Summer E-mails

Weather forecast: very hot, late storm. A revolution is coming. A civilisation is collapsing. Be afraid, be warned. We can’t stop it. We can’t hold back. It is going to happen. Go, read Chateaubriand. Be afraid for those coming after us.

It’s mid-summer and hot. Usually, in Hobart, I remind our neighbour, watering his roses, that it never gets hot until the kids go back to school. This year is different. Though there are a couple of stories I’d like to tell you, it’s too darn hot. It’s time to blow the dust off Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking, pull the ice-cream-maker out of the cabinet deep freezer we have given up using, and rediscover the duty-free bottle of pastis that has hidden itself at the back of the cupboard.

Written while waiting for the tomatoes to ripen, please accept these short summer e-mails for your autumn reading.

The only time I met the historian John Hirst he told me how hard he worked writing the first line in each of his books. We had dinner at the Astor, which was then a pleasant and rather ancien régime restaurant. Over dinner, Professor Hirst ate very fast. At the time he was writing The Sentimental Nation. It begins like this: “God wanted Australia to be a nation.”

For some reason I memorised the first sentence of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In English it is ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early’. Even with my accent from hell it sounds better in French, and slides into my mind at odd times: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. It rattles around in my head and I feel as though I have broken off and souvenired a pointy shard from a national monument, like chipping off a bit of the iceberg which sank the Titanic. In pouring pastis, by the way, it is important that the ice is added last.

The first line in Volume III of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is this:

“In 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission made the most notorious accusation ever made by a government body against Australia.”

The first line in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life is “Unemployed at last!” When I read that I knew I had found a friend.

This is the beginning of The Invention of Terra Nullius—it follows a quote from an Australian academic:

“NO. The decision to make a settlement in New South Wales was taken in 1786 and terra nullius was never mentioned.”

The first sentence in Ernestine Hill’s The Great Australian Loneliness:

“Of course you’ll take a gun,” they said to me when I left Melbourne, “even if it’s only one of those little mother-of-pearl things the vamps used to carry in their evening-bags.”

At our local Big W I found a new book about the Bondi gay murders in the 1980s and 1990s called Bondi Badlands by Greg Callaghan. I opened it, searched and found this: the journalist (my cynical italics, Trump would be more honest) is writing of the morning following the murder of a young Thai kitchenhand:

 Across town, police divers were plunging into the pounding surf at Mackenzies Point, after two tourists that morning found Geoffrey [sic] Sullivan lying on the pathway in a pool of blood. In a breaking voice Geoffrey described the attack to the ambulance officers as soon as they arrived, and asked them about his friend Kritchikorn. The ambos shifted their gaze up to the half-dozen police who had taped off the bloodied pathway, and who were combing through the nearby scrub. The cops had already found torn clothing, a letter and a single shoe—forming a trail that led to the edge of the cliff face. Within 30 minutes of scouring the underwater rock face under the Mackenzies Point lookout, one of the divers caught sight of Kritchikorn’s horribly mangled body.

I was angry. I literally threw this stupid book back onto the shelf. Later I came back and bought a copy.

Almost everything in that extract is wrong and invented. I know. I was there that morning. I saw the blood. It was crime novelist cliché: dog walkers discover crime scene. I walked home to call the police while Shen, our dog, and Kim, my partner, waited. It was a Saturday morning and we had been walking Shen. We saw the blood, Shen found the bloody handkerchief, we found the shoe, the keys, the sunglasses. There was no man lying in a pool of blood, there were no sympathetic tourists or ambos and the two police officers who responded did not tape off the area. The body was only found the following day, after we called the police back to the site.

The police search of the cliff face and the sea began on Sunday after we poked around some more—the three of us were Morse viewers, and I called them a second time. In the bushes which had not been checked we had found evidence which helped locate the other man attacked early Saturday morning. Once a serious search began a body was promptly discovered in the sea. If we had not recalled the police the murdered man might have disappeared into a missing persons file or, if his body had eventually washed up, been treated as a suicide.

In the very beginning we had no idea this was a gay murder. That only became known later when police appealed for information about the dead man.

