Peter Ryan

Peter Ryan MM, who was born in Melbourne on September 4, 1923, died in Melbourne on December 13, 2015. He wrote his column in the back pages of Quadrant from March 1994 to October 2015.

 

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Robert Murray

 

Peter Ryan’s Life (I)

 

Peter Ryan, who Quadrant readers knew as their favourite acerbic essayist for more than twenty years, was one of the last of the post-war generation of Melbourne intelligentsia.

One of his grandfathers was an Irish Catholic suburban tailor and the other a Methodist lay preacher. His father Emmett (“Ted”) Ryan, an oil company clerk and Victorian Football League player, died when Peter was thirteen, oldest of three brothers; the death left a lasting pain. He was pleased that his father had been in the army unit that “wrested” (in the language of the day) New Guinea and neighbouring islands from the Germans in 1914.

He went to school at nearby Malvern Grammar, but left in order to earn some money for his family. The Second World War plucked him at eighteen from the ranks of junior clerks in the Victorian public service into intelligence-gathering behind the lines of Japanese-occupied Papua New Guinea. This became the subject of his first (and recently republished) book Fear Drive My Feet.

This arduous, dangerous work brought a Military Medal, a mention in dispatches, a job teaching elementary Papua New Guinea language such as Pidgin to young servicemen, a commission, and a place in Colonel Alf Conlon’s wartime Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs.

Still only twenty-one when the war ended, he joined the many talented ex-servicemen studying at Melbourne University. He was active in the Labor Club and the fight against communist attempts to take it over—an experience that confirmed him in anti-communist views, which gradually became more conservative. His university friends included later writer, academic and Age editor Creighton Burns and archaeologist John Mulvaney.

As many have found before and since, good arts degrees do not automatically produce an income. Peter spent the next few years in advertising, small-scale publishing and public relations.

In 1962 Melbourne University Press, looking for an ideas man and innovator, appointed him as Director. He kept the finances healthy and published many important and successful books before he retired in 1988. He wrote about these years in his book Final Proof (2010). Later he worked for the Board of Examiners for the Victorian Supreme Court until the early 2000s.

He was particularly proud of MUP’s Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, which had been his own idea. He had a lasting affection for the country of his dangerous youth.

The controversy of which he was proudest—and which most upset academia—was his attack in Quadrant in September 1993 on the quality of Manning Clark’s celebrated six-volume History of Australia, one of MUP’s best-sellers. MUP had already committed to Clark for the series when Peter took over, and he did not feel very proud of the later volumes.

His 2004 book Brief Lives celebrated the lives of fifteen of his friends, fourteen Australians and one New Guinean, from a prime minister and a Nobel laureate to a wood-cutter and a doorman. Peter’s gift for friendship led him early to journalist and author Clive Turnbull, one of Peter’s many older friends, who introduced Peter to the chummy ranks of the intelligentsia and sometime bohemia. Turnbull was one of Keith Murdoch’s talented “bright young men” in the 1930s Melbourne Herald group and post-war columnist, critic and “man about Melbourne”.

Peter’s lunching, partying and drinking mates in this and other circles included the Asianist commentator Peter Russo and Sydney Daily Mirror editor Frank McGuinness, father of the late Quadrant editor Paddy McGuinness; and authors Michael Cannon (author of The Land Boomers and other books), ex-Melburnian Cyril Pearl (Wild Men of Sydney) and Supreme Court judge Jack Barry. Bruce Davidson (The Northern Myth), agronomist and witty scourge of the rural expansionist and Whitlam minister Al Grassby, was his brother-in-law.

Friendship with wartime diplomat and later Professor W. Macmahon (“Mac”) Ball and Creighton Burns helped him land the MUP job. Sir Paul Hasluck, Governor-General from 1969 to 1974, was another friend, and Bob Santamaria yet another of his eclectic band; they often lunched at the old Café Latin. The historian Geoffrey Blainey was one of the younger of these friends.

Peter’s early columns included the mischievously whimsical “Melboune Spy” in the fortnightly Nation, published by Sydney Morning Herald Finance Editor Tom Fitzgerald, yet another Ryan mate. The Australian, the Age and the Australian Financial Review were other publishers over nearly sixty years of Peter’s witty, incisive and erudite columns and articles. One Age column made Paul Keating famously apoplectic.

