I wheeled away from the screen and looked at her for a long minute. A colleague was passing and I called her into my office. “That,” she declared, peering over my shoulder, “is someone I’d want to know more about. She is a real person.”

What does that mean — a “real” person? To begin with, I think, Mary (as I’ll call her from now on) presents a face quite unlike the idealised female faces we see in magazines, movies, the media, advertising and, regrettably, AI-generated images. She had dark hair, sloping deep-set eyes, a wide mouth, and a broad forehead tapering to a small chin. This foreshortening of her face meant those ridiculous hats of her era were entirely wrong for her.

The little there is to know about Mary suggests she was intelligent, energetic, determined and practical. She and husband Joe (as he was widely known) were English, both having been born in Staffordshire. Mary (then Mary Turner) was a schoolteacher before their marriage in 1885. Joe came from a mining family that had known poverty and distress — his father’s death in a mining accident left Joe the main family breadwinner at just twelve. Mary’s brother William had emigrated to New South Wales and settled in Lithgow, and his letters home persuaded Mary and Joe that they too might have better prospects in Australia.

With Mary pregnant, Joe went first, in December 1885, following his brother-in-law to Lithgow where he quickly found work as a miner and built a four-room timber house for his family. Mary eventually arrived in 1887, having made the journey alone with baby George Sydney (known as Syd), the first of the couple’s nine children. All their children survived infancy, which has to be a testament to Joe’s ability to provide and Mary’s skilled parenting and management of the household.

Joe was elected to the NSW parliament in 1891 and to federal parliament in 1901. And so, for thirty years until he left politics in 1921, he was constantly away from home for parliamentary sittings, either in Sydney when the family was in Lithgow, or in Melbourne after the family had moved to Sydney. The rearing of their quiver-full of children fell mainly to Mary.

Mary and Joe must have corresponded during their separations but none of their letters appear to have survived. But among the scattering of records preserved in the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia are many photographs of Mary, more than you might expect. (For comparison, no photograph appears to have survived of Ada Watson, prime minister Chris Watson’s first wife.)

I’ve studied them all, for it turns out that Mary Cook is one of those women, like Mary Gilmore, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Walkom, with whom I long to spend time. I don’t go searching for these ghosts, they find me. Mary Cook looked me directly in the eye with the gentle but firm expectation that her story is important and worth sharing.

And so, if the textual evidence is slender but the photographic evidence is plentiful, let’s go with the latter. I’ve selected the three photographic portraits that seem to me to offer the richest insights into her life.

The photograph at the top of this essay was taken by renowned Sydney photographer May Moore. She and her photographer-sister Mina, based in Melbourne, were both known for their skill in creating dramatic effects with light and shadow, and May’s portrait of Mary Cook is a beautiful example.

I never tire of observing how the light gathers at the top of Mary’s head and slides down through the parting of her hair. The photographer has permitted the light to define the merest sliver of the sitter’s profile — her forehead, cheeks, nose, lips, even the eyelashes of her left eye. It pools softly on her shoulder to illuminate the pearls at her ears and throat, and to touch the lace on her dress and the posy of flowers Mary has inclined her head to examine.

The archival description dates the photograph to 1918, when Mary would have been fifty-five, but she looks much younger. It can’t have been taken any earlier than 1910 because that was when May Moore established her Sydney studio, but it’s possible that it was taken in 1913 to mark Joe becoming prime minister. (He was the leader of a recent fusion of several non-Labor groups calling itself the Liberal Party, only distantly related to today’s Liberal Party.) It was the high point thus far in Mary and Joe’s long, upwardly mobile journey from the coal-mining towns of Staffordshire.

As a young man, Joe had become a follower of Primitive Methodism, a sect of Methodism that aimed to “uplift” the working classes and advocated the right of everyone, by self-improvement, to use their own talents to improve their station in life. This exactly what Joe had done. Although opposed to gambling and the consumption of alcohol, he had no objection to the display of worldly success and, according to his principal biographer John Murdoch, was vain of his personal appearance and loved to mix with rich, distinguished people.

Possibly, then, the photograph reveals as much about Joe as Mary: that Joe was proud of his life and proud of his wife, proud of the jewels he could give her and proud that he could afford such a fashionable studio. The sweet moment of repose captured in May Moore’s photograph renders it unlike the style of Mary’s later portraits and I wonder whether she saw herself in it or felt she was being assigned a part to play. The Moore sisters did, after all, specialise in portraying performers and writers.

With nine children swarming around her Mary certainly had little time for sitting about staring at flowers, though by then, fortunately, Joe had sufficient means to pay for domestic help for her. His burgeoning career had enabled the Cooks to move from their original cottage in Lithgow into a large, two-storey house on the main street. When they sold up in Lithgow in 1901 the inventory of their possessions shows how quickly they had covered themselves with the comforts and conveniences of Victorian middle-class existence. Their ever-increasing social status can be tracked from their subsequent moves through some of Sydney’s more salubrious suburbs: Marrickville, Baulkham Hills, Summer Hill and finally, in retirement, Bellevue Hill.

The Bellevue Hill house had expansive views over Sydney Harbour and was large enough to contain the lavish furniture the couple had accumulated over the years after they left Lithgow. They named it “Silchester” in memory of their Staffordshire home towns: Silverdale (Joe); Chesterton (Mary). Then they alighted upon a canny approach to downsizing. They demolished the house, built a block of luxury flats on the site, selected the best one for themselves, and rented out the rest.

If this woman was standing for prime minister you’d be interested, right? You want someone competent, experienced, trustworthy, tough but also empathetic? Yes you do, and that’s what I see in Mary here, but unfortunately it was still many years before women were elected to the Australian federal parliament, and in the meantime the talents of many were confined to the domestic sphere.

Lady Mary Cook, mid-1920s. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

The photograph of Mary was taken between 1922 and 1927. Joe had left politics and accepted an appointment as Australia’s high commissioner in London. It was taken at Angus Faith’s studio in Hanover Square, and for the occasion Mary has had her hair waved (it was naturally straight) and has selected a silk blouse embellished with sequins, with her customary pearls. One necklace, which she also wore for the May Moore portrait, has two extra pearls suspended by what appear to be tiny strings of seed pearls. The viewer is drawn to Mary’s deep, thoughtful eyes (blue, according to her passport), but although she declines to meet our gaze, I feel comfortable with her.

The challenges Mary faced went further than providing a domestic haven for nine children and a busy husband. The defining feature of Joe’s political life was a complete shift in his principles and allegiances from Labor to conservative, from Free Trade to Protectionism, and from republicanism to ardent support for monarchy and Empire. Cook began public life as a trade unionist, and he was an obvious choice of local candidate in Lithgow when an infant Labor Party was being formed in New South Wales after the failed strikes of 1890. He became one of thirty-five new, inexperienced Labor men to take a seat in parliament in 1891.

Three years later Cook refused to commit to a pledge of caucus solidarity because, he said, he wanted to be free to represent the people in his electorate who had voted for him. In the election that year he stood as an “independent” Labor candidate and easily held his seat. Free Trader George Reid, needing Labor support to form government, offered Cook the post of postmaster-general on a salary of £1500 per year, and Cook accepted. This was what enabled the family to move to their fine new house and fill it with undreamed-of luxuries.

Cook’s political detractors were vicious in their condemnation of his apparent opportunism and surrender to self-interest, and from Labor there could never be any forgiveness: Cook was branded and is still remembered as a traitor, the original “Labor rat.” His most recent biographer, David Headon, notices that a significant absentee from Cook’s funeral in 1947 was the then-prime minister and undisputed hero of the labour movement, Ben Chifley. Never would Chifley’s “light on the hill” wrap its warmth around the reputation of Joe Cook.

How was Mary affected by her husband’s abandonment of all his early political beliefs and allegiances? Did she lose friends of her own? What was Joe like at home as he gradually became more irascible and virulent in his opinions? Did the children scatter to the back garden when he was in a temper?

None of Cook’s biographers — John Murdoch, Frank Crowley, Graham Bebbington, John Rickard, Zachary Gorman and David Headon — have bothered much with these questions. They nod respectfully to Mary by noting how, as a former teacher, she had greatly assisted her young, poorly educated husband by spending her evenings correcting his compound arithmetic and reading to him so he could practice his shorthand. But after that the biographers (Headon is an exception) have little further use for Mary.

John Murdoch does acknowledge that the linked decisions to marry Mary and emigrate to New South Wales “immeasurably enriched” Joe’s life. Mary created a home atmosphere of “rest and contentment,” he says, which was important to Joe who was often “tired” after prolonged work. She was a woman of “energy and resource” and the “ideal wife” for him throughout the sixty-two years of their marriage.

Murdoch will not allow that a mother of nine might also be “tired” and doesn’t pause to wonder if Joe was the “ideal” husband for Mary. And consider this: sixty-two years of marriage by itself signifies nothing in an era when divorce was difficult for everyone, and unthinkable for a man in Cook’s position. Some of those periods of “rest and contentment” no doubt resulted in the arrival of the nine children, but did Mary actually want to be nine times a mother? As with most women of her era, her choices were few. If there had been a divorce, what could she have done? Returned to teaching?

Interestingly, before Mary left Staffordshire in 1886 she obtained references from the education authority under which she had trained as a teacher, presumably to give her something to fall back on should she need it. One official noted that in her final year of training Mary had gained a pass rate of 96 per cent. None of Cook’s biographers have noticed this. Why would they? You don’t go looking if you haven’t asked the right questions.

This third photo shows Mary Cook in court dress. The photograph is dated 1926 but other evidence suggests it was taken for a court held at Buckingham Palace in the English summer of 1927. Joe’s appointment as High Commissioner is about to end. The Cooks have been living at 36 Queen’s Gate in Kensington, near the Royal Albert Hall, and mightily enjoying themselves by all accounts. Joe’s biographers have judged his performance in the diplomatic aspects of the role competent rather than distinguished, but he did work hard and successfully at promoting immigration and investment in Australia, and he and Mary relished the social side.

Dame Mary Cook, 1927. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

Joe had developed a taste for high society during sixteen months he spent with prime minister Billy Hughes representing Australia at the Imperial War Conference in London in 1918, and in Paris for the peace conference in 1919. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross in the Order of St Michael and St George in 1918 and became Sir Joseph Cook. Mary and the family stayed home during that trip, but now, as Lady Mary Cook, she and various of their children went with him.

Joe’s new position meant hosting and attending numerous luncheons, receptions and dinners. He and Mary attended royal garden parties, launches of ships and planes, lunch with Mrs Winston Churchill, “At Homes” with Mrs Neville Chamberlain, Mrs Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and society weddings, notably that of the Duke of York (the future King George VI) to the Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

The absolute pinnacle of social prestige was an invitation (“command”) to attend court, where young, unmarried women from the upper crust would make their social debut by being “presented” to the monarch. Married women such as Mary could also be presented.

It was a highly ritualised event but fortunately for outsiders like Mary and Joe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office issued a guidebook on court dress. Included were advertisements from specialist tailors and outfitters who could supply all the clobber one needed and advice on how to wear it. The 1921 edition instructed that for ladies, feathers, veils and trains had been abolished, but in Mary’s 1927 photograph she is certainly wearing “Court Dress with feathers and train,” as stipulated on her invitation card. The previous instruction has obviously been reversed.

Unmarried women had to wear white, and their headdress was to consist of two ostrich feathers only. Married women could wear colour, as Mary seems to have done, but their headdress had to be a “Prince of Wales” plume consisting of three feathers, the central feather being higher than the rest. The length of the dress’s train was also prescribed. Mary wears the decorations of a Dame Commander of the British Empire, an honour she’d been awarded the previous year. To celebrate their attendance at court women often had their photographs taken at one of London’s prestigious studios, and Mary chose Hay Wrightson in New Bond Street. Lafayette was another popular choice.

For me there are two striking features of this portrait. First, Mary again wears that favourite necklace with the suspended pearls that was obviously so meaningful for her, surely a gift from Joe from way back although not as far back as Staffordshire, I think. This was not a trinket bought at a country fair by a poor young man. (That I would like to see.)

Second, Mary wears glasses for her court photograph. How many women would do that? For an occasion as important as this most would surely leave their glasses in their handbag, and indeed I’ve studied many court photographs and in none of them are the women wearing glasses. One’s character and personality (and weaknesses) were not to be on show. It was all subsumed into the ritual.

And yet here is Mary Cook, just being herself, a real person. She attended at least two other courts during her London years and wore glasses in all her photographs. (Joe, on the other hand, needed glasses for reading but rarely wore them in public, and certainly not for photographs.) It’s possible that Mary was shortsighted and needed her glasses during the formal proceedings to help her manage her train and to perform the tricky act of walking backwards when required. (It was a terrible breach of etiquette to turn one’s back on the monarch.) The glasses also suggest that here was someone who had not forgotten that she had begun married life scrubbing her own floors and stirring the family’s washing in a copper with a stick.

Mary’s DBE recognised “her services in connection with visitors to London from the Commonwealth of Australia” and was not solely for her work with the Red Cross, as John Murdoch believed. (It was mistake repeated by Frank Crowley; Zachary Gorman doesn’t mention Mary’s DBE at all.) Dame Mary, as she was known thereafter, supported a variety of causes and was as active as Joe in promoting immigration to Australia (he and she being perfect exemplars, of course). Most of the biographers fall short of mentioning that Joe’s social prominence could not have been achieved without her.

Or indeed his career success in general. Joe was able enough and certainly hard working, but although he acted the part of a statesman, he lacked a statesman’s vision and capacity to inspire others. Perhaps it was Mary who had the greater talent and ambition? She who plotted and planned, dreamed of and schemed? Biographer Graham Bebbington concedes (where the other biographers do not) that she was a formidable person who did dominate her husband in some things. Shrewdly, Mary could have assessed the marriageable men in her community and thrown in her lot with Joe Cook because he offered the best prospects and seemed the most biddable.

Without Mary, Joe’s highest achievement might have been a job as an accountant to some firm in Stoke-on-Trent, and the closest he would get to Buckingham Palace a day trip to watch the changing of the guard.

Mary was unable to attend Joe’s funeral in 1947 because she was suffering from dementia. She died in September 1950 and her ashes placed next to Joe’s at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in Sydney.

On balance, the evidence does suggest that Mary and Joe shared the same aspirations. My point is that, as so often happens, women’s compliance is assumed, not interrogated. If, for the sake of the exercise, we flip the power in the relationship from him to her, we notice niggling, ragged little ends: questions unasked, facts unchecked, assumptions untested, alternative perspectives unexplored.

In 1992 Diane Langmore published a study of ten Australian prime ministerial wives (ending with Hazel Hawke) and was struck by how little had typically been said about them. Her book is a fascinating and successful attempt at filling that gap. However, of the six pre-first world war wives — Jane (Jeanie) Barton, Pattie Deakin, Ada Watson, Florence Reid, Margaret Fisher and Mary Cook — Langmore selected only Pattie Deakin for her book.

The lives of the rest are largely unknown beyond glimpses in their husbands’ biographies. There has been little exploration of these six women as individuals, and no consideration of them as a cohort. No one has wondered how well acquainted they were with each other, and what advice and encouragement might have been shared among them, across political boundaries, as they attempted to fulfill a role they may never have sought or expected. Their support for their husbands constitutes an entirely unrecognised contribution to the making of the Australian Commonwealth. •

The post Three portraits of a lady appeared first on Inside Story.

You can bet that got a vocal chuckle, as did his quip about being the morning after to the conference’s night before “at a local bar.” Lawyers always laugh at jokes by judges, especially judges from the nation’s top court. As near as I can tell, the last time such a judge appeared at the North Queensland Law Association’s annual conference was when Susan Kiefel — then, like Beech-Jones is now, the highest court’s lowest judge — spoke in Mackay in 2008.

Beech-Jones’s appointment to the High Court in 2023 attracted no interest outside legal circles. He was of interest to me — a fellow science-law grad from the ANU, albeit before my time there — and I had recently praised a sentencing judgement of his, so I tweeted a few angles the media could cover: “the fiftieth man on the court,” “the first hyphenated justice!” But the media went for “married to Suzie Miller” (the playwright of the rightly feted one-hander, Prima Facie) and “born in Tasmania!” if it covered his appointment at all.

That’s how most High Court justices like it. In 2017, then justice Virginia Bell bemoaned her American counterparts’ relative fame:

For $24, you can buy a Ruth Bader Ginsburg coffee mug. It features a rather grim portrait of her honour under the words “I dissent.” How lucky we are that in Australia, outside the law faculties, very few people would be able to name the Chief Justice of the High Court let alone the six puisne justices.

And that seems to be how the North Queensland Law Association likes it too.

“I decided the best approach was to start you off gently,” the judge informed the northerners, “but maybe wake everyone up with something a bit pointier towards the end.” In its Facebook post summarising the event, the NQLA duly covered the gentle part — a mix of bland summaries of recent cases and quirky forays into Queensland history — but completely omitted the pointy bit: the judge’s no-holds-barred attack on a different legal association.

The body that drew the judge’s ire was the Samuel Griffith Society, which is well known in legal circles as a club of conservative lawyers, academics and ex-judges. Beech-Jones wanted the north Queenslanders to know that the club’s namesake — a favourite Queensland son, politician and judge who was the first national chief justice — was himself no conservative, but “was more than Marx curious, Marx adjacent if you like.”

Actually, one historian has argued that he may also have been racism adjacent, the justice allowed, but Beech-Jones refused to go there, saying that judges should never make such charges lightly. And then he called out a slew of papers delivered at the society’s events for criticising the High Court’s native title cases in angry and often racist terms, statements “that say nothing about Indigenous people or the decision in Mabo [No 2] but a lot about the author.”

What would Samuel Griffith have thought, he asked the crowd, of a more recent suggestion that the venerable Queenslander’s namesake society seek funding from a billionaire? “I do not think that question is very difficult to answer. But perhaps the better question is what do you think?’

The audience that day may well have learnt a few new things about Sir Samuel Griffith, but I doubt they learnt anything new about the Samuel Griffith Society. Queenslanders are all too familiar with conservative politics in general, and all but the younger ones will grimly remember the 1990s debates on native title, which made the recent Voice referendum debate seem more like an acknowledgement of country. The proceedings of a group of conservative legal types are easy to imagine and, in any case, are nearly all publicly available.

That being said, a comprehensive account of the society would have to wrestle with the platforms it has regularly given, sometimes repeatedly, to not-so-conservatives like George Williams, Anne Twomey, Michael Kirby and (my law school colleague) Cheryl Saunders. Beech-Jones, who had clearly pored through the society’s proceedings, chose to omit their participation in a society whose first leader was the second Queenslander to head the national court, Harry Gibbs. More pointedly, he didn’t mention the many judges who had delivered keynotes to the society, including Beech-Jones’s fellow north Queensland conference goer, Susan Kiefel, several other sitting chief justices and two of his own colleagues on the current court.

Was Beech-Jones’s speech a dig at his own colleagues? My initial reading was no. Beech-Jones didn’t criticise anyone for merely attending a Samuel Griffith Society conference. That being said, he did attribute some speakers’ unsavoury views to the society itself and urged law students to think twice about “defin[ing]” themselves by joining its “chapters.” You might call his speech “guilt-by-association adjacent.”

But, if recent reporting in the Australian is accurate, Beech-Jones has since rejected an invitation to speak at the society’s coming conference in Sydney. That wouldn’t itself be noteworthy, except that he reportedly cited the Council of Chief Justices’ Guide to Judicial Conduct as one reason, specifically its advice to avoid the appearance of continuing ties to political parties “such as might occur by attendance at political gatherings.” That’s clearly a dig at both the society and his fellow (and past) judges, I’d say. I’d also add that it’s a very strained reading, one that says nothing about the Samuel Griffith Society or the Guide to Judicial Conduct but a lot about its reader.

I’d usually leave such intra-legal tiffs to the Australian and its ilk. But this particular tiff raises some quite startling issues about the High Court’s medium-term future. This will all take some explaining, so bear with me. I’ll start you off gently, but wake you up with something a lot pointier towards the end.

Let’s start with some birthdays. We know that the current justices were born on 9 January, 7 March, 19 June, 5 July and 19 November. Attentive readers will note that, while there are seven justices, I’ve only listed five birthdays. That’s partly because two justices — as it happens, the two who have attended Samuel Griffith Society shindigs — share that birthday in early January. (Shared birthdays are likely in groups of twenty-three or more, but the odds of them in a mere group of seven are closer to one in twenty.)

It’s also because there’s no public information about Robert Beech-Jones’s exact birthday. That’s a little strange, because High Court judges’ birthdays are publicly significant, thanks to a 1977 referendum that mandates their constitutional retirement “upon… attaining the age of seventy.” (A quirky bit of Australian law means that that day actually comes a full twenty-four hours earlier than most people think.)

The judicial birthday that will matter soonest is that of the High Court’s oldest justice, chief justice Stephen Gageler, who was born on the 5 July. Crucially, Gageler turns seventy in 2028, the same year our current federal government turns three. That puts his seventieth birthday soon after the next federal election. Indeed, so soon that the question of who will actually choose the next chief justice is quite murky.

Gageler’s successor might be chosen by the outgoing government (as replacements are typically announced a few months early to ease the handover) or by the incoming one (which will be in power closer to the swearing in.) Or, if the government changes and the new one tries to undo the old one’s choice, the question of who chooses might end up before the High Court itself.

Chances are, this mild constitutional crisis will be dodged. Maybe the electorate will re-elect the current government. Maybe Gageler will quit months early to head-off any impasse. Or, perhaps most likely, Gageler’s successor will be an uncontroversial pick, as most such appointments are.

But all of this puts paid to speculation that Robert Beech-Jones’s speech is an equivalent to Dyson Heydon’s successful “application letter” for the High Court. The election timing means his entrée into politics last month was more of a disapplication letter: #anyonebutRBJ. Indeed, there are multiple reasons why he won’t be the next chief.

One is an unshaken Australian tradition that is perhaps aimed at stopping such power bids from within. Since Federation, every High Court chief justice has been either its next most senior judge — as Stephen Gageler and his predecessor Susan Kiefel both were when they ascended — or an outsider appointed straight to the top. So, unless Albanese or his successor decides that an election year is the right time to break a century-long practice, the top court’s next chief will either be the current second-in-seniority (Michelle Gordon) or someone who isn’t on the current court.

A second reason is one that won’t make me popular with the Samuel Griffith Society: gender diversity. Inside Story’s recent coverage of the Albanese government’s remarkable record of placing women in senior national roles didn’t mention its appointment of Jayne Jagot to the High Court in 2022, a step widely feted for placing women in the majority on the apex court for the first time. The catch is that that female majority ended just eleven months later with Robert Beech-Jones’s appointment.

This is actually the third time a man has replaced a woman on the national court, but it’s a first for Labor, and also the first time female majorities and chief justiceships reverted to male ones. But these unfortunate landmarks passed almost completely unnoticed in 2023. Perhaps everyone assumes a new High Court tradition has been established under which majorities and chief justiceships will see-saw between men and women from now on.

All three of these factors — 2028 electoral politics, the seniority tradition and the possible High Court sex see-saw — point away from the Albanese-appointed Beech-Jones and towards the Abbott-appointed Michelle Gordon as Australia’s next chief justice. But there’s another, very pointy, factor firmly against both of them.

In schooling the Samuel Griffith Society and his colleagues on the Guide to Judicial Conduct’s advice on judges attending “political gatherings,” Robert Beech-Jones perhaps unwittingly drew attention to another part of the guide that states judges “must avoid involvement in political controversy.” If the Samuel Griffith Society’s conferences are too political for judges to attend, surely that makes it too controversial for judges to attack.

But there’s an exception in the guide for a political controversy that “directly affects the operation of the courts, the independence of the judiciary or aspects of the administration of justice.” Perhaps that’s why Beech-Jones paired his criticism of the society with two bits of American judicial politics.

The first one is a perennial American debate about whether old constitutions should be read the way their drafters would or the way modern readers would. Beech-Jones archly pointed out that while the speakers at the society all seem to favour the first approach (known as “originalism”), their namesake (himself a drafter of Australia’s constitution) and successive High Court justices haven’t. He mocked both the society and a majority of the US Supreme Court for favouring reading the American constitution’s “right to bear arms” to fit eighteenth-century gun regulation traditions rather than twenty-first-century public safety concerns. “Which approach do you prefer,” he asked the north Queenslanders, “theirs or ours?”

I don’t know if the judge took audience questions but, if he had and I’d been there, I’d’ve asked him about the current American dispute about “birthright citizenship.” President Donald Trump has urged the US Supreme Court to stop reading a constitutional provision on citizenship the way its post–civil war drafters would (as granting citizenship to almost anyone who is born on the nation’s soil) and more like modern readers would (with an eye to an orderly national border, among other things.) “Which approach do you prefer,” I’d ask Beech-Jones, “the originalist approach or Trump’s?” (We’ll find out the American apex court’s own answer in coming weeks.)

But it’s the other spectre of American judicial politics Beech-Jones raised — the successful push by American conservative groups to have conservative judges appointed to that nation’s federal courts — that would surely have roused his Australian crowd. “There is a highly sophisticated legal term to describe that process,” the judge declared, “it’s known as court stacking.” And then he pointed out a 2020 paper by then senator Amanda Stoker about the High Court’s landmark (and divided) ruling barring the federal government from deporting Indigenous non-citizens that ends with a pointy bit proposing the society should learn a lesson from its American counterparts.

The Samuel Griffith Society will doubtless be chuffed at this seeming judicial endorsement of its potential dramatic influence on Australian politics and more. But Beech-Jones didn’t spell out how exactly Australian courts — staffed via behind-the-scenes ministerial consultations and expiring with each judge’s constitutional dotage, rather than the American method of frantic public hearings and horsetrading that place winners on the bench for life — can be stacked by anyone.

Back in 2017, Virginia Bell said it was “inconceivable that the outcome of an Australian election might turn on whether a Coalition or a Labor government would be in a position to make the next appointment to the High Court of Australia.” Beech-Jones likewise seems to think stacking is exclusively an American thing: “If anyone thinks this particular US style of court stacking and judicial decision-making is a good idea, then go and live there.” That is, he thinks Stoker’s paper says more about the Samuel Griffiths Society than it does about Australia.

But here’s my pointy bit: Bell and Beech-Jones are both very wrong. The reason? Beech-Jones’s appointment to the national court.

It’s time to look at birth years. The current High Court’s are 1958, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969 and 1974. Eagle-eyed readers will notice I only listed six. That’s because, while Robert Beech-Jones’s birth day isn’t public, his birth year is: it’s 1965, the same year as his fellow Albanese-appointee, Jayne Jagot, and adjacent to the birth years of Coalition-appointees Michelle Gordon and Jacqueline Gleeson.

And that’s the rub. Beech-Jones’s appointment in 2023 meant that, for the first time since constitutional age limits were introduced, there are four very closely-aged judges on our national court, all of whom turn will turn seventy in a sixteen-month period between mid-November 2034 and early March 2036.

This spate of mandatory retirements, first noticed in online legal commentary in 2023, will very much complicate the work of the national court in the mid-2030s. It will need a solid pair of hands at the top while it endures an extended period of reduced staffing and judicial churn that will make it very hard to do its core task of resolving major legal disputes in lasting ways. That is why I say none of the court’s current early sexagenarians ought to be picked to replace Stephen Gageler in 2028. And neither, heaven forbid, should a fifth similarly aged judge be appointed that year, as chief or otherwise.

The process of filling these four vacancies will be quite different from the usual process too. They will be (and indeed should be) seen as a job lot, so that considerations of balance on the apex Court — between states, between genders, between fields of legal expertise and (I’d say) between birth years — can be properly managed. If the normal selection approach is taken, female legal highfliers from New South Wales born in the 1970s will be fielding a lot of behind-the-scenes enquiries next decade.

But the selection may well be very abnormal, for a reason election tragics will already have spotted. The four justices’ seventieth birthday parties might well fall entirely within a single federal electoral cycle, that of our nation’s future fifty-first parliament. Whichever party ends up with a majority or a workable minority of the lower house — be it Labor, the Coalition or maybe a new political force — in a federal election held in late 2033 or early 2034 would have untrammelled power to remake the national court.

There’ve been a few American presidents who’ve appointed a majority of that nation’s Supreme Court in a single term in office, including Washington, Lincoln and (Franklin) Roosevelt, but each of them also needed the approval of that country’s Senate for each pick. Australia’s prime ministers are more powerful than their counterparts in exactly this respect, but, aside from the early days of Federation, have only appointed majorities to the national court in between repeated national elections.

By contrast, our prime minister in 2034 — whoever he or she is — might need to win just a single election to personally remake a majority of the court as they wish. Or, to put it another way, to stack the nation’s most important court. Perhaps that possibility will dominate the relevant election. Or maybe, this unusual prime ministerial superpower will be ignored by an electorate focused on other concerns. Which would you prefer, Robert Beech-Jones? Neither? Well, maybe you should have thought about that when you took up Susan Kiefel’s vacancy in 2023.

Fortunately, Beech-Jones can reverse his (and Albanese’s) terrible error, but he’ll need to heed a hard lesson from America. Ruth Bader Ginsburg originally got her face on a mug labelled “notorious RBG” because of her iconic legal role and look in the mid-2010s, but these days she is much more notorious for a quite different reason. As recounted in Suzie Miller’s other one-hander, RBG: Of Many, One, when the judge was eighty, president Barack Obama carefully suggested she retire at a time when the nation and its elected institutions were united behind the Democrats, and her own court’s political affiliations were finely balanced. Alas, Ginsburg turned him down, out of a mix of pride, hubris and misplaced hope, easily her worst and most consequential decision.

Robert Beech-Jones, of all the current justices, knows this story and its many terrible judicial, political and social outcomes all too well. What would RBG have thought of a suggestion that a justice of the High Court of Australia should quit years early just to prevent a future prime minister stacking the court? I don’t think that question is very difficult to answer. But perhaps the nation-changing question is: what does RBJ think? •

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We were due to get a video message from Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, a Palestinian and an Israeli who work together for peace after both losing relatives in the conflict — Sarah’s brother died of injuries sustained in Israeli custody and Inon’s parents were killed by Hamas on 7 October. But the computer failed. A few men stared at a laptop, balefully tapping a key, until a young, bearded bloke wearing a yarmulke took the mike: “I’m Hoff. I’m the tech guy. I’m an introvert, and not very good at public speaking,” He grinned shyly: “I’m also not a very good tech guy.”

But it was just a glitch, and soon the face of a handsome man in his early fifties, with wiry grey hair, filled the large screen at the end of the room. Mo Husseini, a Palestinian-American, was speaking to Friends of Standing Together, the Melbourne branch of an organisation of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis dedicated to — wait for it — peace in the Middle East.

Founded in 2015, Standing Together stands for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories, peace and independence for both peoples, and “full equality for everyone in this land.” It has 7000 members in Israel, about two-thirds of them Jewish, a third Arab. It’s a small number but membership has more than doubled since October 2023. (It also has 250,000 followers on social media.) Standing Together has collected food and clothing for Gaza residents and protected food trucks entering Gaza from attacks by far-right Israeli groups. Israeli novelist David Grossman,  who has written powerfully about the conflict, has spoken at Standing Together rallies.

Husseini, who lives in Washington State, is a filmmaker, novelist and member of the national launch committee for Friends of Standing Together USA. A piece he published in May 2024, “50 Completely True Things,” got more than half a million reads, perhaps because he found a fresh and funny and heartfelt way to write about a conflict that has nothing fresh or funny about it. Husseini grounds his writing not in the region’s endlessly litigated history and politics but in a principle. Two peoples live on this land and both have a right to live in peace and dignity. Start there.

But starting there is difficult, a point Husseini made right off the bat when he thanked people for coming. “I don’t say that as a pleasantry, I mean it. Being involved with Standing Together when the world is rewarding people for picking a side, for the comfort of tribe, for the dopamine hit of certainty, is a choice that carries a cost,” one that was rarely acknowledged.

Husseini spoke for half an hour without notes and in the strange intimacy of Zoom, which shows every twitching eyebrow or thought crossing a face. Noticing a young boy in the front row, he apologised in advance for a few “swears.” I sensed a man not convinced of his own wisdom but feeling his way, through speech, towards his version of the truth.

“I am a Palestinian,” he began. “I am not the Palestinian. I do not speak for any Palestinians. I can barely speak for myself most days.”

His family, carried across borders “by the shifting winds of history,” migrated from Palestine to Kuwait, where Husseini grew up, then to the United States. Husseini always felt he was from somewhere else, “somewhere you can’t go back to.” Belonging was a kitchen, food, a certain accent, the way his mother said the word, “home.” “Being Palestinian is frankly a shitty gig.” But “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I carry it with pride and love, and a ferocity that sometimes surprises me.”

What profoundly shaped his thought was living in America after 9/11. As a cultural Muslim, with a name that “sounds like the names of the people who flew the planes,” Husseini felt a relentless pressure to make himself understood to people who saw him as dangerous or didn’t see him at all. A pressure to show in every conversation that he was a moderate, to condemn al-Qaeda and bin Laden, to make a “performance of harmlessness that is hard to describe unless you have lived in it.”

It was hardly the worst thing in the world, Husseini said, and he wasn’t asking for sympathy.

Nevertheless, in the looks he got on planes and in theatres, in the random body searches that weren’t random, “I learnt in my body, in my heart, what it feels like when a whole society decides that who you are matters less than your category or tribe or religion… when you stop becoming a person and become the representative of a people.”

That lesson was why he became a writer, and why he joined Standing Together. Because, Husseini said, “that same machinery, that same impulse to condense an entire people into a single dangerous silhouette,” was now being applied to Jews.

He didn’t elaborate much on what he meant, but in a recent piece he wrote of “the way Zionist has become, in some corners, a synonym for Jew… the way criticism of Israeli policy slides, sometimes by accident and sometimes very much on purpose, into something older and uglier.” Speaking to Australians while the royal commission was hearing testimony about the shocking extent of antisemitism in this country, Husseini didn’t need to explain.

Husseini said his listeners often asked him a hard question: how could he as a Palestinian extend understanding to a people that was actively oppressing Palestinians? By talking about Jewish pain alongside Palestinian pain, was he not letting Israel off the hook?

The answer was easy, Husseini said. “I’m not both-sidesing this.” The power was not equal; occupier and occupied were not on the same moral plane. “My anger at what Israel is doing to Palestinians is not diminished by one single degree… I judge the occupation, the settlements, the bombing of hospitals, the taking of land and the uprooting of olive trees, the entire apparatus of domination that has made Palestinian life broadly unliveable for generations.”

But, he said, he refused to take the next step: “that because the Israeli government is doing these things, somehow every Israeli is complicit… somehow all Jewish people are guilty.” Because that was the step that had always been used against Palestinians.

“Activists really need to hear this,” he said. “The people who want you to flatten, who want you to say they are all the same, who want to treat everyone on the other side as a stand in for the worst of the other side. You are handing the Israeli right the narrative it needs: ‘See, they all hate us, there is no partner, the only option is more walls and more bombs.’

“You don’t defeat an unjust system by becoming its mirror image, you defeat injustice by becoming the thing that injustice says is impossible — people from both sides in the same rooms refusing to be what the system needs them to be.”

Lest anyone think his vitriol ran only one way, Husseini took “careful aim” at his own side, because “intellectual honesty is not a buffet where you get to skip issues you don’t like.” The Palestinian leadership’s “corruption, authoritarianism and factional cannibalism” had catastrophically failed its people for decades, Husseini said. Leaders had refused to accept imperfect peace deals that might have saved lives. The Hamas “cult of martyrdom” that “feeds children into a meat grinder and calls it resistance” had gotten the people of Gaza killed in catastrophic numbers.

But he was not here, Husseini said, to weigh Israeli failures against Palestinian failures, misery against misery, who had suffered more — “that exercise itself is the poison, the thing that keeps the conflict locked in place.”

Instead, the path forward required “everyone to look at their own house with the same ruthless clarity that they bring to looking at the other guy’s.” Until that happened, “we are not serious about peace, we are serious about being right — and being right has never in the history of any conflict saved a single life.”

Husseini turned to the role of story-telling, and of Jews, in his life. “Before I had a conversation with a Jewish person, I had lived in Jewish stories: books, films, arts, music. They all did something no political argument could have done. They let me feel in my body what it is like to carry a different people’s history. Not to agree with it but just to understand it.”

It was through stories that Husseini learnt that Jewish people were “not performing their fear. Their fear and trauma is real, it comes from somewhere ancient and it lives in their children in the same way my trauma lives in me. A good story makes flattening impossible… you cannot reduce them to a slogan. You know they are a person.” Even a paragraph that “captures someone mid-scroll” on their phone — “that crack is the beginning of something, everything that happens in rooms like this.”

Husseini took a few questions from the room, then left with an apology and a grin: his son’s last soccer game of the season was about to begin.

A young guitarist, Samantha Levy, stepped up to sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in Arabic — words she said she had learnt from a Palestinian man. An organiser, Abe Schwarz, closed the event by pointing out that Husseini had quoted a line from Anthem, another Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” He asked us to support a project to provide food to Palestinian families in the West Bank displaced by Israeli forces. And if people wanted to stick around, he said, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian and Arab people would be meeting that afternoon in this room to talk about the conflict.

People milled around, moved by Husseini’s talk. I was, too, yet something in me resisted these sweet notes at the end. Were they a balm to try to soothe the unending bitterness of this conflict? We would leave, stirred, with Cohen’s “sacred chord” humming in our heads, when only darkness seemed to lie ahead.

Five days after October 7, 2023, Standing Together signed a statement made by twenty-nine Israeli civil society groups calling for negotiations with Hamas to free the hostages and opposing the war that was about to begin. Dozens of members left the organisation as a result, no doubt feeling its line was too soft given the barbarity of the attacks and the ongoing threat posed by Hamas. At that time the organisation and one of its leaders, Alon-Lee Green, were getting 2000 threatening messages a day, after right-wing groups published their addresses.

And when an Israeli military action freed four hostages in Gaza in 2024, Jewish and Arab leaders of Standing Together struggled to write a joint statement that struck the right balance of joy at their release with pain at the collateral loss of Palestinian life. The organisation’s rule that it presents one united position to the two communities can be hard to uphold.

While Standing Together locates itself proudly on the left, it has few friends among the global left that has so ardently embraced the Palestinian cause. The Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which since its founding in 2005 has sought to ostracise Israel in global forums, called Standing Together a “normalisation outfit that seeks to distract from and whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Speaking on American campuses after 7 October, Alon-Lee Green and another Standing Together leader, Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had the bizarre experience of white student protestors wrapped in keffiyehs telling her she was normalising Israel, and telling him to go back to Poland.

I wondered whether Standing Together’s traditional leftist rhetoric of solidarity, justice and struggle would limit its ability to grow in a country that has shifted sharply to the right since the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. But it is not the only voice calling for a middle way.

On the Palestinian side I’m thinking of Ali Abu Awwad, who founded the Palestinian non-violence movement, Taghyeer (Change), and Samer Sinijlawi, president of the Jerusalem Development Fund. In the diaspora there are the British-Palestinian blogger John Aziz, and in the United States, Ihab Hassan and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

None of these writers is blind to the torment of their people. They’ve lived it. Alkhatib has lost thirty relatives, many to Israeli airstrikes, in the war in Gaza. Awwad and Sinijlawi both spent more than four years in Israeli jails after taking part in the First Intifada. In 2000 Awwad was shot by an Israeli settler while changing a tyre in the West Bank; an Israeli soldier shot his brother dead at a checkpoint. Nevertheless, all three have chosen to work with Israelis in calling for what Sinijlawi, in one of the most moving recent articles I’ve read on the conflict, calls dignity for Palestinians based on security for Israelis.

Such voices exist on the Israeli side — probably more of them — but given how much their people are the underdogs in this conflict, the voices of these Palestinian writers leap off the page. They get a lot of contempt — John Aziz is regularly called an Uncle Tom — and are seen as naive dreamers at best, but they might be not only the bravest but the most practical people in the conflict. They work in the space between millennial fantasies on the right and left: of one supremacist Jewish state and the elimination of the Jewish state. They have their own dream, but they also have a strategy to achieve it, one that looks hopeless… and is the only hope.

Husseini said he wasn’t by nature an optimist. “I’ve spent years writing about a conflict that has not gotten better and in the past two and a half years has gotten unspeakably worse.” Yet he held onto the “stubborn, possibly irrational, delusional” idea that “two peoples have lived before on this land and can again.”

Change would come “person by person, grain of sand by grain of sand” until, when the diplomats finally met to negotiate a final outcome, they would find the foundation for peace already built beneath them. Hope was not a feeling but an action, Husseini said. “It’s rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it.”

We left feeling a sliver of that hope, not a lot but a sliver. I’ll go to another Friends of Standing Together event. Hope to see you there. •

Hiba Qasas from the Geneva-based Principles for Peace Foundation and Gil Murciano from the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies are speaking on the Roadmap to Peace in Sydney on 1 June, Canberra on 2 June and Melbourne on 4 June. Details: New Israel Fund.

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Queensland’s voice in the Australian polity has been growing steadily louder since it joined five other colonies in a federation ten years after those labour men got together in Barcaldine. The change is mainly a matter of arithmetic, for there are now so many more Queenslanders.

The House of Representatives embodies the consequences. When Australians elected their first national parliament in 1901, they voted in seventy-five electorates. Nine were in Queensland, 12 per cent of the total. This was more than in South Australia (seven seats), Tasmania and Western Australia (five each), but a lot fewer than in New South Wales (twenty-six) and Victoria (twenty-three).

Today, the House has twice as many members but the number from Queensland has more than trebled. Of the 150 electorates at the 2025 election, thirty (or 20 per cent) were in Queensland. South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales have gained seats since Federation too, but have reduced their share of the enlarged total — South Australia (ten seats) down from 9 to 7 per cent, Victoria (thirty-eight seats) from 31 to 25 per cent, New South Wales (forty-six seats) from 35 to 31 per cent. Tasmania still has the five seats it had at Federation, so its share of the total has halved. Only Western Australia, like Queensland, has increased both its number of seats (to sixteen) and share of the total, from 7 per cent in 1901 to 11 per cent in 2025.

Though louder, the political voice from the north carries confounding accents. Baby Boomers remember the Moonlight State of premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, dominating much of the three decades of conservative rule between the Labor split and 1989. Yet Labor had been out of office for just one term between 1915 and 1957 and has now governed in Queensland for thirty of the nearly thirty-seven years since Wayne Goss’s victory in 1989.

Within the state, the big political voices have moved south. Labor once chose its premiers from the north and west, elevating the members for Barcoo, Chillagoe, Cairns and Mackay before the second world war; since then, they have come from Brisbane. No less than three have been the member for the southwest Brisbane seat of Inala (Ned Hanlon, premier 1946–52; Goss, 1989–96; Annastacia Palaszczuk, 2015–23) and two South Brisbane (Vince Gair, 1952–57, and Anna Bligh, 2007–12). Sydney-born Peter Beattie (1998–2007) was raised on the Atherton Tableland but moved to the capital and had represented Brisbane Central.

The last Labor premier, and now opposition leader, Stephen Miles, is a Brisbane boy, initially the member for Mt Coot-tha and now for the outer-northern suburban seat of Murrumba. Even in the era of conservative ascendancy, Country Party premiers Frank Nicklin (1957–68) and Bjelke-Petersen were from electorates in the southeast.

Victorians go to Queensland, I was once told, for two reasons: to holiday and to die. It was not true even then. For decades, they have been going there to live. Their numbers help make this the only state to have recorded positive net interstate migration every financial year since the early 1980s.

In Ray Lawler’s famous Doll trilogy, the Victorians don’t go there at all. The travellers come south. By December 1953, when the Summer of the Seventeenth Doll opens, sugar-cane-cutters Roo and Barney have spent sixteen summers in Melbourne’s inner-city suburb of Carlton.

The south is more than a holiday. After seven months working in the far north, “the lay-off” is “not just playin’ around and spendin’ a lot of money, but a time for livin’.” The pattern is established in the two prequels, written in the mid-1970s long after the Doll. In Kid Stakes, set in 1937 — “nothing to win and nothing to lose” — Roo and Barney meet young milliners Olive and Nancy and talk their way into staying in the boarding house Olive’s mother Emma runs. Other Times begins as the war is ending in 1945 and the women are waiting for their men to return, having hosted shorter summers of leave away from the fighting.

The Doll trilogy is a landmark in Australian theatre and culture. Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre in St Kilda ran a season of the three plays from February to April this year and is now touring it to cities including Hobart in late May and Ballarat in June, selling out “Trilogy Packages” with the three plays run end-to-end, performed over a single day by the same small ensemble cast, as Lawler preferred.

On its premiere in Melbourne in 1955, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was celebrated for its urban setting, its assailing of myths about masculinity, its radical alternative to conventional marriage. Taken to stages in London two years later and then Broadway, the play “carr[ied] on its back those first timid assertions of national pride in ourselves since Federation,” Katherine Brisbane wrote in the Bulletin two decades later.

All three plays take place in the same sitting room in the same Carlton boarding house, a site dramatically different from the elemental landscapes that dominated the imaginations of Australia’s turn-of-the-century nationalist poets and storytellers. Those landscapes would feature again in the film renaissance a decade or two after the Doll. Red Stitch says Lawler’s characters “personify the friction that arises in a society transitioning from rural life to urban metropolises.” One metropolis stands for them all. Of the playwright himself, one of eight children who grew up in Footscray, Brisbane later wrote “Lawler belongs to Melbourne.”

The audience never sees Queensland but the distant place resonates through all three plays. Lawler, whose early career included a stint in Brisbane as a stage manager, a lyric rewrite man and a “filler-in” for a fortnightly variety show, gives it a dual identity. It is a dreamscape as well as a workplace.

Extensive stage notes require the sitting room for the Doll to be decorated not just with the sixteen kewpie dolls from previous summers but also with “colourful mementos” from North Queensland — “brilliantly plumaged, stuffed North Queensland birds, coral pieces and shells from the Great Barrier reef, and picture frames backed with black velvet to which cling crowds of shimmering-winged tropical butterflies.” These are Olive’s choices, acquired from her annual visitors, evidence of the unseen north but also signs that, over the three plays, “household power” has passed from tough, practical Emma to her endlessly romantic daughter.

The Queensland that Roo and Barney occupy, though, is a place of work, hard manual work, of masculinity and competitiveness. Only when the work is done does the north acquire colour and shimmer, wages for men to spend with women, trinkets to adorn a Carlton sitting room, wealth to last a southern, urban summer.

Filmmaker John Ruane tried “to imitate Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in reverse” in his mid-1970s Queensland. The movie was “a sort of Northcote version of Midnight Cowboy,” he said in a 1995 interview, “not the story, but the fact that they were headed for a dream. Their dream was Miami. Our film was obviously about heading to Queensland.” Ruane’s working class dreamers never make it, the film ending with one of them pushing a broken-down Holden up a hill, unable to get beyond inner-suburban Westgarth.

The Doll too ends tragically and in Melbourne. Roo has had a shocker of a season up north, humiliated in the canefields by a younger, stronger rival. He decides it is time to settle down, to marry Olive, get a job in Melbourne and start a new life. Olive is appalled. She doesn’t want years, she wants summers. A cane-cutter, not a worker in a paint factory. “You think I’ll let it all end up in marriage?” Roo thinks she’s “gone mad, or somethin’?!… You dunno what you want!” She does. “I want what I had before!,” she cries as she beats Roo’s chest with her fists. “You give it back to me — give me back what you’ve taken!”

The play and the trilogy end with Barney leading Roo away, suggesting they “go off on our own… Make a fresh start.” It could be the West, or Rum Jungle — “I bet fellers like us could really clean up there” — or maybe “that bloke up in Warwick, he always said he’d take us on.”

The North that Henry Reynolds looks from was no dreamscape for nineteenth century colonists. In his exploration of “Australian History from the Top Down,” the line that matters is the Tropic of Capricorn, a geographic feature with profound political consequences.

Above it, right across the continent, lay a zone of possibility and anxiety for southern colonists. Anxiety because they feared their claim to the land would be ceded to other colonial powers if they didn’t exploit it, and because they soon learned the land was already occupied by people who would fight for it. Possibility because those who ventured there sent back reports of economic potential, lush grasslands in the interior, a fertile coastal strip with reliable rainfall, pearls and bêche-de-mer (“sea cucumbers”) in the shallow seas, gold in the Palmer River. “Peopling the north became a generations-enduring obsession for policymakers in the south,” writes Reynolds.

Colonists from Port Jackson, Port Phillip, Port Adelaide, the Swan River and Moreton Bay wanted to develop the north but struggled to match their aspiration with people like them to do the work. Those who tried often found the best workers were already there or came from further north or east — Indigenous stockmen and women and crews for the pearling fleet, Pacific Islanders brought in to work on sugar plantations, Chinese miners, merchants, shopkeepers and market gardeners, Japanese and Filipino divers and crew. They provided the cheap labour British convicts had supplied for the economic development of the south. White workers didn’t much like the blistering, monsoonal, cyclonic north with its debilitating tropical diseases, and tended not to stay long. Many were “sojourners rather than settlers,” Reynolds says.

When the colonies federated, the more numerous politicians of the south, with “almost universal” support from electors throughout the new nation, insisted that a defining feature of Australia should be its whiteness. The federation would be British. Having never travelled north of Capricorn and seen the multicultural workforces and communities, they wanted Pacific Islanders sent home, Chinatowns demolished, non-white immigration ended. Over the first half of the twentieth century, they had their way.

Queensland no longer has as much difficulty getting people from the south. They don’t come just to holiday or retire in the sun but to work and live. When Adept Economics reported on Queensland’s decades-long record of net interstate immigration in January this year, it put the figure down to “lifestyle preferences, climate, employment opportunities, and relative affordability, particularly compared with Sydney and Melbourne.” Deputy Queensland premier Jarrod Bleijie recently said it was “an influx of people leaving the People’s Republic of Victoria,” individuals from the rest of Australia saying “we want to invest and we want to not only invest, we want to move our families up here and get a job and build a home in Queensland.”

The migration is not just from other states. New Zealanders who move to Australia are especially choosing Southeast Queensland. A third of Kiwis living in Australia are in Brisbane or on the Gold Coast, says Adept. But Australia’s broader population growth story is about more than Queensland: in 2024–25, Western Australia’s population grew faster than Queensland’s, and Victoria’s increased at the same rate. And population growth has costs. House and unit prices have grown faster in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth in recent years than they have in Sydney and much faster than in Melbourne, jeopardising one of the factors that made the smaller capitals more attractive in the first place.

Australia has a geographic north and south but the boundaries of economy, society, culture and politics are harder to draw. The nation is dynamic, a network of exchanges, of movements across and within its borders.

Federal elections freeze Australia’s voting population every three years, locking electors into their residential addresses for the political stocktake. Once the numbers are counted and the government is determined, movements resume. Trends and counter-trends, the country and the city, North and South, fly-in fly-out, the season and the lay-off. The country is continually remade.

People like the poet and activist Judith Wright move south, from Tamborine Mountain to Braidwood and Canberra, “tired now, summers, of cutting you back to size.” Others head north, like the leftover Fitzroy Lions who merged with a team of Bears already on the Gold Coast: they all arrive in Melbourne as the Brisbane Lions these days, celebrating AFL premierships first at the Brunswick Street Oval before flying back to fans at their newish home ground in Springfield, near Ipswich.

Occasionally, someone or something returns home, like the literary journal Meanjin, established in Brisbane in 1940 and named for the finger of land where Brisbane’s central business district stands. A few years after its founding, it moved to the University of Melbourne, near Carlton. Last year, after eighty years, it went back, this time to the Queensland University of Technology on “Gardens Point.”

Even the university’s predecessor, the Queensland Institute of Technology, didn’t exist when Meanjin was founded. Vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil said the return “nods… to founding editor Clem Christensen’s naming of the journal to relate “culture… to place.”

Brisbane has got back what it had before, an old cultural institution in an unrecognisably changed place, an innovation from an era when the North was about to become Australia’s frontline. There’s a new publisher and a new “establishing editor.” There will be a new editorial advisory board and finally a new ongoing editor, someone who might move north, south, east or west, across the river, or who might not need to move at all. •

The post Geography of the Seventeenth Doll appeared first on Inside Story.

He expanded on his theme over the following weeks by invoking the concept of “progressive patriotism” and holding out the promise that Australia could serve as a beacon of harmony: “At a time when there’s conflict in the world, where people are often divided on the basis of race or religion, here in Australia, we can be a microcosm for the world,” he told the Inside Politics podcast. It was “not just about strengthening Australia, but also being a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward.”

These forays into national identity were relatively novel for Albanese. The subject had been notably absent from his prime-ministerial repertoire compared to the most able of his predecessors. And that muteness was consistent with one of his conspicuous shortcomings as leader: his failure to weave a compelling narrative of his government’s mission. A year later, it is evident that re-election did not remedy that weakness. Albanese has not gone on to develop the inchoate theme of “progressive patriotism.” He has gone quiet on it.

In parallel and of greater moment, the outpouring of confident assertions about Australia’s distinctive democratic resilience has all but dried up during the past twelve months. What was celebrated at the time as a watershed repudiation of an ugly politics of fear and division — a decisive rejection of the Coalition’s efforts to shrink Australia into a mean-spirited country — is now rendered by recent commentary as merely a temporary respite. Right-wing populism has regrouped and, if anything, its threat has grown more menacing. We have regressed to the anxiety and resentment that stalked the land after the defeat of the Indigenous Voice referendum in October 2023 and through 2024 into early 2025.

It is not hard to identify the reasons for a darkening of mood and pessimism about the state of the nation. There was the trauma of the Bondi massacre of December 2025, which battered claims that Australia is a nirvana of social cohesion — a setback rendered worse by the poisonous blame game that erupted in its wake. There has been the disturbing surge in the polls of the grievance-driven and xenophobic One Nation, which began before Bondi but accelerated afterwards. There has been the Coalition’s seemingly inexorable march to the right (and electoral irrelevancy). And, of course, there has been the roiling of global international relations and the world economy by the grotesque US administration of Donald Trump, as exemplified by the reckless attack on Iran.

But even allowing for these factors, how do we reconcile what the election result of May 2025 suggested about Australia’s political character with the country in which we apparently find ourselves a year on? Which better represents the true nature of the nation’s soul?

One way to begin answering these questions is to revisit the run-up to last year’s election. Since the Peter Dutton–led Coalition’s swingeing defeat, it has been easy to lose sight of how different the political environment appeared during much of the preceding two years.

By the second half of 2023, the first-term Albanese government looked to be in trouble. Against the backdrop of the meandering and doomed campaign for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament and worsening cost-of-living pressures, opinion polls showed the government’s primary vote had dipped to the low thirties. Disapproval of the prime minister’s performance was outstripping approval; trust in government and satisfaction with democracy, having risen early in Albanese’s term, were sagging.

Australia seemed to be spiralling back into the cycle that had plagued the country for the previous decade and a half: precipitous loss of support for national governments and widespread public disenchantment with how politics worked.

The drubbing of the Yes side in October 2023’s Voice referendum only seemed to confirm a souring national mood. Albanese’s final recourse had been to characterise a Yes vote as an act of kindness by non-Indigenous Australia — an outstretched hand to First Nations peoples. When 60 per cent of the electorate responded by voting No and the referendum was beaten in every state, it was easy to assume a collective stoniness of heart.

This is not the place to analyse the reasons for the Voice’s decisive defeat. The contributing factors were many, among them the long-established reluctance of Australians to amend the constitution, the cruelling effects of the denial of bipartisan support, the inability of Yes proponents to effectively counter the argument that a constitutionally entrenched Voice would elevate one group of Australians above the rest, and Albanese’s deficiencies as an advocate.

This was the moment in Labor’s first term that most underlined questions about Albanese’s capacity to switch to a dynamic, galvanising prime-ministerial mode. Words, or his lack of facility with them, bedevilled him and the Voice campaign.

The referendum’s defeat upended the political battle between Albanese and Dutton. In a way that rehearsed his initial disorientation after the Bondi massacre — as betrayed by his stricken face and glassy eyes — the prime minister could not disguise his mortification. Having raised the hopes of First Nations people only for them to be cruelly crushed, he had joined a dispiritingly long line of occupants of the Lodge, Bob Hawke most prominent among them, left to rue their failure to deliver for Indigenous Australians. In the days and weeks after the vote, the prime minister was demoralised. It was as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him.

Dutton, by contrast, was emboldened. In the pattern of the referendum results, he was able to discern vindication of his strategy of seeking government through the outer suburbs and regional and rural Australia. There were doubters, of course. Andrew Gee, who had split from the Nationals over its opposition to the Voice, predicted the Liberals would eventually face the reality that campaigning against the referendum had “burned a large swathe of their supporter base” and would “ultimately be ashes in their mouths.” Noel Pearson, a chief architect of the Voice, later observed that Dutton had squandered an opportunity to soften his ingrained and politically damaging “hard-arse persona.”

When the Coalition was thrashed at the polls in May 2025, Pearson declared that Dutton too, “along with the blackfellas,” had become “victim of the failure of the Voice.” Corroboration of Pearson’s argument could be found in post-referendum research by ANU that had highlighted Dutton’s deep unpopularity in the community. The data invited the conclusion that his pitiless prosecution of the No case had been purchased at the price of a chilling of attitudes to him.

Nevertheless, for much of 2024, the impression conveyed by the opinion polls and reinforced by the bulk of political commentary was that Dutton enjoyed the upper hand over Albanese. The prime minister was dogged by the same scepticism about his leadership that had existed before the 2022 election. Columnists asserted that he was “shrinking” rather than growing in office, that he was allowing the opportunities of office to slip through his hands, and that he was sleepwalking towards taking Labor to a first-term defeat.

In early December, the eminence among columnists at the Australian Paul Kelly captured a nagging question about Albanese that had grown more insistent with the election of the disruptor-in-chief, Donald Trump, to a second presidency. Albanese’s problem is his “incrementalism in an age of transformation,” opined Kelly. A fortnight later he suggested that Dutton, who he claimed Labor had badly underestimated — just as it had John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison — was the one clued into the zeitgeist of the times:

[Dutton is] becoming more than a Liberal leader — he is becoming a symbol for the people who feel disenfranchised, overlooked by the system, denied a voice and patronised by the elites. These “forgotten people” in 2024 constitute a growing segment of the population and every move by progressives — from backing identity politics, bagging Australia Day, championing high immigration, altering the way people live, promoting distinctions on race, sex and gender, and deploring Dutton on the flag — only boosts Dutton’s profile. The progressives don’t get it… left progressives in Australia are Dutton’s best friends.

It is worth recalling exactly what Dutton was offering to voters that caused Kelly to believe he had cracked the national political code. The Coalition’s headline policy under his leadership, unveiled in meagre detail in June 2024 after months of delay, was a plan for seven publicly owned nuclear energy plants. The policy defied expert opinion, including from the country’s chief science research agency, CSIRO, to which Dutton responded by impugning its objectivity.

The core problems identified with the policy were the time lag involved in the construction of nuclear facilities and the uncompetitive cost of nuclear-generated power compared with renewables. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the opposition saw nuclear energy not so much as a serious solution to curbing carbon emissions but as a filibuster for delaying the transition from fossil fuels. That depressing reality was effectively confirmed when Dutton announced that the Coalition intended to scrap Labor’s legislated carbon emissions reduction target of 43 per cent by 2030 — a decision he had reportedly taken unilaterally.

Otherwise, Dutton’s statements and policy offerings during 2024 seemed principally designed to ignite xenophobic antagonisms in the community. In his budget reply speech in May, he advocated a major cut in the migration intake, ostensibly to address the nation’s housing shortage. But he did not stop there. He connected excessive migration to people in the suburbs struggling to get their children into school or childcare and to gaining access to medical care. Migrants were even at fault for road congestion.

Another familiar strongman trope in the budget reply address was Dutton’s pledge of action to counter violent crime, despite law and order lying primarily in the jurisdiction of the states. In September, during an interview with a friendly Sydney talkback radio host, he warned that international students appealing for visa extensions had become “a modern version of boat arrivals.”

The opposition leader also showed a cavalier indifference to the social tensions in the Australian community unleashed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which was precipitated by Hamas’s atrocities in October 2023. This was a diabolical issue for the Albanese government, both diplomatically and domestically. As with sections of the Australian media that vehemently policed a line of unfettered support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the Coalition’s position on the Gaza war was bereft of nuance. It dogmatically backed Israel’s military aggression against Gaza’s population even as evidence mounted of its disproportionate and catastrophic deadliness.

Ignoring a plea for restraint from the director-general of ASIO, Dutton provocatively alleged that Labor’s security checks had been lax and demanded all visa applications by Palestinians fleeing the war zone be refused because of the threat to national security. He called for draconian measures to curb pro-Palestinian protests, even proposing deporting transgressors. Then he rounded out the year by announcing on Sky News that, if elected prime minister, he would discontinue Albanese’s practice of standing beside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, in company with the Australian flag, at media conferences. The flags, he claimed, were “dividing our country unnecessarily.” It was all red meat for a constituency Dutton evidently believed to be baying for this stuff.

Significantly, of Liberal leaders this century, Dutton (along with Tony Abbott) came the nearest to being a Howard protégé. He was elected to the House of Representatives in November 2001, arguably the twenty-first century’s other watershed election. The so-called Tampa election, not long after the 11 September attacks, heralded a decisive shift to strongman politics built around the weaponisation of border control and an intensified securitisation of politics.

Combined with climate change scepticism, a lack of sympathy for First Nations self-determination and discomfort with multiculturalism, Howard smuggled into mainstream Australian politics a potent strand of homegrown conservative populism. In the hands of his successors, who lacked their master’s agility in application, that ideological pivot sharpened. Under Dutton, it was a distilled and noxious brew stripped not only of subtlety but also of any serious interest in economic issues. Abbott and Dutton were both conspicuous for their lack of adeptness or interest in economics.

As Australia entered 2025 commentators commonly assumed the country was headed for a close-shave election, with a real prospect that Dutton would achieve the extraordinary by dragging the Coalition back into power after just one term. The dire polls for Labor peaked in February, with one risibly reporting that the party’s primary vote had collapsed to 25 per cent. I always suspected that the picture painted by the polls was a mirage. In an essay for Inside Story in September 2024, for example, I contended that “the nation is neither as fearful nor as paranoid as Dutton is banking on, with women and young voters likely to prove major obstacles” to his prime-ministerial ambitions.

No magical powers of prescience were needed to arrive at this viewpoint. For at least a decade it had been clear that Howardism — a turning away from the forces of cultural and social modernisation doubled down on by his less capable successors — was propelling the Liberal Party towards electoral marginality.

The disintegrating support for the Coalition among young voters was especially stark and portentous. Among millennials and Gen Z voters last year, Labor attracted 64 per cent and 67 per cent of the two-party vote respectively. This loss by the Liberals of cohorts of younger Australians immersed in, and comfortable with, social and cultural pluralism shows where the Howard project had left his party.

Tellingly, the 2025 election also showed that Dutton and his fellow travellers didn’t have much more insight into the outer suburbs. These communities, which were undergoing a tsunami of growth and dramatic demographic change, were vastly and increasingly diverse. They were not defined by so-called “bogans,” as the opposition had condescendingly conceived them.

Above all, the 2025 election was a disavowal of Dutton’s dread-infused vision of the nation. The historian Frank Bongiorno wrote at the outset of the campaign that the Liberal leader’s bleakness was “in a league of its own,” even more unrelieved than that of the minatory Abbott. The Australian Election Study found Dutton to be most unpopular leader since data had been collected, bumping out Scott Morrison from its previous survey.

The result also reinforced the message the electorate had sent the Coalition three years earlier when they cast Morrison from office. Though Morrison was somewhat aberrant in the Liberal Party and Australia’s political culture because of the influence of his North America–style evangelical Christianity on his belief system and style of leadership, the 2022 and 2025 election results effectively telegraphed the same message to the Coalition, with the latter adding an exclamation mark. Indeed, just as Dutton had doubled down on his side of politics’ march to right-wing populism, voters had doubled down in rejecting it.

The unexpected scale of Labor’s victory in May last year left questions about why pundits had been misreading the political mood over the previous eighteen months. Opinion polls had begun to track a recovery in the government’s standing by about March and were tracking a widening gap between Albanese and Dutton as preferred prime minister, but the magnitude of Labor’s improvement between its nadir of February and the early May election beggared belief. This reminder of the limited predictive power of opinion polls at a distance from an election also raises questions about what they had actually been registering. Rather than providing a reliable measure of voting intention, my suspicion is that the polls might well have been acting as an instrument for the public to let off steam and stretch the government on the rack.

The emphatic repudiation in May 2025 of the Coalition’s journey to strident conservative populism also provoked an effusion of interest in the country’s political distinctiveness. Australia had bucked the trend of democratic backsliding in many other parts of the world, not least in Trump’s United States, and the associated proliferation of populist strongman leaders. Its democracy was resilient and its political centre holding.

Historians have been writing about the country’s democratic exceptionalism for many years, but suddenly in the second half of 2025 it became a subject about which every galah in every pet shop was squawking. The ABC’s 2025 Boyer Lecture orations were dedicated to the theme “Australia: A Radical Experiment in Democracy,” and a three-part television documentary on the national broadcaster, hosted by Annabel Crabb, lauded the nation’s democratic architecture.

Nor was it only at home that the country’s democratic system was winning favourable reviews. According to one of Britain’s most influential politics-watchers, Rory Stewart, “if liberal democracy has a future, it looks surprisingly Australian.” One of the ABC’s 2025 Boyer orators, Justin Wolfers, a US-based Australian who has successfully carved out a career as a scholar and economist, rhapsodised that the country’s “democratic and economic institutions” were “not just world class… [but] the world’s best.”

All this optimism came to a shuddering halt on the evening of 14 December with the killing of fifteen innocents at a Jewish festival of Hanukkah on Bondi beach by father and son Islamic State sympathisers radicalised by Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza. That depravity immediately became a subject of partisan-fuelled blame, spearheaded by Coalition politicians, present and former, who accused the federal government of failing to rein in a burgeoning wave of antisemitism. An evidently distraught Albanese was condemned for bungling the moment, for being slow to act in the days following the massacre, and especially for his resistance to what quickly became a coordinated campaign for the appointment of a royal commission into antisemitism.

The legitimate reasons to pause before proceeding down a royal commission path were drowned out by a clamour fuelled by News Corp and Nine media. Later, the Age’s editor, in an extraordinary column puffing the virtues of the newspaper and its journalists, conceded that sometimes its coverage could be “less frantic, more considered.” This was apparently said with no self-awareness that the febrile weeks following Bondi had been just the time for sober debate and steadiness rather than — as the Age had earlier bragged — being in the vanguard of the campaign for the royal commission come hell or high water.

The shocks kept coming, most notably the joint US–Israel airstrikes on Iran in late February, disrupting global oil trade and catalysing intensifying cost-of-living pressures. One Nation’s poll figures had smashed through the 20 per cent barrier by the end of December, with the lion’s share of that vote (as Murray Goot’s trademark granular analysis for Inside Story demonstrated) hiving off the Coalition and especially the Liberal Party.

The Coalition’s answer to this existential challenge has been to move further to the right: to effectively mingle in the same space as One Nation in competition for the votes of the angry and the disaffected. Witness the new opposition leader Angus Taylor’s recent immigration announcement, with its thinly coded signal of the abandonment of the principle of a non-discriminatory intake. One of the most arresting things here is how ill-fitted Taylor is for the role. A leader who looks like he has emerged from central casting and exudes a privileged background has taken on the mission of steering the Liberal Party further towards an anti-establishment position to vie with the much more impeccably credentialled outsider, Pauline Hanson.

Two essays published during the past fortnight probe the national mood a year from the May 2025 election. One appeared in the left-leaning Monthly and the other in the Murdoch flagship, the Australian. Despite their contrasting venues, they are consistent in depicting a troubling picture.

The former is written by the respected journalist and author of an accomplished biography of Albanese, Karen Middleton, and draws on focus group findings by social researcher Rebecca Huntley and polling work by Redbridge’s Kos Samaras. Middleton writes of “a deeper change in Australia that’s been gradual but now feels sudden, like a kind of fraying in the order of things”:

People have endured wave after wave of stress from fires and floods, a pandemic, conflicts abroad, rising inflation at home, a terrorist attack and now a fuel crisis. Australians’ anxiety and exhaustion have progressed to frustration, disillusionment and rage, as people become less willing to accept orthodoxies — political, corporate, legal — and more inclined to revolt.

Not surprisingly, Middleton identifies the dramatic spike in polled support for One Nation as the most visible manifestation of the community’s disenchantment with business-as-usual political practices. She points to the powerful performance of the party in the South Australian election in March, where it captured 23 per cent of the primary vote, as evidence of the realistic threat of that populist surge. She argues the loss of faith of Australians in institutions has been a slow burn, and even harks back to the corporate excesses of the 1980s and 1990s.

Middleton quotes Labor’s federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers, referring to the period since the global financial crisis: “all of these rolling shocks for twenty years have been cumulative. And every time it feels like ordinary people are going get off the mat, something else arrives.” At the same time, she singles out the Covid-19 pandemic as “a major pivot point for Australian attitudes.” In turn, the worsening cost-of-living pressures unleashed since the pandemic are compounding the sense of a system that is not delivering for ordinary people: a situation in which hard work is no longer a guarantee of material progress or security. Huntley perceives a besieged public and a “mood of persistent despair and fragility… she hasn’t encountered in twenty-two years of field work.”

If this is grim reading, then the second essay, by retired sociologist and longtime conservative commentator John Carroll, borders on the dystopian. When he looks at contemporary Australia, Carroll sees “conditions of disunity, malaise and confusion.” This is “a demoralised nation.” Social and culture decay is everywhere, not least in the big cities as manifest in “potholed streets, graffiti-smeared buildings and precincts populated by mentally disturbed drug addicts [and] an increasing failure to address crime, notably at the hands of violent teenage gangs.”

In common with Middleton, Carroll interprets the dramatic increase in One Nation’s appeal to voters as a symptomatic of political despair. But equally suggestive of political nihilism, in Carroll’s view, is the large proportion of Gen Zs who vote “for a marginal extremist party, the Greens.” Like Middleton, Carroll regards the current crisis as having a long genesis, with the decline of Christian faith among its causes. Yet he is also alive to the effects of public policy failure, especially the lack of action to tackle declining housing affordability that has left the young condemned to “a rootless existence, an understandably insecure and anxious one, prone to deflating self-esteem and low hope.”

Depressed? My question following reading these two essays is whether we are in danger of repeating the error of 2024: to believe that Australia is ripe for picking off by an opportunist populism that foments and feeds off grievance and division — that this country is, in other words, no less susceptible to a lurch to the extreme right than the United States or Britain. Indeed, suggestive of a parallel with Britain, Middleton recites how British Labour MP Liam Byrne, in his book Why Populists Are Winning and How to Beat Them, classifies the groups of voters being seduced by the blandishments of Reform leader Nigel Farage.

To put this another way, Middleton and Carroll’s essays would lead us to think the 2025 election result was not so much a defining repudiation of the dark lands of political populism as a mere postponement.

Though not wanting to diminish the extent of disgruntlement with politics in Australia, or the serious economic pressures and social fissures in the community, or the profound public policy challenges, I believe there are grounds to be more hopeful about the nation’s political sensibility and direction. One of the most pronounced lessons of Australian political history is that the public has little time for demagoguery and a keen nose for moonshine. The loathing Morrison engendered once voters had seen through his confections is only the latest evidence of the latter instinct.

Moreover, the institutions that were extolled in the aftermath of the 2025 election for their role in buttressing the political centre have not been packed up in the twelve months since. Compulsory voting and preferential voting, well-documented as restraints against polarisation, are an entrenched part of our democratic architecture, as is that underappreciated national jewel, the independent Australian Electoral Commission.

I also doubt the levels of support for One Nation registered in opinion polls will translate into a vote of that magnitude in a federal election. The latest surveys are already giving an inkling that the party’s appeal has peaked. And, while the SA election result suggested One Nation’s support was far from a polling mirage, it is important to remember that Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government was unmistakeably on track to romp back into office, allowing voters to vent frustrations in the knowledge that a first preference for One Nation would not change who was in power.

In that context, it is pertinent to note Middleton’s citing of Huntley’s finding that most voters contemplating shifting their allegiance to Hanson’s outfit “don’t actually want it to run the country.” Support for One Nation is effectively “a cri de couer,” Huntley believes, rather than heralding the party’s conquest of government.

None of what I am saying here is an excuse for complacency. Nor is it a reason to ignore the fact that Australia’s political system is under significant strain for a complex constellation of reasons, including a radically transformed and balkanised media landscape, two decades of stasis in key policy areas, and the ongoing flight of voters from the major parties. The latter phenomenon, while an expression of disillusionment, is also a natural byproduct of an increasingly diverse and complex society. Historically, the established parties were very proficient at accommodating growing pluralism, but that ability was always destined to reach its limits.

One of my conclusions in my new book on twenty-first century prime ministers, The Alchemy of Leadership, is that two decades of mostly underwhelming political leadership, instability in high office and accompanying policy stagnation have put the country on borrowed time. One thing that has differentiated Australia from many other democracies is that the young, females and males alike, have been overwhelmingly immune to the siren song of angry resentment politics. Instead, as suggested by the 2025 two-party-preferred vote, the young are skewing heavily to the progressive end of politics. Millennials, Gen Z and the coming Gen Alpha are demographic timebombs for the Coalition.

Far from Carroll’s dyspeptic and, I suspect, elegiac outlook developed at distance from younger Australians, the experiences of these generations have conditioned them to embrace diversity and endowed them with an outward-looking perspective. But we can’t expect endless forbearance from young people faced by what the former treasury secretary Ken Henry has acidly described as “wilful acts of bastardry” in permitting intergenerational inequalities to grow unchecked in fields such as housing, tertiary education and the environment. Alienation will eventually fester unless these inequities are meaningfully tackled by government.

Another reason for my guarded optimism is that we appear to be approaching an inflection point in the Albanese government. The prime minister’s maxim for most of the past four years has been to hasten slowly: to stick firmly to a practice of orderly, modest change. Many Cassandras in 2023–24 believed that his circumspection would prove the undoing of the government — that, as Paul Kelly suggested, he had misread the times by being an agent of nip-and-tuck government in an age of disruption.

Though not without good fortune (though which successful prime minister has not enjoyed a fair share of luck?), Albanese’s approach was ultimately vindicated at the ballot box. A year later, however, he finally seems to be signalling that he appreciates the growing urgency of the moment: that the time has arrived for a shift in governing tempo and for a quickening of reform pace focused especially on addressing generational inequalities. That he is cognisant that the upheavals besetting the globe and the public’s discontent present a rare window of opportunity to shake things up. Middleton quotes the prime minister’s address to the National Press Club early last month:

Providing stability and security amidst uncertainty does not mean standing still… It means anticipating and creating change, true to Australian values and in Australia’s interests. Because if people feel like the economy is not working for them, if they’re putting in the effort but not seeing the reward… then government cannot provide stability just by keeping things as they are. There is no security in maintaining a status quo that doesn’t work for people.

This month’s federal budget is being anticipated as a litmus test of whether Albanese is really prepared to spread his wings. Movement in some areas such as the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing has already been telegraphed. The likelihood, however, is that the budget will leave many progressives underwhelmed. They ought perhaps to bear in mind what another former treasury head and ex–prime minister’s department secretary, Martin Parkinson, observed recently. While imploring the federal government to seize this moment, he conceded that not all reform boats can be launched at once.

The truth is that it is a characteristic of the progressive side of politics to devour its own: to be perennially disappointed by Labor in power only to later, once the government is fallen, view it retrospectively through more sympathetic lenses. The impact of any invigoration of the Albanese government’s reform mission will also be hindered by a deficiency in the prime minister’s makeup that I have already referred to: his limitations as a communicator-in-chief. Advocacy and explaining to the public where Labor’s busyness in office is transporting the nation is an abiding deficit in his leadership, and seems all but irresolvable.

The past twelve months has certainly confirmed that right-wing populist politics was not slain in this country last May: it is a hydra-headed beast. Yet neither ought we be spooked by its spectre nor rattled by the now habitual turbulence of politics. History shows that political excess is not a natural feature of the country’s DNA and there remain grounds for confidence that the populist threat can be kept at bay by brave and judicious leadership.

To conclude squarely on leadership: we are prone in Australia to think dimly of the quality of those who govern over us, to believe Donald Horne’s aphoristic assertion in the 1960s that this is a nation that has prospered despite the mediocrity of its governing class. This is not borne out by the historical record. Since the birth of Commonwealth, the nation has had its fair share of accomplished and effective prime ministers: Alfred Deakin and Andrew Fisher in the first decades after Federation; John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Robert Menzies in the mid-twentieth century; and Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard in the modern era.

It is the case that this century has been far from a stellar time for prime-ministerial leadership in this country: a phenomenon I explore in my book. Yet if Albanese can discover something of the heroic within him and rise to the opportunities of this moment, it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibilities that he might one day be counted among those consequential prime ministers. •

The post Glass half full appeared first on Inside Story.

The decision by Bunnings’s owner, the Perth-based conglomerate Wesfarmers, to release those visuals didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s all part of the retailing giant’s battle to use facial recognition technology, or FRT, to monitor people entering its stores. By collecting data on all arrivals, managers are able to alert security guards about repeat offenders, adding vital seconds to call police and prepare staff for what might be coming their way.

It’s hard to argue against a business that has for years topped Roy Morgan’s “most trusted brand” list, particularly on such an emotive issue. Would you deny Bunnings the right to protect its staff and goods against violent thieves? The legal resistance encountered by Bunnings’s plans smacks of do-gooding over-regulation, in this case by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, or OAIC. Indeed, the message of Bunnings’s media campaign is that protecting staff, shoppers and property should trump the privacy enforcer’s concerns.

But here’s the thing: incidents of theft and assault in Bunnings stores have been declining across the country, according to data released during court hearings late last year. And that’s largely been a result of upgrades to traditional security measures rather than the decision to deploy FRT in sixty-three stores in New South Wales and Victoria. Those figures raise the not inconceivable possibility that the drive to embrace the technology is about something more than theft-proofing and occupational health and safety. Outsourcing security to technology could, of course, mean spending less on staff.

Throughout the Bunnings campaign, the OAIC has been adamant that FRT, which was deployed by the hardware retailer between 2018 and 2021, violates Australia’s 1988 Privacy Act. Contrary to Bunnings’s argument that the Hitachi-supplied FRT devices amounted to little more than glorified CCTV cameras, the OAIC argued the technology raised fundamental questions about how personal data can be collected and processed.

The OAIC’s November 2024 determination against Bunnings centred on the fact that, unlike CCTV, FRT collects personal data. The process starts with individual stores creating a database containing stripped-back facial images of customers previously identified as problematic. This isn’t a file of photos; it is a depository of biometric data extracted from CCTV stills according to a person’s facial features. The biometric data of people entering participating stores is compared, in a fraction of a second, to this database.

The key to the OAIC’s concerns is that the FRT collects the biometric data of all people entering the store. This is what distinguishes it from, say, CCTV, which merely offers shop assistants an additional set of eyes without in any way processing the images. Even the cameras mounted above self-checkout terminals in supermarkets, which store footage of all transactions, don’t qualify as FRT because they aren’t positioned in a way that identifies shoppers and they don’t process sensitive data.

Did Bunnings collect the biometric data in a way that would trigger the Privacy Act? The chain’s FRT devices collected customers’ data for 0.00417 seconds and discarded the information immediately if it didn’t match the database of “enrolled” repeat offenders. The OAIC concluded that, yes, Bunnings had collected “sensitive” personal data (which is how biometric data is classified). That it was stored for a mere 0.00417 seconds doesn’t matter — regardless of where you place the decimal point, the regulator said it amounts to “collection” under the Act.

The OAIC’s concerns were informed by recent court stoushes over the use, and misuse, of people’s images. It had successfully forced US-based image-scraping startup Clearview AI to shut down its operations in Australia and had castigated local police forces that used the company’s services. It also knew that FRT trials in New Zealand had produced “false positives,” identifying the wrong people as repeat offenders (with the faces of Pacific islanders particularly susceptible to mix-ups). In the United States, several people (many of them African Americans) have been arrested after being misidentified by Clearview, as outlined in New York Times tech writer Kashmir Hill’s 2024 book Your Face Belongs to Us.

The regulator appeared to be using the Bunnings case, as well as probes into FRT use by Kmart and 7-Eleven, to test the waters. Speaking to me in 2024, privacy commissioner Carly Kind conceded that, without a lot of jurisprudence available on FRT, she was making her “best and most informed efforts to apply the law as I understand it.” Because the use of FRT had never been reviewed by a court, the key provisions of the Privacy Act hadn’t been put to the test.

The OAIC would have preferred the matter to end up in the Federal Court. This would have given a judge with Privacy Act expertise the chance to undertake a “full-merits” review, examining everything from scratch. The Federal Court (and, to a limited extent, the High Court) had dealt with the OAIC’s case against Meta Platforms over the Cambridge Analytica data breach and revealed a readiness to dig deep into Australians’ right to privacy.

Bunnings had other plans. It launched an appeal with the newly established Administrative Review Tribunal, ensuring the focus would remain narrowly on the regulator’s determination rather than on broader privacy issues. A spokesperson told me at the time that Bunnings had hoped Kind would accept its claim that the technology was deployed in a way that “appropriately balances our privacy obligations and the need to protect our team, customers and suppliers against the ongoing and increasing exposure to violent and organised crime, perpetrated by a small number of known and repeat offenders”.

Both Bunnings and Wesfarmers were also lobbying for changes that would legalise — beyond any OAIC challenge — the technology’s use. Bunnings managing director Michael Schneider told the Australian Financial Review the time had come for “stronger protections and smart technology, like the responsible use of FRT, to keep people safe.” Without tougher laws, Wesfarmers managing director Rob Scott warned that organised crime gangs would continue to target the company’s stores, particularly in Victoria.

In Bunnings’s eyes at least, the appeal had become an existential fight.

The room allocated for the four-day hearing at the Administrative Review Tribunal’s Melbourne offices in October 2025 was small and stuffy. I arrived early, guessing there would be a scramble by observers wanting to plug their laptops into the room’s only accessible power point. A couple of other journalists sat with me at the start of the first day, though they left once it became clear how mind-numbingly technical the arguments would be.

But there were also some moments of levity. Representing Bunnings, barrister Ruth Higgins (subsequently appointed Australia’s solicitor-general) argued that the milliseconds required for the FRT to compare customers’ biometric data shouldn’t raise concerns under the Privacy Act. Rather, it was like gathering skimming stones on the shores of a lake, in which the mere picking up of the stone only to examine and discard it didn’t amount to its collection. Higgins went on to say that because Bunnings hadn’t captured CCTV stills but merely images “reduced to their mathematical form,” the process didn’t amount to the collection of sensitive data.

This was the first plank of Bunnings’s case. The company would also argue that even if the three-member tribunal ultimately found it had collected the biometric data, the company was entitled to do so under privacy exemptions designed to reduce serious threats to life, health or safety, or to prevent risks to the public.

There were some tense exchanges along the way. The OAIC’s barrister, Michael Borsky, derided Bunnings’s video compilation of violent incidents in its stores, pointing out that the showreel’s highlight was a man in a balaclava wielding a shotgun. No FRT device would have identified him through a facemask, making its inclusion misleading. The privacy regulator’s legal team also suggested Bunnings had inflated the rise in the numbers of violent incidents by not factoring in an increase in the number of its stores around Australia — as a percentage, violent incidents had in fact decreased. The Bunnings witness conceded this was the case and also said there had been no visible decline in incidents as a result of the FRT trial.

At every turn, the OAIC was determined to emphasise what was at stake. Cross-examining a witness, Borsky suggested that in a single two-month period Bunnings had recorded sixteen false positives and no correct positives. The OAIC also suggested that most of the false positives involved women or racial minorities. The head of Bunnings’s security operations accepted there had been false positives, but said staff had used discretion when reviewing the alerts. What’s more, when a false positive occurred, the image that caused it was expunged from the database of recidivist shoplifters to ensure the FRT wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

This prompted Borsky to question why Bunnings had even bothered with the rollout. “You don’t need FRT to know you have to call the police,” the barrister declared on the second day of hearings.

As the days in the airless room passed, it was becoming clear from the questions posed by deputy president Peter Britten-Jones and his colleagues that, on significant issues at least, the tribunal was leaning towards the OAIC’s arguments.

First, Bunnings’s written warnings to customers that their biometric data would be collected and used by FRT software linked to the CCTV cameras were either non-existent or inadequate. On this front, Australian Privacy Principle 3.3 is crystal clear: a retailer may “only solicit and collect sensitive information if the individual consents to the sensitive information being collected.” Bunnings’s signage wasn’t adequate.

Second, the members of the tribunal also appeared to believe Bunnings had indisputably collected the data. The milliseconds needed to compare customer’s biometric data to that of the store’s database became irrelevant because Bunnings had already admitted to collecting and collating a database of banned individuals.

