Peter Ryan’s Gratitude and Decency

SIR: I’m grateful for the five very fine obituaries about the life of your columnist Peter Ryan (March 2016). I shall miss his regular bracing articles. To fill the gap I’m taking occasional draughts of his book of essays, Lines of Fire (Clarion Editions, 1997).

In its Introduction by the Australian military historian A.K. Macdougall I was reminded of one further aspect of Ryan’s multi-faceted life that is eminently worth remembering. Following his return to Melbourne after heroic service (1942-43) in New Guinea during the Second World War he always kept faith, and never lost touch, with the village and its people who had helped him to survive. This is perhaps not widely known; I suspect he never boasted about it.

The fact is only briefly referred to by Macdougall:

Powerfully enduring from Ryan’s war service is a deep love of Papua New Guinea and its remarkable people … in the hills inland from the town of Lae, among the people who helped and sheltered him during the war, there stands the Peter Ryan Memorial School, at first a simple village primary school with thatched roof and earth floor, now an enrolment approaching 200 children. It was partly built by his earnings from journalism, as a token of his thanks to the people who shared his hardships during the war.  He returns often to Papua New Guinea.

Ryan once spoke of these visits to me.

So there you are: in addition to Ryan’s biting wit and trenchant criticism is the man’s admirable loyalty and benevolence.

Suzanne Edgar
Garran, ACT

SIR: Mark McGinness’s excellent piece on Evelyn Waugh in April’s Quadrant reminds me of an anecdote told me more than forty years ago by a friend who as a young man had rented the gatehouse at Combe Florey from the famous author. Having fallen behind with his rent, he received a most pompous letter which he showed me which included the following unforgettable words: “one does not pay one’s landlord, as a tailor, in arrears …”

On another occasion, when the door locks at the gatehouse froze in a snowstorm, my friend was invited to spend the night at the main house. In the morning the great man greeted him thus: “What do you eat for breakfast, Moberley? We usually have chocolate cake ourselves …”

I told Selina Hastings about these oddly typical incidents for her biography.

Giles Auty
Echo Point, NSW

SIR: Gary Christian’s article (April 2016) was a fascinating though one-dimensional view of drug law reform. Deliberately or not, the article failed to highlight the lobbying efforts, particularly in the US, of industries such as the alcohol and tobacco industries, big pharma, police unions and corrective service unions and the private prison industry in arguing against legalisation.

Notwithstanding the author’s neglect in mentioning that the above industries have vested self-interests in keeping drugs, other than alcohol and tobacco, out of the legal, free-market scope, he also neglected to recognise that he used an arbitrary starting point when it came to “gateway drugs”. After all, it could have been just as easy to contend that alcohol is “the main gateway drug” to cannabis, or that mother’s breast milk is the gateway drug to all of humanity’s vices.

In the end, it seems that Gary Christian, like his adversary, and author of Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari, created a straw man to win over his readers.

Cameron Ljubic
Bethania, Qld

SIR: Peter Kurti’s piece on Cardinal Pell (April 2016) is a mystery. This is not about a piffling issue or some obscure organisation of little substance, but entrenched detestable practices in an institution with as yet great residual influence.

The article on Pell should have been on the mainstream media’s treatment of child sexual abuse, which, we know, treats the subject as a means of political leverage on behalf of the Left and the cause of sensationalism as well as news and socio-political engineering. Instead, Kurti attempts to defend the wholly indefensible aspects of Pell’s behaviour, which is neither denied nor questioned nor analysed for its obvious failings.

“Pell is attacked simply for being Pell and because many of his critics openly dislike him,” according to Kurti. Well, maybe Pell is not the consummate political operator that many critics take him for. The media has certainly made Pell appear as someone who is evading the responsibility of facing up to the demands of his position.

That critics of Cardinal Pell are gunning for him on a less than honourable basis goes without saying, but, curiously, Pell is held to be unable to defend himself. Again, it must be the media which denies him the opportunity to meet such criticisms as are undeserved head on.

I grew up as a Protestant in Holland, at a time when divisions between Roman Catholics and Protestants were still extant and obvious. I was abused and sexually humiliated by some Catholics when about six years of age. This experience has probably been the reason for my visceral and abiding contempt of the Catholic Church.

This matter of abuse was dealt with in time-honoured fashion. I told my parents, who reported the matter to my school principal, and that was the last I heard of it. It did not help, perhaps, that I attended a public school, open to all faiths and none, almost exclusively Protestant, whereas the culprits were at the Roman Catholic school. The intimidation from boys attending the latter directed at Protestant children was at times physical and violent. Those were the days.

Jacob Jonker
Fern Tree, Tas