Hockey: Not Your Average Joe

by Madonna King

  Meanwhile, growing up in Sydney, Beverley Adelle Little enjoyed a life exotic to Richard. She was the only child of Muriel, a wealthy heiress, and Ted, who had played for the Eastern Suburbs Roosters in Sydney back in 1922. Just as Richard’s father gave his family a colourful past, it was Beverley’s grandmother Rebecca who provided a rich tapestry for her family to weave and pull apart at family functions.

  As a milliner at the famous Strand Arcade in Pitt Street, Sydney, Rebecca was a fiercely competitive businesswoman, and she also loved trading shares. In the shadows of the Depression, Rebecca would travel by tram to the Sydney Stock Exchange and at the opening bell, with binoculars in her hand and a representative of JBWere stockbrokers by her side, she would day-trade the market. Each week, the Commercial Banking Company at Chatswood would send a teller to her home in Pymble to collect the dividend cheques. But she wasn’t only a share trader. She bought an entire city block in Chatswood, which is now multiple high-rise buildings, as well as a big chunk of the town of Wangi Wangi, where artist William Dobell lived for a time. But two husbands, one with a propensity to gamble, and a dispute over her estate meant very little ended up in her grand-daughter’s hands.

  Fortunately, Beverley was gifted her father Ted’s good looks. Born in Chatswood, she grew up at Bondi Beach and her striking features stood out. Eventually, they caught the eye of the editor of Pix magazine, and Beverley found herself gracing its cover. Modelling was not her parents’ career choice for their only daughter, however, and it proved a fleeting liaison. Her father told her she would attract the wrong men, like the sailors who would lob into Sydney. He ordered her to stop. Despite one cover photograph equalling a fortnight’s pay from her job as a bank clerk at the Commercial Banking Company, Beverley rejected all future modelling requests.

  Richard had arrived in Australia with enough money to set up a delicatessen at Bondi. Beverley Little was one of his new customers, and he was immediately taken with her. She liked the look of him too, but stayed away because her mother had warned her not to get close to the wog running the corner store. Eventually, Richard moved his business to Eastlakes, near Sydney Airport, where the shop was bigger and illicit trade in rationed goods was more lucrative. A new Australian, Richard and his family worked night and day, and over time the small family business boomed.

  Years passed, and both moved on. Beverley got married, lived across New South Wales, and raised three young children, Michael, Colin and Juanita. The marriage faltered, and Beverley returned to Sydney. By that time, Richard’s business had grown. In 1961, with the help of a Commonwealth Bank loan, he had branched out and rented a new, bigger, shop in Victoria Avenue, Chatswood. He defied trading restrictions on a Sunday, and worked hard. His marketing was rudimentary but effective; he turned his ethnicity into a commercial advantage. Each day he would place a sandwich board outside the shop and each day he would deliberately misspell the name of a sandwich. ‘Vegimight’ was a favourite but ham and ‘cheez’ got a run, as did ‘peenut butter’. As a result, customers would come into the store and help the ‘new Australian’ with his spelling. Richard would respond with gratitude and strike up a relationship with the new customer. He would write down their name and order, and memorise their face. Next time as they walked by, he would greet them by name like an old friend and add ‘so can we get you your usual order Mrs X?’ Customers loved it and business flourished, despite Rose being able to put the odd customer in his or her place. The best example of that was a regular customer who queried Rose’s nationality on one visit. ‘I’m Australian,’ came Rose’s terse reply. ‘But you weren’t born here, so what nationality are you?’ the customer pressed politely. But Rose didn’t like the line of questioning. ‘You’re not black. You’re not Aboriginal, so what nationality are you?’

  One day, Beverley’s mother walked into Richard’s shop. ‘I asked after her [Beverley],’ Richard says. ‘She said she wasn’t happy. I said to send her down.’ Not long after, Beverley went down to buy bread. ‘I had never forgotten her,’ he says.

  It was at a pub at Ryde in the northern suburbs that Richard, at the age of 34, shared one of his first dates with Beverley. Wanting to scrub up well, he wore his best suit and tie. He knew he wanted to marry the beach girl he had first seen in Bondi years earlier and it didn’t take too long before he popped the question. At first, Beverley was hesitant, with three young children to consider. But Richard understood that. His own childhood was never far from his mind. He understood what it meant to be abandoned as a child and to grow up without a father. ‘I will be their father,’ he reassured her. And he meant every word of it.