The Privacy Act boxes had been ticked — the skimming pebbles analogy hadn’t convinced them.

But would the tribunal accept that the real security threats identified by Bunnings would be enough to grant one of the Act’s exemptions? On that question, the OAIC appeared to be struggling. While it might have scored a point by demonstrating how the number of violent criminal attacks had declined as an overall percentage across Bunnings stores, the tally of incidents was still very high, as Britten-Jones pointed out. That shoplifters described by the retailer as “recidivist” accounted for 60 per cent of all stock lost was a real concern.

Higgins drove that point home. These were “very significant losses and the violence itself would suffice” as a justification for deploying FRT, she told the tribunal on the final day of hearings.

When the ART’s ruling was published in February this year, both Bunnings and the OAIC were able to claim a qualified win.

The hardware giant welcomed the ruling, saying the tribunal had “recognised the need for practical, commonsense steps to keep people safe.” But it had “also identified areas where we didn’t get everything right, including around signage, customer information, processes and our privacy policy, and we accept that feedback”.

The OAIC was less conciliatory. It welcomed the fact that two parts of its original determination had been upheld: Bunnings customers hadn’t been properly notified and the Privacy Act does extend to the capture of sensitive data, even if it’s only stored for milliseconds. The notoriously underfunded regulator said it wouldn’t be appealing the ART’s decision.

The take-home was that Bunnings and other retailers would be able to use FRT in their stores, but only with strict safeguards in place. The OAIC warned retailers to view the decision “as a useful case study, rather than a green light for deployments of biometric technologies.”

A close reading of the ruling does point to a pathway for FRT, though, particularly when it’s deployed to combat tangible cases of criminality and violence. “Bunnings was entitled to use FRT,” the tribunal found, “for the limited purpose of combating very significant retail crime and protecting [its]staff and customers from violence, abuse and intimidation within its stores.”

The tribunal also concluded that features of the Hitachi technology used by Bunnings were sufficient to mitigate privacy risks: the biometric data wasn’t stored for long and wasn’t held in a way that could leave it exposed to cybercrime and data breaches. This meant the use of FRT “wasn’t disproportionate when considered against the benefits of providing a safer environment for staff and customers in Bunnings stores”.

Still, FRT seems likely to return to Australian courts given the unanswered questions left by the tribunal’s ruling. For example, what happens if the wrong person’s sensitive data is added to the repeat-offender database? What right of redress might that person have? What if, as has been the case in the United States, false positives are found to unfairly affect certain ethnic groups? And under what circumstances, if any, would one store be able to share its database of offenders with other Bunnings retailers?

A Federal Court review of the case might have shed more light on these questions. In the meantime, the evidence that’s emerged suggests Bunnings — and all Australian retailers — may be well-advised to concentrate on more traditional security approaches. FRT may one day start to replace security guards, but that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. •

The post Lowest prices were just the beginning appeared first on Inside Story.

John the boatman, his arms as thick as fire extinguishers, made short order of lugging fuel drums onto the boat. I carried my overnight bag and a cooler with corned beef and tomato sandwiches, beef biscuits, four cans of beer and bottled water from the local pharmacy marked “Made in China.” We whooshed away from the dock into opalescent waters.

About twenty minutes later the boat cleaved close to a coast of mangrove, rattan, nipa ferns, splayed pandanus trees and manioc. Little villages with church steeples peeked out from the clearings. We had cleared the southern tip of the mainland of Papua New Guinea and I could feel my worries — existential, writerly, born of having spent too much time wrestling with words and wondering about the point of it all — sloughing off me. Samarai Island was another hour away.

“What’s the name of that writer woman again?” John shouted over the roar of the engine, experienced enough in the way of the dim dims to know the value of feigning interest in niche topics, especially when those topics were the reason for the boat hire.

“Beatrice Grimshaw,” I replied.

A century ago, she was one of the world’s bestselling authors, her South Seas melodramas and pot-boilers with titles like Conn of the Coral Seas and When the Red Gods Call likened charitably to Conrad, Kipling and Stevenson. She exerted a grip on the imaginations of middlebrow Australian readers that is almost impossible to imagine nowadays. She dabbled in movies, writing the script for Australia’s first talking movie, The Adorable Outcast. Yet she has disappeared without trace, her name not even a whisper of a memory.

She and I came from the same part of Northern Ireland, I told John, both born with a desire to escape, both having beachcombed in the islands and ultimately settled in Australia. Born in Belfast in 1870, she moved to Dublin as a young adult, worked as a journalist, and published a first novel about unsuccessful getaways. At one parlour party she met a young W.B. Yeats, whom she found to be a “gifted young extremist.” Susan had sent me early studio shots of a young Beatrice, taken shortly after her first novel was published: a young woman with a dress of shimmering white, her hair a contraption of hair pins under a Florence Nightingale hat, mouth in a quarter-smile, eyes hard to read.

A 1913 map of Papua, with Samarai Island (just off the southwestern tip of the main island) shown in an inset. Click to enlarge. National Library of Australia

Dublin was too small for her, too cramped, its literary society too stale. She left Ireland soon after her encounter with Yeats, crossing the Atlantic and then the continental United States, setting sail from San Francisco for Fiji, paying for her passage by organising tours and writing alluring advertising puff for “in-ship” magazines about palm fronds swaying and canoes cresting waves. Their tropical orientalism didn’t read too differently in tone from in-flight magazines I read on my own journeys in the Pacific.

She wrote and wrote, publishing travelogues and pulpy adventure novels which, a Spectator reviewer whooped, were “extremely virile and will certainly not remind any reader of the work of other women novelists.” I found that quote — like so much about Beatrice — in Susan’s doctoral thesis, which I’d fished out from the bowels of the ANU library.

I had looked Susan up soon after, knowing from experience that if there’s one thing a writer on obstruse topics reliably likes, it’s unexpected fan mail.   Her phone number was attached to a hospice in North Carolina, close to the university where she had last been teaching. She was palpably nearing the end, but I enjoyed my conversations with Grimshaw’s chronicler. A month before the trip, she had mailed me what she said were all of Beatrice’s possessions remaining on earth — three portraits and a piece of sail cloth as small as a doily — because she didn’t want them to die with her. I had packed the cloth in my overnight bag.

Grimshaw’s books bought her fame, I told John, a man clearly practised in the art of affected listening. Politicians, diplomats and other worthies sought her counsel. Among them was an Australian prime minister, Alfred Deakin, who made her a proposition: would she write a travel book about the Australian portion of the island of New Guinea? His aim was to encourage settlement in this territory Britain had given Australia upon its own independence. The purpose of Grimshaw’s commission was to produce for Australia a brighter chapter, an assignment that needed someone with creative writing skills.

When Grimshaw had arrived a few years earlier, in the early 1900s, Port Moresby was a dozen corrugated iron shacks with no roads, no hospital, no telephone, no electricity, one tennis court and a drinking saloon called McCrann’s, which was little more than a tin shed on which hung the notice, “Men are requested not to sleep on the billiard table with their spurs on.” Recalled Lewis Lett, another writer, “Hard-living hard-drinking men would fight joyously at the drop of a hat.”

Grimshaw’s travels for the book took her to all the mapped parts of the territory, including Samarai, which she described as the “very prettiest place in the whole tropic world.” Paths made from crushed coral circled the island’s crimson and begonia hedges, its well-tended gardens and the seats arranged to take in the view. It was a significant transport and trading hub, a point on the Tokyo–Shanghai–Samarai–Brisbane shipping line and a day-and-night stop on the P&O cruises, which amped up the beautiful and the diabolical in its promotional material (“Come see the cannibal islands”). Lascars and porters loaded turtle shells and shark’s fins into boats bound for ports across Cathay. The supply ship that picked up the gold miners and dropped them off at isolated wooded camps was the Joseph Conrad, Susan told me, an unimprovably apposite name.

Beatrice’s book, The New New Guinea, has many stock elements of an adventure travelogue. After visiting Samarai, she engages in the slow chase of a Japanese pearling vessel and flings herself into the Coral Sea to forage for pearls. She drinks tea in china cups on a mudflat, developes saddle sores, meets a sorcerer and contrives to get herself stoned on coffee, thereafter restricting herself to twelve cups a day.

Her Australian backers approved the book’s questing tone and so did her literary agent, who suggested New Guinea’s trackless jungles and makeshift mining camps would be ideal backdrops for “good and evil” adventure novels. Living on the little island of Samarai for many years, she drew the outlines of her adventures from the roughhouse colonists who drank far too much in clammy shacks with names like the Golden Fleece and the Commercial. The more she wrote about cannibals and pots of bones, she told one admirer, the more she got paid.

A view of Samarai Island, c. 1909, from a pair of stereocards by the Rose Stereograph Company.

The commercial imperative was understandable, yet I wondered if something else was going on too. There was something gleeful about her descriptions of the “natives” as loinclothed half-devils and her grand guignol amplifications. She did more than anyone to create the image of the islands as a dangerous sinkhole. Her writing brought to mind Orwell’s essay about “Boy’s Weeklies” and the drip-drip-drip effects of popular fiction on popular attitudes.

For all her ability to turn a phrase, there was something off about the books, and about the woman who wrote them. She rarely wrote anything positive about New Guinea. What motivated her to stay? The saddest thing I found out from Susan’s thesis was that Grimshaw dedicated only one of her forty-something books to anyone — and that was to her debauched father, who had glugged the family fortune. I sensed an unhappiness that only an emigrant can truly know, self-exiled on distant shores and unable to report back that things were not going well.

Perhaps it was the allure of relevance that made her stay. She travelled extensively throughout the South Seas, cultivating the role of expert-adventurer-eccentric, acclaimed by all the newspapers of record. When she visited London in the 1920s, the police stopped traffic to let her pass. A later portrait from Susan’s collection depicted a monocled woman in middle age wearing a ballgown, a pistol beside her on the table. Her frequent travelling companion was the governor of Australian Papua, Hubert Murray. The pair never got together and I imagine, perhaps fancifully, Murray engaging in Yeatsian levels of unrequited love for Grimshaw throughout his life.

Steering us speedily past canoes, John asked if Beatrice had ever married or had children. I told him she had remained resolutely single, and described the wretchedly lonely manner of her death in Australia, where she was now living. Commissions had dried up and her bank balance had dwindled to the point that in her final months she could afford only to heat the kettle for one cup of tea each day. Afflicted by diabetes, she wore a dress of mourning black and walked the streets by night shouting obscenities. I showed him the final picture Susan sent me of Beatrice, now a puffy woman in a mourning dress with dejected eyes.

“Beatrice had no line,” John said definitively. “Lain” is a Papua New Guinean pidgin word for children, family or personal connections. Papua New Guinea runs entirely on “lines,” family networks, finely threaded relationships and contacts as well as favours owed, stored, remembered and returned. Having a strong and reliable line is fundamental to getting anything accomplished, especially in a place where the state itself rarely works as it should. Personal and professional lines had gotten me this far and connected me with John, who was anxious to tell me he was giving me a discount on the price.

John is a former soldier, the musculature of his arms explained by his visits to a gym every morning. He pointed ahead and handed me his binoculars. I saw what looked like a giant whin bush erupting from the water. Samarai beckoned and we crested towards the once administrative centre of what was then Britain’s vast empire of the South Seas, a place with a twang as evocative as a Timbuktu or a Xanadu.

My daydreaming was interrupted when John had to give me a fireman’s lift onto the dock. I already knew that the image I had in my mind for the place would be out of sync with reality: there would be no midshipmen lugging sea-chests, tourists lolling and women walking around with parasols. Still, the state of the place was shocking. The old capital was on its knees.

We wandered past paint-peeled warehouses, two busted water-tanks and closed trade stores. We had brought overnight bags to stay in the island’s last hotel, but found it shuttered. Fading too was any semblance of administration: the police were gone, the secondary school too; the little wooden hospital building was little more than a shack without medicine, the discoloured posters about wearing a condom and a tuberculosis campaign remnants of the early nineties. Clapboard churches and chapels from every denomination seemed all that endured. The sepia air was almost bottleable.

Old signs were affixed at the entrances to many of the shuttered buildings, like badges on a boy scout’s scarf. Among the insignia were palm trees and artillery from an old servicemen’s association, the long swooshing tail of the bird of paradise topped by the British crown, and a plaque to a Frank Pryke which declared “the territory owes much to this British gentleman.” A mate of Grimshaw’s, Pryke was a gold prospector, island bon vivant and penner of the most godawful doggerel who made it a condition of his will to be buried on the island to be far away from his wife in Australia.

To cap it all off, we found a memorial to Christopher Robinson, an administrator during British times whose “aim was to make New Guinea a good place for white men.” Robinson himself died tragic death, succumbing to suicide via professional despair.

I imagined the rutted path circling the island was once the coral park parade. The little hillock where Grimshaw lived was thick now with the brambling bush I’d seen from the water; Pryke would have been buried somewhere beneath.

My thoughts turned introspective. I’d met so many Grimshaw-and-Pryke types on my travels. Nowadays they are the first person liking a social media update, the nurturers of weekend whirls of social activity, top-class tittle-tattlers and bon vivants who raise their voice and abruptly change the conversation when the subject of personal life came up. I knew them well. Hell, I was well on the way to becoming one of these types myself. I’d found my footing by falling in love with an amazing Australian woman when I was in my mid-thirties. But what if I hadn’t? I had been cultivating the multiple passport-stamps of an interesting but desolating life. I thought of Susan too, another who had led an interesting life, soon to sink barely a trace.

In my imagination I had assumed Samarai to be a large island, so innumerable were its literary ghosts. Not so: it took all of fifteen minutes to arrive back at the quayside, where women were selling coconuts, papaya, and sweet potato smoked and wrapped in banana leaf. There were no seats in the market; the women were flopped under umbrellas bearing the logo of the mobile phone network whose signal extended in the most sporadic sense. For “morning tea” — one of those olde-world phrases still used in the islands — we bought from a stooped woman fresh fish fried in an orange batter. She wrapped the fish in newspapers from a few years back whose stories of government chicanery rhymed exactly with the edition I had read that morning.

“Let’s ask her if she knows Grimshaw,” suggested John, who then rattled off a rapid-fire explanation of who Beatrice was and when she was around.

“How dare you?” the woman chided him with a smile. “I’m sixty-one years old.” She told us to look for Grimshaw in the library.

The library, it turned out, was at the two-room school, a generous description of a place with a chalkboard, no chalk, a mildewed smell, and six plastic chairs lying on their sides on a bare concrete floor. It was as if the state had conceded and receded. In the corner of one room, sitting just below a curtain of thin pink material flapping in the hot, humid air, were thousands of books squeezed together and piled atop one another on sagging plywood shelves.

What we were looking at was the vast literary remains of old Samarai. Most of the publication dates ranged from turn of the century to the sixties. Titles included A History of the Polar Regions, The High Deeds of Finn McCool and a travel guide to Hanoi when it was still a French possession. Some of the classics were there, too: an Austen, a couple of Trollope’s Barchester novels, a few hardback Dickens and, most fittingly of all, a Joseph Conrad novel entitled The Outcast of the Islands. The most recent volume I could find was a 1999 in-house Australian aid magazine, a document that might be best placed on the fiction shelf if the library was organised in any discernible manner.

When I opened a few of the older books, it was as if the pages squinted in unfamiliar light. I combed the spines hoping to find some of the many books written about Samarai itself — the backdrop to a bookstall adventure novel, starting point for an anthropologist or explorer’s tale, port of call on an administrator’s rounds, exhibit for the prosecution or defence in disquisitions about the ills or wonders of colonialism. There were none. Those living here perhaps felt they knew enough. There were no Grimshaws. Feeling her neglect, I took out a few copies of her Samarai oeuvre that I had read these last few days and laid them face-out on the shelf to resemble a bookstore’s title-of-the-month promotion.

“We treated them like Gods, those dim dims. They could ask for anything, and it was theirs,” I heard John whisper as I picked my way through the collection. I hoped he was holding forth about the old denizens rather than having a swipe at me. He was talking to a woman in a green, blousy dress whom he introduced as Cecilia, the school’s teacher, who had come in to find out what two men were doing unannounced in her school.

Cecilia struck me as happy for this wild-goose author chase as a break from the day’s tedium. She hadn’t left this island for twenty years, she said; the government owed her a leave fare but there was no way of getting it. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had come looking around.

This temporary home for the books was now twenty years old. Originally, these books sat resplendent on three high bookcases made from ship’s timber within the island’s War Memorial and Library Institute, a once-imposing green-tea-coloured building fronted with a cannon. But all the members of the institute died, the cannon fell off its joist, the walls of the building caved inwards and the collection was evacuated. I asked if anyone used the library. She shook her head. Few read for pleasure and the hardest subject to teach was English.

“They spend all their time looking for a phone signal,” she said, which our experience suggested to be a thoroughly exasperating endeavour. She picked up a Grimshaw and said she would read it. I nabbed An Outcast of the Islands and left the sailcloth in its stead.

A few days later, back in Port Moresby. I finally managed to reach Susan. I was looking out at a channel of water that separated me from the city’s yacht club, a place where Grimshaw had lived in a houseboat back in her heyday. I was in a high-end café frequented by those present day outcasts of the islands, police officers, miners, bankers and weathered consultants to the aid program.

I told Susan about Samarai and the side trip John and I had taken afterwards to Doini, the island where the cruise ships docked nowadays. Apart from a horse with flies buzzing around a sore in its right eye and the intriguing presence of a llama, the island was empty. Yet John knew the place well: he came over here once a week to flog statues, prints and trinkets to the tourists. He pointed to the room where he’d disrobe and put on loincloths and feathered headdresses as if he were a murky side character from a Grimshaw novel.

She was lucid, pleased when I told her I’d found a copy of her thesis in Port Moresby’s national library. I mentioned a sentence early in Conrad’s book that resounded almost perfectly with me: “his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effects.” The decay and decrepitude of Samarai had broken something open in me. It was as if encountering its loneliness made me more appreciative of what I had.

I told Susan I had found in the library a selection from the diaries of the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. He overlapped with Grimshaw on Samarai — she gave him lessons in navigational theory and signed copies of her books — and in his diaries he described himself as being in a Dostoevskian state after a few months there. How isolated Grimshaw must have been in exotic but empty abodes over those years; it might in part explain her callous tone.

“Maybe you should write a book about her?” Susan said.

Perhaps it was our shared upbringing in Ireland’s north or her quintessentially Ulsterite turns of phrase that reminded me of my grandmothers, but I had found something oddly diverting about Grimshaw’s novels. That so many of the heroes were Northern Irish always made me smile, even if other parts of them left me appalled. Unlike Hubert Murray, though, I didn’t think I wanted to spend much more time in Grimshaw’s company.

I reminded Susan of a winning line in her thesis that understanding Grimshaw’s personality was “a task that only a psychoanalyst would welcome.”

“That was a good sentence,” she said. “All right, go write something else then.” She had to go. Someone was knocking; I heard the lightly patronising and firm tones of a care nurse. It would be the last conversation we had. •

In memory of Susan Gardner 1945–2022

The post Memento mori appeared first on Inside Story.

The saxophonist Lester Young was solitary and shy and addicted at times to heroin and to drink, which killed him at forty-nine. Yet a life that held much abandonment and pain produced a music of playful exuberance and joy. Young was a man of few words who reinvented words, calling his friend, Billie Holiday, “Lady Day,” and reportedly coining the term, “bread,” for money and “cool” to denote… well, cool. He “broadened the music’s emotional vocabulary,” wrote Ted Gioia in The History of Jazz. He also helped to give us a language of the modern city.

The first time I listened to Young I was making a long, dreamy drive down the Hume Highway. As the late afternoon sun flickered through gum trees I heard his tenor sax summon up the city at night: an anonymous crowd, glistening streets, shadows and pools of light, people in dives and basements, half drunk and full of intentions or regrets, a dim sense that in this bar, in this moment, life can be won or lost. I like jazz for the same reason other people like jazz: it’s urbane, diffident, sexy but not thrusting, moody, melancholy, wryly amused. It’s the missed encounter under the neon sign, a sad smile, acceptance of loss, lighting up a smoke. It is not grand the way much classical music is grand, but the heroic age is dead, and jazz speaks more directly to the ironic, wistful spirit of our time.

There’s a postmodern idea that the life of the artist is irrelevant to the art. Barthes said the author is dead; all that matters is the text and what the reader makes of it. I can’t accept that. I always want to know how the lives of artists and the times they lived through shaped their work.

And yet we can never know exactly how Lester Young’s work emerged from his life. All listeners can do is see their experience reflected in his music. Imagination transports us beyond time and place and race — beyond difference — to feel a tie to him that is purely human. Jazz, wrote the great critic Albert Murray, “exists not only as the intimate and personal expression of Black life, but is meaningful and accessible to any individual in the world.”

I’ve also come to like Barney Bigard, who played clarinet and tenor sax for fifteen years in Duke Ellington’s band and co-wrote the jazz standard Mood Indigo. Bigard was born in New Orleans in 1907, in the birthplace and birthtime of jazz. He grew up in a family of black Creoles, a heritage that was not just Black but French, Spanish and Native American as well. When Ellington’s band toured the segregated Deep South, the fair-skinned Bigard would often be sent out to buy food at whites-only stores, which he did by pretending he was Spanish or Mexican.

Like Young, Bigard said little except through his music, yet his life holds the whole early story of jazz: its origins in New Orleans, its great northern migration to New York, Chicago and Kansas City, its place in black American culture and in white culture and the fight to create a true colourblind democracy, in its claim that one way or another we are all magnificent mongrels.

Drifting from Bigard’s playlist on Spotify one night, I found another list comprised of pieces that sounded like him. On it was an artist or band called “Pause Maybe?” Washing the dishes one night, my wife and I listened for a while.

Pause Maybe? advertised itself as playing forties sax, and indeed the lonely, moody sound had echoes of the music of Young and Bigard, or the score for a film noir. The pieces had names like “Cigarettes and Memories,” “Under the Lamplight,” “Old Souls Stay Late,” “Half-Lit Room” and “Rustling Newspapers, Fading Time.” Attached to each was a drawing, often of a man in a tux slumped in a deep chair, his Homburg pulled low enough on his forehead to hide his eyes, the smoke from his cigarette drifting into the night.

It was a cliché of a certain kind of jazz, but gorgeous in its way, and I wanted to know more about this group. Who were the musicians? Could I even see them play? A google search gave me nothing. I still didn’t work it out.

In the middle of one night I got on my phone and asked AI about Pause Maybe? Dark thoughts come to us all at 3am, but even so I got a shock when I read: “The project is explicitly stated to be AI-generated… The identity of a human creator is not readily available or disclosed.” My AI had recognised its own kind.

Did my impression of the music change? It did. It now seemed somehow patterned: soulless, mechanical, cold. Of course, that thought was simply the effect of knowing it was made by AI.

But what repelled me was less the music than the fact I was not told how it was made. I felt tricked. Then again, if I had known it was AI from the start I probably wouldn’t have listened.

In 2025 Pause Maybe? released no fewer than nine albums. It has more than 100,000 monthly listeners. Its most popular piece, “Night Window,” has had more than 1.1 million listens. Despite what AI told me, nothing on Spotify explicitly states that this music is AI-generated, even though the streamer claims to be “aggressively protecting against the worst parts of Gen AI.”

Another streamer, Deezer, which seems to be doing more to unmask AI than Spotify, has said that slightly more than a third of content uploaded to its platform — about 50,000 tracks a day — is fully AI-generated. Do listeners know or care what they’re consuming?

I looked at the comments on YouTube under a Pause Maybe? piece, “Grandpa’s Smoke.” They start positive: someone says it reminds them of their grandpa; another likens it to a Benny Golson piece, I Remember Clifford. Then Byron Medrano asks: “Can anyone name a real song that sounds like this?” Jai Hunter replies: “As soon as this shit comes on I can tell it’s ai… It just has a weird ai tone that pretty much no other jazz sounds like.”

“This is AI, sadly,” writes another person. But someone replies: “Why sadly? This song is good.” Another says: “If this is AI, where are the humans playing the same style so I can hear them?… because AI or human, it is beautiful.”

Another writes: “Fuck AI. Listen to actual artists making real music. I don’t care how ‘soothing’ it is. It’s slop.” To which someone replies: “Are you mad at the future?”

Under another Pause Maybe? track, “Just Smoke and Jazz, Darling,” I read: “I’m 73 years young, and today my daughter and I shared one of the best days we’ve had in a long time. When I got home, she texted me to say she arrived safely — and then sent me this jazz mix, because she knows how much I love this music. I’ve been listening for over three hours now… and it feels like stepping back into a beautiful time.”

This comment felt powerful because it described an actual human experience built around listening to the music. Or did it?

The poster of the comment goes by the name Whiskey & Jazz Nights. Scrolling around, I discovered exactly the same remark under another Pause Maybe? track, “Cigarettes and Memories,” but this time from a writer called Soft Candle Jazz.

I go in search of Whiskey & Jazz Nights. It’s a YouTube channel: “Welcome to a world of smoky jazz bars, lonely saxophones, and stories whispered after midnight… a cinematic escape inspired by noir films and 1950s jazz clubs — where every note feels like a memory, and every melody carries a quiet longing.”

Getting uneasy, I go back to my phone and ask my AI whether this channel, too, is AI-generated. “It’s a very sharp observation!” it replies, flattering me as usual. Yes, it’s “highly likely” that AI plays a “significant role” in the production of Whiskey & Jazz nights.

If that’s true, then the machine, in seemingly pretending to be a seventy-three-year-old spending precious time with his daughter, is learning how to act human.

What about this comment by VelvetRedNotes: “Why a 28 young woman can’t have an old soul to hear this kind of music? I would like to have a slow dance with my man to this music, all night.”

This time AI insists that VelvetRedNotes is a woman, an anime pianist called Melody. The VelvetRedNotes YouTube channel promises “a refined jazz sanctuary where timeless elegance meets modern mood. From intimate late-night ballads and smoky lounge sessions to cosy café swing and lo-fi focus beats, every track is curated to elevate your moments… one velvet note at a time.”

Which sounds a lot like Whiskey & Jazz Nights to me. I’m in a hall of mirrors, highly artificial, not that intelligent.

Whether or not people care that a work of art is made by AI, we should at least have a right to know. In December, the former Australian chief scientist, Alan Finkel, launched a company, Proudly Human, that enables authors to declare that they made their work, then verifies that the declaration is correct. Instead of forcing AI-content producers to be upfront about how they created their work — which Finkel thinks is technologically too hard to do — he is proposing a positive label, a bit like “Free range” on eggs. Proudly Human is focusing on the written word, but it might work for music and the screen, too.

Authors who wish to be certified by Proudly Human agree to subject their work to a range of verification tests — conducted by AI, of course. (A journalist who wrote about Proudly Human called the process not “Spy versus Spy” but “AI versus AI.”) The published work is also compared to the original to make sure an AI version wasn’t swapped in after the tests were done.

The bet behind Proudly Human is that enough humans will care they are reading a work produced by one of their own. In an email conversation, Finkel sounded excited about his project yet aware that AI is developing so rapidly that the challenge of identifying its influence in any text grows harder by the day.

I sent him a link to a letter Nick Cave wrote on his site, The Red Hand Files, where he responds to readers’ questions. Someone got ChatGPT to write a song in Cave’s voice then asked him what he thought. Here’s the chorus — judge for yourself:

I am the sinner, I am the saint
I am the darkness, I am the light
I am the hunter, I am the prey
I am the devil, I am the saviour

The lyrics sent Cave into a justifiably cold rage. What makes a song great, he wrote, is not its resemblance to other songs, and it’s certainly not the mimicry ChatGPT churns out. Instead, the artist makes a “heart-stopping” departure from what they thought were their own limits.

And here an invisible relationship with the listener begins, Cave suggests. As the artist confronts their smallness and vulnerability, the listener’s heart is stirred, recognising “in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

But data doesn’t suffer, and algorithms don’t feel, Cave writes. “ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”

And yet, Cave concludes, one line did speak to him: I’ve got the fire of hell in my eyes. “That’s kind of true. I have got the fire of hell in my eyes — and it’s ChatGPT.”

Finkel wrote back to me: “Nick Cave’s letter is clearly in the style of Nick Cave!” He found the ChatGPT song “replicative and pointless.” But he sounded a warning: Cave says he found one good line in it. “If ChatGPT has another go in two years’ time, there will be at least ten.”

I think Cave was being sarcastic about that line. Still, Finkel’s larger point about the advance of AI is almost certainly correct.

Finkel told me that his friend, the philosopher Peter Singer, tested Proudly Human by uploading two articles, one written by Singer, the other by an AI, Claude, that had been asked to write in Singer’s style. Finkel was delighted the tests verified the human article and rejected Claude’s. But then Singer asked the AI how it felt about the outcome. Claude’s reply is worth reading in full:

Excellent! That’s a successful test for your friend’s software. This is genuinely interesting because:

1. I was actively trying to mimic your style— using arguments you’d make, sentence structures you’d use, topics you care about

2. The content was substantively sound— it’s not like the software detected nonsense or logical flaws

3. Yet something gave it away— there must be detectable patterns in word choice, sentence rhythm, rhetorical structure, or other features that distinguish AI writing from human writing, even when the AI is trying to imitate a specific human

… it’s encouraging for your friend’s project — and somewhat humbling for me! It suggests that despite AI’s impressive capabilities, there remain detectable differences between human and AI authorship, at least for now.

Finkel says he was surprised by the sophisticated response, and bowled over by the phrase, “and somewhat humbling for me!” The words that struck me, though, were: “at least for now.”

Cave wrote another letter about AI and human creativity. Read stirringly by the actor Stephen Fry, it begins: “God made the world in six days. On the seventh He rested. That suggests the creation took effort, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place. God saw that it was good because He had put something of Himself into it.”

A piece of art is great, Cave writes, precisely because of the striving, and often the failing, behind it. The outcome cannot be separated from the process, the work from the work. To make art using AI is to see the labour of creation as “nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself.”

The artist concludes: “And as the sun rises on the struggle of the day, and the great-crested grebe dances upon the water, it is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse, this creative dance, that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs. And just as we would fight any existential evil, we must fight it tooth and nail. For we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

For better or worse, AI is here. The machines are on the march. The line between them and us is already starting to blur. Yet our home and spirit still soar or shrivel in a physical world that contains landscapes, wind, the great-crested grebe, and ourselves.

What can be trusted? What is true? These are existential questions for us now. Can we find a way to treat AI as we treat fire, as a good servant and a bad master? To find a way to live with it on our terms, and not to accept, through our own choices, the devaluing and trivialising of the human experience? A world dominated by phantoms dancing on screens? A world that still knows jazz — and may even hear the foggy notes of a saxophone drifting up from a basement in a city growing dark — but no longer knows the flawed, fabulous human beings who created it? •

The post The day the music died appeared first on Inside Story.

My father read the paper pretty thoroughly, focusing on the political and general news, the letters to the editor, the cartoons and, especially on Saturdays, the classified advertisements. Cars and real estate interested him the most, but he often glanced through the personal ads and rarely failed to find something to tickle his funny bone.

Until the internet arrived to suck newspapers dry of these “rivers of gold,” the classifieds section of any daily paper heaved with vivid little glimpses of the lives of our fellow citizens. Buying, selling, leasing, proclaiming, persuading, searching, celebrating, grieving: even the tiniest one- or two-line ad had a human story behind it.

Hilary Mantel, a dedicated reader of newspapers, ignored the news and features entirely in favour of the small ads. In a local paper in Norfolk she once saw for sale three bridesmaid’s dresses, identical, to fit sizes 24, 26 and 10. Ever since, she wrote, “I have been imagining the photographs from the original wedding, and wondering if such bridesmaids ever occurred for a second time, or if the dresses are still hanging in the closet.”

This was in a piece she wrote for the Guardian in 2009 titled “Where Do Stories Come From?” She could make a national paper last two hours, she said, after which it looked like a drunk had been making paper hats with it. She was coy about whether she worked any of this material into her fiction, though. Perhaps not, and yet how comforting for a writer to know such slivers of inspiration are right there for the taking.

I often chuckle over Mantel’s bridesmaid’s dresses, so perfectly offered up for the reader to fill in story from their own imagination. And it occurs to me that there would be plenty of material for a historian as well if only we are willing to let go of some of our habitual efficiency and purpose and instead follow Mantel’s example and read a newspaper simply to absorb the ebb and flow of life.

Such an approach runs counter to current practice now that newspaper research is so easy, at least in Australia where so many digitised newspapers can be read online for free through the National Library’s digital repository, Trove. The site’s search capability to deliver astoundingly granular results in seconds encourages what I think of as an “arthroscopic” approach to research.

What I mean is that with each of our searches, we seekers of historical evidence equip ourselves with our arthroscope (in real life a tube with a tiny camera on the end, often used by surgeons to diagnose joint problems) and insert it into our source: a newspaper. We probe deeply until we get what we came for, or what we think we came for, and we ignore everything else.

I use this keyhole technique constantly myself, usually chasing names and addresses. Anything could be significant when you research people whose lives are otherwise barely visible in the historical record, and it’s not just about who married whom, and the names they gave their children. You can trace a family’s slide into poverty by the addresses you find for them, for instance, or the number of times the father or mother appear before a magistrate.

Some of these quests have stayed with me. I once found a snippet about a twelve-year-old “sickly looking little girl” who, having been found wandering the streets in Sydney, was arrested and charged under the Destitute Children’s Act and sent to the Industrial School at Parramatta. I already knew exactly who she was — Clara Mabel Stace, an older half-sister of Arthur Stace, “Mr Eternity” — but this sad little fragment added significantly to my understanding of how this family eventually disintegrated under the weight of poverty and trauma.

I doubt this kind of outcome would have been possible in the age of analogue newspaper research. Still, as with any new research methodology, there are gains and losses.

Once, researchers relied on secondary sources and their own persistence, ingenuity and sheer stamina to scour newspapers for evidence, and you might have to scan almost an entire issue to get what you wanted. Quickly you learned how to identify the different parts of each edition — whether the classifieds would be at the front or the back, which page would feature the main news of the day and which the editorial, the social news, the weather or the sport. The eye might catch on bits and pieces not germane to the task at hand but perhaps providing enriched context or even offering whole new paths to follow.

Now, on Trove at least, an item is illuminated on the screen and the rest of the page greyed-out. It only takes a few clicks to bring up the entire page but I generally don’t, so strong is the temptation ignore the greyed-out section and click back to the next result on the list, and so on.

So this time I thought it might be fun to sit down with just one issue of a daily metropolitan newspaper and give it a slow read from beginning to end. It could be any issue from the glory days of twentieth century Australian newspapers, and yet I found myself unable to pick completely at random. I thought back to my father’s daily newspaper habit and fell to wondering if he had inherited it from his parents.

My grandparents had moved from Brisbane to Hobart in 1936 so my grandfather could take up a job with the Postmaster-General’s Department. George and Kitty had no relatives or friends in Hobart — they were starting life afresh — so surely they would turn to the local paper to help them settle into their new community? With that in mind I selected an issue of the Hobart Mercury published on Friday 11 December 1936.

I began by making myself a replica of the paper. I downloaded each page of the issue as a PDF, printed it at A3 and stapled them all together, blank pages back-to-back. The print is tiny — A3 is much smaller than the broadsheet Mercury in 1936 — but my replica does offer an approximation of the physical experience of reading the original. The issue on 11 December 1936 was twenty pages long and had eight columns. Feeling quite pleased with my little craft project, I sat down to read.

Page one: the classifieds. It seems bizarre to us that newspapers would bury the news people most wanted to read in the middle of the paper, but the longstanding assumption, dating back to the eighteenth century in the English-speaking world, was that people bought the newspaper for the advertising, and the news was incidental. Front page classifieds were also thought to distinguish a “serious” newspaper from a “sensational” one.

In Australia by the 1930s many newspapers had begun placing the news on the front page, and the Mercury started following the trend on 3 August 1939. But in 1936 the classifieds were still the first thing you saw. Top left were the announcements of births, engagements and bereavements, and many readers would run their eye down these to find out who was being “hatched, matched and dispatched,” as the saying went. Probably not my grandparents, though, because they were newcomers in Hobart and knew no one.

Instead I expect they used the classifieds as they were intended: as a source of information to help solve life’s practical problems. Having dropped her children at school and done some of her morning chores, I can imagine my grandmother sitting down at her house at 159b Main Road (now New Town Road) New Town, with a second pot of tea, pondering.

Christmas was coming and Hobart’s grocers were reminding people to think about their lunch menus. Arnolds in Liverpool urged their “numerous clients” to place orders early for English plum puddings, Christmas cakes and mince pies. My grandmother, I happen to know though I don’t remember her, was a splendid cook and taught her daughter, my aunt, to bake on a wood-burning stove, which wasn’t easy when the temperature has to be just right. Kitty was quite capable of making her own Christmas puddings and treats.

But on this day she might have paused, eyeing the stove in her new kitchen, wondering if she knew it well enough to take the risk at Christmas. Just this once, would it be easier just to buy the pudding? On the other hand, Hobart summers were very cool compared to what she was used to in Brisbane, so now would be the time to bake her heart out.

With Cyclops Toys (“They last a lifetime”) is advertising bikes and scooters, she might have made a mental note to talk to George about buying their youngest son (my father, aged seven) a new bike for Christmas. They’d had to sell many of their possessions when they moved to Hobart and having to re-acquire things like that must have been a stretch. Perhaps they could put it off until his birthday in January?

But then her eye might have fallen on the ad for Sunday morning, afternoon or day-long excursions on the SS Cartela along the Derwent river to Opossum Bay and South Arm. That would make a fine birthday treat. (I think my father must have been taken on trips like that because he loved the river and the Cartela, which had been built in Hobart in 1912.) It was still working on the river when I was growing up and we thought of it almost like an extra great-aunt: “Dear old thing, amazing how she gets about at her age!”

A few more classifieds appear on page two. Here’s one of the public announcements: “I, Henry Poynton, challenge to dance J. Dillon old-time waltz at Victoria Hall on December 16, 1936. (Signed) H. Poynton” What was that all about? Some kind of dance-off? Dancing shoes at dawn?

Most of this page is taken up by the shipping information (extremely important in this maritime community) and the weather chart, but there is a smattering of news. The vehicle road to the pinnacle of Mount Wellington, a project organised by the state government and the Hobart City Council to provide relief for Hobart’s unemployed during the Depression, was nearly complete. Here was the premier, A.G. Ogilvie KC, announcing the date of the official opening had been fixed for 23 January 1937.

Kitty and George (along with just about every other citizen of Hobart) would have been most interested in this because the mountain is an inescapable feature of life in this place. My grandparents didn’t own a car in 1936 but when my father was old enough he would join George on hikes to the pinnacle using one of the many walking tracks. The road, meanwhile, became known as “Ogilvie’s scar” — for good reason.

Page three is dominated by the results of the degree examinations held by the University of Tasmania. I showed this page to my younger son — a university student — and we studied it together. Is that everyone? It would seem so. The names of all students who passed their examinations in 1936 across all faculties could fit on one page and still leave room for large display ads by Hobart retailers advertising their Christmas wares, plus a few column inches on a series of thefts in a Hobart boarding house. The university was tiny in those days, neglected by the state government and allowed to limp along in inadequate accommodation in the city until finally, it the 1960s, it transferred to a new purpose-built campus in Sandy Bay.

Page four is dedicated to trade and finance, markets, stocks and shares. I’ve no idea if Kitty’s eyes glazed over this, but mine did. Page five is a full-page ad for Palfreyman’s, a department store in the city proclaiming itself “alive with the spirit of Christmas.” Hosiery, “haby” (haberdashery), handbags, handkerchiefs, tea sets, tablecloths, towels, toys. And “Bungalow cloths.” What are they? I have no idea.

I’ve reached pages six, seven and eight and still have not read any major overseas, national or state political news, which to me is perplexing. State parliament was sitting but was not, apparently, debating anything worth reporting. Instead, page seven has a long report on the school speech night at Launceston Church Grammar, including the headmaster’s address (reported verbatim). From Canberra comes a report on a dispute over the trademarking of the term “Mickey Mouse.” A new public golf course has just opened on a site close to New Town Bay. The Marquess of Hartington, the British parliamentary under-secretary of State for dominion affairs, was visiting Tasmania. There has been an improvement in revenue at the port of Launceston. The New Norfolk Council is in financial difficulties.

Part of what I’m seeing, I suppose, is the sheer insularity of Tasmania, which has been a theme throughout its settler history. The Mercury is, essentially, a local paper. But it also lacks the personality-driven politics we are so accustomed to, and, because I landed on a Friday and not a Saturday issue, there is no film star gossip, women’s page, gardening notes, book reviews or letters to the editor.

Then, just as I was wishing I had chosen a Saturday, my eyes fell on page nine. Here, finally, was the real news of the day, headlined across all eight columns: KING EDWARD DECIDES TO ABDICATE.

Of course. This was the year of the abdication crisis, and I happened to pick the exact day the news broke. I had to scratch about in my memory to recall the story, and the little I do know of it is partly derived from memories of a Thames Television dramatisation broadcast by the ABC when I was in high school. Edward VIII was played by Edward Fox so believably that even now, every time I see a photograph of the real Edward, my mind tries to re-arrange his features into those of the actor.

My grandmother would have had the advantage of me, if she was a daily newspaper reader as I am assuming she was, because the Mercury had been reporting on the story since early December. Just the day before, the paper declared that while there was still no finality in the King’s apparent determination to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson against the wishes of the British and Dominion prime ministers, a statement was likely that day. The “entire Empire” was awaiting his decision.

It arrived in Australia in the early hours of Friday 11 December, just before the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, was due to inform the House of Commons. Australia’s prime minister, Joseph Lyons, had an address ready for public broadcast live on the ABC, but needed the text of the King’s abdication speech (“After long and anxious consideration I have determined to renounce the Throne…”) to add to it. The text came through from London via telephone to Parliament House in Canberra at around 1am, and was transcribed immediately by the prime minister’s staff. A photographer for the Melbourne Herald captured the moment. Lyons read the speech on the radio at 1.52 am and it appeared in print in the nation’s newspapers a few hours later.

I realise now that my grandmother probably skipped all those earlier pages and went straight to the abdication news. She and my grandfather might have read it together before George left for work, and on his commute down to the city there could have been no other topic of conversation. The Mercury’s offices were on Macquarie Street next to the GPO, where he worked, and even as he stepped off the tram journalists and printers might still have been creeping home to bed after a long, memorable night.

The Mercury dedicated five full pages to the crisis, with no ads. A Friday issue was usually fourteen or eighteen pages; on this day it was twenty. The coverage recounted the life of Edward VIII and his ten-month reign; noted events leading up the abdication; added some discreet mentions of Mrs Simpson; and speculated on what the future held for the new monarch, “King Albert I” (as it was assumed George VI would style himself). There were photographs of the new King’s wife and daughters, including Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen.

This content would have come from overseas wire services, but the paper added its own thoughts in its editorial. Reflecting the prevailing view in Australia and other Dominions, the paper chastised Edward for having been “not strong enough to place duty before personal inclination.” Never again, it predicted (accurately, as we now know), could he live in his native land, instead dwelling “in some poor splendour” with the wife for whom he had thrown away the “splendid heritage of duty.”

After all that it was hard to find the strength to turn any more the pages. But life in Hobart had to go on. Cinemas still wanted to advertise their screenings, and there were yet more ads from Christmas retailers. The back page carried a lengthy report of England’s victory over Australia at the Ashes Test in Brisbane.

For this reading of a historical source, I made myself as small as an ant crawling through grass, and just as ready as an ant to be baffled when I bumped into things I didn’t understand. Then, climbing to the top of a blade of grass, I found myself gazing with wonder at events that have had a permanent impact on the history of the world.

This was not what I was expecting. And I never did find out anything about Henry Poynton’s old-time waltz challenge to J. Dillon. That story is not for me; it awaits the eye of a novelist. •

The post My reading challenge appeared first on Inside Story.

Hughes had chartered the helicopter, and the pilot would today be taking him and his assistant James Kerry on a flight that most tourists would strive to avoid. Like the TV crime shows in which a family member is led into a morgue to identify a dead loved one, Hughes knew that the task ahead of him wasn’t going to be luxurious or even resemble a typical day in the life of a marine scientist. Following a record hot summer in which warm sea waters had driven a massive global episode of coral bleaching, they were flying low over the Great Barrier Reef to map bleached coral.

Wind rushed, the engine roared and Hughes clutched his digital SLR camera as the rotor blades lifted them above sugar cane.

Coral bleaching is caused by ocean warming, driven by global climate change. Corals bleach when they get stressed and expel the colourful algae living inside their skin. It’s these algae that provide corals with most of their food and energy. Without them, corals turn white, providing a sinister signal that can be seen from above. If they stay bleached for long enough, they die and become overgrown by darker seaweed.

People monitoring reef health have a short window of opportunity to observe the extent of any coral bleaching before corals either regain their coloured algae and recover, or die and become overgrown. Someone had to act quickly if the full extent of the hot summer’s impact on the Reef was to be known.

El Niño climate cycles drive extreme, extended warming off the northeast coast of Australia every five or so years, adding to already increasing temperatures. This was the case in the summer of 2016 when the seas got warmer and warmer. Hughes, director of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, saw the warning signs of a hot summer as early as November 2015 and convened the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, a loose network of university researchers, government scientists, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

Throughout his career, Hughes has been driven by the desire to support effective ocean governance with high-quality science. If you met him in the street, you might guess he was a science professor — his sturdy frame is topped by unruly brown hair, expressive eyebrows, and glasses, and he has a fondness for woollen V-neck jumpers. If you stopped for a chat, you would find a precise man who delivers his words carefully and deliberately, paying attention to detail.

Originally from Ireland, Hughes embarked on a career as a marine biologist more than thirty years ago. Arriving in Australia in 1990, he built the research centre in Townsville by the central Great Barrier Reef, where his group focused increasingly on the impacts of climate change on the ocean.

Hughes and Kerry flew at a height of 150 metres above the reef for their coral bleaching surveys. Altogether, it would take eight days of criss-crossing over the 2300-kilometre length of the Reef, surveying the extent of whiteness that had spread across the previously colourful surfaces of 1156 reefs. Approximately a hundred researchers worked below the water, meanwhile, getting around on boats and staying at marine research stations to carry out underwater scuba surveys for a month.

Hughes surveyed individual reefs that ranged in size from tens of metres to several kilometres across. He assigned a coral bleaching score to the different zones of each reef using a scale that went from 0 (negligible bleaching) to 4 (severe bleaching). Other members of the taskforce examined 260 sites underwater to provide a close-up picture of which corals were bleaching and extend their observations reliably into deeper water depths, while the aerial surveys focused on the shallow reef tops. Records of coral bleaching from underwater surveys were later compared with aerial survey scores in a “ground truthing” exercise, so that the aerial data could be plotted out into a reliable digital map.

The work was intense. Hughes recorded rapid-fire information about what he was seeing into a microphone for up to eight hours a day. He announced the name and number of each reef before scoring the extent of the bleaching across the different zones. Flying over an individual reef, he would hurriedly report, “The crest is a four, the slope is a two,” often with about two seconds of flying before the next reef approached.

This was a thoroughly modern mapping campaign. As Hughes bore witness to the largest known coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, he reported depressing statistics in live tweets: “Day 3: 400 reefs scored by lunchtime. FOUR of them have no #bleaching.”

It was heartbreaking to sit in an aircraft and fly over a reef where 80 per cent of the coral was well on its way to dying. At the peak of summer, many coral tissues had simply melted away. They cooked.

It was also an assault on Hughes’s physical senses. The helicopter’s perspex dome roof focused the sun’s rays so that it was like flying towards the tropical sun in a greenhouse. The team had to put on sunscreen repeatedly. At one stage, they left the helicopter doors behind in the canefield as a novel form of “air conditioning”; they wore headphones to shout at each other over the engine noise, which left them partially deaf by end of day. They sat in the cramped cabin on jerry cans full of petrol for remote refuelling that released nauseating vapours slowly over the flight. When they finally found an unbleached reef after three days of flying, they cheered.

“We were tired and emotional,” Hughes recalled. “They were long gruelling days, the helicopter was noisy and hot, you had to have good bladder and bowel control.”

All records were compiled after the surveys. Scores were plotted up into what became a notorious traffic-light map illustrating coral bleaching down the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef. It was a depressing message of widespread coral distress and likely death to follow. The red northern sector, which had previously been thought of as the most remote and pristine section of the reef, indicated severely bleached reefs. Up to 80 per cent of live coral had disappeared from reef crests there. The amber central sector indicated a moderate level of bleaching, and the southern sector, being less severely hit, was coloured green, even though only 25 per cent of reefs escaped bleaching there.

The Great Barrier Reef is made up of over 3000 individual coral reefs. To the best of our knowledge, it first underwent mass coral bleaching in 1998, though an earlier mass bleaching event could have gone unnoticed. These events are now getting more frequent, having occurred in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025.

When the first couple of bleaching events hit, there were fewer marine biologists, and not many had seen coral bleaching. Ray Berkelmans coordinated early aerial bleaching surveys on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998 and 2002 with limited funds. He worked from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and then the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences over smaller areas, with limited measurements taken in the water. Hughes was keen to do things differently in 2016.

Many of Australia’s reefs are exceedingly remote and seldom visited. Hughes didn’t want them to be out of sight and out of mind at a time when they were vulnerable to bleaching and possibly dying.

The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce’s job was to closely monitor coral bleaching across the whole of the country, an area extending some 6500 kilometres from offshore territories like Cocos (Keeling), off the west coast in the Indian Ocean, to the eastern extent of Lord Howe Island in the Pacific Ocean, and ranging up to Torres Strait in the north.

Berkelmans had learned practical lessons from those early aerial bleaching surveys. He stressed that the timing of surveys was critical because there is only a short period in which observations can be made: the time when the bleaching is at its most advanced stage and before major coral mortality sets in. If you set out too early, you may not capture the bleaching’s full extent; any delays might mean dead corals grown over by algae were not identified.

Two helpful factors enabled Hughes to send forth an armada of people to act at short notice. First, they had some reliable early warning systems, including forecasts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the NOAA Coral Reef Watch tool, which used satellites to track environmental conditions that trigger bleaching. They also had temperature loggers stationed in the water and received reports of coral bleaching seen by people out on the Reef on a day-to-day basis. Collectively, this information enabled them to quickly identify areas at risk. Second, Hughes had worked for almost thirty years within Australia’s marine science community, and he drew trusted collaborators together into a small, efficient team that was free from the bureaucracy and constraints of larger institutions.

In the third week of March 2016, just after the peak of maximum oceanic heat exposure, they set off to survey the reef at the exact time when it mattered in the immediate aftermath of a coral bleaching event.

“We were able to do the job properly and grasp an opportunity to answer questions at scale in a way that very few research groups or organisations could attempt,” Hughes said.

Scientists’ understanding of coral bleaching had been growing for some time. The earliest known published account of thermally induced bleaching came from Low Isles in the central northern Great Barrier Reef, where members of the 1928–29 Great Barrier Reef Expedition observed whitening of corals in warm pools, which they considered to be a natural, seasonal event during summer months. Coral mortality was later reported during the 1982 mass bleaching event almost 200 kilometres further north in shallow waters at Lizard Island, and linked to high levels of ultraviolet radiation at times of elevated water temperatures.

By the 1999 mass bleaching event, concern among the coral-reef science community was growing. Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg recognised the broader link to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and raised the alarm that global warming would likely exceed the thermal tolerance of many corals, leading to unprecedented levels of coral bleaching by 2050.

The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce articulated a list of research questions to fill knowledge gaps: Of the range of possible drivers, what was the main cause of coral bleaching events? How did the composition of coral species within a reef community change after a bleaching event? What were the implications for coral recruitment and the ecological function of the reef? Answers would come from the maps they made.

The aerial surveys yielded dynamic data in the form of a digital map depicting the geographical footprint of coral bleaching along the full length of the Reef. The traffic-light map was generalised for the public to convey a simple message, but underlying those colours were thousands of individual coral bleaching scores attributed to different zones across hundreds of reefs. This finer-scale detail in the digital map data opened up valuable opportunities to investigate how the different kinds of corals respond to bleaching on the Reef.

Analyses drawing directly on the maps were published in six journal papers, five of which were in the top disciplinary journals of Nature and Science. The first paper came out in early 2017, just as Hughes was boarding a plane to observe the second consecutive bout of coral bleaching. It showed the coral bleaching map and the heat exposure maps side by side to reveal the distinctive gradients in both coral bleaching and ocean warming. The geographical patterns of heat exposure and coral bleaching were almost identical.

This was visually compelling confirmation that coral bleaching was primarily driven by warming seas. Hughes was out of reach for the media storm that erupted. Four thousand news articles reported on that first study, many of which reproduced the traffic-light coral bleaching map.

It was textbook geography. Accompanying plots explored the statistical relationship between the two maps by extracting data points from the same location on both maps to determine the influence of one mapped phenomenon on another. It was a simple yet elegant way to compare the two phenomena based on their geographical distribution.

It seemed to me that not only was expressing all of that data in a map visually arresting, but it conveyed a simple message quickly and with scientific authority. The marine scientist was carrying out geographic inquiry without realising it. When I prompted him about how the similar geographical patterns of coral bleaching they had mapped enabled links between the two phenomena to be numerically modelled, he laughed: “I remember after that 2016 bleaching event that you correctly accused me of being a geographer!”

It was already known that coral bleaching was caused by warmer seas, but the extent to which other factors played a part was less well understood. The coral bleaching maps from 2016 were also placed alongside other maps showing the spatial patterns of phenomena such as nutrient concentrations, water turbidity and fishing pressure. The severity of bleaching consistently correlated strongly with the level of local heat exposure, as indicated in satellite images of sea surface temperatures.

Damage caused by coral bleaching is measured by comparing live coral cover on a reef before and after a bleaching event. For this, direct observations of corals from underwater surveys is needed. But loss of coral cover is not the whole story. It doesn’t tell you which species or types of corals are dying, and which are surviving.

Many different types of coral live within the bustling ecosystem of a coral reef, and changes to the composition of the overall coral communities have profound implications. The complexity creates a three-dimensional structure that provides an important habitat for fish and other small creatures — sponges, worms, shellfish — which nestle in the nooks and crannies to hide from predators. Different coral species also have varying survival strategies. In terms of reproduction, some corals spawn, while others brood. Some grow fast to build up an underlying reef platform relatively quickly; others grow slowly and steadily. All of this has fundamental implications for the overall reef ecosystem.

After the early bleaching episodes in 1998 and 2002, almost nothing was known about changes to the species composition of coral communities. In 2016, Hughes’s taskforce collected underwater records from 169 reefs that identified shifts in the composition of coral communities, including the proportions of fast-growing and three-dimensionally complex staghorn corals versus flatter tabular and foliose corals. Later surveys would also reveal that a shift had occurred in the relative proportion of brooding and spawning corals, with implications for the subsequent recovery of coral communities.

The maps provided a basis for examining the quantitative relationship between a broad range of heat exposures and responses of the coral assemblages in more detail. Pairing underwater survey records with the digital maps revealed “collapse thresholds,” at which the ecological communities on the reef were suddenly irreversibly changed. Critical levels of heat exposure that trigger bleaching and mortality were identified. Associated changes to coral community assemblages could, in theory, be predicted geographically from ocean heat maps.

Hughes and his team carried out a global analysis of 100 international locations that revealed strong geographic patterns in the timing, severity and return times of mass coral bleaching. While bleaching events are caused by shortlived episodes of extreme heat, these are superimposed onto longer-term trends of warming that result in the increasing frequency of coral bleaching events from year to year. This upward trajectory of the baseline temperature means that coral bleaching is occurring more frequently.

As 2016 rolled into 2017, a consecutive hot summer delivered higher and longer-lasting ocean warming. Corals bleached for the second year in a row. The whole arduous mapping exercise was repeated to produce a 2017 coral bleaching map. This time, the central section was the worst hit, with many red dots indicating severe bleaching around Cairns. International news headlines warned that severe coral bleaching had hit two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef.

The second digital map enabled questions to be answered about the ability of past events to influence the present trajectory of ecosystems. One study compared the 2016 and 2017 coral bleaching maps along the entire length of the Reef to better understand how the past history of bleaching influenced the reef’s recent bleaching response. It found the response of corals to heat stress during the second consecutive 2017 marine heatwave was transformed by a lingering signal that could be seen in the spatial footprint of the 2016 bleaching map.

Under similar levels of heat exposure, reefs that had been stressed in the previous summer were less likely to bleach during the second consecutive hot summer. This “ecological memory” appeared to increase the resistance of surviving corals, with a shift towards a more resilient community of corals that had already survived exposure to heat stress.

As 2020 and then 2022 added more digital map snapshots of the coral bleaching, yet more observations were made about how the reef responds to multiple bleaching episodes over time. The simple relationship between heat exposure and bleaching broke down as recurrent bleaching events changed the assemblages of corals living on reefs. Susceptible corals disappeared from the ecosystem to leave behind ones with increased stress tolerance.

As the coral communities living on each of the 3000 individual reefs became increasingly defined by their recent history of bleaching, so their subsequent response to future bleaching events was predetermined. The map with its thousands of data points became a moving mosaic of red, amber and green reefs in poor and relatively good condition.

The taskforce’s aerial surveys and mapping campaigns took place against a backdrop of rising tensions between the coal industry and those advocating on the environment. In 2016–17, the effects of climate change were being felt across Australia. Extended droughts had reduced agricultural production, and bushfires were burning intensely. Water shortages combined with toxic algal blooms to cause mass fish kills in the Murray–Darling river system, while the most extensive dieback of mangrove forest ever seen occurred along 1000 kilometres of the northern coastline in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Pressure was increasing on the government to take substantive action to address climate change by curbing fossil-fuel emissions.

As the first wave of bleaching unfolded in March 2016, federal environment minister Greg Hunt joined the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority on a flight along 200 kilometres of coastline between Cairns and Lizard Island. Upon landing, he gave a press conference downplaying the significance of the coral bleaching. It was a story that stood in stark contrast to the maps of coral bleaching.

Hunt claimed that bleaching was restricted to a small area in the central north where the tourism industry is based. This ignored the immense areas of decimated reefs that Hughes had mapped in the far north stretching as far as New Guinea.

“I briefed the GBR Ministerial Council at that time and there were requests for copies of the data we used to make the map,” Hughes explained. “There were also a few raised eyebrows from people asking who is this maverick professor surveying the entire Reef? Why is he doing it and why won’t he shut up?!”

The federal government was concerned that they didn’t own the data and couldn’t control the flow of information to the public about the extent of the coral bleaching. As Hughes recalled, “They were certainly more comfortable with a government agency doing this sort of national business, as the message is controllable. Or the message doesn’t have to be issued at all… politically I was a loose cannon. I still am.”

The coal versus coral war became an increasingly polarised national debate about energy policy and the need to curb fossil-fuel emissions. Two years earlier, the government had supported a proposal by the energy company Adani to open up the Carmichael Mine, one of the largest coalmines in the world, in northern Queensland. This would require the Abbot Point coal port to be expanded, with millions of cubic metres of sediment dredged to make way for coal export ships. Plans to dump the dredge spoil near the port site inside the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area met with local concern about the effects on the seafloor life.

There was also the bigger, global problem of the additional fossil fuels that would be burned. This would contribute to climate change and warmer ocean waters; the major driver of coral bleaching as had been demonstrated by the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce’s analysis of their maps.

The maps also brought the growing threat from climate change to the Great Barrier Reef into increasingly sharp focus on the global stage. The Reef had received a badge of honour when it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981, in recognition of its outstanding universal value. This gave Australians reason to be proud of their iconic natural wonder, which provided income from more than 1.6 million tourist visits each year. Against this backdrop, the maps of coral bleaching on the Reef clearly demonstrated that characteristics for which it was initially designated as World Heritage were in danger.

The List of World Heritage in Danger is an international lever for reform to encourage better environmental stewardship of World Heritage Sites. The question of whether the Reef should be placed on the In-Danger list was first raised in 1997 as climate change emerged as the major threat to the Reef’s World Heritage characteristics. The question then cycled in and out of media attention as it was considered and reconsidered by the World Heritage Committee over several decades, while all the time the impacts of climate change on the Reef escalated. An In-Danger listing has so far been avoided by the Australian government through political and industrial lobbying.

Hughes’s maps of coral bleaching driven by climate change found themselves at the centre of this debate when they were cited in an independent report on vulnerability of coral reefs inside World Heritage Sites commissioned by UNESCO. The maps were a compelling scientific picture underpinned by robust data. They added to the growing body of evidence linking ocean warming driven by climate change to coral bleaching, and the UNESCO report highlighted the growing disconnect between Australian responsibilities for stewardship of the Reef and the federal government’s support of the fossil-fuel industry. •

This is an extract from Plotting the Oceans: Stories of Powerful Maps and Their Makers by Sarah Hamylton, published by Monash University Publishing.

The post Death on the Reef appeared first on Inside Story.

I was there when it went wrong, and was among the many who have tried to do it better. More than half a century ago, a 1973 proposal to an Adelaide teachers college had a fundamental point to make. Sad to relate, it still needs making.

Teacher education went wrong in the mid-1960s. A huge surge in school enrolments was about to end at last, and so too the need for stop-gaps and workarounds in teacher education. Everyone — employers, the teacher unions, the government in far-off Canberra, teacher educators — thought the old-style training had done its dash, and they were right.

I’d been a student at an old-style teachers college, a glorified high school complete with weekly assemblies, a sign-in book and a women’s warden who, as well as keeping a close eye on the doings of the young female students, determined whether our boarding arrangements were of sufficient probity to warrant a living away from home allowance.

The college, a huddle of wooden temporary classrooms jammed into the garden of a suburban mansion, was run by the Department of Education. It was the department that employed the staff, took students from wherever they could be got, processed them for a couple of years then certificated and employed them. One of my colleagues at my first school was eighteen; she’d got into teachers college after eleven not very successful years at school.

If everyone was right about the old system, they were wrong about the new, and, as it happened, I saw that too. Just four years after my last day at the glorified high school came my first day as a lecturer at Bedford Park Teachers College, which was supposed to blaze the trail to the future of teacher education. It certainly looked the part. Gouts of Canberra money bought flash new buildings (including gratifyingly vast offices for staff), three- and four-year courses, attractive salaries for more highly qualified staff and, the lynchpin, a principal who was also professor of education at the nearby Flinders University. The Department was nowhere to be seen.

Every day the joint appointee would come down — in symbolic as well as topographical fact — to make clear that we’d better get on with becoming more like his other staff up the hill at Flinders. They did research. No one ever suggested, so far as I can recall, that vice versa might also obtain. It was research that would count; teaching (and especially teaching about teaching), not so much. It wasn’t long before Bedford Park Teachers College became the Sturt College of Advanced Education and then, once the research goats had been sorted from the teaching sheep, the whole thing was folded into the university.

All this was sold as making teaching “a graduate profession.” It was a semi-fraudulent professionalisation by higher qualification rather than by building a higher standard or better kind of teaching work.

Worse, the new scheme pressed against any such ambition. The old-style teachers college, for all its cringe-making anachronism and its intellectually undemanding gruel, was respectful of schools, teachers and teaching. All were constants in our minds. As well as practical teaching stints we’d all — staff as well as students — troop out to “demonstration schools” every Wednesday morning to watch the gun teachers at work before trooping back to college for assembly. It was teaching as a craft, a skill transmitted from old hands to tyros.

From its new perch, however, Theory was learning to look down on Practice. A ruthless academic rewards system would soon push researchers toward esoteric and scientistic (and therefore more academically respectable) regions; eventually they would arrive at the astonishingly solipsistic and misconceived mantra of “evidence-based practice,” where “evidence” meant that which researchers produced, and only that.

Well before that unhappy day arrived, however, it was becoming obvious that learning about teaching, in splendid isolation from actual classrooms, wasn’t working. Students struggled to understand what their various branches of extended study had to do with each other let alone with teaching. As the day of Going Out Teaching loomed, many were in a funk. Hence the IGPP, the Integrated, Group-structured Pre-professional Program.

The IGPP’s proponents — there were four of us — didn’t wear Che Guevara berets or wave Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. But the beards, long hair and jeans — or khaki bib-and-brace overalls for one of us — made what would now be called a Statement.

Our proposal was for an opt-in final year of teacher ed in which students’ lives would revolve around three pivots: extended practical experience in the schools; a major project; and a student–staff group (max 15 students, three staff) as an educational forum, the monitor of the program’s progress, and its rule- and decision-maker. The group would be “(a) participatory democracy based on the equality of rights and responsibilities of all members  … decisions (will be) arrived at by consensus wherever possible, and by majority vote where not.”

At the end of the IGPP year a panel (school-dominated) would determine whether the student was “competent in classroom practice, in the formulation and explication of a teaching rationale, in demonstrating the interaction of theory and practice, and shows an understanding of the subject matter of relevant parts of the [school] curriculum.” We proposed running the trial for one year only, with evaluation and next steps, if any, to follow.

We were fortunate in our timing. Most of our colleagues, youngish, of liberal rather than radical mind, weren’t convinced the IGPP was workable or desirable but were willing to give it a try; many signed up to help students work through their major project if and as required. The leadership that had taken over from the principal-professor when BPTC became Sturt CAE wasn’t sold on the idea either, but it too was willing to hear us out.

Thanks to three things — the good-natured persistence of our rep (the bib-and-brace wearer), an excruciatingly courteous resistance led by the head of English (owner of the only highly polished Land Rover in Adelaide, perhaps Australia), and the spirit of a time when “innovation” was taken as a self-evidently good thing — the hearing was both exhaustive and exhausting. It consumed several meetings of Sturt’s academic committee and was eventually flicked to a special meeting of council (for which the head of English turned up in beautifully laundered white overalls). The debate went deep into the night, ending, eventually, in a tied vote. The chair determined that the status quo would obtain.

Among my mixed feelings was a certain relief. In the course of arguing the case I was beginning to realise that the dynamics of a leaderless group, the membership of which was based on a false equivalence and blurred responsibilities, could have taken us to a place very different from that imagined. And the assessment as proposed was, to say the least, open to challenge. Against a bad structure we were proposing something that had very little structure at all.

But whatever the limitations of our prescription, the underlying diagnosis was right: to base teacher education in universities/proto-universities was to get just about everything wrong: the relationship between learner teachers and actual teaching, between schools and universities, between “theory” and “practice,” between teaching and knowledge in/about teaching. In making its big shift teacher education had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.

It is true that teaching has become a more explicit practice, requiring greater command of a wider range of formal, “out there” knowledge including, centrally, knowledge of the process of learning and growing and how teaching helps or hinders. But to be a teacher is to enter into myriad relationships, many of them complicated, tricky and fast-moving. Knowing how to behave in these relationships can be helpfully talked and written about, but to be usable it must be embodied so that it can be deployed intuitively, as a reflex.

In this respect, you do not learn how to teach or about teaching; you become a teacher. Think jazz musician, stunt pilot, or stand-up comic. Some start with more of what it takes than others acquire in years of effort. There is, moreover, no one way to be “a teacher”; it all depends on the individual, the others with whom they work, the circumstances in which they work and, perhaps above all, what kind of learning and growth is being developed. Teaching is, as the cliché has it, “value-laden.”

The only place in which you can become a teacher is where teaching happens: in schools. Schools are also the best place to acquire much formal, out-there knowledge about learning and growth and their relationship to “teaching.” It’s when you’re actually doing teaching that a better understanding of it becomes both urgent and absorbable.

All that boils down to two conclusions: first, “teacher education” should be based in schools. Second, learning about teaching and becoming a teacher is a process, relatively short for some, long for others.

On the location: that doesn’t mean schools as they are now; it does mean schools geared up to become what all schools can and should be, hotbeds of thinking and doing, “learning organisations” as the jargon has it. That would mean schools calling on universities (and others) as required, not vice versa. No more tail wagging the dog.

On the process, the obvious industrial form of a learning/becoming is an apprenticeship, not of the old lock-step Year One to Year Five apprenticeship à la the trades, but a process framed by general principles/objectives, structured by standards-based “developmental continua” (or “learning progressions’) and authenticated by robust assessment, with progress to be linked to expanded responsibilities and remuneration.

The deal we had with the Education Department back in the sixties might be a starting point for figuring out ways and means. (It paid us students a liveable stipend in return for which we were contracted to teach in a school of the Department’s choosing for three years.) So might Teach For Australia, La Trobe University’s Nexus program, the University of Melbourne’s Internship Program, and various upgrade pathways for paraprofessionals, not to mention the Australian Institute for School Teaching and Leadership’s standards for teachers. Even the IGPP might have something to offer.

For most of those examples I am indebted to the most recent of those one-hundred-and-something formal reviews of teacher education, the  Scott report (2023). Its suggestions for “mid-career entrants” are particularly interesting, but why apply that kind of thinking to that small minority only? How many young people now trying to swim in the mainstream might jump at the chance to earn as they learn? In a really classy work-based program? That would take them as far and as fast as they could go? And how many of teacher education’s catalogue of chronic declines — in the “quality” of entrants, in the proportion of entrants lasting the distance, in the proportion of them actually going into teaching and in proportions of them who stay in teaching — might such a program tackle?

Scott’s recommendations for the bulk of teacher education — more like commands, really, given the government’s riding instructions — show no such willingness to reorder the underlying relationships. To the contrary: Scott lends the existing order the weight of compulsion, financial incentives, and national uniformity. That might bring some improvements but it won’t fix the problem, precisely because the problem is in the structure as installed sixty years ago.

This is not suggest that teacher education should once again leap out of the frying pan into the fire, this time from the frying pan of university-based instruction into the fire of school-based apprenticeships. For one thing, the vested interests of 2025, aka the universities and the research industry, are much better defended than those of 1965 — they got three of the six spots on the Scott review, for example, including Scott himself, a university vice-chancellor. For another, it wouldn’t work.

A better approach by far is that which we took in proposing the IGPP: start a small alternative, then learn through doing. All it needs is one state/territory minister, one teacher organisation, a bit of money from the feds and a handful of go-getting schools. And after all, now as then, there’s not much to beat. •

The post A learning experience appeared first on Inside Story.

Moss is a sixth-generation owner of a family business that’s been around for 170 years. It grows up to a million bare-rooted trees annually — almonds, peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots and citrus — and sells them to orchards all over Australia. “We’re the beginning of the horticultural industry,” he says.

I visit in winter, the busiest season for despatching trees to growers. In the fields, teams of workers in hi-vis clothing trail behind chugging tractors. An angled blade carves through the red earth, upending long rows of closely grown saplings. A first set of workers shakes clods of soil from the roots, the next crew bundles them together, and then they are heaved onto trailers and carted off to the packing shed.

At peak times, Mossmont needs between ninety and a hundred staff. About two-thirds of them are employed under the federal government’s PALM scheme, which enables people from nine Pacific countries and East Timor to work in Australia on temporary visas. Government data shows that in November 2025, 32,365 PALM workers were engaged by 530 approved employers around Australia. More than half worked in agriculture, more than a third in meat processing and the rest in aged care, tourism and other industries.

PALM — the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme — has two streams. The workers at Mossmont have come to Griffith under the short-term stream, established in 2012, which offers a nine-month visa. It is designed to fill seasonal gaps for fruit-pickers, vegetable harvesters and other workers in short supply. Workers may return for repeat seasons but must spend at least three months every year in their home country.

The long-term stream allows for a four-year stay. It began in 2018 as part of Australia’s “step up” to improve diplomatic relations in the Pacific and was intended to fill regional jobs in healthcare, social assistance and hospitality. By November last year the meat industry had emerged as the major employer, with more than 11,000 PALM workers accounting for two-thirds of all long-term visa holders. By some calculations, PALM workers now make up around a quarter of the industry’s labour force.

According to Pacific Island affairs minister Pat Conroy, the PALM scheme is “the ultimate win–win.”

The first win is that workers get jobs at far higher wages than they could ever hope to earn at home. On average, individual PALM workers send home $1500 per month, or a combined total of $450 million in 2024–25. These remittances make a significant contribution to national economies, boost household budgets, pay for children to go to school and young adults to undertake training, fund the construction of houses to withstand hurricanes, and finance shops and other small enterprises.

The second win is that PALM workers fill stubborn labour market gaps in industries and regions when many Australians are reluctant to work for the wages on offer.

Jonathan Moss loves the PALM scheme for both reasons. Before PALM, Mossmont Nurseries relied on working holiday-makers to meet seasonal needs. And while Moss still uses backpackers to fill some gaps, he says their motivations are different. “They’re here to make the days within their scheme,” he says, referring to the eighty-eight days backpackers must work to secure a second twelve-month visa. After completing that time, he says, few return.

“I don’t blame them,” adds Moss. “They want to go to the beach rather than cold old Griffith.”

Moss has often trained backpackers only to have them decide they don’t like the work and quit. But since PALM workers are determined to transform the lives of their families, he says, they bring a much stronger work ethic.

Moss calculates that if he had to revert to only using backpackers, he’d need to boost Mossmont’s staff by a third to maintain the same production. This is consistent with research by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, which compared the output of Pacific seasonal workers and working holiday makers over a three-year period. It found that seasonal workers, on average, were 20 per cent more productive.

“Once you have a skilled PALM worker, they will then train the next lot of skilled PALM workers,” Moss says. “I have my staff that have been with me now for eight years, they’ve moved on to being in control of things like irrigation, or supervising roles. And they’re the ones training up the next lot of PALM workers coming through.”

Moss has visited PALM workers in their homes and seen how wages from Mossmont can transform lives. He shows me photos of a new two-storey house in Timor-Leste, painted aqua blue and brick red, with deep tiled verandas. It’s humbling to see such achievements, he says, and makes him proud to be a PALM scheme employer.

Stanley Tamanoah from Tanna Island in Vanuatu is on his third placement at Mossmont Nurseries. Peter Mares

He describes the PALM scheme as “pure aid.” Rather than development dollars being depleted by administration costs and intermediaries, the money goes straight to the people who use it to benefit their families and communities.

Moss’s employees are enthusiastic too. In the field, I chat with Stanley Tamanoah, a father of two from Vanuatu. Tall and softly spoken, he’s wearing a black hoodie under a bright orange jacket. He is on his third rotation at Mossmont.

Tamanoah’s father died when he was young, and he and his four siblings were raised by their mother. At home, on Tanna island, he tended the family gardens and did odd jobs, but had no regular income. Here at Mossmont he can take home as much as $20,000 after nine months work. After the last season, he bought a Landcruiser that his nephew uses to provide taxi services, and he’s also building a house.

“We changed our village back home,” he says. “We miss our family, but we have to sacrifice for a better living.”

Two hours’ drive south of Griffith is Finley, population 1864, according to the sign on the highway. Kylie Titlow is operations manager at Finely Regional Care, a local not-for-profit that runs a seventy-seven-bed residential aged-care facility, a retirement village, two medical centres and a preschool, and delivers care at home to residents within an eighty kilometres radius. When Titlow joined in 2019, the service was suffering from a dire workforce shortage and struggling to find skilled staff.

In 2020 she helped Finley Regional Care recruit four carers from Kiribati. Siera, who asked that I only use her first name, was part of that first cohort and landed in Melbourne with just one cardigan.

“And oh, it was freezing!” she says.

I ask if she arrived in mid-winter. “No,” she replies with a huge burst of laughter. “It was in March!”

After five years in the Riverina, the cold is one thing Siera is still not used to. It’s a sunny day outside, and we’re sitting in a heated office that feels almost tropical. But while Siera found the weather chilly, the welcome in Finley was warm, even though Covid-19 locked everyone down almost as soon as she arrived.

“We didn’t even get a chance to go buy warmer clothes” says Siera. After she admitted to one her new colleagues that she was wrapping herself in a blanket to walk to work, a bundle of warm clothes was dropped off at her house. “And then everyone at work heard about it, and they start bringing all their clothes to us, and now we’ve got a lot of clothes to wear. Heaps of them!”

“She’s my rock”: Finley Regional Care operations Manager Kylie Titlow with I-Kiribati nurse Siera. Peter Mares

Titlow says it was a big change to employ Pacific workers in Finley, where there was previously “no multiculturalism.” There were some initial misunderstandings, though she and Siera laugh about them now. Although she and her I-Kiribati colleagues eat lots of rice, for instance, they didn’t expect it to be served as dessert. “We thought that was really, really funny, when they had a rice pudding one night and it got slopped on the plate with the savoury meal,” laughs Titlow.

As operations manager, though, she felt bad for not giving the new staff a better induction. When the next group came onboard, she was more thorough, even including a lesson on setting the table with knives and forks, since people in Kiribati generally eat with spoons or their hands. Siera’s experience greatly benefited subsequent groups of carers arriving from Kiribati.

“I already informed them about what to bring and what they need here,” she says.

“She’s my rock,” chimes in Titlow. “I use her to settle everybody in.”

For Siera, the only downsides of the PALM scheme have been homesickness and culture shock. “It’s a good program, you get benefit from it,” she says, “and even your family have benefit from it.”

Siera sends money home to support her retired parents, who rely on a small pension. “Oh, they love me when it’s payday week!” she laughs. “And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll send you money, just go take it off from the ATM.”

It would be hard to keep Finley Regional Care running without PALM scheme staff, says Titlow. She cautions that using the scheme involves a significant financial commitment and a lot of administration to satisfy the requirements of being an approved employer but says it’s worth it in the end.

Mossmont Nurseries and Finley Regional Care show how the PALM scheme can be a win–win. But the quality of other PALM workers’ experience in Australia can be hit and miss. Not every employer will visit the families of staff in their homeland, as Jonathan Moss does, or learn a traditional dance and perform it with her I-Kiribati colleagues, as Kylie Titlow did at the Kiribati national day celebrations in Sydney in July 2025.

It would be good to be able to say that problems in the scheme arise from a few rogue employers. But the reality is more complex, as I discover when I meet up with Samuel (not his real name) at a noodle bar one Saturday in another regional town.

He has promised to introduce me to a couple of Fijians employed at the local abattoir under the PALM scheme. I offer to buy them lunch, and shortly before midday, Samuel texts to ask if it’s okay if another two PALM workers join us. “Great,” I reply, expecting to meet four Islanders.

We take a table big enough to seat six but then add extra chairs and tables when more workers arrive. Soon we’re spilling over into the adjacent row of tables. In all, more than a dozen PALM workers show up. Some are too shy — or perhaps too wary — to speak to me. Most, though, are eager to share stories and vent frustrations about their experiences at the meatworks.

“Wednesdays we’ve been told not to work,” one says, which means a four-day working week. “The contractor is asking us to apply for annual leave on those days. We don’t want to.”

It’s winter, and the flow of livestock to be slaughtered has slowed, so their hours have been reduced in apparent breach of guidelines requiring long-term PALM workers to be offered “full-time hours in every week of their placement.” But another provision allows for workers to be stood down for reasons beyond an employer’s control. Even if it’s within the rules, the Fijians are disgruntled.

When the abattoir is busy, workers are asked to do an extra shift on Saturdays — but without, they say, getting paid the time-and-a-half hourly rate they believe they are entitled to.

One man tells me that if he gets injured on the job he keeps working because he doesn’t want to lose any pay. “I got kicked by a beef [steer], but I finished the day,” he says. “You just keep working if you get hurt, to earn more money.”

Another tells me PALM workers get called to work even when they are sick and have a medical certificate. They’re entitled to sick leave and workers compensation, so they shouldn’t lose pay if an injury or illness forces them to miss work.

Most say their hourly rate has barely changed since they started in 2022, though they have become much more productive. All arrived untrained; after two months, once they were proficient, management increased the number of cows, sheep and goats to be slaughtered daily. But the only time they noticed a significant rise in their take home pay was in July 2024 after the government’s Stage 3 tax cuts kicked in.

The Meat Industry Award has risen in small increments since the workers started, but most are being paid at low rates even though they describe working at higher grades.

“I work on the kill floor, the most hard job there,” says one.

“The pay doesn’t meet the work we do,” says another. “We know all the jobs.”

A third man tells me the PALM workers are training new recruits from China. “We’re teaching them. They don’t speak English.”

“They’re doing the easy jobs, we’re doing the hard jobs,” someone else adds.

The central grievance is that conditions in Australia have not lived up to what they believe they were promised when they were recruited.

“It’s different to what they told us before we came,” says one. “The work is much harder, and the cost of living is much higher.”

They expected to be trained as skilled workers and then sponsored to stay in Australia. Whether such promises were made or were misunderstood is impossible to judge, but the Fijians feel let down and ill-treated.

Unlike the PALM workers I met at Mossmont Nurseries and Finley Regional Care, these meatworkers were not direct employees. Rather, like two-thirds of all PALM workers, they were employed via a labour-hire agency, muddying the lines of responsibility and contributing to miscommunication and misunderstanding.

After more than three years in Australian the Fijian workers had gained enough experience to undertake the most difficult tasks in a dangerous industry, yet they would soon leave Australia without any formal recognition of their skills. If they return for another four-year stint, as many hope to do, they will once again be employed at the lowest level.

More than forty people came from the Pacific to work at this abattoir, all of them expecting to stay four years on long-term PALM visas. Fewer than half still work there. Some went home, the workers tell me, some were sacked, and others remain in Australia but now work elsewhere in breach of their visa conditions — a phenomenon known as “disengaging” but sometimes called “absconding.”

It was evident the remaining meatworkers would have switched to a different employer if they had been permitted to do so without leaving PALM. This points to an apparent contradiction in the scheme: workers value it highly and want to keep returning to Australia to work, yet many would also like to change jobs.

A large-scale survey by the Australian National University and the World Bank asked PALM workers to rate their experiences in Australia on a scale from one to ten. The average score was 8.5, but more than one in four said they would prefer to work for a different employer.

A much smaller survey by the Migrant Justice Institute found 97 per cent of PALM workers wanted to return to Australia but two-thirds reported they would change to a different employer if allowed. They wanted to be treated better and work in safer conditions. As the researchers note, workers’ desire to continue participating in PALM does not necessarily reflect strong satisfaction with past experiences.

There is an irony in the name PALM: although it’s a labour mobility scheme, it effectively restricts movement. Workers move from the Pacific to Australia but have almost zero labour market mobility after they get here. They are bound to their approved employers for the duration of their stay, whether it’s nine months or four years. If they leave their approved employer, then they must either return home or become unlawful.

This has two negative consequences. The first is that some PALM workers silently suffer exploitative conditions that Australians could challenge or walk away from. The second is that other PALM workers who experience workplace problems breach their visa conditions and disengage, as more than 7000 have done since 2019. Many of them applied for protection as refugees and in some cases were granted bridging visas with work rights — enabling them to work wherever they choose — while their cases were determined.

Among experts, the causes of disengagement are hotly debated. One view is that disengagement is primarily driven by pull factors: offers of higher pay outside the scheme or the greater flexibility offered by bridging visas. The counterview emphasises push factors: insufficient work hours, excessive deductions, abuse, substandard accommodation and sexual assault. Many disengaged PALM workers — including women who have fallen pregnant and fear returning home to possible family retribution — end up in extremely precarious circumstances.

Of course, pull and push factors can operate simultaneously. But disengagement has fallen sharply since changes to the PALM scheme gave workers greater protections, suggesting push factors outweighed pull factors in shaping workers’ decisions to leave the scheme.

In 2020–21, ten in a hundred PALM workers abandoned the scheme, but in 2024–25 only three in a hundred left. In the intervening period, the Albanese government required employers to guarantee workers at least thirty hours a week of paid employment averaged over a month, and ensure they take home at least $200 a week even when deductions are being made from their wages to repay costs like airfares.

The Australian Workers’ Union also secured a Fair Work Commission ruling guaranteeing a minimum wage for horticultural work. Employers can still offer piece rates as an incentive, but every worker must receive the minimum hourly rate, no matter how much they pick or prune.

Problems persist, though, and further improvements are needed.

The expert panel commissioned to review Australia’s migration system in 2023 concluded that mobility restrictions “limit a migrant worker’s capacity to resist, report or leave exploitive situations.” The NSW Anti-Slavery Commissioner agrees that “tied employment… should be avoided because it promotes exploitation, depresses wages and performs the role of a quasi-‘subsidy’ to particular employers, occupations or sectors.” The Grattan Institute is emphatic: PALM workers should be able to change employers more easily “to reduce the risk of exploitation.”

More mobility would force poor bosses to lift their standards or lose staff. PALM workers would have more options if they suffer abuse. Incentives to disengage from the scheme would be reduced.

But there are practical challenges. Because employers currently pay upfront travel and visa costs to bring workers to Australia, they could be out of pocket if workers changed jobs before repaying those debts. But the government could cover those expenses, and recoup them through the tax system — as was Labor’s policy before the 2022 election.

Flexibility could be sector specific, with meatworkers allowed to move more freely within the meat processing industry, horticultural workers within horticulture, aged care workers within aged care. Or, since most PALM workers are employed by labour-hire agencies, greater mobility could allow any labour-hire employee to switch to a different labour-hire agency, regardless of the work they do.

