Enemy of Humbug

Among the big crowd at Paddy’s funeral and staying long at the subsequent wake were John Howard, Tony Abbott, several judges and legal luminaries, the deputy chairman of the Reserve Bank, numerous ex-editors and financial and other scribes. It was an atheist funeral, but George Pell, who was overseas, sent his good wishes. The chief speaker was Bill Hayden, former Governor-General and Whitlam minister. Another speaker was Peter Coleman, father-in-law of Peter Costello and a former Liberal leader in New South Wales, along with Frank Devine, a former editor of the Australian, and Marion Manson, formerly of the bohemian Sydney Push.

One who didn’t come was Paul Keating, who made the day even more remarkable with a vitriolic spray against Paddy in the Financial Review, calling him a liar and fraud.

Who was Paddy to deserve such a send-off? He had been a columnist and commentator for newspapers and magazines for nearly forty years and about as controversial as they come. He was editor of the Financial Review for some years in the 1980s and until shortly before his death had been editor for ten years of Quadrant, where he succeeded Robert Manne. There was another big ego clash there.

But Paddy was also a highly qualified economist, with higher degrees from both Sydney University and the London School of Economics. His non-journalistic jobs included a period as economics adviser to Bill Hayden—who became a great personal friend—during the Whitlam years. He was also for some years an economist with the Soviet Union’s Narodny People’s Bank in London—more because he happened on a job there than out of any ideological sympathy—though the shock value wouldn’t have escaped him. It allowed him to study part-time at the LSE.

Paddy was also a great character. He knew how to create drama about himself, but most of it came naturally. He reminded me a bit of Frank Knopfelmacher.

I wasn’t a close friend, but I was in his company quite a bit over nearly forty years, mainly in a pub-and-Chinese-restaurant sense and through the Financial Review and Quadrant. Friends who knew him a lot better than I assure me that he was really, despite being sometimes ogreish in print and pub argument, a very nice man: gentle, even a bit shy, kind, reliable and honourable. While he had a gargantuan appetite for beer, he was never an alcoholic or improvident or silly drinker.

He was best known in Sydney, where he grew up and lived and where the Sydney Morning Herald carried his column until four or five years ago. He also wrote for the Australian almost until his death, though in more recent years not regularly. The Age ran him for a while in the 1990s but dropped him. They didn’t like him—and he most assuredly didn’t like them.

He had a pretty acid pen but the controversy he stirred up—quite willingly—was mostly by saying in his columns or promoting in Quadrant contrary views on protected politically-correct subjects, such as feminism, Aborigines, progressive education and arts subsidies. For example, he said the more militant feminists should be called wimminists—to the horror of the Age office. His Quadrant sponsored a weekend seminar on the Stolen Generation, where people who knew what they were talking about strongly criticised as irresponsible the Bringing Them Home report. He gave abundant space in Quadrant to his mate Keith Windschuttle, to attack some of the received wisdom on Aboriginal massacres, especially in Tasmania. You can see why John Howard and he found common ground—but don’t forget that Bill Hayden had precedence at the funeral.

In essence Paddy saw himself as a zealous fighter against humbug—and he thought most of the humbug was on the Left, particularly in educational fields.

The making of a contrarian might be of interest. Though he was in most ways a quintessential Sydneysider, with his comfort zone in Balmain, Glebe and Chinatown, he was born in Melbourne, a few months short of seventy years ago. The McGuinness family had been in Victoria since before the gold rush, though one obituarist noted that much of the Emerald Isle flowed on through five generations. His forebears mined gold at Ararat and Stawell and his grandfather had a farm near Geelong, but later bought a wheat farm near Swan Hill.

Paddy reckoned that the Aboriginal activist Bruce McGuiness was kin—this was in the context of claiming, jokingly, that he had as much right to be considered an Aborigine as Geoff Clark or Michael Mansell.

