Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  My parents were not religious, but they thought I should have the chance to embrace the Anglican God. So off I went, every Sabbath, to Sunday school. I quite enjoyed this for a few years and routinely achieved first-class honours in state-wide Sunday school exams, picking up a working knowledge of the Bible which was later to become useful in defending Gay News at the Old Bailey on the charge of blasphemy. My father took me to the Billy Graham crusade – the biggest excitement in Sydney for years – and I observed the tricks of this over-the-top evangelist as he enticed the depressed and impressionable of Sydney (there were a lot of them) down the Showground aisles to give him money and sign a book which declared they were now ‘saved’. I was very young and very tempted to join them, but I was saved by my father, whom the hokum could not budge. It vaguely occurred to me, however, that if there was any truth in religion, it logically followed that it should be the most important thing in one’s life. Hence my second career choice: I would become a missionary. The job would entail foreign travel, life insurance and plentiful opportunity to preach (a habit I had picked up from Eric Baume, an opinionated idiot who regularly ranted ‘This I believe’ on radio station 2GB). There would, I gathered, be a certain frisson in converting cannibals – ending up in the cooking pot would be an ever-present possibility, but at least I would have a fast track to paradise through their alimentary canals.

  In time, however, it seemed I might have to choose, not between God and Mammon but between God and tennis. My game had progressed well enough for me to be selected in the Under-16 Eastwood–Thornleigh team, but our matches were on Sunday, which conflicted with church confirmation classes. Eventually, I was given a dispensation and was ready to be received into the Church by the laying on of hands. The hands laid upon me were those of Archbishop Gough, the rather ridiculous upper-class Englishman who headed the Anglican Church in Sydney. Just a few weeks before the ceremony he had been quoted on the front page of the Mirror declaiming, ‘The younger generation is wallowing in a mire of sexuality.’ I was not doing much – or indeed any – wallowing, but the good archbishop certainly was – with a number of married parishioners within the range of his archbishopric. He was cited in secret divorce petitions and the scandal was hushed up by the media and even by the Mirror, as proprietors were ‘leant upon’ by an establishment that did not want the ‘established’ church to suffer embarrassment. The public was not allowed to know, and the promiscuous primate was packed off home to the smallest parish in England.

  I went to Eastwood Public School – a venerable institution, as primary schools go, with the asphalt playground which left its marks on schoolboy shins, and a cricket pitch on which I experienced the thrilling sensation of thwacking a perfectly timed cover drive (though when I played for the school as an opening batsman, I made more runs snicking through the slips than thwacking through the covers).

  My arrival at Eastwood Public was initially unhappy – I suffered the indignity of being placed in a ‘B’ class and 2B, I decided, was not to be. I fought to reach 3A and upwards, improving each year until I came third in the class. It was impossible to go higher, as first place was always a fight between two boys of unnatural ability: Roger Hillman, a polite perfectionist, and Ian Campbell, an intense genius, although he picked his nose and ate the product. I wanted to bond, if only with his brain. In my last two years at the school, I had a rival for third place – a laughing, languid, likeable youth called Robert Lyneham. We became good friends – he was the sort of mate you could trust not to eat your last Jaffa. We lost contact after school, for thirty years, until the bush telegraph told me he had become Sydney’s most fashionable obstetrician. I called him out of the blue to entrust my pregnant wife to his surgical hands. He brought my son into the world and we became friends all over again.

  The school was at one end of Eastwood’s main street, which today smells and sounds like a city thoroughfare in Korea. In my day, you saw only white faces and smelt fish and chips – enticing for small boys in the playground at lunch-time. Kids with lunch money were permitted to cross the road to the greasy chip shop but this lucky group never included me, forced as I was to consume my mother’s carefully prepared tomato and cucumber sandwiches. Her diktat against fish and chips was for health reasons as well as expense – they were ruled both unnecessary and unhealthy. Sometimes, driven mad by the aroma, I would beg chips from other kids to savour the taste of warm potato and cooking fat.

