Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  Dorothy Wall, author of the Blinky Bill stories, could certainly pack a punch for a four-year-old. ‘The koala family lived so happily; never thinking of harm, or that anything could happen to disturb their little home, as all they asked for were plenty of fresh gum leaves and the warm sun. They had no idea such things as guns were in the world, or that a human being had a heart so cruel that he would take a pleasure in seeing a poor little body riddled with bullets hanging helplessly from the tree top.’ Her precise description of the killing of Mr Bear, of the vigil over his body by his wife and child, then her decision to go ‘far into the bush with Blinky, away from the man with his gun’ was my first alert to the modern refugee experience. After that, I could never be interested in the milksop experiences of Rupert Bear or Pooh Bear.

  Robin Hood’s adventures came to me in a picture book from the 1938 movie: I remember Errol Flynn, with my father’s moustache, and a photo of a large knight with a large sword, captioned ‘Sir Geoffrey’. He was, I was disconcerted to discover, on the wrong side of history, in the ranks of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Then, inevitably, came The Wind in the Willows, that anthropomorphic classic about character types I would later meet in England (with Jeffrey Archer and Alan Clark playing Mr Toad, and tabloid journalists taking the parts of stoats and weasels). I would beg my father to reread the chapter about ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, with its strangely comforting religiosity which could lull a small child to sleep.

  When I learnt to read, I introduced myself to the unending struggle between good and evil through Biggles books, in which good – the British chaps – always triumphed. I worked my way through every volume, entirely unaware of the gay subplot debunked later by comedians or the racism which has caused librarians to remove the series from their shelves. The first pun that made me laugh, before my age reached double figures, was the suggestion that the next offering from Captain W. E. Johns would be titled ‘Biggles Flies Undone’.

  I started school, at Bellevue Hill, when I was five and a half and was not much noticed by teachers until a lesson about Australian animals. As taught by my mother, I casually explained that kangaroos and koalas were marsupials. The teacher gasped in awe and shushed the class. ‘What did you say? Repeat it.’ I did so, wondering why she was making so much fuss. ‘Stay right there,’ she exclaimed, ‘while I get the headmistress.’ This powerful figure arrived, to listen in wonder as this five-year-old was called upon to repeat the four-syllable word and explain that it denoted the ability to carry one’s young in one’s pouch. Thereafter I was treated by the teacher with some respect, but not by my fellow students, who sourly castigated me as a teacher’s pet, the worst of kindergarten crimes. I had not intended to show off, but I rather enjoyed the attention.

  By this time I was talking, quite volubly, although until I was almost five my speech lacked coherence. When it did develop, it had an unmistakable English accent. ‘Is his father an English migrant?’ my mother would be asked in the street by people who overheard us talking and assumed that I was the offspring of a ‘ten-pound Pom’. I may have picked up these unwanted strains from ABC announcers on the wireless, who were frequently ex-BBC or enunciated as its presenters did.

  Although Frank’s ambition was still to be a bank manager, the Commonwealth soon recognised his potential and put him on an executive training course, where he was mentored by the legendary economist Dr H. C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, at that time the bank’s governor, and emerged with sufficient credit to be made the assistant to a senior manager, whom he accompanied on a three-month tour of banks in America and Europe, which were beginning to deal in stocks and shares. Every day, religiously, my father would send us (my mother had by now, three years after me, produced a truculent baby brother, named Graeme) a postcard from wherever he happened to be. Thus my introduction to the wide world was through the rose-tinted lens of the picture postcard. The Eiffel Tower, the Waldorf Astoria, the Rockies, the Coliseum, the Swiss Alps – places of legend and majesty I craved to visit when I grew up. Most picturesque of all were the bonny banks and braes of Scotland, and the inland waters presumed to be teeming with trout, not to mention ladies of the lake and a monster in Loch Ness. I longed in daydreams to visit the land of clan Robertson and to follow my father’s slipstream to countries that, by the time I did set foot in them, were not quite so pretty.