Paddy’s father was Frank McGuinness, a journalist of some note. Part of his reputation was founded on his extraordinary girth and appetite for beer—like his younger son—and a few colourful exploits, including as a young man decking the editor of the Geelong Advertiser over a perceived injustice. But there was a more serious side. Frank went on to become one of Keith Murdoch’s stable of bright young men at the Melbourne Herald between the wars, along with friends and contemporaries like Frank Murphy, later editor of the Weekly Times for many years, and the writer Clive Turnbull.

Frank did the unthinkable for a Herald man and crossed over to Ezra Norton’s Truth group, where he edited Melbourne Truth. This was the prelude to going to Sydney, where in 1941 he was foundation editor of Norton’s new evening paper, the Daily Mirror. The Mirror became a bit of a rag in the end, but in the early days it was a respectable working-class tabloid—and commercially very successful.

One of Frank’s greatest achievements was at the down-market and derided Melbourne Truth. In notable editorials, he took the aggressive Churchill line over the Munich agreement of 1938. Melbourne and cities other than Sydney were extremely appeasement-minded, taking their cue from the Lyons government. Prime Minister Joe Lyons had become close to the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain over the abdication affair a bit earlier and accepted his conciliatory approach to Hitler. Lyons in turn was personally close to Keith Murdoch and was a frequent visitor to the Herald office. The paper reflected that view.

Another arch-appeaser was Lyons’ Attorney-General and aspiring successor, Bob Menzies, who had been to Europe on a fact-finding trip earlier that year. He accepted the view of the diplomatic establishment there that Hitler could be managed and should not be antagonised. Menzies in turn was close to Geoffrey Syme of the Age, which, high-minded as so often, also ardently promoted appeasement.

The ALP was more or less isolationist at that time, so appeasement hardly came into it there. I sometimes wonder whether Frank learned more valuable lessons about maverick politicians by reporting Victorian politics for the Herald between the wars than Menzies learnt in the diplomatic salons.

Frank died suddenly still in his forties—at a Sydney bus stop—in 1949, when Paddy was eleven. I don’t think Paddy ever got over it. The family on the farm at Swan Hill paid for him to board at Riverview, the elite Sydney Jesuit school, for some years, but funds dried up and he moved to the rival elite Sydney Boys’ High. Versions of this vary a bit, but the Jesuits apparently tried to keep him on a welfare basis but he refused. It is also said—an unconfirmed story—that he decked a Jesuit about that time over a perceived injustice to another boy. That was in the days before it was fashionable to punch teachers.

Paddy started drinking with the bohemians when still at Sydney High and according to one version turned up at a pub in his uniform. His first job was as a cadet journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald. He got the sack over a misunderstanding and refused to be reinstated. Instead, he began a brilliant scholastic career at Sydney University and later in London.

By his early twenties he was one of the younger members of the Sydney Push, a bohemian, libertarian but highly intellectual network of drinking and partying mates. He was on the fringes of the ALP and also an anarchist, with a communist sister. ASIO couldn’t work him out, including the massive intake of beer.

Mothers also have a formative impact. Paddy said his mother, though of mixed old Sydney stock, with a good whack of Presbyterian Ulster background, was the Irish nationalist who chose the Padraic Pearse name for him, after the radical nationalist of the 1916 Easter Rising. Paddy in turn named his own daughter Parnell, after the moderate Irish leader whose policy he much preferred. He was not as interested in Irish affairs as the name might suggest, though.

Mrs McGuinness was a famously feisty lady, into lots of causes, and she threw great parties for the rising bohemians and artistic and intellectual types when her children were young adults. One of her ancestors was John Macarthur, the visonary of the Australian wool industry but also fomentor of the 1808 Rum Rebellion. As early as 1805, Governor King called him the “perturbator” for stirring up infant Sydney.

It was a nice Paddy touch to die not only on Australia Day but 200 years almost to the hour since his great-great-great-grandfather marched on Govern-ment House in a coup against Governor Bligh over a perceived injustice.