‘I doubt whether anyone could get a speedy service from Telecom,’ he replied, to laughter and heartfelt applause.
My scholarship elicited some comment in the press about the selection of an ‘unorthodox’ candidate, by which they probably meant a state schoolboy who was not a rugby player. The main news of the day was about the Queen’s next visit: she would be sailing into Sydney on her yacht Britannia, and Princess Anne would be with her. There would be a royal luncheon on the boat, and to the usual array of state ministers always eager to be photographed with the royals were added a number of gold-medal–winning sportsmen, and the 1970 New South Wales Rhodes scholar. I was intrigued by my first gold-embossed invitation, and my republicanism notwithstanding I brushed aside my younger brother Tim’s insistence that I wear a political anti-pin – anti-apartheid or anti-Vietnam or anti-conscription, I cannot remember which. I was not going to exploit the royal visit, like everyone else. I was going to graze with the dinosaurs, and I did not want to frighten them off.
The guests were arranged in a semicircle in the Britannia drawing room for the meeting with the Queen. There were fifteen of us, and she stopped at each person to ask a few of her trademark questions: ‘Have you come far?’ ‘Isn’t the weather nice?’ I was at the end of the semicircle and watched her performance: the smile, for which she had injections to strengthen her cheeks, was a marvel. It would stay in place for five minutes, then it would start to slip. When it reached a certain level, she would make a movement with her shoulders, and literally hitch the smile up. The exercise was repeated a few times as she progressed around the semicircle. I thought her a real pro.
At lunch I was seated next to Princess Anne, and we discussed LGBTI rights. Seriously, forty years before that acronym came into being. Our topic was a recent English court decision in the case of April Ashley, who had started life as George Jamieson, joined the Merchant Navy, began cross-dressing and worked at a Parisian drag cabaret, had gender reassignment surgery, and became a female model. She wanted the gender on her birth certificate changed, but the judge refused. It caused a lot of controversy, and Anne was on the side of reforming the law to uphold trans rights. I suggested she might undergo a transgender operation herself so that she could inherit the throne (she was last in line below her wimpish younger brothers, Andrew and Edward). She quite liked this idea. If Charles did eventually lose the throne – by becoming a Methodist or Catholic or plant-worshipper of some kind – I thought then that Anne would make an acceptable head of state for Australia.
After the lunch, we were escorted out to the wharf for what was, for some guests, the really important part of the occasion: having our photographs taken for the gossip pages of the Sunday newspapers. I could scarcely believe I would be pictured in the back pages of the Sun-Herald along with the socialites I had pilloried and satirised for years. ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em,’ I joked to the Olympic swimming gold medallists on either side of me as we posed for the photographer, who assured us that the picture would be in the next edition. It was, I have to admit, with some anticipation that I opened the paper a few days later. The gold medallists were pictured all right, guests of the Queen on Britannia, but there was no sign of the man in the middle. The Rhodes scholar had been carefully airbrushed out of the photo: presumed intellectuals did not belong on Sydney’s social pages. It was a neat reminder of my nation’s real priorities.
At this time, a few months before my departure to Oxford, I made, quite unconsciously, my greatest contribution to changing Australian minds about human rights. I was preparing my final edition of Blackacre. My co-editor, John Carrick, and I had obtained a wonderful Bruce Petty cartoon for our cover; we had fine articles by Tony Blackshield, Upendra Baxi, Gordon Hawkins, Alan Cameron, Garth Nettheim, Gordon Samuels and even a contribution from Gough Whitlam; we had poetry from Les Murray and humour from David Marr. I had written an overwrought editorial attacking the Australian Law Journal and the Sydney Law Review for ‘intellectual shadow boxing, forever shying away from the social realities behind the pressure for legal change’.2 All I needed was a good controversy.
One of the most heated questions of the moment was whether Australian sporting teams, particularly rugby union and cricket, should be allowed to continue to play against racially selected teams in or from South Africa. Opposition came from small anti-apartheid groups, whose demands were dismissed by sports administrators and politicians alike, with the mantra ‘We don’t mix sport and politics’. In 1970, Australians were looking forward to the following year’s rugby tests – a rematch after the Wallaby tour of South Africa in 1969 – and then a Test cricket series between the two nations. That was when I bumped into James Roxburgh, a law student from my final year, who had played in the Australian rugby team on the 1969 South African tour. He said that he had been deeply shocked by apartheid, and expressed some qualms about playing again against the all-white Springboks. Maybe we could discuss it? He seemed keen, and then reluctant, and asked if he could bring a friend. In fact, he brought more Wallabies – Barry McDonald, Bruce Taafe and Paul Darveniza. I settled them down in the Law School Library and asked some questions.
