by Leigh Sales
He often spoke off the cuff and from the heart. His remarks after the 2002 Bali bombings, in the Great Hall at Parliament House on 24 October, were typical of the way he would seek to comfort Australians:
. . . this event has told us something of our nation. It has reminded us of things that we knew and understood about our nature and our character as a people. It has reminded us of the great verity of Australian life that in crisis we are all mates together. The sense of mateship that ensured that within 48 hours the injured were evacuated back to Australia and the support mechanisms that have been delivered to people in the days that have followed the tragedy have reminded us of that great trait of the Australian character.
The other great characteristic of which we have been reminded is our sense of defiance. We will not be deterred from living our lives. The young of Australia will not be deterred from travelling in the years ahead. We will not forsake the values of this nation which mark it with great respect around the world. We will continue to live the kind of lives that we regard as the birthright of all Australians. And we’ve also been reminded of the great tolerance of the Australian people. The Australian people, deeply angered and grieved as they are, are not about to abandon the spirit of openness and tolerance which is also one of our great hallmarks.
During Howard’s prime ministership, journalists observed that not only was he adept at knowing what to say, but he also perfectly judged the right notes of restraint and sincerity during times of national tragedy. Canberra press gallery journalist Misha Schubert wrote in The Age: ‘The unlikely sight of a buttoned-up politician throwing his arms around beefy bikies and dreadlocked young women can make you double-take. But his gestures are often spot on in times of pain and loss.’
Howard’s air of awkward authenticity caused many voters to respond favourably, usually handing him improved poll numbers straight after national disasters. Following Port Arthur, his approval rating hit 67 per cent. After September 11, he was at 61 per cent and after the 2004 South Asian tsunami, 63 per cent. Few politicians ever see such heady numbers, let alone after eight years in office. These bumps in his rating after crises caused his political opponents to snipe that he was a master at milking tragedy for political gain.
I read aloud one such comment to Howard, made by his nemesis and predecessor, Paul Keating: ‘[Howard] always pops up at these occasions – he’s at every national, international catastrophe, sort of representative of White Lady Funerals. He’s made an art form out of sadness and sorrow.’
‘He said that, did he? He must have been feeling particularly ignored,’ sniffs Howard. ‘Did I ever think I was conscious of that? Never. I never wanted to be accused of ever milking something like that. I was conscious not to overdo it. But I was also conscious you were expected to say things.’
‘There was no option to not say anything?’ I ask.
‘No. The important thing was to find the right words to say it.’
‘I noticed when I looked at some of your remarks after these things that you would often pull it back to talking about family. Why?’
‘That’s what people identify with most in their lives and whenever there’s something like this, you have a sense of vulnerability of your own family.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. But human nature is such that you can’t allow that to play too heavily on your mind. Otherwise, you become immobilised.’
In John Howard’s personal life, there was nothing that had prepared him to assume the role of mourner-in-chief. To use Michael Spence’s description, his life experiences had been ‘benign’. Howard had no professional background or training in psychology, medicine, trauma or bereavement. He was fifty-six years old when he became prime minister, and most fortunately he had experienced only the anticipated losses of life, such as the deaths of his parents. His three children were healthy and he had enjoyed good luck (and made sound choices) with his marriage and his career. Even when things occasionally seemed like they were not going his way, they actually were. In 1968, Howard missed out on winning the state seat of Drummoyne in the New South Wales parliament by just 420 votes. If he hadn’t suffered that blow, he wouldn’t have been free to run for the federal seat of Bennelong in 1974 and most likely would never have become prime minister. The only slight hitch in Howard’s life was that he had a hearing problem in one ear, although fortune even favoured him there – advances in technology during his lifetime meant it was of little impediment.
The one thing that Howard believes did perhaps help him intuit how to respond to trauma was his many years of experience as a member of parliament before becoming prime minister.
‘People would often come and talk to you about things. Not normally come and talk to me as the local member about the tragedy, but the discussion would often morph into that. I had a number of examples of parents who came to talk to me about the circumstances of their children’s suicide,’ he recollects.
Early in his term as prime minister, he was also, for the first time in his life, dealt a potentially life-changing blow: his beloved wife Janette was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was kept secret from the public at the time but it shook the Howards to the core. It undoubtedly gave him some additional insight into human vulnerability.
‘We as a family confronted that in a very open way. We talked to our children. We did all we could to share. We were both very realistic about it,’ he recalls. ‘Janette said, “Look we’ve just got to keep going and hope.” She said to me at the time it had a big effect on her, thinking more about her priorities.’
‘What about for you?’ I ask.
‘It was a reminder of the fragility of life and I was very grateful for that. I think for both of us, having the demands of the new job probably helped. She didn’t go to things with me, obviously, for several months. Fortunately, she had a good surgeon and we worried about a possible return but it hasn’t happened. More than twenty years now. She’s very fortunate.’
Howard’s limited personal and professional experience of grief meant he had to learn quickly on the job. The people he met who were going through terrible tragedy may have been strangers to him, but to many of them, the prime minister felt like somebody they knew.