  It was a joy – shared by Joy – to have Dad back home, especially as he had come straight from San Francisco with a precious gift – a genuine raccoon-skin cap, as worn by the celluloid hero Davy Crockett, king of the Wild Frontier. It was a sign of how crazes in America were beginning to rub off on Australia, that small children, egged on by Walt Disney, were running around in this hairy headgear in the middle of summer, yelling ‘Remember the Alamo!’ as they fired their cap-pistols. Crockett helped to lose the Alamo, but the Disney film portrayed the disaster as a moral victory by courageous frontiersmen over a lesser breed, Zapata-moustachioed Mexicans. Donald Trump would have been taken in by the film at the same time: his memory of the Alamo may explain his desire to fence off the Mexican border.

  Frank was a father in whom I took pride. He was much admired by other boys, and I sometimes wondered whether he would have been happier with one of them as a son rather than the bookworm I was turning into. His career was taking off, but he always found time every weekend to drive me to tennis tournaments all over the city. Sometimes he stayed to watch, and comment on my unimproving backhand. Years later, I found myself insisting on doing the same thing for my own son, driving for miles up motorways to his tennis games, when he could more easily have caught a train. It gave me pleasure, which can partly be accounted for by the fact that I was unconsciously trying to thank my father.

  When I turned seven, we moved to Eastwood. ‘A suburb without character,’ sniffed one of my father’s clients from Bellevue Hill. Dad had purchased a small brick-veneer house next to a power station, and it came – joy of joys – with a half-acre of land. A giant blue-tongue lizard was in occupation, and emerged from its hole every summer to sunbathe, flicking its blue tongue wickedly, and leaving its skin behind as a parting reptilian gift before it retreated for another six months of hibernation. There was a small orchard, dropping apples and ripe peaches, and a field with a cricket pitch and a few feet to spare. I abandoned hope of emulating Alan Davidson, and shortened my run-up to bowl the sort of leg spin with which the young Richie Benaud had begun to take wickets. Beside the pitch ran a creek, the habitat for a million tadpoles and for bandicoot families in soggy burrows. (Our first visit was from a CSIRO scientist, Gordon Lyne, who lived opposite and sought our permission to trap bandicoots for his experiments.) The willow trees by the creek drummed in summer with cicadas – the common Greengrocer, the less common Yellow Monday, the rare Black Prince. We would pour water down their holes to make them emerge for their brief earthly sojourn and shake them to make them sing. All over Sydney, wanton boys were pulling wings off not flies but cicadas – insects did not merit the regard we had for Blinky Bill’s dad or Bambi’s mum. As for bandicoots, they were a kind of rat so Dr Lyne was welcome to trap them, which he did at midnight with a lantern and a baited cage.

  Best of all in this new house, beyond the creek was a grassy knoll that led to some tennis courts. This became my true sport, and I neglected my leg spin to work on my backhand. I soon developed a dynamite forehand and a serviceable serve, and started to hit, quite naturally, a hard and accurate double-handed backhand, in the hope of one day representing Australia in the Davis Cup (my first career choice). But this stroke was unacceptable to Australian coaches at the time: double-handed backhands were for girls (they used the ultimate put-down: it was ‘sissy’) and I had to be weaned off it. I have never forgiven them: my tennis career was subsequently blighted by a vulnerable, limp-wristed backhand, which I would run round whenever possible.

  Nineteen fifty-three was the most exciting Davis Cup of all time. I listened, breathless, to every point, crouched over the radio by my bed on
our glassed-in front veranda. The top Australian player, Frank Sedgman, had turned professional, and our defence of the cup against the might of America was dependent on two nineteen-year-olds, Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall. On day one, Rosewall lost to the American top gun Tony Trabert, and Hoad beat Vic Seixas, but the next day the team captain Harry Hopman uncharacteristically miscalculated and pulled Rosewall from the doubles, which Australia lost, and was in consequence 2–1 down. The tension on day three was unbearable: Hoad eventually triumphed over Trabert, winning the fifth set 7–5. The next day, Rosewall clinched the final rubber. I have never felt prouder or more patriotic. I’d found a real sporting hero in Hoad: when his autobiography was published, I loitered in Dymocks bookshop to watch him sign copies. I had no money to buy his book, but I finally plucked up courage and asked him to sign a serviette. He looked down at me with his dreamy blue eyes and I was smitten. If only I’d had a mobile phone and could have asked him for a selfie!