Three boys were arrested for the assault and murder. At the Supreme Court trial I gave my brief evidence and left the court—the judge had asked me Shen’s breed. Only years later, when reading online trial reports of the appeals made in the case, did I realise that the man so savagely beaten on the cliff top had first fallen onto a rock ledge where he had lain for a time before falling again—this time into the sea. When the police responded on Saturday morning, and did not begin a serious investigation, he may still have been alive, out of sight, just below us.

It was horrifying, and I wrote an article setting out the sequence of events as I saw them. This was eventually published in the Sydney Morning Herald. I had first submitted it to the Australian and they turned it down, likewise the SMH. Only when I approached a journalist who was interested in the case was it finally accepted by his newspaper.

My first line was entirely accurate: “On the cliff top it looks as though it has been raining blood.” Yet the police did not begin an investigation. The account was based on the statement I had given to the police a few days after the event.

In 2017 the crime writer Duncan McNab returned to the scene of the crime in his book Getting Away with Murder. He fed my article, which I hoped would clarify the sequence of events for later investigators, into a blender: “Around the same time Michael Connor found the Rattanajurathaporn crime scene, two tourists out for an early morning cliff-top walk found Geoffrey Sullivan, the imprint of a shoe clear on his face. They called an ambulance.” I give up.

Interestingly, despite so much having been written about this case no one in the media seems to have located and talked with Jeffrey Sullivan, the second victim.

The Whitlam government was sacked when I was in London. I helped organise a pro-Whitlam rally near Australia House. I was a fool. I rang the poet Peter Porter to get his support; he politely told me to get lost. We organised the design and printing of a large poster for the rally. When it was finally made none of us knew how to get it pasted up around the foreign city.

When Whitlam later resigned from parliament I was in Algeria and wrote him an embarrassingly effusive letter. He sent me a tele­gram of thanks; I began to think he was a fool.

Being out of Australia for most of 1975 I have always been interested in accounts of what happened that year and especially the Dismissal itself. In the mid-1990s I wrote an article about Whitlam’s strange behaviour in returning to The Lodge after the sacking instead of heading to his office in the Parliament. Robert Manne was the editor who published it in Quadrant.

John Menadue, a long-time Whitlam supporter and employee who was then secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, was intimately involved in the day’s events. After the sacking, Whitlam’s driver rang Menadue and asked him to come to The Lodge. At almost the same time David Smith was calling from Government House. Fraser was on his way back to Parliament and Smith relayed the new Prime Minister’s instruction to meet with him immediately. Menadue vacillated. First his driver took him from his office to The Lodge, where he found a distraught Whitlam, and then, after Menadue received an urgent call from his secretary again relaying a message to report to Fraser, drove him back again. Now, his assistance to Fraser was absolutely vital. That afternoon, under his direction,  the documentation which allowed the Governor-General to assent to the Appropriation Bills, dissolve the parliament and call new elections was urgently compiled. Work that normally took two days was completed in about ninety minutes. While Whitlam was fighting to save his floundering administration, Menadue played his part in ensuring it would sink before the six o’clock news.

In 1983 ASIO recorded a famous conversation between Russian KGB officer Valeri Ivanov and David Combe. Combe had been ALP national secretary in 1975 and had also been at The Lodge that day. He was utterly scathing when he recalled Menadue’s behaviour, which he clearly interpreted as betrayal:

I hear people in my own party talking about Menadue becoming a senior bureaucrat under a Labor government. You know he is the same guy who the day we were removed from office by the governor-general’s decree, slunk away from the prime minister’s lodge to go and report to his new master. Now I don’t forget those things. I am a very bitter hater.

Menadue continued working for the Fraser government before accepting an appointment as ambassador to Japan. In April 1976, when he and his wife had dinner in Adelaide with Clyde Cameron, he was still secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Cameron’s diary entries recorded critical comments by Menadue about the Fraser cabinet he served and the personalities of the new government. Cameron’s account concludes with this extraordinary paragraph:

Although I made no attempt to pump Menadue at tonight’s dinner party, I did [italics in original] receive a good deal of very valuable information. He is worried about his future and asked me whether he should take a position as Australian ambassador to Tokyo and thus get out of the hurley burley of politics or stay in the Prime Minister’s Department and do whatever he could for the Labor Party. He said he believed Labor could come back to office and it would be some advantage if he were to stay where he is now. I told him that it was up to him to decide the matter, but from a purely selfish point of view I would like to see him stay in the Department because he could do more good as Head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet than as ambassador to Tokyo.

