Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  It is Bill who is largely responsible for the items on April 1st each year that try to pass off utter nonsense as serious news stories: the invention (for example) of a fishing rod equipped with a dial that allows you to select the type of fish you wish to catch. We’re not talking about fabulous wit: something more like schoolboy japes. But welcome.

  I meet them each day, politicians from both sides. I greet them when they arrive, flatter them, walk them to the studio. But it is not the politicians and not the political stories on TDT that mean the most to me. Gough, sure, who would not be impressed by an intellect like that? And let me say this: his intellect is bigger than his ego, and that man’s ego is Everest. And it is not that I scorn politicians – just the opposite, I usually like them. Why not? Most are prepared to work hard at their job; most are honest enough. A house full of them is like a house full of people from any other profession: a few of extraordinary ability; a few schmucks, shmegegges; most in the middle. The men usually like to flirt – a good thing if they have some style, some wit, which they don’t; the women – not so many women at this time – are mostly half-mad with the struggle to keep smiling when their colleagues throw off one sexist remark after another, hilarious I’m sure, and to mother their children over the landline from Canberra. The women are full of conviction – good convictions, bad convictions – and also resentment after seeing so many schmucks promoted ahead of them.

  I am not a groupie. As a journalism student in the studios in Warsaw, I saw politicians all the time, party hacks, a couple more classy, and most had more power over the lives of their fellow countrymen than any politician in Australia will ever know. Some junior minister for pig production, if he doesn’t like the look of you – maybe you’ve spoken up about the living conditions of abattoir workers – this junior minister can speak to somebody in state security, and in a week or so, you’re off to the Polish gulag for twenty years. If you survive, good luck, but probably you won’t. There’s no mystique in politics when you’ve seen such things, no mystique in the exercise of power. The reporters, the presenters, the producers: they’re connoisseurs of the power game, endlessly fascinated by its ebb and flow, even the very best of them – Bill Peach, Allan Hogan, Kerry, Gerald Stone, Sam Lipski too, and sure, the same goes for Mungo, who tries to keep a satirical distance – they’d go crazy if they couldn’t throw themselves into the hurly-burly of big politics, federal politics. To them the theatre of Canberra is Greek; it’s Sophocles, Euripides, but not as well written. They know it has its ridiculous aspects but they can’t help it. And okay, it’s important, the politics of this big, juicy social democracy, because a completely fair parliamentary system is what you want and that’s what you get here. If you record 50 per cent of the national vote, you can be sure that you have the support of 50 per cent of the electorate, not 50 per cent reduced to 10 per cent by a gang of thugs. If you end up with a government full of schmucks, you can be fairly sure that it was voted in by schmucks. Here, you get the government you deserve. You’re not going to get a government that’s sweeter and purer or more villainous than the people who voted it in. In Warsaw it was different. The Poles were better than the people who governed them. Not a lot better, but a bit. So that’s what I feel you can celebrate in the Australian democracy. If you’re governed by galahs (that Australian term, ‘galah’, I love it; a friend pointed to a flock of galahs once and explained it to me), galahs voted the government in. Simple.

  And as a matter of fact, there are occasions when Canberra is Sophocles. I’m indifferent to the mystique of politics, sure, but when events become particularly torrid I get swept along by the drama like everyone else.

  The Dismissal is like that. Even in Gordon Street, a long way from the main stage in Canberra, the presenters and staff look as if they’ve started the day with a big snort of cocaine. For a month there’s only been the one story: the Coalition senators have blocked supply in the Senate; Gough and Malcolm, the two central characters, are locked in a struggle to the death. This is the sort of maximum stakes combat that gives media people an orgasm-of-the-century feeling. And nobody’s getting a bigger high out of the drama than Gough and Malcolm. They love it. They have the undivided attention of everyone in the country.