  Small boys become very upset when their heroes are treated badly. Conscription required all nineteen-year-olds, including Hoad and Rosewall, although Australian tennis depended on them. Hoad was ordered to attend Ingleburn army camp, where he was bitten by a spider, badly fed, could not train and predictably lost his edge. Trabert and Seixas easily won the 1954 Davis Cup. Just how stupid could you be? I wondered. I blamed Mr Menzies, who had been in a VIP seat at Kooyong when Hoad had won in 1953, but was too busy slobbering over the young Queen in 1954 to instil any sense into the administrators of National Service. These were members of what I later dubbed ‘the dickhead tendency’ – officials without the imagination to use their discretion wisely, in the interests of the greater good. I could not coherently explain my rage and incredulity, but the loss of the 1954 Davis Cup struck me as an entirely avoidable calamity. I had heard of the Korean War, but to an eight-year-old, losing the Davis Cup seemed much worse.

  Later, when I was sixteen, I watched Hoad play the match of his, and my, life. It was at the time that Rod Laver, the reigning amateur champion, turned professional. Lew had lost his touch – he was fat, out of condition, into drink and cigarettes. So the promoters of Laver’s debut as a pro thought it would be a good idea for Rod to thrash Lew as a warm-up, then battle it out the next day with Ken Rosewall, who was the reigning professional champ. But Lew took himself down the coast to Moruya for three months, stopped drinking, lost weight, trained, and beat Laver in four terrific sets at White City. I was there, forever inspired to win against the odds, on court or in court. I did finally get to play with Lew, many years later at a charity gig at White City. I warmed up like a demon, but in the doubles match we played together I muffed my volleys, double-faulted, and even failed to return an underarm serve from the aged Vic Seixas. In tennis, as in love, never partner your hero – you cannot help but let them down.

  I am often asked whether anyone inspired me when I was young. People always expect me to name Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Clarence Darrow. When I’m feeling truthful, I tell them about Lew Hoad.

  In February 1952 I became aware – from the radio, although we were prepared for the news by our teachers at school – that King George was very ill. He had taken a turn for the worse in London while Princess Elizabeth was visiting Kenya, and it was there she was told that her father had died. A clear but crazy image came into my dreams of a man with a crown, in bed in a tree, below which a pride of lions crouched – kings of the jungle paying their tribute to the dying King of England. I was a right little royalist, especially after the Coronation, when I insisted that my parents buy me coloured-picture books so I could be struck with awe by the golden coaches with their red plush seating, the bejewelled crowns and orbs and other impedimenta of royalty.

  This changed just one year later when the young Queen came to visit her Australian dominion. ‘Every woman’s dream of beauty steps ashore’ announced the Sydney Morning Herald. Children from every school were summoned to see her at the Sydney Showground, on a day of 35°C heat. We were packed in and made to wait six hours in this burning cauldron: kids all around me were fainting from sunstroke (there was no shade) or clutching diarrhoea-wracked little stomachs. I was eight but I could recognise torture when I saw it, even if I did not know the term for the deliberate and unjustified infliction of severe pain. The young Elizabeth passed in a closed car which sped around the track, her limp arm waving out of the window.

  The day was a cruel farce: I felt cheated, but also slightly amazed. How could Australia go nuts for an English monarch to the extent of offering up to her its children in inhumane homage? I really did think republican thoughts, without being able to put that name to them. But I could do so by the time I was twelve, when the whole disgraceful spectacle was repeated, this time merely to welcome the Queen Mother (who at least waved to us from an open jeep). I was critical of Prime Minister Menzies, who on a later royal visit looked at the Queen adoringly and emoted, ‘I did but see her passing by and yet I’ll love her till I die.’ Well, I did but see her passing by; so quickly, however, that it made me a life-long republican.