‘The very important thing is that the last thing a prime minister or anybody in a position like public office should do is be diffident or hesitant. You’re only magnifying their grief when you’re meant to be there to help them, not to add to their problems,’ he says firmly.
‘Did you feel the need to be strong and not to cry?’ I ask.
‘I think you owed it to them to recognise it was their emotions that had to be on display. You had to be sensitive – if you couldn’t talk or offer some kind of physical comfort, you’re not much help to them. I didn’t mind people crying in my arms, and that happened a lot. I encouraged them in a sense to do so. It’s their sadness that really matters. You’ve got to try to help them with that.’
One of the political skills for which Howard was most noted was his ability to read the collective mood of the Australian people. His admirers would say he stayed ahead of it; his detractors would say he manipulated it. Most of what he tells me about how his gut led him to act aligns perfectly with what professionals recommend. He always tried to meet the bereaved person at their response, not with something preconceived.
‘One of the things I was very conscious of was that different people expect different things in those circumstances. Some of them want a hug, some of them want a handshake. Some of them just want to talk to you, it depends on their personalities.’
‘How did you judge that?’ I ask.
‘You just make your own judgement,’ Howard says, in that firm way (his opponents would say ‘stubborn’) that he has. ‘I remember spending a lot of time with the people who had lost family members in the Bali attack and they really wanted to talk about it, talk about what had happened and some of the movements their children might have had just before they were killed.’
It’s obvious that the more lives lost in a tragedy, the more it becomes a defining moment in the national consciousness. I also want John Howard’s opinion about why the death of one individual sometimes snowballs into something huge in the community. An example is eighteen-year-old Sydney boy, Thomas Kelly, who was killed by a stranger’s punch on the streets of Kings Cross in 2012. The case sparked New South Wales’ controversial ‘lock out laws’, under which pubs and clubs had to close their doors at 1.30 am and serve last drinks at 3 am. Phillip Hughes’ freak accident is another example. Hughes was not a household name when he was killed by a cricket ball hitting the precise spot on his head not covered by his helmet, and his death had no implications for public policy. Yet it stopped the nation.
‘I think it’s a combination of the extent to which the death and the circumstances of it find a ready identification in the minds of people in the community. I think another part of it is if the circumstances are blindingly unjust. You take Thomas Kelly, seems a perfectly nice kid out on his first date, sort of singing, holding hands with a girl as they walk down the street. The next minute, he’s dead. Parents seeing that react,’ says Howard. ‘People doing a perfectly normal thing, not doing anything wrong, and then out of the blue something like that happens. That has a big impact on people. Phillip Hughes, it was just such a freak accident.’
John Howard remains acutely conscious that some of his own decisions directly led to the deaths of Australians. His call to involve Australia in the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ultimately resulted in the deaths of forty-four Australian soldiers and ongoing suffering for their families.
‘One of the things I’ve done since I’ve been out of office, I’ve written every time there was a soldier killed in Afghanistan. I’d send a handwritten note to the parents or wives or other loved ones. I suppose because I sent them there,’ he says.
‘Is it a heavy weight to carry, the knowledge that people have died because you made decisions?’
‘Yes. You don’t do it lightly. I thought all the decisions I took were correct. I don’t regret the decisions, but I do feel the sense of responsibility.’
John Howard is, at the time of writing, close to eighty years old. As the marvellous Australian author Helen Garner once wrote of herself, he possesses a lengthening past and a shortening future. He is not an especially reflective man, not prone to musing over paths untravelled or words unsaid, and yet it can’t escape him that his own life is in its twilight.
‘Do you think about your own death?’ I ask, slightly mortified at my own gall.
‘Yes. I have the normal intimations of mortality,’ he says.
‘Are you scared of it?’
‘No. Nothing I can do about it,’ he replies, the most Howardesque of answers imaginable.
I’m struck again that, in contrast to all the heartbreak Howard saw firsthand as prime minister, his own life has been remarkably sunny. He has managed to get through his almost eighty years not only virtually unscathed, but amassing some of the greatest treasures life can offer – health, family, happiness, career success, financial security, interesting experiences.
‘When you look back over your life, it has been amazing; you’ve had a lot of good fortune,’ I suggest.
‘An enormous amount of fortune,’ he agrees.
‘Do you think it was fate? Was it God’s plan for you? Or was it luck, dumb chance?’
Howard thinks for a moment. ‘It’s a combination of persistence, some ability, good fortune. Perhaps an understanding of the character of the Australian people that was better than average for people in politics. I had a very stable family upbringing. I’ve been incredibly lucky with Janette and my three children, I think that is my happiest achievement,’ he says.
I begin to gather my things and make moves to leave.
‘Sure, I’ve been lucky. In a few things, I was unlucky. I wasn’t as good a cricketer as I’d liked to have been,’ he laughs.
‘In the greater scheme of things, a small sacrifice?’
