The Unforgotten Brian Fitzpatrick

He died almost exactly half a century ago, but don’t think of Brian Fitzpatrick as forgotten. A quick initial “ask around” among my acquaintance produced a fairly full-throated unanimity of: “Forget Brian Fitzpatrick? Come off it! How could anybody forget Brian Fitzpatrick?”

So that’s clear enough for starters.

Next question: “What do you remember him for?” The following sample of actual answers indicates, you will agree, something very far from unanimity:

He was a drunken bum.

He was a justly jobless journalist.

Whatever, he was trouble, and one kept him out of one’s premises if one could.

He was a scholar and writer whose original researches expounded the view that the Australian economy has always operated under the domination of British “imperialism”: that honest Australian colonists, sweating only with the object of producing a bigger bag of wheat or a bale of even finer quality wool, were unfairly exploited by capitalists in England.

He was a chivalrous and polished gentleman whose descent from the Irish race, living in Ireland under English oppression, clearly showed in Brian’s elaborate manners and fruity tones of voice.

Brian Fitzpatrick (plus a couple of drinks) might well have been the type specimen for Male Chauvinist Pig. Many Melbourne citizens have enjoyed (?) the experience of watching their wives being crudely groped and nuzzlebubbed, even while formal introductions were still proceeding.

That a man of such propensities should have chosen Kathleen Pitt as his (first) bride shows just how very odd Brian was. (An old Melbourne professor who knew him intimately used to say that Fitzpatrick was a puzzle sealed inside a paradox, the whole encased hermetically in an insoluble contradiction in terms.) Kathleen was a young lady of good Melbourne family, delicately raised and educated, notable for her refinement and poise.

The wedding, moreover, was celebrated with the full pomp and ceremony of St Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral, in August 1932. The bride rose steadily as a historical scholar, a polished lecturer, soon to be Professor of History at Melbourne. But the marriage to Brian had ended in deep pain by 1935.

At war’s end, I went up to Melbourne University, as one of Ben Chifley’s rehabilitation ex-servicemen. As Sub-Dean of Arts, and as my brilliant lecturer in British History, Kathleen was a wise mentor and a helpful friend to me, especially when my studies, from time to time, fell victim to recurrent bouts of malaria. (Need I add that the name of Brian Charles Fitzpatrick never once arose between us.)

“Infinite in his variety” would have been an apt epithet for Brian Fitzpatrick. An English journalist just arrived to work in Melbourne, and struggling to understand his new milieu, said to me at lunch one day: “I met your Mister Brian Fitzpatrick last week; I liked him. I take it that his whole career has been on the Left side of Left?”

“You’ve got more homework ahead of you there, old man,” I told him. “In 1923 the Melbourne police force went on strike, and there were disorders—rioting and so on. There was good old Brian Fitz, belting away with his emergency copper’s issue truncheon, hard at work with all the sons of the socialites and silvertails.”

Persons newly meeting Brian soon became curious about the back of his head and neck. He wore his hair quite short-cropped, and it was apparent that the area was closely encased in a network of long-healed small scars; they were his indelible mementoes of the many fisticuff fights he picked, and promptly lost, striking his head on some neighbourhood gutter-edge.

Brian, as a scholarship boy and “student activist” at Melbourne in the 1930s, was one of the founders of the Victorian Council of Civil Liberties, and he came also to play some role in comparable bodies as they sprang up in the other Australian states. They were needed. It is hard today to credit the black illiberality, the autocratic system of ministerial diktat which then ruled so many matters which citizens of a free country should simply decide themselves.

Take books: Our Commonwealth government had decided on our behalf, for example, that we should not read James Joyce’s Ulysses, nor D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; nor sundry of the vibrant works of Karl Marx and his mates F. Engels, V.I. Lenin and—you know—that lot. It didn’t matter where or how you acquired your volume; maybe it was your birthday gift from your favourite auntie in Paris. The only issue was: if you possessed a copy, you were in breach of the law, and liable to penalty—even jail, in certain circumstances. If you wished to be received back into the comforting arms of law-abiding society, your proper course was to seek a certificate from the Honourable the Minister for Customs (no less!) that for special reasons—say your outstanding purity of mind—you may lawfully be allowed to hang on to what you had.

Brian’s ultimate commitment to the principles and philosophy of civil liberties is undoubted; critics as judicious (and as different) as Geoffrey Blainey and Victorian Supreme Court Justice Sir John Barry have sufficiently supported not only his scholarly learning, but a whole range of other knowledge and practical experience of the world. The distinguished public figures who led the policy formation of the Council realised they were lucky to enjoy Brian’s services on a virtually honorary basis.

There were not lacking some who murmured that, as Brian’s way of life included extensive periods quite free of anything you and I might consider the distraction of a necessary bread-and-butter, nine-to-five day job, his executive services to Civil Liberties were made at a discount. Perhaps this contributed also to his preparedness, just occasionally, to break loose, defy the Council, and present to the public a policy directly opposite to the Council’s express resolution.

These outbreaks of irrepressible secretarial high spirits caused great concern to Council members. I have seen J.V. Barry ropable with rage, and other senior judicial and legal figures highly indignant; but as they couldn’t afford to pay their secretary, they were hardly in a position to sack him.

This matter was not really my direct personal responsibility, but I was made seriously uneasy by Brian’s semi-clandestine and equivocal relationship with the Communist Party; indeed with every shifting faction of it, as it filled its characteristically chameleon historical course.

What troubled me was the possible effect on the Melbourne University Labour Club. Its founders (Brian among them) had wisely ordained that it be not formally or organically joined to any ordinary political party; this was, however highly you regarded it, “kiddy politics”, where young people could learn about political realities, and then make their own decisions. This important divide showed for years: long after the ALP changed to the more modern “Labor”, the Club stuck to “Labour”. Some years of the Second World War saw the Australian communists in a highly doubtful light: Hitler and Stalin in actual alliance as belligerent powers. Hal Colebatch has exposed the communist treachery in the Australian wartime workplace.

Twenty-five years after Brian’s foundation, I myself spent a few years as secretary and as president of the Labour Club. A motion was taken to a general meeting that the club should affiliate formally with the Eureka Youth League—an actual part of the Australian Communist Party. Clearly, Moscow was tightening up, but this was outrageous. The motion was defeated. Moscow must have been snouted, for a few weeks later a further meeting was called for the rescission of the earlier motion, and for the Eureka Youth League affiliation to proceed. “The Party” made extraordinary efforts to swell its vote, even to paying certain interstate rail fares to enable attendance. But its winning card was Brian Fitzpatrick, familiar in his raincoat. He gave the shiftiest speech I have ever heard, explaining (or failing to explain) why the organisation he himself had helped to constitute in sturdy independence should now be ruled from Moscow.

Late one afternoon, as I was going home on the Malvern Road tram, we had just crossed Chapel Street into Prahran when my name rang out excitedly from further along the car. Not one, but two of Melbourne’s most obstreperous drunks, highly inflamed: Ian Mair, Age literary editor, for whom I regularly wrote, and—yes, you’ve guessed—Brian Fitzpatrick.

“You must come with us! We’re going to ‘The Pines’! You’ll be most welcome! Be ready to hop off in a couple of stops.” All right. All right. Sheer feebleness of character; I went …

We passed through gates splendid enough for an old state Government House and advanced on a row of cypress pines—no sign of any hospitable mansion where drinks might have been on offer.

“Here we are,” said Brian, flinging himself luxuriously upon a feet-high pile of dried pine needles. “All’s well, Ian; just where we left it!” And his confident hand produced from the pine needles a nearly full bottle of Corio Whisky.