Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  The day itself went off well. There were the usual stunts – ‘keep our city clean’ demonstrations beside the horses of mounted policemen, breaking ancient by-laws against swimming at Circular Quay (fortunately, it was a hot day), and the money raised for Inala (about $250,000 in today’s money) was a record. It had been augmented by the ‘ransom’ paid by a radio station for the return of broadcaster Mike Walsh after a ‘friendly kidnap’. Maybe next year, I suggested, we could abduct Bob Rogers and John Laws (unlike Mike, they were vociferously in favour of Vietnam) and not return them?

  I was elected president of the SRC in the final term of 1966 and my tenure began harmoniously: the ABC filmed my address at a ceremony in the Great Hall for a Four Corners episode on education.1 I wore my mortar board while speaking (a breach of academic protocol) and I mispronounced the word ‘orgy’ – no doubt because I was not indulging in any. I did by this stage have a regular girlfriend, Francesca Macartney, who lived near Dobroyd Head, which has the most romantic view from a high cliff over the Heads of Sydney Harbour. We would contemplate the starry heavens from my father’s Valiant of a late evening, until puerile policemen would sneak their paddy-wagon behind us and switch their lights on to high beam. Once, I parked the car at midnight a little too close to the cliff’s edge, over which it partly slid and needed tow-truck recovery the next morning.

  Taking over the Union board had been easy compared with the next great battle, which was against the university itself, to ensure that it took student concerns into account in major decisions. Australian universities in the sixties were run by powerful administrators responsible to the vice-chancellors: student representation on committees and disciplinary tribunals was unknown and unwanted, indeed feared. ‘Student power’ had erupted on American campuses, the slogan originating in the free-speech movement at Berkeley and spreading like wildfire along with anti-Vietnam protests. The vice-chancellor at Sydney, Sir Stephen Roberts, saw it as a dangerous threat to his authority, and to that of all vice-chancellors. He was ready to nip in the bud any form of US-style protest. So when the first challenge to his absolute power arrived in early 1967, in the unlikely form of a postgraduate student, Max Humphreys, organising a sit-in at the Fisher Library to protest against an increase in fines for overdue books, Roberts and his star chamber – called the Proctorial Board – grossly over-reacted. They suspended Humphreys for a year, without any form of due process.

  It may seem bizarre that a revolution should begin as the result of a fine for overdue books. Nonetheless, what Humphreys was objecting to was a 400 per cent hike, imposed arbitrarily. And what soon became the real issue was the high-handed and obviously unjust behaviour of the proctors. Humphreys had undoubtedly been present at the sit-in, which had disbanded peacefully on the arrival of the Yeoman Bedell – the absurd Oxbridge name given to those we students termed the ‘campus cops’ – sixteen armed guards commanded by our main enemy, Deputy Principal Harold Maze. He was the head of the administration and the real power behind the vice-chancellor, and he regarded students as inconveniences who should put up or be shut up. When Max the next morning attempted to distribute a hastily written pamphlet protesting against the fine increase, Maze had him arrested by the campus cops and dragged to his office, where his pamphlets were confiscated and Max was charged with ‘gross contempt of the university authority and inciting such contempt in others’. I tried to remonstrate with Sir Stephen, a nice enough old man who chain-smoked with trembling hands, but he remained adamant: he had been to a vice-chancellors’ conference where they had all agreed on the need to prevent ‘student power’ from taking hold and he had a weird sense that history had destined him to be the first to stop this menace in its tracks.

  As SRC president I accompanied Max to his hearing before the Proctorial Board – Roberts and the deans of four university faculties. The hearing was a farce – we arrived to find his accusers, Maze and the librarian, taking morning tea with the ‘judges’. They refused me permission to call witnesses who had been present at the sit-in and whose testimony would have refuted the charge that Max had incited them. We were ushered out – while Maze and the librarian were asked to remain in order to ‘advise’ the judges. They returned, half an hour later, with their sentence: Max, for his contumely, would be ‘rusticated’ for a year.

