Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  Our disapprobation of Mr Menzies went deeper than his feather bedding of private and Catholic schools, or his support for censorship and for White Australia. We were, after all, ‘Ming’s kids’, at school from 1952 to 1966, the era throughout which he bestrode the country’s politics like a colossus. As we grew older, more knowledgeable and more in touch with what was going on in Britain and America, we were simply coming to realise that he was as much a fraud as the Wizard of Oz in the movie. He stood for nothing and made no positive impact on our lives or on the world. The drivers of Australia in the fifties and early sixties – the Snowy Mountain scheme, Commonwealth scholarships, expanded (white) immigration from Eastern Europe – were all Labor initiatives. Menzies’ McCarthyite attempt to ban the Communist Party was beaten back by H. V. ‘Doc’ Evatt and the High Court. He mainly seemed interested in staying in power – for which purpose he prevented the rise of any obvious successor in his own party. He was a Melbourne lawyer with a Melbourne Club mentality (no blacks, no Jews), who had bequeathed us no vision, no inspiration and no ideology except a grovelling devotion to British royals (he even wanted the unit of our new decimal currency to be named the ‘royal’, not the dollar) and a complacent continuation of a dull national life without colour or controversy.

  We were not attracted to Labor – its leader Arthur Calwell had his own demerits (not least, his affection for White Australia) and Gough Whitlam had not yet emerged to offer fresh hope. My primary school trip to Canberra to behold the Parliament in action had not impressed me – the only memorable moment had come when left-winger Eddie Ward called Billy Wentworth ‘bomb-happy Bill’, which everyone seemed to think was a great joke.

  And to cap my disappointment with Menzies, the leader whose rounded vowels had sounded so superior to those of ‘the Doc’, came his introduction of conscription. Not, as most think, to fight Vietnam, but to sabre-rattle and threaten Indonesia. Menzies never really understood Asia, or showed much interest in building effective bridges.

  As for the politics of the school playground, Epping was a small, struggling school without many clubs and societies, and I could not find anyone who would bother to help set up a student council. The headmaster, H. E. (Hector) McGregor, was as good as they came in state schools: a grave and serious man with a prominent hearing aid, he had published a book on English grammar that we all had loyally to study (I could never thereafter split an infinitive). It had a permanent influence on my conversations with, mostly, girlfriends and my children: ‘Don’t say quite unique – something is either unique or it is not’; ‘Disinterested means impartial, not uninterested.’ Kathy dubbed me ‘Conan the Grammarian’.

  Like most ambitious teenagers, I was dogged by the question – from teachers and relatives and everyone I met – of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had by now abandoned my more youthful ambitions, but the school was good at careers advice, subjecting pupils to numerous ‘aptitude tests’– and it turned out that my perfect occupation would be that of an orchestra conductor. I liked the idea, but I could not read music. I had lost interest in maths, which ruled out accountancy or the preferred profession of actuary. I began to wonder whether my facility at debating meant that ‘lawyer’ might be an attainable career choice.

  At age fourteen I did a speed-reading course and obtained a list of the world’s best books. I borrowed them from libraries and began to enjoy the pleasure of literature uncondensed (unlike in the Reader’s Digest annuals in our house). The most impactful was Great Expectations, the story of the convict Magwitch who returns from Botany Bay to confront, in a memorable scene, his unwitting beneficiary at Pip’s flat in the Middle Temple – by a coincidence that could be called Dickensian, the very flat allocated to me after I became a Master of the Middle Temple forty years later. The figure in the book who most intrigued me was the lawyer, Mr Jaggers. He is not one of Dickens’ popular or inspiring characters, but I was gripped from the moment he makes his first appearance, to explain the presumption of innocence to bar-room readers of a tabloid who have presumed the guilt of a man arrested for murder. He remains in the book a figure of self-controlled power and professional purpose, dedicated unemotionally to saving the necks of at least some of the wretches at the Old Bailey who manage to pay his fees. Mr Jaggers was the first lawyer I met, and he was someone, I thought, whom I might like some day to be like.