The Quadrant column was the pride and joy of Peter’s last years, when he could not get out much. Shortly before he died he was sharpening his pen for use in Quadrant on the showy columnist, author and republican Peter FitzSimons. Peter Ryan did not think much of FitzSimons’s military history or his republicanism.

As readers would know, Peter had an eye for humbug but was personally friendly, helpful and unassuming.

He had the good fortune of a happy marriage, to “Davey”, lasting nearly seven decades.

 

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Geoffrey Blainey

 

Peter Ryan’s Life (II)

 

Peter Ryan was a scholarship boy at Malvern Grammar in suburban Melbourne when his father died. Peter left school to take a lowly position in the Victorian public service, and on some weekends he walked on his own in the bush and on the logging tracks near the Great Divide.

His eighteenth birthday came just before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On enlisting, he was surprised that his poor eyesight was not detected by the doctor who examined him. Posted to New Guinea, he began—still a teenager—to make dangerous treks in tropical mountains and swamps where, by radio, he reported on the troop movements of the Japanese invaders. In the course of a long mountainous patrol he and Captain Les Howlett were tricked into entering an isolated village. Japanese soldiers, already hiding there, shot Les dead.

Chased by bullets, Peter hurried across a creek and hid in deep mud. “For a few minutes all was quiet,” he wrote, “but soon I heard the Japanese calling out to each other, and their feet sucking and squelching in the mud as they searched.”

Bruised and hungry, he eventually reached an outpost manned by Australian troops. In the New Guinea campaign he was one of the youngest to be awarded the Military Medal for bravery.

The book he wrote about his experiences, Fear Drive My Feet, is now recognised as one of the classic Australian war memoirs. When it was first published in 1959, he flew to Port Moresby to escort to Melbourne his wartime colleague, Sergeant-Major Kari of the Papuan Constabulary, to celebrate the event. Kari’s wish was also to inspect Pentridge prison where “the white fellows” were locked up.

Peter began to study history at Melbourne University, where he took out an honours degree in arts and became politically active, Like most ex-servicemen at the end of the war his politics veered more to the Left. After working in the advertising industry he spent four years as public relations manager of Imperial Chemical Industries, which was one of the biggest manufacturers in Australia and New Zealand, and dominant in explosives. He then served as head of Melbourne University Press for a quarter-century.

I was on the Press’s board in the early 1960s and sometimes watched him at work. If a manuscript excited him, he did a lot of the editing, and was meticulous without being a busybody. In choosing from the pile of incoming would-be-books, he became a first-class judge of whether it would be widely read or simply lose a lot of money. At the same time he believed some works were so important that, win or lose, they had to be published. One was the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the first volume appearing in 1966. Within two decades there were twelve tall volumes, narrating more than 7000 lives, and making it infinitely easier for almost everybody to do research in Australian history.

Peter was the instigator, the general editor, and the publisher of the massive Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, which in 1972 revolutionised the accessible knowledge on that land, soon to become independent. His contributors and consultants were a formidable team, and their work on the scientific topics as well as on history and government was widely praised. It was the kind of reference work which should have been kept up to date. There were no volunteers for such a huge task.

Fascinated by words and vexed by their misuse, Peter wrote eight books and maybe 2000 essays, book reviews and articles for newspapers and journals, the last appearing in Quadrant when he was dying. Many were in praise of friends. Amongst the favourites were William Macmahon Ball, the political scientist, and Sir Paul Hasluck, the politician and governor-general, who Peter valued as an MUP author of “immense loyalty, discretion and tact”.

On any topic Peter wrote exactly what he thought. Our family knew Peter and “Davey” for nearly sixty years, and his firm published four of my earlier books, but he did not hesitate to write publicly that he had no time at all for one of my books and little time for this or that chapter in another. Maybe he was right. You had to respect his even-handed forthrightness. He more than made up for some of his denunciations with kindness. He showered praise on his staff who deserved it. Incidentally he ran a lean and orderly ship as a chief executive.

He became especially a target of controversy in 1993 and 1994 after he opened fire on leading historian Professor Manning Clark. And yet Peter’s writings generally displayed affection more often than distaste. For his homeland his loyalty and affection remained intense. As for his social preferences some were unusual. To visit Britain and Europe was never his wish—Port Moresby was far enough. Restaurants he liked, usually a table for two or three, and in the years when the long lunches reigned in Lygon Street in Carlton his were amongst the longest.