  And whenever Gough and Malcolm cross paths in the studio at this time (the bloodletting brings them to Melbourne a couple of times a week), I notice that a bond is being forged between them. In their lives, they will never know intimacy of this intensity again: not with anyone, not their wives, not their children. They pause for a second to acknowledge each other, nod, pass on, and even though they can’t admit it, don’t even realise it, they love each other in a way that will take a further decade, even more, to come to the surface. What they are sharing is more potent than high-proof Polish vodka. The whole nation is now an arena, the seats are packed, and there in a shaft of sunlight stand Gough and Malcolm.

  Then comes the Dismissal itself. Nobody at Gordon Street predicted it. The news comes through from the Canberra studio that the Governor-General, assuming the role of deus ex machina, has dismissed the Whitlam government and installed Malcolm as caretaker PM. There are shocked expressions, yes, headshaking, even a certain amount of partisan outrage, but also a type of wonder that this fabulous drama, in which all of us in the media have taken the role of chorus, should have reached this sensational denouement.

  Reporters are despatched in all directions; whatever plans anyone may have had for the rest of the day and night are disregarded. I’m furiously ringing all of the Great and Good I have numbers for, arranging for them to express their outrage or satisfaction to our reporters. Malcolm, meanwhile, is getting to every studio he can to promote his cause, which is to say a majority in the House of Representatives at the upcoming election. Gough is doing the same thing. Difficult to say which of the two is the more exultant. Malcolm now has an election he expects to win; Gough is strutting up and down the high moral ground like a Homeric hero. Couldn’t be happier, either of them.

  But politics is only that thrilling now and again. Mostly, it’s tedious. To start with, there’s the whole business of language. Politicians spend so much time expressing themselves in the clichés of their trade that almost every utterance can be predicted. It is as if they’re following a script prepared years in advance, at a time when they were striving for preselection in the drafty halls of their electorates. They learnt then never to stray from the phrases they had practised, not if they were serious about a career in parliament, in government. Your predictability is a test of your reliability; this is what they absorbed. And, it strikes me – on TDT as I stand off-camera with my clipboard and my scepticism – that politicians find it impossible to escape those clichés. For the life of them, they can’t fashion an original sentence. If you were God or Satan, and you promised them the presidency of the world if they would say something original, something made of words that would remain memorable for a hundred years, they couldn’t do it. They see a camera, they see a microphone, and a cataract of clichés pours into their brains. It exhausts me.

  Even those who imagine that they have a gift for rhetoric, like Menzies – no, I don’t think so. Whenever I watched Menzies doing his schtick – he was mostly in retirement by that time, I admit – I thought of those English actors, like John Gielgud, stretching out the vowels of a speech by King Lear or Prospero, like brandy toffee. They think it’s art, but it isn’t; it’s just John Gielgud crazy in love with his voice, or it’s Laurence Olivier. And with Menzies, it was Menzies.

  ‘Look at me,’ he begs, in his suite at the Rio Tinto building, giving an interview to Peter Couchman about the book he’s just published: Afternoon Light, a memoir with an atmospheric title.

  Afterwards, I glance around at the suite, trying to avoid eye contact, because I won’t be able to look as if I enjoyed the performance. And this gives Menzies the impression I’m puzzling out where the toilet is.

  He asks, ‘Do you require the facilities?’ and I burst out laug
hing.

  I want to say, ‘Thank you, no, if I need a piss I’ll squat in the corner.’

  He probably has a fairly good mind, but he’s trapped by his act as a masterful statesman and can never escape.

  I have to wait for Keating before I meet a politician who’s capable of talking with a vernacular elegance. It’s not just the candour and force of what he has to say that makes him so attractive. He’s a truly charming man. When women meet him, they adore him. I read in a magazine once a survey of what things in a man attract women, and a dozen or so anonymous women gave their opinions. One said that she enjoyed more than anything a man with a good, strong body dressed in a cashmere jumper; soft and yielding on the outside, but the exciting hint of something hard underneath. That’s part of Keating’s charm for women. They know his reputation – he’s a battleaxe in parliament – but his voice elsewhere has an intimacy that’s full of suggestion, without a single suggestion being made. You want to be invited out to dinner, want to listen to him for an hour, then, in private, undress in a languorous way and kiss him till your mouth is jelly.