  It was censorship that finally determined my career. In my last year at school I got hold of a book that influenced me profoundly: The Trial of Lady Chatterley. The Menzies government, not content with banning Lawrence’s novel, had banned this account of its trial, a Penguin Special, on the grounds that a transcript of the celebrated court case might ‘deprave and corrupt’ Dame Pattie and the wives of Australia’s ruling classes. This idiocy provoked a courageous Sydney bookseller to arrange for friends in England to transcribe by hand every word of the book – legal arguments, witness cross-examination, judge’s summing-up and all – onto thirty-two tightly spaced ‘air letters’, the fastest means of communication in those days. The pages entered Australia as personal mail and so eluded the censors. The Trial of Lady Chatterley was then reconstituted and printed in a samizdat edition, beyond the jurisdiction of Federal Customs, and a copy (sold in a few brave Sydney bookshops) fell into my schoolboy hands. What I found exciting was not the surplus of four-letter words, or the erudite debate over D. H. Lawrence’s place in literature, but the conduct of the trial by the book’s defenders, QCs Gerald Gardiner (soon to be Labour Lord Chancellor) and Jeremy Hutchinson. Their court tactics replaced those of Lew Hoad in my pantheon, and by the end of my final year my ambition had settled. I was now a prefect, with a particularly cheeky first-year class to oversee (and no power to cane them, as they usually deserved). ‘What’re you going to be when you grow up, sir?’ they asked me in assembly line.

  ‘I’m going to be a barrister, at the Old Bailey in England,’ I replied, to my own surprise as much as theirs. They burst into disbelieving laughter. ‘Some hope, sir,’ said one. ‘How many pimples you got on your face, sir?’ said another. I smiled: thanks to censorship, I had found my vocation, just as (many years later) I found Gerald Gardiner to help with the Spycatcher case, joined my learned friend Jeremy Hutchinson for censorship trials heard in the Old Bailey, and accepted the invitation of Penguin Books to write a foreword to a new edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley.1

  Meantime, some cultural interests were developing. I could neither sing nor play an instrument, and had no knowledge of music other than the Top 40, which I would listen to with Auntie Peg – ‘Volare’ and ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?’ were her favourites. One day I walked into the assembly hall when a rehearsal of Trial by Jury was in process, and was smitten by the wittiness of the words and the rum-te-tum of the music. I became an instant Gilbert & Sullivan fan. Records were usually too expensive for me, but providentially an EMI cut-price operation, the World Record Club, offered some G&S operas that had been recorded in East Germany (to avoid D’Oyly Carte copyright) by good British casts. I soon knew all the words, and moved on to the sexier Offenbach, in clever translations rendered by the Sadler’s Wells opera company. I was excited when the company brought their version of Orpheus in the Underworld to Sydney’s Tivoli Theatre and I persuaded our Latin teacher that she had to attend – she was quite shocked that in Offenbach’s version the reason for Orpheus turning round to Eurydice (and thus losing her to hell) was not the magnetic pull of his love but her thrust of a candle up his posterior.

  Love of operetta led to love of opera – a matter of logic, I think, rather than any genetic inheritance from Joe Kroll. For my twentieth birthday my mother took me to see La Traviata, so I could thrill to the trill of Joan Sutherland, who was accompanied by a striking and actually quite slim Italian tenor named Luciano Pavarotti, in the days before he became, in every sense, great.

  Orchestral concerts never enthused me, perhaps because attendance was compulsory for school concerts at the Town Hall, but al
so because they did not have words. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra had previously had one of the world’s best conductors, Englishman Sir Eugene Goossens, to whom Australian music owes two crucial discoveries: of Joan Sutherland (working in a typing pool) and the need for Sydney to build an opera house. He was, alas, another victim of censorship – disgraced and deported after the vice squad (egged on by the Daily Mirror) arrested him at the airport for importing indecent photographs secreted beneath a score of Salome. When he claimed that his butler must have done it, by packing some continental porn before he left Europe, he was confounded by the fact that the face on some of the photographs was that of Rosaleen Norton, an habituée of Kings Cross who had introduced him to what they called ‘sex magic’. It was a perfect tabloid story – the grand maestro brought low by the ‘witch of the Cross’. Although her magic was no more than the practice of fellatio, this struck puritanical Sydney as demonic. The finest pervert ever to raise his baton to conduct the Sydney Symphony was expelled from our shores.