  School life was uneventful. History, incredibly, was not taught at all, and English amounted to lessons in grammar rather than in drama or literature, which were deemed unnecessary and possibly corrupting, the state school syllabus reflecting the philistine values of the Menzies era. We did have a ‘play festival’ once – in 1955 – when I enjoyed the role of the wise and judicious Mr Badger in The Adventures of Mr Toad.

  There was the cane, of course, overused in all schools of the period, and routinely prescribed at Eastwood for the most minor infractions. It was administered by a kindly old ex-serviceman named Harivell (’orrible ’arivell’, we called him), whose hand shook so much – probably from delirium tremens – that the beating rarely hurt. Had it done so, I might have been inclined to rebel. But the only trace of any sense of injustice that I can find in my prepubescent schoolbooks (loyally preserved by my mother) was in a composition on the subject of ‘My School’. In it I inveighed against the hypocrisy of teachers for disciplining children they’d seen ‘scratching themselves’ in the playground, ‘as I often see teachers scratching themselves’. This scored a hit, and I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw a group of teachers passing around my essay and laughing – rather defensively, I thought. Tight underwear produced in the summer rashes that did bring on an urge to scratch one’s balls and my criticism deterred the use of the cane as punishment for giving in to the itch – my first blow struck for human rights.

  Eastwood did not lack character. There was a cinema, where small boys could roll Jaffas down the aisles and watch endless black-and-white adventures of Hopalong Cassidy, in which the ageing cowboy would embark on different ways of slaughtering Indians. I was never much attracted to this genocidaire on horseback – when we played cowboys and Indians, it was only fair that the Indians should sometimes win.

  Much more excitement came when I was almost ten and Eastwood suddenly became the cultural capital of Australia. This was the new age of television, launched in 1956 with Bruce Gyngell’s famous words, ‘Good evening, and welcome to television,’ as he launched Channel 9. Its screen was full of American imports, but Channel 7 built its studios at Eastwood, around the corner from our street, and began to record game shows I loved, such as Pick a Box (hosted by Bob and Dolly Dyer), The Quiz Kids (with John Dease) and innumerable shows starring my favourite host, the quick-witted Jack Davey. I had enjoyed these programs when they’d been broadcast on radio; we huddled round the wireless with blind Auntie Peg, who cackled delightedly as I laughed alongside her. I went to some recording sessions at Channel 7 – when the primitive technology would invariably break down – and might well have imbibed the adrenalin and some of the techniques I was later to use for Hypotheticals. These shows were top-rating in the early days of television: their popularity was partly due to the excitement of whether the contestants would win money, but there was also a measure of ‘infotainment’ in questions about history, as well as a pleasure in repartee, though this could be repartedious:

  ‘Jack, meet our next contestant, Mrs Hare.’

  Davey [bald]: ‘Nobody misses hair like I do.’

  The studio audience readily roared – there was never any need for canned laughter. I cannot be sure whether those visits to the Channel 7 studios are responsible for my pleasure in performing on television, but I did feel a nostalgic delight when I returned there forty years later, by which time I was an international judge for the United Nations, to make a cameo appearance in Home and Away. You can take the boy out of Eastwood, but you can’t take Eastwood out of the boy.

 
As I think back to those formative years between eight and twelve, I have to acknowledge that the greatest influence came from ABC radio. I was never interested in their kids’ flagship program, a riff on Jason and the Argonauts, although the legend of armed men springing from the bloody soil of an invaded land has been a useful metaphor in writing about the dangers of military intervention. I remember only one altercation with my parents in those years, and it was over whether I could stay up late to listen to the end of an ABC radio performance of Hamlet. My mother insisted it went on past my bedtime; I pointed out that it was said to be the greatest play ever written, and I wanted to hear how it ended. My father was called and I was physically removed to my bedroom, hurling imprecations about their ignorance. It was a bad call on both sides: they could have granted me this indulgence, and I should have accepted their decision with some humility. But it brought home to me the important fact that those in authority – even those you love, with your best interests at heart – are not always right.

