Abbott, Australians and Oxford

Nothing reminds us of the historic links between England and Australia like an unsuccessful Ashes series. But arrive in Heathrow after a long-haul flight, as I did some months ago, and you quickly discover that those historic links seem more like ancient history. As the citizens of Germany, Italy and Poland are hurried through the priority processing of the European Union, the remainder are shuffled through to a village of the damned labelled “non-EU”. I had arrived, like nearly a quarter of all visitors to the UK, as a student. It appeared, from the size of the gathering queue, that most of those other students had arrived just moments before I did. It was some hours, and a round of unusually gruff questioning, before I pulled on my coat and dragged my suitcase onto the London streets. For an Australian with British forebears and an appreciation of the history of the Commonwealth it was a somewhat deflating experience, akin to returning to the house where you grew up to find that your parents have turned your old room into a storage space.

I was following a well-trodden path of Australians who have spent a year abroad studying at the University of Oxford. Travelling to the city by bus from London, I reflected on why it was that Australians continued to pack up their lives and travel to what is a fairly cold and grey island to advance their studies. Hadn’t Oxford itself, as the travel writer Bill Bryson once claimed, become somewhat irrelevant now that the demise of empire had eliminated any British need for colonial administrators who could quip in Latin?

My first task, on arrival, was to haul my year’s supply of books and clothing across town to my allocated college. Oxford colleges, which currently number thirty-eight studded across the town, are walled, self-contained cities set up for scholars; a surviving example of the Middle Ages version of a “gated community”. Many of the colleges can trace a medieval history. The university remains highly decentralised, with the colleges taking much of the responsibility for teaching their students. Entry to a college is through a “lodge”, a small doorway in the high stone walls policed by a bowler-hatted man known as a “porter”. Even now I can’t help but feel somewhat awestruck when passing through a college doorway, fighting to resist the urge to a kind of forelock-tugging deference.

My college was founded in 1458. Magdalen (pronounced for now forgotten reasons maudlin) is known for a particularly long-standing tradition of training Australian lawyers. At its centre a hulking, orange stone, neo-classical “New Building” dates to 1750, or several decades before the first settlement in Australia. The college fields, now home to a herd of deer, once kept the cavalry of Charles I during the English civil war. In some towers around the college walls small slits designed for archer’s bows remain.

“Why,” I was once asked by an Irish friend in a bookshop, “do all of you Australians linger at the history section.” Part of the answer, I think, is that the lack of history on our continent gives many Australians a hungry appreciation for the history of the places that they visit. Yet for many history is a sideshow, the main attraction of Oxford being the promise of a future practising politics.

The university shares, with Cambridge, an almost extraordinary influence in the creation of political leaders. Some twenty-six prime ministers of Great Britain have been educated at Oxford, thirteen at one particular college alone (Christ Church). The current Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister were educated at Oxford and Cambridge respectively. Lest one think that this can be reduced to an issue of class, the current leader of the Labour Party also shares an Oxford education.

That no equivalent phenomenon exists in Australia is, I suppose, a reflection of a more egalitarian society. If pressed few Australians could, I suspect, state with any confidence the university attended by the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. I recall a brief period in 2002 when my old university, Monash, happily propagated the fact that the next prime minister of Australia would for the first time be a Monash alumnus (this being the period when Simon Crean and Peter Costello were facing off as the successors to John Howard). Typically, however, the university, or indeed the secondary school, attended by candidates for public office in Australia is rarely the subject of public attention. 

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that Oxford has no effect on politics in Australia. This was demonstrated to me on my first day in college. I was wearing, as required by college rules, a long black academic gown over my collared shirt and jeans. I entered the main house of the college to be greeted by a senior fellow waiting on the dark red patterned carpet. He motioned towards a grand piano which, inexplicably, was being used as a desk for a large blue book where all college members are required to sign their name. On hearing I was from Melbourne, he replied, “That’s very interesting, I was just talking to Malcolm the other day.” I nodded politely and then realised he meant Malcolm Fraser. He seemed a little surprised that I had no equivalent acquaintance with the twenty-second prime minister of my country and the conversation was steered back to the weather (not that, in any event, one readily admits to knowing Malcolm Fraser these days).

The Fellow equally, I reflected later, could have been referring to Malcolm Turnbull. Or perhaps Kim Beazley, Gareth Evans or Bob Hawke, all of whom also attended Oxford before a career in politics. Of these Hawke retains, intriguingly, a pervasive presence around the university. An example sits in the centre of Oxford, down a twisting medieval lane in a pub known as the Turf Tavern. Visiting, I pushed my way through the bar and into the small beer garden in the back. There, in this old pub that can trace its history back to taxes levied by Richard III, is the mark of Australia. A small plaque, decorated with the Australian flag, testifies to the “historic” moment when Hawke drank a yard of ale in a time that entered the Guinness Book of Records.

Hawke, as is well known, accomplished this feat (such as it is) whilst studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. A significant part of Hawke’s political success was his ability to set off his popular (but perhaps unpredictable) larrikinism with two pillars: his wife Hazel and his time at Oxford. Hawke’s success does, therefore, make it all the stranger that the current Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has a history as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford that is almost never mentioned. His biography, when related by the press, is usually bookended by the lazy journalistic tropes of his time studying at a seminary before jumping to parliamentary “attack dog” for the Liberal Party. Abbott, unlike Hawke, has left no trace at Oxford, with no sign even of his book Battlelines in the prodigiously large university library.