  He was followed by Sir Bernard Heinze, whom even I could recognise was mediocre, but Joseph Post, who deserved a knighthood but never received one, did make that orchestra almost sing. He was my model, when I briefly contemplated the career my school advisers had recommended.

  Theatre offered much more thoughtful entertainment. By good fortune, a close friend, Dan Lunney, had a younger brother, Brendan, who had won the part of the Artful Dodger in a stage version of Oliver! His mother took us to see it, and to other shows, including a memorable Saint Joan played by the remarkable actress Zoe Caldwell, who hooked me on drama forever. My own debut came in the school production of Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly, in which I played the manager of a bank robbed by the outlaws. I had to appear without trousers (the gang had arrived while I was in the bath), so my mother made sure the shirt I would hastily put on was long enough not merely to cover my manhood, but almost to cover my knee-caps.

  The performance was received well enough for the darkroom gang to reprise it at the fifth-year farewell – the revel at which we fourth years would entertain the year above us before they did their Leaving Certificate. I rewrote the script, believing that my version would be understood and enjoyed as satire. The fifth years roared with laughter as teacher after teacher was lampooned, and when the gang was summoned next day to the headmaster’s office, we naïvely believed it would be to receive his congratulations. Instead, H. E. McGregor barked that the play was obscene and blasphemous and a criminal libel on staff members, who were deeply upset and threatening to sue. This tirade ended, McGregor fingered his cane and asked, ‘Who wrote it?’

  There was a very long and (for me) rather painful silence – would any of my mates dob me in? Eventually one of them stepped forward and said, ‘We all did, sir.’ It was the first time I knew what friendship and solidarity really meant.

  But something was wrong – I didn’t want the cane, but I did want the writing credit. My ego got the better of my discretion and I owned up. It turned into a Monty Python moment as we all vied for punishment: ‘We all wrote it, sir.’

  ‘No, I wrote it!’

  ‘No, we all wrote it.’

  ‘No, sir, I wrote almost all of it.’

  McGregor gave up and shelved the cane, but ordered me to go around to every teacher in the school and offer a grovelling apology.

  School, like everything else in Australia, broke up for long Christmas holidays. I spent these at Harrington. It took six hours, with the state of the roads at the time, to make the journey, with a break for lunch at a place called Bulahdelah. At a café there on one trip I had the quintessential Australian experience of peeling back the cheese topping on my veal steak to watch half a dozen flies emerge and slowly flutter away. It is the kind of memory that lingers. Others were happier, especially of the oysters my father could expertly extract from the breakwater rocks, the prawns we would pick up in nets at night and the fish I learnt to catch and would bring back to my grandmother to cook for dinner. I came to know the breaks in the seaweed surrounding the sandbanks where flathead would lazily bask, the rocks from which I could cast at sunset in hope of bream, and, best of all, the beach where I could wade into the waves and pick up some of the sand whiting feeding beneath them. There were big rods stacked underneath my grandparents’ home, with hooks and sinkers that I learnt to tie on to nylon lines, and the pleasure almost made up for the daily sensory torture of sitting on the unsewered dunny.

  Catching fish was exciting – the choice of bait (I could thread a mean worm), the feel of the bite, the jerk to hook the fish, the careful reel-in to ensure it did not escape, my grandma’s delight at seeing my catch and her expertise at boning and cooking it. But as every good fisherperson knows, the true pleasure of the sport can be experienced without catching fish. It comes from the feeling – as you watch hypnotic patterns in the water while fingering your taut line – that you are doing something, even though you are not doing anything except wave watching and waiting for the bite that never comes. It was a common dream of my grandparents’ generation of Australians to ‘head north’ before they reached three score years and ten, retiring to fish in the sunshine, and I shared it at the time.

