneo, 39–40 on Borneo, 31–3 Japanese in Australia, 137 Jellis’s bakery, 15 Joan Saxton Speakers’ Agency, 104, 126, 129 John Wyeth and Brother, London, employers of BCR, 43 Johnston, Alan, 98 Kairi, Queensland, 29 Keating, Annita, 189 Keating, Paul, 164, 172, 184, 186, 189 and Alf Garland, 190–1 Kelliher, Richard (VC recipient), 48, 50–1 Kelly, Paul, 190 Keneally,Tom, 190 Kennett, Jeff, 195–6 Keon–Cohen, Colin, 56 Kew Golf Club, 15 Kew State School, 16–17 Keys Committee, 68, 166–7 Keys, Sir William, 51, 62, 91, 147, 155 and funeral of Hiro Hito, 135–6 on future of RSL, 59–60
Labuan War Cemetery, 185 Lanciana, Percy, 135 Lanciana, Ralph, 135 Landy, John, 195 Law, Nancy , 61, 65 League of Rights, 144 Lee,Wellington, 102, 187 Legion of Honour, 194 Legiun Veteran Republik Indonesia (LVRI) medal, 81 Leonard, Janet, 100–1 Liberal Party of Australia, 57, 84 BCR’s joining of, 47 lighthouse keepers, BCR as, 1950, 41–2 Linacre Hospital, 123–4, 128 Loakoeloe, Borneo, see Japanese Army in World War II, Locke family (relatives of Ruth Proud), 43 London, United Kingdom, 42–3, 183 Long,William Trevor, 24 Lyons, Francis, 186 MacArthur, General Douglas, 34 Macaulay,‘Bill’, boathouse owner, 16 MacDonald, Spencer, 31 MacGregor-Dowsett, James Harvey, 58 Macleod hospital, 165 Mahakam River, Borneo, 30–2 Maidstone RSL sub-branch, 102 Malaysia, RSL tours to, 79–82 passim Mandela, Nelson, 143, 194 Mansell, Michael, 143–5 Mardi Gras, Sydney, 106 Maribyrnong RSL sub-branch, 101 Marson, R. H., 31, 33 Masons, BCR and Willsmere Lodge, 47 Lodge of St Crispin, 42 Mattingly, Keith, 116 McCann-Erickson (advertising organisation), 137 McClintock, Admiral Sir Francis Leopold, 45 McCombe,‘Tim’, 151 McDonald, Geoffrey, 144 McDougall, Desmond ‘Tassie’, 34 McGirr, Jocelyn, 129 McGuire, Eddie, 195
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RUXTON : A BIOGRAPHY McKenzie, Alexander , 21–4 McLachlan, David, 138, 177–8, 187 elected state RSL president, 195 McMahon, James, 182 McMahon, Jill , 181–8; see also Jill Ruxton, McMinn, Holt, 153–4 McNicoll, Brigadier–General Sir Walter, 22 Meadows, Reverend Don, 188 Melbourne Club, 47, 58, 127 Melbourne Cricket Club, 47 Melbourne High School, and young BCR, 20–5 passim Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, 67–71 Member of the British Empire (MBE), BCR’s awarding of, 58 Menzies, Dame Pattie, 89, 116 Menzies, Heather, 116 Menzies, Sir Robert, 94, 116 Messner,Tony, 62–3, 181 Metcalfe, Ron, 75 Meteorological Bureau, BCR’s post–war position with, 41 Millar, Dr Ken, 170 Miller, Keith (Test cricketer), 20 Millhouse, Sir Eric, 69 Mitra, Judi, 125–6 Money, Lawrence, 138 Mooney,William, 69 Morgan, Hugh, 147 Morotai, Netherlands East Indies, 29–30, 33, 37 Moss, Archdeacon Stanley, 141 Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, 58, 93, 115 Mouchel-Blaisot, Rollon, 194 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, assassination of, 93 Mt Eliza Geriatric Centre, and RSL, 110 Mufti, quarterly journal of Victorian RSL, 169–71 Munday,‘Ben’, 22 Murray, John, 93 Nakayama, Makato, 103 Nash, Gerard, 68, 70 Nathalia,Victoria, 84 Nathan, Myer, 53 National Civic Council, 75 National Party, 82, 84 Native Title Claim Tribunal, 147 Naval and Military Club, Melbourne, 188 Newington,Wal (president TPI Association), 166 Newman, Jocelyn, 129, 187 Nichols,W.T.H.‘Nick’, 116–7 Ninja (Japanese assassin), 135 Norfolk Island, 181 Nossal, Sir Gustav, 65, 112 Notice of Disciplinary Hearing, 177