Abbott himself seldom makes any mention of his time in Oxford. It is as if he left no impression on the university, and the university no impression on him. To have allowed himself to be depicted in the intellectually barren climate of federal politics as unthoughtful may be a mistake that Abbott will come to regret. All the more so, because Abbott demonstrates, at times, a deeply philosophical approach to government. Battlelines itself was under-rated as a piece of political thought and Abbott, through his writings, contributed significantly to the intellectual weight behind the monarchist cause during the republican referendum in 1999. By contrast, Julia Gillard has studiously committed herself to never providing an intellectual case for anything. Abbott may do well to learn from Hawke and recognise the importance of showing an intellectual side to the electorate, a softer foil to the aggressive and sporting persona that was successful in carrying him to the brink of success in the federal election last year; to demonstrate a little light as well as shade. 

With this in mind, I visited the Oxford Union, the university’s own training ground for future politicians. The Union is a society built around a large Victorian parliamentary debating chamber in the centre of town. Once a week it hosts students, often dressed in ball gowns or white tie, for a debate where they are joined by public figures or intellectuals. I visited on the night of the annual “no confidence debate”. There three members of the current government and three members of the Opposition visited to debate with students the motion, “This house has no confidence in Her Majesty’s government”.

This was the first debate of the year and an excited crowd of students had gathered outside. The large red-brick debating chamber, shaped a little like the bow of a ship, glowed from the light inside and the entire student population of the city seemed to have emptied into the main hall. The scene inside was the Palace of Westminster in miniature. The two sides of politics spoke in turns, with the students followed by the politicians. It soon became clear, as the speeches went on, that the only real difference between the students and the politicians was age: the same clothing, the same pattern of speech, the bad puns, the provocation of a theatrical call for order. The crowd watched the new ruling class of Britain emerging—a kind of parliamentary version of those Darwinian pictures that show apes standing up as men.

When the floor was opened to all speakers, a budding Australian politician (frustratingly I never found out his name) took to the floor. Dressed in a blue suit with long cuffs hanging over his hands, he began a long walk to the dispatch box, with the slow lop-sided confident gait of a veteran. Reaching the front, he paused, affecting a world-weary lean on the dispatch box, glanced into the middle distance and sipped on a glass of water. The twenty-year-old theatrically put away his scribbled notes and began, “It occurred to me on the way here this evening …”

At the end of the debate each person in the chamber is required to vote, in British parliamentary fashion, by exiting through one of two doorways marked in archaic English as either supporting or rejecting the motion. It was this voting practice that earned the Union national criticism when it carried the motion that “This house would not fight for King and country”, a devastating signal from Oxford in the years building towards the Second World War. On the night I attended, it was the doorway marked “nae” that carried the debate, a majority of university students demonstrating their confidence in a Conservative-led coalition government, an outcome probably unimaginable on any Australian campus. 

But politics can only go some way to explain the appeal of Oxford to Australians. It is certainly not the weather. Before arriving, Oxford was described to me as having a “maritime climate”. This sounds rather pleasant, but what is meant is that it is wet and windy, with a typical day on the High Street feeling like the pounding one would receive standing on the balcony of a lighthouse. When the weather is fine, however, the mood of the city and its people changes. In this miserly climate, every extra degree of temperature is greedily counted, until on the rare day of twenty degrees, vast numbers of students appear in the streets, chatting and laughing as happily as millionaires.

On such a day it is impossible not to get somewhat caught up in a sense of possibility. A few mornings ago the weather hit an unseasonal high. The incredible volume of British air traffic was, for once, visible and the jet streams left trails of clouds that made the sky a white-and-blue lattice. I walked towards the centre of town down my favourite street, New College Lane. All along the street, sitting on top of college walls, are grotesque carvings of figures as diverse as baboons and cardinals, giving the city a fantastic quality. Continuing on, I passed the house where Halley stood on the roof and predicted the return of his comet. I noticed for the first time an orange stained-glass window, behind which a tenor choir sang at such volume that passers-by had to raise their voices to be heard. After a bend in the road, the lane narrowed between high stone walls, before opening up to the wedding-cake view of two white towers: All Souls College, the most elite college in the university, whose architecture gave rise to the expression “ivory towers”, a byword for the exclusivity and isolation of academia. Behind this, visible for the first time, was the iconic blue dome of the library at the end of the street, James Gibb’s famous reading room, possibly the most iconic building in Oxford.

It was a fantastic, storybook morning. But I turned off before the street emptied onto the library. It was not a morning for studying. I was visiting, as it happens, the Turf Tavern. And here the conversation turned, as it often does, to the question of why Australians keep leaving home and coming here.

Writing of his time in Cambridge (or “the Other Place” as it is described in a particularly irritating form of Oxford patter), Clive James said he knew it was time to leave when he realised he had become an old man in a place where people come to find themselves. He meant, of course, that university is a place where the young come to create their own personalities. This fact makes returning to university in one’s mid or late twenties, as many Australians in Oxford do, a strange experience. By this age, life has taught you not to take yourself quite so seriously.

These rules do not seem to have the same force in Oxford. Once while walking down the High Street I was nearly knocked off my feet by a man furiously pedalling on a unicycle. The only thing more ridiculous than a man on a unicycle, is of course, a man riding a unicycle whilst regarding his pastime with utter importance. On another occasion I walked into the eighteenth-century chapel of The Queen’s College to hear the sound of a grand piano being played by obviously expert hands. Inexplicably the music stopped. I looked through the cloisters to see a young man, of perhaps only twenty, fiercely concentrating, the breaks in his playing caused when he pulled a pencil from behind his ear to scribble on the sheet music in front of him. This, I suppose, is the point, the sublime and the ridiculous: the rare chance to regard your own interests, whatever they are, with utter seriousness. In part, I’m sure, that’s why Australians have kept coming for nearly the entirety of the short history of our country. Alongside the history and the politics, Australians make the trip to Oxford for the chance to become again, at least for a year, the most important character in their lives.

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