The session lasted several hours, and the information they vied with each other to impart was chilling. Their four months’ experience of apartheid went beyond the segregated ‘whites only’ and ‘blacks only’ signs which met tourist eyes on buses, lavatories, hospitals, post offices, restaurants and park benches. These young men had witnessed the personal degradation of apartheid. The secret police had been on their tail whenever they attempted to meet non-whites. Whenever they played, the black spectators and ‘Cape Coloureds’ would be herded into the worst seats, behind the goalposts, where they would barrack loudly for Australia. The players were left in no doubt that South African government officials were using the Australian tour as propaganda, as an Australian endorsement of apartheid. They had discovered that not only were black sports stars prohibited from selection for international sporting teams, but they were denied the opportunity to participate even in rugby-club training. Darveniza put the case succinctly: ‘An Australian tour hardens existing attitudes and strengthens the hand of advocates of sporting apartheid, because it implies Australia’s approval of that system … You have to understand how big sport is there, how much it means to the country’s image.’
I came to the crunch – would they play against racially selected South African teams again? They later said they had not decided, before the interview, to make any sort of joint declaration, but when put on the spot were driven by the logic of their earlier answers to say ‘no’. It was a big statement – it would mean sacrificing their places in the next Australian side. But all of them said it, firmly and individually.
It was a decision that had news value, and the editor of the Australian got to hear of it (probably through his cadet journalist Jane Perlez, to whom I may have mentioned it on the bus …) and offered to publish it. The interview was given front-page publicity, and it shocked the Australian Rugby Union to the core. Its officials threatened to blacklist the young men and end their careers, and tried to suggest that words had been put in their mouths by some communist agitator. The boys stood by the opinions I had recorded in the interview and accepted speaking engagements to repeat them. For the first time, Australians were provided with information about sporting apartheid from those whose views about it deserved the greatest respect – players who had directly experienced it and had sacrificed their own futures in an attempt to end it.
The rugby tour went ahead without action by the lily-livered McMahon government, supported by the reactionary state premiers Askin, Bolte and Bjelke-Petersen. On the other side, the leader of the Labor Party, Gough Whitlam, announced that he favoured a ban on sporting contact with South Africa, and the leader of the trade unions, Bob Hawke, actually imposed one on the Springboks’ travel arrangements, forcing them to charter planes, trains and automobiles to get around the country. Peter Hain came out from England to inspire
the protests, and my dear friend Meredith Burgmann was in the forefront of the disruptions, showing extraordinary courage: she was dragged from the pitch by police, beaten up by angry fans and jailed by a benighted Sydney magistrate.
It took a great Australian sportsman – indeed, the greatest – to end the sordid business of supporting apartheid. Sir Donald Bradman was chairman of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket: he read the interview with the Wallabies and began a curious correspondence with Meredith, arguing out the case for and against sporting contact with South Africa. She seemed to convince him, because he cancelled the Test series due to be played in 1971–72, writing, ‘We will not play them until they choose a team on a non-racial basis.’ And we did not, until the boycott ended in 1991.3
In campaigning against racism in sport and the end of apartheid, as with so many other causes in the sixties, we were on the right side of history. It didn’t feel like it at the time: we’d grown up in a society with its mind firmly closed and a police-bashing in store if you wanted to open it too wide. Fast forward half a century, from the stultified Menzies era to our present multiracial, multicultural, more vibrant society, and perhaps we students can take some credit for the change, although success came in large measure because of the moral bankruptcy of the conservatives. Progressive reforms were welcomed by most and turned out to have none of the dire consequences our enemies had predicted. Dinosaurs still roam the Australian earth, with an inhumanity that has slowed progress on same-sex marriage and the constitutional recognition of our Indigenous people and on ending the suffering of refugees in offshore detention centres. They are, however, much less formidable than the opposition we faced in the sixties. Had we been vouchsafed, as students in 1967, a view into the Australia of 2018, we would have been amazed and delighted – there has been real change, much more than plus ça change.
Leaving Australia was always a matter of contemplating return – my generation did not have the despair with which some expatriates renounced the dreary country of the fifties. The leading silk at the Sydney bar, Bill Deane, offered me the chance to ‘read’ with him on completion of the Rhodes Scholarship, and I gratefully accepted. He invited me to dinner at his house, and showed me an Aladdin’s cave of books – his ambition was to become a novelist, rather than go on to be a judge. So, actually, was mine, and I watched his career with interest as he became instead a Supreme, Federal and then High Court judge and eventually governor-general. It is likely that his brilliant judicial career, exploring ‘implications’ in the Australian constitution favouring democracy and freedom of political speech, has been more important to the nation than any additions he might have made to its literature. The instinct of the cobbler, to stick to his last, is right for most of us. I have sometimes been tempted to do something different – to make my home on an island and write a novel; to become a TV chat-show host; to run a Fortune 500 company. The fact, sad but true, then hits home: I am nothing more or less than a jobbing barrister, and should content myself with that lot. It’s not a bad one.
But it can be a hard one. Bill pulled from his library a book for me to read on the voyage to England. It was QB VII, by Leon Uris, the lightly fictionalised account of the defamation case that was brought against him by a former Auschwitz doctor he had exposed in his earlier work Exodus. It contained one of the most glowing tributes ever to be paid to a member of the Bar: in the middle of the trial the author walks at midnight in the Temple, where barristers in London have their chambers, worried sick about the outcome which could lose him his money and his reputation. He suddenly sees the lights on in the room of his advocate, and is filled with awe at a professional who could so relentlessly dedicate himself to another’s cause. Gerald Gardiner, Lady Chatterley’s great defender, was that counsel. (His junior, later my friend and colleague, Louis Blom-Cooper, was burning the dawn oil.) Gardiner’s room was known as ‘the lighthouse’ long before Uris saw its beams and identified the obsessive commitment which is a barrister’s most overlooked yet most valuable quality. Did I possess it? The book left me in no doubt that the course I had chosen would not be easy, and that sacrifices made for a good client would need a different rationale when made for a bad one. That I had yet, in my own mind, to find.