To be true to its name — Pacific Australia Labour Mobility — PALM must allow workers to move more easily between employers. •

This is an edited excerpt from Improving PALM, a narrative report on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute. The author’s views do not represent the position of the Scanlon Foundation.

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Nazarbayev’s guest was the Australian governor-general Bill Hayden. It was April 1994, and Hayden had arrived that day in Almaty, capital of newly independent Kazakhstan, on an official visit.

Having whispered “No notes” to diplomat Ian Parmeter, Hayden replied, “Yes, it’s a complex document, and has been controversial, but it invests my office with sweeping powers. I appoint the prime minister and ministers; I open and close the parliament; I give formal assent to legislation passed by the parliament; I am the commander-in-chief of the armed forces: as such I can call out our army and surround the federal parliament.”

This means, he added, “I could run the country by myself if I chose to.”

“So, if you have all these powers, why not use them?” responded the Kazakh autocrat.

Amid the laughter of everyone in the room except Nazarbayev, Hayden replied that there were certain conventions in Australian democracy he was obliged to follow.

News of governor-general Hayden’s planned visit to Kazakhstan had first reached the Australian embassy in Moscow ten weeks earlier. Australia’s ambassador to Russia, Cavan Hogue, was also accredited to Kazakhstan, so it was the embassy’s responsibility to obtain the Kazakh government’s agreement to the visit and negotiate appropriate arrangements. It was to prove a little more complicated than expected.

As Parmeter related recently, staff at the embassy prepared a “third person note” setting out details of the proposed visit. Hayden was described as “effectively Australia’s head of state,” with no mention made of the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was Australia’s actual head of state. Parmeter, deputy head of mission, flew to Almaty, sought an appointment with the chief of presidential protocol and presented the note.

As a landlocked state near the centre of the Eurasian land mass, Kazakhstan had been visited by very few heads of state since its recent separation from post-communist Russia. The chief of presidential protocol, apparently unfazed by the word “effectively,” became visibly excited as he read the note, and then began sketching out a possible program: Nazarbayev receiving the governor-general at the airport, accompanying him to his hotel, meeting formally the following day and then hosting an official banquet the following evening. Having secured formal agreement to the visit, Parmeter returned to Moscow and reported to Canberra.

“About a month before the visit,” Parmeter recalls, “I flew to Almaty again to check on the program. As before, I called on the chief of presidential protocol, but this time he was not as friendly. His staff had investigated the position of governors-general in Commonwealth countries, discovering that the governor-general was the representative of the British monarch and concluding that Queen Elizabeth II was actually Australia’s head of state.”

All that was true, Parmeter responded, and it was why the word “effectively” had appeared in the note. Governors-general in Commonwealth performed all the duties of heads of state entirely independently of the British monarch. As the Australian constitution set out, the British monarch had delegated the role to the governor- general, whom he or she appointed on the advice of the Australian prime minister.

The protocol chief was unimpressed. He was obviously animated by the fact that President Nazarbayev had until recently been merely the first secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party — head of a Soviet “republic” and therefore a Soviet satrap. Now, as president of an independent Kazakhstan, he was determined to be recognised internationally as a head of state. “As such,” recalled Parmeter, “he would have formal meetings only with fellow heads of state. He was not going to be sold a pup.”

As the Queen’s representative in Australia, said the chief of protocol, the governor-general sounded more like an ambassador. The president would never host a state visit for an ambassador: “Send us your Queen!”

After Parmeter again took him through the constitutional arrangements, stressing the Australian governor-general’s constitutional authority to perform all the duties of a head of state, the chief of protocol said he would consult the president.

Parmeter phoned Hogue in Moscow; Hogue flew to Almaty that night. At a meeting next day the chief of protocol said that the president, in view of the friendly relations between Kazakhstan and

Australia, had graciously agreed to host a state visit for the governor-general. The two Australians flew back to Moscow satisfied that nothing further was likely to impede the visit. How wrong they were.

Returning to Almaty four days before the governor-general’s arrival, Hogue and Parmeter immediately called on the chief of protocol, who took them through a program that was substantially as agreed. Nazarbayev would meet Hayden at the airport and accompany him to his hotel. A full meeting with officials would be held the next day, followed by a formal banquet.

But then, just a day before Hayden’s arrival, the chief of protocol called Parmeter to his office. He explained some fundamental changes to the program: the governor-general would be greeted at the airport not by Nazarbayev but by Yerik Asanbayev, occupier of the largely ceremonial vice-presidency, who would also host the talks and a dinner (not a state banquet) the following day. There would be no meeting with Nazarbayev. The chief of protocol could give no reason for the change.

Hogue sought out the British chargé d’affaires, Owen Jones, who revealed that the Kazakhs had asked him whether Hayden should be received as Australia’s heard of state. Jones had replied that, yes, Hayden should be received with all honours and courtesies due to a head of state. The Kazakhs clearly weren’t persuaded.

Hogue and Parmeter declared the proposed changes, so close to the governor-general’s arrival, to be unacceptable. The chief, clearly embarrassed, left them in his office while he called the presidential staff. The upshot was that Nazarbayev would condescend to meet Hayden with officials at his residence on the evening of his arrival, but would still not be available to participate in the program the following day.

Hayden, en route, couldn’t be advised of the change of plan. So the two men went to the airport the following day to brief him on arrival. A seasoned professional, Hogue parlayed permission to go to the control tower to speak with the captain of Hayden’s VIP jet now it was in Kazakh air space. He was able to let a member of Hayden’s staff know that the vice-president would meet the governor-general when he landed, so at least that aspect of the visit wouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

In protocol terms the Kazakhs had emasculated the visit. But Hayden knew a refusal to comply would risk irking Nazabayev, who was known to place a premium on building personal ties with the heads of those states that had been prominent in supporting Kazakhstan’s — namely his — aspirations. And the government in Canberra, lobbied by Australian firms lured by Kazakhstan’s bountiful minerals and energy resources, had sought to building a solid bilateral relationship. Significant interests needed to be protected and promoted. Such, indeed, was the goal of Hayden’s visit.

Deeply concerned by the threat of a proliferation of nuclear- powered states following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Australia’s foreign minister Gareth Evans had endorsed a measured, pragmatic approach to post-Soviet Russia and the Soviet possessions that had claimed independent statehood. The government’s aim was to balance the twin imperatives of maintaining longstanding relations with Moscow while building ties with those of the newly independent republics — especially the Baltic States, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — that mattered to Australia.

The embassy in Moscow had been instructed to build contacts in all of the new republics. “We could only take a pragmatic, flexible attitude,” recalled Parmeter. “In the present case, such pragmatism meant acquiescing in Nazarbayev’s wishes.”

Other aspects of a visit rich in piquant ironies are not to be found mentioned in Hayden’s autobiography, but were noteworthy in the view of Hayden’s staff. They began at the airport, when Hayden undertook his first duty: inspecting the guard of honour. In accordance with Russian military tradition, the members of the guard were selected for their imposing height — all were about 190cm. But the aide-de-camp pacing along behind the GG, RAAF Flight Lieutenant Crosby, was a diminutive female person, bearing an unsheathed, highly polished cavalry sabre.

Hayden and his wife Dallas had been greeted by Asanbayev, the vice president (then, as now, a largely honorary position). The governor-general and his ambassador were ferried to the Presidential Palace in a capacious ZIL, the Soviet-produced limousine designed to rival the official vehicle used by Soviet leaders.

“Your Excellency’s aide-de-camp is a woman?,” Asanbayev politely enquired during the drive.

“Yes, she is,” said Hayden. “Almost all of my staff are women — I find I can trust them.”

Early on the second day of Hayden’s visit the chief of protocol informed Hogue that Asanbayev would host the governor-general and his delegation to a dinner at a private restaurant. That evening found the vice-regal couple seated with vice-president and his wife at the head table, accompanied only by the Australian ambassador, his wife, and the Australian interpreter.

Hayden, known to be partial to a glass of red wine, was on his third glass and clearly at ease when Asanbayev invited him to savour a Kazakh national dish, қазы (kazy), a salami made from smoked horse meat. The governor-general agreed with alacrity, remarking to Asanbayev that he was aware the horse occupied a special place in Kazakh culture.

“But of course!” responded Asanbayev. “As nomadic herders and drovers of the steppes, we rely on our horses for our very existence. Quite apart from transporting us to and from seasonal pastures, we use virtually every part of the horse. It supplies the hair for our pleated ropes, sinews for sewing, its milk for food and fermented as alcohol. The list is endless! And according to an ancient tradition, if a man over sixty fathers a child, the child’s name should contain a reference to its sire’s horse.”

Hayden appeared to find this revelation intriguing: “So, according to your traditions, the vigour, the vitality of the horse is somehow invested in its rider?”

“Not really,” replied Asanbayev. “We are a down-to-earth, practical people. We see it rather that if a man over sixty continues to spend much of his time in the saddle, a certain part of his anatomy tends to remain in good, productive working order.”

Dallas Hayden, who hitherto had taken no part in the conversation, whispered to her spouse: “Bill, perhaps we should buy a horse…” Asanbayev pounced, demanding of the interpreter: “What did she say?” Within seconds the whole restaurant was convulsed by laughter. Inadvertently, the vice-regal party had won their hosts’ hearts.

Bright and early the following morning the chief of protocol appeared with yet another proposal. The Kazakhs had been pondering how to honour the governor-general.

President Nazarbayev had been most glad to have been informed that last night’s banquet had been a jolly affair, and that the governor-general had taken a particular interest in a subject dear to every Kazakh. “He has decided that Kazakhstan should confer a particular honour on His Excellency,” said the chief. “Please to be ready to depart soon, in casual dress.”

The full delegation soon found itself bouncing along rutted tracks across the semi-arid steppe to be disgorged at a corrugated-iron barn on a stud farm for the breeding of the horse prized by Kazakh and Turkmen riders, the Akhal-Teke. The stud had recently been blessed by the birth of a colt that was an outstanding representative of one of the oldest and most distinctive breeds. He would be formally entered in the annals of the breed and globally recognised. Only one thing was needed: an appropriately dignified name.

The breeders, repositories of one-thousand-years of tradition, had been directed by the president himself to ask the governor-general to name the colt. The only condition was that tradition required that the name begin with a “P.” The arcane reasons behind this stipulation baffled the interpreter.

The governor-general turned to his staff: “Right, you lot are paid to think, so give me a name.” Said staff, some perhaps dealing with the effects of a surfeit of kazy and wine, pondered, until Hayden himself broke a tense silence: “Possum!”

According to that authoritative guide, The Horse Encyclopedia, the Akhal-Teke, bred to withstand desert conditions, is said to be “rather obstinate.” As the visit concluded and the delegation set off for Mongolia, some felt that this adjective aptly described Kazakh officialdom in 1994.

Two postscripts. Five months after the visit the Canberra Times reported briefly in its “vice-regal” column that the governor-general had been admitted to hospital with a fractured leg, having fallen from a horse.

Later, in the lead-up to the Australian republic referendum in 1999, Hayden took the monarchist side. Ian Parmeter recalls seeing him in a television debate claiming that when he travelled abroad as governor-general he was always accepted as Australia’s head of state. “I felt like kicking the television screen,” said the man who had steered the rocky preparations for the 1994 visit. •

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The passionate ones survive today, but in dwindling numbers. Few who rallied for and against Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser in November 1975 could have foreseen that before the end of the century those two men — political giants and fierce enemies in the 1970s — would collaborate in support of a republic, among various causes, and even appear together at public events, as they did at Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008. But the Dismissal itself faded into a distant, blurry history — passing, as even dramatic events must, from current affairs to living history to collective memory.

The egyptologist Jan Assmann’s distinction between two types of “collective memory” — “communicative” and “cultural” — might be helpful in understanding how to think about where the Dismissal now sits in Australian life. Communicative memory is the product of everyday interactions that lead to “numerous collective self-images and memories” and is distinguished by “its limited temporal horizon.” This variety of memory might last three or four generations: say, eighty to one hundred years. “Cultural memory,” by way of contrast, is characterised by its “distance from the everyday,” as well as its role in constituting a social group’s identity. It might be seen as shading into “legend” or even “myth.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the Dismissal suggests that the event, as well as the brief, turbulent history of the Whitlam government itself, still lives within communicative memory. People will tell you where they were when it happened. They will tell you how they felt. They might tell you what the Whitlam government meant to them, and what its Dismissal signified and signifies. Such memories are held, and communicated, in and beyond families and other small groups, even allowing for Australians’ reputed reluctance to tie their identity to political history or civic life.

But I would also like to suggest that the Dismissal is moving towards what Assmann calls cultural memory, with its greater abstractions. It will continue to play a role in telling us something about who we are: but as an event capable of shaping everyday action and understanding, as a truly lived history, it is fast fading.

One test of this is how we talk about our democracy. There is now an entrenched discourse that celebrates the robustness of Australian democracy: it is there in the ABC program, Civic Duty, hosted by Annabel Crabb. It is there, too, in the use of the term “democracy sausage,” which began not much more than a decade ago and seeks to connect the Australian way of life, represented by the pleasures of the barbecue, with to the act of voting, represented as the epitome of democratic fairness.

This discourse equates democracy with voting. It ignores trade union and social movement activism. It hides the decidedly undemocratic way political parties so often operate, including the large donations they receive from vested interests that won’t be revealed until well after election day, if at all. It tells us nothing about the actual exercise of political power, the quiet lobbying and buying of access, the marginalisation and exclusion of voices politicians don’t wish to hear, the oppressions experienced by those without wealth, status, connections and power. It has nothing to say about social and economic inequality.

It also has nothing to say about the Dismissal. That would surprise the generations of 1975, those enjoined to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm” — and perhaps even those who loathed the Whitlam government and were glad to see the back of it. The nation left the Dismissal behind, tucked away in the back of the wardrobe along with safari suits, flared trousers, wide collars and other unfashionable legacies of the 1970s — to be retrieved, perhaps, for the occasional 1970s party.

Each anniversary of the Dismissal was still dutifully noticed in the media, but the idea that the events of November 1975 might carry deeper meaning for one’s judgements about the quality of Australian democracy seemed to be less in evidence as the years passed. New books came out, along with the occasional media documentary. New discoveries about the inner workings of the Dismissal were made possible by historian and Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking’s long legal fight for the release of the Palace Letters, the correspondence between governor-general Sir John Kerr and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris. But the task of demonstrating the contemporary relevance of the Dismissal had become tough.

This disconnect could not easily have been imagined in November and December 1975. The generations of 1975 fought for a version of Australian democracy they believed to be under threat. They believed that vested interests had mobilised, the media had played dirty, a chief justice had betrayed his claim to neutrality, opposition parties had thrown aside propriety, and a representative of the Queen, a “colonial relic” who should confine himself to opening the occasional fete, had sacked a democratically elected government using powers most considered had fallen into disuse.

Part of the process of submerging the Dismissal was to normalise it. The Coalition parties worked that way in 1975: they framed their actions, and Kerr’s, as a working out of the democratic system, the constitution displaying its capacity to resolve a crisis. As we saw in some fiftieth-anniversary public statements by Liberal politicians, including shadow education minister Julian Leeser, and right-wing media commentators, this remains integral to their defence of the Dismissal: that it was legal, proper and, even if hardly a common event, nonetheless a normal and acceptable process.

The work I’ve been doing with James Watson, thanks to support from the Whitlam Institute, tells another story, although not via the usual means of closer study of the elite actors — Whitlam, Kerr, Fraser and chief justice Garfield Barwick — or their principal actions. Rather, we turned to social and political movements, and the engagements of citizens and activists.

There is one sense in which their responses to the Dismissal were indeed “normal”: we are seeking to recover the Dismissal less as a unique constitutional event than as an emblematic and supremely important example of the wider popular politics of that time. It was an era of social protest, political mobilisation and industrial militancy.

We need to recover the history of the Dismissal as part of a more expansive sense of the possibilities of democratic citizenship in the 1970s, and on a less happy note, to see in the course of the protest movement of 1975–77 a harbinger of the disarming of much of this radical hope in the later 1970s, 1980s and beyond.

A gathering crisis

When the Coalition deferred supply on 16 October, it broke a convention of parliamentary politics that many Australians felt was central to the health of their democracy. Few Australians would have believed that a government with a democratically elected majority in the lower house should be blocked by the Senate from governing, despite there being some recent precedents, at least at state level.

The Cain Labor government in Victoria had lost office in 1947 when supply was blocked in the upper house but then forced its way back into government in 1952 by denying supply to the Country Party. Similarly, the Tasmanian Legislative Council had forced an election in 1948 by refusing supply to Robert Cosgrove’s Labor government. And in 1970 Whitlam himself had defended voting against a budget in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in an effort to “destroy the government” (a quote that was often used against him by Kerr and his supporters after 1975). But it is one thing to talk in such terms in the heat of parliamentary debate and in the absence of a Senate majority, and another to actually do it.

In response to Fraser’s denial of supply, Australia’s unions organised large-scale protests. The massive, powerful and militant Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union held “spontaneous strikes.” Sydney members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation announced a twenty-four-hour stoppage for Friday; 1000 of them marched from the union rooms to the rally addressed by Whitlam and the ACTU’s Bob Hawke, the Labor Party president, in Hyde Park.

Outside Parliament House in Canberra on the Thursday, while the budget bills were being considered by the Senate, Hawke told a crowd of 2500 that if the opposition refused to grant supply, “the Australian trade union movement may very well think about withholding supplies from them.” Was that a threat of a general strike? Probably not, given the meeting had considered and then rejected a motion for such action. Still, the National Country Party leader Doug Anthony accused Hawke of “incitement to lawlessness.”

The role of the perceived potential for social disorder in the events leading up to the Dismissal has been underestimated by historians. At the beginning of October, with the plan to block supply on the opposition’s informal agenda but not yet a reality, Liberal Movement senator Steele Hall publicly warned Fraser he would fail to build a “popular base” for his leadership if the community “contained the bitter and growing discontent of Labor supporters who believed the ballot box had lost its democratic function.” Kerr himself, writing shortly after the first rallies and strikes following the blocking of supply in mid-October, told the Queen’s private secretary: “As the money runs out many problems will arise and the reaction of the trade unions has to be considered. There are threats of protest strikes and industrial ‘war’.”

Ian Macphee, a leading Victorian Liberal moderate, wrote a couple of weeks later along similar lines: if the Coalition won an election “stemming from the present crisis we will have the outright hostility of nearly 50 per cent of the electorate.” He worried especially over the unions, which “would feel justified in destroying our government as they believe the Senate destroyed their government.” The confrontation involved, he said, was “frightening to contemplate.” The Labor senator John Wheeldon told the Senate during the budget debate on 16 October:

This government has been trying to maintain the economy of this country on an even keel, by advocating wage indexation and by restraint in public expenditure. If we are removed, will opposition members be able to convince the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union or the Miners Federation to restrain their wage demands? Why should the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union or the Miners Federation restrain their wage demands if they know that they are living in a society in which anything goes.

Fear of violence and disorder was real, even while the rallies and protests held in the immediate wake of the blocking of supply were mainly orderly and peaceful. But at a Liberal rally at Brisbane’s Festival Hall on 31 October, Liberal MP John Hughes was punched in the stomach and on the nose after he tried to snatch a placard from Labor supporters. A picture of his bloodied face appeared on the front page of the Courier Mail the next day. The ugly confrontation, although isolated and minor, exposed the danger of peaceful protest degenerating into physical violence amid an increasingly passionate politics.

The Dismissal and its aftermath

Many Australians would later remember where they were when they first heard about the Dismissal, usually reporting a sense of shock or disbelief. Some simply couldn’t believe what others told them or had heard over the radio. When the news did sink in, some were relieved and others angered, but anyone with even a basic appreciation of the country’s political culture understood they were witnessing something unusual and momentous. A young journalist, Niki Savva, described the scenes in Canberra that followed Fraser’s parliamentary announcement as “memorable, awesome and frightening.”

Demonstrators began assembling outside Parliament House — a few thousand by late afternoon — with smaller numbers going to Government House at Yarralumla where they lowered the flag to half-mast. The Canberra protests were peaceful overall, although demonstrators yelled “Sieg Heil” at Coalition politicians and invited those watching from the upper balcony of Parliament House to jump. When Fraser walked down the building’s famous steps to visit Government House for the second time that day, some protesters tried to punch him. Angry crowds also surged around his car on his return.

Good humour infused the remarkable appearance of comedian Garry McDonald, in character as Norman Gunston, who had flown from Sydney to join in the excitement. His appearance outside Parliament House delighted the crowd, to whom he made a well-received and rousing speech asking if the Dismissal was an “affront to the constitution of this country” or “just a stroke of good luck for Mr Frazier” (possibly confusing the new prime minister with the famous boxer). That people — even a leading player such as Bill Hayden, recently appointed treasurer — could find humour in these moments of high tension probably says more about the basic serenity of the country’s politics than any detailed account of the more aggressive forms of protest.

While Australia’s stock exchanges “went berserk” at the news of the Dismissal and “launched into the biggest buying spree” since the mining bubble of 1970, the events of 11 November raised the spectre of serious civil violence for the first time since the Depression. Protests occurred in the country’s capital cities over the following days, perhaps the largest and most destructive occurring in Melbourne on the 11th.

There, a pro-Whitlam protest at Liberal Party headquarters “erupted into one of the most violent demonstrations ever seen in the city” — according to the Australian — as protesters clambered over police cars and “kicks and punches were freely given.” Police were “led from the taunting crowd bleeding from head wounds and with their shirts torn.” A police wagon drove through the melee, knocking down protesters and police, while a horse used repeatedly to charge through the protesters was “battered with sticks and stones.” Glaziers refused to fix the broken windows of the party offices. “Each time they are asked to repair them, they just can’t quite seem to bring themselves to do it,” a helpful Furnishing Trades Society secretary explained.

In Sydney, about 2000 marched that day, mainly students, with scuffles but no arrests. Smaller protests were held in Adelaide and Brisbane.

Unions and the general strike

At a time when about 55 per cent of workers belonged to trade unions, by far the greatest potential for social disorder came from the possibility of mass industrial action. Sam Oldham has shown in Without Bosses: Radical Australian Trade Unionism in the 1970s that the decade was a period of significant labour movement militancy, not all of it securely under the control of union officials. Ideas of industrial democracy gained a significant foothold in many industries and contributed to shopfloor militancy. As Phil Griffiths has suggested, general accounts of the Dismissal mainly ignore the strikes that did occur and greatly underestimate the potential for mass action.

The Commonwealth Labor Advisory Committee, chaired by Bob Hawke and including the party’s federal parliamentary leaders and officers, ACTU leaders and representatives of the public service unions, met at John Curtin House in Canberra for several hours on 11 November. It passed a resolution expressing a “total dedication and determination to have the Whitlam Labor government re-elected.” Critically, there would be no support for a general strike.

Left-wing unions were most put out by what they saw as the unseemly haste of the rejection of mass strikes, the blame for which they laid squarely at the feet of Bob Hawke. The Melbourne branch of the Waterside Workers Federation, disagreeing with Hawke’s “reaction to the fascist onslaught on Australian democratic government,” urged that “industrial strength must be organised to move Fraser now.” The Federal Council of the Builders Labourers’ Federation donated a massive $20,000 to Labor’s election fund but also found “words hard to describe your [Hawke’s] gutless and cowardly statements regarding the current drive to fascism by Fraser. You have only strengthened current view that you are in the hands of the multinationals.”

The South Australian branch of the Australian Building and Construction Workers’ Federation wanted “an immediate general strike to demonstrate our disgust and complete opposition to the fascist moves of Fraser, the Governor-General and the multinationals.” It also called for “abolition of the colonial positions of Governor-General and State Governors, the expropriation without compensation of the multinationals and resolve to establish Australia as a truly Independent Republic, ruled by the working class, free of Imperialist domination.”

The Australian Railways Union rejected the “passive role” of the ACTU and called for “immediate and positive leadership.” Several unions wanted a twenty-four-hour stoppage, others forty-eight hours, but many others expressed their support for Hawke’s position, which had received subsequent endorsement by the ACTU executive.

Many unionists walked off the job on the afternoon of 11 November to attend hastily organised rallies, and hundreds of thousands went on strike in the days that followed. Seamen walked out, thereby tying up ships in the country’s ports. E.V. Elliott, veteran federal secretary of the Seamen’s Union and a communist, detected echoes of Hitler and Mussolini in Kerr’s actions and reported that many of his 5000 members had walked off the job on the 11 November, with some crews collecting as much as $1000 for the struggle ahead. Many of those at sea had radioed in their objections to Kerr’s actions.

On the 12th, hundreds of members of the union as well as some kindred maritime unions crowded into Sydney’s Trades Hall, where they pledged support for the re-election of Labor, promised at least a day’s pay and continuing political activity, and then marched through Sydney’s streets to Chifley Square. They returned to their ships on the 13th. Meanwhile, waterside workers began a twenty-four-hour strike at midnight as the 11th turned into the 12th.

Other workers — in the metal trades and railway workshops of Sydney and Newcastle, for example, and about 2000 at the Newcastle State Dockyard — spontaneously walked off the job soon after the news of the dismissal reached them. But the leaders of several large unions stood behind the ACTU’s support for the ballot box over strike action. The leaders of the Australian Workers’ Union, the Federated Ironworkers’ Union, and the Australian Postal and Telecommunications Union — all right-leaning — either opposed striking or said that any action needed to await further consultation between the political and industrial wings of the labour movement.

Among other white-collar unions, the Council of Australian Government Employee Organisations federal president, Ken Turbet, called on federal public servants to refrain from strike action. His position that “government are our employers, not political adversaries or friends, who should be served loyally and impartially” received the fullest commendation of one of its large constituent unions, the Administrative and Clerical Officers’ Association, which insisted on the political neutrality of public servants despite some pressure from the rank and file. If public servants had walked out, they could well have disrupted arrangements for the transition of the Coalition to caretaker government from 11 November and the 13 December election. Another group of public employees, ABC staff, held a four-hour stoppage on 14 November to protest against the management’s handling of reports on the crisis.

An emphasis on fundraising emerged quickly. Unions announced fundraising drives among their members and approved large donations to support Labor’s campaign, or in the case of the Teachers’ Federation to highlight the differences between the parties on education.

It is important not to see these actions through our knowledge of their ultimate fruitlessness, given the magnitude of Labor’s defeat on 13 December, because that was obviously not how matters appeared to many observers at the time. With the Whitlam government’s position improving in the opinion surveys, pollster Gary Morgan predicted a close result.

It was the maritime unions — seamen and waterside workers — who provided the strongest counterpoint to the emphasis on overturning the Dismissal at the ballot-box. They remained on strike for several days, while a walkout of Queensland meat workers closed many abattoirs. The massive Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union required its members in the metropolitan areas to walk off the job for at least four hours on Friday 14 November, a day of nationwide protest. In Melbourne, it and other left-wing unions called out about 400,000 workers that day, contributing to the strong attendance at Defend Democracy rallies.

Isolated calls for a national strike continued, but even the left-wing unions appear to have realised that the time for any such action had passed, if indeed it had ever existed. On 25 November Pat Clancy, federal secretary of the Building Workers Industrial Union and a member of the Soviet-line Socialist Party of Australia, placed before the ACTU executive a call for a national strike during the election campaign as a last-resort response to “provocation” from the political right. But Hawke had already won the debate, and that victory would have consequences for Australian politics well beyond the election of 13 December 1975.

Grateful campaigners

The 1975 election campaign really began when a bomb blew out the right eye of Keith Macfarlane, a clerk in Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Brisbane mailroom. On 19 November, just as the day was starting, Macfarlane called over a colleague, Garry Kross, to look at a white envelope addressed to the premier and marked “press release kit.” Inside were white wires. When Kross put the envelope down “a flash and a whoosh” blew a hole in the desk and cut his face and hand. Another envelope had been sent to Fraser the same day, but in that case an x-ray machine caught the bomb before anyone could be hurt. Two days later, a third was sent to Kerr’s office.

These acts of terrorism attracted understandable attention, but the larger story was of peaceful campaigning, drawing on the capacities for social movement mobilisation already well demonstrated in recent years and the credibility the government had built up in such quarters. On the very day of the Dismissal, 8500 women insurance workers had gained equal pay as the result of an Arbitration Commission decision creating a common salary scale in their industry. The Whitlam government had supported equal pay from the moment it came to office in December 1972 and its record of achievement for women had, in the end, exceeded the initial expectations of many feminists.

That was in no small part due to Elizabeth Reid, women’s adviser to the government — a world first at the time of her appointment in 1973. Reid had resigned on 2 October 1975, frustrated at relentlessly negative and sexist media coverage that had eroded support for her among the men advising Whitlam.

The Women’s Liberation Movement was an ambivalent campaigner in 1975, choosing to support Labor as the better alternative to a Fraser-led Coalition government. CAMP, the major pro-gay rights organisation in New South Wales, displayed a similar attitude, its executive having decided during the supply crisis in late October “to strongly urge all members” to support the Labor government at rallies and elsewhere, because compared with Coalition governments, it “has been shown to be the only instrument for reform in Australia.”

Women’s groups also rallied, with “Women for Whitlam” groups emerging around the country. In Melbourne, seventy women representing twenty-one women’s organisations resolved to support Labor and Whitlam, acknowledging that “over the last three years, and especially in International Women’s Year, women’s issues had received recognition for the first time in Australia’s history.” In the same city, Margaret Whitlam addressed a Women for Democracy rally, declaring that “[f]or the first time an Australian Government has dedicated itself to the principle that every woman has the right and should have the opportunity to choose the way of life best suited to her.”

In Adelaide, Women’s Liberation, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom formed a Women’s Action Group with Labor women and held a lunchtime rally in Rundle Mall; it also decided to door-knock “in swinging electorates.”

In Sydney, 1500 members of a People’s Action Coalition met at a Hyde Park rally where speakers represented Women’s Liberation, CAMP, the Australian Union of Students and the Italian community. Members of these organisations then marched with resident action and environmental groups to a rally in the Domain being addressed by Gough Whitlam. Stop Fraser committees were formed among Greeks, Italians and other migrant groups; at the big Sydney Domain rally addressed by Whitlam, “We want Gough” was said to have been heard in almost as many languages as there were migrant groups in Australia. Students and academics also mobilised.

There was gratitude, too, for what the government had done for First Nations peoples. Whitlam had only recently, in August, handed back land to the Gurindji people of the Northern Territory. Yolŋu artist and activist Wandjuk Marika now announced that his people, who lived on the Gove Peninsula, would give the Labor campaign $12,000 raised from the sale of their paintings “because Labor is for the people. If Labor gets in we will get land rights.”

When it came, the election result — a massive Coalition majority in the House and Senate — was a crushing blow for Labor supporters. Many felt betrayed, powerless and depressed. Guido Barrachi, whose career in radical politics stretched back to the first world war and its aftermath as a founding member of the Communist Party, had come out of retirement as an activist to hand out election material for Labor, wandering the hot streets of Penrith with a sign around his neck. Lugging his heavy sack of paper on a hot summer’s day proved too much. He collapsed and died that night, just as the political analysts were calling a victory for Fraser and the Coalition.

Memory does its work

As C.V. Wedgwood warned, history is “lived forwards, but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.” We know that Australian democracy was not destroyed by the Dismissal. There was no outbreak of mass violence. There was no revolution. There was no republic. We know that the Coalition won the 13 December 1975 election in a landslide. But the major actors could not be certain of that result on 11 November. The Dismissal and 1975 election weighed heavily on Labor supporters and the left, who believed their democracy was coming undone before their eyes.

Yet it is possible to discern in the events that followed something of the political order that would take shape in the 1980s. “With passing of time I maintained the rage but its heat diminished,” Labor senator John Button explained. “I could forgive but not forget the indulgences of the Whitlam government. I was convinced that the next Labor government could not be as undisciplined as the last. It would need strategies and patience.” Many of the Labor politicians who, like Button, would do so much to reshape the country from 1983 seem to have drawn similar conclusions from the experience.

Most significantly, there was Bob Hawke. One can detect in his campaigning in November and December 1975 the first stage of his bid for the Lodge. While, as we have seen, some left-wing unions were unhappy with Hawke’s dampening of mass industrial action, there was nonetheless wider support for his position among ordinary members of the public. Hannah Sweeney, a Queenslander, wrote at 11pm on 13 December to congratulate Hawke for the way he had fought the election:

I did not vote for your party, but I admired the spirit of moderation and of true democracy which you showed in many of your public speeches, and which were dangerously lacking in the statements of some other public figures of both parties. When our country has been so deeply divided, we need responsible leaders to heal our divisions. You have helped do this.

Another Liberal voter, Robert Ellis from Melbourne, was deeply impressed by Hawke’s conduct during the election night coverage, admiring the courage with which he endured defeat and his capacity to stay cool despite “unnecessary needling” from Billy Snedden. Ellis continued:

Both the extreme Left and the extreme Right of Australian politics have the potential to threaten the Australian people and are to be feared. I believe that you can do more, by reason and persuasion, to prevent the excesses of both extremes, than can almost anyone in Australia… On Saturday, you proved, at least to me, that you are one of the people on whom the future of this country depends.

We don’t know if Hannah Sweeney or Robert Ellis voted Labor in 1983. We do know that these citizens saw in Hawke’s politics the appeal of a consensus that would form the centrepiece of his appeal to voters a little over seven years later.

For many years, certainly through the Hawke and Keating era, the manner of Whitlam’s demise and the character of his response would dominate collective memory of his government. At some point, though, probably from the mid-1990s, the Dismissal became more marginal to Whitlam’s reputation. He was no longer mainly the martyr of 1975. As he became older, he became ever more venerable, associated more with a great transformation in Australian life he had helped bring about than with the chaos of his government’s demise. The government’s legislative record, achieved in just three years, was remarkable and enviable by later standards.

Fraser’s reputation, too, improved over time as he moved leftward and reconciled with Whitlam. People associated him with his various public stands — now often against the Liberal Party under his former treasurer John Howard — and less with the Dismissal. Kerr, who died much earlier than the others in 1991, was left to carry the worst of the Dismissal’s reputation, as he does today. By displacing responsibility from Fraser to Kerr, it became easier to see the Dismissal as the handiwork of a man of poor character and judgement — possibly a drunkard — rather than the product of a flawed democracy.

Australians have made and remade the events of October to December 1975 in their national imaginary, exercising the kind of agency in evidence during the crisis itself. Today, they are more likely to note that Whitlam gave them the chance of a university education than to recall much about the events of 11 November or the weeks surrounding the dismissal. Many of them were there saying as much outside the Sydney Town Hall in 2014 at the service to celebrate Whitlam’s life and mark his death.

The people were not mere extras in a play acted out by Whitlam, Fraser, Kerr, Barwick and Hawke. Rather, they were at the centre of the drama, just as the nature and quality of their democracy was at the heart of what was in contention. But although the Dismissal remains in the living memory of many older Australians and is still conventionally regarded as the most significant single event in the country’s political history, it paradoxically seems to have very little influence on how most of us regard our democracy today. Is that just Australia’s famous complacency? Are we so easy-going, so practical and matter-of-fact as a people, that we simply decided to put it behind us and move on, letting bygones be bygones?

Yet democracy is now probably more central to Australia’s national self-image than it was in 1975. In a world where democracy is in decay, Australians have been increasingly inclined to celebrate the robustness of the Australian version, with regular and affectionate nodding to the democracy sausage as shorthand for a pride in their success in holding free and fair elections and producing governments with popular consent and legitimacy. In 1975, however, Australian democracy seemed a more fragile thing.

The basic institutional design of our system remains unchanged from those turbulent times. Much of the union protest that occurred in 1975 would today be impossible unless the leaders concerned were prepared to risk massive fines. In some ways, and certainly in that respect, our democracy is less healthy than it was as spring turned to summer in 1975. We would perhaps do well to regard it with a more critical eye, and with a more careful vigilance, than has become fashionable in the land of the democracy sausage. •

The post The Dismissal from below appeared first on Inside Story.

Dykes to Watch Out For, a widely syndicated strip cartoon series, ran from 1983 to 2008, ending only after Bechdel achieved success with her first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comedy, later made into a Broadway play. Fun Home was followed by Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2013), then The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) and now Spent: A Comic Novel (2025). All these, leavened by a dry, mocking wit guaranteed to detonate outbursts of laughter throughout, retained the loyalty of her early readership while aiming to bring in a more broadly based following.

Leaving gender issues aside for the moment, Bechdel’s success depends on her breathtaking skill as an artist. She gets maximum effect from the extraordinary flexibility of the graphic narrative form. As a speciality, she makes a point of drawing not just people, or settings, but texts of all kinds: text messages, typed or handwritten letters, words on a computer screen, and pages of print from books, including pages from her own books.

I was struck by two pictorial conventions she uses to convey a character’s state of mind — the drawing of a face in profile with the mouth yanked around onto the presenting cheek so its expression is visible and readable, and the depiction of two- or even three-headed characters to capture a lightening transition from the expected to the unexpected. Particularly noteworthy is her attention to hands and hand gestures.

It is a paradoxical tribute to Bechdel that as one reads on, all these conventions, the pictorial ground of the text, tend to fade away, become transparent, not noticed, as one is drawn into the story being told.

Each of these books is so many-faceted that it is hard to know where to begin. One way in is via the use Bechdel makes of extensive reading. Fun Home, about childhood and coming of age, refers throughout to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book’s central character, a sort-of Leopold Bloom to Bechdel’s sort-of Stephen Daedalus, is her talented, practical, polymathic, domineering father, a compulsive preceptor and DIY expert, who along with much else runs the family funeral home, the “fun home” of the title, part-time. He discovers in mid-life that he is gay, and finally, possibly, takes his own life. There are passing references to both Proust and Wilde, but the Icarus myth is central: Bechdel’s paradoxical fall to earth, the ultimate via negativa, is the discovery of her own sexuality.

Are You My Mother?, although subtitled “a comic drama,” is in fact a sombre work about Bechdel’s fraught relations with her mother. For guidance she turns to the object relations psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. In one bravura double-page, Bechdel reproduces, by drawing, a sequence of mother and child photographs scattered across her worktable that, put together, rehearse her own fractured Winnicottian babyhood moment. In four steps the baby registers and then absorbs the gaze of an adoring mother eventually returning a look of pure delight until, in the fifth, and last, photograph, “the moment is shattered as I notice the man with the camera” — the interloper, her father.

Bechdel meets Winnicott, from Are You My Mother?

The scene is overlaid with several layers of print information in four text boxes of various shapes and outlines that act as a filter of multiple levels of information. A standard rectangular text box gives Bechdel’s establishing explanation of what the photographs are of and the problem of organisation they present (“I don’t have the negatives, so there’s no way to know their chronological order”). A second standard speech bubble shows Alison’s opening salutation in a phone call she makes to her mother (“Mom!”). In a third text box, this time with jagged outlines to indicate “phone conversation,” the mother replies with irrelevant banalities (“Hi. I was at the gym… couldn’t believe Lady Gaga on the Grammy’s last night… Puh-lease…. Those thighs…”). Then, in a prime example of the kind of authority Bechdel accords to Winnicott, there is a text box in half-tone in which Bechdel draws a highlighted extract of text from Winnicott’s essay “The Ordinary Mother and Her Baby” (“…ordinarily the woman enters into a phase, a phase from which she ordinarily recovers in the weeks and months after the baby’s birth, in which to a large extent she is the baby and the baby is her”).

It is a great drawing, but as the Winnicott extract might suggest, object relations theory can be heavy-going, and it does drag down the book more than a little, not always producing clarifying insight. Bechdel varies the effect by drawing interesting scenes from Winnicott’s life. Are You My Mother? ends with another via negativa: “There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother… there is a lack, a gap, a void… but in its place she [gave] me something else… a way out.” The drawing shows the child about to stand on her own two feet, ready to walk out of frame.

Both these books are printed in black and white. By contrast, The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2022) is in full colour, and correspondingly more cheerful. It introduces Bechdel’s partner, Holly Rae Taylor, and extends the choice of literary pre-texts: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac all make an appearance, with vignettes of episodes in their lives shuffled into a decade-by-decade account of Bechdel’s quest for physical self-improvement.

Romantics on a quest, from The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

Bechdel draws attention to the persistence of Romantic ideals in the modern and postmodern world and emphasises especially the symbolic and actual challenge represented by mountains. The climax — reminiscent of the episode in The Prelude in which Wordsworth discovers he has crossed the alps without realising it — is Bechdel and Taylor’s failure to match Snyder’s (successful) and Kerouac’s (almost successful) ascent of the 12,000-foot Matterhorn Peak in Yosemite National Park, as told in The Dharma Bums. Once again, for the central character, failure is a via negativa, a form of progression, even when it doesn’t immediately seem to be so.

Spent, Bechdel’s latest work, is a very different book, more expansive, more enterprising, more forgiving about human quirks than its predecessors. It is a tightly woven semi-autobiographical comedy depicting small upsets and ructions in a rural bohemian idyll. The literary pre-text this time is Karl Marx’s Capital, and each of the twelve chapters is named with a quotation taken from it: “The Process of Production of Capital,” “The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land” and, the penultimate chapter, a fifty-word sentence, beginning “The circumstances which independently of the Proportional Division of Surplus Value…”

The adoption of Marx is both a jest at left-wing earnestness, and a frank admission that the consciousness of a class is shaped by the economic arrangements that underpin it (Marxism 101). Bechdel offers an acute diagnosis here of how her central characters’ worldview, their dominant attitudes, compromises and flashes of false consciousness, all depend on a dubious and predatory culture industry, a world of agents, show runners, big stars, TV studios, sitcoms, media behemoths, advances and, ultimately, royalties.

The main characters — who, for the moment, can be designated Alison and Holly — live in on a hobby farm near Lake Champlain, Vermont, surrounded by a community of like-minded friends. It is a semi-pastoral, tolerant, multi-cult world of gender fluidity, progressive politics and veganism (they boil their own tempeh). Social rituals include a community meeting opposing school book bans at which Alison, as the featured speaker, “drones on” while her friends in the audience check their phones or just nod off, and a farmer’s market that sells things like “non-binary menstrual products,” “AI Free” eggs (from “The Well-Laid Hen”) and “Vermonty Tchotchkes.” A more savage, less agreeable, America beyond is glimpsed when Alison makes a trip to LA via Chicago airport to pitch her TV show.

The book is far more complicated than this summary might suggest. For a start Bechdel replaces her old straightforward authorial personas with avatars of those real-life existences: the autobiographical characters in Spent are not Alison Bechdel and Holly Rae Taylor but versions of them whom we should style, adopting the genre’s hand-lettered caps, ALISON and HOLLY. ALISON and HOLLY are joined by a huge cast of characters. Some of these are fictionalised versions of real people, like BILL MCKIBBIN, BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH, AUBREY PLAZA and even SANDI TOKSVIG. Others, showing Bechdel’s inventiveness as the creator of typical or representative figures, are newly invented for Spent: the Gen Z Covid refugees from Brooklyn, SASHA and SHAKTI, and strikingly, SHEILA, ALISON’s straight, neo-con, Republican-voting sister, the bane of ALISON’s existence. SHEILA is the creator of prize-winning Seed Art (cute pictures made of millet seeds etc.), the author of a counter-narrative to Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, and, according to a momentarily non-PC ALISON, is “ON THE SPECTRUM.” (From here on such quotations will also be in small caps).

Alison and Holly’s rural idyll, from Spent.

A number of interesting and important intertextual characters is lifted directly (as one can discover from the very good compilation, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For) from Dykes To Watch Out For. The main ones are LOIS, SAMIA, GINGER, and SPARROW. This ethnically varied quartet is part of a long-running longitudinal study of communal living conducted by the sociology department of the University of Vermont: “PEOPLE COULD MOVE IN, BUT THEY COULDN’T MOVE OUT.” LOIS, SAMIA, GINGER and SPARROW have thus been trapped in each other’s company for the best part of forty-two years. They are all lesbian, although SPARROW is bisexual, skewing hetero as time goes by, eventually forming a relationship with STUART, who becomes a late addition to the household (by the time of Spent a fixture for nearly thirty years).

STUART is a reluctantly tolerated, apologetically straight, tokenish male, although with firm opinions when it counts. The hooking-up of SPARROW and STUART occasioned dismay and scorn in the communal household. No one could see anything attractive about STUART, and he was, of course, straight, male, etc.: SPARROW could stare down a lot of this but even she was forced to admit (with Annie Leibowitz’s good fortune in mind) “HE’S NO SUSAN SONTAG.” Still, STUART wants to fit in: at one point he declares he is a Butch lesbian in a straight man’s body (GINGER: “SOFT BUTCH. MAY BE.”), he wears a skirt throughout Spent and eventually gets to act out his dream.

These people, back in the day, were cutting-edge youngsters; now, in the early-twenty-first century, they have settled into comfortable late middle-age — typical boomer oldies, in other words, with burdens and problems with which even the straightest boomer household could sympathise.

Their lives are brought together in an intricate satire of social manners and sexual mores in the progressive provinces. (The county of Vermont where they live voted more than 80 per cent for Kamala Harris.) They are likeable, decent, well-intentioned, principled adopters and upholders of all progressive causes, buffeted by veering headwinds, trying to make sense of a world that resists their best efforts to improve it — the archetypal crooked timber of humanity, earnest, humorous, quarrelsome, wryly self-aware, ruefully acquiescent, but wanting to perform the good, etc., etc., etc.

The burning personal question is no longer “what is my gender identity?” but “am I attracted by polyamory and the challenges it might present to my pretty standard commitment to monogamy and faithfulness?” The polyamory plot is edgy but within comic parameters, partly because the people involved, two lesbians and one rather dopey straight man, are all of a certain age, at a stage of life not typically associated with such adventurousness.

ALISON and HOLLY live off the royalties from a book and TV spin-off series called Death and Taxidermy, a work that closely resembles Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy and its spin-off, the celebrated Broadway play of the same name. The TV series is about to end, and in one amusing drawing we see the book’s characters gather to watch a crazy penultimate episode with a humiliated ALISON squirming at the liberties taken with her story. When, in the not-too-distant future, the show ends, the money will dry up, and so ALISON, as bread winner, forces herself to devise, draw and pitch a new work, a progressive sitcom called $um, that will secure a future for her and HOLLY. As well bringing in the needful cash, $um will “HELP MY FRIENDS LIVE MORE ETHICALLY,” or so ALISON persuades herself.

These noble, if self-serving, intentions are frustrated by a system in which everything is contaminated by the online, post-industrial, digital, commodified age. When the sitcom pitch fails in chaotic scenes in treacherous LA, ALISON manages to clinch a last-minute book deal for the same idea with a Murdoch-like publishing giant named Megalapub. The self-reflective nature of all this is clear enough: $um is a parodic double of the Spent we are reading, and just as $um is to be published by the Murdoch-like Megalapub, so has Spent been published by imprints owned by an actual Murdoch publishing empire. One might even suspect it will end up as a TV series. Bechdel called Are You My Mother a “metabook” and Spent is a clever, more fully worked-out version of that genre.

The main business of Spent is the story of SPARROW and STUART. At the start they are a mildly discontented monogamous couple. The change agent is NAOMI, an interloper from the earlier world of Dykes (she appeared in the very first panel), casually encountered in the local store, to whom both STUART and SPARROW are feverishly attracted. It is hard to fathom NAOMI’s sexual irresistibility, but a throuple is formed, tame at first, soon full-on. The theme of people deciding their existing relationship is played out, along with a quest for pastures new, is echoed diminuendo in the lives of other characters: GINGER has pangs of jealous envy when SAMIA goes alone to Florida to escape the Vermont winter, and ALISON, suspecting HOLLY of betraying her with the local vet, finds herself musing on the likely pleasures of polyamory.

A crucial plot point is the appearance of STUART and SPARROW’s daughter, JAIO-RAIZEL, whose birth was movingly shown in Dykes back in 2003. Understandably, JAIO-RAIZEL, whose part-Chinese part-Jewish heritage is signalled in her unusual name, now styles herself (possibly “themself”) JR. She bears a passing resemblance to Greta Thunberg. Along with her friend BADGER, JR arrives home unexpectedly one midnight, just when STUART, SPARROW and NAOMI are heavily into their first night of sixty-something sexual experimentation and rapture — all this shown in scenes requiring Bechdel to draw pictures so forthright that they feel like an invasion of the privacy of the people involved (parental guidance recommended, i.e., completely unsuitable for parents).

JR and BADGER have dropped out of college and an asexual polycule, an arrangement that fell apart after two of its members, YAZU and LYRIC, realised they were not asexual after all, had sex and, and — so the implication is — were caught in the act by JR. SPARROW and STUART’s reaction to being similarly almost-discovered in flagrante delicto by their daughter is one of intense, thoroughly bourgeois, shame — their first thought is to order Naomi to hide under the bed (she is furious). From this point they do all they can to keep their sexual arrangements from JR and BADGER.

Monogamy vs. polyamory, sexual vs. asexual polyamory, are not the only sources of intergenerational friction. One of the most amusing strands in Spent is the readiness of JR and BADGER to administer correctives to a well-meaning but error-prone older generation. These come in the form of withering asides, such as when BADGER consoles a disappointed ALISON: “I’M SORRY YOU DIDN’T SELL YOUR SHOW. EVEN THOUGH THE PREMISE WAS UTTERLY SELF-CONTRADICTORY.” As the double-barrelled, high-calibre unacknowledged legislators of this world, JR and BADGER are a standing reproach to the complacency of the older folk with their finicky regard for convention and the law. When JR sets up a mail-order business in the family kitchen to supply abortion pills to “PREGNANT PEOPLE IN THE RED STATES” SPARROW objects on the grounds that the scheme is illegal. JR: “THIS IS SUCH WHITE SUPREMACIST SETTLER COLONIAL PATRIARCHAL NEOLIBERAL BULLSHIT!” (The unworldly STUART, it should be added, positive about anything countercultural, thinks it’s a great idea — or perhaps he just adores his daughter.) As a result, JR and BADGER move house once again and, in another midnight surprise arrival, seek refuge in ALISON and HOLLY’s yurt. (Young people. They don’t get that The University of Vermont Longitudinal Group House Study Project is like the Hotel California: you can check in but — so the idea is — you can never leave.)

After a vegan dinner prepared by JR and Badger in Spent, the group household discusses Badger’s anti-vax parents

JR and BADGER support Extinction Rebellion, and in a climactic scene, they break into a local natural history museum and video themselves throwing oil over a huge stuffed polar bear, an attack that links JR’s story to the ALISON Death and Taxidermy plot. Reluctantly sprung from a community correction order sentence, JR issues another fiat: “YEAH, COMMUNITY SERVICE IS CONSIDERED PUNISHMENT. JUST ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF HOW FUCKED THE WORLD IS.”

Eventually, at a wonderful-looking Lammas bonfire eve celebration, SPARROW and STUART confess what’s been going on. Far from being horrified, JR’s flying embrace is so powerful that it almost knocks her parents off their country haybale: “OMIGOD THAT IS SO BEAUTIFUL!” NAOMI is instantly accepted: “MAMA NAOMI! MY OTHER MOTHER!” Even the depressive BADGER concedes this is “PRETTY RAD,” adding rather sadly, “WHEN I LEFT FOR COLLEGE MY PARENTS JUST GOT A DOG” (they did, however, give her a BMW).

The book concludes with everyone watching the final bizarre episode of Death and Taxidermy, in which ALISON’s father is carried off by a dragon and dropped into a volcano. (Spoiler alert: just a dream.) JR: “IN-FUCKING-CREDIBLE.” They then emerge from the house into a beautiful evening, beautifully drawn and beautifully coloured (the book’s colour palette is ravishing). It’s JR’s suggestion that they should hang around for a bit just in case they get a chance to see the spring sky dance of the male woodcocks (or as she phrases it, “THE WOODCOCKS ASSIGNED MALE AT BIRTH”).

The woodcocks oblige — “THEY FLY UP REAL HIGH IN A SPIRAL AND THE WIND IN THEIR FEATHERS MAKES A TWITTERING SOUND” — making for a lovely double-page final spread. The framing moral of the story is given to STUART, big softy that he is, in words he has had freshly tattooed across his back: “PRACTICING MUTUAL AID IS THE SUREST MEANS FOR GIVING EACH OTHER AND TO ALL THE GREATEST SAFETY, THE BEST GUARANTEE OF EXISTENCE AND PROGRESS, BODILY, INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL.” (HOLLY: “WOW, THAT’S AWESOME STU! KROPOTKIN?” It is, from Mutual Aid.) SPARROW and STUART, judging from Fun House and Are You My Mother?, are the parents Alison Bechdel didn’t have.

In some ways Spent is reminiscent of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The world it sets before us is seductively idyllic, the characters who inhabit it are privileged and loveable, if at times a bit daft, and the humour is droll, benign, pleasingly salted here and there with a grain or two of malice. There is a sense of a world protected from harsher realities without, and who wants it to be in any different? Still, as in The Cherry Orchard, the outside world is there, and on the verge of cataclysmic change. One can sense it — too many strings are being snapped, and too many axes, freshly sharpened, are ready to be laid to the trunks of too many cherry trees. Spent begins in the autumn of 2022 and ends in the spring of 2024. The sky dance of the woodcocks takes place six months before the election of Donald Trump. •

The post The marvellous world of the marvellous Alison Bechdel appeared first on Inside Story.

Her gaze is calm and direct. She will enter the University of Sydney the following year, and it’s as if she already knows what triumphs await her there. Her long brown plaits are tied at the ends with oversized bows. Perhaps that morning she had shrugged off her mother’s offer to help her with them. “There’s no need Mother, I can manage by myself.” And so she could, all through her long life.

Her father was Arthur Bache Walkom, a paleobotanist, secretary of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, and from 1940 until his retirement in 1954 the director the Australian Museum in Sydney. He met his wife, Constance McLean, when they were fellow students at the University of Sydney, she studying arts, he science.

As Mrs Arthur Walkom, Constance apparently let go of any career aspirations she might have had, but her daughter had no intention of doing the same. Gifted, determined, independent: rarely has any woman leapt out of the historical record and demanded my attention as Margaret Walkom has done. Once I began to notice her achievements I became determined not to let her story slip through my fingers.

I encountered her first while researching a piece for Inside Story on the 1939 congress of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, or ANZAAS, in Canberra. I was startled to find that its report had been edited by one “Margaret Walkom, B.A.” It was unusual at that time, surely, for a woman to edit a scientific volume?

The report yields nothing personal about Margaret, but paging through it is enough to suggest she showed exceptional early talent as an editor. It consists of papers read at the congress, minutes of the association’s meetings, membership lists, financial statements, plates, graphs, diagrams, scientific formulae and an index: some 450 pages in all. All ANZAAS congress reports were complex publications and typically the editorship went to established scientists. Margaret undertook the work with no scientific qualifications at just twenty-five years of age.

By some kind of alchemy, the mere sight of her name on the title page transforms her — for me anyway — into a living, breathing person, or at least the possibility of one. The book is an unexciting object to look at, and yet there is someone there, quivering behind the static letters on the page, waiting for her story to be released.

Who was Margaret Walkom? The answer couldn’t be discovered by a Google search. I’d have to find out for myself.

When Margaret was born in 1914, her family was living in Brisbane while her father worked at the Queensland Museum. They returned to Sydney in 1919 and settled in Killara, in the prosperous suburbs of Sydney’s north shore. Nearby was Pymble Ladies’ College, a new school establishing a reputation for quality education for girls.

Pleasingly for Arthur, Pymble was strong in his own subject, geology. It was taught there by Katie Walker, who took her students on excursions to Long Reef at Collaroy to observe rock formations and collect fossils. Decades later a former student still remembered these words, taught to generations of Pymble girls: “The coral polyp delights in the dash and spray of the waves.” Why such delight? Presumably because the waves deliver the tiny organisms the polyp consumes as food. It’s a beautiful sentence and shows that Miss Walker understood the power of words to inspire curiosity. Perhaps her coral polyps lingered in Margaret’s mind as well. There and then, perhaps, a science communicator was born.

At Sydney University, though, Margaret chose arts over science and graduated in 1936 with first class honours in English and second class in French. She also took philosophy and Latin. Like her father she was a great one for clubs and committees, and was a member (and often an office bearer) of the Student Representative Council, the Women’s Undergraduates’ Association, the Women’s Union, the Women Graduates’ Association, the Business and Professional Women’s Association, and the Pymble Ex-Students’ Association. She also joined the Australian English Association, and contributed occasional reviews to its journal, Southerly.

In one ambition, Margaret was thwarted. In April 1937 she was elected president of the SRC, having been vice-president the previous year. She was the first woman in the role, and the Daily Telegraph announced slyly to its readers: “Gentlemen, she is not a blonde.”

Uproar. A woman was “not a suitable person” to be president, it was said (although by whom it was unclear). The meeting at which she had been elected was declared unconstitutional, and the SRC met again to invite outgoing president, law graduate Kevin Ellis, to reconsider an earlier decision not to stand again (because he had insufficient time, he’d said). He agreed, and Margaret was deposed after just a week.

Still enjoying the story, the Daily Telegraph interviewed the university’s celebrated professor of philosophy, John Anderson (Margaret had probably studied under him), who declared the reasons for her ousting were “pretty thin” and predicted “righteous indignation” among women students. No doubt there was, but it made no difference.

All Margaret could do was make a gracious statement to the SRC newspaper, Honi Soit, wishing Ellis every success. Her humiliation might have been too much even for her normally indomitable spirit. She was enrolled in an MA at the time but never completed it.

Margaret was no novice editor when she took on the 1939 ANZAAS report. She had been sub-editor and, in 1936, editor of Hermes, Sydney University’s literary magazine — only the second woman since 1886 to hold the position, after Kathleen Commins (later a prominent Sydney journalist) in 1931. She was in talented company: her immediate successors as editor included James McAuley in 1937, Dorothy Auchterlonie (later Dorothy Auchterlonie Green) in 1938, and Edward Gough Whitlam in 1939. Judith Wright is thought to have published five poems pseudonymously in Hermes in the three issues Margaret edited.

Meanwhile, Arthur Walkom was introducing his daughter into scientific circles. As ANZAAS’s honorary general secretary, he took Margaret to the 1932 congress in Sydney as his “unofficial secretary.” Aged only eighteen, she already had sufficient poise to accompany her parents to the garden party held at Government House for the six hundred congress delegates. The Sydney Morning Herald spotted her among the crowd in a dress of bottle-green marcain (sometimes spelled marocain, a kind of crêpe) and matching coat. These were the days when no report of a social event was complete without a detailed account of what the women wore.

In 1934, and undoubtedly through her father’s influence, she gained a paid part-time job at ANZAAS headquarters in Sydney, and in 1938 she began editing the newly established Australian Journal of Science, issued six times a year. It was a natural step, then, to take on the editorship of the 1939 congress papers.

By a twist of fate, Arthur became ill with tonsilitis just before the congress began, and a typist was injured in an accident. Covering their jobs as well as her own, Margaret travelled to Canberra ahead of her father, in that searingly hot summer in January 1939, to work with the local organising committee finalising the last-minute arrangements.

Journalists were fascinated by dauntless efficiency with which Miss Walkom undertook the work of three people. Photographers snapped her at the congress venue, calmly dealing with paperwork and taking telephone calls. Cyril Pearl interviewed her for the Daily Telegraph and noted her enthusiasm for the congress’s star speaker, H.G. Wells. The relationship between science and society would be a theme of the congress, she told Pearl, and Wells had done much to make science understandable to everyone. For a garden party in the Senate rose garden she chose a black-and-white checked frock and a white hat.

No ANZAAS congresses were held during the war but they began again, in Melbourne, in 1946. This time Margaret went as an observer for the ABC, where she had been working since 1941. At a congress reception at the National Gallery of Victoria she was seen in “two shades of petunia under a long fur coat.” By 1949 she was working at the Radio Physics Division of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR, and attended the ANZAAS congress in Hobart in that capacity.

What she wore to the reception that time was not recorded, but nevertheless she was noticed. And this is how I learned the most remarkable thing about Margaret Walkom: she was disabled. Beautiful and glamourous as she was, she had a disability which would have been obvious to everyone who met her and yet somehow, remarkably, she persuaded most journalists not to mention it.

One who got under her guard was Winifred Moore, writing for the Brisbane Courier Mail about the “distinguished women” attending the 1949 Hobart congress. Moore was struck by how Margaret’s “gravely sweet face bore the impress of suffering she had endured.” This was because, as a girl, Margaret had had a leg amputated after an accident. She had “triumphed” over her disability, Moore wrote, and although reliant on crutches, could drive a car and lead an “ordinary active life.”

I was far into my research on Margaret by the time I read this, and never had I detected any hint of struggle. I’d read about frocks and hats but not crutches. Always when photographed in public — which was often — she was either seated or had managed to hide her dependence on crutches. She was quite at ease with being looked at (anyone wearing “two shades of petunia” is not trying to fade into the background), except by the camera.

I’ve not located any personal records left by Margaret so I’m stitching together this story from snippets on the public record, and I acknowledge that there are gaps. I don’t know where she found her inspiration and strength, or what she did with anger, pain and frustration, or how her parents might have urged her on or held her back. I don’t even know how and when her accident occurred. Most likely it was a road or railway accident, which normally would have been reported in the press. Not this time apparently.

In 1941 Margaret left her job with ANZAAS for a position with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, working at first in public relations, and, from 1944, as a researcher with its Talks Department. The departure of many male staff for war offered opportunities for women to gain positions and promotion, and some stepped up from office jobs to sit behind the microphone as announcers.

The Talks Department covered an enormous range of subjects, from international affairs to philosophy to gardening during wartime. Margaret worked on literary programming and would have had contact with some of the prominent thinkers and writers of the time, notably Vance and Nettie Palmer, who were regulars on the ABC then. Occasionally Margaret herself gave a broadcast of a talk, a book review or a reading. She also wrote for the ABC’s magazine, ABC Listen, and in 1946 wrote a charming recollection of lunching with H.G. Wells in Canberra in 1939.

She was still often noticed by the press. She advocated for the extension of the Rhodes scholarship to women, for a uniform basic wage payable to women as well as men, and for ex-service women studying under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme to receive the same financial support as ex-servicemen.

In March 1946 she married Major Francis Hutley, a Sydney University economics and law graduate then serving with the Australian Army Legal Department. A social columnist calling herself “Althea,” who regularly reported “city gossip” for a newspaper in Dubbo, picked up that the wedding had taken place “quietly” the previous week at St Stephen’s church in Macquarie Street.

“Althea” also noted that the bride had lost a leg at the age of sixteen as a result of an accident. This is the only other reference to Margaret’s disability I have seen mentioned in the press. The reported age of sixteen could be wrong; “Althea” certainly had Margaret’s age wrong (she was thirty-two, not thirty).

The couple had been students together in the early 1930s; Margaret had even published a couple of Frank’s commentaries on modern poetry in Hermes. After the wedding they set up house together in Wollstonecraft but almost immediately, in April 1946, Frank was posted to the occupation force in Japan. In his absence Margaret’s life continued much as it had before. She kept her job with the ABC (somehow evading the marriage bar) and even kept her own surname.

Returning in December 1946, Frank was discharged from the army and took up a lectureship at the university’s law school. In the ensuing twelve months, Margaret and Frank’s marriage fell apart. Frank returned from a brief holiday at Mount Kosciuszko in December 1947 to find a note from Margaret saying she was leaving him. She’d told housekeeper, Mary Heap, that she was unhappy, and was driven back to Killara by her parents.

Frank wrote begging her return. He could not understand why she had left. “If it was because you feared you might have to give up work and curtail your social activities, I withdraw my objections and promise not to raise them again.” Christmas and New Year would be lonely without her, he said, adding that “the house was large place to live in with only Miss Heap.”

Margaret was having none of that. “Dear Frank,” she wrote back, “I do not want to seem stubborn and unreasonable, but my mind is quite made up. It is no good going over our differences on any particular point. Our marriage was a failure and I know now it could not have been anything else. Any further approach could only occasion bitterness, for which there is no necessity. Yours sincerely, Margaret.”

And that was that. The couple divorced in May 1949 and in July Frank married Leila Walshe, a solicitor. They had four children, a large house in Mosman and a family retreat in Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains where Frank, appointed to the NSW Supreme Court in 1972, is said to have indulged his passion for gardening and acrimonious disputes with neighbours. If, in a moment of clarity, Margaret had perceived this kind of existence in her future, she rejected it. She had other plans.

In late 1947, during Frank’s little holiday, she had applied for a job with the Commonwealth Department of Education. She was unsuccessful, even with a glowing reference from Sir David Rivett, chairman of the CSIR, whom Margaret knew from her ANZAAS days. The renewed contact might have opened up a new opportunity for her, though, because in 1948 she took up a position with CSIR’s Division of Radio Physics in Sydney.

She didn’t stay long in the Sydney office. CSIR was transforming itself into the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, and in 1947 an editorial and publications section was established at its headquarters, then in Melbourne. Margaret transferred there in April 1949.

She gave up her Sydney life entirely: her family, her literary friends, her committees and causes, her social life, everything. She could have stayed with the ABC and perhaps transitioned into arts journalism. Or she could have sought an academic career as a literary scholar and critic. The right opportunities might not have presented themselves at the right time, but another explanation is that Margaret needed a complete change after the breakdown of her marriage. The reaction of her family and friends might have been even harder to deal with than her own regrets. Better to make a clean break.

The “dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge” was a requirement under CSIRO’s Act and was achieved by a diverse and expanding publications program. Margaret’s job involved a return to her first career, scientific editing (and with that, perhaps, a memory of Miss Walker’s delighted coral polyps). Without scientific qualifications she couldn’t work on CSIRO’s specialist journals, so she edited publications for general readers, including monographs, annual reports, newsletters, circulars and magazines.

The editorial and publishing section was based at CSIRO’s head office at 314 Albert Street, East Melbourne, until 1963 when it moved to the sixth floor of a new office building at 372 Albert Street. (That building must have had a lift. How Margaret had managed access to the buildings she’d previously worked in is a mystery.) A printery was established in a former paint factory at 19 Rokeby Street Collingwood in 1960. In 1976 CSIRO proudly declared itself the largest publisher of scientific material in Australia.

By then Margaret was one of a team of sixteen editors. Most if not all her work was uncredited, but a title I know she worked on was Industrial Research News, an illustrated bimonthly magazine published in a heroically long run from 1957 to 1975. In its later years the magazine’s content was written by Andrew Bell, a young science writer based at CSIRO in Canberra. Andrew is the only person I have managed to locate who remembers Margaret.

Despite rarely meeting in person, the pair established a long-lasting friendship. The first time they did meet, at Margaret’s office in Albert Street, Andrew was astonished to see her emerging from behind her desk on crutches. Until then he’d had no idea she was disabled.

In 1975 CSIRO’s staff newspaper Coresearch did a short profile on Margaret noting how she achieved a “marriage between science and aesthetics” in the publications she worked on. Editing is an art-cum-science, she told the paper; it required “considerable intellectual nimbleness” to be working on publications dealing with soil analysis, botanical taxonomy and astrophysics all in the same day. Her colleagues said she was one of the few editors who managed to preserve the confidence of authors, the respect of printers and the friendship of graphic designers.

In Sydney Margaret had probably lived in households with domestic help, but in Melbourne she was on her own. (Again, I wonder how managed, especially with the heavy housework and grocery shopping.) For many years she lived in flats in East Melbourne but by 1977 she’d bought an apartment in Murphy Street, South Yarra, and lived there for the rest of her life.

After 1949 she slips from view, possibly because the newspapers and magazines I’d been chasing her through are not digitised after 1954 but also because her social circle was much reduced. Her work was useful, important (and secure, which matters for a single woman) but decidedly humdrum compared to her former life. I wonder how she felt about that? Did she keep a little cutting book of her earlier social successes, and did she page through it occasionally, remembering?

Let’s imagine she did, and that we can watch over her shoulder. There’s a photograph of her chatting to the American consul-general at a cocktail party at the Feminist Club in 1949. And there’s a report of the party she attended at the Sydney Town Hall in honour of Jessie Street in 1945. A few pages back she might pause at a clipping about the undergraduates’ ball she’d organised at the Trocadero in 1936. “Rich purple taffeta cut on simple lines and ruched over the shoulders was chosen by Miss Walkom, who fastened a spray of silver leaves and berries in her hair.”

That was the year she was vice-president of Sydney University’s SRC and Kevin Ellis was president. They had greeted guests together, she in her purple taffeta and he in his… well, dinner suit, one supposes. Purple is associated with female empowerment but little good that did her the following year when the treacherous Ellis reclaimed the presidency of the SRC.

Was it treachery? Or was he just doing what many men do, which is to accept power as their natural right? Ellis went on to practice as a solicitor in Sydney before embarking on a long career in New South Wales politics. He had a wife and two children and a home in Point Piper, enjoyed fishing and playing bowls, and in 1969 was appointed KBE and became Sir Kevin Ellis.

As she sat alone with her cutting books and photograph albums, I wonder how Margaret might have told to herself the story of her life as a single woman building a career in fields that could never bring the fortune and glory enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Quite possibly she had some classic texts lined up on her shelves: English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. She could have read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in the original French.

By 1960s there were new feminist authors to consider: Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Anne Summers. Beauvoir had much to say, in The Second Sex, about women and clothing. “[Woman] dresses to display herself; she displays herself to make herself be. She thus submits herself to painful dependence.” Elegance, Beauvoir thought, is servitude.

But what of the disabled woman? Clearly, Margaret had no interest in dependence and servitude, and her disability in no way prevented her from claiming the same right as any woman to enjoy being appreciated for her clothes. She could have reasoned that few men would be sexually interested in a woman on crutches, so she might as well dress as she liked. Or she may have felt especially vulnerable to the unwanted attentions of men, and used clothing as means of asserting power. Whatever her thinking, she was surely just as desirous of emotional and sexual fulfilment as anyone else.

This is a sensitive area. It is challenging to historicise the experience of people with disabilities. In addition to getting into the mind of a person from the past, a biographer must also try to understand how their subject lived inside their bodies.

Margaret’s mother died in 1975 and her father in 1976. She retired in 1977 aged sixty-three. Ill-health was the stated reason but a financial legacy from her father might have made the decision easier. Sadly though, her sight began to fail and by 1988 she was completely blind. Still living alone in her South Yarra apartment, with no family nearby, her days must have been lonely indeed. Reading had been her life, but now that was all gone. The radio might have been her only companion during many empty hours. It was a medium she knew well.

She did have a small community of supporters: neighbours in her apartment building, a part-time cleaner-housekeeper Narda Barkas, and a longstanding colleague from CSIRO, John Lenaghan (a fellow editor), who helped her with shopping, paying bills and banking. Andrew Bell telephoned regularly from Canberra, and visited her once in South Yarra for dinner, bringing cheese, fruit and flowers. She was blind by then, but he remembers a beautifully laid table and Margaret in a pale green dress and jewellery, her hair freshly done. An enjoyable evening, he told me; just the two of them sharing time together.

Margaret died in a private hospital in October 1994. She had invested her father’s legacy and her estate was valued for probate at $2,117,000. After generous bequests to friends and two remaining relatives (a cousin and a niece), she directed that the rest of her estate be dedicated to medical research. Today the Margaret Walkom Bequest is worth more than five million dollars, and in 2024 made nearly $200,000 available in research grants.

Margaret’s life falls into two periods: Sydney until 1949, and Melbourne after that. In Sydney her life was active and vibrant; in Melbourne she seems to disappear behind the institutional walls of the CSIRO. Her isolated old age might have been the exact fate from which her parents had hoped marriage would save her.

Despite the many “perhapses” and “maybes” in her story, one thing we can say with certainty is that Margaret went her own way, always grappling with the double disadvantage of being a woman and having a disability. Even with her privileged background there was no established career trajectory for her to follow, whereas the men of her world had merely to work hard and follow the paths laid out for them. Margaret had her father’s scientific connections to get her started but after that, her only path was the one she created for herself. •

For assistance in preparing this article the author would like to thank Kate Murray (College Archivist, Pymble Ladies’ College), Dr Andrew Bell, and Kylee Nicholls (Archivist, The Women’s College, University of Sydney).

The post A mind quite made up appeared first on Inside Story.

It was a boozy seaplane pilot who introduced me to the idea that the islands of the Pacific are places of escape. His name was Jake Cutter, and he was the lead character in Tales of the Gold Monkey, a television show I adored as a child. Set somewhere in the Pacific Islands before the onset of the second world war, the show is nowadays squirm inducing. Pacific Islanders themselves barely figure, and the storyline contains every conceivable stereotype of the Westerner abroad — the drunk fleeing bad debts and a failed marriage, the swashbuckler with the whisky affliction, the fortune-hunter with a dark past — every character some version of the wild rover washed in from distant shores.

Cutter’s series was an entry point for me into Somerset Maugham and James Michener, each of whom trafficked in similar but more well-rounded stories about the bluffers, beachcombers, bankrupts, buffoons, miners, traders and other flotsam lost at the tail-ends of empire.

As George Orwell observed in his essay on boys’ weeklies, the characters, sounds and impressions encountered in popular culture at an impressionable age can leave indelible impressions. In adult years, some of them were reinforced when I read the histories and memoirs of the actual men and women who made the Pacific their home — accounts as frothy as anything dreamt up by a novelist. Later, I came to Pacific writers too, like Epeli Hau’ofa, who often skewered the affectations and foibles of this expat class as well as dinging the imperfections and occasional craven obsessions of Pacific islanders themselves.

I packed some of these old stories and histories to tide away idle hours during recent work excursions into the Pacific. I lugged them from the Cook Islands in the south seas to Saipan, up on the other side of the equator in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, and then down to Papua New Guinea. I read them in bars, coffee shops, near the pool, on planes, at a tourist show, during an achingly dull presentation on “Pacific regional architecture.”

Perhaps it was my reading diet, perhaps the clammy heat, but sometimes, when I’d look up too quickly at the present-day characters arrayed around me, I’d see similarities. The Pacific seemed still choc-a-block with old-timers. Who are they? What did they do? How did they end up there? And were they ever going to leave?

The first step on my busman’s holiday-cum-literary pilgrimage was the largest of the Cook Islands, Rarotonga. I remembered it from previous visits as languid in the extreme, yet recent headlines had been treating it as the latest frontline in the Pacific’s great game. In February, the country’s prime minister, Mark Brown, signed a package of agreements with China that set strategists’ pulses a-racing and political leaders in New Zealand, the former colonial power that retains loose oversight of the Cook Islands, into apoplexy. Would the place be different from my memory?

Not so much. The small capital, Avarua, was just as sleepy as I remembered. Tourists, mostly Kiwis, were ambling up and down the main drag eating ice cream and ducking in and out of shops offering pearls and knickknacks. Strikingly, not a Chinese person was to be seen. Unlike in many other parts of the Pacific, I saw no Chinese stores, roadworks or new buildings, and no vehicles with “Chinese aid” logos affixed. If this was a beachhead, it was a submerged one.

There were lots of foreign faces, though. In the old books and memoirs, the foreign faces were white. Most arrivals nowadays hail from other shores: Fiji, Indonesia and the Philippines, many filling jobs in tourism and construction. These were people chasing the timeless emigrant dream of a better life. Where are all the Cook Islanders? Many have made their own move, heading off for better-paid work in New Zealand and Australia. Ten times more Cook Islanders live out of the country than within.

A Fijian poured me a cold Cook Islands Lager. I was at the bar at Trader Jacks, Avarua’s archetypal expat spot, which was as just as I remembered it: the type of a place where Somerset Maugham could have written a story about how tropical lassitude wearies the soul. Its founder — long-term expatriate Jack Cooper — was no longer in residence: the New Zealander had gone to the great gin palace in the sky, his memory memorialised with a picture near the toilets that showed him in a loud shirt, cigarette jutting from his mouth, flanked by sixteen bottles of his favourite snifter.

Cooper never wrote the book he threatened, the provisional title of which was the winning Forty Years Behind Bars. But a shelf of amiable books shares the theme of the antics, affectations and foibles of Cook Islands expats. Among them is Years of the Pooh-Bah, an account of the odd assortment of characters New Zealand sent to administer the place during colonial rule, and Tales of the Papa’as, papa’ā being the name in Cook Islands Māori give to Westerners. Each papa’ā in the book is as colourful, eccentric and waggish as the one before.

Apart from one, all books about Cook Islands are either written by or about men. A fellow bookworm and consultant, Hilary Gorman, who put me onto many volumes in my Cook Islands’ collection, confirmed the profound gender disparity. After seventeen years in country, this Canadian expat academic only knew of one tale told by a woman, about a woman or from a woman’s point of view: My Kokotu of the South Seas, by a New Zealander called Helen Henry who had married into a storied Cook Islands political family.

If a pronounced gender bias is a common theme, immersion in local politics is another. Many of the papa’ā in these works forged alliances or business relationships with members of the country’s political elite — deals that invariably ended calamitously. In one case, in the 1990s, a currency scheme nearly bankrupted the country.

Some of the Cook Islands’ present-day revenue-raising schemes echo those freewheeling times. The world’s fastest-growing “flag of convenience” shipping operation is run out of a small office close to Trader Jacks, and the country has an offshore banking industry renowned as a good place for rich Americans anticipating divorce to stash money away. It’s the modern-day version of Jake Cutter’s observation that the islands aren’t a place where you ask too much about anyone’s past.

Other enterprising types are involved in deep-sea mining, a frontier venture that prior generations of papa’ā couldn’t have dreamed of. The seabed here is replete with nodules rich in cobalt; according to some estimates, as much as $10 trillions’ worth of the element lies waiting under the sea. Three exploration licenses have been issued for this very twenty-first-century form of speculation.

The local newspaper, the Cook Islands News, remains essential reading. It combines the fiddle-faddle of the parish-pump newsletter with a reminder that these islands, despite a population of just 15,000, are a place of ever more interest to outside powers. For every story about the police breathalysing Friday evening carousers, there is another about the prime minister meeting Chinese and American delegations keen to invest in deep-sea mining.

Although it may have lost some of its centrality since the arrival of smartphones and social media, the paper’s website provides a window onto this world for an annual NZ$115 (A$102) subscription. The printed version, which retails locally for NZ$2.50, is best enjoyed on a barstool at Trader Jacks, where the reader can look around to see if any of the characters mentioned in the paper are propping up the bar.

It was early June when I visited. The King’s birthday awards had recently been announced and the Cook Islands News was festooned with profiles of gong recipients. The highest honours went to two men who looked like modern-day incarnations of the papa’ās in the books I had been reading, although they had achieved markedly more success in business. One runs the airline, the other manages the country’s largest trading corporation. Each in his own way made life in the far-flung chain of islands viable by providing air links and almost everything non-human I could see in the bar, including the clothes of the patrons.

Yet, as I discovered from Hilary Gorman, many of the other long-stayers were engaged in much less visible work. What was striking was how many of those working with civil society organisations hailed originally from overseas and how many were women. They were environmental campaigners, advocates for nutrition and the importance of exercise, preservers of cultural heritage, teachers, odd job women and the occasional man who did tedious bureaucratic work to keep organisations above water. Few could be doing it for the money, observed Gorman, as each job came with long hours and small pay.

These are smell-of-an-oily-rag operations reliant on occasional goodwill from the civil society funds of countries like Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The long-timers are practitioners of politics as the art of the possible. They know when to push and lobby, and when to ease off. They are schooled in the fate of others, those who came a cropper by either trying too quickly or being too bolshie.

These unsung long-timers are playing a between-two-worlds role. ANU doctoral student and ni-Vanuatu woman Anna Naupa calls them buffers. Being outsiders gives them latitude to operate in uncomfortable or sensitive spaces. The latitude has limits, though. Rare was the long timer, no matter how extensive and storied their tenure on the islands, who could wade head-on into public opining on politics. This may explain why the supplest muscle in every long-timers body in the Cook Islands seemed to be in the neck, so often does it turn to see whether it’s safe to offer sotto voce opinions.

Pleasant as the Cook Islands is, it would take a special kind of mettle to stay too long. I loved my time there but was happy to leave; the smallness of the place closed in on me after a few weeks. It was no surprise to learn that many who arrive from overseas to work don’t last. There is little in the way of high-end living, literally; no building can be higher than the tallest coconut tree, an edict of the first prime minister, Sir Albert Henry — a man, incidentally, whose career ended in ignominy owing to one of those disastrous get-rich-quick schemes engineered by a papa’ā.

I was picked up at the airport on Saipan, the largest island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands by an Indian man wearing an “I Love New York” t-shirt. This was my first visit, but the driver had been on Saipan twenty-eight years and — as if to pre-empt any questions I might have in these Trumpian times — was anxious to tell me he was a citizen. He moved there as a youngish man and had been sending money back to his family each month ever since.

When I told him I’d arrived from elsewhere in the Pacific, he said that the Cook Islands sounded as far away as Syria would be to an Indian: part of the same continent but that’s where the similarities mostly end. To fly from Rarotonga to Saipan takes three days via New Zealand, Australia and Japan. It is a reminder of the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and how little aviation connectivity there is in a region often glossed as being part of one big Pacific family.

I didn’t conduct a scientific survey, but it seemed that only government officials from either Saipan or Rarotonga had spent time in both places. But interest from the major powers was resulting in more meetings, more travel. Pacific officials complain about a steady diet of meetings, training, consultations and workshops that takes many away from their offices for long periods. (Though I wondered how genuine such complaints truly are: as often as not, many I’ve encountered seem happy to take up expenses-paid travel opportunities.) One fellow in Saipan told me that he was on the road three months a year attending such parleys.

Geopolitical competition is also a boon for the hoteliers and airline shareholders of the Pacific. There is a timelessness to this; Hau’ofa’s stories are set during the cold war, the last time the Pacific aroused the interest of the major powers. His characters are forever jaunting away from the office too, “riding the tidal wave of development,” as he put it. The more things change…

Like nearby Guam, the Marianas is a US territory. Its feels as distinctly American in flavour as the Cook Islands feels like New Zealand. Everything seems bigger here: the cars, the portion sizes, the waistlines. Somewhere in crossing the Pacific I had flown not only over the international dateline but also over an international rugby line into a gridiron zone.

The makeup of the Marianas long-timer is different too, owing to more restrictive visa regulations here than in other parts of the Pacific. This is a place for men and women who left the islands in their youth to serve in the US military and have returned in their golden years, or for Americans from elsewhere in the country to retire.

Some of the seniors are no-nonsense sorts; a neighbourhood watch meeting was going on in an adjacent table at a restaurant when I was having lunch one day. Yet Saipan has long had a reputation as a sunny place that has attracted people at the shadier end of the scale. It is a reminder that not all who come to the Pacific have civic-mindedness in mind.

The American apotheosis of the shady sort is Larry Hilbloom, the man who put the H in the logistics company DHL. Hilbloom lived like a monarch on a cliff-edge bungalow on Saipan; his nickname, which he devised, was King Larry, the title of a book I picked up documenting his wild life and times in the closing decades of the last century. In Saipan, he bought the local bank and telecoms outfit and inveigled himself into the justice system. He managed to have himself named a justice on the Saipanese supreme court to adjudicate on a case that involved him. A man of satyric impulses, he flew around Asia indulging illegal desires.

Then came his mysterious death. In 1995, he took off from an uninhabited island in the Marianas chain to Saipan with two companions. His plane crashed. The two other bodies were found but Hilbloom’s never was. I spoke to one of the police investigators who found the plane, a sensible man who did not strike me as prone to conspiracism. He was convinced Hilbloom faked his own death and was still likely to be carousing in one of those Asian fleshpots where law enforcement was pliable or buyable.

I walked past one of the Saipan bars in which a small model plane had been erected on a plinth as if in karmic irony and called into another for a drink. I looked at some of the paunchy and weather-battered men in loud shirts in these end-of-the-line bars staring intently at their phones and wondered what their stories were. They might well have looked up at me and surmised the same thoughts. I typed “What are they doing here? What am I doing here?” along with “This place has a dingy charm” into my phone and ordered another Bud Light.

The other obvious set of old timers in Saipan are US military veterans from wars past. These days, if you’re very lucky, you will see one visiting the American Memorial Park, which commemorates a pivotal American victory in the second world war. Such pilgrimages are more or less non-existent now, the park ranger said. People are put off both by the distance — not counting stopovers, the flight from the US west coast takes fourteen hours — and by the passage of time. A twenty-year-old who fought in the Battle of Saipan would be a hundred years old.

But their career descendants are still prominent in Saipan. A large “tabletop” wargame was going on when I was there, part of an effort to bolster America’s western-flank defences in preparation for possible war. The runway on nearby Tinian Island, from which the planes took off to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is being upgraded at the cost of US$800 million.

For all the looking over the horizon, there is a nearby reminder of a once-omnipresent Chinese presence US authorities did next to nothing about. This is a giant palatial casino resort — 3000 rooms inside, a shoal of rococo dolphins and abandoned stretch limousines outside — that once attracted Chinese high-rollers who gambled their way through US$4 billion dollars a month. The site was a suspected money-laundering venue and visitors were suspected of using Saipan as a back-door entry to the United States. The casino sits as a reminder of what can be built in plain sight on the America’s farthest shores.