  Two years after marrying inside a registry office in October 1963, Richard and Beverley bundled their little boy up to take home to their other children. Richard knew he owed Australia so much. He had arrived with next to nothing, and now he had everything. Australia had given him Beverley and Colin, Michael and Juanita. And she had just delivered him this big bonny child of his own. He would treasure him, have ambition for him, and remind him when it came time to have his own children that each one of them mirrored a diamond. His mother, Rose, wanted his father’s name to carry on – the man who had disappeared after her son’s birth but whose mysterious activities had led them to Australia and this moment. Richard agreed. His newborn son would be called Joseph, after his grandfather. Béni meant ‘blessed’ in French – another nod to Rose’s background. And there was no better way of describing how Richard felt as he carried Joseph Benedict Hockey to the car, heading for home at 10 Coolaroo Road in west Chatswood. It was a beautiful August day, in 1965.

  TWO

  THE SYDNEY HARBOUR Bridge provides a towering backdrop for St Aloysius’ College and there, on the lower north shore, you can hear the business of the harbour from dawn until dusk, as ships ferry people and goods in and out past the vista of the Sydney Opera House. Regularly, the blast of a horn will punctuate a lesson inside a classroom, where parents are promised their boys will be given a solid Jesuit education, allowing them to live the school motto Ad Majora Natus, or ‘Born for greater things’.

  On this day, like many before and after it, the Year 5 boys were mucking around when a horn sounded, briefly pausing their play. ‘Hockey just farted,’ one of the boys quipped.

  ‘He was a big kid and it was a harmless joke,’ a schoolfriend says, but this time Joe hit back. ‘I’m going to be prime minister one day,’ he retaliated. It wasn’t the first time that Joe would lay claim, as a child, to the highest office in the land. One friend, Jonathan O’Dea, who later went on to be the Liberal MP for Davidson, met Joe playing rugby union in the Primrose Park Under-Six team, and his mother remembers asking Joe in the family’s Wollstonecraft kitchen what he wanted to be. ‘The prime minister,’ he replied. At the time, Joe was just eight or nine, and politics didn’t feature among the interests of his friends. His best schoolfriend, Jeremy Melloy, remembers growing up thinking that Joe had dibs on that job – as do Paddy Moore and Murray Happ and a bunch of other classmates.

  Frank Hoffmann, who lived with his wife, Jennie, and their three children a couple of doors up from Joe and his family on Byora Crescent in Northbridge, spent hours with Joe after the teenager developed a passion for debating. After school, and sometimes on the weekends, they would sit and chat about topics and how a debate should progress. ‘I still remember saying to him, have you given any thought to what you are going to do when you finish school? He said, “I think, when I’ve got a degree, I’ll go into politics. I’d love to be prime minister.” ’

  Joe was only a young teenager then, but that answer stayed with him for years. He’d been encouraged by grandfather Ted Little, who would bounce the two-year-old Joe on his knee joking that ‘this one will be prime minister one day’. Perhaps the young Joseph Benedict Hockey said it to sound impressive, in the same way young boys aspire to be police officers or firefighters, but the determination to hold high public office started during infant school at St Philip Neri primary school in North
bridge and followed him to St Aloysius’ College at Milsons Point. Ad Majora Natus.

  Joe was much younger than his half-siblings, with a gap of seven years between himself and his sister, Juanita, who was the next closest in age. His parents embodied the immigrant work ethic, toiling long hours six days a week trying to grow their business, which by then had changed from the delicatessen to a small north shore real estate agency. Joe would stay with his grandmother Rose, or Sitty as he called her, tag along with his parents or be left in Juanita’s custody at home. He often found himself lonely, but now and again he’d rope his brothers, Colin and Michael, into a game of cowboys and Indians. They’d always tire at the same point: when Joe decided to be Abraham Lincoln and deliver a lengthy monologue.