Gough Whitlam sabotaged the sale of Alan Reid’s book The Whitlam Venture. It’s worth finding, and reading:

Several ministers reported that when Whitlam was angry in Cabinet he used to grind his teeth, literally not figuratively, while glaring at them. Senator John Wheeldon told quite openly of one occasion when he was at the receiving end in Cabinet and Whitlam was grinding his teeth. No respecter of persons and not the type to be overawed by anyone, Wheeldon commented, “Don’t grind your teeth at me, Gough. You’ll only damage them without impressing me.”

Working for Whitlam was interesting. Carol Summerhayes, who famously praised his changed hairstyle on his return from China in 1971, was his stenographer when he was Leader of the Opposition and then his personal secretary while Prime Minister. She resigned in early 1975. In an oral history interview for the Museum of Australian Democracy recorded in 2009 she told how, on her very first day working in his office, she was sitting at her desk:

and the next thing, a chair came flying through the air, landed on the floor beside me. I turned around a bit cheekily and said “Who threw that?” and there in the doorway was this tall E.G. Whitlam with this absolutely puce face … he’d obviously tripped over this chair.

I think, something went funny with my relationship [with Whitlam] in ’74 and I don’t know what it was. He used to occasionally get sets on people and I think it was my turn for a bit, so you just had to shrug and get through that. It happened to all of us at times.

I overheard a conversation in the Cabinet Anteroom between Sir Frederick Wheeler who was Secretary of the Treasury and the PM about the possibility of tax cuts being offered and the comment being made that, well, yes, that may be but you didn’t always have to deliver on them. That, sort of, really disillusioned me.

In Matters for Judgment, laurel-wreathed John Kerr cut his book’s opening words into the famous stone plinth on which stands a headless statue of Gough Whitlam: “In Australia in the latter part of 1975 a very serious political crisis occurred which rapidly developed into a constitutional crisis.”

John West, who broadcast affectionately about theatre on the ABC before that institution rotted from within, published Theatre in Australia in 1978. It includes a photo taken from the stage of the audience on the last night in the life of the old Phillip Street Theatre in 1961: “Those alert at spotting faces may possibly identify John Kerr, QC, in the fourth row, centre. He was the theatre’s patron.”

At five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in Sydney a young man’s life changed:

I was standing at the corner of Pitt and Market Streets feeling a pretty dismal sort of failure, when who should walk up but Harry Clay. He took a look at me and then came up and said, “What are you doing to-night, Jewboy?” I said, “Nothing, sir.”

“Go and get your props and come out to Balmain to work tonight, one of the turns is off sick.”

I’d already taught myself eccentric dancing, and I went on that night and I really was a riot. Even so, I got the surprise of my life when I was packing up after the performance when Mr Clay said, “You’ll stop for the rest of the week.”

He gave me £6 at the end of that week, and I certainly thought I was made of money. I can tell you it was pretty good money too, most of the performers only got £4. Mr Clay must have liked me a lot, because after that I was with him for many years playing his circuits.

One of those Pitt and Market four corners deserves an historic marker. Harry Clay ran a suburban vaudeville circuit and the story teller, with the help of Max Harris, was Roy Rene. His book is called Mo’s Memoirs.

Down our way it’s been very Elizabeth David. I’d like to quote her opening sentence from Summer Cooking but it’s about half a page long—Proust would have approved. Instead I’ll quote the opening lines from Edouard de Pomiane’s marvellous French Cooking in Ten Minutes—Elizabeth David would approve:

First of all, let me tell you this is a beautiful book. I can say that because this is its first page. I just sat down to write it, and I feel happy, the way I feel whenever I start a new project.

The first edition was published in 1930.

And I feel happy. And I love Australia Day, which was yesterday.