‘A very small sacrifice, yes,’ the former prime minister agrees jovially as we shake hands and go our separate ways.
While you’ve been reading this book, you’ve been putting your trust in me as a journalist, and to continue reading, you must believe that I’ve been telling the truth about what Louisa Hope, Michael Spence, Walter Mikac and John Howard said to me. You must trust that my reporting of their remarks is accurate, and that the parts of their stories I’ve chosen to emphasise have been fair and reasonable. You don’t have to agree with my interpretations or conclusions, but as my reader you are relying on me to steer you soundly so that you can form your own judgements.
Wielding that kind of influence is humbling for an author, but it’s particularly serious for a journalist reporting a live national tragedy. Then, the information shared and the conclusions drawn can literally become matters of life and death, for people who may need to decide, for example, whether to evacuate during a natural disaster. The trust the community puts in the media at such times is extraordinary.
It’s impossible to fully understand how we react to catastrophes, either individually or communally, without looking at the way the media covers such events and how it influences what we think. It has an enormous impact on our sense of personal security and our collective ability to recover.
I have an acute understanding of how journalists behave from inside the industry, but I have no idea how it feels to be the person at the other end of a story, when everybody in the community wants to know what happened to you, and journalists are fighting to land your exclusive interview. What might somebody who’s experienced that teach us about the aftermath of a blindside? And what if we had the empathy to imagine that one day we might be that person?
I remember somebody the media once dubbed ‘The Ice Man’, and I send him an email, asking to meet.
‘James Scott . . . James Scott . . .’ Friends would search their brains when I mentioned I was flying to Brisbane to interview him for this book.
‘You know, he was the medical student who survived forty-three days lost in the Himalayas,’ I’d prompt.
Blank faces.
‘It was a huge story twenty years ago, one of the greatest survival stories of all time,’ I’d urge.
‘Um, rings a vague bell,’ they’d say.
‘The guy with the Mars Bar!’ I’d finally blurt.
‘Oh, I remember him!’
This was the response nearly every time.
The 1992 rescue of Brisbane medical student James Scott after he became lost in Nepal was one of the biggest stories of my career. His survival was so extraordinary that an American medical journal concluded that elements of it were beyond scientific explanation. Yet the only detail most Australians remember is that he reportedly had a Mars Bar in his backpack.
Here’s the scoop: it wasn’t a Mars Bar. The most famous detail of James Scott’s story is a myth. But more about that later.
Today, James is Associate Professor Scott, a highly respected psychiatrist specialising in child and adolescent mental health at the University of Queensland and the Royal Brisbane Hospital. Almost twenty-five years after his ordeal in the Himalayas, he still hears a Mars Bar gag at least once a fortnight.
‘This week, I went and saw the movie Sully, I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet,’ James says when we meet in his office near the hospital. He has short reddish hair, a boyish smile and an intelligent, inquisitive face.
‘No, but I’m keen to,’ I say.
In the film, Tom Hanks plays US Airways pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who in 2009 landed a jumbo jet on the Hudson River after it flew into a flock of geese and lost both engines. Incredibly, all 155 people on board survived.
‘Go see it, it’s a good movie. The part that really resonated with me is one moment when he’s at a bar. Everyone is friendly, “Oh it’s great to see you,” and stuff,’ says James. ‘Then they go, “We’ve named a drink after you. We’ve called it The S
ully – it’s Wild Goose with a splash of water.” It was referencing the geese and they all thought it was hilarious. Sully didn’t. I thought, That’s kind of like every time someone makes a joke about a Mars Bar.’
The reason the Mars Bar is so memorable is that, improbably, it became the central detail in a phenomenal media frenzy surrounding James Scott’s miraculous survival. His experience, from the point of his rescue onwards, illustrates how stressful and damaging intense media interest can be for ordinary people who inadvertently find themselves in the middle of something extraordinary. When the public becomes fascinated by these kinds of stories and journalists descend, a heavy toll can be exacted on the person in the centre.
In 1991, James Scott was twenty-two years old and a final-year medical student when he signed up for a four-week practical elective at the Bir Hospital in Kathmandu, planning to combine the internship with some recreational hiking. On 22 December, he headed off on a trek and made a decision that turned out to be extremely unfortunate. He was crossing a high-altitude pass with a companion when clouds moved in and snow fell. James decided to turn back while the other man continued over the pass. As the weather deteriorated, James was unable to find the tea house he had slept in the previous night and became lost. He initially tried to find his way out, but the snow was too deep and the cliffs too treacherous.
James had intended to take advantage of the food, water and accommodation in tea houses along the track on which he’d started, and so he had insufficient supplies for the conditions in which he found himself. After he was eventually rescued, close to death, it was his shame and guilt at his own carelessness that caused him the most pain, not his physical injuries.
During the forty-three days that he was lost, James was taken to his limits physically, mentally and emotionally. He began the ordeal as a very fit and secure young man but was quickly starving, dehydrated and freezing, and there was nothing he could do but wait for what seemed certain to be an extremely painful and lonely death.
