Present in Spirit

It was Keith Windschuttle’s idea. The sainted editor of Quadrant invited a group of friends and admirers of the late Christopher Pearson to a lunch on Fort Denison to celebrate the man and his writings, especially the posthumous book A Better Class of Sunset (Connor Court). It was a magnificent spring day on magnificent Sydney Harbour, with yachts, sailing boats, speedboats, ferries and water taxis everywhere. Christopher, despite his fondness for winter, would have loved it.

In editing the book, Nick Cater selected some 140 of Pearson’s columns from the Australian, added some essays, arranged for Introductions by Tony Abbott (who launched the book in parliament in October); Jack Snelling (Minister for Health and Ageing in the South Australian government); Peter von Fritz (old friend and sponsor of this Festschrift); and Nick Cater himself. Other friends—Christopher’s doctor, the novelist and poet Peter Goldsworthy, his aesthetic adviser Peter Jenkinson, and writer Andrew Male—contributed Postscripts.

A Festschrift is usually meant to honour the living. But Christopher was so present on that Sunday afternoon that the word Festschrift seemed absolutely right. Les Murray spoke of his gratitude to him for publishing in full in the Adelaide Review his 1998 novel in verse Fredy Neptune. Peter Goldsworthy told of an opening night party in Adelaide for the stage adaptation of his novel Honk If You Are Jesus in which aspects of Christopher, however disguised, turn up in a couple of the characters—a campy IVF embryologist and a sexually secretive medical professor. At the party Christopher shared a drink with the actor who played “him” and offered advice by over-acting himself in true drama-queen style.

My own reminiscence was about editing his acclaimed memoir “The Ambiguous Business of Coming Out” for the symposium Double Take: Six Incorrect Essays (1996). It led to some heated exchanges. My complaint about the early versions was that Christopher relied too much on long quotations from other writers. We want to know what you think, not what they think, I said, banging the table. After some testy phone calls we found a compromise. I was chuffed to have coaxed the memoir out of him. It is the opening essay in A Better Class of Sunset.

The book itself was the main topic of conversation on Fort Denison. It is an important monument and will remain a primer of Australian liberal-conservatism. Nick Cater has divided the essays and columns into twenty-four categories from Epicureanism to republicanism, with diversions on all sorts of themes from the history wars to his conversion from Anglicanism to a Roman Catholicism which Christopher said is “surely but slowly dying”. (He quoted Malcolm Muggeridge describing his own conversion as “a rat swimming towards a sinking ship” and B.A. Santamaria’s response: “Welcome aboard!”)

The title of the book comes from his column in 2003 deploring the tyranny of our summer beach culture. “I’m not entirely averse to beaches,” he wrote, “but it’s best done on an isolated strand, in winter and wild weather. You get a better class of sunset that way too.”

Pearson takes an independent view of R.G. Menzies, whose influence on higher education—too many mediocre students and teachers—was, he writes, “catastrophic”. He despises Paul Keating’s “infamous Redfern speech” which demeaned Aboriginal Australia by suggesting that it was deprived of any human agency in the historical process. He thinks “the national interest has seldom been better served than in the Hawke years”. He sees Don Dunstan as “a more considerable figure” than Gough Whitlam or Neville Wran and far more considerable than any of his South Australian successors. He has a poor opinion of the Canberra press gallery. It reminded him, he wrote,

of a tankful of tropical fish. They have a marked tendency to change direction, suddenly and simultaneously, as if by magic or in response to some signal, almost undetectable outside the aquarium, from one of their number.

He claims to have persuaded his good friend Tony Abbott not to keep calling all and sundry “mate”.