  My wife and I have sometimes been invited to the palace, invitations which, as a rule, we have graciously accepted. We do our best to entertain Her Maj – I may, after all, be one of her more distant relatives, on the German side. On one occasion my wife wore a suit emblazoned with corgis, which was greeted with a delighted royal smile. As you can see from the dirty look on the face of the flunky in the photograph, Queen Liz is not often allowed to be amused. This was at a celebration for the Commonwealth, and I sat next to her while the orchestra played ‘God Save the Queen’. I noticed that she tapped her feet to the tune and seemed to sing along – ‘God Save Our Gracious Me’, I suppose.

  Our presence was publicised, and we were berated by Australia’s more common commentators – Gerard Henderson and Andrew Bolt – for betraying our republican principles. They did not seem to understand either the virtues of politeness or Kathy Lette’s point about accepting invites to Buck House: ‘Of course they are dinosaurs, but who wouldn’t want to see dinosaurs in their natural habitat?’

  The Robertsons were a middle-class family in a middle-class house in a middle-class suburb, with a Hills hoist in the backyard and a small car in the carport. It was a Renault, tested every weekend as we went to visit relatives in Dapto, making a rattling descent down the terrifying gradient of the Bulli Pass. My own adventure with speed came when Dad built me the essential training machine for Australian revheads, a billy cart. It had red wheels and strong reins and a good braking mechanism – our home was at the top of an incline, and at the age of nine I was blissfully careering down it. Clive James has written memorably of the joys of billy carts in Sydney suburbs in the 1950s: there were few cars, and we never thought of danger. Bikes, for some reason, I could never learn how to ride.

  The billy cart prepared us for the car, which was the necessary next step (L plates at sixteen, licence at seventeen) and I applied as soon as I possibly could, during our summer holiday at Harrington. Driving licences in those days were granted by policemen, so my test was conducted by the nearest cop, in a tiny town called Coopernook. He was a good bloke, who offered me a free licence if I ran over the local dog, and asked me two searching questions: ‘What does a red light mean?’ and ‘What does a green light mean?’ After my correct answers, he thought for a moment then said as the thought dawned, ‘Oh, wait a minute. You’ll be driving in the city. What does an orange light mean?’

  I passed, and my father dutifully left the expected case of beer on the police station doorstep. After she came to experience my driving, Kathy described me in print as a ‘westie revhead’. Her geography was wrong (although I suppose Eastwood seems to be west if you’re looking backwards from a Cronulla beach), but an ability to swerve out of trouble definitely comes from learning the art of billy-cart driving.

  Eastwood was not exactly middle class; it was a mix – in those days when your ‘class’ in Sydney was deducible from your household newspaper.
We took the Fairfax paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, while our working-class neighbours took the Packer Telegraph. Those with no class at all took Rupert Murdoch’s evening tabloid, the Daily Mirror. My mother wouldn’t have it in the house – she noted that the men in our street who read the Daily Mirror were the ones who beat their wives.

  Each month we took the Women’s Weekly. It was full of the doings of a strange breed of females called ‘socialites’, who all lived in the eastern suburbs and tried, not very successfully, to prove that ‘Sydney society’ was not, as Barry Humphries had suggested, a contradiction in terms. I would turn with delight to Ross Campbell’s genuinely amusing column about the goings-on in Oxalis Cottage, invariably featuring the antics of his daughter, Little Nell. It was a delight to become friends with Nell Campbell many years later and to find her even more irrepressible (or should that be even less pressible?) than in her father’s imagination.

  My mother’s favourite maxim, instilled from the cradle, was that money cannot buy happiness. This was consoling when we had so little, and was given a particular emphasis in my impressionable young mind by Australia’s first kidnapping of a child for ransom. Graeme Thorne was a boy around my age whose parents lived near our old flat at Bondi. In 1960 they won the lottery – £100,000, which translates as several million dollars in today’s money. Their address was published in the press and soon their son Graeme was being held hostage and after serious errors by the police was killed by his kidnapper, Stephen Bradley.

  ‘That’s what can happen when you win the lottery. Money does not buy you happiness,’ pronounced my mother, insisting she was glad that her one lottery win had yielded only money for my nappies. The evidence for her proposition seemed overwhelming, and I went through most of my life believing it, despite my wife’s elucidation of the proverb: ‘Money does not buy happiness. It just buys yachts and five-star hotels and diamond jewellery – I quite like the sort of misery that money buys.’