  How bloody annoying the Australian media can be – still! – when it comes to high culture. The first thing that occurs to so many journalists when a political figure reveals an attraction to art, to music, is affectation. Isn’t it possible that the fellow (it’s always a man) is simply standing up in the sincerity of his enjoyment? I mean Paul Keating and his French clocks and his Mahler. Can you imagine the French president or the British prime minister sneered at for passions of the same sort?

  The Israeli Symphony is in Australia for a series of performances, in Canberra this particular evening. I’m at the concert hall with my dear friend Hazel Hawke. It’s Mahler, and beside us two seats are still vacant just before the commencement. Paul arrives with his wife, Anita, making his way with apologies past the knees of audience members already seated and takes the vacant place next to me.

  I whisper to him, ‘What the hell are you doing here? You’ve got the budget tomorrow.’

  He says, ‘I know, I know. I’ve got papers all over my desk. But it’s Mahler, Vera, it’s Mahler.’

  His political ambitions depend on making a fine budget, not on what Zubin Mehta does with Mahler, yet he comes to the performance. Can’t he be admired for that?

  Okay, politics is one thing and it’s another, but I don’t want to have anything to do with that lazy sort of disgust with politicians that you hear so often. Politics is what we have in place of murder. Let it prevail. If you’re disgusted with politicians in Australia, what would you suggest? That we burn down the Reichstag? Relax.

  I was saying, before I rudely interrupted myself, that other stories meant much more to me than anything happening in parliament.

  One TDT story that I love has a very local origin. On Fitzroy Street, not so far from the Banff, there’s an old bluestone church with a Canary Island Palm out the front. The church is running a school for homeless children, without any publicity, not just schooling but food and accommodation.

  I go down there with my notepad and get details from the minister whose name may have been anything – see if you can dig it up, Robert, I don’t know – the Reverend Tom, or the Reverend Phil, a decent human being, and the volunteers, good human beings, although just a little overexposed to the teachings of Jesus, but nothing fatal. The kids, all homeless in the middle of this big, juicy country, it wounds you to see them like that, some of them quite young, living feral until the Reverend Tom or the Reverend Phil came across them.

  I don’t want to make a bore of myself with constant backward glances to my own ordeal in Lvov, but the experience of these kids cries out for cross-reference. Not that anyone is trying to hunt them to extinction, but I hate to see their famished faces when most people are swimming in excess: it’s immoral.

  And so I am more than usually conscientious in gathering the data for this story, in arguing at TDT meetings for the story’s priority. It’s not that I seek out stories – this one, or any other – that relate themselves to my past; it’s that Lvov has left me – and countless other Jews, from their own Lvovs – especially sensitive to privation, injustice, what you will. You can’t have a life that disregards the marginalised, even those who lack the competence to make their way in our society.

  19

  LEITH RATTEN

  In my email today, there is a list of questions from Robert. In two days he’s flying up to Byron to interrogate me again, and he wants me to prepare some answers for him. I read through the list and groan: he asks me about Marek, about Jan, about things I’m not ready to talk about yet. It’s exhausting. We will sit at the table in my dining room, Robert always courteous but at the same time a pain in the arse. I wish this book could be written in a stream-of-consciousness way, a glass of wine in my hand, slumped in an armchair, eyes closed, babbling away without any need for thought or reflection. Each question of Robert’s is meant to stimulate certain specific memories, but the questions also stimulate the memories close by, and some of those are awkward for me, some of them are unpleasant, some are vile. I wish I could quarantine things I am happy to recall, or at least willing to recall, from those that unsettle me. I embrace my life, but some of it I embrace much more warmly than other parts.

  But okay. I’ll look at the questions. Let me first roll a cigarette. Also, pour a glass of wine.