  Holidays at Harrington put me in touch with old people, and really poor people. My grandparents were happy enough in a home they had bought and part-rented: I would play bridge and cribbage with them and listen to the cricket – the wonderful commentaries of John Arlott and Michael Charlton and others who knew not only what they were talking about but how to talk, unlike the current crop of ex-players who drive me mad with their fatuities. As for the town poor – the aged and the disabled, who would struggle to the post office for a pension that barely allowed them to live – I felt some stirring of political feeling. In a land of plenty, with a mining boom beginning, the care of the old and unfortunate – I called them ‘down underdogs’ – should be a priority for all politicians and political commentators. It wasn’t and it isn’t – I am still annoyed at how little politicians and the media (especially the ‘commentariat’ I read in the Murdoch press) care about the poor. The Calvinism that has shaped the Protestant religion holds that although you cannot earn your way to heaven, concern for the poor is a sign of your election as a saint; lack of concern is an indication that death will mean a one-way ticket to Lucifer Land. For Australian Christians, the interesting thing about dying – if there is a God, that is – will be to watch well-known politicians and journalists going the other way.

  Much as I would like to believe in such supernatural phenomena, I must say that my scepticism about religion first came from compulsory lessons in it at school, inflicted on all state pupils for one period a week and taught by the local minister of their denomination. These poor priests, untrained in how to teach a class, were ragged relentlessly. Epping at the time was full of religious cults, but my mother always warned me of the cruelty and stupidity of extremists. She had suffered in her youth from the grip of the Plymouth Brethren, and she brought me up to be wary of Bible-bashers who sought their own salvation by spoiling everyone else’s fun. There were quite a few of their progeny at Epping High School, and I felt sorry for these poor kids who had to sit huddled in a circle at lunchtime lest contact with the rest of us would spoil their ‘exclusivity’ with God. Perhaps their self-imposed ostracism did not do them much harm – in later life some went on to join the Epping branch of the Liberal Party, as a way of inflicting their prejudices on the wider population.

  We were not allowed to study politics at school – I did English and history honours, together with economics, French, Latin and maths. Nevertheless, at age thirteen I developed a short-lived political theory, which I would propound to my friend the librarian. The trouble with democracy, I explained, is that so many dumb people get to vote (my evidence for this was the ‘donkey vote’, by which many electors simply voted down the card, on which candidates were listed alphabetically, so that parties would strategically select candidates with names beginning with A or B). My
juvenile solution was simple: we should not deny the vote to the unintelligent, but we should give an extra vote to all those with an above-average IQ. ‘I don’t think that’s likely to find favour, Geoff,’ said the librarian over-kindly.

  From my earliest high school years, my favourite day of the week was Saturday. At the time, people worked on Saturday mornings and my father occupied offices in the Commonwealth Bank in Market Street, opposite the northern end of the Queen Victoria Building. This was my mecca: I would catch the train from Eastwood with my father, raid his office fridge, then take myself to visit the City of Sydney library on the second floor of the QVB. It had a vast range of books, all covered by cloth glued with a substance which gave off an aroma that had the effect of a drug. In some strange way, I think it turned me on as I sniffed the covers of my borrowed books before setting off for the heady delights of George Street.

  First stop was the State Theatre, which had a weekly program of Movietone newsreels, interspersed with The Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin. The black-and-white coverage of the world was narrated histrionically by Jack Davey, his voice rising to repeated crescendos as he spoke of war, communists, car rallies and (invariably) the royal family. I vividly remember the white flowers on the coffin of Ethel Rosenberg, executed with her husband, Julius, for spying. Her children were my age and I wondered – I still do – how Americans could bring themselves to kill a mother. Executions were always good news for Movietone: they were covered with grisly fascination. But comedy invariably followed, or Australian news that would end with a joke or a homely salutation: the rest of the world was there to be gawked at, but should not be allowed to intrude on our love for cricket and football, the Royal Family, car rallies and Mr Menzies.

  Out in the sunshine, I would walk along George Street to press my small face against the windows of shops selling model aeroplanes – how I longed for the money to buy one – and then cross the road to Dymocks bookshop. In this shop, at age thirteen, I committed my first – and only – crime of dishonesty. There was no one looking on the first-floor display of Latin textbooks, and a racy translation of Catullus, at the cost of 1/6d, was just sitting there. I had the money, for once, but became overwhelmed by curiosity – how would it feel to break the law? It felt guilty, of course, and the buzz of excitement as I liberated the book fizzled out as soon as I left the shop without being apprehended. The guilt did not come because of the deterrent effect of the criminal law, or from remorse, or the eighth commandment, but because I had done something of which my mother would have disapproved. That has always been my ethical standard, as I suspect it is for so many others of my generation. In my case, it even stops me from fibbing on my tax return.