  Joe would tag along to elocution lessons with Juanita sometimes, eventually joining in – a decision that provided a platform in later years for a swag of debating awards. But mostly, as a youngster, Joe found himself in adult company and it was around the kitchen table in Northbridge, where the family moved when he was four, that he would find himself talking politics. Beverley was Liberal to the bootstraps, just as her parents were before her. Richard barracked strongly for Labor, believing it had provided both migrant friendships and networks. He served on the Chatswood branch of the Labor Party, at least until Beverley convinced him of the error of his ways. But at home, no rancour tainted political discussions, and Joe would often parrot them in the schoolyard, keen to see what others thought.

  Whitlam’s 1975 dismissal polarised voters across Australia, and Sydney’s north shore was no different. Many parents made significant sacrifices to send their boys to St Aloysius’, and their politics could be heard in the chatter of their children at lunchtime. Some parents were breaking open the champagne at night, their children revelling in their parents’ joy. Others wanted to load up cars and head to Canberra to start an insurrection. Joe was fascinated by it, and kept raising it with his friends. Most of them had heard their parents talk about it, but that’s where their knowledge and interest ended. ‘He understood what that meant,’ Lewis Macken, who joined Joe at St Aloysius’ as an eight-year-old in 1974, says. ‘To me, he was just a prime minister.’

  Damian Burton, another friend, says he remembers Joe, aged ten, wanting to talk about the implication of Gough Whitlam’s sacking. ‘From Year 7 it was just a known fact that he would go into politics and it was a discussion point that he would one day be the prime minister,’ he says.

  The Jesuit education, derived from the Society of Jesus, which was founded by Spaniard St Ignatius Loyola, came to Australia in the mid-1800s and encouraged questioning in a boisterous atmosphere. Joe did well enough at school, but mainly in those subjects where his passions lay, particularly history and English. Maths wasn’t his strong subject.

  Misdemeanours, ranging from recording less than 15 out of 20 in spelling in Mrs Kath Collins’s Year 3 class, to talking during quiet time, were dealt with by a visit to the primary school principal Father Geoffrey Schneider’s office. Mrs Collins, whose daughter Clover Moore would go on to become Sydney’s first popularly elected female lord mayor, was particularly strict and Joe would often find himself, on a Friday, joining his friends on the long walk down to Father Schneider’s office. There, the principal would open a drawer and let the boys see the straps all neatly folded. Father Schneider had names for each of them. ‘Pick a strap, boys,’ he’d say. ‘And we’d pick one and he’d do it,’ Joe recalls.

  He was in good company. Classmate Michael Delany, who went on to represent Australia in swimming, remembers being strapped across the hand and the elbow. John Tully, who has gone on to do big things in business, and Lewis Macken, now a top Sydney intensive care specialist, lined up behind Joe, too, although their punishment was usually for minor disruptive behaviour, not spelling. Joe didn’t stand out from the pack, though, as Father Schneider aligned the number of strokes to the number of spelling mistakes and the severity of their misdemeanours. ‘He came in with a crowd that came in for their whacks,’ Father Schneider, who turned 100 in 2012, says. ‘Mrs Collins thought it would help them learn their spelling. But he wasn’t looked on as a troublesome boy in any way and he left with a good name.’

  It was on the sporting field that Joe felt most at home, debuting in Year 6 in the Under 12 XV for rugby as well as the Under 12 cricket team. A year later he added soccer to his list of sports. ‘Joseph Hockey played well in goals and made some good overhead saves,’ the school newsletter, the Aloysian, remarked in 1978.

  His passion on the field continued and he joined the college athletics team in Year 10 as their representative shot putter. He reached the Second XI for cricket in Year 11. ‘Joe at times can be temperamental but batted and bowled very well during the season,’ the school records show, and he was welcomed onto the field for a few games in the First XV in rugby, too.

  In his final year, Joe captained the Second XI in cricket, only losing three of its 12 matches, as well as being captain of the Second XV. Sport offered Joe a camaraderie and a sense of belonging. The boys had to depend on each other, and he loved the sense of being part of a team. He especially loved when he got to lead the team, and his gregarious nature and quick wit made him a popular choice. But despite being sports mad, perhaps more so than many of his peers, and being good at it, he sat at the top of the second-tier teams, frequently being the first to miss the call into the top teams.