The resort closed during Covid and has yet to reopen. Nearby tourist restaurants are shuttered. The few people left from the boom forlornly staff beauty parlours murmuring offers of special massages to walkers-by.

“Port Moresby? So different to here,” observed a government official in Saipan when I told her the Papua New Guinean capital was my next stop. She had been there recently for one of those ubiquitous training sessions and she wasn’t giving the place a five-star rating.

“I thought it would be like Guam,” she groaned. Her pre-departure image of a palm-fronded paradise with cheery locals was far from the hermetic reality. She spent two weeks cooped up in her five-star accommodation, bussed to the training and warned by her hosts — in kindly but not uncertain terms — that walking the streets was not recommended.

It takes two days to travel from Saipan to Port Moresby, the third point on my roughly triangular trip. I arrived via Tokyo and Brisbane, crossing from an American to a distinctly Australian habitus, sushi in between, and back into the Pacific’s rugby zone. The NFL posters in bars are replaced with the logos of NRL teams. But the Pacific’s largest, most populous country has also produced the most writing: derring-do accounts of the early British colonialists, ghostwritten hagiographies, mystery novels and one book of doggerel.

PNG was a publisher’s paradise during Australian colonial times, when expatriates were running commerce, government and the churches. Back in the early decades of the last century the Irish writer Beatrice Grimshaw bucked the entrenched misogyny of her era to rule the Papuan literary scene, her works serialised in the New York Times and acclaimed by Australian prime ministers. She wrote more than forty adventure novels and travel books with titles like The Sorcerer’s Stone and In the Strange South Seas. I picked up many of them for little more than the price of the postage on secondhand book websites. One had a little card attached thanking the recipient for “helping keep the lights on for another few days,” a reminder of the perennially tight margins in the book industry.

Nowadays, only the hardiest publisher will dare to venture here. No obvious reading culture exists except for one very particular genre. In the city’s dimly lit Vision City mall are little pop-up stores selling self-help books adorned with pictures of big-haired American evangelists and bombastic business gurus.

Particularly prominent was the literary oeuvre of one Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series. I googled him to find out more and discovered a salutary tale. News stories had him admitting he was more than US$1billion in debt. His own advice clearly hadn’t worked; he was going to need all the help he could get if PNG’s book-buying market had become a principal income stream.

Papua, Grimshaw wrote, was a place for ambitious second sons to make their fortune. At first blush, the expat scene seems to skew older nowadays. Many men are still there but now well into the second half of their lives, working in oil and gas or behind-the-scenes helping with the paperwork of government.

Many fly in and fly out; they constitute most of the passengers on the flights up and down from Australia. The oil and gas workers would be wearing their uniformed tradie shirts emblazoned with logos displaying boosterish inscriptions like “534 days on site without an accident.” The consultant types are different: R.M. Williams shirts, chinos and boots. Many are former public servants from Australia, hired because they can write administrative English and navigate the vicissitudes of government.

Physical danger isn’t a risk — their most difficult daily safety challenges would involve navigating a scalding flat white — but it is still treacherous work navigating the bureaucratic jungle. These are occupations that reward watchfulness and where the less one advertises one’s centrality or role, the better. It’s a role I had for a spell but realise I could not do for long.

A person who does put himself out in the public square is Paul Barker. An Englishman with jack-in-the-box levels of enthusiasm, Barker manages the Institute of National Affairs, a Port Moresby outfit producing commentary and policy advice on PNG’s society and economy. Like many, he came to Papua New Guinea as a young man and never left.

When Barker arrived in 1978, the country’s present prime minister, James Marape, was in primary school. Apart from an eighteen-month stint in nearby Solomon Islands, the Englishman has stayed put. He spent a quarter century in the agriculture department and sixteen in the prime minister’s office. It was time well spent for his current role.

Barker is respected to the point where he’s no longer even considered different, a part of the Moresby fabric. Being familiar but not of the place gives him the moral legitimacy and latitude to speak out on social and economic issues buffeting the country. When I asked him about his role and how he knows when to push and when to pull back, his answer was resonant of those in the Cook Islands.

“Most Papua New Guineans respect you for saying things that many people think but many have to keep their heads below the parapet about,” he said. “Some Papua New Guineans are speaking up quite strongly on social media. But sometimes it gets sort of emotional. I’m trying to say things in a reasonably rational, calm manner. Sometimes, some Papua New Guineans say ‘You should speak more forcefully.’ And yeah, well, if you speak too forcefully, then you know you’re going to be on a one-way ticket somewhere.”

“Paul isn’t only an expat,” said the economist Maholopa Laveil. “The fact he has a Papua New Guinea family and resided this long, lends his comments weight. I’ve learned a lot from him over the years, and he has inspired a passion for speaking truth to power.” Whether a new generation of Barkers will replace him is an open question.

On my final night, I called in for a drink at the whiskey bar at my hotel, many of whose denizens could have fit into a twenty-first century reboot of Tales of the Golden Monkey. Some oil and gas types having furtive conversations with a Papua New Guinean wearing a pork-pie hat, an old consultant I knew from yesteryear pounding whiskey while pretending not to know me and a group of Aussies who had returned from doing the Kokoda trek toasting their exploits. A woman limped in on crutches and ordered a large glass of wine. Waiters sashayed around the room with crudites.

I’d been in so many of these mise en scène(s) in Port Moresby over the years. It’s a place I loved returning to; I had many friends here and I loved checking in with the intrigues, but was glad I no longer had to metabolise them or worry about losing my footing in its bureaucratic jungle.

A memory came back to me, of a conversation I had with an old-timer in a bar like this some years back, one that changed my direction. He was a burnt-out case; someone who kept coming back for work to Papua New Guinea because his wife in Melbourne liked the money he was making but didn’t like him. He was engaging in energetic sugar daddy relationships which he implied was taxing his vigour and made me hope he had comprehensive medical insurance. “I’m still not sure which of those characters I am, though,” he said. “You know, the misfit, the missionary or the mercenary.” When he asked me which archetype I was, I knew the universe was telling me not to renew my contract.

Of all the people in Paradise lounge at Port Moresby international when I flew out, the one who sticks in my mind the most was the pale man with gelled hair tottering around with a plate of cheese in one hand, a tumbler of wine in the other, the volume sloshing therein proportionate to the size of his head. The hands of the clock had just nudged past noon.

I thought of some of the people I’d met on my journeys and whether they resembled the beachcombers in the books and TV shows of old. Of course, the Pacific was different then. Except for the Kingdom of Tonga, it was one big imperial lake permeated by Australians, Americans, British, French, New Zealanders and, further back, German and Spaniards. Nowadays, the Pacific is home to fourteen independent countries alongside other places, like Cook Islands and the Marianas, that still have the imprint of empire.

The novelistic way to render the collective stories of the modern-day castaways would be in absurdist hues, to write up these middle- to late-aged men and women as modern-day beachcombers barnacled onto Pacific societies because circumstances and life choices mean that they can’t be anywhere else.

But that wouldn’t be entirely accurate or fair. Some are plainly on the islands for dubious reasons and others seem like rebooted versions of their forebears, the traders selling washing machines and blenders rather than calico cloth and looseleaf tobacco. There are still plenty of gold-diggers around: the deep-sea miners of the Cooks and the copper and gold miners of Papua New Guinea. Just as many, though, are playing roles as buffers: fixers, solvers, advocates, consciences and factotums. All forms of the human condition are here.

With the Pacific framed ever more as a tug of war between two great powers, my trip was a reminder that for all the impersonal talk of security pacts, alliances, Chinese inroads and US retreats, individuals matter as much as ever. •

The post Misfit, missionary, mercenary? appeared first on Inside Story.

There are millions who have stories like mine. Many are more dramatic and just as worthy of exploration, but most remain untold. As a writer, I have had the privilege of being able to explore my story, and I share it to shed some light on the impact that political decisions wreak on the emotional lives of those they affect.

I was born in the United States but grew up with my sisters in a beautiful house in the south of England. It was set on acres of its own woods and gardens. The entrance was by one of two long drives, each of which bore the signs “Keep out. Trespassers will be prosecuted.” I was the eldest of three girls and we were surrounded by material plenty but lived in what as an adult I now know to be emotional deficit.

Our parents occupied the formal side of the house while my siblings and I had our own zone. We rattled around in our large quarters, haunted by the absence of meaningful connection with our parents. We ate meals in front of the television in the playroom. The walls were decorated with somewhat bleak quotes that my father had encouraged us to write out in calligraphy, and they provided the emotional backdrop for our youth.

There are two in particular that I remember. The first is from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra:

O, withered is the garland of the war;
The soldier’s pole is fall’n; young boys and girls
Are level now with men. The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

And the second from my father’s favourite poem, Yeats’s “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Despite, or maybe because of, those prophecies of doom, I buried myself under my covers, listening to love songs on pirate radio at night and finding comfort in the now horribly dated Enid Blyton novels, full of clichéd and loving English families. I don’t remember being hugged, complimented or affirmed as a child. How reliable that memory is I don’t know, but I do know I longed for affection.

I can remember one day begging my father to tell my mother that he loved her. He refused. “There’s no such thing as love,” he explained with the tone of contempt that he reserved for anything he classified as idiotic.

One of the few games I can remember playing with him was “broken chair.” We would sit on his knee, not knowing at which moment his legs would separate, leaving us crashing to the floor. The thrill of being close to him was enough to ensure that no number of falls would make us lose interest in the brief intimacy it offered.

I worshipped my father and longed to be close to him. When I was brave enough, I would creep out of the playroom, through the living room and to the entrance of his large book-lined office, where he’d sit typing on one of his two typewriters. A thick velvet curtain hung across his door. We weren’t allowed into his study, nor to ask for entry. But the tap of his fingers on the keyboard was a welcome song, reassuring me he was there.

He was an academic, a historian who had taught at Harvard and Princeton and was working on his magnus opus — on the history of the philosophy of history, especially as articulated by Lord Bolingbroke. He also was editing the academic journal he’d begun while a student in the States. History and Theory was (and is) a prestigious journal that numbered luminaries like Ernst Gombrich and Isaiah Berlin among its board. As well, my mother would emphasise to us that my father was an English country gentleman.

It was a childhood with many rules. Obviously, we should be seen and not heard — this was England, after all. But most important was that we did not ask questions. Questions were considered the height of rudeness. For years into our adulthood my sisters and I would struggle to make conversation with outsiders. Without being able to ask questions, having a normal healthy dialogue with another human can be hard.

Of course, as children we wanted to know about our parents, and when we were brave enough we would beg our father to tell us about when he was little. His answer was always the same: “Well, when I was a little GIRL…” And he’d then spin a wonderful fairytale about his female childhood. He was a gifted storyteller and of course we longed for his tales, but more than that, we longed for the truth. He would not budge from his narrative, and when we professed disbelief that he’d ever been a girl he’d show us pictures of himself as a toddler in an elaborate lace christening robe that looked like a dress, which he claimed as proof.

Even his name was a mystery to us. We knew that in addition to being our Papa, he was called George H. Nadel. But what did the H. stand for? “Feet,” he’d tell us in a deadpan voice. It was only years later that we discovered the joke: his middle name was in fact Hans — definitely not a typical name for an English country gentleman.

In addition to questions being forbidden, we were not allowed to tell strangers anything about ourselves or our family. Strangers included the staff who helped raise us. There was one thing only that we were allowed to tell people we met in the village: that the three large Alsatians my father kept were trained to kill. “I only need to make one sound,” he’d tell us, “and they will pin someone to the ground and finish them off.” We dutifully told all our friends this, which could possibly be why playdates were few and far between.

There were other clues that all was not as it seemed in our outwardly “perfect” childhood. There were moments of what I would now call cruelty, though at the time I simply experienced these as painful and confusing events that illustrated something lacking in me. One time, on a walk with my father, I asked him if it was safe for me to balance on top of a thin bar at the top of a metal fence. “Of course,” he replied. So, I clambered up to try to impress him. The pole was thin, about the same width as a rope, and balancing impossible. Within seconds I’d fallen and cut my chin on the metal. My father laughed. How could I have been so idiotic as to even attempt such an impossible thing?

My father kept guns, which he used to shoot the rabbits and squirrels that threatened the plants on his grounds. I considered this to be murder. If I saw him leaving the house with his shotgun, I would run ahead of him, shouting to try to scare his prey away. He also used traps and would bring the unfortunate creatures he’d caught to his workshop, where he’d transformed a large plastic dustbin into a makeshift killing chamber. He’d put chloroform on cotton wool at the bottom, and would then push the animal in through a homemade hatch at the top. He would tell me he was putting them to sleep and it was for their own good. Later, I would be allowed to bury the corpses. Indeed, I had a small graveyard.

In the children’s section of the house there were murmurings among the staff. They frequently alluded to the existence of secrets: things we’d be horrified about if we knew, but ultimately were never told. Despite that, the nannies and cleaning ladies were warm, doing their best to make up for the absence of affection from our parents. I felt loved in their presence and I couldn’t fathom the hierarchies that kept their material circumstances so different from mine. I credit those early relationships for the socialist beliefs that have driven my adult life, and for giving me the strength, at the age of eleven, to refuse to be sent to boarding school, which would have been the norm for someone of my background.

By the time I reached my teens and had developed the courage and will to force questions on my father about his past and his childhood, he’d developed Parkinson’s disease. Plying him with unwelcome questions felt cruel when he was in obvious physical discomfort. Before long, it was too late: for the last decade or so of his life he was rendered largely incapable of speech. The glorious home we’d grown up in was sold and we lived in more humble circumstances, with a shared living room, close at last to our now dying father but still unable to reach him.

When I was eighteen, I travelled to Australia. While there I stayed with a college friend of my father’s, the economist Murray Kemp. He showed me a book my father had written as a doctoral student on the colonial culture of Australia. “It was so good it was used as a standard text for many years,” Murray explained. For the first time I realised that my father had had a past life in Australia. Before that, I had only a vague notion that he’d studied there before winning a scholarship to Harvard to complete his PhD, where he’d met and married my mother.

It was just before he died that I gained my first hard evidence that my father had a hidden past. Once discovered, it began to make some sense of his emotionally withdrawn nature, his fear and his insistence on privacy. And also, to some extent, of the flashes of macabre cruelty that I had occasionally witnessed.

By this time, my father was so sick that he’d been moved to a nursing home. There were only two words he managed to communicate, through a lengthy process of guiding a felt-tip pen on a pad of paper. These were “die” and “exit.” Before he’d become completely debilitated, he’d joined the voluntary euthanasia organisation EXIT. These contorted notes left us in no doubt that he did not want to live but, in 1980s England, decades before Dignitas and debates about assisted dying, we felt trapped by the law and utterly powerless to help.

As he was unable to talk, I got into the habit of reading to him. I was never sure whether he was following, but it helped to pass the time and we hoped it helped to distract him. Shortly before his death, I found a book by his bed in the nursing home. Publishers had continued to send him books for review, and my mother delivered these books and copies of journals to the nursing home, even though there was no possibility of his ever opening or reading them. This book, The Dunera Scandal, was written by Cyril Pearl and featured a twist of barbed wire on its cover. As the book explained, the Dunera was a transport ship commandeered during the war to carry “enemy aliens” from Britain to Australia. The episode had become a British national scandal because of the brutality with which the “enemy aliens” were treated.

The majority of the men on the ship were not enemies of the British state, but Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler’s regime to what they’d thought was safety in Britain. They then found themselves herded up, incarcerated and transported to an unknown destination alongside fascists and Nazi sympathisers. The British guards threw overboard many of the possessions the internees had brought with them, though not before pocketing valuables.

The book fell open on a page about a third of the way through, and I started to read to my father. It described how inmates on the Dunera were forced at gunpoint to run barefoot over broken glass. With his shaking, crippled hand he reached out to my arm to stop me from reading. He pointed first at the book and then at himself and I was sure I could see his lips forming the words, “That was me.”

It wasn’t until his death, when we went through his filing cabinet, that we found a second clue: an envelope marked “Destroy on my death.” We didn’t. It contained only a few documents, but enough to reveal a past our father had not disclosed. Born in Vienna, he was Jewish and had fled alone to Britain in March 1939 on a Kindertransport. He’d been a child refugee.

Over the years that followed, I was unable to find out more. This is ironic given that I had become a journalist, as had one of my sisters. Despite growing up in a household that forbade questions, we had both built our lives on careers that demanded we do so. However, it felt impossible to turn our journalistic skills towards our father. If my father had wanted me to know about his past, I reasoned, he would have told me. Out of respect I didn’t want to transgress his clear instruction not to know. I also felt frightened. What if he’d hidden his Jewish heritage to keep us safe in case it happened again? One of his most repeated historical quotes was George Santayana’s: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Maybe he deliberately buried his personal history to avoid it repeating for his daughters.

It was to be another twenty-five years before I had the courage to overcome that cocktail of fear and guilt. It was the British general election of 2015. I had turned from television journalism to politics, and was standing as a Green Party parliamentary candidate at the election. Antisemitism was on the rise. I didn’t feel I could talk publicly about the issue while hiding my own Jewish heritage, whatever that might mean. As I changed my biographical description to include my father’s heritage, I felt fear, but also a sense of liberation. It was as if I were beginning to reclaim one part of my family’s unknown past. The genie was out of the bottle. Now that I had “come out,” I wanted to know more.

By this point I had been through years of intense therapy, with various therapists suggesting I displayed the symptoms of someone suffering second-generation trauma. But trauma because of what? It wasn’t that mystery that bothered me so much as my never having had the chance to really “know” my father. That was coupled with what was, if anything, a still more painful fact: my father, who had overcome so much in his life (or at least the limited bits of his life I knew about), had died as emaciated and skeletal as those liberated from the concentration camps.

Parkinson’s disease had done what the Nazis had failed to. He had spent his final years incarcerated in a rundown nursing home, trapped in his own pain-ridden body, unable to speak and unable, most poignantly to me as a writer, to finish the book that he’d spent much of his life working on, alongside his editorship of History and Theory.

It left me feeling unbearably bleak and fed my own existential struggle with meaninglessness. That my father could have escaped the Holocaust to have died what felt like an equivalent death was unbearable. His book unfinished, he had failed to make his mark on the world. To top it all, my mother had decided, out of respect for his atheism, that he shouldn’t have a grave. So, there was literally nothing tangible left to mark his existence, not even somewhere to grieve. He had been erased.

Since standing for parliament, and despite being dogged by depression, I was doing anything but staying silent. In 2018, spurred on by pictures of refugees drowning at sea while trying to reach safety in Europe, I set up Compassion in Politics, an NGO that would campaign for a more compassionate response to human suffering. I was thrilled that the celebrated British parliamentarian Lord Alf Dubs, who had himself come to the Britain on a Kindertransport, agreed to be our patron.

I became more desperate to know about my father. I did what online research I could and discovered that, when he arrived in England as a fifteen-year-old in March 1939, he was alone. He’d spent a year living with a family in Midhurst in Sussex, before at sixteen being arrested, along with thousands of other refugees, many of them Jewish, as an “enemy alien.” In May 1941, Churchill had instructed British authorities to “collar the lot,” in other words to round up those with a German or an Austrian passport. My father went from being a child refugee at fifteen to an enemy at sixteen. He was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man and then deported on the prison ship the HMT Dunera.

A few years later, in 2019, I was invited to speak in Australia at a conference about compassion. It reawakened my old longing to connect with my father’s past. I couldn’t resist the idea that maybe there was someone still alive in Australia who had known him from his Dunera days. At the last minute, I looked online and found an article about the Dunera by a historian called Seumas Spark. I dropped him an email and caught my flight.

When I arrived in Melbourne, my host — in an attempt to keep me awake and stave off the jetlag — took me on a series of museum visits. The first stop was the Jewish Museum of Australia. I asked the curator if she had anything on the Dunera. She went to a bookshelf and retuned triumphantly with a large academic tome entitled Dunera Lives. There was a whole page of information about my father and a photo of him at Queen’s College, University of Melbourne. The author was the very same Seumas Spark whom I had emailed before leaving.

Seumas and I met the next day. Over coffee and Viennese cookies, he told me how excited he was to get my email. Working alongside the historian Ken Inglis and others, Seumas had devoted much time to researching the Dunera and the lives of the men it brought to Australia. “We’ve been looking for George’s descendants for a decade,” he explained, “but kept drawing blanks.” My father’s privacy had resulted in his having covered his tracks so well that even contacting History and Theory hadn’t yielded an address for Seumas to find us.

A friendship quickly developed. I learnt that when the men had finally arrived in Sydney, in September 1940, many emaciated and sick from months at sea, they were interned by the Australian government, as instructed by the British, in detention camps. Their mistreatment was eventually publicly acknowledged and, later, they became widely known in Australia as the “Dunera Boys.”

When Seumas came to England to research the artwork of another Dunera Boy, Georg Teltscher (George Adams), I went with him to meet George’s widow, Sara. From her I got a clear account of what life in the camp had been like: how the inmates, many of them intellectuals and artists, had organised themselves and created their own “university” within the camp, with lectures, seminars, art workshops and concerts. They’d put on plays and even designed and printed their own currency.

Sara also had her late husband’s collection of drawings and paintings from that time and so I was given a visual insight, too. I saw a clutch of huts, surrounded by barbed wire, in the middle of a barren and remote patch of Australia. Seumas took me on other Dunera-related expeditions in London too, including to the British Museum print rooms to see its collection of Dunera art. The night before Seumas left to go back to Australia he handed me a manila folder, similar to the ones I’d seen stacked on my father’s desk as a child. “This is all I have,” he said. “It’s our research file on your father.”

I left it on my desk for some months. Again, I was inhibited by the old feeling that I was breaking my father’s cardinal rule. When my curiosity finally got the better of me, I found a wealth of anecdotes and accolades about my father’s academic work, including the frequent observation that his work was continuing to have an influence on academic thinking to this day. After years of despair about my father’s wasted life, it turned out that he had left a very visible trace. His work continues to be researched, studied, discussed and built upon. And even more to the point, there was a historian actually researching his life and publishing papers that featured him.

However, while those interviewed by Seumas had much to say about my father’s professional life, there was nothing about his personal one. Indeed, many of them commented on the air of mystery that surrounded him. Because he had not been willing to talk about his background or personal affairs, rumours abounded. There were snide comments, which Seumas kindly attributed to professional jealousy, but which, to some extent, rang true to me from my childhood.

I had one other possible lead. The academic who had taken on the editorship of History and Theory was living in London. Full of fear and burdened by the knowledge that my father would have hated my making contact, I arranged to meet the former editor, Richard Vann. He and his wife invited me to tea in their Kensington flat.

They were familiar figures from my childhood, having visited us in Sussex regularly through the years. It was strange to re-meet them as an adult. Strange also to see them living and breathing so many years after my father had passed away. They had laid out a formal tea, perhaps remembering the formality with which they’d been treated whenever they visited us in Sussex.

Before I’d even had a chance to sit down, Dick burst out, “We are so glad you’ve come. Now you can tell us about your father.” Dick explained that although he’d worked with him for forty years, he knew nothing of his private life and family background. My hopes were dashed; the man I’d come to for answers had even more questions than I did. I’d drawn a very definite blank; at least I wasn’t the only one.

It was interesting how much came to be projected on to my father’s life in the absence of the normal biographical knowledge that most of us have about each other, especially in this digital age. A number of articles online said that he had married a Rockefeller. Not true. Another took a prank he had played at university and interpreted it as evidence of something untoward. My father had rigged up a dummy in his study to make it look as if he were working all night, when in fact he was out — I hope having a good time. This was lifted straight from Sherlock Holmes, but to the historian who wrote about my father it became something sinister.

I met an academic from Sydney who said he was fascinated by my father because of his “missing years.” “I could find nothing about him online from 1990 onwards,” he said. “I mean, what was he doing? Why did he just disappear?” I told him that he’d got a little overexcited. My father’s “disappearance” wasn’t due to some mysterious clandestine mission, but because he’d died.

My sisters and I may not have known about my father’s past, but we nevertheless absorbed its emotional impact, which has played out in our lives. Of his three daughters, two of us have suffered from severe depression, which started in our mid-teens (at about the age our father fled Vienna). This depression was accompanied by excessively high levels of fear and insecurity, and a belief that we “didn’t belong,” that we would get found out at any moment. We have both felt that we have spent our lives studying how to appear normal, endeavouring to do this or that, and often failing. We have felt there was something shameful about us, but what exactly we couldn’t quite identify.

I have lived with an excessive fear of impending catastrophe. In my twenties, I was fortunate to go out with a wonderful and kind young art dealer who worked for his father’s business. He had the sort of financial security most of us can only dream of; they had vaults of priceless artworks, including by the Italian painter Canaletto and well-known impressionists. The sale of any one of these could have provided comfortably for a lifetime, and yet I was riddled with fear that we weren’t secure enough.

I became preoccupied that he didn’t have a second career to fall back on: “What happens if we have to flee Britain and you have no more art?” I would beg him to qualify as a teacher so that he’d have a skill to his name, utterly unable to see the reality of his situation, or to see how my father’s unnamed experience was subconsciously driving my fear.

There are other coincidences. As a broadcast journalist, I devoted myself, both on television and in print, to the task of trying to free people who had been wrongly imprisoned. Again, I wonder if my father’s own story played out untold in my concerns. And in my children, too. My oldest son, who can be alarmingly like my father, has struggled with the same depression as my sister and me, beginning at roughly the same age that my father’s journey began.

Another coincidence that amuses me is that my journalist sister chose a decade or so ago to get a house in the country. She chose to live in a beautiful town called Midhurst, the very same Sussex town, it transpired, where my father had found initial safety when he fled Austria.

I can hear my father’s voice dismissing these “coincidences” as unscientific but, for me, perhaps one of the biggest pieces of experiential proof I have of their truth is this: over the recent past, since I began to reclaim my father’s story, my own depression has abated. I have gained an increased sense of comfort. A sense that it is okay to be me and that I no longer have to pretend or work hard to camouflage myself to fit into everyday society. By bringing the unknown from my subconscious into my conscious, a real and liberating shift has occurred.

Despite the healing I have found, however, a deeper political concern continues to trouble me. If my father were fleeing persecution now and trying to reach Britain, I doubt he would be permitted entry. The dogwhistle racism in Britain ushered in by Brexit, the brutality of Trump, and a British government that thought deporting traumatised refugees to Rwanda was decent policy spell a dangerous shift in attitudes towards refugees, in Europe, Australia and across the globe.

Our collective memories are short. And individualistic neo-liberal ideologies have left too many of us divorced from the values that create a caring, cohesive society. As mass migration brought about by climate catastrophe threatens to dwarf the current global refugee crisis, we are at a dangerous point. War has flared once again in Europe, and the Middle East is ablaze.

I find myself in my political work haunted by the quotes my father had me transcribe as a child; often I use them in speeches. Increasingly it feels that “mere anarchy” is being “loosed upon the world” and that the “odds” are indeed “gone.”

As I look out across today’s bleak political landscape, with its rising levels of hate and its failure to prevent injustice, I remember my father’s preoccupation with Santayana’s remark, which now seems more prescient than ever. My hope is that we will remember and learn from the history of the last century before it’s too late, so that we and the generations to come are not doomed to relive it. •

This is an extract from Fault Lines: Australia’s Unequal Past, edited by Seumas Spark and Christina Twomey, published this week by Monash University Publishing.

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When you consider distance and population size, that relative ignorance is puzzling. It’s 1500 kilometres from Tasmania to New Zealand’s South Island, ten times the distance between Cape York and the New Guinea mainland. If it weren’t for crocodiles and sharks, an experienced swimmer would be able to cover the less than four kilometres from there to the closest inhabited Australian island, Sabai in the Torres Strait. Today, New Zealand has just over five million inhabitants, about as many as Queensland, while household surveys and satellite imagery put PNG’s estimated population in 2021 at close to twelve million, almost half the size of Australia’s.

Yes, lots of New Zealanders live in Australia. But in Cairns and other Northern Queensland towns the presence of Papua New Guineans is hard to ignore. And who knows, someday many more might come. PNG is a volatile country and its southern border is “porous,” as former Liberal senator Ian Macdonald once aptly put it.

But it’s because of its twentieth-century history that Australians may want to show a more lively interest in PNG. Early in that century, in 1906, Australia formally took over British Papua, the British colony established at the urging of Queensland twenty-two years earlier. When the first world war broke out, Australia seized German New Guinea; after the war, that former German colony was administered, separately from Papua, by Australia under a League of Nations mandate. Then, following the second world war, Papua and what had become the UN Trust Territory of New Guinea were combined under Australian rule, though it wasn’t until 1971 that the entity was renamed Papua New Guinea. In 1973, the colony became self-governing; two years later it was independent.

PNG is not entirely ignored in Australia — at least not now. In the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the day of independence, 16 September 1975, Australian media coverage about PNG has been extensive. And some of it has been very good. But the history of Australian rule, which in one part of PNG lasted for more than ninety years, has barely featured.

Of course, it makes sense to celebrate PNG’s achievements over the past half century, explore the young nation’s manifold challenges and try to predict its future. But such a focus allows Australians to hold on to powerful myths: that Australian colonialism was incidental and benevolent, that the inhabitants of Australia’s colony were treated far better than Indigenous Australians, and that Australia gave independence to Papua New Guineans.

Under the headline “At 50, Papua New Guinea Deserves a More Complete Story,” the Lowy Institute recently published a post by Peter Raynes, the Fred Hollows Foundation NZ program director responsible for the NGO’s activities in the Pacific, who has worked in PNG on and off since the 1990s. Raynes’s narrative of how the Australian colony became an independent nation is fairly typical. “After the war, the global tide turned toward decolonisation,” he writes, making the process appear inevitable and unrelated to the specific circumstances in PNG.

Under growing international pressure in the 1960s, Australia began preparing Papua New Guinea for independence. But the timeline was short, and the adoption of a centralised Westminster-style parliamentary system proved ill-suited to the country’s traditional bigman leadership structures and its extraordinary regional and cultural diversity… A local House of Assembly was established in 1964, followed by formal self-government in 1972. Full independence was achieved on 16 September 1975 — bringing us to this year’s 50th anniversary.

The only named actor in this extract is Australia; the passive voice in the last two sentences suggests that Papua New Guineans played little part in how independence came about. That narrative has an obvious corrective: a small group of local leaders — the politicians Michael Somare, Albert Maori Kiki, Julius Chan, Iambakey Okuk and John Guise among them — played instrumental roles in the immediate lead-up to independence. But that corrective often implies that an indigenous elite existed only because Australia had invested in education, including creating the University of Papua New Guinea in 1966.

In reality, the momentum for independence was also influenced by Papua New Guineans who objected strongly to Australian colonial rule. People living around Port Moresby, on Manus and on Bougainville, and Tolai on the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain were prominent among them. In 1969 the latter formed the Mataungan Association, which fought for economic and political autonomy. When opposition leader Gough Whitlam addressed thousands of Mataungan supporters in their stronghold, Matupit, in January 1970, he considered it “one of the most moving experiences of our lives” and “the biggest election rally we have ever seen.” His encounter with militant Tolai helped to convince him that self-rule and independence couldn’t come soon enough.

Tolai living on the Gazelle Peninsula first encountered European traders and missionaries as early as the 1870s. Before other Papua New Guineans, they gained access to Western education. The Methodist missionaries used the Tolai language as a lingua franca to spread the gospel in other parts of the New Guinea islands.

The Tolai’s location helps explain why they played a prominent role in colonial New Guinea. They lived in villages near the colony’s administrative capitals: Herbertshöhe (Kokopo) from 1899 until 1910, and Rabaul until 1937. Rabaul’s port continued to sustain its economic importance after the second world war.

Tolai sometimes established amicable relationships with missionaries, traders, planters and the colonial administration. But they also had a long history of being a thorn in the colonisers’ side. In 1893 and again in 1902 the Germans were able to put down large-scale rebellions of Tolai only with the help of plantation labourers and Tolai from other districts. In each instance, the rebels suffered heavy casualties.

The leaders of the 1902 uprising, ToVagira and ToKilang, were killed by police patrols after a bounty had been put on their heads. According to his grandson, the colonial official in charge of the counterinsurgency kept a photo of their severed heads. An old Tolai woman I interviewed in the 1980s remembered ToVagira’s head being affixed to the wall of the German government offices at Kokopo. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe the story is merely a suitable image of the violence with which German colonial rule was associated.

By the time the Australians took over the German colony in 1914, the Tolai’s armed resistance had ended. But some Tolai kept protesting and rebelling against colonial rule. In August 1958, the Australian administration’s heavy-handed response to a protest on the Gazelle Peninsula even made it into the New York Times: “Two natives opposed to civilization in general and census-taking and taxes in particular gave their lives today in defense of their freedom,” the paper reported from Rabaul. “They were shot to death in a clash with Administration officers and police over a census in the nearby village of Navuneram.”

A commission of inquiry found the “view that the natives had planned to make an attack on the Administration forces” to have been “based on a reconstruction of the matter in the light of subsequent events and a preconceived idea,” which the commissioner considered to be incorrect. The commissioner also established that the two victims, ToVurete and ToVatuna, were shot in the back. No officials were ever prosecuted for their deaths, but Tolai remembered the name of the official who had fired the first two shots; he was murdered by Tolai in an unrelated dispute thirteen years later.

The conflicts between Tolai and their various colonisers — first the Germans, then the Australians, then the Japanese, followed again by the Australians — are remarkable not for Tolai violence but for the colonisers’ retribution.

The Gazelle Peninsula was home not only to Tolai and Europeans but also to many labour migrants from other parts of the country, most of whom lived either in Rabaul or on plantations. These labourers were involved in one of the most spectacular incidents of anti-colonial defiance in 1929, when thousands of them went on strike for better pay. In the year PNG gained independence, Australian historian Bill Gammage, then a young lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, published an article about that strike that is still worth reading. His findings were based on archival sources and, importantly, oral testimonies of participants in the strike.

The strike collapsed almost immediately. Gammage provides an excellent account of how it began and how it ended, which I won’t rehash. But two other aspects of the history he recounted have stayed with me.

First, the Europeans were completely taken by surprise — not so much because the preparations were kept secret but because planters, missionaries and government officials couldn’t imagine Papua New Guineans disobeying orders and objecting to being treated badly. When they went on strike, many Europeans assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that the instigator was an Australian missionary.

The other part of the story concerns the aftermath of the strike. Although no one came to harm and almost all strikers returned to work within hours, the retribution was merciless. “Some strikers were flogged and then sacked or taken to court and charged with desertion,” Gammage writes. “Beating natives was illegal, but apart from issuing warnings… no government official dared or cared to enforce the law.”

In fact, some European residents considered the Australian administration too lenient. “Why, the only thing a native understands is a beating,” an Australian woman wrote in private letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Too much is tolerated and too little done, and, as everyone says, we are too small a community of whites to let the blacks get the upper hand.”

But the official response was also extremely harsh. Twenty-one men were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Because the Native Labour Ordinance didn’t allow for either the charges or the sentences, Gammage explains, the court used “the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899, adopted in New Guinea in 1921, a section of which laid down a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment for any conspiracy to commit an offence in Queensland.”

The labour migrants who went on strike in 1929 objected to their paltry wages. Most Tolai, meanwhile, were subsistence farmers, and some of them sold copra to European traders. But Tolai too resented colonial rule. At about the time of the Rabaul strike, men in Vunamami, a coastal village near Kokopo, formed an organisation they called kivung na pidik, or secret association. “Let us collect a bit of money and see what happens,” the initiator, Enos Teve, is reported to have said. Later that money was used to finance a copra drier. Tolai men in other villages formed similar kivung after 1945.

When I enquired about the kivung na pidik in the 1980s, I learned that those involved were unhappy about having to observe a 9pm to 6am curfew and being prohibited from wearing shirts. (The Native Administration Regulations stipulated that men not wear clothes on the upper part of their bodies.) They also resented the fact that they were barred from drinking alcohol.

“Whoever was caught drinking — off they went to jail for six months,” Polos ToPultima, who worked as a government clerk in interwar Rabaul, told me. “Six months in jail for every single time you were caught drinking. Enos saw all this, and he thought of the council, actually not yet the council, of the kivung. A kivung to collect money to have a say, so that a government would materialise and we would govern ourselves.”

Independence was not just the result of Australian tutelage, or of the leadership of people like Somare. A colonial dress code may seem to be a trivial matter, but the resentment it created, particularly among grown men, mattered. And the sense of injustice and humiliation lingered long after it had been consigned to the dust bin.

It’s up to Papua New Guineans whether they want to remember colonial injustice. Australians may want to be aware that such injustice was widespread and that it mattered a lot to Papua New Guineans, at least before 1975. They would also do well to remember that in the 1920s and 1930s, when New Guinean men were not allowed to wear shirts, Australians working in the colony saw nothing amiss. In fact, some of them would have been convinced that allowing “the natives” to dress like Europeans would spell the end of the colonial order. After all, the last thing they wanted was “to let the blacks get the upper hand.” •

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There, in Papua New Guinea, he will find signs of the Australian legacy, from the love of Rugby League football and the felt hats, moleskin trousers and elastic-sided boots favoured by its politicians to the institutions and notables welcoming him: a Westminster-style parliament, a governor-general representing the distant monarch, the bewigged justices in their new court centre.

But after encountering nationalistic prickliness in Vanuatu and the Solomons, the Australian prime minister will find the power dynamics between the Australian parent and the grown-up Papua New Guinean child greatly changed by the decades. Generosity and friendliness remain, but Canberra’s efforts at guidance are more and more tentative, if they’re made at all.

Even when PNG was staggering from successive political and fiscal crises in 2004, John Howard’s naive attempt to intervene by inserting 210 police and sixty-eight treasury officials to clean up PNG’s corruption met insurmountable objections. A court case challenging the immunity Howard wanted for the Australians marked its end.

From then on, buoyed by a resources boom, prime minister Michael Somare’s relations with Howard were testy. In 2011, his successor Peter O’Neill leveraged Kevin Rudd’s scheme to park boat people on PNG’s remote Manus Island to get Canberra off his back. “By then Australia’s brief attempt to exercise policy influence had come to an end,” say the authors of Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust, a new ANU study of PNG’s economic record since independence.

The Manus deal marked a new phase in Australia’s relations with PNG — a phase “in which power shifted from the former to the latter.” The scales tilted further from around ten years ago, when China began looming much larger. “PNG was increasingly viewed in Australian policymaking circles through a China lens,” write the ANU researchers, led by economist Stephen Howes. “What mattered from this perspective was not whether Australia was having a beneficial impact on PNG but simply whether it was popular. While budget support was again provided in the most recent period, this time it came with less onerous conditions.”

Over the early decades of PNG’s independence, Canberra had shifted its economic support from general contributions to the PNG budget to more specific program aid, tying funds to projects rather than letting PNG ministers and bureaucrats decide how to spend them. Since 2019, under Scott Morrison and then Albanese, Australia has provided the PNG Treasury with swathes of soft loans — nearly A$3.2 billion over five years — free of what the researchers call the “onerous and controversial policy conditions” of previous eras.

In return, Albanese has persuaded PNG to look to Australia and its allies first for defence and security arrangements. But the issue isn’t straightforward: Australia’s northern neighbour still has about 20,000 Chinese residents (as against about 10,000 Australians), most of them recent migrants, as well as numerous Chinese state-owned enterprises ready to undertake projects at cut-throat prices.

That geo-political game will continue. But there is another kind of security question, one about PNG’s inner resilience and the prospects for improvements in wellbeing and livelihoods. Aside from the benefits for ordinary citizens, it is these that will create the strength PNG needs to resist malign influences and engage more with the world.

Behind the big projects that make PNG one of the most resource-dependent countries in the world — with gas, oil, gold, copper and nickel making up 32 per cent of GDP in 2022 — the government’s performance has been lacklustre. The result has been a dual economy, the ANU study shows, with the benefits going to the better-off strata of the urban populations.

The rural 85 per cent of PNG’s people have seen stagnation. Over the fifty years of independence, the annual growth rate of non-resource GDP per person has averaged just 0.4 per cent and the annual growth in formal-sector employment only 1.5 per cent. Life expectancy, literacy and school enrolments have continued to improve, but “non-income indicators” remain “alarmingly low by international standards and, in some cases, have worsened.”

The report continues: “In recent years, PNG has had the lowest rate of immunisation, the fourth-highest rate of child stunting [nearly one in two] and risk of premature death from non-communicable disease, and the seventh-lowest doctor–population ratio in the world [63 per million].”

As well as its fractured geography, ethno-linguistic diversity and rigid systems of customary land ownership, independent PNG started out in 1975 with some high-cost Australia legacies.

One was the floor on wages and civil service salaries, and their regular indexation, which Somare had won ahead of independence in 1972–75 with the help of Bob Hawke’s ACTU. Until it was unwound in the early 1990s, PNG had the highest wage costs in developing Asia, and those rates of pay encouraged thousands of hopeful villagers to Port Moresby. Their disappointment eventually added to the growing crime problem.

Another was the pegging of the new currency, the kina, to the Australian dollar, reducing the exchange-rate buffer that would have muted global price downturns for the coffee, cocoa and other tree crops that gave many households their only cash income. Despite different exchange rate systems and suspended kina convertibility, this remains a negative for all except the politicos protected from the consequences of running up budget deficits.

Dual economy: with the Ok Tedi mine’s copper-slurry loading dock in the background, villagers wait for canoes home after shopping in Kiunga’s Chinese-run stores. Hamish McDonald

The big copper mine opened by Conzinc Riotinto Australia on Bougaineville island also proved a time-bomb thanks to the Australian administration’s disregard for local land-ownership issues. The mine was providing half PNG’s exports at independence and much of the government’s revenue. But the locals wanted out of PNG from the start. In 1989 they closed down the mine and started a civil war.

New resource projects blossomed, meanwhile, pushing GDP growth up to 18 per cent in 1993. PNG no longer needs the Bougainville mine, but its leaders are still unwilling to endorse the express wish of 98 per cent of Bougainvilleans to have their independence.

Try as the ANU authors might to focus on economic policies, they can’t ignore politics and governance. As elsewhere in Melanesia, Papua New Guineans took to the Westminster system left by Australia like ducks to water. Then they muddied it in their own special ways. “Elections continued to be regularly held,” the authors say, “but a political culture of clientelism and precarity became entrenched, with MPs elected on the basis of local issues and a high rate of turnover of MPs every election.”

With increasing numbers attracted to politics, and with MPs’ business interests growing, “no distinction developed between the political and the business class. As parties weakened, politics became increasingly attractive, but as an arena for never-ending power contestation rather than for competing policies.”

Increasingly, MPs used their personal slush funds, allocated from the budget, to compensate for declining administrative services and build up their own prestige. Corruption scandals didn’t keep them out of action for long.

Meanwhile, crime and violence were making Port Moresby notoriously unsafe. That has moderated somewhat, but across the country local groups use real or spurious land claims to hold up projects. Modern high-powered guns turn up in fights between political support outfits and tribal groups across the populous Highlands.

There are bright spots, however. Alongside the unruly legislature, “judicial independence and integrity have been largely maintained and many look to the judiciary as a bulwark against chaos,” the ANU authors maintain:

And, indeed, the judiciary does play a vital dispute-settlement role, especially for the political class. The courts also provide a useful constraint on power. Since, given the lack of fixed party divisions, it is often not difficult to obtain the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed for constitutional change, politicians control the constitution except to the extent that the courts rule that constitutional changes are inconsistent with other parts of the original constitution.

The downside of this “regime stability” is that PNG is among the most litigious countries in the world. “This is costly, and slows down change, whether positive or negative, and development.”

It adds up to a political system that has proven unusually durable. Few developing-country regimes last more than twenty years without an unheaval of some kind. In contrast to the rapid turnover resulting from votes of no-confidence in early decades of independence, PNG’s governments have become more stable. Over the past twenty years, the country has had only three prime ministers, as against seven in Australia (or eight if Rudd is counted twice).

But while the state is stable, it is also weak. “PNG’s development outcomes can be explained by its hyper-politics and pervasive insecurity, and the feedback effects generated by the weak state and the low growth these two factors cause,” the ANU authors argue. “Political regime stability provides a positive countervailing force, meaning that the constraints on development in PNG have led, not to collapse, but to a weak-state and low-growth equilibrium.”

PNG has felt both the positive and the negative impacts of resource growth — the latter, an unbalanced economy, known as the “resource curse” among economists. “An increasingly resource-dependent economy is one in which a weak state becomes ever more important as a distributor of economic rents, and perhaps weaker as it is distracted from other policy challenges. It is probably also one that is even more prone to conflict. These feedback loops constitute Papua New Guinea’s institutional resource curse.”

Being economists, the authors rely on the available data. But they admit that not much is known about economic activity that goes unmeasured. Huge numbers of households seem to growing and trading betel nut, the narcotic chewed and shared for its mild uplift and impact on sociability. Many make and sell snacks, or trade home produce.

When the government relaxes its controls, private services spring up. The country may have only 5000 or so police for its 11.8 million population, but it has 31,000 registered security guards and numerous neighbourhood watch networks. When the state monopoly on mobile telephone services ended in 2007, Digicel expanded to more than two million subscribers. Responding with ingenuity, micro-insurance and other businesses took advantage of the new network.

This non-government energy perhaps explains why Papuan New Guineans appear so stoic despite a political system that hasn’t yet tackled pressing, deep-rooted problems, including how to put traditionally held land to modern uses, how to better protect individual safety and property, and how to direct resource earnings to general welfare.

“Many things have got worse, and there are certainly serious risks,” say the ANU authors, “but, so far, the pessimism of the doomsday merchants has been as misplaced as the optimism of PNG’s boosters.” •

Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust: An Economic History of Papua New Guinea Since Independence
By Stephen Howes, with Martin Davies, Rohan Fox, Maholopa Laveil, Manoj Pandey, Kelly Samof and Dek Joe Sum | ANU Press | $79.95 print, or free download | 442 pages

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In some countries, Manele’s decision has been portrayed as ingratitude — even in Australia and New Zealand, forum members that will each have a seat at the leaders’ table. But the Honiara jeremiad might be getting rueful sympathy from a wider selection of bigger countries on this side of the Pacific. Great power competition no longer seems to be working to the benefit of the countries of East Asia — Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — or the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or even Australia and New Zealand themselves.

Instead, they have been singled out for erratic treatment, and punishment, since Donald Trump’s was first elected to the White House nearly a decade ago, punctuated by the Joe Biden interlude. Constant admonishments from Washington have demanded more defence spending and explicit opposition to China, regardless of trade links and likely retaliation by Beijing.

In Australia’s case, the government has responded by stepping up engagement with Asia, providing more security-linked aid in the Pacific, engaging in more big-talking and cheque-writing in defence, and maintaining a head-below-the-parapet stance towards Washington. (Except for occasional placatory gestures, like Aztec priests throwing sacrifices into the volcano, that have so far included a lifting of a longrunning ban on US beef and two US$500 million contributions to American submarine yards.)

For all countries in the region, Trump’s most shocking move has been the removal of mostly low-tariff, quota-free access to the rich American market, with no exceptions for friends and allies. This month’s anniversary of the end of the second world war is a reminder that access to American consumers helped Japan rebuild after its wartime devastation, moving from manufacturing toys and gadgets to transistor radios and then from motorbikes and video-cassette recorders to cars and computers. Behind Japan came the Asian “tigers” — Korea, Taiwan and Singapore — followed by a wider array of manufacture exports from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Until recently, American elites saw this trade as a strategic gain, creating robust capitalist economies and eventually more prosperous markets for US products. America adapted, with its carmakers building regional factories into their supply chains and bringing smaller Asian-designed cars into their ranges. If Japan and others supplied hardware like television sets and VCRs, the real money was in the content that played on them, and that was made in Hollywood. More revolutions came out of America: mobile phones and wi-fi, advanced pharmaceuticals, geospatial systems, electric cars, AI. America’s deficit in the goods trade was increasingly counterbalanced by a surplus in services.

Now Trump is playing to pushed-aside American blue-collar workers (many of them now past retirement age) with dreams of bringing back car and steel production and manufacturing and assembling semiconductors and mobile devices. Japan, South Korea and New Zealand have been hit with 15 per cent tariffs, Taiwan and Vietnam with 20 per cent, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia with 19 per cent. Whether it stimulates US domestic industry enough to warrant the price effects for American consumers remains to be seen.

The region’s leaders have had to tell their people this was the best they can get, in many cases after pleading with Trump and accepting wildly ambitious demands in return. Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim agreed to invest US$70 billion in America. After the meeting with Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba on 22 July, the White House announced Japan would invest US$550 billion in US industry and facilitate new imports of US cars, farm produce, aircraft and liquified natural gas.

Japanese officials later clarified that the investments would be made by Japanese businesses on normal commercial terms, and it can be assumed that many of the promised imports would have been made anyway. (American-model cars are unlikely to be seen much in Japan’s narrow streets, where they have cachet mainly among yakuza bosses and film stars.) “Japan has been playing rope-a-dope on trade commitments for fifty years,” says John Berthelson, publisher of Asia Sentinel. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

The reaction in Japan has nonetheless been furious. “It’s nothing but an outrageous act that will destroy the post–World War II international economic order,” editorialised the mass circulation Mainichi Shimbun. In the Asahi Shimbun, veteran Washington correspondent and economics professor Kensuke Karube likened Trump to a chimpira, a protection racketeer. “[Tariffs have] become a bargaining chip in Trump-style deals, sometimes like violent thuggish shakedowns, to achieve various US policy objectives,” he commented.

It’s not just an economic strategy, agrees Vietnamese-Canadian lawyer and commentator Khanh Vu Duc. “It is a [wider] strategy cloaked in tariffs,” he wrote early this month in Asia Sentinel. As well as demanding zero-tariff access for US exports in return for lower-than-threatened access, Trump demanded rules of origin and trans-shipment disclosure, especially to block Chinese rerouting of exports through third-party nations, and alignment with his security objectives. It was all designed to isolate China.

“What we are witnessing is the birth of a Transactional Order, a system where access to the US economy is conditional upon political alignment and economic reciprocity,” says Duc. “Trump’s deals signal an end to the postwar liberal order anchored by the World Trade Organization, and a transition to an American-centric hub-and-spoke system where power, not principle, dictates terms.”

It has a certain logic, he adds. “It rewards loyalty, punishes opportunism, and leverages America’s economic gravity to enforce strategic discipline. For countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even parts of the EU, it offers a path to security and prosperity, provided they accept American rules of engagement.”

The examples of Brazil (hit with 50 per cent tariffs for not calling off its prosecution of ex-president Jair Bolsanaro), India (threatened with 50 per cent for buying Russian oil) and Canada (35 per cent for being, well, defiantly Canadian) hover as the sort of club Trump is prepared to wield. Along with the tariffs come public insults. Modi was stung by Trump’s comment that he ran a “dead economy” (India has been the fastest-growing big economy in recent years), an insult that has driven a truck through the Quad strategic alignment of India with the United States, Japan and Australia.

As well as the economic hit, Trump is removing much of the other support coming out of America. Well-off families will worry about the quality of education in the universities he is shaking down, and whether they and their children could get caught up in a capricious and punitive immigration system. His dismantling of the US Agency for International Development removes well-appreciated aid programs in the poorer parts of the region.

Trump’s heath secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, has just removed US$500 million in government support for mRNA vaccines, which played a huge part in quelling Covid-19 in Asia and elsewhere. USAID assistance to the South Pacific was relatively small (about US$1.4 billion over 2009–22) but considered effective. One focus in Papua New Guinea, for example, was public health; lapsing vaccinations there have just led to a new outbreak of polio.

“Trump is an example of the dangers faced by a country when its leader is ignorant and uneducated,” writes author and mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara in the current issue of the monthly Bungei Shunju. “It was the high quality of American university research that turned the US into a first-rate country. Trump seems totally unaware of this and behaves like the Chinese emperor who burned books and buried scholars alive.”

Many of Trump’s threats and actions are designed to whip non-China Asia into line. But are they working? Not exactly.

“The overall direction of travel… is clear,” according to Singaporean scholars Yuen Foong Khong and Joseph Chinyong Liow, writing in Foreign Affairs. “Southeast Asian countries may insist that they are staying above the fray, but their policies reveal otherwise. The region is drifting toward China, a fact that bodes ill for American ambitions in Asia.”

In Indonesia, for example, new political elites and business groups pushing a pro-growth agenda see China as a source of economic opportunity rather than ideological threat. Newly elected president Prabowo Subianto’s first foreign visit was to China, and Chinese premier Li Qiang has since made a reciprocal visit to Indonesia. The Southeast Asians “pick à la carte from American and Chinese offerings,” write Khong and Liow. India’s Narendra Modi is also off to China soon, after border confrontations between the two countries have cooled.

Surveys of elite opinion in Southeast Asia showed a wariness about China — it came a distant fourth in trust after Japan, the United States and the European Union, in that order — and fears about “not just the serious loss of access to US investment and the American market but also the United States’ abdication of its economic leadership…” Khong and Liow go on: “If it becomes clear that the United States is disengaging economically and militarily from the region, its ten countries will increasingly have to rely on one another and engage with Australia, Japan, and South Korea more seriously.”

Unlike in Europe, Trump is showing no sign of pulling back America’s military role in Asia. If he made that momentous move, Japan and South Korea could possibly go nuclear — and maybe Australia too. But the US economic relationship he seeks with China is still unclear, perhaps even to himself. What emerges will affect trade patterns all around the region, and it’s likely to be tangled up with competition in technology.

China’s leader Xi Jinping met Trump’s announced tariffs with tit-for-tat responses and threats. Chinese exports to the United States now face 30 per cent tariffs and US shipments to China 10 per cent. Trump has backed off for a second time on his threatened 145 per cent tariffs, with ninety-day pause running to 10 November.

Derided by Trump’s treasury secretary Scott Bessent for negotiating with “a pair of two’s” (a reference to poker), Xi has used China’s dominance in certain strategic materials to win concessions. He has wielded China’s choke on rare earths and special magnets (used in hi-tech devices from electric vehicles to F-35 fighters) to force Trump to lift a ban on exports of Nvidia’s powerful H20 micro-processors.

China hawks are fuming. “President Donald Trump’s team just gave China’s rulers the technology they need to beat us in the artificial intelligence race,” write former Trump security adviser Matt Pottinger and one-time National Security Council member Liza Tobin. “If he doesn’t reverse this decision, it may be remembered as the moment when America surrendered the technological advantage needed to bring manufacturing home and keep our nation secure.”

In the region Xi is seen as playing Trump deftly and offering the prospect of an alternative market, to the extent he can maintain China’s growth and open up its economy. “Beijing is edging towards a more active leadership role in a fragmented world through domestic reform, regional cooperation and support for open, multilateral trade,” says economist Jiao Wang of Britain’s Sussex University. It’s role-reversal in progress.

Playing all this has been a delicate exercise for prime minister Anthony Albanese and his government. Along with Britain alone, Australia has so far got away with the Trump “baseline” tariff of 10 per cent (apart from specific 50 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminium). Albanese has not been noticeably anxious to join the conga line of trade supplicants at the White House.

But the situation is precarious. Trump is under pressure from Big Pharma and social media giants to punish Australia for keeping down the price of pharmaceuticals and putting age restrictions on social-media sites. And when Albanese was weighing recognition of Palestinian statehood he would have had in mind Trump’s reaction to the earlier decision by Canada’s Mark Carney: “Wow! Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine. That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!”

Even so, Albanese made the decision on Palestine — though not before France, Britain and Canada, and hedged with conditions — at last bringing Australia into alignment with Indonesia and Malaysia and breaking with Washington. He has also made a long official visit to China that included a meeting with Xi Jinping. And he has batted off a demand by US defence secretary Pete Hegseth for an immediate lift in defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and a suggestion by US senior defence official Elbridge Colby that Canberra commits to the defence of Taiwan.

Behind this defensive posture, what is the Australian government doing? In open forums, Penny Wong has held back from direct criticism of Trump over tariffs. “Australia still believes in the logic of the postwar economic order, which continues to enable development and growth through openness,” the foreign minister said in a wide-ranging speech in Kuala Lumpur last month. By contrast, she directly pointed to “destabilising and dangerous conduct” by China in the South China Sea.

Trade minister Don Farrell has been more pointed. Institutions and rules made after 1945 had brought unprecedented global economic growth, he told the Lowy Institute earlier this month. “But these institutions and norms we worked so hard to build are being questioned and the rules we wrote are being challenged,” he said. “One of the chief designers of the global trading system, the United States, is now questioning the benefits of open, rules-based trade… What we risk seeing is a shift from a system based on shared prosperity and interdependence to one based solely on power and size. We cannot risk a return to the ‘law of the jungle.’”

Has Australia’s embassy in Washington spoken up for its Asian and Pacific partners on the tariffs, either directly to the Trump administration and congress, or to the US public? “Australia continues to advocate on Indo-Pacific economic and trade matters in the US,” a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade official tells me. “We are in close contact with counterparts from Southeast Asia and the Pacific on their engagement with the Administration and Congress.”

Back in the South Pacific, meanwhile, Australia pursues the geopolitical contest in the absence of the Americans. In early August, defence minister Richard Marles opened a refurbished patrol boat base on Manus Island, facing north from Papua New Guinea. Then he flew to Vanuatu, where — at a table placed surreally on the rim of Tanna island’s rumbling and smoking volcano Mount Yasur — he, Penny Wong and Pacific minister Pat Conroy initiated a new pact with their Vanuatu counterparts.

This so-called Nakamal Agreement, named for the communal house in the villages of Vanuatu, provides for assistance valued at $500 million over ten years. It is said to include a promise by Vanuatu that Australia would be top of the list if the island nation needed to call for security assistance. Barring any last-minute quibbles, the agreement comes into force when signed by Albanese and Vanuatu prime minister Jotham Napat on the sidelines of the forum meeting in Honiara next month.

If the ministers had gone down from Mount Yasur to the nearby village of Sulphur Bay, they would have seen the headquarters of the messianic John Frum movement, founded in wartime years after Tanna people reported visitations by a yellow-haired man, apparently American, who came to free and redeem them. Followers still march every February in US army fatigues behind the Stars and Stripes, hoping (as they say in the Bislama vernacular) that “John Frum, he come.” But numbers are dwindling. The islanders, like people across the region, are realising they have to look after each other and not look to America. •

The post Rallying the region appeared first on Inside Story.

Johnston is often remembered today, for the decade he and Charmian Clift spent at the centre of a colony of expatriated writers and artists on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1950s and 60s. This notable example of postwar bohemianism preceded Johnston’s triumphant return to Australia in 1964 amid the success of his widely admired novel, My Brother Jack. It was the first instalment of the autobiographical Meredith Trilogy that cemented his place among Australia’s great mid-century writers.

Johnston had first attracted attention after being appointed a war correspondent with the rank of captain in 1941. He built his reputation with action-filled accounts filed from the frontlines of New Guinea, and then spent time in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, India and finally China, from where he covered the second Sino-Japanese and Pacific wars.

From the moment he arrived in mid-1944, Johnston was fascinated by China. A quick learner with excellent journalistic instincts, he rapidly acquired the knowledge of Chinese history, politics and culture reflected in his dispatches. He was also well-placed to report on the epoch-defining conclusion of the Pacific war following the cataclysmic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — or he would have been if he hadn’t embarked on an intrepid personal quest through Tibet’s high mountains in search of the fabled monastery of Shangri-La.

Johnston’s adventure was driven by a need to replenish his war-damaged spirit. Although China enthralled him it also delivered the most confronting experience of his war service. In a personally devastating episode in late 1944 he had followed refugees fleeing the southwest city of Kweilin through famine-stricken country ahead of a Japanese advance. Tens of thousands died in fields and on roadsides. This encounter with massive civilian death left him burnt out and soul-sick.

Johnston hoped for recovery in neighbouring Tibet, whose mysteries fascinated the inquisitive journalist. In early 1945 he reported that wartime reconnaissance was discovering “unsuspected geographical features… where China and Tibet come together in a Disney phantasy of incredible mountains and untrodden gorges.” Tibet crystallised in Johnston’s imagination as a sanctuary, the place “least touched by all the years of the war.”

Feng Liu-lu, Johnston and Minya Konka (Gongga Shan), July 1945.

Another factor was also driving Johnston’s fascination. He had read James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, arguably the most influential utopian novel of the twentieth century. Lost Horizon featured the imagined Shangri-La lamasery, a monastery for Buddhist lamas. Hilton described Shangri-La and its surrounding valley as a beautiful, fertile, immaculate place with kindly, gracious, long-lived and peace-loving people uninterested in worldly goods. Crucially, he claimed that Shangri-La could heal Westerners damaged by modernity — a last-chance utopia in a world benighted by war.

Rumours had reached Johnston that Hilton’s Shangri-La was based on the lamasery of Konka Gomba. At an altitude of 13,000 feet, Konka Gomba had for eight centuries clung to the flanks of Minya Konka (known in China as Gongga Shan), at 24,000 feet the highest peak on the Tibetan plateau. If he could find a way into Tibet, Johnston resolved, he would go in search of Shangri-La.

He soon found a means to realise his plan. The American army’s Sino-American Horse Purchasing Bureau was acquiring Tibetan mountain horses and overlanding them to China, where they were desperately needed as remounts. Drawing on information from fellow correspondent James Burke, a Shanghai-born son of American missionaries, he submitted a story about the Bureau in June 1945.

Burke was fluent in Mandarin, was attached to the US Office of War Information, and had previously accompanied one of the Bureau’s Tibetan rotations — all of them skills and experience vital to Johnston’s plan. With his support Johnston was invited to “come along” by the colonel overseeing the Bureau’s next rotation. Improbably, the trip had an Australian angle: the Bureau was exchanging a cargo of slouch hats — much sought after in Tibet — for the all-important horses.

Like Johnston, Burke was entranced by mountainous Tibet, so the pieces fell into place. In mid-July the two men were flown into Ying Kwan Chai, probably the highest airfield in the world at the time but an unpromising starting point for a search for utopia. The place was infested with rats, blowflies and “prowling village mongrels,” the streets “an awful treacly mass of mud and manure.” The pair stayed long enough to acquire riding and pack horses and a local guide, Feng Liu-lu, who spoke Mandarin and Tibetan.

Johnston and Burke encountered a land that was beautiful and enthralling but also demanding and dangerous. They were tested by long days in the saddle, ice-cold streams to be forded, freezing nights, squalls that left them miserably cold and wet, and the danger of vicious Tibetan mastiffs.

The human element was also challenging. Banditry was rife, and while Johnston recorded with interest the Buddhist rituals he observed, he also became contemptuous of avaricious, pestering lamas. Scarce places to sleep were found only in damp, overcrowded inns offering distasteful food amid the odour of rancid butter. Even an apparently idyllic valley turned out to be controlled by farmers who refused them shelter.

But the compensations were enormous. As Johnston and Burke trekked upward, crossing a mountain pass at 18,000 feet, they were overwhelmed by magnificent landscapes of broad, green flower-studded valleys over which loomed pristine glaciers and the mighty, glistening peak of Minya Konka. They were enchanted by “the tinkling of bells and the chuckling laughter of mountain streams.”

James Burke crosses a mountain stream.

The travellers’ mood also improved when they were welcomed by poor nomadic herders summering cattle in the highest valleys. Although Johnston noted that these hosts “smelled prodigiously” he admired their generosity and dignity as they shared their yurts and food with the unexpected passers-by. In this unlikely place, he found a reassuring normality where “so much was as familiar as the everyday scenes on an Australian farm.”

Johnston and Burke had another encouraging encounter when they were invited to meet a Living Buddha (the revered teachers who have reached Tibetan Buddhism’s highest form of enlightenment), Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai, who had camped nearby with his impressive cavalcade. From having met the Buddha on his previous trip, Burke was aware that his proudest possession was a phonograph on which he had nothing to play but a Noël Coward recording, so he was carrying a “hot jazz” record in case they met again.

After approving this new disc, the Buddha and his guests settled into a lengthy conversation about the basics of reincarnation, diet, prayer and the differences between Buddhism and Christianity. Despite Johnston’s lack of interest in organised religion, he had long been fascinated by other cultures, and he and Burke eagerly maintained a conversation experienced by few Westerners.

Johnston with Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai (Ninth Gangkar Rinpoché) and lamas.

After nearly a fortnight, a final twelve-hour day of riding took the men and their guide within reach of Konka Gomba, where they faced final challenges from aggressive yaks, the threat of wolves, ever-steeper gradients and unexpectedly thick forests. In surroundings Johnston described as “dreary, dismal and eerie,” the portals of Konka Gomba were suddenly upon them: “Feng stiffened in his saddle, pointed ahead dramatically. ‘There,’ he shouted, exultantly. ‘Konka Gomba!’ Ahead was the real Shangri-la.”

Johnston and Burke’s first impressions of the much-anticipated endpoint of their gruelling yet exhilarating journey were disappointing. The drab, brown, stone buildings and dirty, uninspiring monks were very unlike the gleaming white palace of Johnston’s dreams. The destination was saved only by the drama of its stupendous setting beneath a broad glacier spilling from Minya Konka. Seemingly undaunted, Johnston declared, “That night we slept in Shangri-la.”

After staying several days, however, the travellers despaired of finding Hilton’s utopia. To Johnston the monastery seemed filthy and disorganised and the lamas, while hospitable, covetous and uninspiring. Preparing to leave disenchanted, he and Burke took a desultory final tour of the lamas’ cells.

Johnston and lamas at the Konka Gomba Monastery.

What followed was a meeting Johnston later said he had hesitated to report in case it was “construed as a newspaperman’s invention.” But, he asserted, it “really happened.”

A guide, recognising the visitors’ waning interest, paused before opening a closed door. Then they entered an immaculately clean room containing a solitary figure deep in meditation. In a fairy-tale-like awakening, the figure slowly raised its head, opened its eyes, and removed a hat and spectacles, revealing a beautiful Chinese woman who presented herself as Shen Shu-wen from Peking, also known as Hsueh Shan Chu Shih — “The Snow Mountain’s Resident Scholar.”

Replying to eager questions Shen recounted how she had been a guerrilla fighter resisting the Japanese invasion. Severely wounded, needing to recuperate but unable to return to occupied Peking, she was led by her interest in Buddhism to find refuge in Konka Gomba. Here she had been confined to her room for three years, fasting and meditating under the influence of Minya Konka and the tutelage of Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai.

Having discussed the progress of her Buddhist learning, including her struggle to understand her reincarnations, Shen enquired about the progress of the European and Asian wars. The men shared the news that Hitler was dead and Germany defeated, but Japan was fighting on.

Johnston and Burke were deeply impressed by this devout warrior-scholar who fused Tibetan spirituality with their own fragile, war-effected condition. And while Shen’s presence was troubling — evidence the war had indeed reached this seemingly untouched place — they saw in her prayerful meditation and meticulous cleanliness someone quite unlike Konka Gombas’s listless lamas.

Reinvigorated by meeting this brave and intelligent woman, Johnston’s faith in Hilton’s utopia was restored. The disappointing lamasery was once more “this fantastic Shangri-La.” After that, “everything was inclined to be anticlimactic.”

The men’s return journey came, however, with its own startling climax. Burke was stricken with a kidney infection and fell into a life-threatening fever. Johnston and Feng kept him sedated and upright in his saddle, but progress was painful and slow. As the desperate trio entered the valley of Ying Kwan Chai they saw a dismantled airfield, and to their dismay, what was a final US flight taxiing for departure. Fate intervened when one of the plane’s engines stalled. With Johnston frantically firing a pistol to gain attention, they were saved from what he believed would have been certain death in the coming winter. (As far as we’re aware, details of Feng’s subsequent life haven’t been recorded.)

From the aircrew Johnston learnt that he was returning to a world that had changed dramatically while he had been imbibing “a thousand years of mysticism.” It was August 14th and the Pacific War was over, with Japan capitulating after the annihilation of two of its major cities.

As Burke recuperated, Johnston flung himself back into his work, submitting rapid-fire articles covering the war’s end. He was rewarded with a privileged invitation to accompany Allied representatives to Japan, where he attended the formal surrender onboard the USS Missouri and visited “the heat-fused nightmare of Hiroshima.” The disparity between visiting the uplands of Minya Konka and the wastelands of the Japanese holocaust would have been wrenching.

Johnston returned to Australia in October 1945 with his Tibetan adventure still front of mind. Within days he published a long article describing his encounter with Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai, and soon after another featuring the meeting with Shen Shu-wen accompanied by an illustration of Shen greeting her visitors.

Shen Shu-wen as depicted in the Australasian, 10 November 1945.

Johnston’s 1947 war memoir, Journey Through Tomorrow described his search for Shangri-La and again reported the two memorable meetings. There Johnston’s Tibetan interlude might have remained — except that he revived the story a final time, a quarter of a century later.

Before reaching that point, however, Johnston’s public profile continued to grow, though not always in a way he would have welcomed. His return to civilian life became tumultuous when he began the office affair with Clift that ended his first marriage and caused the pair to be dismissed by Melbourne’s Argus. They departed for Sydney, where they co-authored High Valley, a novel that relied heavily on Johnston’s experience in Tibet.

After Johnston and Clift moved to London in 1951, Johnston took an editorial position on Fleet Street and he and Clift co-authored a second novel, The Big Chariot, this time drawing on Johnston’s knowledge of China. In late 1954, driven by mounting literary ambition and romantic yearning, Johnston and Clift moved on again, this time to the Greek islands. When they arrived on Hydra in mid-1955 they were the only foreigners, but others soon followed. In short time they emerged as the guiding spirits of a proto-hippy community attracting participants disillusioned by postwar optimism’s morphing into cold war reality.

Johnston and Clift’s own reality unfolded as a vexing battle with disappointing literary progress, marital problems, poverty and alcohol. It was a welcome relief when in 1960 Johnston again crossed paths with James Burke.

Postwar, Burke had turned to photojournalism and constantly sought opportunities to work in his beloved Himalayas. Success came his way in 1953 when he was the first newsman to interview Tenzing Norgay after he and Edmund Hilary descended from Everest, and in 1959 he covered the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India after fleeing Tibet.

In 1960 Burke was working for LIFE magazine and found himself posted to Athens. From there he saw the opportunity for a photo-essay based on Johnston and Clift’s pivotal role in Hydra’s bohemian enclave. He started by producing more than 1500 photographs depicting the Johnstons surrounded by a young, off-beat, international cohort that notably featured Canadian writer Leonard Cohen and his partner Norwegian Marianne Ihlen.

But Burke’s photos, after initial acceptance, weren’t published at the time and were instead consigned to the LIFE archive. They only began to circulate more than five decades later when, aided by the internet, they were immediately recognised as a tantalising glimpse of significant lives and a potent picturing of the postwar Aegean on the cusp of transformation.

Burke’s Hydra visit may have also induced Johnston to revisit his own war experience in fiction. He was soon at work on The Far Side of the Moon, a novel dealing with a remote Himalayan airfield and Allied crews flying the “hump” route between northern India and China. This was written simultaneously with The Far Road, in which Johnston recounted his traumatising experience among the fields of Kweilin in 1944. In the same period he also completed another novel, I Was the Only War Correspondent, which remains unpublished.

It was, however, My Brother Jack — the concluding sections of which expose war correspondent David Meredith’s guilt-riddled examination of his non-combatant war service — that brought Johnston the longed-for popular and critical success that allowed him to return to Australia. His fortunes were temporarily buoyed but he remained troubled by unresolved personal and health issues. Clift’s suicide in July 1969 added to his woes and focused his preparation for his own demise. He responded by embarking on A Cartload of Clay, the final instalment of his life-spanning trilogy.

In that novel Meredith mirrors Johnston’s real-life battle to come to terms with his wife’s suicide and make sense of his own life before he too dies. In preparing for death Johnston creates a book deeply engaged with pressing question about “life” — the life one has led, the lives one might have led. Johnston (and Meredith) confronts myriad missteps made while playing the “absurd game of going from the cradle to the grave” and the inadequate means individuals have to shape their destiny amid the disarrayed forces of character, opportunity, fate and chance.

Meredith’s contemplation of these matters is compressed into a single day — a day that involves another uphill journey with a religious destination, his local church. But his capacities are depleted by tuberculosis and emphysema, and the short walk requires rest. He finds a bus stop, sits and dozes. His mind wanders restlessly over the contours of the lives of those with whom he has “shared the oars,” and the deaths of those who have preceded him to the grave.

In particular, Meredith returns to the war years and to 1945 and his Tibetan journey with “Jim” Burke. But it is no longer a trek in search of a fabled lamasery or punctuated by meeting a Living Buddha and a cloistered warrior woman. It is now recalled as a time of existential transformation triggered by the staggering landscape. The two men ride “wherever the whim took them [through] long verdant valleys” amid the “Wagnerian drama of tremendous evening blizzards spawned out of the glittering cold womb of the mighty and sacred peak of Minya Konka.” It’s an “exhilarating bizarre experience” by which he and Burke were changed, perhaps for the last time in their lives.

This time the journey is resolved by a more complete account of Burke’s near death and the rescue of the two men in 1945, followed by his actual death in 1964. Meredith recalls learning how his friend slipped and fell while photographing in the Himalayas, his body spiralling into a crevice and beyond retrieval. This was “a precisely right sort of death” for Burke — who had remained driven by his singular passion for the mountains. Meredith, however — reflecting Johnston’s tendency to see purpose and success in others and little in himself — reviews his own postwar progress from Sydney to London to Hydra and back to Sydney, and finds only disappointment, diversion and an unfulfilled “quest for meaning and self-recognition.”

A Cartload of Clay remained unfinished when Johnston died in July 1970 and was published incomplete. It is clear, however, that the Tibetan journey was to be the narrative’s pivot point — the before-and-after, end-of-war moment beyond which the contrasting but linked fates of Meredith and Burke were sealed.

The end of the war was also a watershed for others. Unknown to Johnston, it allowed Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai and Shen Shu-wen to descend from Minya Konka. Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai — whose name is now usually rendered as Karma Chokyi Senge and who is widely revered as the ninth Gangkar Rinpoché — toured extensively through China teaching the fundamentals of Tibetan Buddhism. His impact established the religion as an important (and repressed) component of Tibetan cultural survival within China, with Rinpoché as its recognised founder and guiding spirit.

The war’s end also allowed Shen to return to China, where she continued to follow and promote Rinpoché’s teaching. After his death in 1957 she moved to Taiwan and established the influential Dharma centres that made her a critical force in promoting Tibetan Buddhism on the island. She died at ninety-four in 1997 and is now revered as Gongga Laoren.

The details of the crucial teacher–student relationship between Rinpoché and Shen had for decades been impervious to scholars of Tibetan Buddhism. They found no evidence to support Shen’s claims that she spent the war at Konka Gomba as Rinpoche’s disciple. It is only the recent rediscovery of Johnston’s accounts of his Tibetan journey, particularly the reports of his conversations with Burke and Shen, that confirmed she was indeed the legitimate inheritor of Rinpoché’s religious teachings.

Johnston remembered his Tibetan journey for its exhilarating, if temporary, effect on his own wellbeing. It is testimony to Johnston and Burke’s insatiable curiosity about people, their lands and their cultures that Johnston’s words (like Burke’s Hydra photographs) endured, were rediscovered, and were eventually comprehended in a very different context. Nearly eight decades later, Johnston’s story of war-effected lives colliding in an unforgettable location amid the devastating conclusion to a near-global war has found its full significance. •

We are grateful to the family of James Cobb Burke for their assistance and permission to use the above photographs; and to Professor Yunfei Bai, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, for sharing his knowledge of the ninth Gangkar Rinpoché and Gongga Laoren.

The post George Johnston’s odyssey of war and peace appeared first on Inside Story.

“An Irish Ballad” had been sung already by Mr Lehrer in a television program shown in Adelaide. The Sunday Mail now sent naughty bits from two of the other banned songs into most South Australian homes. “The ban,” said the News, “(as always is the case with bans) has also had the effect of creating much wider attention for Mr Lehrer’s songs than they would otherwise have received.”

It was too much for even the Advertiser, which interviewed Mr Lehrer before the concert, reviewed it sympathetically, reported on Mary Armitage’s page what the ladies wore (“HOT NIGHT AT TOWN HALL”), conducted a street quiz of young people (“AGAINST BAN ON SONGS”), printed three letters against the ban and one for it, and made it the subject of an editorial. “Not everyone can appreciate Tom Lehrer’s brand of humour. But it is a sad soul who cannot get a laugh out of the fact that he has been forbidden to sing some of his best-known songs in Adelaide.” The Advertiser thought that “Be Prepared” was “most unfair to a fine movement,” but that the chief secretary had “made us look slightly ridiculous.”

Leaders of local theatre groups wrote in protest to the News. “Mick,” of Largs, wrote to that paper: “The restrictions placed on Tom Lehrer justify SA’s reputation as a wowser state, but also indirectly reflect on Princess Margaret, who enjoyed his show.” A lady from Toorak Gardens implied in the Advertiser, however, that some royals are more royal than others: “Although he boasts of singing before royalty, I am sure our much-loved Queen would not listen to those which have been banned.”

On the day parliament opened, [the premier] Sir Thomas Playford said that the ban was proper. “I notice,” he said, “that similar action was taken in Queensland, so this action was not peculiar to SA.” This was untrue; in Queensland action was threatened by the police commissioner if Mr Lehrer sang “Be Prepared.” He sang it, and nothing happened. Nowhere else in the world, Mr Lehrer says, had a performance of his been censored.

One pleasant effect of the decision was to give a kind of imprimatur from the chief secretary (who is also our chief Scot) to the material that remained. So, with the approval of Sir Lyell McEwin and in the presence of an inspector and two research assistants from the Vice Squad, Mr Lehrer treated a young and crowded audience to a song about Oedipus and his mother (“the most offensive of the lot,” in the author’s view, “but the censors never object because it goes right over their heads”); to the “Masochism Tango (in which one of the milder passage, is: “Go put on your cleats and come and trample me”); and to the “Old Dope Peddler.” Just before interval he swung into the first bar or two of “Be Prepared,” stopped suddenly, and explained that he just wanted to keep the Vice Squad men on their toes. He plugged his record, which he said was banned in Adelaide but on sale at a joint, just past the fourth church down, which had illicit wine tastings. When he sang, in “Merry Little Minuet,”

There’s rioting in Africa,
They’re starving in Spain,
There’s censorship in Adelaide…

the audience clapped, as it were, their hands off.

The last song, which Mr Lehrer called a survivalist hymn, was a sardonic rhymed tract about nuclear disaster, which on this night ended:

When the world is one big ruin
You and I and Lyell McEwin
We will all go together
Wherever we go.

Then came the most popular item of all, a lecture. He hoped this had been “a fitting anti-climax to the Festival of Arts.” It did seem to him that there was a lot of immorality in this town under our very noses. “My Home Town,” he thought, was not as shocking as a newspaper published in our home town, “called, for reasons that escape me, Truth.” A quick content- analysis of the current issue followed. (The next issue of “Truth,” whose poster said GIRL, 12, POSED IN NUDE,” had no reference at all to Mr Lehrer.) From what he had heard about two intimate revues put on during the Festival, the songs in them made “When You Are Old and Grey” sound like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He was puzzled that a song about a severed hand should be forbidden, while [opera singer] Joan Hammond could not only sing to a severed head, but carry it around the stage, and do a dance clearly intended to arouse illicit passions. Not that he wished to be unfair to our community: “South Australia,” he allowed, “has one of the finest governments of the eighteenth century.”

In a television interview Mr Lehrer said that these days “it’s very difficult to do anything but laugh, if you’re really bothered…” The remark is a clue to his whole act and to the demand for it. The audience in Adelaide would have laughed anyway, but the censors made them laugh all the more. They savoured Mr Lehrer and took part in a joyful demonstration against the sour and mindless Puritanism of their rulers. •

First published in Nation on 9 April 1960

The post Hot night at Town Hall appeared first on Inside Story.

Soon after being founded as a military post — a succession of frontier wars were fought nearby — Grahamstown became the nodal point for the 1820 Settlers, probably the largest state-sponsored scheme sending English people to South Africa. Capturing the trade further in the interior, the town throve. A secessionist movement from the Afrikaner-dominated western Cape soon arose: to appease it, a full session of the Cape parliament met in Grahamstown in 1864. But with the coming of the railways, the town found itself artfully placed on a branch line. Meanwhile huge mineral discoveries at Kimberley (diamonds) and then the Witwatersrand (gold) drained energies away to the North. The editor of the Eastern Star loaded his printing press on to a cart and headed for Johannesburg, where the paper still survives today.

Grahamstown did not give up easily. It began to turn the central Anglican church into a cathedral, adding an extra saint to bring it in line with the new imperial order, St Michael and St George. In the tussle with Cape Town, it had managed to secure an eastern High Court. Meanwhile a number of notable schools established themselves there, perhaps the most significant cluster in the country. These were capped in 1904 by Rhodes University — which still trades under its old name (despite the protests of a few years ago). Brand recognition was deemed to be of greater importance. (Rhodes currently leads in the country’s academic output.)

In the late 1960s, a major presence in the town was Professor Guy Butler. Partly to counter Afrikaner nationalism, he turned to Settler history for material for plays and poems, and envisaged a festival in Grahamstown that might be centred on a memorial hall. The Afrikaner Nationalists were prepared to go along with this — at least the English-speaking whites were now identifying with South Africa, rather than with England. (The hated Union Jack was tactfully deconstructed, apartheid-like, into the flags of the whites tribes of Britain.) Even so, one Afrikaner enthusiast promoted the idea of an Anglostan — centred on Grahamstown.

The monument was duly built on a nearby hill, looking like a Crusader fortress. It was stressed that the governing body would promote English-language activities, which deftly left room for changing tack from 18twentology as the need and demand arose. An annual Science Festival furthered outreach.

But the central occasion remains what has become the National Arts Festival, which since 1974 has been drawing performers and audiences from all over South Africa. Gradually it became open to all races; important theatre works have been premiered there. Originally sponsored by the Standard Bank, it boasted that it had become the largest festival on the African continent. Today the emphasis is on dance, physical theatre and stand-up comics; plays are few. There’s jazz, and an enormous range of acts on the Fringe. The Festival is positively bursting with the energies of a truly multicultural South Africa.

But the people are not coming. Walking down the main street of Makhanda on the festival’s opening day, there were no posters up, no printed program to entice people. An improvised restaurant — a regular feature — contained only a handful at lunch. Rhodes University was on vacation; nothing doing there. Some say the festival, organised from Johannesburg now, has lost touch with its roots. Indeed an exhibition of photographs of the Black Sash (a white women’s opposition movement to apartheid), contained scarcely a photograph from Grahamstown itself, one of its bastions. A sports day organised by the town’s two main colleges, I was told, now draws more people than the festival on an average day. It has been on the slide for some time; the Standard Bank downsized its support some years ago.

The deterioration of the town is also a factor. Power blackouts (“load shedding”) are common — but Makhanda has more than its share. One recent twenty-four-hour one was followed by another, shorter one the next day: thieves had taken advantage of the first to steal copper wiring. Tap water is undrinkable — and the general supply so short that during a drought a few years ago an Islamic organisation, The Gift of the Givers, came to the town’s rescue. Livestock wander about the streets; a donkey (offering his services for a Flight to Egypt?) was photographed at the doors of the cathedral. Then there are the potholes; so many that sometimes people have to swerve off the road. Cars need serious repairs; some doctors advise elderly patients to wear neck braces.

Unfortunately it is fanciful to say that the neglect of the old white town has been due to a reallocation of services, to improve facilities in the former African location. Much is to be done there still: there has been sewage in the streets. The main problem seems to have been the Makana council, where the ANC sits entrenched. Twice the state anti-corruption Special Investigating Unit has examined it, and each time has been deluged with so many cases that it has seized up. And so the council just sits there, in what is one of the most solid ANC provinces.  Meanwhile people liken it to a mafia, complete with criminal acts. Alas, it’s the local version of a national problem: the respected Business Day recently made the extraordinary claim that South Africa was losing up to US$120 billion every year in corruption.

Yet there are a few positive notes. Quite rarely (given apartheid South Africa) you will see a white mother with Black tot. One of these told me that once an African woman came up to her and said, “Do you think you will love him enough?” (The answer in this case was an emphatic yes.) And what is striking about South Africa now — compared with my last visit a dozen years ago — is that Black and white people go about their daily business in a spirit of acceptance, even mild courtesy. There may be more high walls and electric fences, and a rapid response security service, but it is striking nonetheless that there have been no murders of white people in the town. Tellingly, whereas under apartheid the whites’ dogs would bark at Black people — and the Blacks’ dogs bark at the whites — these days the canines play the field, barking at any pedestrian.