  The Far Left began to mutter about the need for sit-ins and occupations of university property. They called a lunch-time meeting on the front lawn, and to their – and my – amazement, several thousand students turned up with banners demanding ‘Justice for Humphreys’. I stood there, undecided, while Hall Greenland, ever the opportunist, revved up the angry audience to various forms of violent protest. I realised the opportunity really belonged to the SRC, so I grabbed the microphone and solemnly pledged that it would fight the university to reinstate Max Humphreys, but any violence had to be postponed. I kept speaking – a long diatribe against the Proctorial Board and the need for student representation on it – until 2 pm, by which time I knew the audience would have to melt away to attend classes. They did so, seemingly content with my promise that the SRC would fight the university and win. But how?

  When I made that promise, I was thinking about the law. I had not been studying it for long, but I had picked up enough knowledge to realise that it could rectify injustice, even at a university. And I had by this time commenced my articles of clerkship at Allen Allen & Hemsley, the most prestigious (or so it described itself) law firm in Sydney. The partner I was working for thought it would be fun to sue his alma mater – so long as I did all the work, and we found a QC prepared to take it on. The silk who accepted the brief with great pleasure was Gordon Samuels, a witty and learned Englishman who had cut his teeth debating at the Oxford Union against Kenneth Tynan and was a dab hand at civil procedure, in which he was a part-time lecturer at the Law School. His name on our pleading was calculated to strike fear into the vice-chancellor’s heart, and it did.

  Sir Stephen and his proctors – all eminent professors in disciplines other than law – had no defence to our claim for the reinstatement of Max, and the last thing they wanted was a trial which would expose their ignorance and unfairness. They offered to settle by restoring Max after a ‘retrial’, at which he would merely be reprimanded. I drove a harder bargain – we wanted two seats for students on the Proctorial Board and on other key university committees. Sir Stephen gave in – paying the SRC its legal costs and cancelling the increase in library fees. Both he and Harold Maze were ridiculed, not only by the Left but in right-wing journals like the Bulletin and Quadrant, while the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that the Quad be turned into a ‘penitentiary for naughty students’. This was a crucial learning experience for my future: ‘lawfare’ could win battles for just causes, on behalf of people with no other kind of power.

  The ‘Humphreys Affair’ was my SRC’s finest hour. I am all in favour of student protest, including, as a last resort, occupations and sit-ins – but not if they can be avoided by sensible compromise or, as a second-last resort, legal action. The importance of the action we took was that it created a precedent: it served notice on all Australian university administrations that they must deal with students fairly. I had come to university expecting to find a community of scholars, but had found instead a community organised largely in the interests of its professors and administrators. Students were to be seen but not heard. We forced Sir Stephen to resign as a result of our legal action: when his replacement arrived – an emollient economist who’d come from Manchester University – he made a point of including me and my successor, Alan Cameron, in his counsels.

  I like to think that this period in student politics did force the university’s ‘community of scholars’ to include scholars in their community, even to respect them. In my ‘president’s welcome’ to new students in the university handbook in 1967, I sought to explain why tertiary education should be highly prized:

  It may provide you with beliefs – in humanity, tolerance, the worth of
learning – which will last a lifetime. Perhaps the first friend you make here will be an Asian student, and you may wonder about the honesty and sanity of an immigration policy which excludes coloured people from a permanent life in Australia, or a South Africa which practises white superiority. Perhaps you will study criminology, compare murder statistics and laugh bitterly at a premier’s crusade to hang a prisoner ‘for purposes of deterrence’. Or you may research the history of South-East Asia, and conclude on the evidence that Australia’s military presence there is not justified. These beliefs you will form are likely to be strong. They have fired many with a determination to change the status quo, and moved some to demonstrate. I hope that university will teach you to tolerate, or even to follow, those who do.