In sport he took the faintest interest. Mentally he retreated when the talk turned to football, though his father had played League football with Richmond and St Kilda. Nor were racecourses one of his venues, though he liked horses. Successively he rode Cloud, Tinkerbelle and Bonny on the small hill-farm he and “Davey” set up at Rainy Creek near Heathcote.

He hesitated to join clubs and societies, for he was companionable rather than gregarious. He took no part in an Anzac Day march until 2000, when he found himself deeply moved by the clapping crowd, the flutter of migrant children’s flags, and his own memories.

In 1947 he married Gladys “Davey” Davidson from Tambo Crossing in East Gippsland. They had a son, Andrew, who farms in northern New South Wales, and a daughter, Sally, who lives in Melbourne. The three could only marvel at the stamina, will to live, and indestructibility of Peter as he was knocked about in old age by injuries and illnesses. A few years ago, just after a major operation, he was found escaping from the hospital. At the age of ninety-two, close to death, he still had writing tasks in hand.

 

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John Poynter

 

Peter Ryan the Publisher

 

I first heard of Peter Ryan while still at school. My slightly older sister, a friend of Peter’s future wife Davey, told me of the exploits in student and public affairs of this boldly individual young ex-serviceman. I entered the University of Melbourne in 1948, the year he graduated, and those of us straight from school could not but be aware that the gap in experience between us and those who had been to war was more like a generation than a few short years. Later, after reading Peter’s Fear Drive My Feet, I realised how extraordinary his wartime experiences had been. Months behind enemy lines in New Guinea, and later service in Alf Conlon’s extraordinary intelligence unit, could not but shape character indelibly.

I got to know Peter after 1962, the year he was recruited to help the Vice-Chancellor draft a submission to the newly-created Australian Universities Commission, and then to take charge of a re-organised Melbourne University Press. Both tasks were exercises in the management of crises, of which the university had an increasing number in the 1960s. How firmly the new Director managed the then-ailing enterprise I learned when I agreed to write a biography of Russell Grimwade; after a decade studying English paupers, a rich Australian philanthropist promised a change of scene.

Neither Peter nor I had met Grimwade, who had died in 1955, but he knew and I learned that Grimwade’s will envisaged that MUP would set up the equivalent of Oxford’s Clarendon Press on his magnificent two-acre Toorak property, Miegunyah. His intention depended on his wife Mab’s will as much as his own, since he had given her the house as a wedding present decades before. She outlived him for eighteen years, so the 1960s were a time of protracted expectation for both the university and MUP. Meanwhile the circumstances of both, and of Victoria, changed rapidly and radically.

Russell Grimwade proved an interesting subject to write about, broad in his skills and interests and with the time and means to pursue them. The skills ranged from industrial chemistry to photography and cabinetmaking—his testamentary “wishes” included setting up MUP’s printery beside his workshop—and the interests included collecting Australiana (notably Captain Cook’s Cottage) and the conservation of the natural environment, and especially of native forests. Peter and the MUP Board agreed that the biography should appear as No. 1 of the new Miegunyah Press, with a little financial support from Mab but none yet available from Russell’s estate. Peter later gave a typically jocund account of the book’s launch in Miegunyah’s great hall by the university’s new Chancellor Robert Menzies in 1967, “the one and only time the Press and the house achieved anything like a physical consummation”. None of us foresaw that two decades would pass before Miegunyah Press No. 2 appeared in MUP’s list.

I joined the Board of MUP in 1974, the year Peter consummated a lifelong passion for “the islands” with the launch of The Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, a major editorial initiative he had begun seven years before and worked on full-time to complete. As the Board’s Chairman from 1976 until 1987, a year before Peter’s retirement, I learned how economically the Director and a handful of trusted colleagues managed the organisation, how meticulously he briefed the Board and its various committees, and how shrewdly he negotiated legal agreements, whether with landlords of Press premises or with such august bodies as the ANU. I also learned how trenchant his judgments could be. Towards Melbourne University itself, and to the academic world of the day generally, he was always ambivalent, and was especially proud of the MUP authors he discovered outside it. In those years I learned too that he liked to keep his worlds apart, the weekdays as an urban man of business who enjoyed good lunches and dinners, and the weekends as a teetotal hard-working farmer and family man. Only his dog, it seemed, shared both worlds.