  Joe’s weight was central to that, as it would prove to be for the rest of his life. He was a big baby who grew into a pudgy primary schooler, and a solid secondary school student. It made him the brunt of jokes, too. Taunts such as ‘fatso’, the ‘fat Lebo’, and ‘fat wog-boy’ were standard fare in a schoolyard packed with boys. Others were the butt of jokes over their sporting performance, or their academic records. By today’s standards, it was bullying, and Joe felt it, but he gave back as good as he got. Sometimes that involved a physical scrap, but afterwards the boys would always wipe the dirt off and head back in from lunch as a pack. In quiet times, though, it really needled him. ‘I reckon Joe grew a thick skin then,’ Jeremy Melloy says. ‘That sort of bullying – or whatever you call it today – was part and parcel of the way everyone was dealt with. He gave as good as he got and he could verbalise things well. But like all of us, it would hurt; it would hit a raw nerve.’

  It wasn’t helped by Joe’s lunchbox either, which was sometimes full of Arabic delicacies. In a school where conformity reigned, he stood out. At home, family discourse also revolved around food. It was plentiful, and good manners and grace dictated you finished eating what was on your plate. Joe’s father had gone without food at times as a youngster and now he considered a full stomach a sign of prosperity. Waste not, want not. Joe’s father was proud of his son’s size. It proved he was raising a strong and healthy boy with a tough constitution. But at school, while Joe would respond to the fat jibes with a smile or a rebuke, it stung. ‘It was pretty much a white Anglo-Saxon thing,’ Joe says now. ‘I was knocked for being a wog. I really copped it. But I got through it. I don’t think it ever really affected me.’

  It was in Year 9, as an early teenager, that Joe hit his straps in public speaking. He loved the drama and ability to have people listen to every word he uttered. He believed what he said, too. ‘We have been blessed with a land of opportunity; this lucky country has talent and potential in every one of its citizens,’ he told the school in Year 10. ‘When John Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, we ask the question, what does our country do for us? Australia gives to us what many millions of people around the world don’t have: food, shelter, a stable economy, democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, but above all freedom itself.’ That speech saw him take home first place in the Art of Speech competition.

  ‘Once again,’ the judges noted, Joe had shown ‘what a real politician should sound like.’ He’d also won the speaking prize the year before, by channelling Sir Winston Chu
rchill, as he would again later in life. ‘On entering parliament for the very first time as prime minister,’ Joe told the judges, ‘Churchill gave one of his greatest speeches, inspiring the world’s freedom fighters “to continue against the tremendous odds of the Nazi war machine”. Never before has one man had such an influence on world peace.’

  Joe represented St Aloysius’ in the Lawrence Campbell Oratory Competition in his second-final year, as well as taking out the Art of Speech prize for a third year. ‘Joseph Hockey of Year 11 took us away from war and brought us closer to home with his speech of what it means to be an Australian,’ the judges determined. So what did the 16-year-old son of an immigrant father see as being Australian?

  ‘I believe that real nationalism lies not in what we say but in what we do,’ Joe told a packed room. ‘The older members of the community have a task ahead of them. They must inspire the potentially talented youth, as well as offering opportunity and stability to the hard workers, who may not have that gift of talent but remain the backbone of this nation. United we stand, divided we fall! Where our nation is united it may throw down the gauntlet to the rest of the world and proudly declare that we are a young, buoyant and industrious Australia.’

  Joe, using history and borrowing heavily from the words of world leaders, took out the prize for public speaking almost every year he was eligible to compete, but in his final year he stepped back. His mother and father loved seeing their son perform and would attend every event. In Joe’s final year of school, his father, Richard, decided to donate a trophy and sponsor the Art of Speech competition, ruling out Joe’s participation. But his love of public speaking flowed into the debating team, where he took the prized third-speaker position and became team captain under coach Magar Etmekdjian. With debates held every Friday night for the first three terms, a spot on the team carried significant kudos. ‘In hindsight you could see an ability to speak in front of people and to engage his audience,’ Etmekdjian says. The use of famous political quotations was a hallmark of his debating speeches, too, sometimes irrespective of whether they added value. ‘Special mention must be made of Joe Hockey,’ the annual school magazine recorded, ‘who by his publicity drives managed to pull good crowds to our home debates and was always prepared to get fine details from an adjudicator about a decision.’