  When Robert arrives, we sit at the kitchen table and go through his list of questions. I’m being especially patient. I don’t lose my temper when he fails to understand a point I’m making. I want to, but I don’t. It’s all nice Vera today. Good Vera. Forebearing Vera. I even make him a cup of tea. But, you know, it is only when he gets to the questions about Leith Ratten that I become properly engaged. Robert’s questions about politics bore me a little. But Leith – that was life and death. I tell him the whole story. Please God, let Robert do it justice.

  Leith Ratten killed his wife with a shotgun. That much is agreed. He says it was an accident; the cops say it was murder. He comes from Echuca on the Murray River, and that’s where the shotgun went off, in the kitchen of his house in Mitchell Street. She was about eight months pregnant, Beverley Ratten, and the police investigation revealed that Leith had been having an affair with a woman by the name of Jenifer Kemp, a married woman. Leith had spoken with her not long before the gun went off. A few hours before: not so long. He calls the emergency number; he’s hysterical. The police arrive; Beverley is dead; Leith is a babbling wreck. They take him away and he is eventually able to tell them that he was cleaning the gun in the kitchen when it went off. The police: ‘Yeah, sure.’ Leith is charged with murder; the jury finds him guilty; he’s sentenced to hang. In Pentridge, waiting for the hangman, Leith’s lawyers appeal the verdict, but the appeal is dismissed.

  I hear about the case – the guilty verdict, the dismissal of the appeal, and become interested. A number of people in the legal profession are convinced that there has been a miscarriage of justice and that Leith is innocent. It could be a story for TDT. I have some acquaintance with a law professor in Melbourne, Peter Brett, a lovely man, and I ask him to take a look at the trial transcript and the appeal verdict.

  He says, ‘Vera, the man’s innocent.’

  And one way or another, I’m able to interest the Melbourne producer of TDT in the story.

  I am on my way to Pentridge to talk to Leith. He has a second appeal in the works. Of course he does – they want to hang him.

  I have seen men, women and children hanging from lampposts and trees, and I have a special horror of it happening here, in the city I have come to in order to escape such horrors. The death penalty means that if the state decides to hang someone, you, the citizen, know the exact minute of the hanging. You go to sleep the night before, thinking, ‘They’re hanging Mister X in the morning.’ And when you wake up, you might think, ‘They’re hanging Mister X in an hour’s time.’ And at five minutes to eight that morning, you think, ‘In five minutes, they hang Mister X.
’ Then: ‘He is standing on the trapdoor. He has said his prayers.’ And at eight o’clock in the morning, exactly: ‘He is now falling through space.’ This, to me, is an abomination: that the death of Mister X, his hanging, is enacted in the consciousness of all the state’s citizens in real time. That it is an item in a schedule.

  I hope to discover in my audience with Leith Ratten that he is innocent, but if I look into his eyes and say to myself, ‘Uh-oh – he did it,’ I will tell him that I won’t be watching the clock on the morning of his execution. I will be listening to loud music; I will be drinking vodka; my awareness will be obliterated; I will think of anything but his feet on the trapdoor – and that will be my protest.

  I know the governor of Pentridge Prison. I spoke to him in regards to another TDT story a couple of years back.

  When I ring him, he says, ‘Vera. Of course. Vera Wasowski. What can I do for you? You want to talk to Leith, before we hang him? Okay, why not?’

  I make my journey out to Coburg, a dreary suburb of weatherboard houses either side of Sydney Road, many of then constructed in what is known as the Californian bungalow style, with red brick pillars supporting a broad, overhanging verandah roof. Around the houses, in homely garden beds, are a few geraniums, beach daisies, small acacia bushes.

  Immigrant Greek families, and the first of many Turks, inhabit these houses. But they will be owned one day by couples who have put off making babies until Mrs Mum and Mr Dad are in their early forties and can afford a stroller bigger than a ride-on mower, also a huge monster of a vehicle with a name that evokes adventure and glory – a Toyota Indomitable; a Holden Saga. And in those days to come, when Robert is flying up from Melbourne to Byron and plaguing me for information, the grounds and buildings of Her Majesty’s Prison Pentridge will have been given over to new housing, apartments for the owners of those behemoth strollers.