  The surprise, reading those words half a century later, is that they could ever be thought radical. In Australia in 1967, incredibly, they were.

  Soon enough, our triumph had the practical result of requiring the appointment of two student proctors to join the board for its next big case: ‘Who threw the tomato at the governor?’ The governor was the imposing Sir Roden Cutler, a VC winner no less, who had come to campus to inspect the university regiment. He had lost a leg in the course of winning his Victoria Cross, which did not stop him supporting conscription for Vietnam where many more legs, and lives, were being lost. That justified, perhaps, a demonstration against his visit, though not the act of someone in the crowd who had hurled a rotten tomato, accurately, at his medal-bejewelled chest. But who? The indefatigable Sergeant Longbottom, charged with policing student demonstrations, came up with the tiny figure of Nadia Wheatley, a friend of Meredith Burgmann (which was the main evidence for Nadia’s guilt).

  I was appointed a student proctor, along with my friend Joe Skrzynski, to advise the distinguished professors of Medicine and Science and Engineering. They certainly needed advising – we could hardly believe how insouciant these great men were about the rules of evidence, and how anxious they were to convict someone – in this case, young Nadia – to satisfy the media thirst for blood over the splattering of a war hero. We found it necessary to argue that the charge, which would have ended Nadia’s academic career, had to be proved beyond reasonable doubt – I even brought one of my criminal law books to read to them about ‘the golden thread of the criminal law’.

  The yellowing transcript of ‘The Trial of Nadia Wheatley’ reads amusingly today – most of the dialogue is between Joe and me and Nadia’s representative, Jim Spigelman, by then SRC president. Every so often a proctor complains – the dean of Medicine says he should be transplanting a kidney and the dean of Politics says he should be giving a lecture on politics – but here they were, being lectured by Jim, a future New South Wales chief justice. Still, that is what you get when you try to do a job that should be left to real judges, if to anyone. Eventually Nadia was acquitted and went on to write prize-winning books for children and an acclaimed biography of Charmian Clift (although she failed to track down my mother, Charmian’s teenage friend).

  One benefit of life in student politics was to participate as delegates to the National Union of Australian University Students (NUAUS) conferences, held at different campuses around the country, and most often upstairs in a Melbourne pub. Here, my generation of politicos would be impressed by our elders – Michael Kirby, for example, and Gareth Evans, who puffed a pipe and pretended to be Ben Chifley.

  One enduring friend I made was John Bannon. I came across him first in an inter-varsity debate in which he was proposing ‘Vice is nice’. He turned up wearing a colourful waistcoat, smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking a bottle of Barossa red, which he had drained by the time it was his turn to speak. He did so fluently and wittily, to win the debate for Adelaide University. I was nineteen, he was twenty-one, and I admired his panache and showmanship. We bonded at conferences over the next few years over a shared love of Gilbert & Sullivan: in capital cities throughout the country we would find a piano and a willing pianist, and with a few colleagues as chorus sing through the G&S songbook until the early hours. He had a lovely light baritone which masked my tunelessness, and we enjoyed many nights of innocent merriment. My daughter, when a radical student leader at London University, would tease me by asking, ‘What did you do in the sixties, Daddy? Were you arrested in an anti-Vietnam demo; were you on the barricades with the students in Paris in sixty-eight?’ I could only reply, ‘No, darling, I was up late singing Gilbert & Sullivan with John Bannon.’

  My friendship with John earnt me a small footnote in South Australian history – my part, as it were, in his political rise. NUAUS was an unimportant union but it did have an elected full-time president, from which office you could jump from the tiny toilet of student politics to the large cesspool of the Labor Party. The candidates in 1967 were John and Tom Roper, a member of my own delegation. The smart money was on Tom – the other universities were evenly divided, but he would obviously win because Sydney as the largest uni had seven votes and Adelaide only three, and no university delegation had ever voted against its own delegate. But G&S bonding goes deep. The choice was ‘captain’s pick’ and I called my delegation together. ‘Tom is a great comrade, and he’ll make a very good state minister. [He did – I was good at hypotheticals.] But there is something special about Bannon – he’ll obviously become premier of South Australia, but he might become the first prime minister for our generation. Sydney will vote Bannon.’