It could be said that the white town has rarely looked better: more houses have been done up, some probably by members of the Black middle class, moving in. Others have been the work of parents with children at school in Makhanda, and — since the Net enables them to work from anywhere — they’ve decided to live closer to the kids. But the parents of some university students from elsewhere in the country have given Makhanda the flick, preferring to send their children to Stellenbosch rather than Rhodes.

The white madam still exists, but in muted form. She may have her “regulars,” Africans who call at a particular time for food or some other handout. And might drive to town, since it is deemed not safe for a woman or an old white man to walk about alone. Fifty years ago the Black youths poking about High Street were often dressed in chaff bags. Now there are car guards, paid in food vouchers, who mind parked vehicles. But not always: a friend returned to his car one day to find it missing — stolen, with the car guard vociferously demanding payment regardless.

Problems can surface at any time. There’s no point in posting anything, since the South African post office barely functions. And there are endless problems owing to shortages. A malfunctioning toilet may stay that way because the necessary parts are in short supply, and have to be shipped. But then changing Australian banknotes can also be a problem. Two banks failed me in a row, because their whole foreign exchange system was “down.” The second bank manager explained apologetically: nowadays “It’s another country!”

The cathedral is still there, of course, and has a mixed congregation. On its walls are many plaques, commemorating deeds of derring-do against the Kaffirs. As this is South Africa’s n- word, the church authorities covered the offending parts of the inscriptions with the soothing words of honeyed Anglicanism. But this was not enough. Strips of matching stone are now plastered over the offending words.

Not far away is St Bartholemew’s, a vigorous building with a superb Victorian pipe organ. It once catered to the (white) artisan class of the town. The morning I went there were four people present, including a Black woman. A man, rather surly-looking, got up and left shortly after. He was not happy that the communion wine and wafers had been pre-consecrated. For the priest was away; so too the organist. Two women stood in to lead the service. The hymns were spoken, not sung. Suddenly there was a click, click, click. An old man on crutches slowly made his way into the church, and up to the communion table. Gnarled, hair thick and streaming, trousers hitched. A poor white looking for a swig? No, a former classics master. The ghost of Grahamstown past.

“We’re stuck!” says a former Rhodes staff member to another retiree who’s just joined us for coffee. “So am I!” he says, as they exchange exhausted smiles. Indeed there’s a new term for those who have left for the Cape, “semigration.” The place is reverting to its prime condition of being a frontier town. Some Brits, with the coming of independence to India, spoke of “staying on”; sometimes the whites in Makhanda seem to be simply hanging on, their lives tautened by daily challenges. •

The post Return to Gra Makhanda appeared first on Inside Story.

Hirst might have found the idea that anyone was likely to agree with everything that anyone else said as amusing as his sudden prominence on social media. He would certainly have found the implication that anyone could agree with everything he had to say a most peculiar one. For Hirst prided himself on his resistance to the current of fashionable opinion, and he was above all else a fiercely independent intellectual.

I’ve thought long and hard about why Hirst evoked this kind of response. He evoked it in me, too, and in many others I know. Apart from his personal generosity and kindness, I think it was because he wasn’t afraid to argue a case — historical or political — from a set of premises he knew to be debatable. Even if you could not accept those premises — for instance, that border protection was not thoroughly entangled in Australia’s distinctive and resilient politics of race — it was hard not to admire the passion, the fluency and the consistency with which Hirst would then prosecute his argument. The value was really in the case itself which, in his hands, would take flight with wings of its own.

Hirst was not really a historian of the “look at this startling new document I found today” type, although he was certainly no slouch among the dusty archive boxes. He ranged widely but I believe was at his best in writing about colonial Australia — the sharpest of his historical articles and essays on the nineteenth century disclose a raw intellectual power decades after they were first published. He never seemed quite as comfortable when venturing far into the twentieth century.

A South Australian by birth and education, his doctoral research culminated in a fine study, Adelaide and the Country, 1870–1917: Their Social and Political Relationship (1973), that remains the standard work on its subject. But it was the appearance of his Convict Society and Its Enemies a decade later that announced the arrival of a historian of real originality.

In effect, Hirst founded a school of historical writing about convict Australia that is usually — if somewhat simplistically — referred to as the “normalisers.” The convict system, he argued, had suffered bad press in being presented as a form of slavery. Those who had wanted to end transportation had portrayed it as a brutal system dominated by chains and floggings, one that debased master and convict alike. He argued that this was essentially political rhetoric put about by enemies of the convict system; it did not correspond with a more prosaic reality. Colonial New South Wales, he said, “was not a society which had to become free; its freedoms were well established from the earliest times.” Even Robert Hughes, who would later write a bestseller indebted to the very image of convict society Hirst had tried to overturn, could not but admire the persuasiveness of his argument.

Hirst was not afraid to take up some of the big controversies and puzzles in Australian historical writing — as in Australian History in 7 Questions (2014) — or to challenge the orthodoxies created by the profession’s biggest names. So Geoffrey Blainey thought distance shaped Australia? Hirst was doubtful, and he outlined his case to his colleagues with characteristic eloquence in their premier professional journal, Historical Studies, in 1975. Russel Ward reckoned that the noble bushman, the pastoral worker, was the typical Australian? What about the pioneer, asked Hirst in the same journal in 1978; the conservative and patriotic small farmer who was also widely noticed and frequently celebrated? The federation of the Australian colonies was a mere business deal? Hirst wrote a whole book, and a very good one, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (2000), putting that one to rest, presenting it instead as the fruit of nationalist idealism.

Hirst understood that nationalist idealism particularly well because he felt it so strongly himself. But I also sensed disappointment here; Australia never quite lived up to his ambitions for it. In these matters, he sometimes seemed like a talented bowler stuck on a pitch — his home turf, no less — offering precious little encouragement.

Hirst did not shy away from the fundamentally political and contemporary nature of historical writing, including his own. But his politics were much harder to pin down than the predictable 2016 headline in the Australian proclaiming him a “culture warrior” might lead one to imagine. He was an active and principled supporter of public education but became a critic of what he regarded as some of the sloppier, levelling versions of progressive pedagogy. He believed in economic redistribution but came to worry about welfare dependence. He thought Australia’s immigration program a great success but was a sceptic about some versions of multicultural ideology. He was a Labor voter by instinct and practice — he had been greatly angered by the dismissal of the Whitlam government — but increasingly presented as a disappointed Labor man. At one point during the Howard era he declared in an op­ed piece that he was a social democrat and therefore a supporter of John Howard!

He was out of sympathy with the libertarianism of the 1970s, a period that coincided with his work on Convict Society and Its Enemies; by his own account, working on that book changed his “bedrock assumptions about the world.” Hirst often found himself sympathising not with the convicts — which would have been a familiar enough stand for someone of the left — but with the masters and others in authority. His understanding, he recalled, was influenced by dealing with a “very rebellious teenager” at home: “I was under siege myself as I watched masters trying to control convicts”: an unusual insight into the relationship between this — or perhaps any — private man and public historian.

Other distinguished books followed: in 1988, the year of the Bicentenary, there was The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848–1884; perhaps less successful than the startling Convict Society and Its Enemies but all the same an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Australian political culture and one I still use in my own teaching and research. Hirst puzzled over how democracy seemed to have come into being “almost without a struggle” — a claim that has been hotly contested by others in the years since he wrote — and somewhat in the manner of E.M. Forster he seemed to want to offer only two cheers for the results. “But why should we care what [democracy] was like?,” Hirst asked at the beginning of the book, then answering his own question: “because in many fundamentals this is the political world we still inhabit.”

Hirst did not jump on and off bandwagons. A republican out of historical expertise and political conviction, he threw himself into the cause with passion and energy. He served as the Australian Republican Movement’s first Victorian convener and was also appointed by the Keating government to its Republic Advisory Committee. He did not commit himself to republicanism because it was flavour of the month, but rather out of a belief that Australian democracy would be incomplete for as long as its people owed allegiance to the British monarchy.

As he made clear in A Republican Manifesto (1994), Hirst did not see a republican Australia as a break with our British past but rather as completing a decolonising and democratising process he had traced through his major works of Australian history since the 1970s. The Republican Movement’s weakness for glitzy celebrities, however, ensured that the country’s leading republican intellectual would have no place at the table when a convention finally met in Canberra to devise a model for a referendum. The occasion and the nation were the poorer for it.

There were perhaps some complex issues on which he might have been well advised not to tread — the area of family law and fathers’ rights springs to mind — but it was hard not to see the usual Hirst traits in this business; his compassion for a student in distress; the embrace of a cause and a case he considered right; his concern with political and legal authority; his belief that historians should be public intellectuals grappling with difficult things that mattered. He was a frequent contributor to newspaper opinion pages not because he particularly enjoyed the limelight — I never sensed any desire for fame — but because it was part of his ideal of engaged citizenship. He set a high bar for himself in such matters. There was a fierce intensity to many of his contributions to the media. These were invariably delivered in his spare but compelling prose.

The public saw a creative historian capable of engaging a wide audience, as well as a public intellectual who delighted, infuriated and provoked. Hirst’s colleagues in academia knew this John Hirst, but also a generous colleague and decent man. He spent a long career at La Trobe University in Melbourne, contributing to making its history program one of the strongest in the country. He was a committed teacher as well as a highly successful supervisor of postgraduate theses on a bewildering array of topics. Several of his students are now successful history professors in their own right, often with historical interests and political opinions diametrically opposed to Hirst’s, yet grateful for the guidance and support he offered them as young scholars. He also edited Historical Studies (now Australian Historical Studies) for a time.

And the large number of tributes that appeared on the web in the weeks following Hirst’s passing attest to the boards and committees on which Hirst served, even during a busy retirement. Governments from both sides of politics felt able to call on his skills, judgment and expertise. After his work for the Keating government, the Howard government asked him to chair the Civics Education Group and advise on a history curriculum. Meanwhile, a new generation of postgraduate history students at the University of Sydney learned from him the craft of historical writing, just as new readers of his work in several countries can enjoy his bestselling The Shortest History of Europe, published like most of Hirst’s later work by Black Inc., which was a surprising late season fruit of his teaching at La Trobe. It was translated into Chinese, something about which he was justly proud when I last saw him.

I cannot claim to have known John well but our acquaintanceship went back over twenty years, and he was a generous supporter of my career at critical junctures. In later years, I visited him at his home in Coburg occasionally, where we would have a coffee either in a nearby shop or in his and Christine’s front room. I always enjoyed these brief moments in his company.

We last exchanged emails just a few weeks before his death: he wrote to congratulate me on my book on the 1980s, which he’d just read. Having encountered a passage in it on Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat,” he had looked up YouTube to see what all the fuss was about. Couldn’t hear a word of it, John reported, but it spoke of his intellectual openness that he had bothered looking. I suggested he try the Johnny Cash cover version. •

This is Frank Bongiorno’s introduction to John Hirst: Selected Writings, published this month by La Trobe University Press. For a $7 discount on the cover price, order here using the code JOHNHIRST at checkout.

The post A political world we still inhabit appeared first on Inside Story.

The year was 1996. John Howard had just been anointed prime minister and Parliament House was buzzing. Politicians who had spent what felt like a lifetime in opposition saw a ministerial career finally within reach. And we were there, along for the ride: electorate officers travelling to Canberra on sitting weeks, feeding off the crumbs of excitement that fell to the bottom of the food chain. As true believers, we were happy to work long hours on crappy salaries and two-star travel allowances just for the buzz of walking through the hallowed halls. We were naive enough to feel ourselves on the cusp of something great.

Our lanyards told the world that this was where we belonged, which is why I offered my commiserations when I introduced myself to John at a function for newly elected parliamentarians. Someone had jumbled the consonants and come up with “Pessuto,” making an otherwise solid Italian surname unpronounceable. But its bearer was upbeat. “It happens all the time,” he said, rolling his eyes. He would get it sorted.

Having all received the “loose lips” speech from our bosses, we staffers tended to be cagey. Over lunch in the canteen, though, John was chatty and affable without being awestruck like the rest of us. He had indeed planned to come to Canberra — but as an MP. While I would have been happy to sweep floors just for thethrill of being around on sitting weeks, he had pictured himself lunching upstairs in the white-tableclothed members’ dining room, rather than down here at parliament’s monopoly purveyor of cafe-style food.

As sitting weeks came and went, I ended up getting the full story. After finishing a law degree at Melbourne University, he’d moved back to Traralgon, in Gippsland, and challenged the sitting federal member for preselection. He lost — as might have been expected. But the member for what was then the seat of McMillan, Russell Broadbent, was impressed enough to give him a job (keep your friends close, etc…). And here John was, lunching with a group of lowly staffers while his vaulting ambition and clear mental roadmap meant he was never truly one of us.

Machine men may do well in the ALP, but to be a hit with Liberal Party members in Melbourne’s inner-eastern heartland you need to bring life experience to the table — assuming your life experience is that of a business executive, a partner in a top-tier law firm or a researcher for a dark-money libertarian think-tank. Unlike us, John knew that every moment spent schlepping around Canberra for another politician was time he should have been using to schmooze branch presidents. He needed to be in those Melbourne suburbs awash with Liberal-held seats.

For me, at least, they were heady days. I wrote my member’s maiden speech and listened to my words being read in parliament — an indescribable honour for someone who fancied himself as a Graham Freudenberg in the making. I would watch the theatre of parliamentary debate on the office monitor — not question time, which is when we would go to lunch, but the lonely, unrewarding speeches to an empty chamber or the tedious committee work delving deep into policy. The parts of the job that our bosses saw as peripheral at best were all I really cared about. I would chisel away at the words on a computer screen late into the night, reading them out loud in the empty toilet cubicle at the end of the green-carpeted corridor and trying to imagine what they would sound like in the House of Reps.

My days in Canberra would start at 5am at a low-budget hotel, followed by a taxi ride to Parliament House. The first engagement was somewhere around 6am, when a select group of Victorian Liberal parliamentarians and their staff would congregate in the offices of Petro Georgiou, a former party director who had gone on to become the member for Kooyong.

It was an intimidating experience. Georgiou would sit behind his desk, blowing cigarette smoke upwards and allowing it to descend on us like a thick London fog. Each of the staffers presented a summary of the top political stories covered by the papers, looking to the oracle of Kooyong for his take. His every utterance was absorbed breathlessly by the parliamentarians in the room. These muttered insights were the closest thing a newly elected backbencher would ever get to a political education.

Although Georgiou had only been in parliament for a couple of years, he had already been pushed to the outer. The unconfirmed story was that Howard had offered him a role as parliamentary secretary and Georgiou had told him to get fucked. Literally: he had told the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia to go fuck himself. The story may have been apocryphal, but it felt right in the telling.

I would watch Georgiou like a hawk, noticing every word, every roll of his eyes, every impatient snort, even as the inhaled nicotine knocked months off my life.

One morning I mixed up news stories involving two Aboriginal activists: brothers Mick and Patrick Dodson. When Georgiou asked me which one I was talking about, I panicked and said: “The one who wears a hat.” He thumped the newspapers on my desk, pointed at the pictures and shouted: “They’ve both got fucking hats!” These are, as they say, foundational memories.

As for John, he continued to meet up with other staffers at the cafeteria, where we would studiously avoid discussing anything overtly political — for good reason. First, we feared revealing something our bosses didn’t want ventilated in public, which could be anything and everything, according to the politicians’ ever-evolving insecurities. More importantly, though, there were the deepseated ideological differences that dated back to the Liberal Party’s creation in 1944.

Not every staffer at the table would have been aware of the party’s cultural history and only a handful would have been able to place their personal views on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum. Nonetheless, our conversations were usually permeated with the unease of people who didn’t know if they were breaking bread with ideological friends or foes.

This uncertainty meant we were often reduced to talking about TV shows — the latest episode of Seinfeld could help us fill the awkward silences and ensure we all got along. As is often the case with political types, my colleagues enjoyed a joke but none of them had what could be described as a sense of humour, which entails self-deprecation and a willingness to embrace the absurdity of the human condition.

Like the other creatures of the party, John wasn’t given to prolonged introspection. Yet he was certainly capable of it. And as was the case with many old-school liberals I came to know, he was determined to downplay his idealism lest the hard-nosed, pragmatic conservatives take it as a sign of weakness.

He managed all exchanges with confidence, exuding a maturity beyond his years. I now realise that he was a year younger than me, but at the time he felt older. If he’d had a rebellious youth, you’d never have known it; I couldn’t picture him wearing anything other than a suit and tie. Yet he could be warm and engaging. While cautious in what he said, he’d never duck a question. As someone who lived and breathed politics, he was happy to share his knowledge: the Victorian party’s key figures, the structure, the make-up of the executive, the preselection challenges.

As for me, it’s not that I was totally devoid of political ambition. But I was attracted to this world mainly because I had come to see politics as a great contest of ideas that could allow people to effect real change. I had spent my adolescence in Italy at the end of the “years of lead,” when terrorism from all sides had chiselled away at democratic institutions and freedom had been left hanging by a thread. Compared to that, life in Australia’s Parliament House was heaven; my peripheral participation in the rituals of a stable albeit dreary parliamentary democracy somehow felt reassuring. I had become a zealous proponent of boring normality.

The respectable mediocrity of the politicians I met, their suburban accountants’ worldview, was all part of the attraction. Behind the vanilla personalities and entrenched indifference to big-picture issues, they all appeared to have the potential to become a steady, sensible, mildly reactionary leader like John Howard turned out to be. They would work hard, keep out of trouble and enjoy an occasional research trip to safe, English-speaking countries, carefully timed to take in the cricket at Lord’s. Where the Italian politicians I had observed had been both erudite and unfailingly incompetent, the parliamentarians I met in Australia were the opposite: uninspiring and under-read, yet somehow capable of rising to most occasions.

That said, after just a few months in the job I could feel my enthusiasm waning. With every taxi ride to the airport, every commute to my MP’s electoral office in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, a part of me seemed to be dying. The more Pesutto got into the groove, the more I felt myself stuck in a rut.

You hear about the gruelling lifestyle and the toll it takes, but it’s hard to fully understand unless you’ve lived it. Every late-night meeting I attended, every branch function I signed up for, was time away from the normal life of a twenty-six-year-old. There were no moving pictures in the dark of a cinema, no memorable books to absorb in an outdoor cafe, no late nights with friends, no chance to find someone to fall in love with (other than fellow staffers — a recipe for disaster if ever there was one). It wasn’t just the boredom of the events that would drain you; it was the feeling of missing out on life.

More importantly, though, I sensed that I wouldn’t be able to navigate the ideological storm that was brewing. I was in Parliament House, watching from the office’s monitors, when Pauline Hanson gave her “swamped by Asians” speech. From that moment on, I sensed that there would be no going back. The mutterings of many MPs and senators I encountered suggested they were sympathetic to Hanson’s position and concerned about her speech resonating in their electorates; those within the party who objected to her sentiments didn’t seem to have the clout or the intellectual heft to counter them. The liberalism of Malcolm Fraser was being consigned to the history books; his last disciple, Petro Georgiou, had been left floundering at the party’s periphery.

I was already familiar with Hanson, who had been elected as the independent member for Oxley after being expelled from the Liberal Party. I would see her in the corridors and, unusually for an MP, she would have lunch in the canteen alongside her controversial staffer, John Pasquarelli, a bald, black-shirted former member of Papua New Guinea’s pre-independence assembly. She was also the only politician who showed up to the special briefings for new staff offered by the Parliamentary Library, which is where I got to see her up close.

The intriguing thing about Hanson was that there was no gap between her public and private persona. The library staff, many with PhDs in economics, wouldn’t be able to make it through their presentations because of her constant interruptions. It wasn’t just her encyclopaedic ignorance that stood out; it was her determination not to be condescended to by people she clearly considered out of touch with reality. She would question everything and roll her eyes when she got an answer she didn’t like or, more often, didn’t believe. “You would say that” was her frequent response.

Hanson had no chip on her shoulder about her lack of education — in fact, the opposite was true. She thought she was better than those who mocked her. Her “please explain” moment wasn’t underpinned by insecurity; she honestly thought that anyone using words like “xenophobic” was an idiot who would be held in contempt by the real Australia she claimed to represent.

We forget how shocking her first speech to parliament was at the time; how the targeting of a particular community had long been a taboo for politicians. It was a particularly significant moment for the Liberal Party because the response to those sentiments would go on to heighten the differences between the often-misunderstood founding factions of Menzies’s child.

Even without the spectre of a rising far right to grapple with, these were tough times. I spent three months working for an MP from Victoria, then returned to university to finish a degree before lasting another three months with an MP in country New South Wales. But the real turmoil came when I responded to the expectation that staffers would be their MPs’ eyes and ears among the membership and agreed to join a party branch in Melbourne. I had no idea what I was supposed to watch out for.

I remember one meeting of the party’s Kew Central branch, in Melbourne’s Liberal Party heartland, in which elderly party members spent hours debating a motion dealing with military hardware. I would close my eyes and visualise my life slipping away like sand through the proverbial hourglass. At home, my father would always bang on about how his had been una vita vissuta — a “lived life.” Would I be able to say the same at the end of it all? Would I look back from my death bed and see those Liberal Party branch meetings as moments in a life that had been worth living?

Luckily, there were also party functions that introduced me to a cross-section of inner-eastern party membership that I found easier to relate to than the people I met in my day job in the sprawling outer east. Back then it was still possible to encounter members whose outlook was tinged by pragmatic progressivism — well-heeled types, often the product of private schools. Their belief in social justice may have been more noblesse oblige than radical commitment, but when you find someone in the Liberal Party prepared to do the right thing you’re just thankful that they’re ready to show up and be counted.

It was in this period that I first met Kay Patterson, an inner-eastern Melbourne Liberal senator. If there was a political ideology associated with those suburbs, Patterson embodied it: progressive without being ideologically driven, interested in individual rights balanced against general notions of social justice. She wouldn’t have been as deeply into liberalism as my hero, the late senator Alan Missen, but the few interactions I had with her — including the crushing handshake designed to teach me that a firm grasp is everything in politics — left me impressed.

Unlike the NSW division, the Liberal Party of Victoria didn’t have ideologically defined factions. There may well have been wets and dries, moderates and conservatives, but they weren’t locked in preselection tussles like the factions in Sydney. It tended to be more an issue of geography: the further you ventured down the Eastern Freeway and onto what’s now the Monash Freeway, the more conservative party members seemed to become. Religion, which members in the inner-east would wear very lightly or not talk about at all, was a factor in outer-suburban politics. And because those seats were often marginal, the impact of these conservative party members appeared to be magnified. Liberal politicians were eager not to antagonise even the craziest constituents and party members.

To survive the week in the Deakin electorate office, I took to watching Sixty Minutes as part of my Sunday night ritual. I knew that when Nine’s flagship current affairs program featured dole-bludgers or victims of crime you could bet on the office receiving calls from irate constituents on Monday morning. Back in the inner east where I’d grown up, though, my Liberal-voting mother had never allowed us to watch anything other than what Peter Dutton described at the “hate media” — namely, the ABC.

We Australians are uncomfortable discussing class, which is why the ideological struggles within the Liberal Party are poorly articulated. In Melbourne’s east, the clash was broadly between Menzies’s Forgotten People — the established middle classes — and those we would come to know as Howard’s battlers, members of the socially conservative lower middle class who might have voted Labor a generation ago. It was all about class.

The weaponisation of the “doctors’ wives” moniker was linked to these social divisions. Out in the land of upward mobility and sprawling shopping malls, the expression was used by conservative party members to conjure up an image of do-gooder establishment types with too much time on their hands. Real people out in the suburbs dealing with cost-of-living challenges wouldn’t have the time or the inclination to dabble in lefty issues like Indigenous rights or refugees. If you had tried to tell the outer-suburban Tories that, in fact, the Federal Women’s Committee — the paradigmatic doctors’ wives — had played a central role in the creation of the Liberal Party, they wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. Their knowledge of the party’s history was close to zero.

When the independent teal candidate, Monique Ryan, won Kooyong in 2022, she took pleasure in riffing on what she saw as the sexist undertones of the Liberals’ references to “doctors’ wives.” She pointed out that, far from being a doctor’s wife, she was herself a paediatric neurologist — suggesting that the Liberals were stuck in a world in which women were married to male breadwinners.

Yet after my year in the 1990s dabbling in Liberal Party politics, I would argue that to see the “doctor’s wife” as merely the product of 1950s sexist archetypes was itself misogynistic. At the Liberal Party functions I attended there were indeed wealthy women with time on their hands, often with children who had just finished high school. They tended to be busy Beryl Beaurepaire types and were the backbone of progressive politics within the party. They would show up to branch meetings, do the numbers, speak to local politicians about issues of concern and helped rein in the more divisive policy ideas that many of the aloof male party members conjured up. Doctors’ wives in the inner east were overwhelmingly a force for good.

Whether it was a decision predicated on ideology or political pragmatism, Pesutto decided to throw his lot in with the inner-eastern suburbs and everything that entailed. He left Broadbent’s office, moved to Melbourne and started working as a lawyer for what was then DLA Phillips Fox, while doing whatever he could to boost his profile within the party. As for me, I had decided to return to journalism and was happy to let my party membership lapse, promising myself I would never return.

One day I caught up with John for a lunch somewhere on Glenferrie Road in Hawthorn, close to where he was now living, and we reflected on our time as staffers commuting to Canberra. By that time, dissatisfaction with Georgiou in Kooyong party branches was being discussed openly. Given the local expectations that such a celebrated seat would be occupied by party leaders and ministers of the crown, the unhappiness was more about his lack of career progress than his progressive politics. Under Howard, Georgiou wasn’t going anywhere.

Others would ask whether this was the right electorate for a party machine man, which is what Georgiou had been before entering parliament; and there were also those who said he just wasn’t the right person for Kooyong, which could mean just about anything.

That hostility towards the sitting member would have been tricky for Pesutto to manage as a prospective candidate looking around for preselection opportunities. Georgiou’s problem was that he wasn’t particularly presentable. These were party branches with treasured memories of the suntanned charisma of Andrew Peacock, whose Colt-of-Kooyong persona had little in common with Georgiou smoking in the corner and uttering “fuuuuck!” under his breath. And because he had been born in Greece he looked and sounded unlike anyone who had been in the seat before him.

Pesutto was himself what my father would have called “visibly Italian” — although I still don’t know whether that would have played against him. It would certainly have been a reminder that he was an outsider, in the sense that he had grown up in Gippsland in a very different social context. Going to the right schools in Australia is as much about staking a claim to social status as it is about gaining access to a network of former classmates who end up in strategically significant positions. John would have had to build a web of support from scratch.

I used to joke that if the concept of ethnic branch-stacking had been extended to Australians of Anglo-Celtic descent in the Liberal Party, it would have been front-page news. At functions I would be introduced to someone’s cousin, or brother-in-law, or step-aunt. There were branches full of members with respectable names and connections who didn’t show up for meetings but were out there — lurking, ready to be called upon when required. John didn’t have any of these networks.

It would have been some time in 2009 that he made his first high-profile move towards elected office. Georgiou had finally announced his retirement and party members in Kooyong were starting to position themselves for preselection. Ultimately, it was a polite contest among Josh Frydenberg, Institute of Public Affairs director John Roskam and Pesutto, who was leveraging his enormous work supporting local campaigns and just showing up.

I had taken a year’s paternity leave from my job at the ABC and had agreed to write a series of profiles of influential community members for the local Italian paper while grappling with two screaming toddlers at home. John was a good place to start.

DLA Phillips Fox, the firm later absorbed by DLA Piper, offered us a bland conference room for our chat and we eased in by swapping stories about how we used to get lost in Parliament House all that time ago. Once the recorder was on, though, the conversation became more cautious. John told me it would be improper to talk about either the preselection process or his rival Frydenberg — fine, I had expected that. But he also appeared baffled by what I assumed would have been the most basic of questions for a community publication: how did the child of a working-class migrant family from regional Victoria find himself throwing his hat into the ring for a seat that most people would associate with Robert Menzies or Andrew Peacock? Wouldn’t the Labor Party have been a more obvious choice?

“The irony is that the very things that can give you mobility in life are the very things that the Liberal Party espouses,” he said. “For example, the notion of the discipline required to lift yourself out of poverty… and my dad had known poverty, like a lot of Italians before they came out here… The only way you can get out of that is through the virtues that have influenced my thinking and my approach to life, which is ‘lift yourself up by discipline.’”

Looking back at my clippings, I realise that my interviews with other Italian-Australian Liberals, including NSW senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Queensland senator Santo Santoro, had highlighted similar ideas — often a broad notion that the act of migration is inherently an expression of individualism or a striving for upward mobility. In Fierravanti-Wells’s case, it was underpinned by the entrenched social conservatism of Roman Catholicism; for the others, it was a culture acquired by parents who largely grew up under Italian fascism. (That’s not to say they were politically fascist, just anti-left.) But John, who had always struck me as on the liberal side of the conservative–liberal spectrum, appeared inspired by the individualism at the heart of liberalism rather than by its social conservatism. And whatever values he had acquired at his Catholic high school in Gippsland didn’t feature prominently in his political outlook.

I asked John for a few family photos to use for the article. He went one better, producing an article from a local newspaper dated 27 September 1963 featuring a photo of his newly married parents standing in front of the house that his then twenty-seven-year-old father had recently built. “I love this article — the picture is really moving for me,” he said. “There they are, starting a new life. They couldn’t speak English. I just love it.”

Although his sisters had been solid influences on his thinking, John could pinpoint the moment he became interested in politics. “I remember I was around sixteen and I wrote an essay on the history of the ACTU,” he told me. “Suddenly, I found a source of interest, which was politics. So, it was in early Year 11 that I started to realise that I could see a higher purpose for me. Because before then I really hadn’t.” The way he recounted the story suggested that it was the calling of politics, rather than the lure of a political philosophy, that led him to where he was.

During the Kooyong preselection, Pesutto was seen as the candidate for the more socially progressive side of the Victorian party. To the extent that factions existed in the state, he was part of the grouping led by former premier Jeff Kennett, although he also appeared to have built bridges with the more conservative Kroger–Costello faction, which was supporting Frydenberg.

Part of his broader appeal as a potential candidate was the fact that his focus as a lawyer on industrial relations had ticked a few credibility boxes. Former treasurer Peter Costello had built a career around his legal work in the 1985 Dollar Sweets industrial dispute and had created something of a blueprint for those considering a life in centre-right politics.

Costello’s position within the Liberal Party had been strengthened in 2008 when he chaired the committee reviewing the party’s structures and culture in the wake of its defeat in the “Kevin 07” federal election. The committee ended up recommending a flattening of the party structures that effectively reduced the importance of branch-level politics. All party members, not just the branch delegates, would get a vote in preselection contests — something that made Pesutto’s attempt for preselection in Kooyong a chance to unleash some retail campaigning in addition to the usual schmoozing of party potentates.

My childhood home was not far from Kooyong’s southern border. Our house was nothing flashy — a three-bedroom investment property owned by my mother’s parents, who lived only a few blocks away in Malvern. Yet this was leafy Toorak, one of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs, which had voted Liberal since the party was founded in 1944 (and was destined to become part of Kooyong after the 2024 redistribution).

My mother’s people were of solid Scottish stock, their Presbyterianism having somehow given way to a less ostentatious form of Anglicanism that was taken seriously but never really talked about. Patriotism was of the understated kind and usually expressed by listening to the cricket on the radio and a strict adherence to not just the spirit but also the letter of the law. They had a zealous sense of honesty and respect for the state. If they found a wallet, they would move mountains to track down the owner and hand it back, with no reward requested or accepted; they viewed tax evaders with the disdain the rest of us would reserve for a mass murderer.

To the best of my knowledge, they had always voted conservative — it’s hard to imagine an upper-middle class, Anglican family doing anything else. My mother had inherited her politics from them, although she supported Gough Whitlam in 1972 and then again in 1973, before returning, chastened, to the Liberal fold. She and my father also had a brief dalliance with the Australian Democrats in 1977. (A campaign banner bolted to the roof of our family Fiat 132 caused me unspeakable embarrassment.) But that fad also passed — in fact, had it not been for multiple copies of Don Chipp’s The Third Man on our bookshelf, my parents would have denied it ever happened.

You could argue that my mother’s decision to marry an Italian immigrant was also the manifestation of a progressive streak; her classmates from the Geelong Church of England’s Girls Grammar School all embraced far more conventional trajectories. There she was — instinctively conservative and too disturbed by the strong Australian accents of Labor Party leaders to countenance a serious move to the left. Yet she was socially progressive and often moved by a strong sense of social justice, which only became more evident after years working as a primary-school teacher in working-class Richmond.

My father’s path to the Liberal Party was very different. He had arrived in Australia in 1960 driven not by poverty but by the need to break free of Italian society’s many strictures. He didn’t like being told what to do, and he wanted to run his own business — something that wouldn’t have been possible back home. He was no fan of communists, of which there was no shortage in postwar Italy, and also instinctively disliked labour unions. He defined his politics as classical liberal, although he drifted into conservatism as the years went by.

Dad was a product of the city where he was born and raised: Venice. Living there in the 1930s wasn’t like living through the Serenissima’s 1400s heyday, but it still had an outward-looking, free-market swagger. My grandfather, a Tuscan immigrant who had been a first world war fighter pilot, ended up running a water-taxi company on the Grand Canal; my father’s mother came from a family of shipbuilders.

My father saw Venice as laudably un-Italian in its flat government structure — a product, he would argue, of the fact that all social classes had an interest in commerce. As for social hierarchies, he used to say that when you’re transporting precious goods across the Adriatic and you spot a ship full of scimitar-wielding Saracens on the horizon, all inequalities fall away. Whether you’re the child of servants or the heir to a doge, you’re all fighting for your survival and the commercial success of your voyage. The culture of Venice, he would say, was liberista — based on a belief in free markets.

Whether any of this was true is debatable. In postwar Italy, the city of Venice was usually run by communist or post-communist mayors, even when the rest of the Veneto region was solidly centre-right. But this is how my father framed his own politics and why he voted for the Liberal Party as soon as he became a citizen. Unlike other immigrants, though, he was never a zealot for hard work. On Saturdays you could find him at the tennis courts of St Peter’s church, on Toorak Road — a pastime that may have been his only motivation in having us baptised Roman Catholic.

My father would have identified with the key message of Pesutto’s connection between Italian migration and the Liberal Party as an expression of individual striving. He saw his arrival in the country as emblematic of his drive and initiative; and even if he had experienced discrimination — how could he not have? — he never saw himself as a victim. Even when working as a waiter at the Atheneum Club (where he would regularly serve his future father-in-law), he always saw himself as a small-business person in pectore, in his heart of hearts, waiting for the right opportunity.

My parents were moderate Liberal voters, yet they would often come to the same conclusion via very different cultural traditions. I remember when, in 2001, the Howard government refused the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa permission to dock in Australia, mum and dad both bristled. My mother was horrified by the lack of compassion — something she saw as both immoral but also slightly tacky, as though the Liberal Party had become déclassé by embracing such nastiness.

My father, the believer in open borders, was horrified that a boatload of potential workers was being denied entry to a country that, he believed, still needed the shot in the arm that comes from immigration. “Let them work!” he would shout at the television. “Let them spend! Let them consume!”

During my brief career in Liberal Party politics I saw people landing on a moderate, pragmatic centre-right outlook for different reasons. And it wasn’t just establishment types — even back then, the inner east attracted both old and new money, along with upwardly mobile migrants with an eye on getting their kids to jump through the hoops of respectability: private schools, university at Melbourne or Monash, a job that was both respectable and respected. Somehow, they also tended to be socially progressive.

Meanwhile, as I write this, the political career of perhaps Victoria’s highest-profile socially progressive Liberal appears to be on life support. Not only was John Pesutto removed from the leadership of the state opposition, but a court has ordered him to pay $2.3 million in penalties and legal costs to the woman he defamed — conservative Liberal politician Moira Deeming. At the eleventh hour the party has agreed to lend him $1.55 million to avoid seeing him thrown out of parliament as a bankrupt.

I had always assumed that John would be able to fight back when the conservatives came for him. Now I’m starting to wonder where he finds the energy. Should he leave parliament tomorrow, he’d soon be earning enough to repay his debts without breaking a sweat. The problem for the party, though, is that Pesutto’s departure would tarnish its reputation and harm its electability even further.

So, how did it come to this? Other than making the mistake of defaming Deeming, what brought Pesutto down?

The problem is that he was always an outsider. Not belonging to any of the party’s three constituencies was both his strength and his undoing.

The first chunk of the party is the one tasked with finding jobs for the idiot sons of the establishment (and, only very occasionally, the idiot daughters). No surprises there: if you grew up in Toorak, you’d have friends or family members who have used their networks to spend a lifetime of failing upwards. I certainly do.

As for the outer east, that was the chunk of the party under the influence of the religious types: the people small-l liberals would refer to disparagingly as the “God botherers.” Just as Australians were turning their back on organised religion, the Liberal Party was busy producing candidates supported by branch-level zealots determined to impose their moral framework on mainstream Australia.

Then there was a third chunk: those who may have stood a chance but were often burdened by the kind of smarmy, humourless mediocrity I saw in so many of the elected officials I met over the years. For every Malcolm Turnbull you would meet fifty Scott Morrisons. And it wasn’t about elected officials’ lack of formal education — they all had university degrees. It was the lack of curiosity about the world around them, their reluctance to read or to get deeply involved in policy.

Every time I recall branch meetings full of pleasant, elderly blokes with a bee in their bonnet about Collins-class submarines it’s clear that this was a membership no longer fit for purpose. Every time I listen in to parliamentary debates, in particular Senate Estimates, I’m struck by how few of the party’s elected members have taken the time to understand the issue before cross-examining witnesses. They haven’t even glanced at the Wikipedia entry.

Of all the people I met in the party over the years, John was perhaps the only who stood a chance against these constituencies because he wasn’t weighed down by an allegiance to any one of them. The flip side of that coin was that his rise to public office was unnecessarily slow and marked by humiliations, suggesting the struggle that lay ahead.

After losing the Kooyong preselection to Josh Frydenberg in 2009, John had a stint at the Institute of Public Affairs before joining the office of the Victorian premier — the Liberals had made one of their increasing rare returns to the government benches — where he ended up as legal counsel to the leader, Denis Napthine. He then put his name forward in Deakin — the outer-suburban electorate where I had worked back in 1996. But he was beaten by Michael Sukkar, the since defenestrated conservative Catholic MP who had leveraged his connections to Christian groups in the electorate. Elected in 2013, Sukkar would go on to oppose marriage equality during the plebiscite and abstain from the vote in parliament.

Finally, ahead of the 2014 state election, Pesutto’s streak of rebuffs came to an end when he secured preselection for what was considered the safe seat of Hawthorn. The inner-eastern seat had become available when Napthine’s predecessor, Ted Baillieu, left politics after struggling with party conservatives and his own limitations. Elected without any trouble, John took on the role of shadow attorney-general under the ill-fated leadership of Matthew Guy.

It was in the act of losing his seat at the 2018 election, when a Labor candidate took Hawthorn, that John Pesutto revealed himself as the leader capable of articulating the more inclusive vision the party needed. Speaking both live to air on the night and over the following days, he put forward a vision of all members of the community being able to look at the Liberal Party “as a source of leadership and inspiration and optimism… If we are inclusive, people will come back to us.” He was critical of the party’s lukewarm efforts to attract women and failure to embrace Australians from a wide range of cultural backgrounds.

Whether all of this was the cri de coeur of someone who thought his political career was over or a strategic move to position himself as a different kind of leader if he found his way back into parliament, is anyone’s guess. But again — when you find a Liberal prepared to say the right things, you don’t put their motivations under too strong a microscope.

Pesutto’s four years in the wilderness gave him a chance to tick off a few more credibility boxes for the Liberal Party establishment. He founded a consultancy firm, took on an honorary role at the University of Melbourne and made himself very available to the media — in particular, the ABC, which offered a direct line of communication to an inner-suburban electorate that wouldn’t be seen dead buying the Herald Sun.

By 2022, he was back in parliament, re-elected as the member for Hawthorn by a 10 per cent swing against the Labor MP who had snatched the seat from him four years earlier. But his election as the party’s leader later that year pointed to the depths of its ideological divisions. At the age of fifty-four, Pesutto defeated his rival Brad Battin, a former policeman representing the outer-eastern constituency of Berwick, by seventeen votes to sixteen. With the party so clearly divided, he couldn’t afford to make mistakes.

Non-Victorians unfamiliar with the Deeming affair may be surprised to know the extent to which it dominated Pesutto’s leadership, depriving him of a real chance to create the more inclusive political force he had envisaged back in 2018.

Here’s how it unfolded. In March 2023, Deeming, a Liberal member of Victoria’s upper house, attended a “Let Women Speak” event in front of parliament — a rally featuring UK-based anti-trans-rights activist Kellie-Jane Keen. The event was gatecrashed by a group of men from the National Socialist Network, who perhaps unsurprisingly regaled the assembly with Nazi salutes.

Pesutto was quick to declare that Deeming’s role in the event made her position in the party “untenable.” Yet the public messaging got scrambled: what could have been a solid argument that Liberal MPs should steer clear of the culture wars if they want to see the party elected ended up as a suggestion that Deeming herself had links with the neo-Nazi protesters.

The defamation lawsuit dragged on for what seemed like an eternity. And then, in December 2024, two years after Pesutto had defeated Battin, his leadership came crashing down. Deeming, who had been expelled from the party as a result of her decision to sue the leader, won the case in court, with a judge finding that Pesutto had defamed her on multiple occasions. The court awarded her $300,000, with the opposition leader also on the hook for her very significant legal expenses.

For reasons that remain unclear, both Pesutto and the party were adamant from the beginning of the legal action that the opposition leader would be personally liable for what he had said. It was a strange call: however ill-advised the comments may have been, he made them not in his personal capacity but as party leader.

By December 2024, Battin had ousted Pesutto in a snap vote that also readmitted Deeming to the party room. Relegated to the backbenches, he was left to cough up the cash on his own. As for the party, the conservatives were back in charge, doing what Dutton had done federally — alienating the party’s more progressive heartland in the inner-east.

Labor supporters in Victoria might rejoice in watching their opponents score one own goal after another. Yet the absence of a credible opposition can’t be good for anyone — particularly as the state faces a series of governance challenges, including the not insignificant issue of a criminal infiltration of government contracts. The demise of Pesutto, whose chances of returning to power appear slim, will affect both the party’s future and that of the state.

I lost contact with John several years ago, although he was warm and polite when he declined my offer to chat for this article. Yet his rise from political staffer to leader of Victoria’s opposition remains noteworthy. His vicissitudes are in some way emblematic of a party struggling to find its way, locked in a no-win struggle between an increasingly reactionary membership and an electorate looking for middle ground that’s tolerant, optimistic and perhaps even good humoured.

Of course, the question of whether the Liberal Party is a broad enough church to accommodate everyone is nothing new: the informal factions made up of small-l liberals, capital-c conservatives and everything in between have been grappling with this for years. But the 2025 federal election broadened the implications of the internal ideological clash. It’s no longer just a question of which tradition will have the numbers to impose itself on the party, but of which of the contested outlooks will ultimately be more palatable to the electorate. Dutton’s poor showing in Victoria points to the vulnerability of the party’s right, which can recruit party members and get its way internally only to find itself out of step with a centrist and moderate electorate.

Expecting Victorian voters to support a leader like Dutton was a big ask. Whether it’s the anti-ABC rhetoric, a thinly disguised disdain for environmental concerns, the nastiness directed at public servants, the blaming of immigrants for Australia’s housing crisis, the comments about welcome to country ceremonies in the wake of neo-Nazi heckling at Anzac Day ceremonies… there’s just too much of a cultural divide. The teal vote in previously blue-ribbon bastions like Kooyong and Goldstein can’t be dismissed; progressive Liberal Party voters are getting antsy and are ready to throw their weight around. The question is whether the party will be able to move past its conservative base and strike a more balanced political posture.

For people like me, that ship sailed when the Howard government kickstarted its plan to outflank Pauline Hanson from the right. Yet even as the country drifted towards this brand of muscular conservatism, I remembered many of the party members I had met in Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs with fondness. They were solid people. Reliable. Decent. And their marginalisation within the party had already begun.

In the lead-up to the federal elections I drove through the old neighbourhood. Our three-bedroom house with jasmine growing on the wooden fence was demolished long ago to make way for a McMansion; the Patras milk bar on Canterbury Road is now an apartment block; the shop on the corner where I got my first pair of school shoes now sells blinds and drapes. My father and mother are long gone, as are my loving, no-nonsense Scottish-Australian grandparents. With them, the Australia of the 1970s, the years of my childhood, has faded away, along with the defining political moments that my parents lived through.

Meanwhile, John, my former Parliament House lunch buddy, remains stuck in a losing battle to regain control of the party. He’s a long way from Traralgon, and even further from Catanzaro, the city Luigino Pesutto and Antonietta Mercurio left in the early 1960s to try their luck on the other side of the world. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post The rise and fall of John Pesutto appeared first on Inside Story.

Batteries, electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps are being added to solar panels by more households and businesses, intensifying the challenge of maintaining safe grid voltages, balancing supply and demand, cutting emissions and doing it all at an affordable cost. Labor’s home batteries program will help, but it will also make finding solutions more imperative.

What McIndoe is describing is a growing bunch of homegrown technology companies leading the global race to solve teething problems and other hurdles along the road to clean energy. Embracing their solutions could help get the transition back on track, solve the problem of whipsawing supply and demand from four million solar households and dispel doubts and confusion about clean energy in rural Australia.

You’d hardly know it from a public debate that pits nuclear power against renewables, wind turbines against whales and rural folk against the inner city, but firms like McIndoe’s might be the transition’s unsung heroes. “It frustrates the hell out of me because [overseas] companies are saying, ‘Wow, we’re really interested in this,’” McIndoe says.

Coming up with practical solutions to bottlenecks between investors, generators, distributors and end users, these companies are winning fans in global markets facing the same challenges Australia’s distribution networks began to grapple with a decade ago, when wind and solar energy took early flight here.

The ultimate prize could be a big new export industry to substitute for fossil fuels — a “Silicon Valley for energy,” says Audrey Zibelman, a director of investment bank Pollination and former chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator. “The traction that Australian companies are getting in the US is further evidence that Australia is leading the transition technically, and is a fertile ground for developing the technologies,” she says.

Yet they fly under the radar here, appreciated by distribution and transmission network operators and other customers, backed by some government grants — including Labor’s recently announced $30 million for grid-enhancing technology — but rarely celebrated by political leaders in the way manufacturing or mining exporters are.

These solutions are urgently needed. Since voters endorsed the Albanese government’s ambitious renewable energy plans on 3 May, benchmark retail power prices have increased again, and the soaring costs of high voltage transmission lines spurred AEMO to consider the alternative of enhancing distribution networks. A week before the election, an epic blackout in Spain drew attention to the challenges of keeping rapidly changing grids within safe voltage and frequency limits.

The good news is that these challenges can be solved, and local firms were on the case early.

Energy tech firms are born of necessity —­ in this case the challenges thrown up on the road from centralised fossil fuel–based electricity generation to decentralised renewables. A profusion of startups have sprung to life in the last decade with the common goal of helping energy suppliers and their customers make the most of the transition to net zero.

This article focuses on companies with technologies that can help grid operators and retailers make large gains in efficiency, reliability and affordability by better use of technologies already broadly accepted in the marketplace. They can also optimise emerging technologies — such as vehicle-to-grid charging — to further enhance the system.

Some of these startups monitor local and regional distribution networks — the poles and wires down your streets and arterial roads — to help their operators run them efficiently. They assist in maintaining safe voltages as rooftop solar floods into the grid on sunny days, keeping wires free of vegetation, and minimising fire and extreme weather risk. (Distribution networks are the poles and wires in your streets, connecting customers to high-voltage transmission networks and bulk electricity generation.)

McIndoe’s company, Edge Zero, tracks voltage and power quality across the transformers on power poles to check if they are running at correct voltages, see how much extra solar and EV charging they can host, and managing usage to help ease the squeeze during demand spikes. Customers include Endeavour Networks and Ausgrid in New South Wales, SA Power Networks and the Vermont Electric Co-op and Virginia-based Dominion Energy in the United States.

If the voltage is running 10 per cent higher, customers are being force-fed 10 per cent more electricity than they need, McIndoe says. Part of Edge Zero’s business case for Endeavour to put in 10,000 monitors across its network was that they would be able to manage the voltage close to the correct level and — by eliminating the excess — reduce customer consumption by up to 10 per cent.

“This is giving me real-time visibility of not just what’s there,“ he says, “but also how much more solar I can tolerate before I need to be thinking about upgrading the size of the [poles and wires]. We’re just providing the visibility that allows other technologies to do that control.”

Sydney-based Neara uses AI-powered software to monitor poles and wires for the fallen trees or bushfires that threaten the network with outages, prioritise maintenance in fault-prone areas, and spotlight spare capacity going begging for wind and solar power. In 2023 it estimated NSW’s networks could host an extra 10 gigawatts of power with a minimal capital spend.

Customers include Endeavour, Essential Energy and Ausgrid in New South Wales, PowerCor and AusNet Services in Victoria, and SAPN. Southern California Edison got in touch after being fined $US500 million because of wildfire-induced outages. CenterPoint Energy in Texas came on board after being hit by extreme weather.

Neara’s chief commercial and operations officer Jack Curtis says the company is helping CenterPoint navigate extreme weather by identifying potential points of failure that could cascade into wider failures. “It’s essentially being able to say, ‘All right, if we spend $1 here, we don’t have to spend $10 on the back end fixing ten assets that fail, because we only really have to make sure that one asset didn’t fail.”

Curtis says there’s a dawning realisation that distribution networks can play a bigger role in delivering clean, zero-carbon energy faster and at lower cost than the big transmission projects and utility-scale solar and wind farms that get bogged down by community objections and long approvals processes.

If renewable energy zones, or REZs, in New South Wales were opened up to distribution networks and not confined to the high-voltage transmission network, “it would enable someone to come forward and say, ‘Hey, I can put 200 megawatts of solar on a bunch of warehouses and have a cheaper, faster result,’” Curtis says. (REZs seek to bring on new wind, solar and battery projects with the required transmission.)

Wollongong-based Gridsight uses AI-powered software to distil data and insights from network maps, smart meters and third parties (such as Edge Zero and Neara) to better manage complex decentralised grids. It could advise customers to invest in batteries to avoid more expensive network upgrades, for example, or identify extra solar-hosting capacity by using “dynamic” — rather than static — line ratings. Its customers include Endeavour, Canberra distribution network Evo Energy, Horizon Power in Western Australia and Energy Queensland.

Founder and CEO Brendan Banfield says utilities in the United States and Europe look to Australia for a roadmap as the penetration of solar panels, EV chargers and other customer energy resources increases. He hopes Australia can use this recognition “to accelerate the adoption of these technologies over the next few years.”

Gridsight’s insights help customers understand where their grids are constrained, Banfield says. They tell them how solar panels, batteries and EVs are affecting grid constraints, and how they can host more customer-owned energy resources as households and businesses invest in them.

Uptake will likely accelerate under Labor’s offer to cover 30 per cent of the cost of a household or business battery from 1 July, an outlay of $2.3 billion over four years.

Infravision uses drones to hang transmission lines, cutting costs and the risk of accidents and fatalities among the linesmen and helicopter pilots who traditionally did the work. After a pilot hanging lines in South Australia died in an accident in 2019, Transgrid and Ausgrid in NSW and Powerlink in Queensland decided there must be a better way, and Infravision’s bespoke heavy-lift drones met the bill.

California utility Pacific Gas & Electric asked them to tackle a decade’s worth of tough unfinished jobs, the AI boom turbocharged demand in the United States, staff will jump from 100 to 500 within two years — and not even Donald Trump can stop it.

The company is now headquartered in Austin, Texas, the better to tackle the growing demand for its unique services. “We’ve had more inbound interest in our business in this category than I’ve ever, ever experienced,” says Cameron Van Der Berg, co-founder and chief executive. “We’ve got no issues with runway or anything like that. It’s more, ‘how do we grow sustainably at the rate that our customers are demanding our product and services?’”

Two more startups are trying to solve another puzzling problem: “Commercial and industrial” customers — or small and medium enterprises — lag far behind residential customers in adopting rooftop solar and batteries, despite consumption patterns that better match solar supply.

One reason is that they typically rent their premises, and landlords have few incentives to instal solar panels for the benefit of their tenants. Another is that they lack the skills to analyse their options across different solar arrays, battery capacities and tariffs.

Orkestra Energy’s software tackles this skills gap by helping installers to model hundreds of combinations of solar panels, batteries and tariffs for commercial and industrial firms — and identify the best options — at a fraction of the cost charged by large consultancies for the same work.

The software was used to model 500 kilowatt one-hour batteries and virtual power plant participation for RACV’s Torquay and Inverloch resorts, which already had solar panels and EV chargers. It’s also been used to model projects for Origin Energy, commercial solar installer GEM Energy and residential installer Energy Locals.

Orkestra initially identified the biggest knowledge gap was in modelling battery business cases against tariffs for commercial and industrial firms, co-founder and co-CEO James Allston says. But they also model solar panels, appliances such as EV chargers, participation in virtual power plants and markets for FCAS (system-strength services) and arbitrage (storing power when it’s cheap and selling when it’s expensive).

Power purchase agreements bundling up any or all of these pieces can help bridge the incentives gap between businesses and landlords. The software can bring all the different elements together and help determine the size of the asset and work out commercial returns, often 15 per cent to 35 per cent per annum, Allston says.

“We can train a salesperson or a junior analyst to be able to produce a high quality, bankable feasibility study for one of these investments in about fifteen to twenty minutes of work. And we’re trying to take that to being about five minutes of work using AI.”

Perth-based Gridcog provides energy transition modelling for larger companies and their projects — such as Shell’s P2X charging rollout in Europe, Ampol’s charging sites in Victoria, TransLink’s electric bus chargers in Queensland, and large supermarkets — to identify optimal solar, battery and EV charging solutions.

Fabian Le Gay Brereton, Gridcog’s co-founder and chief executive, says its role is to help direct the vast investments required for the energy transition into the right assets in the right locations, with the right technical and commercial operating models, and accelerate that investment by building confidence.

While flagship investments in grid-scale generation and transmission are slow to bear fruit, customers can help to accelerate renewables investments and cut carbon emissions by installing their own energy resources in the meantime.

“There’s this obvious case for trying to get more investment in the distribution network and empowering consumers because you can do that really quickly,” he says. “You can’t build a nuclear power plant quickly and even building a renewable energy zone in western New South Wales is going to take a long time.”

Wider adoption of the technologies described here can build on Australia’s clean-energy advantages, especially those that maximise existing network capacity, says Paul Gleeson, head of energy for Australia at engineering giant Aurecon.

But these technologies still face hurdles. For example, those that depend on customers “opting in” to virtual power plants or other demand management markets may run into the natural disinclination of many — especially older — people to surrender control of their batteries, EVs and chargers, Gleeson says. Aggregate benefits may be measured in the billions of dollars by AEMO, but the benefits for individual households may be “fairly boring.” This may change over time but “it is a barrier right now.”

Still, despite many headwinds, the energy transition has a lot going for it. Prices for some transition goods — solar panels, batteries, EVs, EV chargers and (at least in China) wind turbines — continue to fall; the consequences of climate change are impossible to ignore; and governments are loading their policy slingshots and taking aim at the right targets.

Smart grids are more efficient too. The methods traditionally used by electric utilities to meet peak demand from large, centralised station power plants were necessary but notoriously inefficient, says Zibelman. In contrast, the new technologies being developed in Australia can support energy systems that are decarbonised and more efficient, resilient and reliable because they maximise the use of all resources.

“For electric utilities, deploying these type of technologies should be the power grid equivalent of flossing your teeth — we do it because it is the right thing to do,” Zibelman says. “It’s an opportunity for Australia to show how the grid can and should transition to the power system of the future, and to offer these solutions globally rather than allow them to be exploited by others — as locally developed wifi and solar panel technologies were in the past.” •

The post A Silicon Valley for energy? appeared first on Inside Story.

As they had done elsewhere, the rebels initiated negotiations with their adversaries. “We proclaim Jesus Christ,” they wrote to the princes. “We are not here to harm anyone (John 2) but to maintain godly justice. We are also not here to shed blood. If you will do the same, we will do nothing to you.” They had been emboldened by a portent. A rainbow resembling the one on some of their banners had appeared: according to the Book of Genesis, “the token of the covenant” between God and His people.

While the insurgents waited for a reply, the princes attacked them with canons and cavalry. Possibly 6000 rebels were killed, and half of the 600 who were taken prisoner were beheaded the next day.

These events are referred to in Germany as the Schlacht bei Frankenhausen (“Battle of Frankenhausen”), which is surely a misnomer for such a one-sided affair. But perhaps Schlacht in this context echoes the pre-sixteenth-century Middle High German term slaht, which has been preserved in the English “slaughter.” The forces of the peasants were no match for armies of trained soldiers, some of them mounted, all of them supported by artillery.

The “battle” site is still called Schlachtberg, or Battle Mountain. The steeply descending path to Frankenhausen — the route along which those who survived the slaughter tried to escape — is known as Blutrinne (Blood Gully). Standing on the hill, I imagine the insurgents watching the enemy troops approaching, being taken by surprise when the artillery opened fire, panicking and fleeing towards the nearby town, and being massacred by their pursuers. From my vantage point on Schlachtberg, the 500-year distance from the historical event has suddenly shrunk.

From afar, the Schlachtberg is easily recognised by the large cylindrical gasometer-like building at its summit, which houses a panoramic oil painting, 14 by 123 metres, which tourist brochures advertise as the “Sixtina of the North.” Commissioned by the German Democratic Republic’s culture ministry in 1976, this vast artwork is actually more than three times the size of Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The East German authorities wanted the Schlacht depicted in the style of the battle panoramas popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prominent surviving examples include Michael Zeno Diemer’s monumental depiction of the 1809 Battles of Bergisel in Austria and Louis Dumoulin’s 1912 painting of the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. The authorities were particularly fond of Franz Roubaud’s 1911 painting of the Battle of Borodino, which is housed in Moscow’s Panorama Museum.

The ministry approached well-known Leipzig artist Werner Tübke, who accepted the commission but warned he would want to do more than merely depict an historical event, and definitely wouldn’t try to emulate Roubaud’s work. He also stipulated that the ministry not interfere in his decision-making as an artist. Between 1979 and 1981, he completed a 1:10 scale model on five wooden panels, which was approved despite some reservations. But tensions remained: at one stage, the ministry arranged for artists from the Soviet Union to complete the job, at another Tübke threatened to leave the GDR for West Germany.

Tübke’s war: the artist (left) showing his scale model to the East German leadership in October 1982. Klaus Franke/Bundesarchiv Bild via Wikimedia

With the help of a small team of collaborators and around 90,000 tubes of paint, Tübke completed the painting in 1987. It was eventually unveiled in September 1989, less than two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most apparent trace of the East German leaders’ intentions is the painting’s title, Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. The Soviet Union’s main contribution was the canvas, which had been woven in one piece at a factory in Russia.

Tübke’s painting is by no means socialist-realist. Inspired by the iconography of late medieval and early modern Germany, it also contains allegorical and surrealist elements; tellingly, Tübke considered Giorgio de Chirico, co-founder of the scuola metafisica movement, to be the most important artist of the twentieth century. Tübke also travelled to the Vatican in 1985 to study Michelangelo’s frescoes in order to “add fresh blood to the whole thing,” as he put it at the time.

Many of the panorama’s 3000-plus figures are based on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings, drawings, engravings, woodcuts or sculptures, some of them anonymous illustrations in pamphlets, others the works of well-known artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas Cranach the Elder. While the painting depicts some recognisable historical figures — Martin Luther, Charles V, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Tilman Riemenschneider among them — most of the women and men are unidentifiable. Particularly prominent are the “fools” who appear in several of the scenes.

Two years before the painting’s completion, Tübke said its “intellectual and emotional richness” would reveal itself to viewers if they were prepared not to think of it as a didactic depiction of history. Not unlike the Sistine Chapel frescoes, this monumental painting invites us to let our eyes and minds wander from scene to scene. And yes, the painting does depict the violence of the Battle of Frankenhausen, but that event is embedded in a magical representation of the universe of early sixteenth-century women and men.

Arguably the first harbinger of the 1525 conflict appeared half a century earlier in Niklashausen in Germany’s south. There, a vision of the Virgin Mary told a shepherd that Jesus wanted all “tolls, levies, forced labour, exactions, payments and aids required of the prelates, princes and nobles” immediately abolished. Thousands flocked to hear the man who came to be known as the “Drummer of Niklashausen” talk about his vision. When the local bishop had him arrested, a crowd of some 16,000 people tried to force his release. Soldiers opened fire, killing many of them. The shepherd was burnt as a heretic.

Revolts broke out in other parts of southern Germany in the 1490s and early 1500s. These “Bundschuh rebellions” were named after the boot typically worn by peasants, which was depicted on the rebels’ banner. One of their leaders, Joß Fritz, managed to evade the authorities and initiate revolts in different places over a long period. But it was not until early 1525 that armed unrest engulfed most of southern and central Germany.

The German Peasants’ War wasn’t the result of a worsening economic situation. By and large, the peasantry was better off than in the century before, although they may have begged to differ. True, they had good reason to complain about the lords’ excessive demands on their labour and produce. But the transformation of complaints and legal challenges into armed rebellion has more to do with people’s changing outlook on the world.

The war was not least a result of the Protestant Reformation. In 1517, Luther had published his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, later known as the Ninety-five Theses, in which he denounced the Catholic clergy’s sale of indulgences to raise funds for the construction of St Peter’s in Rome. Three years later, in On the Freedom of a Christian, he proclaimed: “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none. A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” The following year Luther was summoned to appear before the Diet in Worms, where he refused to recant. News of his steadfast criticism of the Papacy, and seemingly of serfdom, circulated widely, made possible by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention in the 1450s of a printing press using movable type.

A widespread expectation of impending doom added to a collective sense of nervous excitement. A Great Conjunction — the coming together of Saturn and Jupiter in the night sky — occurred on 30 January 1524, and Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter were all in the sign of Pisces between 13 and 19 February. Astrologers’ claims that these unusual celestial phenomena foretold wars, poor harvests and floods, circulated widely in pamphlets.

Piscean prophecy: title page illustration for Leonhard Reymann’s Practica on the Great and Middling Conjunction of the Planets, published in Nuremberg in 1523. Erhard Schön/Wikimedia

When the peasants rose up in different parts of Germany in the spring of 1525, it seemed like a concerted attack on the existing order. Though similar, their complaints also reflected local circumstances. They nearly always demanded the right to appoint their own pastors, the abolition or reduction of tithes, levies and taxes, and the freedom to hunt and fish. Many but not all of the rebels were serfs whose bodies were owned by their lords. Some were comparatively wealthy, others were poor day-labourers. In some regions, villagers were supported by townspeople; in Tyrol, peasants and miners formed an alliance. Even some nobles — including Götz von Berlichingen, the main protagonist of the eponymous 1773 play that made Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famous — sided with the peasants.

Even in the spring and summer of 1525, when hostilities peaked, there was not one war, but many bloody local or regional conflicts in which the peasants targeted particular monasteries and castles and challenged the authority of abbots, bishops and princes. This fragmentation also reflected political divisions within Germany. From 1519, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, head of the House of Habsburg, reigned over the German lands (as well as much of Italy, the Low Countries, Spain and other parts of Central Europe). But while the Habsburgs had possessions in Austria and southwestern Germany, elsewhere Charles’s German empire was a patchwork of territories ruled by princes, bishops and cities, each of them in pursuit of their own interests.

The complex and sometimes confusing history of the German Peasants’ War is magnificently told in Australian historian Lyndal Roper’s recently published Summer of Fire and Blood. Her previous books have dealt with women in sixteenth-century Germany, witchcraft and, in an acclaimed biography, Martin Luther. Roper is not only exceptionally knowledgeable about early modern Germany’s cultural history, she is also a terrific storyteller. The further I delved into her book, the harder I found it to put it down.

Historians writing about 1525 have to grapple with a lack of historical sources to help flesh out the insurgents’ perspective. Peasants didn’t leave behind first-hand accounts — in fact, nearly all of them were illiterate. Much of what we know about their motivations has been gleaned from their enemies’ words or from statements they made when interrogated, often while being tortured. The sources produced by victors and rulers can be read against the grain, but only within obvious limits.

In his 1992 book about the Drummer of Niklashausen, the American historian Richard Wunderli employed fictional elements — always clearly signposted — to make up for the lack of primary sources and draw attention to the inadequacy of the historical record. Roper takes a different path, highlighting the biases of the written accounts, drawing heavily on contemporary visual sources, and focusing less on individual actions than on collective mentalities, emotions and worldviews. She also relies on her readers’ ability to imagine ordinary people as historical actors, and it is this that makes her book so exciting. Without claiming to do justice to her extraordinarily rich account, I will highlight those of Roper’s insights I found particularly fascinating.

Significantly, the rebels swore oaths that turned them into brothers. “Once sworn, that bond of fraternity was lived out in drinking, eating, sleeping, and marching together,” Roper writes. Peasants from a local area or region formed a Haufen, which Roper translates as “band.” The German term, which literally means “heap” or “pile,” conveys a sense of disorderliness, but the various Haufen usually followed a democratically elected leader. They were also remarkably disciplined: Roper found no evidence that they committed rapes.

The movement of these Haufen of previously unrelated “brothers” through unfamiliar terrain brought the men together. “The thrill of it must itself have helped drive them on,” Roper observes. “They felt what it was to be ‘free.’” Brotherhood was offered to — and sometimes accepted gratefully or grudgingly by — miners, townsfolk and even lords and monks. “It was also an emotional appeal, an attempt to lance the potential aggression by offering kinship and love,” Roper explains. “Brotherly love was about creating a Christian world where there would be no division, class or enmity, and where injustice would be overturned by the affective bond of fraternity.”

Roper’s attention to gender issues subverts a romantic reading of the rebels’ fraternity. She goes to great lengths to shed light on the role women might have played in the war, without unduly focusing on a handful of prominent individuals, such as Ottilie von Gersen or Margareta Renner, as some of the current exhibitions to mark the quincentenary do.

Roper emphasises the role of emotions, which she claims have too often been ignored in accounts of the conflict. Thus the peasants’ preparedness to keep going, even after the first reports of the revenge exacted by the lords had reached them, may have partly reflected the elation they were experiencing.

“We know with hindsight that their actions were doomed to fail, but they did not know that,” Roper writes. The dubious benefit of hindsight has persuaded many historians to focus on the defeat and ignore how, at least for a few months, the peasants were remarkably successful, taking control of large swathes of southern and central Germany and beginning to “put plans for a new future into action.” Roper shows how the pillaging of monasteries meant that the peasants gained access to significant resources and were thus able to provision Haufen of several thousand men. To ignore that success would be to ignore how it came about.

Roper debunks the claim, promoted in a couple of the exhibitions I’ve seen in recent months, that the peasants attacked armies of heavily armed and experienced soldiers with nothing more than pitchforks. They had some artillery, they were joined by men who had worked as mercenaries, their military strategies often worked, they were skilful negotiators, and they knew how to get what they wanted through intimidation alone.

Summer of Fire and Blood is a rehabilitation of early modern peasants as smart and thoughtful historical actors. As Roper writes, they are “the heroes” of her book.

Was the German Peasants’ War historically significant? Roper certainly thinks so. She argues that the war altered the course of the Reformation, suppressing its potential to bring about profound social change. Luther, who had seemed sympathetic at first, turned against the peasants and insisted that the traditional order and the authority of state and church be upheld. He also justified the slaughter by calling on his readers to “smite, slay and stab” the rebels and proclaiming such killings godly work. I doubt whether the readiness with which the Lutheran clergy in Germany, with few exceptions, embraced first the authoritarianism of Wilhelmine Germany, and then fascism, could be explained without going back to the 1520s.

Roper also shows how the war weakened monasticism. Hundreds of monasteries and convents were ransacked and some of them burnt to the ground. Then, after the war, Protestant rulers exploited the monastic orders’ weakness and secularised some of those that had survived.

The conflict’s demographic impact was profound. As many as 100,000 peasants were killed. In the areas directly affected by the war, perhaps 15 per cent of the men capable of bearing arms — those in the best position to do the hard physical labour on which rural communities relied — lost their lives.

According to Roper, some of the ideas developed by the insurgents lingered beyond their comprehensive defeat. She is particularly interested in a 1525 pamphlet, To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry, whose anonymous author “supplies a potted history of the tyrants of Roman history.” Subsequently, she observes, the “concept of tyranny found its way from radical religion and political utopianism into nascent republicanism.”

She believes that “the peasant conception of freedom” and their “utopian vision” is still relevant. “It encompassed the environment and the obligations of care we owe to others, our mutual dependence… They did not think in terms of individual rights.”

Roper suggests the German Peasants’ War ought to be termed a “revolution” because of the transformations it wrought and the number of people it affected. I wish she had elaborated, if only because the question of which historical events and processes in German history amounted to a revolution often comes up in public debate. Could it be that the Peasants’ War — “the most radical fact of German history” (Karl Marx) — was the only revolution Germany ever had?

In postwar West Germany, the Peasants’ War has been considered historically significant mainly because of the Twelve Articles, a list of demands formulated in March 1525 by the furrier Sebastian Lotzer in the southern German town of Memmingen. Based on numerous lists of local complaints, Lotzer’s articles “allowed everyone to recognise their own concerns: peasants free and unfree, townsfolk… and miners,” Roper writes. “Written in rhythmic, memorable prose, the demands sounded biblical, and there were twelve of them, like the Twelve Apostles; indeed the document reads at points almost like a devotional creed.”

The Twelve Articles were reproduced repeatedly and distributed widely; many of the 25,000 printed copies would have been read out publicly and discussed in villages and towns. Although similar texts appeared, only the Twelve Articles became known all over central and southern Germany, thereby helping to turn numerous local conflicts into the Peasants’ War.

Contested inheritance: an anonymous artist’s woodcut on the title page of one of numerous editions of the Twelve Articles published in spring 1525. Wikimedia

In March this year, speaking on the Twelve Articles’ quincentenary, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted that they “were not a footnote in Germany history” but “triggered a movement for freedom that spread like wildfire throughout southern and central Germany.” Memmingen, he claimed, “was the starting point of a mass uprising for freedom and justice.” Maybe Roper’s German publisher agrees, because the German edition of her book, published months before the English original, includes the original text of the Twelve Articles and a rendering into today’s German.

According to Steinmeier, the ideas first formulated in the Twelve Articles were taken up another three times: during the 1848 Revolution, by the drafters of the West German constitution, and in 1989 when the “brave women and men in Plauen, Leipzig, East-Berlin and many other places fought for freedom.” “Remembering the places, actors, ideas and events in our history of freedom is more important than ever in these turbulent times,” Steinmeier said. “[L]iberal democracy is being threatened and attacked — both internally and externally, and with a force many of us would never have imagined.”

In a thinly veiled reference to the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the president warned: “At the same time, we are witnessing that those who invoke historical freedom movements are precisely those who incite hatred against democratic institutions and want to allow freedom to apply only to themselves and their peers.” Leaders of the AfD have indeed tried to style themselves as the legitimate heirs of the March revolutionaries of 1848 (and demanded that 18 March, the day soldiers opened fire on demonstrators in Berlin, be declared a national day of remembrance). They have also embraced the failed Hitler assassin Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and have claimed to act in the tradition of the demonstrators who brought about the fall of the East German regime.

Twelve Articles for today: German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier speaking in Memmingen’s St Martin’s Church on 15 March at a commemoration of the quincentenary of the Twelve Articles. Stefan Puchner/dpa via Alamy

The Social Democrat Steinmeier is not the first German head of state to commemorate the publication of the Twelve Articles in Memmingen. In 2000, Johannes Rau, another Social Democrat, marked the 475th anniversary by insisting that the authors of the Twelve Articles are part of a tradition stretching from Amos to Martin Luther King and from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the East Timorese bishop Carlos Belo. In 2009, Rau’s immediate successor, Christian Democrat Horst Köhler, referred to the Twelve Articles in a speech lauding the writer and former East German dissident Reiner Kunze, recipient of the Memmingen Freedom Prize 1525. Köhler, too, referred to the eighth-century BC prophet Amos, and like Steinmeier and Rau declared the Twelve Articles to be a kind of human rights charter.

Köhler drew another historical parallel: the sixteenth-century peasants who fought for freedom were “persecuted, imprisoned, and killed,” much like members of the resistance in Nazi Germany and “those who fought for freedom in the first workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil,” using the German Democratic Republic’s official designation.

Comparisons and parallels, often questionable, are also a feature of exhibitions marking the quincentenary. The Württemberg State Museum in Stuttgart currently hosts an exhibition, “Protest! From Rage to Movement,” ostensibly commemorating the Peasants’ War. The curators have drawn a line from the protests of 1525 to those of 2020, when tens of thousands of people in Stuttgart demonstrated against the measures designed to stop the spreading of Covid-19, and invite visitors to vent their own fury by taking a baseball bat to a car.

In 1525, insurgents looted Kloster Veßra, a Premonstratensian abbey in the south of Thuringia. Unlike other monasteries, it was not destroyed then, but burned down accidentally in 1939. Today it is an open-air museum. An exhibition mounted this year features video footage of protests by German farmers in the winter of 2023–24 prompted by the federal government’s decision to cut fuel subsidies, as if the expectation that farmers pay more for their diesel is comparable with the rapacious demands made of sixteenth-century serfs.

Lyndal Roper is not the first to call the Peasants’ War a revolution. “Both at home and abroad no one has ever paid enough attention to the fact that there was once a German revolution,” wrote Hugo Ball, founder of the Dada movement, in his 1919 Critique of the German Intelligentsia with reference to the Peasants’ War. That’s still true. Yet Germans readily apply the term to the protests of March 1848 and September–October 1989, and the abdication of Wilhelm II in November 1918.

The attention the conflict has received has also been very selective. Steinmeier celebrated the Twelve Articles in Memmingen in March but didn’t visit Bad Frankenhausen on 15 May this year, nor any other site where thousands of insurgents were massacred 500 years ago. The quincentenary has prompted commemorations only locally, particularly in Thuringia and Baden-Württemberg.

The lack of national attention becomes particularly obvious when the quincentenary of the Peasants’ War is contrasted with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Between 2008 and 2017, Germany marked the latter with the Luther Decade, a ten-year long celebration of Martin Luther’s role in German history. More than a thousand events commemorated the birth of Protestantism during the Reformationsjubiläum, the year-long jubilee held in 2016–17. The thirty-first of October 2017, the anniversary of the day Martin Luther reputedly nailed a copy of his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, was declared a national holiday.

Afterwards, the state parliaments of the North German (and predominantly Protestant) states of Hamburg, Bremen, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein made 31 October a permanent public holiday, thereby emulating the five East German states that had instituted a Reformation Day public holiday in the early 1990s.

I can’t recall learning about the Peasants’ War in high school, but I distinctly remember the attention our history teacher paid to Luther’s achievements and the Protestant armies’ fortunes in the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48. West German friends of my age all report that they found out about the peasants’ uprising only after finishing school.

But when I dug out my old history textbook, published in 1966, it turned out my suspicion that the Peasants’ War is not mentioned was unfounded. Maybe we just took too long to get through the eleven pages devoted to Luther and had to skip the four pages on “Unrest in Germany.” (Half of that text, by the way, is concerned with Luther’s role in the war. It is illustrated with two woodcuts depicting insurgent peasants, and portraits of two knights, Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen, and of Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon.)

The early modern rebels I first came across were not the peasants of 1525, but Joß Fritz and the Bundschuh. That was in the second half of the 1970s, in the early days of the anti-nuclear movement, when opponents of a planned nuclear power station at Whyl in the southwest of Germany (and, a few years later, of a Mercedes test circuit) publicly identified with the Bundschuh and flew its flag.

My old textbook’s chapter on the 1525 “unrest” includes the lines: “In Thuringia, a revolutionary movement emerged under Pastor Thomas Müntzer. He wanted Christianity without the Church, a state without authority. Thus, the Kingdom of God was to be established on earth.” That’s the only reference to Müntzer. There is no image of him, yet Luther is pictured three times.

In the historiography of the Peasants’ War, Thomas Müntzer (sometimes also spelled Münzer) — radical theologian and charismatic preacher, dreamer and firebrand, bête noire of Luther and the princes — is usually considered a key protagonist. But assessments of his role and impact have differed widely.

If I had attended school in the German Democratic Republic I would have learned about Müntzer. I would even have thought I knew his face, because it was depicted on the East German five-mark note. But Müntzer might not have looked anything like that image; his earliest known depiction is a copperplate engraving from much later, in the early seventeenth century.

If I had grown up in East Germany, I might also have associated Müntzer’s face with that of Wolfgang Stumpf, the actor cast as Müntzer in Martin Hellberg’s film Thomas Müntzer, produced in 1956 by the state-owned DEFA. The film was frequently shown in East Germany but reached West German audiences only after 1990.

Among the East German representations of Müntzer, Tübke’s is the odd one out. Müntzer appears twice in his painting, once as a preacher and once in the scenes of the Battle of Frankenhausen that are reproduced at the beginning of this essay. There he cuts a forlorn figure: not leading the charge against the princes’ armies but resigned, indifferent to the drummer next to him, a Bundschuh banner lying at his feet.

Refracted by history: members of the Freunde von Anno Dazumal association in May this year reenacting the 1525 march of 300 Mühlhausen townsfolk, led by Thomas Müntzer, to join the rebels encamped outside Frankenhausen. dpa picture alliance/Alamy

West German interpretations of the past came to dominate representations of the Peasants’ War in reunified Germany. Of the three presidents commemorating the Peasants’ War after 1990, only Rau mentioned Müntzer — and only when he talked about the East German regime’s abuse of history. The exhibitions I visited in Thuringia in recent weeks give the impression that their curators wanted to avoid drawing attention to Müntzer’s role.

Roper doesn’t seem to think much of Müntzer. His theology, she finds, “was at once majestic in its apocalypticism and modest in scope,” his rhetoric “a flood of bloodthirsty, violent language with barely a pause for breath.” But she also acknowledges that most of what we know about him is “refracted through the lenses of his opponents or of those who desperately tried later to distance themselves from him.” She also makes the important point that “peasant theology,” of which her book provides valuable glimpses, was very different from Müntzer’s (or from Luther’s for that matter).

Two towns in East German Saxony-Anhalt carry Luther’s name: Lutherstadt Wittenberg (since 1938), where he published his Ninety-five Theses and translated the Bible, and Lutherstadt Eisleben (since 1946), where he was born and died. Mühlhausen, where Müntzer worked as a preacher and was executed, was awarded the title Thomas-Müntzer-Stadt in 1975; Stolberg, where he was born, was named after him in 1989. In the case of the latter two towns, which are also in East Germany, the additional names were dropped after 1990.

No town is named after events or protagonists in the Peasants’ War. Frankenhausen, where the “battle” of 15 May 1525 was fought, is officially known as Bad Frankenhausen/Kyffhäuser. The town was registered as a spa (Bad) in 1927; it is one of fourteen certified spa towns in Thuringia. “Kyffhäuser” refers to the nearby mountains and helps to distinguish the town from other Frankenhausens, such as a village in Hesse. But for many visitors Kyffhäuser signifies the Kyffhäuser monument rather than the mountains.

Legend has it that a medieval emperor — initially Frederick II (1194–1250), but from the nineteenth century his grandfather Frederick I (1122–1190), known as Barbarossa in Germany — is asleep in a cave deep inside the Kyffhäuser mountains, biding his time until the ravens stop circling the mountains, when he will rise and lead a united Germany back to its erstwhile glory. In 1816, the Grimm brothers published the legend of Frederick Red Beard in their compilation of German legends. The following year, the German poet Friedrich Rückert identified the historical figure of Barbarossa as the subject of the legend in a well-known poem: “The splendour of the Empire / He took with him away; / And back to earth will bring it / When dawns the promised day.”

Waiting for the ravens to stop circling: Barbarossa at the base of the Kyffhäuser monument. Klaus Neumann

After the unification of Germany in 1871, the Hohenzollern emperor tried to position himself as the legitimate heir or reincarnation of the Hohenstaufen Barbarossa. In 1896, an eighty-one-metre-high monument with a statue of Wilhelm I at the top, funded entirely through donations mainly from veterans of the 1870–71 Franco-German war, was erected in the ruins of a medieval castle, Reichsburg Kyffhausen, in the northeast of the mountains.

After the first world war, the monument was used to invoke the revanchist “Kyffhäuser spirit” and continued to be a rallying point for the veterans’ associations. It survived the second world war and the forty years of the German Democratic Republic. In 1964, the East German authorities even added to a dome-like room inside the monument a bronze relief that depicts scenes from German history.

But that was a rather half-hearted attempt at repurposing the Kyffhäuser monument. The East German leadership’s response to a monument proclaiming a line of descent from medieval Barbarossa to the nineteenth-century Hohenzollern emperors was to commission Tübke to create an image suitable for a counter-genealogy.

The Kyffhäuser monument is only a two-and-a-half-hour walk from Schlachtberg. When I visited last month, it seemed to be a more popular destination than the panorama museum. But tourist numbers are no longer as high as in 1990, when West Germans were first able to freely visit the East. Much like earlier generations, they were attracted by the monument’s purported role as a symbol of the German nation, rather than by its scenic location.

Between 2015 and 2019, members of the most extremist faction of the far-right AfD, led by Thuringia’s Björn Höcke, chose the myth-laden Kyffhäuser mountains for their annual gatherings. Höcke himself is convinced that “Germans’ longing for a historical figure to heal the nation’s wounds, overcome its divisions and set things straight, is deeply embedded in [their] soul.”

The Kyffhäuser myth resonates with the AfD and its followers because it sees the present as deficient and anticipates the return to a past where those deficiencies will be overcome. Frederick I is also a suitable foil because he died in the Middle East while leading an army in the Third Crusade; after all, the AfD, too, has embarked on its very own crusade against people of the Muslim faith.

The panorama museum never played the role envisaged by East Germany’s communist leaders, partly because of Tübke’s peculiar interpretation of his commission and partly because the regime collapsed within weeks of the museum’s opening. So far, reunified Germany’s political leaders don’t appear to be interested in embracing the building on top of Schlachtenberg in order to neutralise the nearby relic of Wilhelmine militarism.

It wasn’t the German Democratic Republic that discovered Thomas Müntzer. He had already played a prominent role in Wilhelm Zimmermann’s three-volume history of the Peasants’ War, which was published in the early 1840s and informed Friedrich Engels’s 1850 text about the war. Hugo Ball, who lamented Germans’ lack of attention to the Peasants’ War, called Müntzer a “philosopher, prophet and rebel” and considered him the “leader of the German peasants’ revolution.”

In notes dated 18 November 1917, and later published in his book Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, Ball wrote: “I am now often meeting with a utopian friend, E.B., who prompts me to read [Thomas] Morus and [Tommaso] Campanella, while he in turn is studying Münzer.” The friend was the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, later an inspiration for sections of the student movement of the late 1960s, and best known outside Germany for his The Principle of Hope.

Bloch published the fruits of his studies in Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921) and it was there that I first encountered the sixteenth-century theologian. When I came across it as an undergraduate student, the book was a revelation — and an antidote to the tedious history seminars and lectures I attended.

Rereading the book several decades later, I wonder how much of the text’s expressionist prose I comprehended at the time. Now I am critical of Bloch’s interpretation of the Peasants’ War and his elevation of Müntzer as its key protagonist. He makes the peasants’ self-interest, naiveté and political fragmentation responsible for their defeat and seems to think that the outcome would have been different if only the miners had joined the fight. Although his historical materialism is far more sophisticated than that of Marx and Engels, the book’s historical account now strikes me as doctrinaire. I don’t hold it against Roper that she didn’t include Bloch’s book in her bibliography.

But there are parts of his text that I still cherish. He insists that the 1525 insurgents and Müntzer speak to us. That’s not because we are able to drink Bauernbräu, a craft beer created to commemorate the Peasants’ War, or experience the “atmosphere and excitement” of a reenactment of the slaughter on Schlachtberg. It’s not because we ought to be reminded of them when we think about the drafting of the West German Constitution, Swabian Covid-19 conspiracy theorists or farmers protesting against the cutting of fuel subsidies. It’s because their dreams and deeds constitute a promise yet to be fulfilled.

Historians tend to privilege pasts that can be regarded as antecedents of the present and dismiss the presumed cul-de-sacs of history. The dreams and deeds of hundreds of thousands of early modern peasants constitute such a cul-de-sac. True, some of their ideas lived on, for example among sixteenth-century Anabaptists. But the survival of dreams and deeds should not be needed to justify learning about them. Perhaps Lyndal Roper, too, had in mind dreams and deeds cut short when she referred to “this freighted history” and the “paths that were not taken.”

What’s lacking these days in many Western political cultures is the ability to dream radically, to develop visions for a tomorrow that is more than an extension of today. Pasts that are, in William Faulkner’s words, not even past yet, and past injustices that are not abgeschlossen (done with) in Walter Benjamin’s sense, could animate such visions, particularly when the just world envisaged by a previous generation has not yet been realised.