I saw less of Peter after we had both retired from the university payroll, he to write more outspoken columns and I some over-large books, though whenever we met we resumed conversation as if little time had passed. In 2010 Quadrant Books published Final Proof: Memoirs of a Publisher, his succinct and forthright account of his twenty-six years at MUP. He rightly chronicled a succession of achievements, while characteristically inviting disagreement from his usual critics. One chapter I found wanting was “The Miegunyah Promise”, his account of the university’s difficulties in fulfilling Russell Grimwade’s testamentary wishes after Mab’s death in 1973. We had disagreed at the time, Peter naturally wanting the bulk of any eventual largesse for the Press to manage and blaming the university for the years of delay, while the rest of us, facing unexpected complexities before and after the eventual sale of Miegunyah, also recognised other claims, especially for the care and conservation of the collections the Grimwades bequeathed to the university.

In 2012 I joined Ben Thomas and others in preparing a full account of the Grimwade benefactions, and the outcome—Miegunyah: The Bequests of Russell and Mab Grimwade—was published by the Miegunyah Press in December 2015. Peter was invited to the launch; I expected him to disagree with my chapter describing the years of our joint involvement in the saga, though confident he would approve the appropriately handsome design of the volume. I did not see him at the launch, and before I could ensure that he had received a copy of the book I was told of his death. Like many others I feel deprived, of a critic as well as a friend.

 

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B.J. Coman

 

Peter Ryan at Rainy Creek

 

You could describe him as the universal man. Like Banjo Paterson’s Mulga Bill he was “good all round at everything”. He could strain up a fence, recite a bit of poetry by James Hogg or Andrew Marvell, give you an account of the customs of New Guinea tribes, run off a list of local noxious weeds, and then pull down a weighty volume from his huge library and talk with authority on Dr Johnson, Horace, or (dare I say it) Banjo Paterson. It was not wise to get him started, at some late hour, on Sir Paul Hasluck, whom he admired or, for that matter, Manning Clark, whom he admired less!

And, to continue a theme, somewhat like Banjo Paterson’s Man from Snowy River, his was a household name for dozens of hack writers like myself, for men and women of high office and, especially, for readers of Quadrant over the past two decades. I will leave it to others better qualified to speak of Peter Ryan’s literary achievements and, rather, briefly mention his love of the Australian bush and its people, and his feeling for all aspects of Papua New Guinea. I should add that these comments are based on only a few meetings with Peter and I certainly cannot claim any long and close friendship. Nonetheless, such was the character of the man that even such brief encounters made an indelible impression.

Other than his devoted wife (known universally as Davey) and family, Peter’s great love was his farm, “Rainy Creek”, near Tooborac, not all that far from where I was brought up. Here, he ran a few pampered livestock including an aged horse. From the veranda of the house, you looked out from the northern edge of the Cobaw Ranges over a vast inland plain and, on a clear day, you could (with the aid of field glasses) just make out the shimmering tree-line of the Murray River. Peter and Davey loved the place. Some of his best descriptive writing, in my view, came from his country experiences. I particularly remember an account in Quadrant of the smells emanating from the local grocer’s shop (in the days when there was a local grocer) which immediately transported me back to my own childhood. There was also a memorable account of one of his more eccentric rural neighbours.

I do not know of any prominent literary figure in Australia who could relate to ordinary rural Australians like Peter Ryan. A visiting woodcutter or produce merchant would never guess that this same man, leaning over the farm gate, was once Director of Melbourne University Press, author of many fine books and a war hero. He wore all his achievements very lightly.

I happen to know the man who built the house at Rainy Creek, and he was astounded to learn, years later, just how famous Ryan was. He related to me the manner in which he got the job. At the time, he was doing some building work at the Heathcote Catholic church. Peter Ryan drove up one day and made himself known as a local. “Do you build houses for Protestants and atheists?” he asked. Keith House (for that was the name of the builder) answered in the affirmative, adding that, even for Catholics, “a quid was still a quid”. And so the house was built. They became firm friends and I had the good fortune to drive Keith House and his wife over to Rainy Creek for a memorable reunion not long before Keith died.

Peter’s other great love was Papua New Guinea. His accounts of patrol officers and other Australians serving in New Guinea in former times will be well known to Quadrant readers. He had strong views on the positive role of Australia in Papua New Guinea affairs. I think he would have claimed that the granting of independence in 1975 was too hasty and, however well-intentioned, not in the best interests of the local people. As always, his feelings here were based on his own intimate knowledge of the Papua New Guinea people and his love for them. I think the recent history of Papua New Guinea bears witness to Peter’s concerns. The environmental disaster of Ok Tedi, for instance, is difficult to envisage under an Australian government administration.