  What brought my ear to the wireless at appointed hours on most evenings were the BBC comedies – Take It From Here, Hancock’s Half Hour, Educating Archie and so on. I would note and venerate the names of the writers – Galton and Simpson, Muir and Norden, the latter two featuring in My Word!, a favourite show in which their wordplay was dazzling and their seeming ability to deconstruct well-known quotations amazing. It was my introduction to the art of rehearsed spontaneity, and these men were my gods of insightful comedy. Many years later, when I bumped into Denis Norden shopping in a delicatessen in north London I almost fell at his feet, and when I heard that a friend was to marry Frank Muir’s daughter I envied his marriage to a goddess, although I had never set eyes on her.

  Best of all was The Goon Show, with writer and star Spike Milligan. This was a wonderful world for a small boy growing up in suburban Eastwood, although it was wonderful for those growing up anywhere (in palaces, for example, where Prince Charles became a fan). It was radio at its best, enabling the attuned listener to conjure in his imagination a surreal world of exploding puddings and the dolly mixture of the British Empire. It could never work on television, or so I believed, until Monty Python, years later, made a brilliant attempt. I idolised Spike and dragged my somewhat uncomprehending father to the recordings of some of the ABC shows he did with John Bluthal. Milligan was a regular visitor to Sydney – his mother lived north of the city in the coastal town of Woy Woy (a name as far-fetched as any he invented) – and in due course he acquired an Australian stalker as in love with his imagination as I. Her name was Kathy Lette.

  Later in life and through Kathy I met many comedians, some of whom – Stephen Fry, Billy and Pamela Connolly, Barry Humphries – became good friends. Comics rather than lawyers graced our dinner table with an anarchic ebullience that my own profession is trained to subdue. Delight in humour transcends politics – many comedians are conservative, but hours in their company never exposed political differences. They have a special insight into the absurdities of life for which they should always be valued – a point overlooked by Australia House in the years when it banned Barry because his caricature diplomat, Sir Les Patterson, was ‘bad for Australia’s image abroad’. In fact, it much enhanced that image in a Britain which loved the kind of self-mockery that did not come easily to those from other nations (Canadians and New Zealanders, for example).

  My exposure to British comedy in my formative years provided my next career ambition – to be a comedian, to hear the sound not of my own voice but of audiences laughing with it. In time, I had to recognise certain disqualifications. I can never tell a joke, for a start, or write one – the only funny stories I tell are true, and derive from that fact whatever humour they provoke. At least my Hypotheticals posturing became a regular send-up in the Wharf Revue – the actor Drew Forsythe does a precise imitation of my Uriah-Heepish hand-wringing and Pommified voice and has become my doppelgänger. On-stage he’s better at playing me than I am at playing myself.

  School life took a turn for the better when I was selected to spend my last two years of primary education in what was called an ‘opportunity class’. I was never quite sure what it was an opportunity for, other than to be educated by a remarkable young teacher, Lionel Phelps, who taught me (and Robert Lyneham, Roger Hillman and Ian Campbell) to think. Phelps made us read the Sydney Morning Herald every day, and to criticise the doings of grand men with three names – like John Foster Dulles and Robert Gordon Menzies. ‘Ming’ was at the time an international laughing stock for his one attempt at world attention – he had allowed himself to be used by a dishonest British government plotting with Israel and France to invade Egypt and recover the Suez Canal. Menzies’ role was to threaten President Nasser to give up the canal, or else. It was a despicable role, and Nasser called his bluff (‘You send this Australian mule to threaten me’). Menzies was ridiculed, particularly by the Eisenhower administration, which deplored this last throw of the colonial dice. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Dulles was justifying CIA interventions (the CIA being led by his brother) in small islands in the Caribbean, while Khrushchev was preparing to khrush freedom in Hungary.