Let me end with a few lines from Christopher in September 2012 about Abbott and the death of Christopher’s mother:

At the service, at the offertory hymn, “Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest”, I started sobbing. Abbott, who was standing beside me in the front pew, turned and thumped me gently on the back a couple of times … it was a fraternal gesture and I knew what he was up to. If I was going to preside after the interment over lunch in the parish hall for 130 guests, I’d need all the self-possession I could muster. Besides, we’d long ago agreed that, as far as humanly possible, men should resist the temptation to public tears and Mum, a stern Protestant Ascendancy girl, had felt the same way.

The book’s cover portrait is a splendid painting by Bill Leak.

SOME three years ago Desmond Ball of the ANU published an explosive report in the Australian in which he quoted the illustrious (now deceased) Coral Bell—“one of the world’s foremost academic experts on international relations”—about an attempt in 1947 by some of her colleagues in the Department of External Affairs to recruit her as a spy for the Soviet Union. She was then a diplomatic cadet. The Ball–Bell report, if accurate, would fall within the key opening chapters of David Horner’s new and official history of the early years of ASIO—The Spy Catchers. Many of his readers looked forward to what he would have to say about it. But Horner—co-author with Ball (“my distinguished ANU colleague”) of Breaking the Codes (1998) about Soviet espionage in Australia—does not mention it, either in support or rejection. Puzzling.

Especially since Horner as a military historian knows the value of personal anecdotes in illuminating war and peace—in the jungle, the bureaucracy or wherever. Here are a couple from The Spy Catchers. Horner does not simply note that ASIO kept the Soviet spy-master Wally Clayton (code name “Klod”) under surveillance in the early 1950s. It kept an officer on Klod-watch day and night. But the only suitable vantage point from which to observe Clayton’s house at 15a Awaba Street, Mosman, was from a rocky outcrop in Balmoral. The officer had to go fishing daily—or pretend to. This was fine in summer but in bleak, wet winter he retreated to a bus shelter. Since his pay-packet was often late (and flung from a passing car by an officer called Wake, known as Hereward), he survived on devon sausage and potato crisps—and three hours sleep a night. He ended up with pleurisy. In another surveillance an ASIO officer trotted for five kilometres behind a tram carrying a suspect from Dr Evatt’s office to the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place and then sprinted up nine floors to see what office his quarry entered.

Not all Horner’s anecdotes are black comedy. He ends the book with the sad story of Mercia Masson, an ASIO agent in various communist fronts whose real role was publicly exposed during the Petrov Royal Commission. She was left “a broken woman”, stigmatised and friendless, a wreck whom ASIO had undertaken to protect but did not.

Horner goes far beyond anecdotes. As “principal author”, he sets out to strike a balance between what ASIO got right (identifying Soviet spies) and where it went over the top (creating files on mere dissenters, Lenin’s “useful idiots”). The following paragraph sums up his guiding idea:

ASIO’s officers were, and are, normal dedicated Australians. In the 1950s they believed they were doing a job that was vital to the security of the nation. They need to be brought out of the shadows, and their efforts in the service of Australia need to be recognised.

This tribute is highly tempered. It’s about the 1950s, not the 1960s, about what they believed, not what they knew, about recognising efforts, not honouring achievements. It’s not quite damning with faint praise but comes close.

ASIO’s greatest achievement was cracking “the case”, that is, tracking the Soviet spy-ring in Australia as revealed in Venona decrypts, the defection of the Petrovs, and the exposure and expulsion of the Soviet spy-diplomat Ivan Skripov. By 1954 ASIO had, in Horner’s words, “achieved a remarkable ascendancy” over the Communist Party. It knew its every move.

After the Royal Commission the Party declined even further. But ASIO surveillance continued “with unrelenting intensity”. It kept files on leftist academics, artists, writers. It may have been only a small part of its work—the files on historian Manning Clark are “rather thin”—but it was still a “massive waste of time and resources”. It also had a “corrosive effect” within ASIO, encouraging the idea among its officers that dissent indicated potential disloyalty. These themes will be developed further in the next volume of the Official History by John Blaxland. What will its title be? I don’t think it will be Useful Idiots.