On 27 May, exactly 500 years after Müntzer’s death, “Am jüngsten Tag – eine Abrechnung” (On Judgement Day – A Settling of Accounts) by Vicki Spindler premiered in the Frankenhausen panorama museum. In this remarkable play, Müntzer, his wife Ottilie von Gersen and Luther meet in 2025. While Luther is pleased about today’s world, Müntzer insists that the quincentenary commemorates a 500-year nightmare. To truly achieve freedom and justice, Spindler lets him say, people need to become each other’s and the world’s friends and guardians; everything would be possible if only they stopped being egotistical.

Bloch and, a few years later, Benjamin called the attention to the unfinished business of the past: Eingedenken. The term is usually translated as “remembrance” or “recollection” (as neologisms work not nearly as well in English as in German, I leave it at that). Eingedenken is keenly interested in the redemption of buried promises, but it is the exact opposite of the far-right Kyffhäuser pilgrims’ regressive turning back, their longing for a return to the authoritarianism of Wilhelmine Germany or to the crusading days of medieval Europe.

In fact, in the quincentennial year, Eingedenken could be a response prompted by attempts either to resurrect the dream of a thousand-year Reich, or to paper over an unresolved injustice by claiming, as Spindler’s Luther does, that all is well.

Müntzer’s millenarian fervour struck a chord with Bloch. He emphatically denied looking back. “The dead come back,” he wrote in the introduction of his book, and he would enable them to continue where they left off. Müntzer was Bloch’s personal drummer, urging him on, the events of 1525 the revolution’s “underground history” that needed to be reanimated. Eingedenken in this sense means seizing the past by the scruff of its neck.

But Eingedenken is also contemplation — in this case, of a defeat that could hardly have been more devastating. The author of the pamphlet To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry had warned: “Listen dear brothers, you have embittered the hearts of your lords so greatly with an excess of gall that they will never be sweetened again… There will be less pity shown you than any evildoer or murderer.” He was right. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the princes’ soldiers. Those taken prisoners were sometimes tortured before being killed. The executions were horrific spectacles to intimidate the survivors. Some of those whose lives had been spared were branded or blinded or had their fingers chopped off.

Müntzer too met a horrible end. He escaped to Frankenhausen only to be tracked down, tortured for several days and then beheaded. His head was put on a spike and, like the rest of his body, left to rot.

To publicly remember the vanquished — not as heroes, but as men and women who deserved so much better — is one way of doing justice to them. No contemporary memorials honoured the defeated rebels in sixteenth-century Germany. But a design of such a memorial survived. Albrecht Dürer, the most famous German artist of that time, sketched a monument that features a sad-looking peasant who resembles the angel in Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I, but is sitting atop a pillar, a sword stuck in his back.

Unperturbed? Timm Kregel’s Dürer-inspired sculpture in Mühlhausen. Eckart Wetzel

In 1986, Canadian artist Jeff Wall produced a work he named The Thinker. The title is a reference to Auguste Rodin but the figure pictured by Wall with the sword in his back is inspired by Dürer’s sketch. Two recent memorials in Germany also attempt to realise Dürer’s design: Peter Brauchle’s 2002 bronze sculpture at Nußdorf, which recreates only the figure atop Dürer’s column, and an arresting seven-metre high bronze sculpture by Timm Kregel in Mühlhausen, unveiled in April — without any input from the German head of state.

Kregel’s sculpture commemorates the peasants’ defeat. But the figure atop the column seems unperturbed by the sword — as if to say: “I’m not done yet.” •

Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
By Lyndal Roper | John Murray | $75 | 527 pages

The post Quincentenary of a revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

After he returned from his nocturnal rambles, the man skinned the creatures he had killed. Then, to the amazement of onlookers, he stuffed the empty skins with padding and sewed them up. The late David Minyimak was one of several elders who spoke with authority about the stranger. After all, he had paddled him around in a dugout canoe. For Minyimak, the ability of the American to alter the dead was branded in memory. They “looked like they were alive,” he said of the stuffed animals. In the words of another old man, it was “like they had a real body.”

At the time of the stranger’s visit, the Iwaidja-speaking people had not yet moved to Minjilang, as the mission on Croker Island is known. In those days, they still lived on or near their ancestral estates on the mainland. Information about the man did not circulate outside the community until the first decade of the present century when it was recorded on video as part of a cross-cultural research project. Close collaboration between Bruce Birch, a linguist, and several Iwaidja speakers resulted in the English translation quoted here.

For David Minyimak, Charlie Mangulda, Khaki Marrala, Archie Brown, and others who recounted this important episode in their local history, the passage of time was seldom measured by numbers or dates. Instead, they used broad temporal signposts, recognised by the entire community. There is, for example, “Macassan time,” the era when voyagers from the port of Makassar on the Indonesian island of South Sulawesi used to come annually, trading and gathering the sea slug known as trepang, which would eventually be taken to China where it is considered a delicacy. Other well-known epochs include “wartime” (the second world war), “mission time” (the time of the missionaries) and “Whitlam time” (the era in the early 1970s when the prime ministership of Gough Whitlam introduced pro-Aboriginal policies that changed their lives).

Map of base camps and other locations visited by the 1948 American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. National Geographic, December 1949

Everyone agrees that the visit of the American scientist occurred “after wartime.” In those days, many of the northwest Arnhem Landers were living at Jamarldinki on the tip of Cobourg Peninsula. The maps made by Balanda — the white Europeans — refer to the place as “Cape Don.” After a lighthouse was constructed there in 1917, Aboriginal people began to camp nearby, forming a semi-permanent settlement.

It was there at Jamarldinki that they first encountered the American. He was so different from the men who ran the lighthouse and from all the Balanda they had previously met. For that reason, they observed him with special attention. A small but well-remembered detail is that when he returned from his night-time activities, he had scarcely a mark on his pale outfits. This struck the Aboriginal witnesses as strange because the scrub and grasslands were heavily charred as a result of the seasonal burning. Another strange thing about the visitor was the manner of his departure.

When he left the community at the lighthouse, he walked eastwards along the peninsula and then south to Oenpelli, where Anglicans oversaw a mission station. Although the distance exceeds 200 kilometres, he is said to have walked it in just two days.

The more fantastical elements of the story suggest that the local mob were at something of a loss in trying to understand this peculiar individual. In their efforts to make sense of him, they did what most of us do when confronted with the inexplicable: we try to bring it into focus by reading it through our own cultural lens. When they did this, the people at Jamarldinki came to the conclusion that the scientist was a marrkijbu. This is an Iwaidja term that translates as “shaman,” “clever man” or “man of high degree.”

The marrkijbu is said to possess “a heightened ability to manipulate aspects of both the natural and the supernatural realms.” He has a “special power” to “heal, or equally, to harm another.” A figure of heightened wisdom and judgement, his “clever” attributes can include the ability to foresee future events. For Aboriginal people of that era to identify an affinity between scientists and clever men is anything but far-fetched. In their respective cultures, both types of expert are reputed to have refined knowledge of, or control over, their natural environments.

A 1955 issue of National Geographic gives insight into the origins of the story about the American clever man. That year, the Geographic ran an article titled “The Incredible Kangaroo” by David Horn Johnson, a PhD in mammalogy who worked as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In this capacity, he was sent to Australia in early 1948 as a member of the American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. While the article is about kangaroos and says very little about the places and people that Johnson encountered as an expeditionary scientist, an earlier National Geographic article by Australian photographer, amateur anthropologist and expedition leader Charles Mountford describes how Johnson visited the Cobourg Peninsula where he made a “lonely walk through the ‘Never Never.’” Along the way, he collected and pres        erved zoological specimens for the Smithsonian’s natural history collection.

Monitored and analysed: David Johnson performing taxidermy during the Arnhem Land Expedition. Charles Mountford/Mountford–Sheard Collection, State Library of South Australia

There are so many affinities between Johnson and the Clever Man that there is no real doubt the story was inspired by Johnson’s visit in 1948. While in Arnhem Land, Johnson carried out a survey of mammals, concentrating on marsupials. His time in northwest Arnhem Land began at Cape Don, which he reached by boat. Like the man remembered in the story, he travelled entirely on foot. He did walk the full length of Cobourg Peninsula and onwards to Oenpelli — something that no white man had done in living memory. However, in contrast to the ultra-marathon attributed to the Clever Man, Johnson took twelve days to complete the journey.

The Aboriginal and Balanda sources agree on several fundamental points. The scientist was a highly competent backwoodsman and he wore pale safari outfits. His own colleagues were struck at how he kept himself so clean. Johnson, like the Clever Man, was an ace marksman and highly adept at tracking wildlife. Most significantly, he travelled with surgical instruments, chemicals, needles and a supply of thread that enabled him to taxidermically preserve specimens as he collected them.

Johnson’s scientific report on the expedition makes only brief mention of his time on the peninsula, although it does praise the hospitality of the chief lighthouse keeper and acknowledge “a great debt of gratitude to many aborigines, some never learned by name, who for little or no reward collected specimens, showed me where to look for different species, guided me on walkabout trips, and tried earnestly to impart some of their profound knowledge of animal life.”

It is disappointing that Johnson did not say more about these interactions, but compared to the reports compiled by some of his colleagues, he is generous in his acknowledgement of the traditional knowledge that informed his fieldwork. There is no evidence that he had any idea of how closely he was being monitored and analysed by the locals. Johnson died in the United States in 1996 and never heard the story inspired by his visit to the peninsula.

The Smithsonian mammalogist appears briefly in a documentary film, produced by the National Geographic Society. There is even a scene in which Johnson performs his taxidermic “magic” for the camera. This sequence seems to have been shot on the mission at Oenpelli, where the meaty spectacle of carcasses being stripped of fur again aroused interest, and not only from a human audience. The local dogs, ubiquitous in Aboriginal camps, milled around the visitor, as did great swarms of flies, harassing him while he worked.

Sixty-two years after the film was shot, the late Joy Williams, the traditional owner of the Adjamarduku homeland on Croker, invited me to visit the island with a videographer and sound recordist. Enabled by Bruce Birch, who interpreted the Iwaidja for us Anglophones, we camped on Joy’s ancestral country and studied the American clever man narrative in further detail. In the process, we showed the historic film to the key tellers of the story. They scrutinised it knowingly and everyone agreed that this was the American scientist of whom they had spoken many times. Indeed, a few seemed to regard it as something of a “told you so” to those naysayers in their own community who had doubted the validity of the story.

Important as they are, the consistencies between the oral account and the textual evidence are less revealing than the divergences, which take us into the most controversial parts of the narrative. A more sinister face of the Clever Man became apparent when he visited a forested area on the peninsula called Madirrala. This is near Port Essington, a fabled site in the history of Australian exploration, for the British garrison that was stationed there for a few years was the end point of Ludwig Leichhardt’s first expedition in the 1840s. These days, it is an evocative ruin. For the local people, Madirrala is a site of extreme danger because it is occupied by a type of hostile spirit known as a yumbarrbarr — a giant creature that eats human flesh. A yumbarrbarr lives inside a tree that is never far from the physical remains of people it has eaten.

Ordinary folk are understandably terrified of these homicidal tree spirits. Not so the clever men of the area who “have the ability to “tame” yumbarrbarr, and to use them as an extension of their own power.” David Minyimak was with the American at Madirrala when the scientist told him that he had seen a “big man” near a tamarind tree and that he “would have liked to have captured him,” but decided not to because of his size. Minyimak and his kinsmen inferred that the scientist had seen a yumbarrbarr. Merely to suggest that he could capture such a foe was deemed extraordinary, and it provided further confirmation that the visitor had supernatural powers.

The towering David Johnson (right) inspects a stuffed wombat being held by a museum official in Melbourne prior to the expedition. On the left is the expedition botanist Raymond Specht. Charles Mountford/Mountford–Sheard Collection, State Library of South Australia

Like several other Clever Man episodes, this part of the story is less easily reconciled with a “factual” account of Dave Johnson’s tour. It does, however, say a great deal about the way ideas and knowledge transit between cultures in a process that is so often pitted with invention and misunderstanding. That said, the story has its own deep logic, being founded on close observation and analysis. The association between the scientist and the yumbarrbarr was undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that Johnson himself was extremely tall.

In his examination of the story, Bruce Birch points out that the Cobourg Peninsula has long been inhabited by sambar deer, introduced from Asia. He asks whether Johnson, who had encyclopedic knowledge of animal taxonomy, could at some stage have suggested to Minyimak or other people camped at the lighthouse that he shoot one for food. Johnson’s scientific report does mention “Indian sambar deer” (Rusa unicolor) in a discussion of introduced mammals. So it is possible that he used the term when speaking to the people he encountered. Was “Indian sambar deer” in an American accent misheard as “yumbarrbarr”?

While that question, like so many issues raised by the story, must remain unanswered, the suggestion in the narrative that the scientist derived both power and authority from killing, manipulating and arresting the decay of the bodies of his prey is highly salient. In the eyes of the beholders, his taxidermy blurred the accepted boundaries between the living and the dead. This led them to draw parallels between his empowerment as a scientist and the powers claimed by local shamans. As an assessment of Johnson, a man of knowledge and erudition within his own society, the story is shrewd.

The business with the yumbarrbarr presages the darkest of all the deeds attributed to the American clever man. No local man or woman would have dreamed of doing what the scientist is alleged to have done during his long walk to Oenpelli. The locality where this occurred was Dilkbany, another site of ancestral power, in this instance resulting from the presence of human ghosts. Their concentration at the site requires some explanation.

The traditional mortuary rites of western Arnhem Land are long and complex, sometimes lasting several years. The body of the deceased is subject to various forms of ceremonial treatment and is likely to be shifted on a number of occasions. In the last phase of these observances, the dry and fleshless bones are painted with ochre, wrapped in paperbark, and interred in a rock shelter located within the ancestral estate of the deceased. This final act involves much more than the physical placement of the bones. As well as being a formalised expression of grief, it is about emplacing and orientating the deceased so that he or she is secure in the process of becoming a dead person within their home territory. In death as in life, people inhabit the country they were born to.

While spirits are not exactly tethered to the physical remains of their living selves, they remain closely connected with them. The bones are tangible evidence of the ancestor, perceptible to both the living and the dead. Despite the turn towards Christian burial, encouraged and at times enforced by missionaries, traditional mortuary rites were performed for at least some individuals until well into the twentieth century, especially if the deceased were considered to have been exceptionally “strong” in their culture. The extended history of these practices means that certain caves and fissures in the rock have, over centuries, become large storehouses of the dead. Dilkbany is one such location.

The narrator of the Dilkbany section of the Clever Man story was Archie Brown, whose own grandfather was at the centre of the sad events recounted. As Brown told it, at this stage of his southward journey the American was walking along a well-defined trail, resulting from activity associated with a nearby sawmill. Archie Brown’s maternal grandfather, a member of the Alarrju clan, had died some years earlier. His name was Marrarna and according to custom, his bones were placed in a rock shelter at Dilkbany. The story recounts that when the Clever Man approached this place, he noticed the opening in the rock where the bones were housed. Marrarna (which is to say his spirit) happened to be standing outside the cave at that moment. Then, as the stranger approached, he slipped inside. The American must have glimpsed Marrarna for he immediately picked up a rock and threw it inside the cave, forcing the dead man to come out. As soon as he did so, the American grabbed him and put him in a bag.

“He carried him off,” said Archie. “It was his spirit that he took. It seemed like a spirit, but it must have been the actual body itself. They headed off. He put him in the bag and they headed for Gunbalanya.”

At Gunbalanya, as Oenpelli is more often known to the local people, the American met with his Balanda friends who were staying there. But he never told them about Marrarna, who remained imprisoned in the bag. The American then left Arnhem Land, travelling first to Darwin and then to his home in a city in America, where he was reunited with the people who Archie Brown referred to as his “bosses” or the “ones who sent him here.” Only then did he remove his captive from the bag. The bosses or other American people who were present took “lots of photos” at this moment. As they did so, they documented an astounding transformation.

A staged photograph of the expedition camp at Gunbalanya. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

“At that point,” said Archie, “my grandfather had already undergone a change. He’d assumed the body of a living man. He no longer resembled the bundle of human remains, the way we put them there. He stood there as a living person… He spoke to all of them. ‘It’s me. It’s me. I’m the one you captured. You took me.’ He identified himself. ‘I’m Marrarna.’”

Then, in a sort of incantation, Marrarna uttered the names of his children and close relatives, as well as that of Paddy Compass Namadbara, the famed bark painter, widely regarded as the last great shaman of the region. That Marrarna should mention him is not surprising since Namadbara, while not his biological relative, was the adoptive or “classificatory” son of Marrarna according to the local kinship system. Brown recalled that the bosses in America were well pleased with the work of the American scientist and they paid him handsomely. He made “lots of money” from the capture of Marrarna.

The Clever Man story draws a connection between the scientist’s ability to make dead animals look lifelike and the rejuvenation of Marrarna. In so doing, it points to the range and limit of the scientist’s powers. There is, after all, a huge contrast between the stuffed animals the scientist tried to reanimate and the vital life force who leaps from captivity to assert his name, his kin relations, and thus his very existence. “It’s me… I’m Marrarna.”

Although displaced from his country (a horrific prospect for Arnhem Landers), Marrarna exerts power at this moment. Indeed, we could rightly think of it as a display of cleverness, for it transpires that in life Marrarna was himself a clever man, or marrkijbu.

An esteemed painter, Paddy Compass Namadbara was widely regarded as the last great clever man of west Arnhem Land. Namadbara and his wife Rhoda were photographed at Mountnorris Bay in the 1970s by the rock art scholar George Chaloupka. Courtesy of Ian White

The Clever Man story perceptively links the gathering of zoological specimens and the scientific collecting of human remains. In its artful and incisive way, the story fills the gap between the mysterious visit of the scientist and the appalling discovery at some later date that Marrarna’s bones had been stolen from their final resting place.

The belief that the American visitor purloined the bones is understandable, and it cannot be eliminated from the realm of possibility since his route went close to the mortuary site. Moreover, Johnson worked for the Smithsonian, an organisation that notoriously — although unbeknownst to Arnhem Landers at that time — had an enormous osteological collection that included the remains of thousands of First Nations people from around the world.

That said, the literal accuracy of the story on this point is far from certain. The acquisition of a human skeleton was well outside Johnson’s remit as a collector of marsupials, which is why he was sent to Australia. There is no evidence that he strayed so far from his area of specialisation, especially at a time when he was already laden with many animal specimens collected on the peninsula. A further and critical factor is that one of Johnson’s colleagues from the Smithsonian, an anthropologist-cum-archaeologist named Frank Maryl Setzler, collected human bones for much of the Arnhem Land Expedition. He would be the prime suspect for the bone theft in the story were it not that he had an alibi. Written evidence shows he never went anywhere near Dilkbany.

While the identity of the robber of Marrarna’s bones remains unresolved (they might have been taken by someone unconnected with the expedition), the Clever Man story again converges with the archival record when it describes the place to which the bones were headed. Setzler dispatched the human remains he stole to the United States, where they arrived in early 1949 as part of a larger consignment ambiguously described as “Natural History Specimens” in the shipping documents.

Something that makes the Clever Man story both clever and cheeky is the way it compresses the expeditionary party into the figure of a single, nameless scientist — as if to remind us of the thousands of Indigenous people who guided, or carried, or collected specimens, or made objects for trade, or shared songs and stories, or, in a myriad of other ways, assisted expeditions down through the centuries, but whose names were not recorded. When the Clever Man story finally gives us the name of a person it is that of Marrarna. Here again, a world of difference between the named and the unnamed is underscored. In contrast to Marrarna’s assertion of power through the declaration of his own name, the skeletons, stolen from grave sites by the Arnhem Land Expedition, were given numerical identifiers when they arrived at their new “home,” the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum. The imposition of those numbers, which were etched into the very surface of the bones, encapsulates their transition from human subjects — known and cared for by kith and kin — into objects in a museum collection.

The need to understand how these mid-twentieth-century bone thefts were tolerated and even valorised has driven my account of an expedition that turned out to be a most quarrelsome affair. Beneath the propagandist blather about good-neighbour policies and scientific mutualism, the project was riven with internal conflicts that were only heightened by a chaotic lack of organisation. Competition between the expedition’s three anthropological collectors, all of whom wanted the best possible “specimens” for the museums they represented, resulted in intra-expeditionary hatreds that would last a lifetime. The gathering of human remains from traditional mortuary sites was enabled by these conditions of conflict, competition and lack of executive authority. Conducted behind the backs of the traditional custodians, the bone thefts showed an extraordinary contempt for the Arnhem Landers who, for the most part, received the visitors with friendliness and good grace.

In order to understand holistically the origins and ramifications of these events, the book reaches far beyond the crowded year of 1948. The timespan covers a little more than a century, beginning with the intellectual formation of Charles Mountford, the originator of the expedition as well as its leader, and ending in the early twenty-first century when some restitution for the bone thefts was finally achieved. In accord with the basic principle, impressed upon me by so many Arnhem Landers, that land, sea, and the relationships among all living entities are our cardinal teacher, I have sought to communicate the social, cultural, and political ecology that created an environment that permitted this expedition to go forth and do what it did.

The great friction at work throughout the history of the 1948 expedition, and so constant through the twentieth century as a whole, is the old and suspicious dance between those who claim to be “modern” and those who the “moderns” classify as “primitive.” The alleged “primitives” are the people who, despite (or indeed because of) that classification, the “moderns” never manage to leave alone. Colouring that relationship between those two peoples is an argument about cleverness: a trait that the Iwaidja storytellers attributed to the visiting American, albeit with a certain irony. When the rejuvenated Marrarna leaps from the bag and loudly proclaims his name and identity, the hapless scientist who thought he had bagged nothing but bones does not look terribly smart. Maintaining “cleverness” in the face of science has long been a strategy for cultural survival on the part of people deemed technologically inferior.

Like other things that are usually hidden, bones are a focus for competing claims about knowledge and thinking. The bones that give structure to our bodies are among the parts of ourselves we don’t directly see. To view a skeleton, we must look at a person who is dead and decayed. Or that was the case until certain forms of technology were invented.

When Arnhem Landers began to go to hospital in Darwin, X-ray machines became the subject of animated discussion. Some people compared them unfavourably with the diagnostic techniques of clever men like Paddy Compass Namadbara, a renowned healer. Namadbara would examine his patients at the end of the day, illuminated by the last rays of the sun. In these conditions he said he could see inside the person and identify the illness. Western doctors were deemed inferior to clever men because they required elaborate equipment to perform this basic task.

To be clever is to see beyond the surface, to know the difference between the shallows and the depths. The concept is famously expressed in the rock art that is especially prolific in the west of Arnhem Land and across the border into Kakadu National Park. There you will find the unique “X-ray” paintings that the 1948 expedition helped make internationally famous in its publications. Such paintings show both the inside and the outside of the person or animal represented. Bones, especially the vertebrae, and sometimes the internal organs are clearly painted. The scientists on the expedition spent a lot of time looking at these paintings. They photographed them and copied them into their notebooks and they collected many examples, painted on bark by local artists. But for all the clever things they did in acquiring and exploiting this knowledge, it seems that the deeper truths inherent in the paintings eluded them.

Who were the clever ones?

That is the question that haunts the record of this expedition. •

This is an extract from Martin Thomas’s Clever Men: How Worlds Collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, published today by Allen & Unwin.

The post The American clever man appeared first on Inside Story.

Courtesy of the National Archive’s annual release of official papers, we also know that the cabinet record was unusually sparse. Before the conflict, not a single submission went to cabinet making the case for or against war, and none assessing the strength of intelligence reports on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. In the three months prior to the war, Iraq generated twenty-four pages of cabinet paperwork, less than ministers would expect for a minor change to a federal law.

Iraq was prime minister John Howard’s great international blunder, but his political execution was masterful. A strong leader worked his cabinet, controlled his party and dominated the bureaucracy.

That mastery was built on the political fib that Howard was deeply pondering the option of not joining the United States in attacking Iraq. The fib was a function of the core reason Australia went to war — to serve its alliance with America. Howard treated any doubts about the Iraq commitment as a questioning of that irreplaceable strategic prize. In retirement, he declared it “inconceivable” that Australia would fail to enlist in a US war.

Howard took Australia to its “greatest” war of choice. All wars are a mix of necessity and choice, but Iraq is further out on the choice axis than any other Australia has fought. It makes Iraq the example of the prime minister’s prerogative to send Australia to war.

Not asked for advice, the public service didn’t speak. Written submissions pondering the life-and-death decision would have fuelled debate within the government and party and have been explosive if leaked.

The five-year path to war

Australia’s self-invitation to Iraq began five years before the war, at the start of 1998, when Canberra signed on to US military planning for Iraq. After Saddam Hussein had suspended cooperation with UN inspectors attempting to monitor Iraq’s biological, chemical and missile capabilities, the United States and Britain threatened military retaliation and began building up forces in the Persian Gulf.

Early in February of that year, Howard briefed cabinet on his Iraq discussions with US president Bill Clinton and the prime ministers of Canada and New Zealand, and on “recent decisions” taken by cabinet’s National Security Committee. Cabinet affirmed the NSC’s decision to “offer military support to the United States’ coalition,” namely special forces personnel, two air-to-air refuelling aircraft, and medical and intelligence specialists. For Howard, that “offer” became a firm commitment to all that followed.

Cabinet granted the NSC authority to alter the mix of military forces to provide “support of a similar magnitude” if what was offered “cannot be incorporated into US plans.” On 20 February, the NSC approved two sets of rules of engagement, or ROE, “a defensive ROE applying during peacetime and the second, if necessary, an operational ROE for use during conflict.” Both sets of rules provided for integration into a coalition force, with the Australian Defence Force under the “direction of the coalition force commander, with ADF elements to remain under national command.”

The 1998 push to war reversed after UN secretary-general Kofi Annan swung into action and Iraq stepped back. By March, the NSC noted Iraq’s “current cooperative approach” and the failure of fresh inspections to find evidence of WMD. In May, nevertheless, cabinet considered options for Australian military support for operations in the Gulf. The starting point was that the United States should maintain its commitment to the military coalition. ADF liaison officers should be integrated into the US land headquarters in Kuwait, the special forces headquarters in Kuwait, the air operations headquarters in Saudi Arabia, and the US Central Command in Florida. Australian officers would help the US plan to fight Iraq.

Alliance insurance is served by military integration. Yet integration can define and drive commitment. Once you’re in, you’re in. And by 2002 war with Iraq was looming.

Howard begins the Iraq chapter of his memoir with this sentence: “Speaking to the General Assembly on 12 September 2002, George Bush not only recited Iraq’s long record of defying the demands of the United Nations but made it clear that if the United Nations did not act, the United States would.” Parse the alliance grammar: the US is both the subject and verb. And for Howard, the United States was always the central object. US actions would drive Australia’s response.

The archive trail includes a two-sentence minute from 10 September 2002, two days before Bush spoke to the UN, noting that Howard gave cabinet an oral report on his discussions with the president “on the American position in relation to efforts by Iraq to secure and maintain weapons of mass destruction. The cabinet also noted that the US intended to make appropriate use of United Nations forums and processes in seeking to resolve the issue.”

The archive record is that of a government determined to act, marching to an alliance beat, working on how to go to war, not whether to go. The tempo of the march was set by Howard’s innovation in the machinery of cabinet — the National Security Committee.

When Howard took government in 1996, he created the NSC as the peak decision-making body for national security and foreign policy. Marking a significant shift in cabinet structure, it has been retained by subsequent governments. Unlike those of other cabinet committees, NSC decisions needn’t go to full cabinet for approval. Also unusually, ministers are joined at its meetings by senior officials, including the secretaries of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Defence and Foreign Affairs, the chief of the Australian Defence Force, and the head of the Office of National Intelligence.

As the authors of a history of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet comment: “At NSC, the officials sat at table in the cabinet room with ministers, even if on the other side, and could participate in discussions — although those discussions were led by, and the decisions were made by, the ministers. Howard wanted his ministers to hear the views of the defence and intelligence chiefs.” The gathering of ministers and officials in the cabinet room makes the NSC a strong and effective instrument, especially for a powerful prime minister with a clear objective.

The NSC was “meeting frequently” in the five months leading to the start of the Iraq invasion, according to defence secretary Ric Smith. “But it did not, in my time at least, address the big issue because by then the prime minister and ministers seemed to have a firm view about where they were going and why.”

On Iraq, a single omnibus cabinet document in 2003 tracks the detail of the NSC trek to Howard’s alliance objective. Titled “Iraq: Australian Contingency Arrangements for Possible Military Action,” the file contains a series of ministerial letters and NSC decisions covering the period from 10 January to 5 March.

The eighteen-page file records decisions on “contingency arrangements for possible Australian military involvement in any future United States-led military action against Iraq” (10 January); rules of engagement, policy on military targeting and the NSC’s agreement that the defence budget should be supplemented by $467 million to meet the costs of the Middle East deployment (18 February); arrangements following an invasion, when Australia should “promote a strong and visible UN involvement in the post-conflict management of Iraq” and “encourage coherent planning and sound policy settings for reconstruction, including by early engagement with international financial institutions” (5 March).

The decisions were based not on departmental submissions but on oral briefings and “letters” from ministers. On 27 February, foreign minister Alexander Downer wrote to the prime minister, copying the letter to other NSC ministers, about dealing with Iraq after “military action” and “conflict” (words such as “invasion,” “war” and “occupation” do not appear). Commenting on “US Phase V” planning for the administration of a defeated Iraq, Downer observed:

Our starting point has been that, while Australia will do its fair share, we do not have the resources to do the “heavy lifting” on Iraq reconstruction. You have made clear to President Bush that Australia will not be in a position to contribute to a post-conflict or peacekeeping or stabilisation force. There are however significant Australian commercial interests in Iraq which we would want to advance. And we have a strong political interest in ensuring that the institutional arrangements in post-conflict Iraq are credible and effective.

US Phase IV planning is now well advanced. It is increasingly clear that the US envisages a dominant role for itself in all sectors in post-conflict Iraq for as long as eighteen months, while relegating the UN to a subsidiary role, primarily through its humanitarian agencies. This position was reaffirmed to me by [US secretary of state] Colin Powell in Seoul on 25 February.

I doubt that the US position is sustainable and much will eventually depend on whether any US-led military action goes forward under UN cover. The UK shares our view that there needs to be a strong and visible UN involvement in the post-conflict running of Iraq and we should continue to work with the UK to press this position in Washington.

Downer’s two-page letter is as close as the cabinet documents come to discussing the meaning of the planned conquest, but it still doesn’t stray anywhere near the merits of the war.

With all the preliminary work done by the NSC, the one substantial document generated by the full cabinet before the war began was dated 18 March 2003. The six-page cabinet decision, “Iraq: Authority for Australian Defence Force Military Action,” has to do a lot of work as a key piece of documentary history on Australia’s choice for war.

The next day, 19 March, the bombing campaign started; the day after that, 20 March, the ground invasion began.

The cabinet minute notes “oral reports” by Howard on his “extensive discussions” with the US president and British prime minister about the use of force against Iraq. On the morning cabinet met, President Bush had requested Australia join “military action by a coalition to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.” The rest of the minute is about accepting the Bush case for war — Iraq’s WMD were “a real and unacceptable threat to international peace and security” — and the mechanics of Australia’s military role. The cabinet decision is the final step in Australia’s march to war.

In making the Iraq commitment, Howard sidelined the governor-general, Peter Hollingworth, who has the constitutional power to declare war. The National Archives historian David Lee reports that Howard had originally planned to follow the constitution and take the decision to Hollingworth “for noting.” But Howard was worried by Hollingworth’s request for further advice on international law. Instead, the legal step was taken without reference to the governor-general using the ministerial powers of the Defence Act.

The intelligence agencies

Howard’s lingering mastery means his argument for joining a preventive war based on intelligence still gets a run. Two decades after the war, Australia’s defence minister in 2003, Robert Hill, maintained: “On the basis of the information we had at the time, we made what we believe was the right decision, and I still believe on the basis of that information that was the right decision.”

Such forgetting must overlook the conclusions of two Canberra inquiries: the joint parliamentary intelligence committee’s Inquiry into Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and the specially commissioned Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies.

Both reports showed Howard had little support from Australian intelligence agencies in deciding on war. The prime minister got just enough cover from the Office of National Assessments, or ONA, to meet political needs; beyond politics, the intelligence — as a basis for war — was thin. Parliament’s intelligence committee found that the Defence Intelligence Organisation was sceptical throughout about Iraq’s weapons, while the ONA, located within the Prime Minister’s Department, hardened its line as Howard marched to invasion. The committee commented on a sudden shift “in the nature and tone” of ONA’s view of Iraq’s WMD in September 2002: “It is so sudden a change in judgement that it appears ONA, at least unconsciously, might have been responding to ‘policy running strong.’”

To see how “policy running strong” bulldozes counter-arguments and unhelpful evidence, turn to a fine public servant who spent many years serving parliamentary inquiries — and writing much of what came to be tabled as committee findings. Margaret Swieringa was secretary of the parliamentary intelligence committee from 2002 to 2007 and put together its Iraq report. In retirement, she offered a withering analysis of Howard’s arguments about Iraq’s WMD. “None of the government’s arguments,” she wrote, “were supported by the intelligence presented to it by its own agencies. None of these arguments were true.”

Here is how Swieringa summarised the findings of the parliamentary inquiry she served:

• The scale of threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was less than it had been a decade earlier.

• Under sanctions that prevailed at the time, Iraq’s military capability remained limited and the country’s infrastructure was still in decline.

• The nuclear program was unlikely to be far advanced. Iraq was unlikely to have obtained fissile material.

• Iraq had no ballistic missiles that could reach the US. Most if not all of the few SCUDS that were hidden away were likely to be in poor condition.

• There was no known chemical weapons production.

• There was no specific evidence of resumed biological weapons production.

• There was no known biological weapons testing or evaluation since 1991.

• There was no known Iraq offensive research since 1991.

• Iraq did not have nuclear weapons.

• There was no evidence that chemical weapon warheads for Al Samoud or other ballistic missiles had been developed.

• No intelligence had accurately pointed to the location of weapans of mass destruction.

When the parliamentary committee report was released, Patrick Walters’ front page story in the Australian was headlined “PM’s Spin Sexed-up Iraq Threat,” a vivid rendering of what happens when a prime minister is running strong.

Howard could not allow that damning headline to stick. Hurt by one inquiry, a political master responds with another investigation with refined terms of reference. The PM called in a former diplomatic mandarin, Philip Flood, to inspect a failure — the failure of the intelligence agencies, that is. Flood’s conclusion began: “There has been a failure of intelligence on Iraq WMD. Intelligence was thin, ambiguous and incomplete.” He lamented a lack of rigour in challenging preconceptions or assumptions about the Iraq’s intentions. Sticking to his brief, his focus had to be on intelligence errors, not any blunders by political masters.

The old intelligence lessons of contestability and care endure. Intelligence is always partial, and partially wrong. The stuff that seems too good to be true can look good because it isn’t true (a truth as important for politicians or journalists as it is for analysts). Howard used the Flood report to blame failure on the Australian intelligence community. The punishment? Big increases in funding to do a better job.

The Iraq fib

John Howard’s story to the Australian people as he headed to war used a fib as a fig-leaf. The fib was deployed throughout 2002 and all the way to the moment of invasion in 2003. Australia had an open mind, said the fib. It was weighing the options and had yet to commit to a US-led attack. Even at the time, the fib was transparent. In the history of the open secret, it is a fine example.

I’ve used the word “fib” instead of “lie.” This political distinction is best not used when disciplining children or giving evidence under oath. The fib in its political garb is a thing of sophistry and silences. Some truth resides within it, but it is not wholly true. It is the politics-as-usual version of being economical with the truth. Neither a bent untruth nor a straight lie, the fib contains many shades of shadiness.

The truth in Howard’s fib was that if Saddam Hussein had totally surrendered — if he had revealed to everyone’s satisfaction that Iraq had no WMD — Australia would, indeed, not go to war. Saddam, though, would have had to convince the United States: not a simple task given the ambition and hubris of the Bush administration after what seemed like a successful invasion of Afghanistan.

Howard sets the terms of the fib in a brisk chapter on Iraq in his autobiography. The book recounts his White House talks in June 2002, where President Bush was given to understood that he “would keep my options open until the time when a final decision was needed.” But Howard writes that Bush also understood that “close discussions were under way between the US military and their Australian counterparts.” Bush was “entitled to assume on the basis of that, and also the tenor of our discussions” that he could rely on Australia’s military commitment. The “tenor” of that White House deal was a promise of support from Howard. Later, on the eve of the war, Howard gave a further personal pledge to Bush: “George, if it comes to this, I pledge to you that Australian troops will fight if necessary.”

The commitment to Bush was not, however, the story Howard gave Australia all the way to the invasion. The fib that Australia could step back and not join an American invasion was the public version.

The fib miasma held the government together, sidelined the public service, and provided that fig-leaf of cover as Australian public opinion turned decisively against the Iraq war. “Our decision to go into Iraq was against the weight of public opinion,” Howard wrote in his memoir. By January 2003, he noted, one poll showed that only 6 per cent of Australians supported joining an invasion of Iraq without a specific UN resolution.

Right up to the moment the guns started firing in March, Howard maintained that Australia had not made up its mind. In a statement to parliament on 4 February 2003, he again promised that “the government will not make a final decision to commit to military conflict unless and until it is satisfied that all achievable options for a peaceful resolution have been explored.”

Strange that a government agonising over such a choice asked no questions of its senior public service advisers. The reality was that all sides of Australian politics — and most of the Australian people — knew the commitment had long since been made. The ADF was deeply involved in US planning for the war and Australia was in.

American versions of the Iraq decision-making paint Howard as urging Bush, not cautioning him. In his memoir, Bush describes Howard as committed to action against Iraq, although preferably with UN backing; he writes that “almost every ally I consulted — even staunch advocates of confronting Saddam like prime minister John Howard of Australia — told me a UN resolution was essential to win public support in their country.” Bush lauded this staunch advocate as “a man of steel” and Howard steeled Bush to act.

When Howard appears in Bob Woodward’s account of the US invasion, the prime minister is urging Bush on. In an interview with Woodward, the president said Howard shared his “zeal” for the “liberation” of Iraq (along with Britain’s Tony Blair and Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar). Bush said they “all share the same zeal for freedom. It probably looks paternalistic to some elites, but it certainly is not paternalistic for those we free. Those who become free appreciate the zeal. And appreciate the passion.”

When the Bush and Howard met in in the White House on 10 February 2003, a month before the invasion, Woodward quotes Bush telling Howard that “thanks to your strong resolve we’re finally getting clarity.”

In his memoir Howard reflects that he committed Australian troops without bipartisan support and against public opinion: “Although the cabinet, most particularly my senior National Security Committee colleagues, unconditionally supported our stance, I had been the driving force behind the firm support we had given to the Americans. Both the party and the public saw this as something to which I had given a deep personal commitment.”

That “driving force” herded and harnessed Canberra.

The cabinet submission that never was

The public service silence on Iraq quickly entered Canberra lore. A year after the war, in a book on Howard, Bush and the alliance, journalist Robert Garran wrote:

Howard acknowledges there was no cabinet submission on the costs and benefits of going to war in Iraq. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was not asked for, and did not offer, any advice on the pros and cons of supporting American intervention. This reinforces the view that Howard’s decisions on Iraq were political, not based on a dispassionate appraisal of the threats it posed.

Garran’s footnote for that statement reads: “In an interview with the author on 12 March 2004, asked to comment on reports there had been no overarching cabinet submission on Iraq, Howard did not dispute the point, and answered that the issue was dealt with by cabinet’s National Security Committee.”

The journalist Paul Kelly observed that one of Australia’s most contentious conflicts “saw an astonishing and complete unity of opinion in Canberra.” He called this an insight into both strategy and governance: “Ministers made clear they did not want contesting advice and the public service offered no advice on the merits of the war or Australia’s commitment.”

Here is the modern version of the Canberra system. Frank and fearless advice is not an automatic requirement. If the prime minister has decided to go to war then don’t give him contrary advice. Certainly, don’t give him advice he hasn’t sought. And beware any senior bureaucrat who produces paperwork that could be leaked to attack or discredit the commitment to war.

The public service would attend to details; Howard and the NSC would do the rest. The secretary of foreign affairs and trade, Ashton Calvert, said his department’s task was to prepare for Australia’s Iraq role and make it work: “DFAT did not argue against that war role. In my view there was a strong and shared sense of policy direction on Iraq from Howard and Downer… In my view they didn’t need advice on what they should do because they had, in effect, made up their minds.”

When Ric Smith became defence secretary in November 2002, the message he got from ministers was that “they did not want strategic advice” from his department. “This reflected a conviction that ministers knew the issues and would take the decisions for or against the war.”

Making up your mind is one thing. Having a closed mind is a recipe for policy disaster. Australia would help to invade, conquer and occupy — then leave immediately. Iraq’s future? The consequences for the Middle East? Not our problem, thanks. All issues for the United States.

Consider what the Howard government could have known and asked in 2002 and early 2003 before committing to the blunder that became the Iraq war. No perfect hindsight is required; merely what cabinet could have focused on as it prepared to be part of an invading coalition.

If the big cabinet submission that never was had been ordered, what would have been discussed? Beyond military planning, such a submission would have covered intelligence, the nature and future of Iraq, the geopolitical balance in the Middle East, and Australia’s legal responsibilities as an occupying power. Then the submission would have drawn all the strands together to discuss the core driver of commitment — the alliance.

Intelligence

The WMD intelligence was thin, as Canberra’s two post-invasion inquiries found. Suffice to say that a government considering options would have wanted the intelligence stress-tested and argued over.

In a retrospective on the war in 2013, Howard argued that the “belief that Saddam had WMDs was near universal” while quoting the ONA’s view that the evidence “paints a circumstantial picture that is conclusive overall rather than resting on a single piece of irrefutable evidence.”

The strength of the intelligence was questioned by the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, when he met Howard in New York five weeks before the war began. At the meeting, Blix wrote later, “far from saying to Mr Howard that there were WMDs in Iraq I conveyed to him that we were not impressed by the ‘evidence’ presented to this effect. Regrettably, there were few at that time who cared to examine evidence about Iraq with a critical mind.”

As Blix later commented in a review for Inside Story of the memoirs of Howard, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the three leaders relied on Iraq’s alleged WMD to justify invasion but “the evidence was nowhere to be found.”

The three leaders used intelligence as the basis for a preventive war, not just a political debate. If the intelligence was circumstantial rather than definitive, other factors should have weighed heavily, such as a discussion of what would happen in a conquered Iraq.

The nature and future of Iraq

As war loomed, many expert voices denounced the dream that a US-led war would transform Iraq into a peaceful democracy.

Ten years after the invasion, John Howard gave this version of what went wrong:

The post-invasion conflict, especially between Sunnis and Shiites, which caused widespread bloodshed, did more damage, in my judgement, to the credibility of the coalition operation in Iraq than the failure to find stockpiles of WMDs. Persecution by the pro-Saddam Sunnis of the Shia majority had been a feature of Iraq for the previous twenty years. It was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted, but a stronger security presence would have constrained this.

Ponder how those thoughts would figure in the crucial cabinet submission that was never written. Take as the text for that submission an article published in the Australian six weeks before the war by Rory Steele, Australia’s ambassador to Iraq from 1986 to 1988. Offering a brisk survey of Iraq’s artificial nature as a country and the Sunni–Shia split, Steele judged that invasion would be the easy part. After that would come “the mother of all messes” as Iraq’s “abundant internal contradictions” turned to chaos:

New questions will arise daily, of legitimacy, of policing, in a situation of revenge killings, armed resistance and terrorism. With Iraq risking fracture, the coalition of the willing that entered may find it is in for a much longer and murkier haul than expected. Its hope will be to exit quickly, leaving Iraq in good order. The peacekeepers’ role could be thankless, dangerous and open-ended.

This was no 20/20 hindsight, but advice offered before the invasion. Having pondered that dark vision, the cabinet submission that should have been written would then turn to the impact on the Middle East of the mother of all messes.

Middle East geopolitics

Howard always presented himself as a tough international realist rather than a mushy multilateralist. Yet he had little regard for the realist views he accurately summarised a decade after the war:

The realists were probably untroubled by the UN issue, likely believed Saddam had WMDs, and regarded him as a loathsome dictator. Despite this they saw merit in continuing a policy of containing him and eschewing resort to military action. To them the world was too dangerous a place to become involved in such action except in the most compelling circumstances, which they did not think existed in Iraq in 2003.

The war’s disastrous impact on the geopolitics of the Middle East was predicted by many — not least a generation of US policy-makers who could not make George W. Bush listen.

After throwing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, president George H.W. Bush (the senior and wiser Bush) stopped short of toppling Saddam from power. The argument he made to Australia and others had a public and private dimension. The public line was that freeing Kuwait was the extent of the UN mandate. The private version was that deposing Saddam would destroy the regional power balance and that remaking Iraq would be a vast endeavour.

The US secretary of state in 1991, James Baker, wrote in his 1995 memoir that if the US had marched on to Baghdad after taking Kuwait, “Iraq might fragment in unpredictable ways that would play into the hands of the mullahs in Iran, who could export their brand of Islamic fundamentalism with the help of Iraq’s Shiites and quickly transform themselves into the dominant regional power.”

In the power realignment, the big winner would have been Iran, no longer balanced by Saddam’s Iraq. The United States would deliver regional victory to Tehran, aiding the regime it hated most. It was a strong realist argument in 1991 and it needed to be considered in 2002–03. It also turned out to be true.

Australia as an occupying power

An invading power is responsible for the country it conquers. Arguing with his president, US secretary of state Colin Powell compressed this international responsibility into a single image — Bush would “own” Iraq — that evoked the pottery shop rule, “You break it, you own it.”

The imagined cabinet submission would have needed to consider Australia’s obligations to the state it had broken. After Australian forces helped overthrow Saddam, Howard was asked on 17 April 2003 if Australia was “an occupying power.” The prime minister replied: “We have the obligation of an occupying power under the Geneva Convention. We, along with the Americans and the British have responsibilities, certainly, and we won’t neglect those responsibilities.” Howard said Australia had an obligation to the people of Iraq to help establish a new democracy, and expressed the view that “the predictions of a civil war are unduly pessimistic.”

Howard’s embrace of occupying-power responsibility was another fib: the fleeting words of a radio interview, not a government commitment. Australia invaded, then fled, declining a role in governing postwar Iraq. Canberra refused to sign on for that legal responsibility at the United Nations, leaving it to the other members of the military coalition.

UN Security Council resolution 1483 in May 2003 attributed only to the United States and Britain the status of occupying powers. It noted that on 8 May the two countries had written to the Security Council claiming “the specific authorities, responsibilities, and obligations under applicable international law of these states as occupying powers under unified command.”

The US alliance and Howard’s view of his masterful blunder

Having dealt with those four dimensions of the looming war in the submission that never was, cabinet would have turned to the central concern: what Iraq might mean for Australia’s alliance with the US.

A single sentence in the penultimate paragraph of the Iraq chapter in Howard’s autobiography expresses the foundational view that took Australia to Iraq: “I found it inconceivable, given our shared history and values, that we would not stand beside the Americans.” Howard was confident the United States would win, and that Australia would do its duty. Much history underpins that “inconceivable” conviction.

In the years since the United States came to Australia’s rescue during the second world war, Australia has trooped to America’s wars — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. A singular purpose runs through Australia’s role in these wars: the US alliance. Canberra invites itself so it can pay its alliance dues. Paying the insurance premium explains much about Australia’s longest war in Afghanistan and our role in Iraq.

The self-invitation process can be swift and built on high emotion, as it was when communist forces invaded South Korea in 1950 (Australia’s quick response helped clinch the ANZUS alliance) and in Afghanistan after the 11 September 2001 attacks on America.

The 1991 Gulf war sits close to this category but doesn’t quite fit the “America’s wars” typology. In the first exuberant moments of the post–cold war era, Australia went to the Gulf to support the United Nations and international law by overturning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The multilateral interest might have been of equal importance to the US alliance. The balance of interests meant that Australia’s contribution was primarily naval; no boots on the sand in 1991 and no Australians in combat.

At other times, as in Vietnam and Iraq, a step-by-step journey builds until it culminates in an Australian commitment. This is not sleep-walking to war. Many debates and decisions are involved. But a sense of narrowing options, even inevitability, can grip Canberra, building a sense of alliance necessity. The premium must be paid.

Australia did a better job of military preparation for Iraq than it did for Vietnam. Australian officers were embedded in the US system and took part in a prolonged period of military planning. In Vietnam, by contrast, the location of Australia’s first deployment was decided by the US military and advised through diplomatic channels. Australia went into Iraq far more cautiously than it did in Vietnam and got out as the dust of invasion cleared. We were slowly drawn back into Iraq by alliance demands in later years but, again, the military commitment was limited and confined. That is why the price paid in Australian blood was low, with two Australia military personnel killed between 2003 and 2009.

Examining the Vietnam–Iraq echoes, former Australian diplomat Garry Woodard found an “astounding durability” in Canberra’s alliance mindset, marked by “the dominance of the prime minister, decisions made in secret by a small group of ministers obedient to him, minds closed against area expertise, preference for party political advantage over bipartisanship, and willing subservience to and some credulity about an ally, the United States.” Woodard listed fifty Vietnam–Iraq parallels, including:

• Advice that ministers don’t want to hear won’t be heeded.

• The focus of Australian decision-makers is the US alliance.

• Australia will be part of a coalition of two or three if necessary.

• Australia’s assessment of the US is personalised and presidential qualities weigh heavily in that assessment.

• Australia relies heavily on US intelligence.

• There was no exit strategy for either war.

• In both cases, Australia put its standing in Asia at risk.

As Woodard judged, these are “enduring features” of Canberra’s decision-making. Howard exemplifies those features in his alliance commitment and the way he drove the government.

In December last year I questioned Howard on those issues during a media briefing at the annual release of cabinet records held by the National Archives.

One of my questions was based on the history offered from Washington in the books by George W. Bush and Bob Woodward. Both accounts, I said, painted Howard as an advocate of the war, not a caution. The Bush memoir described him as a “staunch advocate.” But the word that caught Howard’s attention was Woodward quoting Bush’s view about Howard’s “zeal” for the Iraq cause.

“My what?” Howard responded.

“Your zeal to go after Saddam,” I said.

“His word, not mine,” Howard said.

“Indeed, his word,” I said, “but were you an advocate rather than a caution in terms of the war?”

Howard replied that “zeal” would be a label more appropriate for Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, and his “huge commitment” of 45,000 British troops to the war.

“He believed in it very strongly,” said Howard. “Now, was I zealous? I think ‘zeal’ is slightly overstating it. You imply my role was to act as a cautionary friend. Well, you’re entitled to that view. I thought my role was to assess the Australian national interest, and that’s above all what I was sworn to uphold. I thought I pursued that because I thought it was in our national interest to put a curb on the capacity of terrorists to get hold of weapons of mass destruction from Saddam. I believed at that time that he not only had programs but he had stockpiles. I thought it was in Australia’s national interest to listen carefully to assessments of international reality and situations by our close friend and ally, the Americans.”

I’d prefaced my questions about the government process with a quote from Howard’s memoir, where he stated his aim to run “a fully functioning and orderly system of government.” My questions were: “Why in the decision to go to Iraq did you not use the system that you’d set up? Why were there no submissions from the public service on the intelligence? Submissions from the public service on the Middle East process? On what would happen in Iraq? Instead, the documents we do have — and there aren’t many — are basically letters to you from ministers and oral briefings. So why did you follow that, if I might say, rather unusual process, running it through the NSC?”

“What you’ve got to understand about the NSC,” Howard responded, “is that’s where all of detailed discussions about Iraq took place. There wasn’t one, single cabinet submission that you could isolate. But over a period of months we discussed in detail what was happening in Iraq, what was the current state of the intelligence and all of that. It was just a rolling process. Now you’re entitled to make the point, ‘Why was there at least one omnibus submission that covered everything?’ Well, it was pretty hard during that time to cover everything, because different events unfold.”

He went on: “When the Americans finally decided to push the button, they had to come to us to tell us, then they had to come back to get the result of a cabinet decision. And it was, from a legal standpoint, perfectly open to Australia to decide even at that late point, for one reason or another, that we wouldn’t go ahead. However, I never had that in mind. Certainly not. I think that would have been verging on the deceptive to a close ally to have behaved in that way. But it was, nonetheless, a legal decision.”

A decade after the war, Howard had offered this key sentence: “Australia’s decision to join the Coalition in Iraq was a product both of our belief at the time that Iraq had WMDs, and the nature of our relationship and alliance with the United States.”

Don’t be misled by the order Howard gives. Notice the weighting of the words: the issue of the moment feeds into the permanent interests of relationship and alliance. Given the strength of the two issues in the Howard universe, my estimate of relative importance is US alliance 75 per cent, Iraq WMD 25 per cent. And even that probably underestimates the alliance premium.

The Australian Army’s unofficial history of the war, produced by the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis, concluded that Howard went to war solely to strengthen the alliance. It dismisses as “mandatory rhetoric” Canberra’s other claims about enforcing UN resolutions, stopping the spread of WMD and global terrorism, and remaking Iraq.

Only the alliance was a strong enough reason for Australia to join the United States in launching war. At huge cost to the United States and many others — but relatively little cost to Australia — the purpose was met. Washington made one of its greatest strategic blunders; Canberra served the alliance. On this reading, Australia shouldn’t care whether the United States wins or loses as long as the alliance is burnished.

But does Australia bolster its alliance credentials by cheering on Washington as it plunges into folly and quagmire? Disasters that sap America’s treasure and national psyche hurt its ability to meet the alliance promises Australia so values. A principal concern for Canberra ought to be the harm the United States does to itself, diminishing its ability to shape the world to its (and our) advantage. This is the great blunder in Howard’s political mastery.

In writing about Iraq, Howard demonstrates that the necessary act of political will — the choice — at the heart of the alliance can take on an automatic tinge. That’s what happens when the pact is elevated from vital to sacred.

Australia had never before launched a war. In Iraq we did. Consider our catalogue of conflict: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Vietnam, Malaysia’s confrontation with Indonesia, Korea, the second world war, the first world war, the Boer war. In no case, apart from Iraq, was Australia the aggressor. We mobilised and joined alliances in response to attack, playing defence, not offence. (The Boers and Vietnamese might argue, but the regime-protection, defence-not-offence model can encompass those conflicts.)

A cabinet that truly debated its options in 2003 would have had to contemplate “doing a Canada” and refusing to join the invasion. We would have avoided a war of choice that was really a war of aggression. Howard’s tight hold avoided a dangerous discussion of the possibility that the closest of allies can say “no.” Refusal would have crashed against the prime minister’s personal pledge and deepest beliefs. Australia would have stepped back from a campaign it helped plan.

Surveying the Iraq disaster, one of Australia’s great foreign policy realists, Owen Harries, judged that “uncritical, loyal support for a bad, failed American policy” would hurt Australia’s standing as an ally in the long run. His dry but devastating denouement: “A reputation for being dumb but loyal and eager is not one to be sought.”

The lack of any Iraq WMD meant the reason for the “dumb but loyal” choice soon stood alone as the sole justification: Australia would go all the way with the USA. Iraq was the means. The alliance was the purpose. Squibbing a role in the conquered nation, Howard was deeply committed but not responsible. The US hubris was massive, and we drank of it. •

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It’s six decades since the publication of Donald Horne’s classic analysis of Australian politics and society, The Lucky Country (1964). Horne was blind, as were most others at the time, to the deep biological and cultural narrative of Australian earth, as well as to the enduring Aboriginal character of the continent. These insights have crystallised in our lifetimes and have transformed the way we understand the world and Australia’s place in it. This is not to criticise Horne for overlooking them; rather, it reminds us that if such a brilliant and edgy analyst didn’t see them, then these things were not part of the Australian zeitgeist of the early sixties, hardly even at the edges of it.

Fire, air and water were invoked in The Lucky Country, but they were configured as sun, freedom and the beach. The true power of the elements was yet to be appreciated. In mid–twentieth century Australia, the midday sun was bronzing rather than cancerous. “Open spaces” meant primary industry; “nature” often meant “raw materials.” And “the bush” was represented as a social setting, an inspiration for literary and artistic expression, and a subject of national myth-making.

Australian nature was the distinctive substance out of which a new society might be wrought, but it was not afforded independent agency and integrity, and nor was it regarded as finite. It was a setting, a commodity and a resource; it needed to be fought, tamed and reshaped to human needs. It was separate from humanity and subordinate to it. It was the background to the human drama.

There was one significant way in which Horne mobilised the environment politically, and that was in terms of geography. Australia’s geographical position on the globe was seen to have consequences. The southern continent’s proximity to Asia, its kinship with the Pacific, its long-distance triangulation with Britain and America: this was our unique geopolitical predicament.

What did it mean for emerging national, social and political identities? Another book published about the same time, a book whose title also entered the language — Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance, published in 1966 — asked Australians the same question. Both books saw Australia in the 1960s as drifting geopolitically. Blainey ended The Tyranny of Distance with a vision of the island continent floating in the southern seas, unmoored. “The Antipodes,” he wrote, “were drifting, though where they were drifting no one knew.” For Horne too, Australia had “lost its bearings.”

But geography is often part of mainstream cultural and political debate so this was no great leap. Ecology, however, is very different — for it is a discipline that questions the centrality of humanity. It reminds us that humans are inescapably part of nature, and that their fate may even be determined by the elements and other creatures. Ecology first emerged as a scientific term in the 1860s and assumed professional status as a science in the 1930s, but it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that its insights gained moral and political impact.

The anthropogenic planetary peril that loomed in 1964 was atomic rather than climatic. The nuclear threat galvanised environmental thinking. American historian Don Worster in his book Nature’s Economy (1977) described the postwar period as “the Age of Ecology” and declared that it started in the New Mexican desert on 16 July 1945 with the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The atomic threat to all planetary life generated, he argued, “a new moral consciousness” founded on the insights of ecology: it was called “environmentalism.”

The book that signalled the arrival in the West of this new environmental political consciousness was Silent Spring, published in 1962, focusing on the dangers of pesticides, and written by the American marine scientist Rachel Carson. Almost contemporaneous with Donald Horne’s book, Silent Spring portrayed a very different natural world to his: one where technology was a threat rather than a promise, and where humans were conducting a giant, dangerous ecological experiment on Earth.

There were Australian stirrings of this new moral consciousness around the time that Horne’s The Lucky Country was published. In 1964 the Australian Conservation Foundation was formed; so also was the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, of which Judith Wright was a founder. In 1966 the combative zoologist Jock Marshall published an Australian version of Silent Spring: it was an angry condemnation of Australian environmental practice called The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo-Australian Cupidity, Wickedness and Waste. In 1969, the first significant Australian conservation victory was won on the grounds of ecology and biodiversity when development plans in the Little Desert of Victoria were stopped by popular protest and a minister in the state government lost his seat. From the late 1960s, “the environment” announced itself as a ubiquitous term, an ecological concept and a political force.

The Moon missions of the Apollo space program fuelled a sense of the beautiful fragility of planet Earth, delivering some of the most reproduced pictures in the world. First there was “Earthrise,” taken on Christmas Eve 1968 as Apollo 8 went into lunar orbit. One of the three astronauts, Bill Anders, reflected: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” That revelatory image of the beautiful blue planet, visibly alive and floating alone, finite and vulnerable in deep space, had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Four years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as the “Blue Marble” showed the Earth as a luminous breathing garden in the dark void. Within a few years, the American scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that the Earth is a single, self-regulating organism.

In the postwar years there was an exponential shift in the impact of humans on the planet: the human enterprise exploded dramatically in population and energy use and rapidly began to outstrip its planetary support systems. World population, water use, tropical forest loss and species loss all soared after 1950. This turning point is known as the Great Acceleration and it charged the social excitement of the sixties. Now we live with the long afterburn of the fossil-fuel era.

Ecological thinking developed political momentum in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century and was expressed in public debates about pollution, population, wilderness, national parks, endangered species and sustainability. Conservation action was focused on enclosing and protecting threatened nature in place. Historian and activist William Lines wrote a book about environmental protest in postwar Australia called Patriots. Published in 2006, it was written under this twentieth-century paradigm of defending our natural heritage, as the subtitle declares. The phrase evoked the defence of heritage from development and the separation of nature from culture — in the book, the category of “natural” seems unproblematic and the use of “our” is unquestioned. “Heritage” here suggests something historic, a relic that might be preserved like an old building, object, or a fly in amber.

This was a time when getting back to 1788 was a purifying aspiration for conservation, another perceived boundary between nature and culture. This same paradigm of “defending our heritage” drove the noble quest to register “the national estate.” As if nature might be registered, fenced, signposted and preserved. This was the romantic age of state “national parks” and it was blooming when Horne wrote The Lucky Country.

Don’t get me wrong: I enthusiastically seek and defend conservation reserves; I love national parks and respond to the ecological integrity — and indeed historic landscapes — that they preserve. Expanding our national parks remains a vital quest. But now we live in a world where we recognise nature as fluid, dynamic, shifting and feral; it is part of us and not just optional and recreational; our survival depends upon it. Nature’s “management” (and that word is still used) changed its focus from national parks to public lands in general and then to private lands as well, all connected; and it now calls for corridors, baselines, renewal, respect and stories. Perceived wilderness has become beloved Country, nature is cultural and Indigenous care paramount.

Gradually in the 1980s and urgently from the 1990s, the spectre and then grim reality of the climate emergency brought a sense of extreme anxiety and even desperation to the quest for economic and social transition. By the beginning of this century we had a new metaphor for the extraordinary character of our times — the Anthropocene, the insight that we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of the Earth and have now left behind the Holocene, the relatively stable epoch since the last great ice age. The idea of the Anthropocene recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy. With the climate unleashed, the land of drought and flooding rains, of cyclone and firestorm, is now on steroids.

Just as nature could no longer be corralled, so did ecology invade the heart of economic debate. Pollution, extinction, forest destruction, population growth: these concerns were suddenly seen as symptoms of a much greater cataclysm. Local indeed became global; what you did in your backyard had planetary ramifications, for good or ill. The warriors at the frontline of logging protests were suddenly recognised not only as local heroes but also as defenders of precious carbon sinks, as fighters for the future of the Earth. Ecological thinking could no longer be dismissed as a dilettantish luxury; rather, it had become the single essential survival tool for our species.

Yet here we are, a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, and still our politics and even many of our intellectual discussions fail to centre the existential emergency. We have come up hard against the limits of our human capacity to act rationally and collectively in the face of planetary peril. We have discovered that we are instinctive denialists when we contemplate extinction, even our own.

Two Australian biographies in the last half-century exemplify the ecological revolution. Judith Wright, born in 1915, became arguably Australia’s best known and most admired poet of the twentieth century. From the 1940s her poems quickly entered the national literary consciousness. Her early poetry was popular and critically acclaimed because of its distillation of white pioneer mythology, yet she was to become a critic of that inheritance, especially regarding the violent dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and the destruction of the environment.

Wright’s activism quickened in the 1960s through her work as president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, and soon she was passionately engaged in defence of the Great Barrier Reef from mining. Her advocacy moved swiftly from wildlife preservation to the conservation of whole ecosystems and Aboriginal rights.

Her defence of nature was founded on an ideological critique of Western civilisation; she always understood just how radical the ecological revolution was. It was not only about saving particular places; it was about saving the Earth. In the 1980s she said of the Great Barrier Reef: “It is not the explosion of the Crown of Thorns [starfish] population, but that of the human species and its wants, that will destroy the reef.” She foresaw that it would not be a local starfish but human planetary impact that would bleach the reef into oblivion.

The other biography I find instructive is that of Tim Flannery, born in 1956, who became a scientific celebrity in the years following Judith Wright’s death. He began in the late 1960s as a young field naturalist inspired by Jock Marshall, then as a zoologist volunteering and working for museums. He shaped his career by frontiering in New Guinea and the islands, became dedicated to understanding marsupials now and through time, and composed a grand, bestselling ecological narrative of Australian history called The Future Eaters (1994).

In the late 1990s, as the plight of the planet became obvious, Flannery turned urgently to climate change science and politics, which consumed him. In 2005 he published The Weather Makers, a year before Al Gore released his film, An Inconvenient Truth. The celebrated Australian became a global figure. The first act of the Abbott government in September 2013 was to sack Flannery as chief climate commissioner.

Tim Flannery was both product and exponent of the ecological revolution; he morphed mid-career from being the relatively uncontroversial student of new species in Australasia into the inescapably political role of global climate scientist. His first degree in literature and his warm regard for the humanities equipped him for versatility, storytelling and interdisciplinarity, the kind of creative synthesis demanded in the Anthropocene.

Judith Wright was a poet turned activist, Tim Flannery a scientist who can write; their philosophies were profoundly shaped by the ecological revolution. They came to think on a planetary scale, seeing Australia in deep time and deep space, keenly conscious of our responsibilities to a living, breathing, vulnerable Earth.

Donald Horne would recognise their investment in shaking the nation awake, their belief that good ideas might save us, but in the early 1960s he could not foresee how swiftly and brutally planetary fate would overwhelm Australia’s luck. •

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The confrontations at Laverton followed an influx of Indigenous people from surrounding communities over the course of December 1974 and a spate of alcohol-induced fighting among the visitors that led to requests for police reinforcements. When a housing officer at Warburton, 550 kilometres northeast of Laverton, radioed a report that a large group of Aboriginal people armed with spears and nulla nullas was heading in a convoy to Laverton, further police were flown into the town. Over the next seven days their numbers in Laverton grew from the usual complement of around four officers to twenty-six.

A convoy of vehicles carrying about seventy people, including women and children, was in fact travelling via Laverton to participate in ceremonies in Wiluna, further north. When it was intercepted by twenty-two police at Skull Creek just outside Laverton on 5 January, a violent fracas ensued.

Aboriginal informants alleged the police assaulted the Aboriginal men in the group before arresting them. The police initially swore arrest statements alleging the men were fighting among themselves. These statements were subsequently amended to allege they had attacked the police. Thirty men including several adolescents were arrested and locked in the already crowded police watch house, where many were allegedly assaulted again.

Following media interest in Perth, and the rapid involvement of the state’s comparatively new Aboriginal Legal Service, the charges against those arrested were adjourned and ultimately dropped. Yet the issue continued to simmer, and in February the federal Aboriginal affairs minister Jim Cavanaugh proposed that the two governments, state and federal, establish a jointly funded royal commission to examine the violence and recommend appropriate responses. Premier Charles Court initially refused, but when the Commonwealth threatened to establish a commission on its own, he acceded on the condition that he could appoint two of the three commissioners.

The Laverton royal commission came into being in April 1975 and reported in April 1976. The commissioners were the prominent WA barrister Gresley Clarkson QC, a judge of the Supreme Court of PNG; Aboriginal pastoralist and businessman Ernie Bridge, president of Halls Creek Shire in the Kimberley; and South Australian barrister Elliott Johnston QC, whose initial application to take silk had been overturned by Steele Hall’s Liberal government because of his membership of the Communist Party.

When the three commissioners reported in April 1976, they found that one or more incidents of violence had occurred when the police were making arrests at Skull Creek and later at the police station, but they had been unable to determine who was responsible for initiating the violence.

They did find that large numbers of men were arrested without justification, and that the police conjured up a false narrative to justify the arrests. They also found that the second set of statements alleging attacks on the police by the Aboriginal men arose after a request by the police commissioner for charges to be progressed. But they were unable to determine why the changed narrative was adopted and how the briefs came to be prepared.

The police officers who prepared the briefs intentionally frustrated the commission’s inquiries. A senior inspector named by the commissioners was found to have “failed inexcusably to demand an explanation for the change and implemented it by altering certain documents.”

Because of the lack of concrete evidence, the commission’s recommendations were fairly general, encompassing improved communication facilities, better housing and transport, strengthened police training in race relations, and the possible appointment of Aboriginal police aides and Aboriginal JPs.

On alcohol, the commission focused on how the liquor laws were administered, noting that while many Aboriginal people had been arrested for public drunkenness, no hotel licensee had been prosecuted  for selling alcohol to an inebriated person for “at least many years.”

The commissioners’ high-level recommendations were generally ahead of their time, broadly aligning with recent Australian Institute of Criminology research on the underlying causes of hyper-incarceration. Somewhat surprisingly, though, they made no specific recommendations regarding the misfeasance of police, nor the attempts to mislead them, despite finding that “generally, on the whole of the evidence, we accept the substance of the Aboriginal version and reject the substance of the police version.”

The commission’s report attracted media interest and some debate in parliaments in Canberra and Perth. Premier Court declared that his government doesn’t “condone any misconduct, any over-reaction, but we do ask people to look at this very detailed report in its proper perspective.” He went on to indicate that the government would ask the Licencing Court to look at how the liquor laws might be improved to prevent situations where Aboriginal drinkers “overreact and bring about this situation.” The report’s immediate policy impact, in other words, was minimal.

The commission might seem overly restrained from a distance of fifty years, but its approach was shaped by the times and by the conservative (or perhaps tradition-bound) bent of its two West Australian members. Given the institutionally embedded antipathy to Aboriginal people, their caution might be interpreted as an effort to avoid provoking an antagonistic public and sceptical state government. In retrospect, though, the decision to hold back appears to have been neither justified nor effective.

Another clear example of institutionalised discrimination had occurred, also in Laverton, just six years before the events at Skull Creek. An Aboriginal man, Raymond Watson, was shot by police constable David Ludwig at the town’s Aboriginal reserve when he and Constable Ron Hall, along with five non-Aboriginal civilians, returned to the reserve following an earlier argument between Hall and another Aboriginal man. Hall admitted firing his revolver a number of times, and in the ensuing scuffle Ludwig fired a shotgun owned by one of the civilians.

Watson, badly wounded, was refused access to a Royal Flying Doctor Service flight and died in an ambulance heading to Leonora Hospital 120 kilometres away. A coronial investigation found that Ludwig “did not intend to kill or injure the deceased” and that the police were the “victims of a premeditated attack.” Hence, the coroner concluded, there was no basis for committing Ludwig for trial for manslaughter.

Historian Fiona Skyring has found that the police extracted signed confessions of participation in the assault on the police from the (non-literate) Aboriginal witnesses to the affray, and each of those witnesses was later convicted and imprisoned for various lengths of time. Skyring’s account identifies numerous discrepancies and irregularities in the police accounts of the shooting and the subsequent coronial investigation.

These 1969 events and some other troubling incidents had contributed to a decision in 1972 by Perth lawyers Robert French and George Winterton to set up a legal aid centre staffed by voluntary legal practitioners operating in conjunction with an Aboriginal organisation, the Aboriginal Advancement Council. Within a year, a new Aboriginal Legal Service, with full-time lawyer Graham McDonald, had begun taking on cases — and playing a key role in the aftermath of the January 1975 violence at Laverton.

An involvement in the commission changed the lives of many of the protagonists and undoubtedly helped expand the rights of Indigenous citizens. Among the commissioners, Ernie Bridge — who later said his experience on the commission fuelled his decision to enter politics — became the first Indigenous person elected to the WA parliament and the first to serve as a cabinet minister in an Australian parliament. Elliott Johnston QC went on to play arguably the most influential role in shaping the content and recommendations of the 1987–91 royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody.

John Toohey QC, who represented many of the Aboriginal witnesses before the commission, was appointed the Northern Territory’s first Aboriginal land commissioner in 1977 and joined the High Court a decade later. He was among the justices whose numerous decisions expanding Indigenous rights included the Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) decisions.

Brian Wyatt, a young Aboriginal bus driver who was arrested and allegedly bashed by the police the day before the Skull Creek events, having queried the manner of arrest of his brother, later became involved in the governance of the Western Australian Legal Service. Towards the end of his life, he became a key player in the National Native Title Council, the peak body for native title organisations.

While all of these individuals have since died, their legacies continue to shape public policy towards Indigenous Australians.

Another key lesson from the commission was that there are circumstances where there is a clear role for the Commonwealth in shaping state and territory policies towards Indigenous people., Yet proactive Commonwealth engagement across the Indigenous policy domain, which derived from the success of the 1967 constitutional referendum, has faded into disuse, despite the fact that the last three federal ministers have been Indigenous. The Indigenous policy domain is less effective as a result; the challenges of Indigenous hyper-incarceration are a case in point.

Police forces across Australia continue to pursue flawed operational policies that affect disadvantaged citizens, including Indigenous citizens, more seriously. The ongoing woes of the Northern Territory police force are perhaps the most egregious, but not the only, example. An independent review in 2022 of investigations of police-related deaths in Queensland recommended changes to ensure independent investigations and the establishment of a Police-Related Deaths Advisory Board; no formal response appears to have been made by subsequent Queensland governments.

The lesson here is that ad hoc inquiries, reviews and occasional royal commissions in reaction to particular outrages, and the ubiquitous practice of the police using internal investigations whenever placed under pressure won’t change the quality of police operations. Perhaps it is time to shift the organisational model for police forces from one controlled by a single police commissioner to a statutory corporation governed by a board with community representation as well as law enforcement experts.

Even now, in 2025, Indigenous incarceration rates are at stratospheric levels. Indigenous imprisonment is six times the non-Indigenous imprisonment rate. The ABS’s latest data reports a national prison population of 44,403 persons on 30 June 2024, of which a vastly disproportionate 15,871 were Indigenous. The Indigenous prison population increased by an extraordinary 2019 people, or 15 per cent, over the previous year, despite it being identified in two specific targets in the Closing the Gap framework to which all sides of politics are nominally committed.

Police work is never easy and is shaped, implicitly and often explicitly, by the underlying intentions and mindsets of lawmakers. Each upward ratchet of penalties for breaches of the law increases the likelihood of negative police/Indigenous interactions. The events at Laverton are a reminder that these interactions have long been fraught.

The Laverton royal commission was a landmark event in Indigenous policy. The challenges it dealt with ― poor communication, alcohol abuse, poor housing, police violence in interactions with Indigenous citizens ― remain with us. As a nation, we should strive not to forget the lessons learned. •

This account of the violence at Laverton and its aftermath relies on the royal commission report and Fiona Skyring’s insightful book Justice: A History of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia (2011).

The post The incident at Skull Creek appeared first on Inside Story.

If I may be indulged for one moment in personal reminiscence I should like to say that I can date the exact moment when the sense of the past awoke in me. I had just finished my first year at this university — I was studying history, but it was just a subject like any other until in my first long vacation I went to Tasmania and visited the old penal station at Port Arthur. To me this very recent ruin was incredibly ancient and peopled by the dead. I have still — though wild horses would not drag it from me — documentary evidence in the shape of my first historical essay, to show the extraordinary impact of those few poor stones on my imagination. And when, many years ago, I came to write an historical work myself it was about convict Tasmania.

Kathleen’s foundational course in history could attract enrolments of five hundred students split into a daytime and an evening group. She must have taught thousands of students across her career and the impact she had on them was profound. Particularly memorable was her elegant presence, how she would sweep into the lecture theatre splendidly dressed and coiffed, pearls at her throat, often with a flower attached to her billowing academic gown: a rose, a carnation, or sometimes a camelia freshly picked from the garden in the Old Quad.

Her lectures were always carefully structured and so beautifully delivered that (unbelievable as it may seem in our own day) some students at the afternoon session returned for the repeat performance in the evening. Fifty years later many of her students claimed to remember whole passages from them.

Kathleen was on leave in 1947 when Ken Inglis took her course, so he had to endure the “scratch team” that filled in for her. But in 1949 he sat in on her lectures for “revision and inspiration.” He never forgot her quoting Thomas Rainborowe, who fought for parliament during the civil war: “The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.” In those early years after the second world war, Inglis felt that this was what his generation’s postwar reconstruction was all about too.

By the early 1960s Kathleen’s “god professor” demeanour was looking rather affected in the eyes of students drawn from increasingly diverse backgrounds. Many were more amused than entranced. Although the era of jeans, T-shirts and student revolt had not yet arrived (Stuart Macintyre recalled twinsets and Fletcher Jones slacks during his student days at Melbourne in the 1960s), Professor Fitzpatrick must have seemed an emissary from another epoch to a lecture theatre of 250 eighteen-year-olds.

I like to picture the scene — the startled looks and the pens suddenly still — as Kathleen craved her students’ “indulgence” for her “personal reminisce.” This remote, ageing woman (she was actually in her mid-fifties) had been an undergraduate herself, apparently! She had sat, pen in hand, in the same lecture theatre at the same long wooden desks, as nervous and eager themselves.

She too had wondered if history was the right subject for her, until by chance she realised that it can be discovered not just in classroom and library but also out there in the world. Still, she confided, “wild horses” would not drag from her that first literary effort that was not a university assignment. Surely at that point everyone in the room must have immediately longed to read it; I certainly would have.

As it happens, the passing of years has given me the advantage because Kathleen did keep that student essay and it was among her personal papers transferred to the University of Melbourne Archives after her death in 1990. When I realised this, wild horses couldn’t have stopped me booking a flight from Canberra to Melbourne to read it.

It would have been simpler to have it digitised of course, but by then I was agog with curiosity as to what else I might find. Having years ago read Kathleen’s memoir, Solid Bluestone Foundations, published to wide admiration in 1983, I’d noticed that she is the sort of person who stays with you. I read her published correspondence with Manning Clark, Dear Kathleen, Dear Manning (1996) and was delighted when finally a full biography appeared, Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s A Brimming Cup (2013).

Once again, just recently, Kathleen popped into my line of sight while I was working on a piece for Inside Story on the historiography of Australian biography. I learned that for her 1949 book Sir John Franklin in Tasmania 1837–1843 she’d had to find and slog her way through prodigious quantities of primary source material because very little had been published about Franklin’s years in Tasmania. The book was Kathleen’s most sustained academic achievement, but I was disappointed to note that Kleinhenz passes over it in only a couple of pages.

Kleinhenz concludes her biography with the strange observation that not a great deal survives of Kathleen’s work as a research historian and writer. And yet Kathleen had published steadily throughout her career, and her papers at the University of Melbourne are full of notes and drafts and correspondence about her work. Among them, quite clearly identified, is an essay titled “Port Arthur,” neatly written out in her own hand. The only oddity is that the piece is initialled “J.D.O.” and not “K.P.” (for Kathleen Pitt, as she was then). Perhaps she hoped to publish it pseudonymously and the O was a reference to her maternal grandmother’s family, the O’Briens.

The Port Arthur visit occurred during a Pitt family holiday in the summer of 1923–24, and the young historian-to-be asks her reader to join her for an evening stroll through the site. She begins with “the stately church such as our own ancestors worshipped… in many an English village,” but which turns out to be an empty, ivy-clad shell. As we proceed past hawthorn hedges and old-fashioned English flowers, we notice a “deadly quiet” has settled on Port Arthur where once, “in the old days,” everything was “clutter and bustle and stir.”

Port Arthur photographed in the early 1930s by Frank Hurley. National Library of Australia

We pass the hospital, the penitentiary, the model prison (now known as the separate prison) and the guard tower. We even cross to the Isle of the Dead, where headstones mark the graves of soldiers and warders but one now “walks unknowingly over the dust of the unhonoured dead [of convicts].”

Kathleen would soon learn via the blue pencil of her English tutor at Melbourne, Muriel Berry, how to eliminate the purple passages to which she was prone, and her history lecturers helped leaven her colourful imagination with healthy doses of scepticism and detachment. But at this moment Port Arthur had her in its spell. She abjured the “fairy stories” spun by the site’s tour guides but fell for one herself when she wrote that the “Governor’s cottage,” as she called it, was the summer residence of the governor of Van Diemen’s Land. She thought it ironic that this personage would choose to make “this place of suffering his place of pleasuring.”

She goes on: “In this old deserted garden, and by this crumbling fountain weary of waiting many years now for the hand that shall set it play again, strolled once many a Vice-regal lady and resplendent military man.” Had she been able to resist invoking shades of Tennyson (“By this still hearth, among these barren crags…”) she might have realised how improbable this was. The government cottage was built merely to accommodate government officials and visitors to the settlement, and the colonial governor’s actual summer retreat was at New Norfolk, on the River Derwent northwest of Hobart.

In fairness, Port Arthur is difficult to write about. To be confronted by stupendous beauty and terrible pain in the same place is a challenge for anyone who goes there, especially after the events of April 1996. Many people are struck by quiet, as was Kathleen. In 1923–24 she wrote that although in the summer “great chara-banc [motor-coach] loads” of people pass through every day, to be rushed around by tour guides, “the quiet enters into them, and they make little noise to disrupt the prevailing calm.” She noticed a few visitors lingering among the crumbling ruins, and in the hush it seemed that “the spirits of the dead are not far away.”

It’s a mark of Kathleen’s strength, I think, that for the rest of her life she held on to her essay on Port Arthur. She kept it under wraps, certainly, but she was never embarrassed to allude to the awakening experience she’d had at Port Arthur. From my reading of her lecture scripts, I think she began including her “personal reminisce” in 1948, and was still including it, word-for-word, in lectures delivered in the early 1960s.

Underneath the cloak of formality Kathleen donned along with her academic gown every day there was a warm-hearted but also quite vulnerable person. She was, as she once admitted to her head of department, Professor Max Crawford, a “highly strung and nervous character, who only produces an effect of calm and confidence by a continuous act of will.”

Her academic career misfired twice. In 1926, having completed her first degree at Melbourne, she enrolled at Oxford in a second undergraduate degree. But there, lonely, unmentored, without a scholarship (her fees were paid by her father) and despite working herself to exhaustion, she came away with a second-class degree, not a first. The second setback was a brief and disastrous marriage in 1932 to journalist and future historian, Brian Fitzpatrick. She emerged from the divorce determined to regain her career and independence. Her appointment to Melbourne’s history department in 1938 set her back on track to the life she had always wanted.

It also meant that she could start to plan a research career, and perhaps then she felt the time had come to dust off her essay on Port Arthur to see where it could take her. She was quite certain by then, I think, that her research methodology would focus on primary source material. Ernest Scott, professor of history at Melbourne during her undergraduate days, had inspired this passion. In his lectures, the people of the past had become much more real to her than in school textbooks and he had done it by quoting from primary sources.

Very soon Kathleen selected Sir John Franklin’s governorship of Tasmania as her special interest. In 1939 she published an article about him in the journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, based on archival material newly transferred to the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Few academic historians were interested in Australian history then. Scott had been an exception, but sadly for Kathleen he died in 1939 just as she was restarting her career.

Sir John Franklin in Tasmania was a long book with simple ambitions. Franklin was famous in the history of polar exploration but his six-year governorship of Van Diemen’s Land had been given scant attention by biographers. This had left unrefuted a long-held belief that his Tasmanian years had been a failure. Kathleen countered with the argument that he had struggled with circumstances beyond his control, and she furthermore contested the notion, put about by his enemies in Van Diemen’s Land, that his government was subject to “petticoat” interference by his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. By bringing gender relations so firmly into her narrative, Kathleen became a pioneer of women’s history in Australia, although it was more than fifty years before her contribution was recognised as such.

Impeded by wartime interruptions and by a heavy load of university teaching and administration, her book took ten years to write. Her main sources were the official records, kept in Hobart, of Franklin’s administration, which included copies of despatches sent to London as well as various departmental records and police and convict records. She supplemented these with an extensive reading of early colonial newspapers.

Kathleen consulted a range of personal papers as well, some held in libraries, others still in private hands. A breakthrough came in 1947 when she was granted leave by her department to travel to Cambridge to read the papers of Lady Jane Franklin held at the Scott Polar Research Institute.

I often think of her in the basement of the old Supreme Court building in Hobart confronted with shelf after shelf of the unsorted and unlisted records of Franklin’s administration. During many a lunchtime she must have sat alone with her sandwich on a bench in the adjacent park, Franklin Square, named after her hero, looking up at his statue and wondering if it was all worth it.

To my knowledge, no historian at that time, not even Manning Clark with his books of documents on Australian history, was sweating at the coalface like Kathleen. Clark was mainly working with published primary sources, not archives, and in any case, he had his wife Dymphna to assist.

Kathleen’s narrative did sink sometimes under the weight of all that archival material, leaving obvious errors for academic reviewers to find. Some of the reviews caused her great distress, but in Tasmania the book was well-received. Sir John and Lady Jane had always been fondly remembered there. Many local readers might have been pleased that it begins not with a dreary academic exposition of her central thesis about Franklin, but this: “The heart-shaped island of Tasmania hangs like a pendant from the mainland of Australia, larger than Ceylon and smaller than Ireland, the last outpost of Australian before Antarctica.”

She continues with a description, beautifully done (because she had long-ago learned how to write crisp English prose) of the island’s physical features: its mountains, its plateaus, its climate, its rivers and rainfalls. She understands the relationship between physical environments and human cultures, just as historians do today.