Nui Dat House, 157 O’Halloran, Max, 104, 170 Ollington,‘Nappy’, 124 Olszewski, Peter, 105 Order of Australia (AO), 99 BCR appointed Member (AM) of, 192–3 Orr, Martin and Waters (company), 74 Owen Stanley Range campaign, 80 Pacholli, Jack, 138–9 Papua New Guinea, 80, 103 Parkinson, Michael, 110 Peck, John, 63 Pembroke, Lord Reginald, 115 Penman, Archbishop David, 145, 194 Penman, Jean, 194 Perkins, Charles, 146 and father’s war medals, 148 Perkins, Derek (of Malaysia), 103 Petersen, Ken (TNT Security), 118 Phuoc Tuy province, 152, 156 Pravda, 73–4 Prismall,William John, 17 Proud, Ruth , 43–6; see also Ruth Ruxton, Queen Elizabeth II, 113 RAAF, and Melbourne High School, 22–3 Railway Hotel, South Melbourne, 110–1 Ramsay Health Care, 175 Ray, Robert, 78–9 Reagan, Ronald, 77 Rechter, Bernie, 22 Record of Ongoing Commitments (RSL/Govt), 176 Remembrance Day, 117, 127, 185–6 Repatriation General Hospital, Heidelberg, 175, 179 BCR’s position on board of , 161–5 Repatriation legislation, 61–71; see also Keys Committee Repatriation Private Patient Scheme, 176–7 Republic of South Africa, see South Africa, republican debate in Australia, 180, 184, 189–92 retirement dinner, 195 Returned & Services League, see Returned Services League, Returned Services League (RSL), 84, 93–7, 126, 146–7 and BCR’s allowances, 82 and death of Ruth Ruxton, 89 and funeral of Hiro Hito, 134 and Sandakan War Memorial Park, 81–2 and speeding offences, 86 and welfare work, 104–5, 110 as incorporated body, 70 BCR elected Victorian state president, 59
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INDEX BCR’s earliest positions in, 47–9 broadens membership qualifications, 63–5 funds school in PNG , 80 life insurance program, 62–3 policy on Gays in armed forces, 105–7 policy on rights of Aborigines, 144–9 passim policy on women in the armed forces, 130 relations with Vietnam veterans, 151–4 passim system of lobbying on veterans’ issues, 133–9, 154–5, 167–71 Rhodes-James, Robert, 112–4 Riddiford, Leonard, 22 Rockman, Irvin, 109–10 Rollins, Alwynne, 58 Rose, Dr Sol, 170, 173–6 Ross-Edwards, Peter, 59, 89, 187 Rossi, Keith, 180 Rotary, 47, 58, 82, 104 Rowe, Normie, 157, 189 Royal Australian Navy , and Melbourne High School, 23 Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), 152 Royal Brighton Yacht Club, 47 Royal Melbourne Hospital, 118 Royal Navy, 121–2 Rozenes, Michael, 68–9 RSL Gold Badge, 54 RSL tours of battle sites, 60, 79–82 RSL, see Returned Services League, Ruxton Collection, memorabilia volumes described, 12 Ruxton family history, 45 Ruxton Techno Rap, 184 Ruxton, Carlyle Ernest , 17, 39, 42, 44–8 Ruxton, Ellie D. (formerly Prismall), 17–18, 29–30, 35, 43, 48 Ruxton, Henri William, 17, 44 Ruxton, Ian , 46–7, 103 Ruxton, Jill, 188, 194 Ruxton, John Carlyle, 18 Ruxton, Ruth, 72, 74, 87–90, 135 property purchased with BCR, 49 Ruxton, Shirley, 18, 152 Ryan, Michael, 135 Ryder,‘Bill’ (section–corporal), 31 Salvation Army, 101–2 Samarinda, 30–2, 37 Sandakan, 103 death march, 80–1 War Memorial Park, 81–2 Santamaria, B.A.‘Bob’, 75 Saunders, Reg, 148 school for PNG veterans, funded by RSL, 80 School of Cookery, BCOF in Japan, 36–7
