A Big Hug from the Prime Minister

What revolutions we Australians have watched in what Doctor Johnson would have called “publick manners”. Does this reflect some significant change in the deeper reality of human personality so that, deep down, we feel differently about our neighbour? Or are manners simply the trivial froth floating on life’s surface, mere fads and fashions drifting this way and that from year to year, startling in their variety, but not really worth our serious attention?

Certainly the changes have been spectacular. Women’s skirts moved steadily upward from below the knee towards the now barely sub-perineal. Look at one of those well-covered-up beach photos of the 1920s and 1930s, and try to imagine a bikini-girl strolling casually among them. (You’d have to look quickly: the poor darling would certainly have been arrested within minutes.)

Look carefully at any Australian city street scene of the same period. If you can find a man not wearing a hat, you have very good eyesight.

Well within my memory, if a funeral happened to pass along the street, you quickly took off your hat and stood quietly until the last car in the cortege had gone by. Nowadays, such a gesture would look extremely odd. But its impromptu occurrence used to be an everyday reminder of our common humanity and shared mortality; we were better people for it. What manners show on the surface reveal to some extent what lies beneath.

One of the most striking changes has occurred in the conventions which are now acceptable (or expected) in the public expression of grief. Born in 1923, I was brought up in the doctrine of the stiff upper lip: a proper man didn’t cry or break down; words, however deep their sincerity, might yet be spoken briefly, and even gruffly; appropriate body contact was one firm handshake, or a brief pat on the shoulder.

Women were more readily allowed a weep, preferably behind the closed bedroom door. Vanity set one limit to their indulgence of feelings: “I look so awful with my eyes swollen, and my nose all red from sniffling.” With a touch of powder and lipstick came also a touch of gentle stoicism.

My father died when I was thirteen. I had loved him dearly. From earliest years he had taken me on fishing trips; we sometimes lunched (coffee scroll and fruit jelly) in Coles’ cafeteria, when he knocked off work for the Saturday half-holiday then allowed to most city office workers. Occasionally we made exciting visits to the dim stores in exotic Chinatown, where he knew some of the merchants.

Such a blow was a heavy one for a boy. My family told me the facts in a gentle but not a “damp” fashion, and we all got on with it. Most vividly I recall the kindness of the local Glen Iris barber, Jack Hazen, where dad and I went for our fortnightly haircut. (“Boys Sixpence”.) I was uneasy the first time I had to make the visit alone. Would Jack Hazen mention Dad? What should I reply? As he settled me into the chair he pressed three firm pats on my left hand, picked up the clippers and got to work in the normal way. So that’s what men did! The pats on the hand had sufficiently established human solidarity and sympathy, and that was enough to go on with. I felt deeply comforted and matured.

During the war, if you lost a mate, you were likely to be too heavily preoccupied with your own survival for any quick or elaborate show of grief. But when you got into your blankets there was private thoughtfulness. A field burial party was never a light-hearted singalong, but a quiet reserve seemed to be the appropriate and respectful atmosphere.

Repression of emotion today is widely condemned: “Let it all hang out; don’t bottle it up.” I prefer the dignity of earlier days. Perhaps the change began with the prime ministerships of Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. When his election defeat was announced in 1983, Fraser appeared very close to bursting into tears. To me, this signified only that he was a sore loser. Hawke wept openly at the news of the Chinese communist government slaughter of the students in Tiananmen Square. His wild exuberance when yachtsman-swindler Alan Bond won the America’s Cup was an equal collapse of gravitas, this time for pleasure. Both occasions amounted to no more than a display of the vein of crassness which always threaded the Hawke personality.

If we are to judge by what we see on television, whenever Kevin Rudd ventures out among the public, citizens have to be pretty nimble to avoid being hugged, embraced, double back-patted, tear-bespattered or (if sufficiently small and unprotected) sat upon his knee. This is very brave of him; does he not fear catching, from every fresh huggee, a dose of the flu, or the measles, or maybe something even less attractive?

All this kiss-kiss, of which we saw a prime display in the recent Victorian bushfires, is to catch the camera. Convinced Christian though he is, don’t tell me that Mr Rudd’s endowment with the milk of human kindness is enough to succour every soul who crosses his path. Besides, we should not forget that the record of kisses throughout history is by no means unblemished. The prelude to Christ’s crucifixion was a (suitably cash-subsidised) kiss from Judas; Oscar Wilde warns us against the homicidal kiss of the coward.

Kisses and caresses are exchanged between those who love each other. Politicians—butt out!

My article in last November’s Quadrant was an admonition to the Governor-General, Her Excellency Quentin Bryce. It had the damned cheek to offer suggestions as to how our first female viceroy might choose to shape her course in office, to the best advantage of the Commonwealth, and to her own eventual record of service to her fellow Australians.

In general terms I urged Her Excellency to remember always that she was now the head of the Commonwealth, its first citizen. It was no longer open to her to enter into controversy on public affairs, nor to push her own ideas on—say—social reform, however worthy and generous these might be in themselves. I reminded her of the awful example of one of her predecessors, Sir William Deane, who seemed to think he could at one moment get down and dirty in the political bearpit, and then straight back into the dignity and detachment of head of state.

I reminded her also of another predecessor, Paul Hasluck, whose term, so long as our Constitution lasts, will remain a model for a successful governor-generalship. He also wrote the short and simple textbook on the subject—his forty-seven-page pamphlet: The Office of Governor-General. It’s all she needs to know.

My article drew an encouraging number of letters and comments, both from friends and acquaintances, and from people concerned about public affairs who were not known to me personally. I thank all of them.

At first Her Excellency’s dignified representation of us (for example, in France, at the Villers-Bretonneux war cemetery) seemed to augur well. But now (for example, her costly and faintly off-colour African tour, and her summoning of Commonwealth department heads for personal briefings) it seems we may have a head of state who has got off her constitutional chain. Hostile media coverage and public controversy might soon face her with the choice of reforming or resigning.