In her several trips to Hobart for Franklin research it’s unclear whether Kathleen got to Port Arthur again. She made friends with some historians in Hobart and one of them might have taken her there in their car. “Port Arthur is an enchantingly lovely place,” she writes in her book, “but one that every visitor is glad to leave, because here man soiled in a few years the secret and untroubled beauty that nature had sheltered for a millennium.”

Kathleen also recounts a distressing story of a twelve-year-old boy, William Pearson, brutalised at Point Puer, the prison for boys at Port Arthur. She says Pearson’s police record was one of the “most horrible documents” she had ever seen. Other than that, she remains detached and impersonal in her analysis of the administration of convicts at Port Arthur. Once bitten twice shy, perhaps.

In a tribute to Kathleen published in the Melbourne Historical Journal in 1964, Ken Inglis (who, after graduation, was a junior colleague of Kathleen’s at Melbourne for a few years in the early 1950s) admired Kathleen for wanting to make the study of the past a “personal encounter.” Her Franklin book demonstrated her ability to evoke visual images. “Here… is a historian using her eyes,” he declared. Her readers can see the places and the people as they are too seldom allowed to in the works of academic historians.

The year 1949 was an important one for Kathleen. Franklin was finally published and she had just been promoted to associate professor, the first woman in a non-scientific field to attain that rank in an Australian university. In January 1949 she achieved another first when she was made president of the history section of the 1949 ANZAAS meeting. No other woman had ever been given the role.

As president she was expected to give an extended address (a “keynote,” we would say), and the topic she chose was “The Role of Imagination in History.” The conference was held in Hobart, and how immensely satisfying it must have felt, riding a wave of success after all her hard work, to stand in front of an audience where, twenty-five years previously, she had first begun to exercise her own historical imagination.

Her lecture, later published in the conference proceedings, was a long mediation on what she had learned in those years from the work of many historians and thinkers, and from her own experience. Imagination is not an ornament to history, she said, but belongs to the very structure of historical knowledge. It is not free to roam at will but is bound to the evidence. It must not conflict or go beyond evidence except as speculation, which will be indicated as such. Anything can evoke the “authentic voice of the past,” not just archival records but objects, works of art and historical places also. And here Kathleen inserts her personal reminiscence about Port Arthur, telling her audience that the encounter had made her a lifelong student of history.

I can’t say for certain that Kathleen Fitzpatrick was the first Australian historian to write about imagination in history, but it’s possible. Nor do I know if she was aware of William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past is never dead, it’s not even past. But she says something similar when she notes that we all belong to our own time and we must cultivate our modern consciousness.

Any account of time past, she muses, is at best only an approximation of what happened. “The most beautiful piece of historical interpretation is only the tale told by a historian.” •

The post A tale told by a historian appeared first on Inside Story.

The twenty-five-year-old Nolan was an unlikely soldier. There’s a grainy photograph of him taken just a couple of years earlier, in 1940, that perfectly captures his nonconformist nature. He’s sitting on a pier in St Kilda with his first wife, fellow artist Elizabeth Paterson, squinting suspiciously at the viewer, his unruly hair held back by a thick head band. Decades before the invention of rock and roll, he looks for all the world like guitarist Keith Richards. You have to wonder what staid Melbourne or the Australian army — or Paterson’s parents for that matter — thought of this unrepentant bohemian.

Nolan’s Wimmera interlude must have felt to the young artist like an unjust exile into a pit of irrelevance, but in some ways it was the making of him. Wherever he was stationed — Dimboola, Horsham, Nhill — he would set up a rudimentary studio and get to work. During this khaki sojourn he also had a lifeline to the outside world: his lover Sunday Reed.

Nolan had left Paterson and his young daughter Amelda in 1941 to take up with Reed — and her husband John Reed, to form probably Australia’s most famous ménage à trois. He eventually moved to the Reed’s property Heide, a small farm on Melbourne’s northeastern outskirts, where an informal artists’ colony flourished under their patronage. After the war, Nolan would paint his famous Kelly series on the dining table at Heide, often with Sunday by his side. By the late 1940s, however, the love triangle would fall to pieces. Nolan left and never returned.

But that was all in the future. During the war Nolan and Sunday were very much in love. She would post him sheets of Masonite and muslin-laid boards to paint on, and tins of Dulux lacquer and Ripolin enamel to paint with. Nolan, an autodidact with a love of public libraries, read voraciously, so Sunday also sent him books: Rimbaud, Kafka, Kierkegaard. On leave he would return to Heide; sometimes Sunday would visit him.

She also encouraged Nolan to paint the landscape around him. In the Wimmera, Nolan and his fellow conscripts laboured under a vast dome of blue sky, surrounded by flat fields of yellow wheat interlaced with interminable roads and railway lines. In the distance they could see ancient rocky outcrops worn down from what were once mountains. Nolan captured all this, and more, and developed rapidly as an artist.

And then he did something out of character: he applied to become an official war artist. In the archives of the Australian War Memorial you’ll find the letter of application he wrote to the man in charge of Australia’s war artists, a lieutenant-colonel named John Treloar. Pinned to it is a note that describes Nolan “as an extremist of the modern school.” He didn’t get the gig.

Treloar was a veteran of Gallipoli, where he had almost died of typhoid. Later in the war he worked closely with Charles Bean, the progenitor of the Anzac legend, in the Australian War Records Section, collecting documents and artefacts and commissioning artists for the memorial Bean had decided must be built. After the war, he became the second director of the AWM. The paintings Treloar wanted to adorn the walls of the memorial had to be factual, consoling and inspiring.

But imagine if Treloar had taken a punt on the young artist. Imagine if Nolan had been sent off to New Guinea with a haversack full of Ripolin and a melancholy kiss on the mouth from Sunday Reed. Imagine what Nolan may have taught us about Australia’s war in the Pacific.

In 1944, fearing he might be sent overseas to fight, Nolan went absent without leave. It seems he was willing to paint for Australia; but not to fight for it. On the run, he took up the pseudonym Robin Murray and, with the help of the Reeds, managed to avoid the authorities until 1948, when an amnesty allowed him to become Sidney Nolan again. While he was mythologising Ned Kelly in paint, Nolan himself had been an outlaw.

There is little in Nolan’s work during the war that is overtly about the war. The best-known are Latrine Sitters and Dream of the Latrine Sitter. The titles speak for themselves: they are the paintings of a young man resentful at having to suffer the depredations of army life. Neither painting is in the spirit of Anzac as Colonel Treloar would have understood it.

But one work stands out, mainly because Nolan would later return to the image again and again. Painted in 1942, Head of a Soldier shows a digger in a slouch hat with the staring eyes of a soul in the grip of post-traumatic stress disorder. Not surprisingly, it was used on the cover of a book called Psychiatric Aspects of Modern Warfare.

More than a decade later, in the late 1950s, Nolan would revisit the subject of war in a major series inspired by the story of Australia’s disastrous Gallipoli campaign. He worked on the project off-and-on for the next two decades and produced hundreds of images. It might be the best least-known work of Nolan’s fecund and celebrated career.

Nolan’s Soldiers (1959). Australian War Memorial

Unlike Colonel Treloar, Nolan wasn’t interested in historical accuracy; he wanted to get at something truthful and universal. Nolan’s Gallipoli series is full of arresting images. Diggers are sent twisting and turning by shell bursts. Shadowy figures fight to the death with their bare hands. Doomed men frolic in the Aegean. Drowned corpses bob and roll in the surf. The mad stare from Head of a Soldier is repeated many times on many faces. Though they are twentieth-century Australians, the subjects of these paintings could have been fighting side-by-side with Achilles at Troy.

In 1978 Nolan no doubt outraged the ghost of Colonel Treloar when he donated 252 pieces from the series to the Australian War Memorial. The extreme modernist deserter had made it inside the building. Today the collection — probably worth millions — lies safely in the AWM’s secure storerooms.

The story behind this donation, and the creation of the series itself, is a little-known chapter in Australia’s cultural history. At its heart is Nolan’s friendship with three other accomplished Australians: George Johnston, author of the Australian classic My Brother Jack; Johnston’s partner Charmian Clift, a writer and newspaper columnist; and Alan Moorehead, a war correspondent and non-fiction writer.

The quartet were all members of Australia’s Double War Generation. Born during, or just after, the first world war, their childhoods were dominated by the Great War and its aftermath, while their twenties and thirties were shaped by the Great Depression and the second world war.

Nolan might never have pursued his Gallipoli series without the influence of the other three. Or if he had, it may have been very different. What do you call it when painters and writers exchange ideas, and meet and talk and drink together? You call it the history of art.

Back in the 1920s an iconoclastic member of the student body at Scotch College endured his school’s annual Anzac Day ceremony with well-hidden ennui. Many years later, Alan Moorehead would write: “I think that we school children, in our secret hearts, became bored with all this as we got older… bored with the singing of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’… bored with the retired generals’ speeches, the crossed swords and the little glass box of medals hanging in the school hall, and the war paintings in the art galleries.”

This was blasphemy, and the young Moorehead knew it. Anything less than veneration for Australia’s “civic religion” — as the historian Ken Inglis dubbed Anzac — was deeply frowned upon at Scotch College. “Even now,” Moorehead would write as an adult, “I have the feeling that I am dragging a shameful secret out into the open.”

On this point, Moorehead was not exaggerating. As for so many other Australian families, Gallipoli had been a catastrophe for the Mooreheads. Alan’s uncle Frank had been killed in action during the famous landing; another uncle, Harold, had survived a Turkish shell blast but lost his right leg and right arm.

While Moorehead was keeping his renegade views on Anzac Day to himself, elsewhere in Melbourne two other young Australian boys were also growing up in the shadow of the Anzac legend. In Elsternwick George Johnston spent the war waiting for the return of his father John, who served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Johnson’s mother Minnie worked as a nurse, caring for maimed veterans.

Many of these damaged men stayed with the Johnston family during the war. One of them, Bert Thornton, who had lost a leg in France, eventually married George’s sister Jean. As they wore out, Bert’s obsolete prosthetic legs were discarded in a pile behind the hallway door. Johnston’s childhood home was a sort of living memorial to the horrors of the war.

In nearby St Kilda, Nolan’s childhood was also suffused in the Anzac legend. His father Sid enlisted in 1916 and became a military policeman. As a young boy Nolan remembers reading The Anzac Book, a collection of poems and drawings written and illustrated by the “Men of Anzac.” Its famous cover picture, drawn by the soldier artist David Crothers Barker, succinctly conveys the Anzac story that most Australians in 1916 would happily accept; it was all about heroic Australian Britons fighting for the British Empire under the Union Jack.

Inside the book, the young Nolan would also read the following jingoistic doggerel, “The Trojan War, 1915”:

Homeric wars are fought again.
By men who, like old Greeks can die,
Australian back-block heroes slain,
With Hector and Achilles lie.

For these three young boys, the place names of Gallipoli — Suvla Bay, Achi Baba, Chunuk Bair — were as familiar as the tram stops of Melbourne. As Nolan once explained: “You grew up with Anzac, not so much a fact of life: it was part of one’s existence.”

In 1926 Moorehead began a law degree at Melbourne University. In the middle of his final exam he was gripped by an epiphany that must have bewildered his parents: he didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. He put down his pen, got up from his desk, and left the exam room; then he caught a tram straight into town, went to the Herald and Weekly Times building, and asked for a job.

After a few years as a journalist, this impulsive young man became restless again. The world was heading towards disaster, and he wanted to report on it. Moorehead left Melbourne in 1936 to try his luck on Fleet Street. His mind was on the war to come, not on the dusty rituals that commemorated the past war. “I must admit,” he wrote later, “that soon after I left Australia… the whole elaborate Anzac legend vanished utterly from my mind.”

The second world war made Moorehead famous. Writing for the Daily Express, Britain’s largest-selling newspaper, he became one of the world’s most celebrated war reporters. He covered the Desert War in North Africa, the invasion of Italy, and the final defeat of Germany from the Normandy landings to the fall of Berlin. Clive James considered him “a far better reporter on combat than his friend Ernest Hemingway.”

An untitled Nolan painting of Gallipoli figures in battle amid shellfire (c. 1962). Australian War Memorial

After the war Moorehead became a regular contributor to New Yorker, as well as writing general histories and travel books that became international bestsellers. By the 1950s he was the most widely known Australian writer on earth.

Moorehead began work on a general history of the Gallipoli campaign in 1954. At first glance it seems a quixotic choice of subject. Weren’t there plenty of interesting stories to tell about the war that had just recently ended? Why would a story that so bored him as a child make for a good yarn now? But the more he researched the story, the more haunted he became by it.

Moorehead realised his research would be incomplete until he visited the scene of the disaster. In the northern winter of 1954, he travelled to the Imperial War Cemeteries at Gallipoli. As he was ferried across the Dardanelles by motorboat to the land of the dead on the other side, he became aware that the short trip was redolent in history and myth. It’s the stretch of water Leander is said to have swum to visit his lover Hero. It’s where Xerxes, the King of Persia, built a bridge of boats to enable his invasion of Greece in 480 BC. And not far away is the site of Troy, the battlefield of Greek legend recounted in Homer’s Iliad.

When he finally set foot on Gallipoli itself, Moorehead encountered emotions he’d not expected.

There is a sense of timelessness about the Gallipoli Peninsula. Nothing very much has happened there since 1915. After the last battles were fought, silence descended on the place, and although there have been occasional earthquakes, it remains pretty much as it has always been — a simple farming countryside dotted with a few poor villages and fishing communities… [E]verything evokes the past, even the local shepherds; as they stand in the fields, swathed in tentlike goatskin capes, they look like figures in a classical landscape.

As his guide, a Turkish officer, lectured the defenceless Australian about the intricacies of the campaign, the boyhood cynic now grown to manhood found himself swept up in a reverie.

While I was waiting for the interpreter to translate, I would look at the lizards scuttling… and, beyond them, at the silver cloud of the olive trees, the heather on the cliffs and the sea. There seemed to be some stereoscopic lucidity in the air that brought all these things into one plane, so that the fisherman’s caique with red sails drifting by in the bay appeared no further away than the lizard on the wall; one felt one could reach out and touch either of them.

The veteran war correspondent admits that his feelings towards Anzac had shifted decisively.

Not unnaturally, in this atmosphere I found that my interest in the campaign had advanced through one more stage, that it had developed from legend, through history, to the point where it almost seemed to have become a personal experience of my own, and the sense of boredom it had produced in me as a child was quite gone.

Moorehead is inspired to make one final stop on his tour. “We found the grave easily,” he writes, “a plaque in the ground no different from the others, but still moving to me, since it had my surname on it.” It is, of course, the gravestone of Frank McCrae Moorehead, his long-dead uncle.

Moorehead wrote about his Anzac pilgrimage in a piece for the New Yorker called “Return to a Legend” in April 1955. Note: that’s not “of” but “to.” Throughout most of 1955, he hunkered down on the Greek island of Spetses, south of Athens, to write his book.

As you might expect from a war reporter who filed copy from the frontline, Moorehead was a speedy writer. His Gallipoli, published in 1956, was a commercial and critical success. Moorehead didn’t know it at the time, but his writings on the failed campaign — particularly his New Yorker article — would plant a seed in the imaginations of three other Australians.

In November 1955 Nolan left grey-skied London for the sunlight and stimulation of the Greek island of Hydra. Much had happened to him since his days at Heide. He’d moved to Britain, where his career was floating ever upward on a rising tide of artistic and commercial success. Most importantly, though, he had married John Reed’s sister Cynthia, a former dancer who had become a travel writer. The marriage, seen as a betrayal at Heide, was the final blow that toppled Nolan’s relationship with the Reeds irretrievably into a ditch.

Living on the island were his friends and fellow expatriates, the novelist and journalist George Johnston and his partner Charmian Clift. Clift was the youngest of the quartet. Born in 1923, she joined the Australian Women’s Army Service during the war and became an anti-aircraft  gunner. Like many other women, the war offered her opportunities that might have been denied her in peacetime. She became an officer, a journalist, and began to fulfil her greatest ambition: to become a writer.

Clift and Johnston are perhaps the best-known of Australia’s literary couples. They had scandalised postwar Melbourne when Johnston, a respected journalist and, like Moorehead, a famous war reporter, left his wife and daughter for the much younger Clift. Both were romantics who pursued the writing life with little regard for the poverty and strains it inflicted on them.

After several years in London, where Johnston worked for Australian newspapers, the couple grew frustrated with their easeful, metropolitan lives. They wanted to write books and needed somewhere cheap to live. Nolan played a small part in their plans. In London he had introduced them to a friend of his who extolled the virtue of Hydra as an ideal retreat for writers. They arrived in 1954 with their two children, Shane and Martin, and two new typewriters. A third child, Jason, would be born on the island.

With only a handful of English-speakers on the island, the two Australian couples are soon seeing a lot of each other. All through that winter and spring, after a day of writing and painting, they would meet in the backroom of the Katsikas general store or their other favourite haunt, the Douskas Taverna. As Johnston later wrote, “When the retzina circled and wild winter buffeted at the shutters of the waterfront taverns, we would talk far into the small hours.”

Inspired by his reading of The Iliad and Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, which had been published to great acclaim in 1955, Nolan had started a series of works based on Greek mythology. But the project was frustrating him. “In a rare outburst of emotional passion,” Johnston recalled, he “flung his sketches down and cried, ‘You can’t paint it! You need metal and a forge; it’s got to clang!’”

By the end of his sojourn on Hydra, the hardworking Nolan had nevertheless created a significant body of work. In her book Peel Me a Lotus, Charmian Clift has a character based on Nolan — a painter she calls Henry Trevena — display his artistic haul from a season spent on the island:

In the studio Henry had spread out his winter’s work for inspection: five hundred small sketches in oil paint on the stiff white sheets of heavy art paper that he buys in bundles of a thousand at a time. The islands are there, the rocks, the goats, the spikes, the thorns — Greece actual. But most of the studies are concerned with Greek myth, browbeaten into tractability… The sketches are terribly impressive. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Henry might well turn out to be one of the really important artists.

At some point during Nolan’s stay on Hydra, Johnston showed the painter Moorehead’s New Yorker essay. Nolan was particularly intrigued by the connections Moorehead made between Greek myths and the Anzac story. On his trip to the Anzac peninsula, Moorehead had also visited the site of Troy, which is not far south of Gallipoli, on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles:

Just at first, it is difficult to evoke a picture of the past from the meandering diggings in the brown soil, and the vision of Helen of the lovely hair is lost somewhere in the rocks. But the Scamander still flows, the earth is the same earth that was kicked up by the chariots of Hector and Menelaus, and Mount Ida, looking detached and serene under its snow, cannot have altered at all.

For Nolan, Johnston later wrote, “It was like unlocking a door.” According to Nadia Wheatley, author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, “It would take Nolan another few years to get the ideas onto canvas, but this was the genesis of his Gallipoli series.”

All his career Nolan relied on travel to stimulate his imagination. He rarely painted en plein air but he never painted a landscape he hadn’t visited. To produce the final work, he made sketches or relied on his eidetic memory. In his later, financially comfortable years, he owned a Manor House on the Welsh border called The Rodd. “I’m very fond of it, except I don’t paint it,” he explained in a 1984 interview, “I sit down and look at the snow and paint Ayers Rock.”

As the Anzac story began to percolate in his mind, Nolan realised that he would have to make a pilgrimage to Gallipoli, just as Moorehead had done.

In late September 1957, visiting Clift and Johnston in Hydra, he noted in his diary: “Delighted to see George & Charm. In evening talk about Anzac Gallipoli and Alan Moorehead’s book. Confirms my decision to do Anzac paintings & go to the Dardanelles.” The next day he wrote: “Hydra. Swimming. Decide paint large picture of Australian soldiers swimming at Anzac Cove.”

Within a month Nolan is in Gallipoli. As he later recalled:

I stood in the place where the first Anzacs stood, looked across the straits to the site of ancient Troy, and felt that her history had stood still. Here and there I picked up a soldier’s water bottle or some other piece of discarded equipment… I found the place on top of the hill where the Anzac and Turkish trenches had been only yards apart and the whole expedition balanced between success and failure. I visualised the young, fresh faces of boys from the bush, knowing nothing of war or of faraway places, all individuals, and suddenly all the same — united and uniform in the dignity of a common destiny.

Before he left Turkey, Nolan sent a postcard of Troy to Clift and Johnson back on Hydra: “Here it is that famed spot. We took a taxi there. Got to Anzac today so the record is complete. Thought of you both. Love Sid.”

The paintings and drawings Nolan created in reaction to this intense period of conversation, research, contemplation and pilgrimage would be unlike any other art produced in response to the Anzac Legend.

Beaten down by money troubles and ill health, Johnston and Clift retreated to England in 1961. It was to be a sanctuary from their worries; instead, it was a disaster. They missed the Greek sun. They failed to find well-paid work. Their children weren’t happy in school. But there was one bright spot: Johnston got to visit Nolan at his house in the London suburb of Henley and for the first time saw some of the outcomes of those drunken late-night talks on Hydra. Then their old friend came through with some tangible help. He encouraged them to return to Hydra, and sent them an art book with £5 notes interleaved between the pages.

Once back in Hydra, Johnston began work on the book that would solve his family’s money problems and make his reputation. Nolan’s biggest gift to Johnston, it turned out, were those same late-night retzina soaked talks back in 1955–56. Just as Johnston inspired Nolan, the painter also inspired the writer. As Nadia Wheatley explains, “If Nolan saw a way to fuse two potent myths [Anzac and Troy] and present the old story in a new and Australian light, a door had also been nudged open for George Johnston.”

The discussions about Gallipoli on Hydra encouraged Johnston to write a semi-autobiographical novel that would become My Brother Jack. It tells the story of Johnston’s avatar, a character called David Meredith, from his childhood during the first world war to his adult life as a journalist. The novel is about many things — ambition, masculinity, betrayal — but at its heart is a theme that was new to Australian literature at the time: the disastrous impact of “shellshock” — or what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder — on returned servicemen and their families. When My Brother Jack was finally published in 1964, it struck a resonant chord with Australia’s Double War Generation.

As Nolan pursued his vision of Gallipoli, he finally met the man whose ideas kicked the project into motion. In January 1960 Nolan contacted Moorehead in London; a few months later they met for dinner. As the historians Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell note: “Nolan and Moorehead may not have met in the Aegean in 1955, but they were destined to become close friends.”

According to Nolan’s biographer Nancy Underhill, the friendship between Nolan and Moorehead led to an important “intellectual interchange” between the two men. Moorehead was prompted to write about the Burke and Wills expedition by Nolan’s series of paintings on the doomed explorers. He published Cooper’s Creek in 1963. Later, Nolan’s second attempt at painting a series about the duo was influenced in turn by Moorehead’s book.

In January 1964 the two men travelled together to Antarctica for eight days. While Moorehead worked on an article for the New Yorker, Nolan made sketches for what would become his Antarctica series.

Nolan’s Gallipoli series got its first dedicated showing in 1965, when 145 paintings and sketches were exhibited at the Qantas Gallery in Sydney to coincide with Anzac Day. As Nolan explained in an interview, the works had been bubbling around in his head for some time:

And that is how I came to paint the series. Not then and there, and not all at once. But after I had thought about it in places like Hydra, in the Greek Islands, and Egypt, and Kenya and Ethiopia, and Australia and Antarctica, and London. I let the paintings come along as they wanted to.

As Nolan once said about his artistic output: “five minutes in the making, five years in thinking.”

Nolan visited Clift and Johnston on Hydra for the last time in 1963 to discuss the cover art he was designing for My Brother Jack. Just as he once gave them money to return to the island, Nolan now encouraged them to return to Australia.

Life on Hydra was becoming increasingly difficult for the couple: Johnston’s health was deteriorating due to tuberculosis; both were drinking heavily; Clift had become involved in extramarital affairs. With the imminent success of Johnston’s new novel, it might have been their best — and last — chance to return home. Nolan sealed his argument by burning some eucalyptus in an impromptu smoking ceremony: “He put a match to them and burned them and held them under our noses,” Clift later wrote, “and I was ready to cry with longing for the spiky wild strange grey bush, tunnelled with harshness and silence.”

Johnston and Clift returned to Australia with their children in 1964. To Johnston’s delight and relief, My Brother Jack was quickly and widely lauded as a classic of Australian literature, winning that year’s Miles Franklin Award. Two years later it was made into an ABC TV drama with a script by Clift. Johnston went on to write two more books in a trilogy about his alter ego, David Meredith: Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), which also won the Miles Franklin Award and then, posthumously, the unfinished A Cartload of Clay (1971).

In a diary entry written in September 1987, Nolan jotted down the following: “Remember that Alan Moorehead was going to write a book on the sacred lotus. Also, on the Sahara. Also, on the whalers who went from Nantucket to Tahiti, Antarctic, Australia, Peking: returning three years later to their wives.” If you know the context, it is a poignant memory of his old friend.

Moorehead had suffered a stroke in December 1966 that left him unable to write or speak with any skill for the rest of his life. For the seventeen years until his death in September 1983 — four years to the month before Nolan’s diary entry — he was pretty much incapable of working.

What Nolan was remembering, of course, was all the work Moorehead might have produced if he’d still been able to bang out a sentence on a typewriter. In July 1979, to compound the tragedy, Moorehead survived a car accident that killed his wife and primary carer, the journalist Lucy Milner.  The purgatory of this energetic and vital man’s last years is hard to imagine.

In 1967 the Art Gallery of NSW held a major retrospective of Nolan’s work. He and Cynthia returned to Australia to attend the exhibition, and Nolan began work on a biographical documentary for the ABC called This Dreaming, Spinning Thing. The ABC filmed Nolan as he travelled around the country, revisiting places he’d lived and worked. As an old friend, Johnston was commissioned to accompany Nolan to conduct interviews and write the narration. Ill-health meant that Clift stepped in and conducted some of the interviews with Nolan.

The film’s director, Storry Walton, who also produced the 1964 TV dramatisation of My Brother Jack, tells me that the three old friends worked happily together on the project. “George’s script,” he says, “was respectful, reverent of [Nolan’s] talent and, I think, infused with his affection for the man, and the wonder for the kind of creative spirit in Nolan that George could never ever quite understand.”

When Charmian interviewed Sid for the film — out in the red centre, atop one of Kata Tjuta’s domed rocks — the two chatted like old mates who understood each other very well. “I never saw a hint of any bitterness or strain between them,” says Walton. “But it’s not to say that it didn’t exist. I saw the three of them for a sliver of time, when they were all bound together on a project.”

Under the surface, however, there is evidence that all was not well. As Nadia Wheatley explains: “Unfortunately, in all the planning, no one had realised that Sid’s affection for George — and to some extent Charmian — had considerably waned since the Hydra winter of 1955–56. With this film… would come the ending of the old relationship — at least from Nolan’s side.”

Also working on the project was a young Sue Milliken. A successful producer of TV and films, including the recent documentary Charmian Clift: Life Burns High, Milliken was back then a twenty-five-year-old production secretary at the ABC. She got to know the three quite well. “They all loved to talk,” she tells me, “and they were all charming.”

But Milliken also remembers that Cynthia Nolan, who she also got to know at this time, might have been the reason for the waning friendship. One night when Nolan was away filming, the two women had dinner together, and Cynthia confided to Milliken that she didn’t much like how Clift had portrayed a character based on her in Peel Me a Lotus. Ursula Trevena, the wife of the painter Henry Trevena, is described, for example, as “worn out” with a “ravaged” face, who “yawns and yawns as she hunches down in her coat and broods.”

Whatever the reasons, the relationship between Clift and Johnstone and the Nolans seems to have cooled somewhat by 1967.

Clift and Johnston’s relationship was also fraying and becoming more volatile. In July 1969, just before Johnston published Clean Straw for Nothing, Clift took a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Friends would reveal afterwards that Clift’s depression was partly generated by the book’s fictional depiction of her extramarital affairs during the Hydra years. After her death, Sue Milliken remembered something Clift once said to her: “Everyone says ‘poor old George’. No one ever says, ‘poor old Charm’.”

A year later, in July 1970, George Johnston died from the tuberculosis that had plagued him since living in Greece for many years on the borderline of poverty.

Nolan was not spared by tragedy either. In November 1976, Cynthia, his wife of twenty-eight years, was found dead in a room at London’s Regent Place Hotel — also from an overdose of sleeping pills. Nolan was deeply shocked. He professed to have had no idea about her mental state. Nor would he find any explanation in a farewell telegram she sent to him shortly before taking her own life. It declared cryptically: “Off to the Orkneys in small stages.”

So that’s the story of the series’ creation, but why did Nolan donate his Gallipoli paintings and sketches to the AWM?

In the confusion of the Anzac landing, many diggers died without ever reaching the shore. As they leapt over the gunwales of their steel lifeboats, weighed down by heavy boots and packs, they sunk into the depths, and never rose again.

Nolan’s Gallipoli Series contains many images of soldiers drowned in Anzac Cove. Nolan’s obsession with death by drowning goes back at least to his time on Hydra. The ever-observant Clift noticed that he was fixated by the story of Icarus, the boy who flies too close to the sun, and falls into the sea and drowns.

“Icarus occurs again and again,” Clift wrote, “The same haunting naked figure soars above fanged rocks and wide dark seas, sometimes just rising from the ground, sometimes a speck floating high against a burning ball of the sun, frail as a dragonfly.”

The myth of the drowned boy was always a key point of connection between Clift and Nolan. She owned a small Nolan painting of Icarus that for many years hung on the wall in her house on Hydra. On the island she also invented a parlour game based on the myth. She would divide people into Daedalus types (the careful engineer) and Icarus types (high-flyers and risktakers). George and Cynthia Nolan were Daedalus types; Charmian and Sid were born of Icarus. Nolan even turned the Icarus story into a sort of artists’ battle cry, urging his friends, in the face of rejection slips and the fear of failure, to “Fly then! Bloody well soar, why don’t you?”

Nolan was obviously engrossed by the Icarus story, but why did he transfer a version of this image from Greek myth into his Gallipoli series? He would have known that many Australians were drowned at Anzac — so the image is based on historical fact. But as we know, trifling facts were of limited interest to Nolan.

Back in 1944 when Nolan went AWOL, his patriotic parents must have been horrified and embarrassed by their son’s behaviour. Nolan claimed later that his father — the former military policeman — even threatened to tie his legs to a chair and jump on him; a punishment meted out to deserters during the first world war.

Like George Johnston, Nolan had a brother. Raymond Nolan, known in the family as Boy, was seven years his junior. He had been born in 1924, just a few months after the Australian champion swimmer Andrew “Boy” Charlton won gold at the Paris Olympics. To the pride of his parents, the younger Nolan turned eighteen in 1942 and promptly enlisted, becoming a sapper in the 15th Small Ship Company, and serving in the South Pacific.

On 20 July 1945, with the war almost over, Raymond was drowned when he slipped and fell from a boat into the harbour at Cooktown. A few weeks later, on 6 August, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the war was effectively over.

Nolan believed that Raymond’s death shortened his father’s life. It must have also exacerbated the distress both his parents felt about their eldest son’s dereliction of duty.

Nolan’s Gallipoli, panel 1 (1963). Australian War Memorial

The largest of Nolan’s works held by the AWM is a diptych simply called Gallipoli that features several ghostly figures struggling in water. It’s been described as “an aquatic vision of hell” and directly references Raymond Nolan and his father Sid. On the left-hand side of the first panel (above) is a portrait of the father and his son. Is the older man trying to save Boy? Or is Boy trying to protect his father?

When Nolan donated the Gallipoli series to the AWM back in 1978, he did so in the name of his brother Raymond. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Anzac Iliad appeared first on Inside Story.

In its purest form, the national narrative rests on the belief that voters are driven by concerns broadly shared across all seats — concerns about the cost of living or defence, for instance — and which side will better deal with them. The major parties make their pitch to various demographics — women, young voters, working families, and so on — not because these voters are necessarily concentrated in some electorates more than others, but because the numbers are large, and these voters are everywhere.

Campaigning is about informing voters about the parties’ policies, with different policies emphasised in different electorates; it is not about “announcables” tailored to advantage this electorate or that. In campaigns said to be increasingly presidential, the alternative prime ministers compete in the media to “win” the day or the week.

Central to this narrative is the electoral pendulum. In 1972, when political scientist Malcolm Mackerras published the first pendulum, every seat was held by a Labor, Liberal or Country Party member. In the latest pendulum, produced by the ABC’s Antony Green, not all the seats are listed — only the 135 (out of 150) held by the government or opposition — and of these only the results where the final count is expected to be between Labor and the Coalition are expressed in terms of a two-party preferred (124).

The pendulum arranges every seat by how “safe” it is, with Labor seats on one side and Liberal, National and Liberal National Party (Queensland) seats on the other. In the Australian Electoral Commission’s terminology, seats held on a two-party vote of 60 per cent or more are “safe,” seats that would change sides with less than a six-point swing are “marginal,” and those in between are “fairly safe.”

Given a swing of certain size averaged across the nation, the pendulum purports to show each side’s net loss or gain. Of the 124, thirty-eight (nineteen Labor, nineteen Coalition) or nearly a third, are “marginal.” Exactly which seats would change the pendulum doesn’t predict. But it encourages the view that marginal seats need a good deal more attention than safer seats if parties are to confound its logic. Since shifts in the vote are never uniform, swings in different directions are expected to cancel out, with unexpected losses matched by unexpected gains.

The contrasting narrative rests on the two-candidate-preferred vote in each seat, regardless of who the final two candidates are. It gains extra force from the fact that, increasingly, at least one of the final two candidates in individual seats has been neither Labor nor Coalition. In 2022, twenty-seven of these “non-classic” contests took place; in 2025, Antony Green expects twenty-eight, or roughly one seat-in-five. Increasingly, seat contests appear to be sui generis. It might well seem, as former US House of Representatives speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, that “All politics is local.”

In these circumstances, the idea of a single pendulum looks more and more dated. Instead of one pendulum, Green invites us to consider no fewer than six: one that includes every seat held by Labor or the Coalition, two-party-preferred or two-candidate-preferred (135); another listing seats held by independents and Greens (fifteen); and four others — in Labor seats threatened by The Greens (seven), Green or independent seats threatened by Labor (six), Coalition seats threatened by independents (six), and independent or Greens seats threatened by the Coalition (twelve).

But it’s doubtful that pendulums covering non-classic contests are pendulums in anything other than name. There is little reason to think that an overall shift in support for Greens or for independents, nationally, would predict a change in the number of Greens or independents in parliament; to date, their successes have been highly localised. To generate a series of pendulums more attuned to the varying nature of the seat-by-seat contests risks turning what was designed as a simplifying device into something unduly complicated and contrived.

The narrative of the two-candidate-preferred rests on the idea that no seat is a safe seat. In 2022, the success of the teals in six formerly Liberal seats — the largest rout of any party of government since the Second World War — gave this view of electoral politics a big boost. Two of the seats, Mackellar and Curtin, had been “safe” seats; Warringah, first won by Zali Steggall in 2019, had also been “safe”; Indi, in 2013 the first success for “community independents,” had been held by the Liberals with almost 60 per cent of the two-party vote.

What puts a “safe” or “fairly safe” seat “at risk” varies. An issue of public policy, especially salient in that seat, may be one reason. At this election, for example, the government’s policy on the war in Gaza is likely to be of concern to the large number of Muslim voters in Labor seats in Melbourne (Calwell especially) and Sydney (Watson and Blaxland especially) and to Jewish voters in Labor seats, especially in the Melbourne seat of Macnamara.

Contests may also depend on what the parties promise to do locally. Nowadays, much of the election campaign consists of the leaders visiting one electorate or another — some more than once — to announce a piece of local infrastructure they think will make a difference. The Daily Telegraph has long published a daily “pork-o-meter” and Crikey has rolled out a “Big Pork Barrell map.” Whether these bribes work is an entirely different matter.

In this narrative, the election is not a single contest but up to 150 different contests. It’s a narrative for the times: witness not just the rise in “non-classic” contests but the failure of the main parties to see these challenges off.

In postwar elections, until 1990, only one independent or new party ever won a seat in the House of Representatives. This changed — slowly, then dramatically. From 2010 to 2019, the number of seats the major parties didn’t win ranged from five to eight. In 2022, when the number of seats won by Labor or the Coalition without going to preferences collapsed, they missed out on eighteen. In only 15 per cent of the seats did Labor or the Coalition win more than half the primary vote; in 2016 (48 per cent) and 2019 (46 per cent) the figure had been close to half.

Still, while the number of seats won by the parties of government has declined, only once has this forced the winner to govern in minority: in 2010, when the two sides were tied, 72–72. In 2016, when the Coalition won just seven more seats than Labor, and in 2019, when the margin was eight, it governed in its own right despite the presence of other parties and independents in the chamber. In 2022, not even a crossbench of eighteen was enough to force Labor into minority government: it had won nineteen more seats than the Coalition. A closer two-party contest on 3 May could prove  a different matter.

MAPPING THE NARRATIVES ONTO THE POLLS

The two-party-preferred figure was the focus of the three most-watched pollsters when they published results within days of the election being called on 28 March: Newspoll, conducted 27–29 March for the Australian; the Resolve Political Monitor (26–30 March) for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age; and the Freshwater Strategy poll (28–30 March) for the Australian Financial Review. It was also a feature of the Essential poll (26–30 March), published online and by the Guardian; the Accent/RedBridge poll (28 March–1 April), published online and by News Corp’s metro mastheads; and the polls published online by Roy Morgan (24–30 March) and YouGov (28 March–3 April). (The results of all these polls can be found here.)

The state of play in individual seats — focused on the two-candidate-preferred figures — is the centrepiece of YouGov’s other recent poll, its large (10,217-strong) MRP (multilevel regression with post stratification) poll, which reports individually on all 150 seats. Completed on 27 February–26 March, shortly before the election was called, it was published both online and by ABC’s Insiders.

Several other polls were also conducted before the election was called in individual seats or groups of seats —  seats held by the teals or the Greens. Most were paid for or published by groups keen to see teals and Greens defeated. One set of polls was conducted by Insightfully (on undisclosed dates) for Advance (a campaigning organisation on the right) in Ryan, Griffith and Melbourne (seats held by Greens but threatened by the Liberals and/or Labor) as well as in Wills and Macnamara (where Labor is threatened by the Greens and/or the Liberals); selected results were released to James Campbell, News Corp’s national weekend political editor. Another set was conducted by Freshwater (5–7 March), for the Daily Telegraph, in Curtin, Goldstein, Kooyong, Mackellar, Warringah and Wentworth — all seats held by teals. A third set was conducted by JWS (12–13 March) — again, in Goldstein and Kooyong, for Australian Energy Producers, and the results released to the Herald-Sun.

These seats or others where independents or Greens are likely to do well have also attracted the attention of campaigners on the left. The Australia Institute polled Sydney (17–18 March) and Climate 200 polled Goldstein (18–25 March). Both polls were conducted by uComms. Polling commissioned by Climate 200 from uComms in Bradfield and Monash led to allegations of “push-polling” but figures from the poll were not published.

The national vote: According to most of the national polls, the race has “tightened.” The Coalition’s two-party lead over Labor has narrowed if not disappeared — or Labor is now ahead and increasing its lead. Even where Labor is behind, it remains better placed to form the next (minority) government. If, as some polls suggest, Labor is now in position to be re-elected with a working majority, then the race hasn’t tightened; on the contrary, Labor has drawn further ahead.

Once the election was called, Resolve reported the biggest shift in support. It had Labor and the Coalition either split 50–50, based on how respondents said they would allocate their preferences (versus 45–55 on 18–23 February), or Labor with “a narrow lead,” 51–49, based on “the way they flowed at the last election” (versus 48–52 in February). If the first allocation of preferences suggested a shift to Labor (and a corresponding loss by the Coalition) of five percentage points, the second set suggested a shift to Labor (and away from the Coalition) of not much more than half that, three points.

Which of the two was more likely to be correct neither Resolve nor David Crowe (who reported the results for the Nine papers) seemed prepared to say. Most pollsters would have chosen the way preferences flowed in 2022. The shift from 45–55 (February) to 50–50 (March) is difficult to credit. A “shock poll” is how the Sydney Morning Herald headlined the February poll. Compared with all the other polls conducted at the time, it was an outlier.

Had the level of support for Labor improved by even three points, converting a four-point deficit (48–52) to a two-point lead (51–49)? This, too, seems unlikely. Key to the change was an apparent improvement in Labor’s primary vote, from 25 per cent in February to 29 per cent in March; in 2022, Labor secured 32.9 per cent of the first preferences. The February figure was almost certainly wrong. No other poll taken in February reported a figure for Labor less than 28 per cent. (Ahead of the 2022 election, Resolve was the only pollster to underestimate Labor’s first preferences.)

According to Newspoll, Labor’s position had improved in three polls conducted between 20–24 January and 3–7 March from 49–51 to 51–49, a shift of two points made more dramatic as a news story because it reversed the Coalition’s lead. For the Australian’s headline writer, “Labor Seizes Lead” was confirmed by the level of satisfaction with Peter Dutton’s performance as opposition leader, also “drift[ing]” up by two points, and the gap between Dutton and Anthony Albanese as the person who would make “the better prime minister” increasing by two.

In its most recent poll (31 March–4 April), Labor’s lead has improved to 52–48. Since Newspoll is the acknowledged market leader — no poll has a better record at predicting Australian elections — it is likely to be a price setter. It is easy to imagine pollsters looking at Newspoll’s results before releasing their own. Elections are marketing opportunities, and unless a poll is deemed the most accurate on the day there is more to be lost being on your own than being wrong with the rest of the pack.

For Accent/RedBridge, 52–48 (28 March– 1 April) and YouGov, 51–49 (28 March–3 April), Labor’s two-party vote, measured after the election was announced, has improved by just one point. In the Essential poll (48–47, with the other 5 per cent unallocated), Labor’s vote had also improved by one point — though over the previous fortnight rather than the previous week.

On Freshwater’s reckoning, however, nothing had changed in the previous fortnight: behind 49–51 in early March, Labor was still behind 49–51 (49.4–50.6, to be more exact) in late March. Nor had there been a change in the weekly Morgan poll, steady on a much less plausible 53–47; only later would it move to 53.5–46.5 (31 March–4 April).

For the Guardian, a team of data scientists has been combining all the polls and adjusting for three factors: sample size, previous results (excluding election predictions but including their consistency since 2022) and party bias (or “house effects”). Their 10 April modelling puts Labor nearly one point behind the Coalition, 49.6–50.4, rather than ahead (as five of the seven polls indicate). Within a confidence level of 95 per cent, Labor’s two-party preferred is somewhere between 48.0 and 51.3 per cent and the Coalition’s between 48.7 and 52.0 per cent.

And the track record of the Guardian’s data scientists? In 2022, similar modelling undertaken by Luke Mansillo (now part of the Guardian team) predicted a two-party vote of 53.5–46.5 — an overestimate of Labor’s vote by 1.4 points. Though the estimate was well within the bounds of the model, a similar overestimate this time would mean the true figure for Labor would not be 49.6 but 48.2 per cent — a swing away from Labor of 3.9 points, three times the size of the swing of 1.3 points derived from a simple averaging of the polls.

Another model, this one from political scientist Simon Jackman, has Labor on 51.5 per cent — much more in line with what the polls themselves are showing. His modelling includes house effects, constant over time, that “‘cancel out’ (or sum to zero) across the included pollsters.” AI models that consider a wider range of factors (though probably not house effects) make similar predictions.

If, as the formal campaign got underway, Labor was behind and has been trailing ever since, is it trailing by a smaller margin? In the Guardian’s model, scarcely. Its estimate of the Coalition’s two-party vote for 8–12 March was 49.5–52.3 per cent; for 13–26 March, 49.4–52.1 per cent; for 27 March–1 April, 49.3–52.4 per cent; and for 2–8 April, 49.6–50.4 per cent. In short, it’s back to where it was four weeks ago.

If, on this modelling, Labor has suffered a two-party swing of 2.5 points since 2022, what might this mean in terms of seats? Based on the pendulum, Labor would suffer a net loss of five seats, taking it from seventy-eight seats to seventy-three and the Coalition from fifty-seven to sixty-two. While Labor would have to find three members of the crossbench to support it, the Coalition would need to find fourteen. A 50–50 split (one reading of the Resolve poll) would mean a net loss for Labor of four seats; a 51–49 split (another reading) would mean a net loss of just three, leaving Labor able to govern after enticing someone — probably an independent — to become the speaker.

A 52–48 split (recorded by Accent/RedBridge and the latest Newspoll) would leave Labor’s current majority unchanged or give it an extra seat. A 52.5–47.5 split (YouGov) would see Labor with a net gain of three. Morgan’s 53.5–46.5 split would see Labor with a net gain of six.

If Resolve’s 45–55 split in February would see Labor lose by the biggest margin since its massive loss to the Coalition in 1977, YouGov’s 52.5–47.5 and Morgan’s 53.5–46.5 would see Labor become only the second government since Federation to attract a higher vote (and parliamentary majority) at the end of its first term. (The first was the Bruce–Page Nationalist–Country Party government, first elected in 1922 and re-elected in 1925.)

Seat by seat: In YouGov’s MRP, run from 27 February to 26 March, Labor’s two-party vote was 50.2, the Coalition’s 49.8; in its earlier MRP (22 January to 12 February 12), the split was 48.9–51.1. “Polling will likely continue to be tight,” YouGov predicts. But the two-party figures — “a blend between what our thousands of respondents are telling us themselves about how they will number their ballot, and historic flows between parties at previous Australian elections” — were not what interested poll-watchers or grabbed the attention of the ABC.

What made this poll interesting was that, in addition to reporting the two-party preferred, YouGov reported a two-candidate vote for each of the 150 seats. This allowed it to say which seats would change colour — and how many would become red, blue, green, or teal. By this reckoning, the Coalition would gain six seats — Bennelong, Gilmore, Werriwa and Robertson (NSW), Aston (Vic) and Lyons (Tas); Labor would gain Deakin (Vic) from the Liberals plus Griffith and Brisbane (Qld) from the Greens; and the Coalition would lose two (Cowper, NSW, and Wannon, Vic) to independents.

Overall, Labor would lose three seats, taking it to seventy-five and the Coalition would gain three, taking it to sixty, a result little different from what the pendulum might lead us to expect on the basis of a swing of 1.9 points: a loss/gain not of three seats but of four.

It’s true that YouGov’s estimate of the likely result came with caveats: Labor’s seat share (seventy-five) was estimated to be in the range sixty-nine to eighty; the Coalition’s seat share (sixty), in the range fifty-five to sixty-eight. But polls that simply reported an overall two-party-preferred vote also come with caveats: the ubiquitous plus or minus percentage allowed for “sampling error” (though not being based on truly random samples, none of the polls’ sampling errors can be estimated).

Compared with YouGov’s earlier MRP, when support for Labor was 1.3 points lower, had there been a shift towards Labor across most electorates, as the two-party narrative might lead us to expect? Or were the shifts all over the place, as we might expect if we were witnessing 150 separate elections? The shifts were largely towards Labor. Across the 133 seats where Labor candidates were expected to figure in the final count (overwhelmingly two-party contests), support shifted towards Labor in no fewer than ninety-three (69.9 per cent); in only fifteen (11.3 per cent) were there swings against Labor, the remaining twenty-five (18.8 per cent) registering no swings one way or the other.

As pendulum-watchers would expect, every seat called as a Coalition “gain” was a Labor marginal held on margins of between 0.04 (Bennelong, notionally Labor) and 5.3 (Werriwa). In the other fourteen seats held on margins of 5.3 or less, Labor was either even with the Coalition (McEwen) or ahead and expected to hold on — notwithstanding the fact that many of these leads were very small (certainly, within the “margin of error”); in three seats (Paterson, Chisholm, and Reid) Labor was ahead by only 51–49. That Labor might pick up Deakin (held by the Liberals by the smallest of margins, 0.02), YouGov described as “surprising.” But to have seats change hands both ways is hardly surprising; since 1972, it’s happened twelve times out of twenty.

Not shown as switching were any of the seats where the Middle East conflict might leave a mark. In Watson (where the MRP says Labor leads 57–43), Blaxland (56–44) and Calwell (55–45) the two-party gap has narrowed since the last MRP. In Watson, Labor had led 60–40, in Blaxland and Calwell, 58–42 — but YouGov continues to describe both as “safe Labor.” It continues to describe Macnamara (60–40), where Labor has improved its position (it was previously ahead 58–42), as “likely Labor.”

On these figures, neither Muslim nor Jewish voters will come even close to changing the outcomes. But, as YouGov concedes, “we cannot reliably capture every local factor specific to every single seat.” It makes no allowance for an electorate’s religious makeup. It does not factor in the number of Indigenous voters in an electorate such as Lingiari, a Labor marginal in the Northern Territory where many voters are hard to reach online. It does factor in place of birth, but in marginal seats such as Bennelong, Reid and Tangney, with high numbers of voters of Chinese heritage only a third of whom are likely to have been born in mainland China, cultural heritage is another thing it ignores.

What of other seat-by-seat polls with samples of 800–1000 rather than the MRP’s samples, which average fewer than seventy? Some pollsters offer only incomplete figures, but in other cases comparisons — however rough — can be made.

Some results turn out to be very like YouGov’s. In Bradfield, a poll conducted for Climate 200 (3 February), shows a two-candidate split of 52–48, teal vs Liberal; the MRP figure, 50–50. In Cowper, another poll conducted for Climate 200 (“late” February), shows a two-candidate split of 53–47, teal vs Nationals; the MRP figure, 52–48. In Sydney, a poll conducted by uComms (17–18 March), shows a two-candidate split of 66–34, Labor vs Green; the MRP figure is 63–37. In Goldstein, another uComms poll (18–25 March), shows a two-candidate split of 54–46, teal vs Liberal; the MRP figures are identical.

Other polls show results very unlike YouGov’s. While the MRP describes Brisbane as “safe Labor,” the polling for Advance has it swinging to the Coalition. Where the MRP sees Ryan as “toss-up Greens” rather than a Coalition gain, Advance sees it as a Coalition gain. For the MRP, Griffith is “likely Labor” but Advance thinks it more likely to go to the Coalition, And though the MRP sees Macnamara as “likely Labor,” Advance has Labor finishing third. There is a similar contrast between the conclusion reached by Freshwater (for the Daily Telegraph) and the MRP: Freshwater sees the Liberals regaining Curtin, Kooyong, Goldstein, and Mackellar from the teals; YouGov doesn’t.

No doubt some of the differences between results reflect differences of a month or more in the fieldwork dates. But, surely, not all. In Goldstein, while uComms (18–25 March) has the Liberals behind 46–54, JWS (12–13 March) has them ahead 54–46. In Kooyong, where Freshwater (5–7 March) has the Liberals winning (the margin not disclosed), JWS has them behind 49–51.

Putting the names of the candidates — especially the independents — to respondents rather than asking a “generic” question can be one source of difference. In a Compass poll conducted in McMahon in early April but sketchily reported, an independent (Matt Camenzuli) is said to have received 41 per cent of the vote, the Liberal (Carmen Lazar) 20 per cent, and the Labor candidate (Chris Bowen, named?) 19 per cent; where the other 20 per cent went wasn’t stated. On these figures, Bowen would have lost his seat regardless of whether he finished second to Camenzuli or third. On the estimate produced by YouGov’s MRP, Labor led Liberal, 54–46; naming the independent on this ballot might have yielded a different result.

BOTH, ONE, NEITHER?

The pendulum (integral to the two-party narrative/story) and the MRP (the best test we will have of the single-seat story) could both prove accurate — the pendulum predicting Labor or the Coalition’s winning margin in terms of the number of seats, the MRP naming the seats that change and hence the net balance. In 2022, the pendulum underestimated Labor’s seat share and overestimated the Coalition’s by one or two; YouGov’s RPM overestimated Labor’s seat count by a similar number — three.

Another possibility is that the pendulum proves to be right — or much more nearly right than the RPM about the number of seats each side wins/loses. On the Guardian’s current modelling, the MRP is overestimating Labor’s vote share.

Conversely, the MRP may prove to be better than the pendulum in coming up with the net balance. The fact that it wasn’t a better guide to the result in 2022 doesn’t mean that it won’t be a better guide in 2025. When it comes to picking winners in non-classic contests, the pendulum has never been a guide; on these contests — for many, the most interesting of all — single-seat polling, including the massive effort involved in mounting an MRP, will have the field to itself.

The other possibility, of course, is that both the pendulum and the MRP prove wayward. In 1998, the pendulum was out by twelve, and didn’t predict the overall winner; it was out by six in 1987, and by five in 2010 — the only other time it hasn’t predicted the winner — and again by five in 2013. And in 2022 the MRP miscalled eleven of the 151 seats and erred by double figures with its estimates in several others. •

The post Which are the polls to watch? appeared first on Inside Story.

In the years that followed the trajectory of truth-telling had its ups and downs, but by the time we got through nine years of John Howard to the next Labor prime minister all we felt we had to apologise for was taking the children. The Voice vote marked another new nadir. There may be more to come.

For fifteen or twenty years — from, say Bill Stanner’s Boyer lectures in 1968 — truth-telling had worked. Unearthing and telling the story battered Stanner’s “great Australian silence” almost into submission. But from then? Telling schmelling. As Kate Grenville points out in the most recent of her four books on relations between Black and White, the story is told and the facts are known “beyond dispute,” so the question arising is: “What do we do, now that we know?” (italics in the original).

It is a very good question, but it has to compete with old habits. Grenville’s intentions notwithstanding, Unsettled tells the story, once again, and offers only a brief and unconvincing answer to the living-with-knowing problem. Grenville’s difficulties are not hers alone.

Unsettled is a road movie. Setting out from her home town of Sydney Grenville tracks five generations of her family who have made lives and livelihoods on “stolen land,” the first of them headed by Solomon Wiseman, made infamous by his great-great-great-granddaughter’s celebrated novel Secret River, the fifth and furthest out, on the country around Tamworth, worked by her grandfather. Along this journey’s many branches are hung insights, recollections, realisations, facts and observations about small lives in a big history.

Most affecting for Grenville and for the reader are moments that bring her close to vertigo: yes, it really is true, those forebears were living on stolen land and so are we. We are living on land that has been home to more than a billion lives, lives lived in an elaborate civilisation that touched every nook and cranny of a vast continent.

But where does this journey, this quest, this pilgrimage get us, and Grenville? What is the point of arrival? The answer comes almost as an epiphany: it ends at Myall Creek, not far away from her grandfather’s holding, a place where terrible things happened and where, 160 years later, those things have been remembered as they should be:

In memory of the Wirrayaraay people who
Were murdered on the slopes of this ridge
In an unprovoked but premeditated act in
The late afternoon of 10 June 1838.

Erected in June 2000 by a group of
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians
In an act of reconciliation, and in
Acknowledgement of the truth of our
Shared history.

We remember them.
Ngyani winangay ganunga

Here, in this place, says Grenville, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians came together to acknowledge and record the truth. If they can do it, “the rest of us can do it too.”

Well, yes, but also no. Yes, public history of the Myall Creek kind matters; it has power. It is the history curriculum of everyday life. But no because the Myall Creek monument is the exception that proves the rule, which is this: sixty years of truth-telling has left scarcely a mark on public history.

Australia has around 41,000 monuments, plaques, obelisks and other markers of the past. The biggest single group: the war memorials, more than 12,000 of them, memorials to the “fallen” of the first and second world wars. Then come the “explorers” and “pioneers,” followed by civic worthies and local events or places of purely local significance. Only a couple of hundred have to do with Indigenous people or relations with them, and only a small fraction of those tell the truth of the long and violent conflict between Black and White.

The general rule can be illustrated by the example of three history-laden towns in central Queensland, Barcaldine (“birthplace” of the Australian Labor Party), Longreach (“birthplace” of the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services aka Qantas) and Winton (where Banjo Patterson wrote Waltzing Matilda). As well, all three played prominent parts in the dramatic shearers’ strikes of the early 1890s. All are cashing in on this “heritage,” and all have been active installers of monuments and memorials of every kind, more or less doubling the number since the 1970s to a total of 140.

These new markers were installed over the years of the ever-more detailed telling of the story. But if it weren’t for a sanitised display in the Stockman’s Hall of Fame there would not be a single trace of relations between the incumbents and the invaders in the public history of these three towns. This is not for want of local relevance or significance; to the contrary. All three sprang from a frontier that moved west across the vast plains at around 300 kilometres a year, thanks not least to the “Queensland method” of “clearing” the country in advance rather than waiting for Aboriginal resistance and a chance to “teach them a lesson” per massively disproportionate reprisals.

Why does public history tell so much less than history knows? Why do thousands of books, articles and the like tell the story in exhaustive detail, when public history avoids it just about entirely?

Public history is a collective endeavour; most history is not. Books are written by individuals and are bought or borrowed and read by those who want to read them. Public history is different; it has to be agreed (or not disagreed anyway) by anyone and everyone within range. The first rule: unless you’re in a position to overrule others and wear the consequences, avoid touchy topics. And there is no touchier topic in Australia than whether we’re living on “stolen” land.

There is no doubt that telling and learning the truth is for some, including Kate Grenville, a moral imperative. But truth-telling also has a more transactional side to it — after all, what does it cost, apart perhaps from manageable doses of dismay and sadness? And on the other hand, what an agreeable view from the high moral ground!

To others — broadly speaking, those who voted No in the Voice referendum — to tell or not to tell is a more complicated matter. These complications were routinely glossed over in much pro-Yes commentary. Polls and surveys of “opinions” and “attitudes” routinely conclude that it’s mainly a matter of “education levels,” the clear implication being that education brings enlightenment.

Much more to the point: different education levels come with different life-worlds, including different experiences of the powerfully formative institutions of education, where you live, the kind of job you get, the terms of employment and, for some, relationship with a different category of Aboriginal people. From life in the regions or the outer suburbs, blue-collar jobs, less secure employment, lower lifetime earnings and different relations with the education system come mixed feelings about “them,” often as strongly held as they are rarely “articulated.” Those mixed feelings range all the way from the first fine and careless generosity of the 1967 Referendum and its astonishing 90 per cent Yes vote to Pauline Hanson’s “why should they be treat any differently from us” to visceral contempt for Aboriginal people.

This reality is misconstrued by surveys as well as pundits (surveys conducted, we should note by those with “higher” levels of education). Thus did a post-referendum survey find that eight in ten Australians are in favour of “truth-telling processes” and that many of those who vote No in the referendum were in their heart of hearts troubled by the prospect of “division” in “the community.” Thus too the Reconciliation Council, relying on the findings of its “barometer,” conclude not long before the referendum was launched that there was “continued strong support for a constitutionally enshrined Voice.”

To those who conduct surveys, the difference between what people told them and what they did in the voting booth was simply a “shift” in “public opinion.” It is better explained by considering who appealed to which of those mixed feelings in the run-up to the Voice vote. Should we go with Albo and all those other graduates up in Canberra? Or that forthright Peter Dutton and senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (an actual Aborigine!)? In this way the vote was swung by the Coalition, that loyal political mouthpiece of the two great wreckers of Aboriginal lives and land, the pastoralists and the miners.

It’s happened before. Perhaps the first time came not all that long after the 1967 referendum, when surveys found most West Australians happy to go along with these new-fangled land rights — until the miners commissioned an infamous TV ad featuring black hands building a wall across a map of the state and posting a sign: “Keep Out — this part of Western Australia is under Aboriginal land claim.” It has happened many times since, perhaps most spectacularly in Bob Hawke’s humiliating backdown on the promise of a treaty (and again, of course in the vote on the Voice).

These are not “shifts in public opinion.” They’re episodes in class relations and the exercise of class power. And there will be more of them if us graduates don’t stop calling other people — well, not deplorables quite, but ignorant, uncaring, lacking in empathy, uneducated and so on and so forth — unless, that is, we realise that it’s not a matter of telling the story again and again. What the story needs now and has been needing for decades is hearing, understanding and remembering — in ways and places that No voters respect and are respected by.

That will not include the Reconciliation Council and its assumption of the moral equivalence of the two parties to “reconciliation” (not to mention its faith in surveys), or by state-based truth-telling agencies, because that’s not what they’re set up to do. Their wholly legitimate but quite limited priority is to at last get compensation (for which they are attacked by those who have thwarted even the most gestural compensation over and again).

There will probably be no movement unless and until all those graduates in a Labor government in Canberra realise that truth-telling demands a re-think as to ways and means. Public history, including public history of the Myall Creek kind, will have an important part to play. In this Labor made a less than inspiring start when it appointed Kim Beazley to get the Australian War Memorial to finally recognise that the 120-year armed conflict between peoples was in fact war (and, we should add, by far Australia’s most costly and formative war). Down in the grassroots much could be achieved by a properly funded and focused body to encourage thousands of local communities to work with Indigenous people and local and professional historians to audit the telling by local public history of the local story, and then to work though those mixed feelings by deciding whether and how the story could be more fully told.

In the meantime, there is one substantial part of the story that could use some more telling: the story of the telling of the story — the story, that is, of the long struggle between White and White and then Black and White over whether or not the story should be told. •

The post Yet more truth-telling? appeared first on Inside Story.

But in recent months Dutton has remained tight-lipped about the detail of his nuclear plans, though he has promised to lift Australia’s nuclear power moratorium and pursue a federal civil nuclear energy program if his party wins government. Under a Coalition government, he promised, Australians would be using nuclear power by some time in the 2050s: “zero-emissions” power that won’t faulter when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Nuclear power would kill two birds with one stone, giving energy-hungry and cash-strapped Australians a new, “clean” and as-yet-untapped source of power.

Yet Dutton only mentioned nuclear twice in his budget reply last month, and although he referred to it as both a “visionary” and a “necessary” goal he gave no concrete details about what Australia’s nuclear future might look like (let alone cost). Is the Coalition equivocating on nuclear? And, if so, why?

The debate Peter Dutton initiated — or rather reignited — last year is by no means new. The use of nuclear energy for civilian power in Australia has been floated as a possibility on and off since the 1950s. Nuclear has been heralded as scientifically path-breaking, fiscally responsible, environmentally friendly, and essential for Australia’s future energy needs. Time and again, Australians have been embroiled in feverish stoushes over what now seems an age-old question: to go nuclear, or to not go nuclear?

In the early fifties, when these debates began, Australian nuclear optimism was backlit by the atomic ambitions of Britain and the United States. But Australian politicians also considered that nuclear power would enable a fledgling dominion to prove its worth as a Commonwealth nation and an emergent middle power in the Pacific. Scientists were keen too, urging the government and its constituents to recognise the importance of nuclear to Australia’s future energy needs.

Physicist Harry Messel advocated vocally for a home-grown nuclear capability, arguing that a distinctly Australian scientific training program was necessary to develop nuclear physics in Australia. Echoing Messel’s confidence in nuclear but also evoking a strong retrospective sense of déjà vu, chemical engineer Philip Baxter and physicist Mark Oliphant publicised their shared belief that nuclear power would reduce Australia’s reliance on coal. Nuclear power was seemingly the answer to diversifying Australia’s energy future.

But Baxter and Oliphant readily acknowledged the diseconomies of this energy source. Given the technological hurdles yet to be overcome, Oliphant argued that a viable capacity was at least a decade away. Baxter maintained that only once the economics of nuclear power had sorted themselves out could this new energy source transform Australia.

Rather than commit exorbitant sums to the promise of a long-term, safe and efficient new energy source, the Australian government chose to sit back and follow others’ lead. If Britain and the United States could perfect their own civilian energy programs then Australia would trail in their footsteps more cheaply and efficiently.

In the late 1960s, seemingly fulfilling Oliphant’s prediction that nuclear energy was still a decade off (and also foreshadowing Peter Dutton’s contemporary ambitions), Liberal prime minister John Gorton decided it was time to pursue a nuclear energy capability. “We would not want to be dependent on any country outside our own… for the supply of fuel for a power plant,” he declared. Luckily, Australia had an ample supply of natural uranium. Nuclear power once again appeared inevitable.

In pursuit of an atomic Australia, Gorton’s government approved and sought tenders for a reactor to be sited at Jervis Bay on the NSW coast, the first in a vast network that would power New South Wales and beyond. National development minister David Fairbairn pledged that “by the year 2000 about one-quarter of Australia’s electricity supply would come from nuclear power stations.”

As so often happens, a change of leader and a confluence of factors torpedoed the Jervis Bay project. When Billy McMahon replaced Gorton as prime minister in 1971 amid considerable economic strains, Treasury determined that nuclear energy was no longer economically viable. “The prospects for economic nuclear power in Australia seem rather remote,” the Canberra Times reported in 1972. The numbers just didn’t add up. The possibility of an Australian civil nuclear energy program was shelved indefinitely.

Economics aside, it was increasingly apparent by the 1970s that the world’s hunger for energy necessitated an alternative to fossil fuels. Just as climate change currently looms large in the nuclear debate, that decade’s energy crisis influenced an earlier wave of nuclear optimism in Australia and across the world.

The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, released in 1972, rather alarmingly concluded that “the earth’s interlocking resources… cannot support present rates of economic and population growth.” Neo-Malthusian ideas proliferated as many grew fearful that the world would run out of the resources necessary to feed, house, clothe and provide energy to the world’s rapidly increasing population.

In the following year the decision of the OPEC oil-exporting countries to restrict the supply of Middle Eastern oil sent an economic tsunami across the Western world. The US government, and hence the Australian government, began evaluating its reliance on imported fuels, looking instead for alternative, home-grown sources.

It was from within this heady mix of population expansion and oil shortage that nuclear power (re)emerged as a potential solution to what appeared to be a critically endangered fossil fuel supply.

Closer to home, and seemingly in answer to these worsening crises, several large uranium deposits were identified by mine geologists in the Northern Territory. In 1977, after years of debate and reams of research into the viability and potential environmental impacts of re-establishing uranium exports, prime minister Malcolm Fraser gave the go-ahead for mining in Arnhem Land’s Alligator Rivers region. The Ranger uranium mine, according to Fraser, responded to “the need to supply essential sources of energy to an energy-deficient world.”

Public speculation about Australia’s energy future ran rife, with newspapers reporting that this sleeper energy source had “taken a giant stride towards the hearths and heaters of the home.” Among the familiar faces encouraging this resurgence in interest were Baxter and divisive nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton. Stalwart in his belief that nuclear was the future, Titterton implored readers of the Canberra Times to “appreciate the enormous importance of nuclear energy to the world,” especially given the “consumption trends of the world population.”

Tapping into fears over the world’s “limits to growth,” Titterton detailed the rapidity with which fuel reserves were being consumed by an increasingly ravenous global population. This was the true energy crisis, he argued, warning Australians that the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves they might force them to “return to a cave-man style of living”: “no heat or cooling for homes, no TV, radio, washing machines, lawn mowers [and] cars.” “No one wants to do this,” he went on, “and so humanity turns to nuclear energy to solve this looming problem.”

As well as dealing with the world’s energy crisis, nuclear power was advertised as “environmentally clean.” Where solar, wind, geothermal and wave power were all considered unproved, dozens of countries around the world had showed (with only a few notable hiccups along the way) that nuclear energy was both viable and far cleaner than coal-fired power.

In the 1970s, as in the 1950s, nuclear advocates considered it inevitable that Australia would come to rely heavily on nuclear energy. In an assurance that could be lifted from the opposition’s current handbook, nuclear power was described as “cleaner, safer, generally cheaper, and less ecologically damaging than the only practicable alternative.” Solar and wind power were mostly discounted, leaving the conversation to circulate around the benefits of nuclear over coal.

Environmentalists and others endeavoured to debunk the notion that nuclear energy was the only “green,” “safe” alternative to coal. Many attempted to expose nuclear energy for its contribution to what they understood as a growing and insatiable greed for more: more industry, more consumer goods, and therefore more irreplaceable energy sources. The conversation around renewable energy in the 1970s sought to encourage the broader Australian population to recognise the fundamental limits of growth in an effort to avoid serous climactic disruption.

Again foreshadowing today’s discussion, nuclear power was part of what could be broadly conceived as an attempt to come up with an alternative energy future. Could nuclear power have been the heir to carbon-emitting fossil fuels in Australia? It certainly could have — at least according to Baxter, who believed all that stood between Australians and nuclear power in the late seventies was “an imaginary waste problem… in the minds of those who presumably just did not want nuclear power.”

Both then and now, this waste problem is far from imaginary, as are many other obstacles. In 2023, the Australian government’s latest attempt to find a place to house Australia’s existing levels of nuclear waste was abandoned following a highly publicised Federal Court battle between the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation and the federal government.

We are no closer to solving what Baxter described as an imaginary problem. Yet, as the Coalition’s current campaign demonstrates, the notion that nuclear is clean and green remains influential in debates over the nuclear future.

In many countries that use nuclear power, it is considered vital in the transition to renewables. But what about in Australia, where it has failed to gain traction time and time again and an industry like the one envisaged by the Coalition would be starting from scratch?

Last year a CSIRO report concluded that nuclear power “does not currently represent a timely or efficient solution for meeting Australia’s net zero target.” The report’s authors explained that those countries currently relying on this energy source for the green transition have had nuclear power for decades.

While scientists and economists in particular have pointed out several basic flaws in the Coalition’s plan, two in particular echo the hurdles experienced by nuclear energy in the past. They may also assist in understanding the Coalition’s seeming reticence toward spruiking its nuclear plans during Dutton’s budget reply, which instead focused largely on what he called Labor’s “sometimes-on” energy plans versus the Coalition’s own “always-on” gas-fuelled ambitions.

First, the cost of importing the knowledge and infrastructure necessary to get nuclear power off the ground in Australia would negate any cost savings it offers as an energy source. Messel wanted to build Australia’s nuclear research capabilities more than fifty years ago but no Australian nuclear energy program was forthcoming. Going nuclear now would require Australia to import considerable scientific know-how, technology and materials.

Second — and inherently linked to the first — the immense amount of carbon that would be released in the process of building a nuclear power capability in Australia would see the Coalition significantly breach Australia’s emissions commitments.

Nor is joining those “other nineteen top economies in the world in adopting proven, zero emissions nuclear power” as simple (or cost-efficient) as Dutton’s budget response would have constituents believe. Experts maintain that to establish a nuclear power capability rather than committing to renewables and energy storage would cost the Australian taxpayer far more money, materials, energy, and emissions than it would ultimately save them.

Much has changed since the nuclear power discussions of the 1950s, 60s and even 70s. But the similarities between those debates and the one we are having today are stark. For more than seventy years Australians have argued back and forth about the economics and efficiencies of nuclear power. But nuclear power has consistently failed to capture the hearts, minds and wallets of Australians. Understanding the history of nuclear power in Australia thus raises the question: if not then, why now? •

The post Nuclear Australia: an on-again, off-again history appeared first on Inside Story.

But, as with the retreat from Gallipoli at the end of  1915, ignominious defeat would soon be dressed in the new livery of patriotic pride. The Australians had fought with distinction as the Japanese swept down the Malay Peninsula, their gallantry evident in a series of tenacious engagements that had briefly slowed the inexorable advance. And, as with the Dardanelles campaign, it soon became lore that weak British leadership and inadequate military support was to blame for failure.

The suffering over the following years as more than 18,000 Australian prisoners of war were subjected to the horrors of Changi, the Thai–Burma Railway, Sandakan and countless other slave labour camps — more than 8000 of them dying in captivity — would further reinforce the comforting national belief in the ill-fated but untarnished valour of our troops in Southeast Asia.

That reverently curated mythology was rudely challenged with the release three decades ago of previously secret British wartime records damning the behaviour of Australian troops in the final days before and after the surrender in Singapore. It has now been punctured with the publication of a new book that not only reinforces the British allegations but concludes that the official Australian history of the war, by design or omission, failed to include a truthful accounting of those events.

In June 1942, General Archibald Wavell, the allied commander-in-chief for the Southwest Pacific, sent an incendiary report from his headquarters in Delhi to British prime minister Winston Churchill and the war cabinet. The Australian troops had “gone to pieces,” it claimed: “For the fall of Singapore itself, the Australians are held responsible.”

Based on interviews with about fifty servicemen, officials and civilians, the report alleged there were mass desertions by Australian troops well before the official surrender was declared and that lawless Australian troops had fought with civilians to gain access to boats to flee the island in defiance of final orders to lay down their arms to the Japanese.

The report was released in 1993 by the British government. Two years later, British historian Peter Elphick went further, claiming that more than 8000 Australian troops had deserted — close to half the entire Australian force — and that some of them had been involved in looting, rape and murder. In his book Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress, Elphick claimed the mass desertion of the Australians, as well as by many British and Indian troops, represented “the highest incidence of desertion from any army, anywhere at any time.”

The initial release of the Wavell report drew an indignant response from then Australian prime minister Paul Keating, who said attempts to blame young Australian soldiers for “the British Empire’s most humiliating debacle” were “beyond the bounds of decency and credibility.”

While conceding that the allegations, if true, would bring discredit on the men and their country, and that it was important not to hide from uncomfortable historical truths, Wavell’s report focused on the fact that Singapore’s defences were inadequate and the British government knew it.

“It was certainly not Australian troops, or British troops, but British policy which led to the fall of Singapore,” Keating said. “It is unlikely that the other allegations will ever be satisfactorily tested. But blaming young soldiers for the failures of politicians and generals will not find much support in this or any other country.”

He went on: “Whatever the alleged behaviour of individual soldiers in the last days of Singapore, the fact remains that Australian, British and other Commonwealth troops were placed in an impossible position. Overwhelmingly they served with courage and distinction in appalling circumstances not of their making.”

Peter Elphick conceded that the Allied troops had suffered from poor morale from the start of the campaign that grew steadily worse after the Japanese landed on the northeast coast of Malaya and rapidly advanced down the peninsula towards Singapore. “The lack of air cover, the absence of tanks and the shortage of anti-tank guns meant that by the time Northern Jahore was reached the situation was probably irretrievable unless we could have sent a fleet and more aircraft.”

But Elphick supported Wavell’s claims that the mass Australian desertions made it impossible to avert surrender and force the Japanese into retreat. “Wavell felt that if the island could have held out for six weeks he could have brought in air reinforcements,” he argued. “If the desertions hadn’t been on such a large scale, I believe the garrison would not only have resisted longer but would have been capable, even as late as the final day, of launching a counter attack.”

A controversy that has since subsided into the corridors  of academic debate is set to be reignited with the publication of the first biography of the general editor of Australia’s official history of the Second World War — Gavin Long, the highly regarded successor and protege of Australia’s fabled Great War official historian, Charles Bean.

In Great at Heart, published this month, Garry Hills offers a generous and admiring account of the life and work of Long, who achieved distinction as a war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald in Europe, North Africa and New Guinea before being selected by the Curtin government, on Bean’s recommendation, to oversee the vast official history project. But he is sharply at odds with the hero of his narrative on the matter of the conduct of Australian soldiers during the fall of Singapore.

Hills writes that many documents that informed Peter Elphick’s conclusions about the magnitude of the desertions and the misconduct of Australian troops were available to but ignored by both the British and Australian official historians in the early 1950s — not to mention the many witnesses to the events who might have been interviewed but were not.

“The question at hand is whether a full and accurate depiction of the shameful episode is evident in the official history,” says Hills. “Clearly it is not.”

When the volume of the history dealing with the fighting in Southeast Asia was first published in 1957, it gave barely a hint of impropriety in the conduct of Australian troops in the dying days of Singapore. “The Japanese Thrust” carried the byline of Lionel Wigmore, a British-born Sydney journalist who had served as a media officer with the Australian forces in Singapore before being evacuated to Java a few days before the island’s capture.

Wigmore’s volume alludes briefly to misconduct before setting off on an elaborate defence of the motives of the men faced with imminent capture by the Japanese and arguing that a fine line distinguished escapers and deserters: “The behaviour of the escapers varied greatly. Some, generally regarded as being among the deserters, including Australians, blackened the reputation of their fellow countrymen and prejudiced the chances of those who followed.”

But the only detail of such reputation-blackening conduct is a single sentence in a footnote that refers to an unnamed Dutch police inspector who had hosted a party of twelve Australian soldiers and “found upon returning from absence on duty that his house had been ransacked and food, bedding and parts of his dress uniform taken.”

Wigmore argues strongly — perhaps in anticipation of future controversy — that the dividing line between desertions and escapes was in some instances indefinite. He points out, not unreasonably, that a report that a ceasefire was to take effect from 4.30pm on 15 February 1942 had gained wide circulation: “Many acted on it in good faith. Some, as the plight of the city worsened, consciously deserted. Once the fighting had ceased, others felt free to get away if they could.”

Garry Hills is scathing about what he describes as Wigmore’s attempts to mitigate the culpability by briefly referring to “odious actions and then immediately offering a psychological rationale” for them: “The reader is presented with a glimpse of the stark facts about the shambles that the Australian soldiers lived through that day, but… remains unenlightened about the extent of the unconscionable behaviour.”

While “The Japanese Thrust” was Wigmore’s work, Garry Hills is unsparing about its implications for Gavin Long’s reputation as general editor of the full history: “Long had such a close and active involvement in the project that he is clearly implicated in any editorial failures.”

Hills notes that in 1956 the Australian chief of staff in Malaya, Colonel Jim Thyer, wrote to Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the allied commander in Singapore who stayed to embody the humiliation of surrender and spent three and a half years as a Japanese POW (unlike the most famous Australian escaper/deserter, Major General Gordon Bennett, who defied Percival, abandoned his troops and made it home to Australia). Thyer declared that any watering down of the official history did not worry him because “a discerning person” would be able to read between the lines.

“Wavell claimed his report to Churchill was ‘fair and accurate’,” Hills writes. “Is the Australian history fair and accurate?” •

The post The fall of the myth of Singapore appeared first on Inside Story.

In the Senate in December that year, Thorpe gloated about the No campaign’s triumph, referring to “this year’s referendum for constitutional recognition — that no one wanted — and a Voice to Parliament — that no one wanted.” But what did she want instead? During the Voice campaign she argued for two measures she considers more important for social justice: a treaty recognising Indigenous sovereignty, and legislation incorporating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, or UNDRIP.

When voters rejected the Voice they also rejected the only body with which an Australian government could negotiate a treaty. But what about Thorpe’s second aim — to have the UNDRIP incorporated into Australian legislation?

The Rudd government signed Australia up to the UNDRIP in 2009, but no government has translated that recognition into domestic law. Its four key principles, as spelt out by Greens senator David Shoebridge in a recent parliamentary debate, are self-determination, participation in decision-making, respect for and protection of culture, and equality and non-discrimination. All four principles already inform its conduct towards Indigenous Australians, says the Albanese government, and there is thus no need to legislate.

The UNDRIP principle that Thorpe most often refers to is “free, prior and informed consent.” Indeed, one of her frequently expressed arguments against the Voice was that the authors of the Uluru Statement violated that principle. “There are many clans and nations around this country that were not consulted and did not provide their free, prior and informed consent,” she claimed on 12 May 2023. According to her (on 31 March 2023), “we have 500 nations who have had a formal structure since before colonisation.” Every one of them, she implies, must be asked to consent to laws and policies of national scope such as the Voice.

Thorpe’s first attempt to give the UNDRIP legislative teeth came during the final weeks of the Morrison government. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Bill, which she introduced into the Senate in March 2022, would have obliged the federal government to do three things: “ensure consistency between Commonwealth law and the Declaration,” “prepare and implement an action plan to achieve the objectives of the Declaration” and report annually “on the progress of those actions.”

The Senate immediately referred Thorpe’s bill to its Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee. Parliament was prorogued in April 2022, a new government was elected in May, and the inquiry resumed soon after, though now under the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, chaired by senator Patrick Dodson. It got to work on 2 August 2022 charged, among other things, with proposing “options to improve adherence to the principles of UNDRIP in Australia.”

After meeting during 2022–23, Dodson’s committee tabled its report in November 2023, six weeks after voters had rejected the Voice. It recommended that the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act be amended to include UNDRIP’s provisions in the definition of the “human rights” to which the parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights must refer when it advises on legislation.

Parliament routinely asks the Joint Committee on Human Rights to determine a bill’s compatibility (or not) with Australia’s human rights obligations under a range of conventions and treaties. But in practice — as Dodson’s committee observed — this leaves “no formal mechanism to consider the impact for the unique experience of First Peoples” (emphasis added).

Why not follow the Dodson committee’s recommendation and mandate the Joint Committee on Human Rights to consider a bill’s compatibility with Indigenous rights? Surely this would be, as the Dodson committee put it, “a simple and fast reform”? The committee was keeping alive a prospect that had seemed to disappear only weeks before, on 14 October 2023: that a mechanism could be created for parliament to receive formal advice from an Indigenous perspective.

In response, Thorpe introduced a bill more limited in scope and more precisely targeted than the one she had proposed in 2022. Picking up on the Dodson committee’s majority view, her new bill sought only to ensure the UNDRIP was among the international conventions that the parliament’s human rights committee would refer to when assessing a bill.

But her original, more ambitious bill remained before the Senate and was debated on 6 December 2023. As David Shoebridge reminded the chamber, this law would have required a “full audit of our existing laws, policies and practices to ensure they are UNDRIP compliant, which means consulting with First Peoples about how these laws, policies and practices can become compliant with UNDRIP and then actually following that advice.”

In a half-empty chamber, Labor and the Coalition combined to defeat the bill by twenty-seven votes to ten. Four Indigenous senators — Dorinda Cox, Patrick Dodson, Kerrynne Liddle and Jacinta Price — were absent, but Labor’s Malarndirri McCarthy was present and voted with her party. The one Labor speaker (the government’s deputy leader in the Senate, Don Farrell) assured senators that “self-government and participation in decision-making remain at the heart of policy development and legislative change for matters of Indigenous affairs” for the Albanese government.

The defeat of Thorpe’s first bill meant that any hope of legislating the principles of UNDRIP now rested on the government’s response to Dodson’s committee.

The idea of strengthening Australia’s parliamentary commitment to human rights has been gaining momentum since 2019, when the Australian Human Rights Commission began developing a legislative reform package through its “Free and Equal” consultations and a series of discussion papers and reports.

Labor MPs who believe in a human-rights approach to public policy got their chance to do some policy thinking when, in March 2023, the Albanese government asked the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, chaired by Labor MHR Josh Burns, to consider “the scope and effectiveness of Australia’s Human Rights Framework.”

A little over a year later, the Burns committee’s seventeen recommendations gave priority to a new federal Human Rights Act that would invoke a variety of rights under international law, among them the rights spelt out in the UNDRIP. In arguing for a strengthened role within parliament, the committee drew heavily on the Human Rights Commission’s 2023 paper Free & Equal: A Human Rights Act for Australia.

Perhaps anticipating that the Albanese government wouldn’t commit to a whole new Human Rights Act, Burns’s committee proposed a fallback option: that the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act be amended to include the UNDRIP and the Refugee Convention in its definition of “human rights.” This echoed the Dodson committee’s November 2023 recommendation and added to the credibility of what Thorpe was proposing in her second attempt at an UNDRIP-inspired bill.

Whether “human rights” should include distinct “Indigenous rights” is perhaps the most contentious issue in the Human Rights Commission’s “Free and Equal” push. Many MPs oppose distinct Indigenous rights in principle; others have become prudently wary of the concept since observing the No campaign’s successful use of the words “equality,” “divisive” and “unity” against the Voice. Indigenous advice on bills and draft bills might hae been what advocates of the Voice were hoping for, but 60 per cent of voters said No.

When Dodson’s committee reported six weeks after the referendum, three of its Coalition members — Melissa Price (Durack), Llew O’Brien (Wide Bay) and SA senator Kerrynne Liddle — issued a minority report opposed to adding the UNDRIP to the human rights committee’s brief. The committee was already taking account of the rights of Indigenous Australians, they claimed, because those rights are not distinct from other “human rights” Australia recognises.

On 13 February this year, Labor and Coalition senators combined to oppose taking Thorpe’s new bill to a second reading, with only the Greens and some other crossbenchers supporting her.

Lidia Thorpe professes to champion distinct Indigenous rights. She often invokes “genocide” and other concepts from international law in her efforts to have the UNDRIP expressed in legislation. Her first bill sought comprehensive assessment of government against the principles of the UNDRIP; her second bill more modestly empowered the parliamentary human rights committee to assess new legislation from an UNDRIP standpoint.

While Thorpe persists in thunderous overstatement (“for over 200 years the human rights of First Peoples in this country have been violated every single minute of every single day”), the sequence of these two bills suggests a more pragmatic approach. It is a pity that her modest promotion of the UNDRIP didn’t get Labor’s support in February.

I detect in Thorpe a deep ambivalence about the parliamentary system. For her, the defeat of the Voice was not a setback but an opportunity for Australia to take what she believes to be a better path: parliamentary commitment to progressive international law. She scorns the colonists’ assertion of sovereignty but invests hope in parliament — the locus of popular sovereignty and (she is a senator) of the residual sovereignty of the six colonial-era states that federated in 1901. As she said in the Senate not long after the referendum:

You all bow to the Queen and bow to the King and bow to everybody in here and follow the processes of the colonial institution. Yes, I’m a part of this, but I’m only here to rattle and shake every one of you into understanding that you are complicit in genocide and that the genocide continues in the most sophisticated way in 2023.