  Australia at the time still had a British mindset, but was dimly aware of the hegemony of the US. This had really started, of course, in 1941, when the guns of Singapore fell silent and John Curtin turned for salvation to America, but in the fifties the consequence of American leadership was still sinking in. Mr Phelps was not a great admirer, and encouraged us to question rampant capitalism (Eisenhower himself had just condemned the ‘military industrial complex’) and the invasion of small islands, as well as the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Today, teachers are meant to have no views about anything, which is a pity. Mr Phelps was not left wing (I met him again half a century later, by which time he had become a distinguished chancellor of Southern Cross University), but he was a liberal who incited us to think about right and wrong in the world, and for that much thanks.

  I did not veer to the left – indeed, I tormented my grandfather (the old French polisher) by pointing out how preferable was the well-modulated voice of Mr Menzies compared with the gravelly Strine of Dr Evatt. ‘Ah,’ my pop said sadly, ‘if only you had heard the Doc when he was at his best.’

  If only: I hear his voice now, in his international achievements as foreign minister that still survive; in the world of international law, where he is remembered as a giant of the new world order. But this was not apparent to me at the time: the Doc was in decline and would soon be appointed as the chief justice for New South Wales, where his mental illness was not noticed.

  Mr Phelps encouraged other enthusiasms. He set inventive composition subjects such as writing Goon Show scripts, and urged us to try our hands at poetry. Only one of my efforts survives in my class notebook:

  There was a young lady named Helen

  Whose breasts were the shape of a melon

  But it also appears

  She had cauliflower ears,

  Which is why she was so meloncholy.

  Helen would have been a figure of my eleven-year-old imagination – Eastwood was strictly segregated and the only girls in my orbit were those I met at Sunday school. One I did rather like was Meredith Oakes. We met up many years later when she was a distinguished musicologist in London, having written the libretto for Thomas Adès’ opera The Tempest. Her mother produced a photo of us together in a class at St Philip’s Sunday School in Eastwood, and I hope our learning of the Bible has come in as handy for her as a librettist as it has for me as a defender of blasphemers.

  My primary schooling at Eastwood left me, by age twelve in 1958, with some degree of self-confidence but no clear ambition. I was losing interest in a missionary life, there was not much call for comedians and the single-handed backhand was not improving. But thanks to Mr Phelps I did have an interest in world affairs, and the Channel 7 studios had possibly induced a taste for television performance. And I had broken cover – in the Sun newspaper, of all places, which had run an
editorial about opportunity classes encouraging arrogance and pomposity. I snapped off a letter in their defence, which was published in bold type, possibly because it demonstrated arrogance and pomposity. I cannot recall any interest in law, although I have found among my mother’s papers a copy of an Empire Day speech I gave the school when I was eleven. It eschewed the usual grovels to the Queen and noted that ‘the true spirit of the British Empire’ was shown when ‘its people combined to defeat the Kaiser’ (I did not know then that he might be a relative). I went on to make this point:

  British justice, envy of the world today, dates back to 1215, when King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Its main clause is the basis of British law today. It states that: ‘No free man shall be taken, or imprisoned, or deprived of his property, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, save by the lawful judgment of his equals.’

  There, at this young age, I was unconsciously piping a principle I would later intone in Commonwealth courtrooms around the world. That of course would have gone over the heads of my schoolmates and their parents – and probably myself – when enunciated in my unbroken Pommy voice in the Eastwood Odeon in 1957.

  4

  Striving to Achieve

  The attraction of being in an opportunity class was that your card was marked for onward transmission to a selective school – in my case, to Fort Street, where a Dettman relative had once been a celebrated headmaster. But by the time my turn came, the New South Wales Education Department had changed its policy, and kids in my year were streamed off to a new and very unselective school that had just opened in Epping, a suburb just north of Eastwood. My parents were inconsolable and offered to pay for me to go to Sydney Grammar, the city’s very top private school, where another Dettman had once been a headmaster. I refused. I would like to think of myself at age eleven a precocious progressive, firm in my support for state education, but this political principle had nothing to do with my decision. I simply worked out that I could spend an hour longer in bed if I went to Epping Boys High School. I went to a state school out of youthful laziness, not youthful idealism.