  Sydney did, which put John over the top, and the rest is history. Well, South Australian history, at any rate. I attended John’s funeral in 2015 and still think that South Australia’s gain was Australia’s loss.

  The defence of students arrested in anti-Vietnam rallies was often funded by Gordon Barton, an ebullient former student who had used his fortune made in trucking to found a political party – the Australia Party – which pushed for economic liberalism, social libertarianism and the nation’s troop withdrawal from Vietnam. It was a welcome sign that ‘small-l’ liberalism was alive and kicking, against a political and media establishment that was (as Harold Holt promised) ‘all the way with LBJ’. There were pockets of disquiet in strange places. After one massive rally, at which Sergeant Longbottom’s goons excelled themselves by making hundreds of arrests, I received a call from John Kerr, then a federal judge. His son, Philip, had been arrested, and over tea in John’s chambers he wrung his hands over the Australian intolerance of dissent. ‘I’ve just come back from America, and there are many distinguished people who are opposed to Vietnam – why is that the mark of Cain in Australia?’

  I wondered whether he would support a strategy of me taking Phil’s case first and using it as a precedent for the others if he were acquitted. Kerr not only supported it but offered to come to court – his features as distinctive then as they were when he sacked Whitlam a few years later – and fix the magistrate with an intimidating glare, thereby helping him see through the police evidence. I thought this a bit much, although in a justice system obsessed with status I knew it might work.

  Kerr struck me in 1967 as genuinely progressive, although in later writings I used him as an example of liberal lawyers who had a fatal tendency to go weak at the knees when given access to power. Another example was Ramsey Clark, who when made attorney-general by LBJ proceeded to authorise the prosecution of Dr Spock for encouraging opposition to the draft. Yet another was Sam Silkin, the Labour attorney-general in Britain who initiated oppressive actions against journalists (my clients) under the Official Secrets Act. I detected in the minds of these men a certain craving to be accepted as ‘responsible’ by the establishment they had hitherto been happy to criticise. Their proclaimed commitment to civil liberties faltered whenever the security services told them – often mistakenly – that national security required an oppressive prosecution. The Phil Ochs folk ditty ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal’ neatly skewered the hypocrisy of ‘small-l’ liberals, like – I began to worry – me. So I decided to describe myself as a ‘Gladstonian liberal’, unwavering in carr
ying through domestic reform and taking humanitarian action against atrocities abroad (well, in his case, atrocities against Christians). William Gladstone did not, however, have to deal with the Cold War, or with ASIO.

  By this time, the CIA had me in their sights. In 1968 I received a strange letter from the US Embassy: would I care to apply for what they called a ‘Far-East Student Leader Scholarship’ – a three-month all-expenses-paid tour of America? I would – I was a student leader, Sydney was in what must have seemed, from the vantage point of Washington, the ‘Far East’, and I had never been out of Australia (other than to New Zealand, which didn’t count). I did not smell a rat, or have any inkling that this seemingly educational trip, run by a pleasant-sounding foundation in Vermont, was in fact a CIA front – part of its long-term plan to win friends and influence people to believe in the American dream, or at least to be wary of the communist nightmare. They were secretly funding, for this purpose, Radio Free Europe and Encounter magazine. (Its editor, Melvin Lasky, who later became a friend, defended taking CIA money – it prevented his writers, Europe’s liberal intelligentsia, having to earn their money by writing for right-wing propaganda sheets.) In any event, I was awarded the ‘scholarship’, apparently because I had been ‘spotted’ by the CIA as a future prime minister of Australia. The CIA made many mistakes in the sixties.