And so to farewell. There would be no tears at my departure: brother Graeme was probably glad to be rid of me; brother Tim was excited at my prospects; and my parents were proud that I was leaving as a Rhodes scholar. My girlfriend seemed resigned – Francesca had, I suspect, a more reliable prospect in mind. There was one piece of parting advice, from my mentor Michael Kirby, which made an indelible impression. He took me aside and wagged his finger. ‘Let me make this prediction. You will stay in England and be a great success at the English Bar, until the day you appear in the highest court – the House of Lords. As you address the Law Lords, you will not be able to resist that temptation of yours to make a joke. And that will be the end of your career.’
I lived in fear of Michael’s Delphic warning for many years, and never made jokes when appearing in the House of Lords. But in 2010, when the Law Lords were transferred to the new Supreme Court and I was called upon to address them in their first case, I could not resist. I was appearing for The Times and The Economist and other papers in an appeal against secret justice – the use of acronyms to hide the identity of parties to litigation. As I came into the court I noticed its list for the next three months, full of ABCs and XYZs. So I began by saying, ‘Your first-term docket reads like alphabet soup.’
It wasn’t a very funny joke, but it caused a flutter in the audience and the sound of withdrawn breath. It was hard to tell the judicial reaction until they handed down judgment some weeks later. It began, ‘Counsel challenged us in opening by saying that our first-term docket read like alphabet soup …’ It was official: the Law Lords, now they are Supreme Court justices, appreciate humour. The case is known as the ‘Alphabet Soup’ case, and it has served as a precedent for the occasional joke from the Bar table, although not yet for a funny one.
8
Must Rhodes Fall?
I remember the streamers – the great multicoloured tangle of ribbon that encased ocean liners as the voyage began. The Rhodes Scholarship paid only for a sea passage, which is why I found myself, in August 1970, on a castellated tub which would take me to Durban, so I could see a little of Africa en route to England. The ship stopped for an afternoon in Melbourne, where I went to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to observe the currently ‘hot’ ex-Rhodes scholar, by then ACTU president and advocate Bob Hawke, in action. His tactics were to call for regular adjournments, whereupon he would repair with his clients to the next-door pub and quickly down a schooner or two. As the afternoon wore on, his advocacy actually improved although his clients became too sozzled to notice.
In Adelaide for a few hours, I had the first of what turned out to be forty-eight years (and still counting) of enjoyable lunches with my South Australian Rhodes scholar counterpart, Julian Disney. By the time we reached Perth the ship had lost a stabiliser, but that did not deter the shipping company from sending us, wallowing and listing, across the Indian Ocean. Never again have I been able to contemplate a sea voyage longer than, say, the ferry ride from Piraeus to Mykonos.
South Africa was exactly as described by my rugby interviewees. Petty apartheid was everywhere, in segregated buses, park benches and urinals, although in Durban the facilities were triply segregated – for ‘coloureds’ as well as for blacks and whites. I’d had a stoush on television, a few weeks before departing Sydney, with Dr Christiaan Barnard, the smooth-talking South African playboy surgeon who had done the world’s first heart transplant. He denied my allegation that his country segregated not only hospitals but also ambulances. Of course it did, and I took photographs proving (if only to myself) that he had lied. I was invited to dinner by some wealthy liberal contacts: the hostess and her friends were clever and cutting about the stupidity of the Afrikaners and their apartheid polic
ies, but I couldn’t help noticing the absence of black faces – until she tinkled a little silver bell, whereupon black waiters and maids emerged to clear the plates and serve the next course. Apartheid seemed a congenial system for white liberals, offering endless opportunity to laugh at the Boer while enjoying the benefits of cheap labour. In time I would return to South Africa to meet liberals risking their lives to dismantle a system that brought benefits they could no longer accept. But I had little time before my first Oxford term and had to crack on, overland to Nairobi on a Contiki bus that was conveniently making the journey.
My first stop was in the Matopo Hills, to contemplate the grave of Cecil Rhodes, invariably known to his beneficiaries as ‘the Founder’. It was a serene beauty spot, where his ghost could survey hundreds of miles of the colonised country that then bore his name – Rhodesia. I did not actually pay my respects – I knew enough about the Founder to realise that he was too devious ever to qualify for one of his own scholarships (he had written home to his mum about the joys of having ‘land of your own, shooting when you like and a lot of black niggers to do what you like with, apart from the fact of making money’). I might, however, have had a sneaking suspicion that the trip could earn a few brownie points at Rhodes House. Perhaps a photo beside the Founder’s remains might induce the Warden to extend my scholarship for a coveted third year.
Rather His Own Man Page 17