School, East Kew Central, 19–20 School, Kew State, 16 Sciacca, Con, 172–3, 175, 186 Scotter, Sheila, 112 Seaby Coins and Medals, 52–3 Section 47, Repatriation Act of 1920, 64–5, 68–9, 166 Sharp, Norman, 50–1 Shepparton,Victoria, 84, 86 Short, Nelson, 80 Shrine of Remembrance, 51, 117, 118, 183 Board of Trustees of, 83 Sinclair, Graham, 186 Singh, Diljit, 103 Sir Edward Dunlop Medical Research Foundation, 168 Slim, Sir William, 114 Smith, Frank, 101 Sotheby’s, London auction house, 49–54 passim South Africa, 85, 140, 141–3, 194 South Hawthorn RSL sub–branch, 102 Soviet Committee of War Veterans, 74–9 Spendlove,Thomas, 15 St James Old Cathedral, 188 St John’s Anglican Church, 141 St Luke’s Church, South Melbourne, 49, 72 St Michael and All Angels’ Anglican Church, 89 St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, 117 Statement of Minimum Requirements (RSL/Govt), 171, 176 Stephen, Sir Ninian, 118 Stobart, A. A.‘Bert’, 60 Story Writing and Art Project for veterans, 163 Students’ Representative Council (Melbourne High), 21–2 Supporters of Law and Order Limited (SOLO), 186–7 Sutherland, Struan, 123 Swan Hill,Victoria, 83–4 Szapiel, Bernard, 153 Tambo, Oliver, 85, 141–2 Tate, Frank, 20 Tehan, Desmond, 66–71 Tehan, Marie, 174–5 Tewantin, Queensland, 182–3, 195 The Old Unicornian, and young BCR’s larrikinism, 21 The Unicorn, 21–2 There to the Bitter End:Ted Serong in Vietnam, 11 This is your Life, filmed at BCR retirement dinner, 195 Thompson, Phillip ‘Phill’, 154, 154–6, 159 thrombosis, 124 Tierney, Basil, 86
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RUXTON : A BIOGRAPHY TNT Security, 118, 125 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Moscow, 76 Toorak Times, 134, 138–9, 141, 143, 170 Toorak Uniting Church, 117 Totally and Permanently Disabled (pensions), 65 Tothill, David, 122, 143, 194 Treatment Monitoring Committee (Victorian), 176–7 Truth, 134, 139, 141 Tuckey,Wilson, 186 Turkish Veterans’ Association (Ankara chapter), 114 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 141 two-up, 124, 129
viral pneumonia, 194–5 Volker, Derek, 63–4
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 73–9 Unistat Pty Ltd, 74 USS Butner, 29, 37 USS Tank Landing Ship 579, 30 Veliz, Claudio, 111–2, 129 Veterans Against Discrimination, 106 Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986, 166–7 Veterans Legion of the Republic of Indonesia, 81 Victorian Achiever (award), 129 Victorian Association for the Blind, 89 Victorian Association of Jewish Ex–Servicemen & Women, 51–3 Victorian Blinded Soldiers’ Association, 89 Victorian Golf Club, 47, 49 Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia (VVAA), 149–54 Vietnam Veterans Counselling Centre, 154–5 Vietnam veterans, and war medals, 157–9 as members of RSL, 152–3 Vietnamese community in Australia, 97–8, 100 Villers-Bretonneux, northern France, 50, 130, 193 BCR’s 1951 visit to, 44 Vincent,Tim, 155 Vinning, Howard, 86
Wake, Nancy, 130 Walter, Jona, 52 war anxiety neuroses, 82, 110 War Widows’ Guild, 83 Warr, John, 152–3 Warrnambool Rotary Club, 91 Warrnambool,Victoria, 83–4, 91, 144 Water, Robert, 74 Waverley RSL sub–branch, 95 Webster, Neil, 142 Werrett,Wally, 182, 186 Werribee RSL sub–branch, 84–6 West Brighton Club, 59, 116 What’s Wrong with the Repatriation System?, 62, 66 White Australia policy, see immigration, white tail spider, 123–4 White, Patrick, 189 Whitlock, Fiona, 129 Wilcox,Vernon, 186 Wild, Dorian, 121, 125, 128 Willesee, Michael, 75, 78 Williamson, Mike (television commentator), 137 Wilsons Promontory , lighthouse at, 41–2 Wilsons Promontory, 147 Women Against Rape in War, 67, 130–1 Women’s Council of Victoria, RSL, 167 Woodfull,William ‘Bill’, 20, 23 Workers’ Compensation Act, 85 Working Men’s College (later RMIT), 24, 28, 47 World Council of Churches, 145 Xuyen Tam Po,‘Sam’, 101–2 Yarra Bend golf course, 15 Yarrawonga,Victoria, 171 Yarrawonga–Mulwala RSL sub–branch, 86 Young, Peter, 152–3, 156 Zimet, Dr Allan, 170
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