It is usual in valedictions of this sort to end with, “He will be sadly missed”. And, indeed, we will miss his physical presence. But so much of Peter Ryan’s character went into his writing that, in a sense, you can bring him back anytime you wish, simply by pulling down one of his many books and immersing yourself in it. And there he will be—almost as large as life itself. Horace was right: Non omnis moriar.

 

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George Thomas

 

Peter Ryan the Columnist

 

Although Peter Ryan was a work colleague at Quadrant for more than twenty years, I met him in person no more than half a dozen times. For the first five years or so Peter wrote his column longhand and faxed it to us at the Fitzroy office, usually from the Flemington post office near the house he lived in during the week. At first I had no contact with him at all, but when on one occasion we printed “cheery grin” where he had intended “cheesy grin”—an insignificant error, fortunately, but an error nonetheless—he decided that his handwriting was not quite up to the job, and asked us to send him a proof of each column. Occasionally arising from the proof there was something he wanted to discuss with me over the phone.

It was only when the Quadrant office moved to Sydney and I took over the preparation of articles at home in Melbourne that we began the monthly chats that I grew to look forward to so keenly. Peter on the phone was the same man as Peter the columnist: cheerful, wise and witty. But there was only so much he could include in his columns, mostly for reasons of space, sometimes for reasons of propriety, and he liked to talk about the things he had not included in that month’s column, or had just not written about yet. He was an inexhaustible source for Australia’s social, cultural and political history from the 1920s to the present, and with his lifelong capacity for friendship and his wide and deep reading he could talk, as he wrote, fascinatingly on any subject he chose. He never seemed to be at a loss for a subject for his column, and given reasonable health he might have continued for many years to write with the sparkling freshness of his final two columns on Brian Fitzpatrick.

I am glad his final columns displayed Peter at his best, and glad too that when he died he was still our columnist. I said “reasonable health” above. In fact his health in the last ten years was often far worse than reasonable, and deteriorated in the last year or two. Typically of his generation he did not complain about his health, preferring to joke about it briefly before moving on to more interesting topics. But he dealt with at least one bout of cancer, recurrences of malaria, injuries caused by falls, numerous other ailments and several hospital stays, while writing as if he were simply taking his ease in a comfortable armchair with a glass of sherry.

Sleep was at times elusive. I asked him once if he had really sent his copy at around four o’clock that morning, as my inbox indicated. He replied, with an air of resignation, “Better than lying in bed awake.”

His column meant a great deal to him. Once, while walking to the Flemington post office, he was knocked over by a car; he still made it to the post office and faxed his copy. He was about eighty at the time. Soon afterwards he bought a computer and learned how to type his columns on it and communicate by e-mail, eliminating the problems of handwriting and faxes.

It frustrated him sorely a few years later when illness prevented him for the first time from submitting his monthly copy. Feeling that he had let us down, he offered to resign, as he did on several such occasions thereafter. But the idea was always unthinkable to us, as we assured him each time.

I don’t know what Peter thought of our phone calls. They were not the conversations of equals. When he began writing for us, in order to get to know the man behind the columns I read Fear Drive My Feet. From then on, I was in awe of him. Anyone who has read that book, of the wartime exploits of a nineteen-year-old Melbourne boy operating alone in the jungles of New Guinea, will understand what I mean.

I was far from alone in my admiration. The editor since 1973 of the venerable American literary quarterly the Sewanee Review, George Core, described Fear Drive My Feet recently as a book “of great but understated power” and noted that he was not the first person to compare Peter’s prose style to George Orwell’s. Weary Dunlop, who knew only too well about such things, called it “a moving account of a young man’s lonely heroism in the face of great adversity”.

At a Quadrant dinner in Melbourne about ten years ago the speaker was Major-General Jim Molan, who had recently returned from a year as chief of allied operations in Iraq, a position of eminence such as few Australian military leaders in our history have attained. When he arrived at the venue, he asked if Peter was there, and immediately sought him out and introduced himself. He told Peter he was glad Peter was there, because he wanted to tell him how much Fear Drive My Feet had meant to him over the years. As the two war veterans talked it was clear which of them Major-General Molan regarded as the hero.