Among those who rejoice in the Indigenous Voice’s defeat, Thorpe is unique in preferring a parliamentary committee as the vehicle for an Indigenous appraisal of legislation. Let’s recall that, unlike the Voice, the human rights committee — the body that she would like to appraise legislation — is under no obligation to include Indigenous people among its members. It is a committee of MPs of various political affiliations mandated to take “human rights” seriously.

Thorpe’s strong preference for parliamentary representation of Indigenous interests goes even further than her opposition to the Voice. She also invokes the UNDRIP — and in particular free, prior and informed consent — as the standard by which Australians should judge the Indigenous sector, which takes in the thousands of publicly funded corporations delivering services, including political representation, to Indigenous Australians.

This was apparent in her participation in the Dodson committee’s public hearings in 2022–23. Not only did she ask federal, state and territory officials about the concordance of Australian law and policy with UNDRIP, she criticised how Indigenous views are represented. For example, she derided the First Nations Assembly of Victoria, elected in 2019 by a process in which only 7 per cent of eligible voters participated. “How do we ensure that we get everyone to the table?,” she asked on 10 March 2023.

Invoking free, prior and informed consent has become the basis of Thorpe’s populism. Her rhetorical use of the principle is the key to her maverick identity as her people’s tribune. It is never not a winning card; she can always speak for “the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander grassroots population out there.”

Hansard records a particularly revealing exchange with Pat Dodson during his committee’s hearings on 26 October 2022. Thorpe asked a government official if the process of appointing Indigenous ambassador Justin Mohamed and two committees to advise the government on the referendum had reflected “free, prior and informed consent.”

Dodson intervened from the chair to say that the government was indeed talking to “people who are representative of large numbers of the population”:

They’re either chairs or they’re directors or they’ve been approved by their constituencies to be in this. So it’s not just an ad hoc —

THORPE: I don’t agree with that.

DODSON: You mightn’t agree, but that’s how come to be where they are [sic].

THORPE: They’re closed memberships. They don’t represent our people. They don’t represent me.

In similar vein, on 10 February 2023, Thorpe said, “We have an issue here with peak bodies who say they represent those grassroots people but don’t actually — they’re not members of those organisations and sometimes it’s hard to get into those organisations.” In March 2023, she said that native title bodies, of which she has been a member, “don’t care about the traditional owners. It’s the board that runs the show. As a result, there’s no free, prior and informed consent.” Later that month she alleged people were “locked up” at the formulation of the Uluru Statement in May 2017. “I saw elders put in the back of divvy wagons because they didn’t agree.”

Thorpe invites us to distrust all the “organisations and corporations” that have come to comprise the Indigenous sector. But at least one representative process does meet her standard: that which made her and several other Indigenous Australians members of parliament. Speaking from that office she invokes free, prior and informed consent to discredit rival platforms of Indigenous representation.

“Everyone” will never be “at the table.” The politics of Indigenous peoplehood can’t survive Thorpe’s “free, prior and informed consent” test because the collective representation (and thus the collective rights) of Indigenous Australians depend on their developing faith in the political forms of the Indigenous Sector, the government-funded civil society bodies and the statutory bodies created by land rights and native title legislation.

For these bodies to be effective and legitimate, Indigenous Australians as a whole will need a higher tolerance for being represented by people who may be socially distant from them. Thorpe’s populist invocation of free, prior and informed consent is an opportunistic and self-serving use of an international law concept, and converges with the position taken by the Coalition’s two Indigenous senators, Liddle and Price, who have repeatedly accused Indigenous sector bodies of failing to act in the interests of Indigenous Australians. •

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In the cricket nets at Lofberg Oval, where I played rugby for twenty muddy seasons, boisterous under-tens are practicing their batting. A short stroll away is the scout hall where I learnt to tie reef knots under the imperious gaze of Queen Elizabeth II. At the nearby pool a bunch of kids are learning to swim, just as I had done fifty years earlier.

To my eyes, the only signs of the passing of time in this quintessential slice of middle-class suburbia are the taller trees and the solar-powered EV charging station that now dominates the pool’s carpark. As I’m about to discover, though, things have actually changed quite a bit — and might yet change a lot.

At the West Pymble shops, just a torpedo punt from my now-demolished childhood home, I have an appointment to observe a group of political activists who are keen to overturn the established order of things here in the federal electorate of Bradfield. These friendly locals in matching blue-green T-shirts are leafletting their fellow West Pymblians. “Vote 1 Nicolette Boele Independent,” the team’s leaflets proclaim. “For people, not political parties.”

When I lived in West Pymble it was pretty much a politics-free zone. No one leafletted the citizenry weeks before an election; we all knew which party would win. Since 1949, when it was created, Bradfield has been an impenetrable Liberal Party citadel. Not anymore. Democracy has broken out on its streets.

According to the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green, Bradfield will be a seat to watch at this year’s upcoming federal election. In the teal corner is the community independent Nicolette Boele (pronounced Buller); in the blue corner is Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian, a party moderate who used to work for Coalition foreign minister Julie Bishop.

It will be a closely fought campaign. Boele first ran for Bradfield against Scott Morrison’s communications minister, Paul Fletcher, in 2022. That year seven teal or teal-like independents shocked the political establishment by winning (or defending) blue-ribbon Liberal seats across the country, including Bradfield’s neighbouring electorates of Warringah, North Sydney and Mackellar.

Though Boele didn’t manage to surf the teal wave all the way to shore, she did take Fletcher’s margin from a whopping 16.5 per cent to a marginal 4.2. Suddenly this Liberal citadel was missing a portcullis.

A year and a half later, at the 2023 Voice referendum, Bradfield was the only Liberal-held seat in the country to return a majority Yes vote, with a shade over 52 per cent in favour. Boele had kept her network of election supporters in place and campaigned for the Yes vote. The counterweights on the drawbridge had fallen into disrepair.

Then, in September last year, the Australian Electoral Commission redistributed the seat of North Sydney — held since 2022 by teal independent Kylea Tink — out of existence. A substantial chunk of the seat’s voters were transferred to Bradfield, reducing the Liberal margin to a notional 2.5 per cent. The alligators had disappeared from the moat.

And then, in December, Paul Fletcher announced he would retire from politics. Fletcher maintains this unfortunate series of events didn’t influence his decision, but he didn’t do his party any favours by pulling the plug. Sitting members usually bring in a percent or two of the vote simply by being the incumbent. The citadel’s defences had all but crumbled.

When I catch up with Ms Boele at her new HQ in Lindfield, just a stone’s throw down the road from Fletcher’s Pacific Highway office, she assures me that Bradfield’s many disgruntled voters are still unhappy today. “What I think a lot of people are thinking is that the Liberal Party no longer understands them, or even seeks to understand them, or represent their values,” she says.

Her campaign has deep roots in the community and a battalion of 950 volunteers. Boele and her team have been hard at it since February. Her campaign website shows every day packed with events across the electorate: doorknocking in Chatswood; leafletting in Wahroonga; corflute lines in St Ives. The operation is also well-funded by donors large and small, the former including Climate 200, the pressure group founded by businessman and political activist Simon Holmes à Court.

The Boele insurgency might be the most interesting thing to happen in West Pymble since the 1950s, when police shut down the open-air two-up game held weekly in the bush at the end of Minnamurra Crescent. And the most interesting thing to happen at this year’s election might yet be the formation of Australia’s third minority federal government in its history.

Not that the numbers and complexion of the post-election crossbench in the House of Representatives are easy to predict.

The current parliament’s nineteen crossbenchers include the seven teals; four Greens; that unclassifiable Queenslander, Bob Katter; Rebekha Sharkie from South Australia’s Centre Alliance; veteran Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie; the teal-adjacent rural independent Helen Haines; former Liberal Party member Dai Le; and three refugees from the Coalition — former National Andrew Gee and former Liberals Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough.

Changes are inevitable. For a start, the redistribution made Kylea Tink a one-termer. Teals having a second go, like Bradfield’s Boele or Wannon’s freshly cashed-up Alex Dyson or Cowper’s Caz Heise, could yet enter the parliament. The Greens, on the other hand, are predicted to struggle, so there might be fewer of them. Dai Le is in for a tough fight in Fowler against Labor’s Tu Le. The three former Coalition MPs will struggle to hang on.

The key bloc will be the six teal MPs plus rural independent Helen Haines, who seem on track to successfully defend their seats. In these seats held for decades by the Liberal Party, they represent a teal wall Peter Dutton will be hard-pressed to surmount if he wants to claim majority government.

So, how likely is it that the 2025 federal election will give neither Labor nor the Coalition a majority in the House of Representatives? According to some polls, quite likely.

An Accent Research and Redbridge Group poll conducted in December last year projected a 98 per cent chance of minority government. For what it’s worth, the poll predicted the following result: sixty-nine Coalition, sixty-four Labor, four Greens, nine others, and four ties (between Labor and the Coalition).

A mid-February YouGov poll predicted seventy-three Coalition, sixty-six Labor, one Green and ten others. But polling expert Ben Raue of The Tally Room noted, “If you drill into the individual seat data, it produces most likely outcomes of seventy Coalition, sixty-six Labor, ten others, one Greens and three ties.”

No one in any of these three possible scenarios is getting the seventy-six seats needed to claim outright victory.

At this point I make the usual provisos about polls. They’re a snapshot, an educated guess, the election hasn’t even been called yet. Regardless, I will make this bold claim: if the polls are right — and remain that way up to polling day — the politicians of Australia will be off to the saleyards in the wake of this year’s federal election and the horse-trading will begin.

Not long after his self-guided defenestration from politics, Fletcher delivered a somewhat bitter speech to the Sydney Institute. Setting the tone was his opening declaration that “the teals are a giant green-left con job.” But his main argument was the danger they posed to the majesty of majority government. “My argument is that majority government is a good thing for Australia,” he said, “and the teals constitute the most serious threat to majority government in eighty years.”

The prospect of a hung parliament is often portrayed —mainly by the major parties and their supporters — as a political disaster. Don’t believe the hype. Sydney University’s Anne Twomey, a leading expert on the Australian constitution, says a hung parliament is “one of those subjects about which there are a lot of myths, usually myths that are manipulated for self-serving purposes.”

It’s sometimes argued, for example, that the party with the largest number of seats or highest primary vote should supply the prime minister. Unfortunately for advocates of this position, it doesn’t take the Constitution into account. In the event of a hung parliament, it’s of no interest to the governor-general who has the most seats or the biggest primary vote; it’s all about who can demonstrate they have the numbers to pass a confidence vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.

If there is a hung parliament, Peter Dutton has said he would talk with (and presumably seek support from) Bob Katter, Dai Le and — interestingly — the teal member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender. I would add Mayo’s Rebecca Sharkie as a likely target. But he’s ruled out dealing with the other teals and the Greens.

If he’s going to be PM in a minority government with these four crossbenchers, the Coalition will need to win seventy-three seats: because seventy-three plus four, minus one speaker, is a majority of seventy-six on the floor of the House.

If he doesn’t get to seventy-three, Dutton will have to choose some extra dance partners, and maybe some of them will prefer to boogie with DJ Albo, leaving the Liberal leader as a political wallflower.

If the Coalition does win the most seats, it won’t mean Dutton’s a shoo-in for the Lodge. If Labor got to sixty-nine and the Coalition dropped to seventy, for example, and if the six urban teals, the lone rural teal Helen Haines and Dai Le (who, after all, represents an old Labor seat) all threw their lot in with Labor, the Albanese government would survive with seventy-seven votes on the floor of the House. Stranger things have happened in Australian politics. Anyone remember the illustrious career of senator Pat Field?

And what of Paul Fletcher’s contention that minority governments lead to domestic political chaos? It’s not well remembered today, but Julia Gillard’s minority government was a pretty well-run operation. Despite not having the numbers on its own, it managed to pass much of its legislative agenda with the aid of three independents (Andrew Wilkie, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor) and the sole Green in the House at the time, Adam Bandt.

And the person in charge of all this, as manager of government business in the House, was a bloke named Anthony Albanese. Much of the chaos in the Gillard years was the result of internecine hatreds within the Labor Party arising from the dumping of Kevin Rudd, not the minority status of the government.

Critics could also point to the Trump Factor. At times of geopolitical tumult, some commentators will argue that Australians would be mad to risk a minority government. History tells a slightly different story.

In October 1941 the balance of power in federal parliament was held by two independents: Arthur Coles, co-founder of the Coles department store chain, and Alexander Wilson, a wheat farmer from Victoria. The prime minister was the Country Party’s Arthur Fadden, who ruled in coalition with the United Australia Party, which had recently hacked down its own PM, Robert Menzies.

Not surprisingly, the government was fractured by internal divisions and never looked like being an ongoing concern. Fadden was famously advised by his Country Party colleague Archie Cameron not to bother taking up residence at the Lodge because he “would scarcely have time to wear a track from the back door to the shithouse.” He was right.

Coles and Wilson voted to bring down the Fadden government after a biblical forty days. Labor’s John Curtin became prime minister, and performed the job very creditably until his death in 1945.

This momentous event happened in wartime — just a few months later the Japanese would be on our doorstep — and yet Canberra didn’t crumble into dust and the Australian nation didn’t collapse into the sea. Chaos wasn’t created by independents; it was ended by them.

Still, the Trump Factor might trump all. If the election comes down to a question of who is best placed to handle the erratic and dangerous president of the United States, voters might feel inclined to favour the major parties — and even the government — over independents and minor parties. Better the devil you know.

Depending on how the numbers work out, a key question in all of this will be: are the teal independents ordinary politicians?

Are they people who, having clawed their way into parliament, will hang on for dear life? Or are they motivated by a higher ambition, to make a difference, even if it might mean losing their seat? Would they prefer to stick around for a good time, rather than a long time, and bugger the adverse electoral consequences that anointing Anthony Albanese as PM could possibly have in their formerly Liberal seats? Or will they hold their noses and support a government that wants to solve the climate crisis by spending huge wads of public money on nuclear reactors?

If the teals do well, could we end up with a crossbencher as speaker? Would you like to see question time monitored by someone like the teals’ Monique Ryan? In their negotiations with the Coalition, this key slice of the crossbench might even insist that the secret coalition agreement governing the relationship between the Liberals and the Nationals is made publicly available for the first time in its history.

Most importantly, better policy ideas might have a better chance of becoming law. Many issues flicked into the too-hard basket by the major parties might finally get a run: tax reform, for example, on which the teals’ Allegra Spender has done a lot of work in conjunction with the former Treasury head Ken Henry.

The respected political journalist George Megalogenis revealed in his recent Quarterly Essay, Minority Report: The New Shape of Australian Politics, that his attitude towards minority government has changed over the years. Once fearful of its potential for gridlock, he’s now more optimistic. It could be the shot in the arm Australian democracy and policymaking needs.

We hear a lot about disruption nowadays. Minority government might be disruption, but in this case it would come with Australian characteristics — and might not be such a bad thing. •

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New, not very important but very symptomatic, the Australian Education Research Organisation fits snugly into the elaborate machinery of Labor’s “national approach” to schooling. As an “evidence intermediary,” its task is to make a certain kind of research finding more available to teachers and schools. But its key sponsors hope it will proclaim the doctrine in a system dependent on prescription, surveillance and compliance.

The doctrine is this: schooling is first and foremost about knowledge; teaching is first and foremost about getting prescribed knowledge into young heads; research has established the relative effectiveness (“effect size”) of teaching techniques and “interventions”; learning science has reinforced this evidence by showing how to “harmonise” teaching with the brain’s learning mechanisms; teaching must be based on evidence supplied by this research.

The faith: that in this way the long slide in the performance of Australian schools will at last be arrested and reversed.

In AERO’s view, though, there is no doctrine or faith. “Gold standard” research into effective teaching and findings on the workings of the brain have established scientific facts, clear and definitive.

Of AERO’s two intellectual pillars, effectiveness research is the much larger and stronger. Long-established and buttressed by a vast literature, it has become the lingua franca of education policy (including the policies promoted by the national approach) and has been absorbed by many teachers. But effectiveness research and its uses have also concerned and sometimes enraged many, including, surprisingly enough, John Hattie.

For many years Hattie has been by far the most influential exponent of the effectiveness idea in Australia, and perhaps around the world. But in a series of conversations with Danish philosopher Steen Nepper Larsen (published as The Purpose of Education in 2018) Hattie looks back over a formidable body of effectiveness research and his own work with schools and involvement in national policymaking to find flaws and limitations in the research itself, and gross misinterpretation and misuse of it by policymakers and schools alike.

Education research has (Hattie says) “privileged” quantitative studies over qualitative, and has been “obsessed” with the technical quality of studies at the expense of their importance and value. The focus of so much effectiveness research on basic outcomes (80–90 per cent of it by Hattie’s estimate) has been salutary, but has also obscured much of what schools do and should do. “I want more,” Hattie says. “I want broader. I want schools and systems to value music, art, history, entrepreneurship, curiosity, creativity, and much more.”

In much the same way, measuring “effect size” was useful but has ended up being the reverse, Hattie argues. It helped teachers and school leaders to accept that there are many ways of skinning the educational cat and to rely less on habit, hunch and assumption. But the “effect sizes” summarised in his celebrated Visible Learning (2009) and many publications following are averages, he points out, and too often the fact, extent and causes of variation are forgotten — along with the importance of context. Effect-size tables have been taken as a kind of installer’s guide — policymakers look at them and say “tick, tick, tick to the top influences and no, no, no to the bottom,” thus missing the point entirely.

The point? To inform and prompt thinking, interpretation, explanation: what is this evidence telling us? What do these numbers mean? What’s going on here, and why? What, for example, should we do with evidence showing that smaller classes have not produced better performance? Just say: no more smaller classes? Or ask why smaller classes aren’t being used more effectively? How can we actually do what effectiveness research has made possible? Research can go only so far; it reflects schooling as it is, not how it has to be; the rest is up to government and policy. Properly interrogated, Hattie concludes, the evidence first assembled in Visible Learning (2009) reveals a sustained failure of policy.

Hattie’s criticisms cover much but not all of the ground on which effectiveness research stands. He and others were convinced that education research could do for schooling what medical research had done for medicine. Research of the “gold standard” medical kind would reveal what worked in the classroom (or as Hattie later put it, what worked best). They were also convinced that the teacher was the crucial variable in the schooling equation, which made teachers and teaching “quality” the central objects of policy.

But teachers are not like medical practitioners and students are not like patients. Teachers try to enlist students in their cause; students might or might not join in. They might do their best to make sense of what the teachers seems to want, or pretend that they’re trying to, or subvert or resist the teacher’s efforts in myriad ways. Much of what students learn is not what is taught but what students think has been taught; often it has not been taught at all, for students learn all kinds of other things in the classroom and everywhere else at school. They learn about themselves, the world, how the world treats them, and how they can and should treat others. Students are, in other words, co-producers of learning, of themselves, and of each other. They learn, and they grow.

What students learn and how they grow, taken in its full extent and complexity, depends partly on what teachers do but mostly on the circumstances in which they and teachers meet. Producing learning and growth is in many ways just like producing anything else. Any form of production combines people, time, space, task, expertise, objectives, rewards and sanctions in a specific way. The central question is not how to make teaching more effective (as effectiveness research assumes) but how to make schools more productive. Which combination of the many factors of production is most productive of what kinds of learning and growth for which students? The failure to ask what the evidence is telling us about what is going on and what could go on is the seed of the policy failure Hattie points to.

“Learning science” is an even less reliable vessel. There is in fact no such thing as “learning science.” The learning sciences (plural) include experimental psychology, social and affective neuroscience, cognitive anthropology, developmental psychology, robotics and AI, and neurology, systems theory and many others. AERO relies on a particular subset of a particular branch of the learning sciences, cognitive load theory, or CLT, which is held in low esteem by many for its failure to take into account “the neurodynamic, attitudinal, social, emotional and cultural factors that often play a major, if often invisible and unsung role in every classroom.”

Learning scientists who do pay attention these “often invisible and unsung” factors reach conclusions very different from AERO’s. Two prominent psychologists for example, concluded after career-long research that learners thrive when they feel competent and successful, challenged, purposeful, connected to community and culturally safe, working collaboratively on things relevant to their lives. A neuroscientist studying the relationship between young people’s behaviour, circumstances and neural development found that “support, safe spaces, and rich opportunities [to] think deeply about complex issues, to build personally relevant connections, and to find purpose and inspiration in their lives” is crucial to the brain’s development. Indeed, “the networks in the brain that are associated with these beneficial outcomes are deactivated during the kinds of fast-paced and often impersonal activities that are the staple of many classrooms” (emphasis added).

One of the consequences of AERO’s use of CLT and effectiveness research is the assumption that teaching “knowledge” is the only game at school and there is only one way to play it. Of course knowledge is core business in schooling: knowledge of reading, writing, maths and science are “basic”; didactic teaching is for most kids and some purposes the shortest route between a fog and an aha! moment; the precepts of “explicit” teaching may well help to improve didactic teaching; and “effectiveness” research and its “effect sizes” can indeed make teachers and school leaders more aware of options and less reliant on hunch, habit and anecdote.

But what about other kinds of classroom teaching? And other ways of learning? Is AERO’s “teaching model” a one-punch knockout? The sovereign solution to the many things that students, teachers and schools contend with?

To look at AERO’s teaching model is to wonder whether the organisation is living in some other reality, a world in which there are no students who refuse to go to school, or leave school as soon as they can, or last the distance but leave with not much to show for it, or wag it, or bully and harass or are bullied and harassed, sometimes in the classroom often outside it, or have little or no sense of “belonging” at school or “attachment” to it. Why on this crowded stage is AERO putting the spotlight solely on what the teacher is doing in the classroom? Can teaching be expected to change the whole experience of being at school? Or is that somebody else’s problem?

And what about kinds of knowledge other than formal, out-there, discipline-derived knowledge, the staple that has launched a thousand curriculums — know-how, for example, knowing how to learn, how to work in groups, how to think through complicated life and ethical questions? And what about students’ knowledge of their own capabilities and options? The suspicion arises that what AERO is after is schooling for the poor, for the denizens of the “long tail of attainment,” cheap, narrowed down and dried out, a something that is better than nothing.

As well as misconceiving, AERO is misconceived. Its job is to gather research from up there and packaging it for consumption down below. It wants teaching to be based on research evidence — on just two kinds of research evidence, in fact — as if what teachers and school leaders know from experience, debate and intuition isn’t really knowledge at all, as if it’s research evidence or nothing. That most teachers and others in schools don’t use research evidence very often is taken not as a judgement about priorities but as an “obstacle” to uptake.

AERO claims that “evidence-based practices are the cornerstone of effective teaching” without providing or citing evidence to support the claim. More, it implies that the “how” of teaching is the only thing that teachers should concern themselves with, that teaching and schooling are free of doubts and dilemmas, of messy questions of judgement, decision and purpose.

AERO’s deeply hierarchical idea of the relationship between researchers and practitioners is of a piece with its conception of the relationship between teacher and taught. It is, in fact, the kind of institution that John Hattie feared. “There’s a debate going on about building an evidence institute for teaching,” he told Larsen in 2018. “My fear is that it will become like [America’s] What Works Clearinghouse and people will be employed to take academic research and translate it into easy language for teachers.”

At the risk of an apparent sectarianism, let me suggest that Martin Luther had the necessary idea: the priest should not stand between God and the flock but beside the flock reading God’s Word for themselves and finding their own way to salvation. AERO should stand beside teachers and schools, and it should help them stand beside their students. But that is not what AERO was set up to do.

Nominally the creation of the nine ministers of education and their departments, AERO is actually the handiwork of the NSW Department of Education, long the bastion of the “traditional” classroom, and Social Ventures Australia, or SVA, an organisation privately funded to “influence governments and policymakers to create largescale impact.”

SVA was much taken by Britain’s Education Endowment Foundation, and pitched to the Commonwealth the many benefits that would flow from an Australian equivalent. The pitch included some words about new things to be learned in new ways but more about a “robust evidence ecosystem” serving the cause of “continuous improvement” that would boost school performance. SVA wanted the new organisation to be independently funded and established through a tendering process. As the proposal made its way through the machinery of the “national approach” it was shorn of the progressive talk along with the independent funding and the creation by tender.

The organisation that emerged is indistinguishable from the NSW Department of Education in its underlying assumptions about “evidence-based teaching,” its “teaching model,” its definition of “evidence,” and its view of the relationship between theory and practice and of the control of schools. AERO’s board is chaired by the former chief executive of the Smith Family, a charity so committed to “explicit teaching” that it has taken ads in the mainstream media to urge its universal adoption. The chief executive is a former senior officer of the NSW department and AERO references the department’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (“the home of education evidence”). AERO’s “partner,” Ochre Education, a not-for-profit provider of “resources [that] support effective, evidence-based practices,” has one “partner” larger than all the rest put together, the NSW Department of Education.

AERO is deeply embedded in its own dogma and in the national machinery that was supposed to deliver “top 5 by ’25.” Well, here we are in 2025 and no closer to the top of the OECD’s league tables than we were fifteen years ago when the boast was made. To the contrary, as the former head of Australia’s premier research organisation and of the OECD’s mighty education division concluded recently, inequality is rising, quality is falling, and the system is resistant to reform. What reason is there to expect that another fifteen years doing the same thing will produce a different result?

AERO is not going to go away, but perhaps it can be pressed to lighten up. It should be persuaded, first, to accept that teaching is a sense-making occupation and that schools are sense-making institutions. Schools should not be treated as outlets applying recipes and prescriptions dispensed by AERO or anyone else.

Second, AERO’s evidence should bear on the system in which schools do their work as well as on the schools and their teachers. That should include evidence about whether and how Australia’s schooling system should join schools and teachers as objects of reform.

Third, AERO should be pressed to rethink its conception of “evidence.” Schools do and must use many kinds of evidence, including some that they gather formally or informally themselves. Evidence derived from academic research may well be a useful addition to the mix, but that is all. It is — and AERO should say so — provisional and contingent, not altogether different from other kinds of evidence schools use. The contrary idea, that evidence generated by formal academic research is scientific and therefore beyond debate and disagreement is encouraging the gross misconstructions of effectiveness research described by John Hattie.

AERO should also expand the range of academic sources it draws on and the kinds of evidence it embraces, going beyond the “how” to include the “what,” “why” and “whether to” — debates over evidence and evidence-use, and evidence from educational philosophy, sociology, economics and history as well as from that dubious disciple psychology (the source of both the effectiveness paradigm and cognitive load theory) and from beyond the all-too familiar Anglosphere.

And, most important of all: while many teachers are no doubt grateful for at least some of AERO’s output, and perhaps particularly for the resources distributed by AERO’s partner, Ochre, those resources go no further than helping teachers do a job in need of a fundamental rethink. The lens must be widened to include the organisation of students’ and teachers’ daily work and the organisation of students’ learning careers as well as what teachers can do in the classroom as it now exists. AERO should identify schools working to organise the curriculum around each students’ intellectual growth and the development of their capacities as individuals and as social beings. It should put those schools in touch with one another, and work with them on a different kind of research, on finding ways through an essential but immensely difficult organisational and intellectual task. •

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Even before Munich, one of Australia’s most respected foreign policy analysts, Peter Varghese, former head of Foreign Affairs and the federal government’s peak intelligence assessment body, was highlighting the baleful effect of Trump’s bullying of American friends big and small and his crudely extractive trade bargaining.

“Donald Trump may achieve what seventy-five years of postwar Americanism could not: concede the case for moral equivalence,” Varghese wrote in the Australian Financial Review. “Moral equivalence,” he added, “was the accusation that for all America’s claims to the ethical high ground, it was in practice no better than its authoritarian enemies.”

After the Munich shocks delivered by vice-president J.D. Vance, the sense of betrayal was too much for an equally respected figure, economist Saul Eslake. “Do we want to ally ourselves with a people who can knowingly choose people like Trump and Vance to lead them and to be the public face of their country presented to the rest of the world?” he wrote in Pearls & Irritations. These are “people who are willing to ‘cut deals’ with murderous dictators — in much the same way, albeit on a smaller scale, that mob bosses carved out territory in the boroughs of New York, where Donald Trump learned his trade under the tutelage of his father and the likes of Roy Cohn…”

Among politicians in Canberra and other US-allied capitals Trump’s approach is more politely referred to as “transactional.” But Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s highest-circulation newspaper, is even less diplomatic than Eslake, labelling Trump a “mobster” and “grifter” who is creating “a jungle law international order blinded by self-interest and money.” According to an editorial last week, the US president is “blackmailing Gaza, Greenland, Panama and Canada like an organised crime syndicate.”

“He is what the anthropologists and scholars of ancient mythologies would call a trickster,” writes Michael Ignatieff, the writer and former Canadian opposition leader who until 2021 headed the George Soros–founded Central European University, based in Vienna after it was ousted from Budapest by the Hungarian pioneer of “illiberal democracy,” Viktor Orbán. “Tricksters intimidate and unsettle. Barbed humour is the weapon of choice. They have an instinct for what gets under the skin of opponents and a gift for keeping them off balance.” Hence Trump’s needling of the nice Canadians.

Political analysts usually wait the first hundred days to get a sense of where a new United States president is taking his administration. In Trump’s case, it’s clear after not much more than a month that he intends to break and disrupt an awful lot of systems and assumptions, as well as punishing those officials and critics who gave him legal and reputational strife between his two administrations.

Notable among his targets are the multilateral world trade order, a range of international cooperative efforts including the World Health Organization and the Paris climate change agreement and, at least in Europe, the post-1945 Pax Americana. His new secretary of justice, Pam Bondi, has halted application of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, thus signalling that American businesses are free to bribe overseas, and suspended her department’s “kleptocracy initiative,” which had been seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs and other corrupt figures.

But the world order Trump envisages is still hazy, perhaps even in his own mind. And other players are using Trump to push agendas he may discard or pursue.

Many of his goals track those of Project 2025, the manifesto put out by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation last year. Even though Trump disavows any connection, several of his key appointees — including Russell Vought (head of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House), Tom Homan (the “border czar”) and John Ratcliff (the new Central Intelligence Agency director) — helped write Project 2025.

The 900-page program aims to restore the family as the “centrepiece of American life,” dismantle the administrative state, defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders, and secure “God-given individual rights to live freely.” Along with banning the mailing of abortion pills over state lines, criminalising pornography, abolishing the education department, dumping a sweeping range of environmental regulations and cracking down on diversity programs, it would expand presidential power by boosting the number of political appointees and increasing the president’s authority over the justice department.

There is an urgency to this project. “History teaches that a president’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the administration’s opening days,” wrote its former director Paul Dans. Trump, with a stacked Supreme Court and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress (and Musk threatening to “primary out” any dissenters through weight of money in preselection campaigns), is a chance for unprecedented change.

Trump’s appointment of Tesla–X–SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk to an unofficial but empowered “Department of Government Efficiency” has started the demolition of the federal administrative state, with mass sackings and voluntary redundancy offers. Musk is part of an anarchic cabal of tech “bros” urging investment to keep America ahead of China in futuristic systems like AI and quantum computing.

The second group latching on to Trump are what analysts Jeremy Shapiro and Majda Ruge call the strategic “prioritisers” — those who think America’s main game is countering China and distractions like European defence should be ended or drastically scaled back. The key advocates are the defence department’s new policy head, Elbridge Colby, and secretary of state Marco Rubio.

This group is distinct from the “primacists” like Trump’s first-term CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who once set a goal of removing Communist Party rule in China. Pompeo has been banished and his security detail removed on Trump’s orders. Likewise the “restrainers,” who would have confined the US sphere of influence to the Western Hemisphere in a new Monroe Doctrine. Some thought Trump’s early thoughts on annexing Greenland, Canada and Panama were part of such a new isolationism.

Rather than isolationist, Trump’s team are “unilateralists” or a “sovereigntists,” say international relations scholars like Clinton Fernandes at the Australian Defence Force Academy. “Their aim is an illiberal international geopolitical order where domestic political systems resemble ‘competitive authoritarianism,’ with multi-party elections embedded in a rigged legal and political environment,” says Fernandes. “Under this model, the media and the machinery of government are used to attack opponents and co-opt critics.”

Trump wants the United States to set the technical standards governing the global economy, he adds. “Control over these standards creates lock-in effects in finance, telecommunications, space, robotics, bioengineering, nanotechnologies, and advanced materials and manufacturing methods. That means full-spectrum rivalry with China. If economic control is not possible, the plan B goal is global economic separation from China.”

The clearest sign of prioritising is the removal of strategic assurances for Europe. Vance and new defence secretary Pete Hegseth have told Ukraine bluntly that Trump will pursue a peace settlement that involves Russia keeping the territory it has seized and Ukraine being kept out of Nato. The United States might give some protection to the rump Ukraine’s neutrality, but only in return for an extortionate share of its hydrocarbons, rare earths and lithium.

Vance (and Musk before him) also gave open support to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in Germany’s elections last weekend while chiding West Europe for being soft on immigration and abandoning “some of its own fundamental values.” The AfD duly doubled its vote to 20 per cent, making the country’s the second-most-popular party.

After Munich, Rubio met Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh to start negotiations on a Ukraine settlement, with neither Ukraine nor the European Union invited. The two parties agreed to restore staffing at their respective embassies in Washington and Moscow, create a high-level team to support their Ukraine talks, and explore closer relations and economic cooperation. “Should this conflict come to an acceptable end,” said Rubio, “incredible opportunities… exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically on issues of common interest and frankly, economically on issues that hopefully will be good for the world and also improve our relations in the long term.”

With officials working towards an in-person meeting, Trump had a ninety-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin and later seemed to be repeating the Russian line on Ukraine. As former Kyiv and Moscow correspondent James Meek explained in the London Review of Books, Putin has essentially the same aims as were set out in the surrender draft Russian negotiators put to the Ukrainians in Istanbul in 2022. Putin still thinks Ukraine was ready to sign at the time but was talked out of it by Western “warmongers” like Britain’s Boris Johnson.

“Russia has already said that any Western peacekeeping force in Ukraine after a ceasefire is out of the question, but the Istanbul draft goes much further,” Meek wrote. “It demands that Ukraine renounce any defence treaties with other countries, forbid any foreign troops on its soil, give up any missiles or drones with a range of more than 155 miles and reduce its military to one-sixth of its pre-invasion size, with a skeleton force of only 1500 officers. The draft proposed that all Ukrainian units would return to barracks, with their disarmament supervised by Russia.”

Since the 2022 talks, Russia has declared five Ukrainian regions to be part of Russia. “Of these regions, it has complete control only of Crimea,” Meek wrote. “Will America back Russia in trying to force Ukraine to hand over these huge, heavily populated areas of free Ukraine, including the large cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to Putin, without a fight?”

Meeks also noted that “ousting Ukraine’s Zelensky and putting a pliable puppet in place in Kyiv has always been, and continues to be, one of Putin’s war aims.” Trump seemed willing to help out with his comments that Zelensky was a “dictator” with little popular support, afraid to hold an election. Only after global criticism did he walk back these claims.

Putin is also expected to demand the withdrawal of outside Nato troops from all the former Soviet states admitted to the treaty after 1990, effectively leaving the Baltic nations, Moldova and other countries at the mercy of Moscow.

Unsurprisingly, this reduction in American support for Ukraine has been received in Moscow “like Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s all rolled into one,” as Alexey Kovalev writes in Foreign Policy. For Europe it has been a bombshell, prompting an immediate emergency summit of German, French and British leaders. The location of the meeting, in Munich, drew immediate comparison with Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 agreement with Adolf Hitler, struck in that city, which allow the German dictator to take Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia as the price of “peace for our time.”

It is worse than that, says Keir Giles of the London think-tank Chatham House. “In some respects, the danger to Europe’s democracies today is greater, not less, than it was ninety years ago,” he wrote last week in the Financial Times. At least Britain and France were frantically re-arming in parallel with the 1938 appeasement. For decades, the Europeans have relied on American guarantees and run down their forces.

“The popular perception that Russia’s armed forces are incapable of harming Europe because they were eviscerated in Ukraine in 2022 has been slow to dissipate,” Giles wrote. “The fact that Russia’s land forces had been built back bigger by early 2024 is now more widely recognised — as is the way some Nato militaries have become not more but less capable since 2022 as a result of donations to Ukraine not being replaced in inventory.”

He went on: “Looking back at the 1930s, we used to wonder how it seemed that everybody could see war coming but do nothing to stop it. Now we understand, as we see the same mistakes repeated one after another. Instead, credible European deterrence of Russia is key to avoiding disaster. Europe has seen huge investment in countering terrorism by individuals and groups. What it needs now is also investment in countering state terror of the kind delivered by Moscow.”

Despite the European Union’s budget deficit limits and recruitment constraints, its member governments are being pushed into dealing with the Russian problem. Poland — which already spends 5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence and hosting US army units — is the big exception.

Excluding the Europeans from the Ukraine peace talks was not a plot against them, writes Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank: “It is yet another demonstration of Europe’s increasing geopolitical irrelevance.” To became relevant, Europe would have to front up with funds for reconstructing Ukraine, security guarantees (including stationed troops), and sanctions to keep up the pressure on Russia.

It’s not yet the withdrawal of the Roman legions, but Europe is realising it can no longer count on American protection. “We must be prepared for the fact that Donald Trump will no longer fully accept the promise of assistance under the Nato treaty,” said Friedrich Merz, the centre-right leader expected to became Germany’s chancellor after the election. Europeans now had to make every effort to gain the capacity to defend their continent on their own. Implicitly suggesting the US nuclear umbrella was no longer reliable, Merz also said he would seek talks with London and Paris “about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the UK and France, could apply to us.”

Could a “reverse Kissinger” be in play? Provoking Europe to take over its own defence would let the US step back from its European security role and make its long-promised pivot to Asia and focus on its main adversary, China, writes John Blaxland of the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. “Russia evidently features as part of this plan. Trump appears intent to try to cleave Russia from its Chinese embrace in order to either isolate or weaken China. A hard-nosed deal with Russia over Ukraine may well be the price he’s willing to pay to make that happen.” But could Putin ever be held to such a deal?

America’s allies in Asia are meanwhile wondering if they are in for the same treatment as Europe. “It is clear to all of us that we live in quite interesting times, that the assumptions that we have undertaken in last eighty years have now fundamentally changed,” Singapore’s defence minister Ng Eng Hen said after hearing Vance’s speech at Munich, adding — a little more robustly — that America’s image in Asia “has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent.”

After the Russian invasion three years ago, Japan became one of the biggest donors of non-lethal aid to Kyiv, but its conservative government also used the shock to greatly increase military spending, expand its own forces by reinterpreting the non-belligerency clause of its post-1945 constitution, and open military dialogues with Europe, South Korea and Australia.

Trump’s switch on Ukraine has put Japan in a dilemma, says long-time Japan-watcher Tobias Harris. “It will remain dependent for its security on a United States that has ostentatiously abandoned the international order that the Japanese government has articulated is vital for the defence of Japan’s national interests,” he writes, adding that Japan has been “sympathetic to — and committed to — the European countries left behind by the United States.”

Tokyo was appalled by the Vance and Hegseth messages in Munich. “It is important that a just and lasting peace be achieved as soon as possible with the full involvement of Ukraine as a party,” foreign minister Iwaya Takeshi declared, emphasising the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity. A war that ends “with Russia seen as the victor… would send the wrong message not only to China but to the world.” In a hurried visit to Washington, Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba managed to win a joint statement opposing attempts to “change the status quo by force or coercion” in the East and South China Seas and Taiwan Strait.

“Perhaps US allies in Asia can view this is a ‘hard pivot’ from Europe to Asia, the price of an ‘Asia First’ policy,” Harris writes. “But how do they know that Ukraine today won’t be Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan tomorrow?” Still falling short of defence spending demands by Trump officials like Elbridge Colby and knowing its wide US trade surplus to be in Trump’s sights, Tokyo’s resolve faces a test. “Would Japan be willing to invite US opprobrium — or worse — to oppose a US–Russia settlement that rewarded Russia, punished Ukraine, and left US allies in Europe alone to face Russia?”

Tokyo is not yet debating openly, as Berlin is now doing, whether it should develop an alternative nuclear deterrent, though in the recent past Ishiba has cited the need to stockpile fissile material as a reason to reopen nuclear power plants closed after the Fukushima disaster.

The same is not true for South Korea, though its immediate worries reflect Transactional Trump. The US president has demanded Seoul pay US$10 billion a year for the costs of the 28,000 American troops stationed in the south, up from the current US$1.2 billion, as a “tripwire” against North Korea. Korean companies will be heavily affected by the 25 per cent tariff threatened on US imports from Mexico, where Korean cars and electronics are assembled, as well as on direct imports of steel and aluminium.

The South Korean conservatives clinging to power despite the impeachment of their president for trying to impose martial law in December are deeply worried that Trump might resume his courting of the North’s dictator, Kim Jong-Un. They fear he will strike a deal that would involve withdrawing US forces in return for Kim promising to eliminate his nuclear capability, thereby putting the South at risk of a conventional blitzkrieg as happened in 1950. Veteran commentator Shim Jae Hoon says Trump’s sidelining of Ukraine has been badly received in Seoul. “Nothing is impossible from this dangerous man,” one government politician told him.

By contrast, South Korea’s leftist opposition Democratic Party is hoping Trump will do exactly that, and perhaps achieve a lasting peace with the North. Somewhat ahead of the game, it has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The nuclear weapons debate has gone much further in South Korea than in Japan, says Sam Roggeveen, director of the Lowy Institute’s international security program. There, advanced missiles are already on land, surface ships and submarines, so far conventionally armed.

President Joe Biden’s administration attempted to renew “extended [nuclear] deterrence” in 2023 but jitters remain. “What I’d take away is real uncertainty and nervousness in Seoul that the United States is willing, in a crisis, to use nuclear weapons on South Korea’s behalf,” Roggeveen tells me. “So there is real erosion of US credibility in Korea.”

“The same would be true in Taipei — it would have to be,” he adds. “If you were in Taipei and watching Ukraine, you see a nuclear armed great power invading a smaller neighbour — that’s pretty analogous to the problem the Taiwanese face. The Americans are doing an awful lot on Ukraine’s behalf. They sent arms, they imposed sanctions on Russia, gave diplomatic support, intelligence support. But one thing they haven’t done is commit troops. If I was Taiwanese, I’d be drawing the lesson there: we’d get a lot of help from America but we won’t get the exact help we’ve really depended on. Especially none from a Trump administration.”

What does it all mean for Australia? Treasurer Jim Chalmers has gone to Washington to plead for an exemption from Trump’s tariff threats on the grounds of running a big bilateral trade deficit and being a good military ally.

In the strategic relationship, some share the South Koreans fears that Trump might be tempted into deals with North Korea’s Kim or China’s Xi Jinping, unravelling the entire post-1945 setting in Northeast Asia. But others, like ADFA’s Fernandes, see this as highly unlikely. They believe that America’s allies there, including Taiwan, will be seen as vital sentinels keeping China confined behind the “first island chain” and its closely monitored exit channels to open seas.

In Canberra, the bipartisan consensus sees Australia playing a part in this strategy through the ambitious AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine acquisition. Anxious to lock in Trump, defence minister Richard Marles went to Washington with a $800 million down-payment on the US$3 billion (A$4.7 billion) Canberra has promised to help expand US submarine-yard capacity. He seems to have got no assurance that Trump would not ask for more. Asked if the US would deliver the three to five attack submarines in the 2030s, as envisaged under AUKUS, Hegseth said: “I sure hope so.”

It looks unlikely. “Between now and 2032 the US Navy will drop from forty-nine nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs) to thirty-two to thirty-five,” says retired Australian admiral Peter Briggs, a former submarine commander. “The US will not have sufficient SSNs to be able to sell Australia three to five Virginia Class submarines.”

“It’s not clear whether in formal terms this will land on Trump’s desk in the next four years,” says Lowy’s Roggeveen. “But some other preliminary decisions might cross his desk, not the actual sub transfer. If that happens and the national security adviser or whoever is briefing him on that day says that for Australia to get these three to five submarines we [the United States] are going to have to do with three to five fewer submarines — if the bargain is presented to him in those terms, I think the danger is that he will say no.”

On the issue of moral equivalence, many members of the Australian services will be wondering about the ally with which they are increasingly integrated. Hegseth has fired the US military’s judge advocates-general, the three-star military lawyers charged with keeping US forces to the rules of conflict. Hegseth wants to restore a “warrior ethos” among soldiers less restricted by the rules. Trump has sacked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Charles Q. Brown, the second Black American in the job, as well as the first women to lead the navy and the coast guard, Admiral Lisa Franchetti and Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, on the grounds they obtained their posts through now-abandoned diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

On Ukraine and the Middle East, the Albanese government stands with Europe rather than America. Defence sources say the transfer of the Australian army’s older-model Abrams heavy tanks to Ukraine is going ahead this year. Support for the International Criminal Court, threatened with sanctions by Trump, is strong. With recruitment falling behind, the Australian forces need to be inclusive as possible.

The jitters in Canberra’s intelligence agencies, meanwhile, can only be imagined. As Kori Schake of Washington’s conservative American Enterprise Institute points out, they and other Five Eyes intelligence partners are increasingly worried about sharing secrets with the United States. Trump’s new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is an inexperienced wildcard. His administration has offered career-ending buyouts to all CIA staff. Employee information has been put on vulnerable internet connections. The state department office watching out for foreign state-sponsored disinformation has been closed, the Department of Homeland Security has put staff working on foreign influence operations on administrative leave, and the FBI has closed its foreign-influence taskforce. The National Security Agency will likely be next, Schake thinks. All this goes back to Trump’s resentment at investigations into the extent of Russian help for his election in 2016.

Canberra’s US-alliance supporters are “a little shell-shocked,” says Roggeveen. “I wouldn’t expect any kind of public reversal. That’s a bit too painful for anyone to conduct.” But he finds it extraordinary that Trump’s humiliation of Canada and its prime minister Justin Trudeau passed so quietly in Australia.

“When Trudeau addressed the nation, it sounded like a wartime speech,” Roggeveen said. “At one point, in almost a pleading tone, he invokes Canadian wartime shared sacrifice with the United States. And the terminology and the imagery of that section of the speech is almost exactly what you hear one Australian prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister after another say about the US alliance: sacrifice, mateship, we fought together in every war. When you hear it come out of Trudeau’s mouth in those circumstances, you wonder: how much comfort can we now take from that sentiment? The alliance tragics must be thinking: that sentimentality, that values-based alliance, as they would call it, is a fantasy.”

Paul Dibb, the former defence deputy secretary and ANU strategist, sees different implications of the prioritising of China. “It’s not for me to underrate what’s happening in Europe, but for us it’s not all woe and doom,” he told me. If the biggest threat is China, Australia is now much more important in terms of its geographical position than it was when the Cold War was centred on the Northern Hemisphere. With US forces in Guam, Okinawa, Japan and South Korea vulnerable to Chinese conventional missiles, Australia offered a “geopolitical position sufficiently far back, short of nuclear war, to be a massive, stable base for American forward positioning.”

And as Fernandes and others note, whether analysts doubt American assurances and urge greater self-reliance or see a need to do more to keep the Americans happy, their remedy is the same: spend much more on defence. Either way it’s a win for the military–industrial complex.

And these are just the early weeks of Trump’s presidency — though Roggeveen isn’t sure the new administration will keep up the pace. “And exactly how close are Trump’s actions to his rhetoric?” he adds. “At the moment there’s only a vague association between them.” Other centres of power — the surviving bureaucracy, the courts — will impose themselves, as might a big scandal or a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, which hit the second George W. Bush administration. By the congressional midterms, a second-term president becomes a lame duck. “I’m cautious about projecting forward this first month and saying this is it for the next four years.”

For all the wild adulation Trump and the chainsaw-wielding Musk got at last week’s Conservative Political Action Committee festival, their policies are copping a backlash. As US historian Heath Cox Richardson notes, the honeymoon is already over. A new Washington Post/Ipsos poll shows majorities disapproving of the “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president,” and of specific policies including abolishing USAID, tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, dismissal of federal employees, and deportation of undocumented immigrants with US-born children. The pardon for the 6 January rioters is especially unpopular, opposed by 83 per cent.

Maybe Eslake’s disillusionment with Americans is premature. But it’s going to be a long four years. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post The unilateralist appeared first on Inside Story.

The film follows the travails of its fictional hero, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), from his arrival at Ellis Island in 1947 (establishing shots of the Statue of Liberty, on her side or upside down, are a keynote metaphor) to his eventual settlement in Philadelphia (the city of brotherly love). It ends in the 1980s with a Tóth retrospective in Venice.

Once in the United States, Tóth picks up a career cut short in Europe before the war. He boards with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), designing knock-off Le Corbusier furniture for Attila’s modest homeware store, before being taken up by a wealthy businessman, Harrison Lee Van Buren Snr. (Guy Pearce). At the end of Part I, Van Buren presents Tóth with the commission that will occupy him for the next twenty years of his life. This is the Margaret Van Buren Center for Creation and Activity, named in honour of Van Buren’s recently deceased mother.

The film’s editing marshals a complicated storyline by a lingering and leaping technique: some episodes are dwelt upon in detail while others are skipped over, continuity is not always clear, and Corbet doesn’t trouble to complete several important trains of action. Does one character make a pass at another, thereby ending an important domestic arrangement? Has another character been seduced? What happens to the third character at the very end? How far these and other gaps are bug and how far feature is hard to determine.

The film was mainly shot in Hungary on a small budget ($10 million) in just thirty-three days. To surmount the problem of making present-day Budapest look like fifties’ Philadelphia, Corbet intercuts contemporary civic promotional footage that presents the city as the mid-century powerhouse of American industry. The acting is uniformly strong, capped by a bravura, if at times overwrought, performance by Brody. A few complaints: the script lets itself down on occasion, as when one character mentions the “significant others” of another, or someone says that someone else’s mother “has passed”; a subplot involving two Black characters, Gordon and his son William, doesn’t go anywhere; the score by Daniel Blumberg is over-insistent.

Anyone expecting insights into an architectural style called Brutalism will come away disappointed. Tóth’s building is more Bauhaus than Brutalist. How typical Tóth is of other ex-patriate European Jewish architects associated with either the Bauhaus or Brutalism is not considered. He is presented as a lonely architectural pioneer with no professional contemporaries, colleagues or contacts. The film does not allude to the many ex-Bauhaus architects already established in America, especially at Harvard. The omission of Louis Kahn, whose Yale University Center for Art, a near-Brutalist building, was completed in 1953, is striking, given that Kahn ran an architectural practice in Philadelphia in a timeframe overlapping the action of the film. This untethering of Tóth’s imaginary story from the real story of real architects thins out the air of reality.

But the film’s title is not “Brutalism” but “The Brutalist” and it may be conceded that, historical considerations aside, it legitimately concentrates less on architectural history and more on the degree of brutality — brute personal history, brute determination, brute struggle — required to realise a gigantic architectural commission. Tóth’s own brutality, alleviated by indications of his essential kindness and cultivation, is what enables him to survive and succeed. His story obeys a familiar story pattern, that of the male hero’s journey, in effect A Quest. Such a hero needs a field of action, involvement with the world’s materials — wood, coal, steel, concrete — and above all, participation in conflict, contest and struggle.

Tóth’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) turns out to be a journalist (she studied English at Oxford), but the women in the film stand apart from the main action. The character of Van Buren’s daughter Maggie Lee (Stacy Martin) is underdeveloped, but what is there — her sympathy for the Tóths, for example — suggests that much more could have been made of her character.

We first see Tóth in a state of abjection, following on from some form of internment, we guess, most probably a concentration camp, although this is not yet made clear. His initial design efforts in Philadelphia — remodelling Van Buren’s library in the Bauhaus style — are met with derision and rejection. The new library is, in fact, one of the film’s visual triumphs: wholly convincing, elegant, stylish and functional. Sacked, Tóth finds work as a rigger and labourer. Then Van Buren, chancing on an article in Look magazine, discovers the pedigree of the man he has spurned and offers Tóth a second chance.

In another memorable set-piece, and the climax of Part I, Van Buren troops his dinner guests out into the cold evening air and up a prominent hill near his house overlooking the exurb of Doylestown (a real place). He announces that the Margaret Van Buren Center will be built on this spot, and that Tóth will be its architect and builder. In Part II, with the help of Van Buren, Tóth is reunited with his wife, unexpectedly confined to a wheelchair, and his beloved niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy).

Progress on the centre is punctuated by series of setbacks, cost-overruns, and quarrels over materials and construction methods. The principal conflict is over what kind of building the centre should be; whether it will be three buildings in one, a community centre, a gymnasium and a library, a secular community asset, as Tóth wants; or four buildings, as the Doylestown council wants, and Van Buren supports, with the important addition of a chapel. (In fact, the chapel seems to replace the library.) This modification, resisted but eventually accepted by Tóth, is the crux, both literal and figurative, of the story.

The monumental sculptural edifice Tóth engineers — shown by what must be Potemkin-Village-like structures made of frame and canvas or building board intercut with shots of real buildings that might plausibly be part of the centre — is charged with symbolic value. It is crowned by twin towers, each one with an inset notched into the top, creating twin balconies that mirror and overlook each other.

The towers might be belltowers, they might be watchtowers. They certainly embody the Christianising of what had originally been a secular building. As seen in silhouette the negative space between them forms a gigantic cross. Tóth so orients the building that at its zenith the sun over the towers will project a cross onto an altar far below (although only on a few days a year, the sceptic within might murmur).

By the end of Part I we are beginning to understand that Tóth is not the titular brutalist after all. That role belongs to Van Buren Snr., a stock Yankee/WASP capitalist. Guy Pearce is a little too pompous in this role, but he is dealing with a script that doesn’t offer him a lot to go on. The most interesting, although undeveloped, aspect of Van Buren’s character is that he never mentions his father but is clearly fixated on his mother. She is ill at the start of the film, and her vulnerability as a sick (although off-screen) woman helps fuel Van Buren’s outrage at the remodelling of his library. After her death she haunts the film in the form of the memorial centre. Although she never appears she is the most important character in the film, the motor of the plot.

So far as Tóth is concerned, Van Buren is a helper and an antagonist, but also something much worse. He is not entirely without kindness or sympathy, he is not a complete philistine, nor does he appear to be an anti-Semite. The discreet sign of an endemic but well-concealed prejudice against Jews is given by Van Buren’s son, Harry Lee, who, having announced his desire to “slip my prick” into Zsófia, adds “you know, we tolerate you people.” This sort of attitude is the subtext of the foisting of a Christian purpose on a building that Tóth had originally envisaged as a secular community asset.

Underlying hostility toward the Jews that America has welcomed is brought to a critical point in a long and spectacular episode set in the quarries of Carrara. (Historically the Roosevelt administration had been reluctant to offer admission to European Jews, a policy supported by conservatives in the Jewish community on the grounds that an influx of co-religionists would exacerbate native anti-Semitism.) Tóth and Van Buren have travelled there to select the marble for the altar. The establishing shots of the Carrara quarries are the visual high point of the film. In one memorable scene Van Buren lays his cheek against the huge chunk of marble and weeps. Marble, because of its association with the iconography of the church, is meant to contrast with the democratic concrete so beloved by Tóth, on which no one lays their cheek and weeps.

The quarry scenes conclude, a little implausibly, with a dance party deep in the mines under the mountain, where László dances with a flirtatious younger woman under the watchful eye of Van Buren. This is a prelude to an unexpected scene in which Van Buren stalks a drunken Tóth through the labyrinthine corridors deep under the mountain, and finding him collapsed on the ground, insults and then violates him.

Or does he? We see the attack only as two silhouetted figures struggling in the middle ground and it is hard to know what, exactly, has taken place. And yet later, in the film’s melodramatic climax, Tóth’s wife, now able to walk with the help of a frame, forces her way into Van Buren’s house late at night and denounces him before his family and friends as a rapist. The rape clinches the argument of the film about the fate of post-Holocaust Jews in America, a case strongly reinforced by two subplots showing the contrasting responses to America of two other émigré Jews.

On the one hand, there is Toth’s cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), the owner of the furniture shop. Attila, an enterprising but conventional shopkeeper, has been in the States since before the war and has fully assimilated himself. He has married Audrey (Emma Laird), a Massachusetts Catholic, and has become a convert himself. Once Attila Molnár he is now Attila Miller. The episodes early in the film dramatizing the László, Attila and Audrey triangle are one of the most absorbing parts of the film, with an especially strong performance from Nivola. The warmth of the relationship between the cousins, the pride Attila feels in his business and his wife, his need to show Audrey off and yet, dangerously, press László to dance with her, the sexual tension between László and Audrey, the turning of Audrey against László, and the inevitable break between the cousins, is all absorbingly and convincingly shown.

On the other hand, there is László’s niece, Zsófia. In the opening scenes she is in what appears to be a DP camp in Hungary where she has been looked after by Erszébet. The film opens with an interrogation of Zsófia by an unseen official in which, despite a barrage of questions, she says nothing. She then says nothing for the following two hours. What has caused her aphonia? Erzsébet insists that she has kept Zsófia “safe,” especially from the attentions of two Russian soldiers, although it is possible to think that Erzsébet is shielding László here from a horrible truth.

Zsófia’s aphonia is perhaps the hint of an earlier violation in the manner of another literary wartime mute, Kattrin, in Brecht’s Mother Courage. But Zsófia’s later silence is also political, a refusal, unlike Attila, to join America. Zsófia speaks only when she has found a fiancé, and the pair announce they will “make Aliyah.” As to America, “this country is rotten,” Erzsébet (a convert to Judaism) says.

These sub-plots — one about acquiescence, one about refusal — throw light on the more insidious attack America mounts on Tóth. America welcomes Jewish émigrés, but it subtly deracinates them. Tóth’s secret act of resistance is encoded in the building, revealed only in the epitaph, spoken by the adult Zsófia, with her child in attendance, in the presence of the aged Tóth, by now a maimed, Rochester-like figure — wheelchair bound, possibly blinded, his face disfigured by a stroke, a man whose victory has been achieved at the cost of an assault upon him of which the rape is but the outward sign.

In this secret, the Van Buren Center, a Christian building in Christian America, is at the same time a memorial of the century’s darkest event. It makes the film more than an epic about one man’s achievement, but a story about the fate of Jews in America. How far we are encouraged to revise the optimist view of Israel that key characters express in the light of the country’s later history remains an open question, and one that will no doubt be answered in different ways by different viewers. •

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The writer Paul Bowles was among the reasons I wanted to visit this city on the northern tip of Morocco. Writers flocked to Tangier following the Second World War, when it was capital of the evocatively named International Zone. Bowles was at the centre of an eclectic literary cast that included William S. Burroughs, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal. Each mined the scenes around them in their works.

There was certainly plenty of material. The Tangier of those days was an anything-goes place ruled loosely by European powers and populated with a cast of barons, bounders, boulevardiers, black sheep, desperadoes, exoticists, spies, sensualists and assorted flotsam and jetsam. After reading so much of their writing in anticipation of the trip, these literary ghosts seemed so alive to me in this mahogany old cafe that some of them could have been sipping mint tea at nearby tables. Hisham said he was delighted to show me some of their haunts, a deviation from his staple work of taking roly-poly tourists from cruise ships on food tours. At least that was the story he told me.

I first came to know of Bowles when I was told he’d named the ill-omened male character of The Sheltering Sky, his first and most remembered novel, after a city I knew all too well. The man’s name, somewhat preposterously, was Port Moresby, a nod to a city Bowles had never visited but intuited as being an epitome for existential desolation. Moresby, his wife Kit and their acquaintance Tunner make up the tangled and doomed triangle at the book’s centre. Side characters include a callow young Australian, Eric, and a ghastly woman introduced as his travel writer mother, it being entirely ambiguous to the reader throughout as to what their relationship is.

Many elements of The Sheltering Sky were autobiographical. Kit had many of the characteristics of Bowles’s wife Jane; Eric and his mother were thinly fictionalised versions of figures Bowles wrote after encounters on his travels. There was a gossamer thinness between his fiction and nonfiction, phrases and scenes from one form popping up in the other.

I’d finished rereading this strange, sad, haunting novel in a bar in Tarifa, the Spanish port town from where the ferries depart for Tangier. Perhaps it was the immediacy of the words, but the bar itself seemed populated by characters with similar attributes, the most obvious of which was a middle-aged American woman in multicolour kaftan feeding cheese to her dog while monologuing tales from her miserable childhood to a bored young man who looked sure to be her unhappy lover.

Nothing good awaits any of the characters in The Sheltering Sky as they fan across the Sahara. One dies, another is willingly imprisoned as a concubine; throughout, characters cogitate about their inconsequential place in the universe, “how fragile we are” under the sheltering sky of the title.

But the novel is positively upbeat compared to some of Bowles’s short stories. A fiction-writing friend of mine had urged me to read “A Distant Episode” as part of pre-trip reading but warned I would find it hard going. I did. The story is about a trusting linguistics professor who returns to the site of his fieldwork somewhere in the Moroccan hinterland. Expecting acclaim, the hapless don instead finds himself tortured by relatives of his former informants who mock him for not understanding their dialect. Tennessee Williams — another member of the city’s rotating cast — told Bowles to spike another of his short stories lest readers think him an outright monster.

Bowles’s writings are certainly much easier to admire than adore. Yet I have always been drawn to them and his ruminations about travel, place and our place in the world; I’ve probably read him as deeply as any writer. Many of his stories serve as cautionary tales, speaking to a fear that travel doesn’t so much enable discovery so much as to reveal personal flaws and insecurities. No matter how much outsiders strive to understand another place, they will remain largely deaf and dumb to both the place itself and, in many ways, their own motivations. As someone who has lived a lot of his life overseas and tried to understand places far from my own, Bowles’s observations pointed to a melancholy conclusion that was uncomfortable yet necessary to ruminate on.

I was also in Tangier as a halfway stop to Australia after years in the United States, reckoning with a return I was at best ambivalent about. We were in Morocco the week before a new president would be inaugurated in Washington and the world seemed frozen in purgatorial uncertainty about what would come next. To put it another way, I was in a profoundly Bowlesian mood, a disposition enhanced still further by the presence in my backpack of a dogeared and often read copy of Travels, his collection of non-fiction pieces.

I asked Hisham if people still come to Tangier seeking to make it as writers. “Not really,” he replied. “Everyone wants to be a YouTuber and a Tiktoker nowadays.” My own children aspire in similar directions; their dreams seem faintly ludicrous but no sillier than my own dream from adolescence of trying to make it as a writer.

And maybe they are onto something. There were probably a hundred people in the Gran Café de Paris. One person was reading a newspaper, another a magazine, a few chatting among themselves and the remainder watching their phones impassively. Just hanging on in the city are bookstores dating from Bowles’s time, including the Librairie des Colonnes, a place he seldom visited because he said he feared the djinn (ghosts) that haunted it. It was Sunday when we went on our walking tour and the bookshop was closed, but I peered in the window and noticed relatively few volumes on the stands. I started to feel ever more like I’d chosen the wrong dream to chase.

Hisham had a couple of stops planned out for us, the first being Bowles’s old apartment well outside the gates that marked the International Zone. Bowles spent sixty years in Tangier and forty of them, up to his death in 1999, in that apartment. Photos I’d seen the day before in a small exhibit at the American legation in Tangier — the building that housed the United States’s first overseas mission — hinted at Bowles’s affectations and peccadillos as well as revealing brutally the ravages of time.

In the first photo he is a young blonde dandy in a Liberace style dressing-gown complete with unfeasibly long cigarette holder, a man consciously aware he is at a literary height. In the next he is typing purposefully on his typewriter. Another photo shows the apogee of the lurid Orientalist fantasia that by many accounts the libertine Bowles indulged lustily: a now grey-haired man, imperious in a three-piece suit, flanked by a phalanx of robed striplings, extras in the production of Salome whose music he scored.

But the most affecting photos are from Bowles’s final days, sitting up in the bed where he did all his writing. He is emaciated, jacket pulled tightly over shrunken shoulders. He was already close to becoming a ghost writer.

On our way, we passed by an unremarkable shoe shop, above which Hisham said the singer James Brown once played. We talked about whether Tangier’s lurid mystique constituted a blessing or a curse. I was travelling with my family, and an Anthony Bourdain documentary about the city I’d watched with my eldest son had perturbed him no end. Bourdain depicted Tangier as depraved, dark, dangerous and drug-addled (for Bourdain these were all attractive attributes of course). We had girded ourselves to hurtle straight into a dystopia, a concern exacerbated by listening in to the conversations of supposed experts giving unsolicited advice to jejune newbies like us in the passport queue about how every Moroccan was primed to gouge the unwary traveller.

The reality was anything but. Expecting braying hordes of touts and peddlers, we instead met a polite man in a brown desert robe (evoking an Obi-Wan presence) who directed us into an airconditioned taxi that charged a price ten times less the figure the doomsayers in the queue had warned us about.

We’d been walking for twenty minutes now when we reached what we thought was the approximate location of Bowles’s apartment. While Hisham had taken a group here before, he couldn’t quite remember in which of the samey yellowish housing complexes it was located. Asking around didn’t help much either. Even though he probably would have served him in the decades prior, the elderly grocer had never heard of Bowles. Nor had the young man in the Paris St Germain shirt watching a football match on his phone.

Eventually a stooped woman directed us to a gloomy entranceway. A stone plaque with Arabic and English lettering at the foot of the stairs read: “Paul Bowles, American Writer & Composer lived here.” A family bustled up the stairs with their shopping and another came down the stairs as we took a bunch of pictures. A quote from another writer I admire, W.G. Sebald, came to mind: “to set one’s name to a work gives no one a right to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace.” The apartment is supposedly occupied now by his last houseboy, who would now himself be an old man. We lingered for a time, too embarrassed to knock on the door.

On the way back to the old city and our next destination, we passed by the sprawling palm-fronded Spanish consulate, a place where acquiring a visa, Hisham told us, could take up to three months for Moroccan citizens like him. “The process gets harder and harder,” he lamented. Many of those who did make it over found the cost of living in Spain overwhelming but were too ashamed to admit it and return. Hisham shelved their reports of glittering lives in Europe in the part of his brain marked “fiction.”

For all that, getting to Europe remained the dream of many, including Tangier’s newest residents, who stand out today as much as the dandy writers did of old. These are the sub-Saharan Africans, many of them selling laughably phoney wares, such as T-shirts I saw bearing the combined logos of North Face, Versace and Nike.

Many of these new Tangerines see the city as a way-station to elsewhere, a stopoff to acquire a smuggled passage to a Spanish beach in dead of night. “Who takes them,” I asked. People connected with the drivers of the ostentatious Mercedes and BMWs cruising Tangier’s streets, Hisham told me. This closet African city to Europe retains the air of a smugglers’ paradise.

We talked about Bowles’s complicated life and legacy. He fell out with, and was eventually disowned by, many of the Moroccan writers whose work he translated. The causes were familiar to anyone who has been involved in a joint writing project: disagreements about the pulling of weight, attendant spats involving credit, status and bruised pride.

Other stuff was darker. The writer Michelle Green writes about how Bowles devised a scheme as dark and sinister as any of his fictions that preyed on the insecurities of an upstart American writer and drove the man further into madness. The Guardian obituarist wrote a dark tales reminiscent of a Bowles story about how he’d repressed a memory of waking wearing a djellaba robe one morning in the writer’s apartment after an evening of enthusiastic hashish piping, his clothes strewn at the foot of the bed.

There was much poignancy too. Jane spent much of their marriage rotating between psychiatric institutions, flamboyant and costly affairs and Tangier barstools where she would run up huge bills and lament how unfulfilled had been her literary career. When Paul Theroux visited Bowles at his home near the end of his life, he found the old writer shivering in a thin blanket, largely forgotten by a literary world that once renowned him. The man who wrote cautionary tales had become one himself.

We passed the el-Minzah, still one of Tangier’s most storied hotels and a hangout for Bowles on the infrequent occasions when he had money. Another peril of being acclaimed as a “writers’ writer” is the rare and small royalties. A better remunerated writer, Ian Fleming, spent a month a year there writing James Bond novels. We peeked inside its stately courtyard, its walls festooned with pictures of visitors from yesteryear: European royalty, movie stars from my grandparents’ era; John Malkovich, who played Port Moresby in the film version of The Sheltering Sky; and somewhat incongruously the former Australian soap star Melissa George.

Several stars downscale from the el-Minzah is the whitewashed El Muniria hotel, nestled inside a warren of streets in the old city. The El Muniria is a basic, no frills, no ensuite type of place. There are much better hotels in Tangier but none had as many literary ghosts for guests to séance with.

Old sepia photographs of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Bowles hung here and there but the more prominent person staring from the walls was a sinister-looking fellow with dark glasses and a porkpie hat. He was William S. Burroughs, a man who made even the most outré residents of the International Zone seem placid by comparison. He had arrived in Tangier after killing his wife in a William Tell–style escapade in South America; his life in Tangier was only marginally more sedate. His hotel room was pocked with bullet holes, a stove burned inside for his hashish candy and the floor was carpeted with discarded pages of a novel Jack Kerouac would ultimately pick up and organise into Burrough’s most celebrated work, Naked Lunch, a fever dream of a book revolving around an opioid-addicted man who lives in a city called Interzone.

While I found Bowles’s writing can’t-look-away absorbing, I struggled through Naked Lunch, flailing because of its absence of obvious structure. Burroughs had written the book in such a way that it could supposedly be picked up at any page and read from there. I found it easier to put it down.

The hotel was excellent for people watching. I typed into my phone some of the novelistic characters we saw as we puttered around. A man with an English accent, Tudor yeoman face and Arab robes speaking loudly on his phone; two blonde men with identical leather jackets and handlebar moustaches speaking German and holding hands. On the roof, a young man was speaking to a phone perched on a tripod; scrolling around the internet a few weeks later, I found him enthusing in a brash video with crazed graphics that the hotel rooftop is one of the “must do sites” in Tangier. My initial thought was to scoff until I realised that if they were around now, those literary swaggerers and experimenters with form might well have been doing the same.

We headed back to the Gran Café de Paris to meet my family and embark for the afternoon, entirely without irony, on one of Hisham’s food tours, which culminated in the purchasing an assuredly counterfeit soccer shirt in the red and green colours of the Moroccan national team. Very excellent the tour was too.

Readers can get a sense of what a place is like only if they know its effects upon the writer, Bowles wrote. What had I learned from my few days in Tangier? Obviously, the city was very different from the dark image of my imagination. On its surface, it exuded an easy PG-13 charm and affirmed to me that always the best way to get a true sense of a place is not rely on the others but to go and see.

We called back to the El-Minzah later that afternoon for drinks. Hisham met his next client, an elderly Frenchman who wanted to see one last moon rise in the desert, and my family and I had drinks in the beautiful cool courtyard. My children could not identify a single person on the wall, their legacies faded already. They had lemonade and my wife and I had a Casablanca lager while we tried to tell them about people like Richard Harris and Rex Harrison.

I remember thinking that this was a perfect moment, something I remembered existential Bowles said was one of the things that made life worth living. It was from his novel The Spiders House, set during the anything-goes years the International Zone. I winkled out the full quote later: “the only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

While I wasn’t at all sure what the future would be for me, I had a happy family. Perhaps that was as much certainty and surety as one was going to get afforded in this mad world.

My wife and I could happily have stayed for another drink, but the perfect moment was already fading. Why is it that kids just don’t seem to enjoy kicking back in bars as much as their parents? We headed up the stairs once more to hail what would turn out to be another reasonably priced taxi. The door opened into us and the burly Englishman in the Arab robes from the el-Muniria swaggered purposefully in the direction of the bar. We stepped out, once more under the uncertainties of the sheltering sky. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Ghost writers appeared first on Inside Story.

As secretary of the Fabian Society, he’d briefly met Whitlam and his principal private secretary, John Menadue. When Menadue stepped down to take up a job with Rupert Murdoch — who was then politically left-of-centre — he recommended Race take his place on Whitlam’s staff. And so, in September 1967, began “the most tumultuous, and by far the most rewarding, five years of my career.”

Just minutes after Race had installed himself in his office, the door to his new boss’s office burst open. “Whitlam emerged,” he later wrote, “shouting for me to produce from Hansard — a publication with which I then had no more than a nodding acquaintance — the answer to a question on notice about the DFRB — an acronym of which I had never heard, and which he did not explain.” Whitlam’s shouting continued “while I fumbled and failed to comply, and his face turned more and more purple, until a tactful intervention by another staff member defused the situation and he vanished again behind the door.”

Race’s rescuer was one of the secretaries, Barbara Stuart, who would become a good friend, like all the Whitlam staff. Hansard was the official record of parliament and the DFRB was the Defence Force Retirement Benefits scheme. Gough’s explosion wasn’t personal, Barbara explained, and Race shouldn’t take offence.

“I was to learn that such episodes were a way of relieving his frustrations with the still largely inert majority of his parliamentary colleagues,” recalled Race, “and the shambles in which he had inherited the Labor Party from Calwell, particularly in Victoria. Sweetness and light would prevail again ten or so minutes later, but the heat was fierce while it lasted.”

Whitlam had become leader of the party in February that year and was determined to change things. But Labor was at a low point and there were many problems to overcome, including the hostility of the Victorian branch. The caucus was far from united behind Whitlam, and would not be until Labor made great gains in the 1969 election. His loyal staff felt he was in an almost impossible situation and it was part of their job to put up with his tantrums.

Deposed leader Arthur Calwell, meanwhile, remained in the parliament, totally embittered. “He was in his early seventies, but always wore a black tie in memory of his son Arthur, who’d died in 1948, at the age of eleven,” Race later told journalist Garry Sturgess. “Calwell used to haunt the corridor outside our office; sitting on the green leather couches against the wall. If you walked past, he’d seize you by the arm, sit you down, breathe whisky over you, and deliver a tirade of criticism about Gough. He was like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. You learned to keep walking and not make eye contact.”

Whitlam had only six staff, a tiny number compared to the opposition leader today. Graham Freudenberg, his adviser on political strategy and foreign policy, wrote the great parliamentary and campaign speeches. He was immensely well read, and Race found it a pleasure to watch him and Gough together. Both had an encyclopaedic knowledge of history.

Besides being principal private secretary, Race was the second-string speechwriter as well as working on policy initiatives and expanding the great network of advice Menadue and the ANU sociologist Sol Encel had initiated.

Whitlam’s assistant private secretaries were Peter Cullen — an acquaintance of Race’s who had once lent him a copy of Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism — and, later, Dick Hall. They were the troubleshooters, maintaining the office’s party and union links and dealing with the throng of individuals and interest groups who increasingly clamoured for Gough’s attention.

As Race later recalled, “It pained Whitlam that his staff had mostly chosen to educate themselves in unconventional ways, and were therefore — as he reminded us in moments of exasperation — ‘educational dropouts.’ Even so, our deficiencies were not without their uses. When the embittered Calwell attacked Whitlam for having ‘an office full of long-haired academics,’ Whitlam was able to retort that none of his staff were university graduates, and one of them was bald.”

As well as a receptionist, the office had two secretaries, Barbara Stuart and Carol Summerhayes, both of whom Race found to be a joy to be around — funny, clever, well informed and resilient. Carol worked mainly for Freudenberg, while Barbara assisted everyone else.

The Whitlam staff bonded closely and there was a lot of laughter; it was a way of letting off steam after Gough’s rages. They called him “Leader,” while he called them by their first names. They treated each other as equals, and socialised together.

“I went into the job with high hopes, and was never disappointed,” Race told Sturgess. “There was huge job satisfaction attached to it, and the feeling of making the sort of contribution I’d always wanted to make. I developed a pretty good rapport with Whitlam, and there were joyous occasions along the way. I was constantly learning and growing. We were a sort-of extended family and worked as a team. We all had our own jobs and were self-directed. We knew what we had to do and got on with it.”

Race’s life had changed dramatically. He was picked up in Melbourne at about 7am on Monday mornings, returned home around 7pm on Friday evenings, and often travelled with Gough on weekends. Before taking the job, he’d discussed it with his wife Jill, who was supportive. Both of them were Labor “true believers” and saw his job as a cause for celebration, but initially they had no idea of the actual intensity of the job, or what it would be like with Race living away from home so much of the time.

Gough was on the campaign trail every weekend, accompanied by one of the three male staffers and a secretary, so Race was away one weekend in three. “I spoke on the phone every night to my family and that was my lifeline. Gough understood, because he was in the same situation, with [his wife] Margaret bringing up the children almost single-handedly in Sydney.”

Race learned a great deal about speechwriting from Whitlam. “The starting point was usually a note or oral briefing from Whitlam, complete with references,” he told Sturgess. “In the first instance, a Whitlam line on a key topic was likely to have been laid down in earlier speeches that had the status of revealed truth, and could only with extreme difficulty be changed.”

After Race had given him a first draft, Whitlam would send it back “heavily annotated, or say something like, ‘you haven’t referred to my question of 23rd April 1964,’ or ‘have a look at such and such government report,’ or ‘have you talked to so and so about this?’” The drafting would continue until Whitlam was happy with it.

“I learned about ‘scansion’ or the rhythm of a speech,” said Race. “He was fond of alliteration and liked short phrases that could be used over and over again. As a speechwriter, you need to look at the world through the eyes of the person for whom you’re writing, and you’ve got to catch the cadence, or inflection, of their voice. I used to read his speeches in Hansard to see the way he spoke, and when I got better at it, I felt empowered.

“And the funny thing is that unconsciously I started to speak a bit like Gough. Not the deep, breathy voice we used to mimic when he was not around, but the way he enunciated very clearly and stressed certain words.” He wasn’t the only one: according to Whitlam’s biographer, Jenny Hocking, Graham Freudenberg “drew uncannily close in manner, speech and ideas to Whitlam.”

Because he and Gough shared the experience of living in facility-starved outer-suburban areas, Race particularly enjoyed writing speeches on urban and regional development. “The Liberals sneered at this,” Race told Sturgess. “They thought it was the business of local councils, and why hadn’t he just become a mayor, if that’s what he was on about.”

When he was in Canberra, Race had a room in Brassey House, a guesthouse mainly for public servants. He left there at about seven or eight in the morning and walked up to Parliament House, “dive-bombed by magpies in the nesting season.” At night he usually left for Brassey’s at 11pm. “It was glorious to walk through the big front doors into the night, looking out over the lake to the lights of Civic beyond. Canberra’s cold, dry air in your face was so invigorating that you felt you could go back in and do another day’s work.”

Race’s policy work was particularly focused on education and Medibank (later Medicare). “Race Mathews was the coordinator of policy and, to a degree which he has never claimed for himself, the originator of policy,” Graham Freudenberg wrote later.

When Race joined Whitlam’s office the Labor leader was busy attacking the Coalition government’s voluntary health insurance scheme, which was heavily subsidised by the government but deeply flawed and inequitable. The scheme was not designed to reduce the expenses of patients, the Labor leader declared, but to guarantee the fees of doctors.

Whitlam has been criticising the policy for years, mainly through the questions on notice that he’d put down annually since 1960 to successive health ministers. He had elevated these questions on notice to an art form. How many claims were accepted or rejected by the medical benefit funds that year? What were the reasons for rejecting a claim? If accepted, what percentage of the cost was met by the fund and what percentage by the Commonwealth? What were the reserves and operating expenses of the funds?

Whitlam had not yet come up with an alternative, but he had been impressed by ideas for a national health service put forward by Moss Cass, a young research doctor at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, whom Race had met in the early 1960s. Like most people on the left at the time, both were impressed by the National Health Service, introduced by the British Labour Party in the late 1940s.

When Race became Fabian Society secretary in 1960 he commissioned Cass to put his ideas into Fabian pamphlets. The first, “Reform in Medicine” (1961), advocated a national health scheme centred on public hospitals and health centres and staffed by full-time salaried doctors. Cass published more details in a second pamphlet, “A National Health Scheme for Labor” (1964), written when he was director of a trade union clinic in Footscray.

Impressed by the fact that Cass was focused on healthcare delivery and not just health insurance, Whitlam’s principal private secretary, John Menadue, had studied for himself the literature on different healthcare schemes. The evidence showed that private, fee-driven medicine resulted in excessive treatments and high costs.

Whitlam embraced the essence of Cass’s proposals. In his 1961 Curtin Memorial Lecture he said that “the best way to achieve a proper national health service is to establish a national hospital system.” The core of the program would be free treatment in public hospitals. Whitlam wanted a tiered system, with a major teaching hospital in each region and smaller local hospitals and community health centres, all staffed by salaried doctors. Although hospitals were a state responsibility, the scheme would be driven by Commonwealth grants to the states under section 96 of the Constitution.

In mid 1966, Menadue arranged for Whitlam to meet with Cass and two young researchers from the Institute of Applied Economic Research at the University of Melbourne, Dick Scotton and John Deeble, who had done groundbreaking research on hospital costs and health insurance. Among the several other doctors present was Rod Andrew, dean of medicine at Monash University. The discussion was mainly about the shortcomings of the government’s health insurance scheme.

As the meeting was about to conclude, Whitlam said, “Well, you’ve described the problem. Have you any solutions?” Scotton and Deeble said they had some general ideas but had not yet put anything in writing. At Whitlam’s urging, they agreed to do so.

Whitlam continued his attacks on the Coalition’s scheme after he was elected opposition leader in February 1967. The following February, Scotton and Deeble sent him a fifteen-page document outlining a universal, compulsory health insurance scheme, to be funded by a tax levy.

Soon afterwards, Whitlam received an invitation to speak on healthcare policy to the resident medical staff at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. He asked Race, who had taken over as principal private secretary, to draft a speech on the national hospital system outlined by Cass.

“I was completely sold on the national hospital idea,” Race told me decades later, “but had developed a standard procedure when writing a speech, that I’d go back to Menadue’s files. I found the Scotton and Deeble paper and could see it was absolutely right. Because you couldn’t jump from this decrepit, dysfunctional, private insurance scheme to a totally free, regionalised set of hospitals.”

Meeting with Scotton and Deeble in Melbourne, he discovered that the two researchers — inspired by a royal commission in Saskatchewan, Canada — had now written a paper setting out a universal health insurance scheme. “So instead of writing the speech about the national hospital system, I wrote about both schemes, with the emphasis on Scotton and Deeble’s health insurance scheme.”

Whitlam wanted to focus on Cass’s hospital proposal but eventually agreed to promote both schemes. Race drafted a speech titled “The Alternate National Health Program” and gave the first draft to Whitlam. “When Gough finally signed off, it was very close to the deadline. I showed it to Graham Freudenberg, who said, ‘You’ve won us the 1969 election!’”

Whitlam delivered the speech over lunch at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital on 5 July 1968. Despite the importance of the announcement, it was “one of the worst days of my life,” Race later wrote:

Fogs at Canberra Airport have tormented politicians and public servants for years. I had stayed on the night before the speech was to be delivered, in order to add some finishing touches, and supervise the printing. Fog duly closed the airport the following morning, and continued to do so until noon, while telephone calls from Whitlam in Sydney became increasingly terse. By the time I arrived at the hospital, Whitlam had been ad-libbing for half an hour, and I was anything but popular. Insult was added to injury when a doctor was overheard to comment afterwards on how much better the speech had been before the prepared version of it had finally been handed up to Whitlam.

The media coverage, including publication of the scheme in the Medical Journal of Australia, was good. Given that the scheme was not yet Labor policy, Scotton and Deeble were astonished when they read reports of the speech. Scotton later wrote that he and Deeble had expected their proposal to find its way into “the byzantine processes of policy formulation in the Labor Party, from which it would emerge, if it did at all, in an unrecognisable form.”

Whitlam had gone ahead in his usual “crash through or crash” style. Race recalled:

It was a huge success, because it created this terrific brawl with the Australian Medical Association. They immediately denounced it and embarked on a classic exercise of lobbying and disinformation. Prime Minister Gorton attacked it, along with Jim Forbes, the Minister for Health, especially in question time.

They set about dealing with these attacks:

We needed to get onto the public record a clear picture of what we were proposing, while fine-tuning the scheme to meet criticisms. Gough made a major speech to parliament about it and from then on until the 1969 election, we got more information via answers to ‘Questions on Notice’, which strengthened our criticism of the Government’s scheme…

“If I hadn’t found the Scotton and Deeble paper and persuaded Gough to run with their proposals,” Race later recalled, “we would not have had a health insurance policy for the 1969 election, only the hospitals policy. To that extent I can claim to be one of the midwives of Medibank.”

Labor came to the brink of power at the election, with health insurance one of the key contributors to its surge in support. Bill Hayden became the shadow social security minister and, with Whitlam, carried the Medibank policy into the following election, in 1972. Moss Cass, meanwhile, had entered federal parliament as the member for Maribyrnong and later became Whitlam’s environment and conservation minister.

Medibank was established on 7 August 1974 in a joint sitting of federal parliament. The national hospital system would come later. •

This is an edited extract from Race Mathews: A Life in Politics, by Iola Mathews (Monash University Publishing).

The post Working for Whitlam appeared first on Inside Story.

Swift’s songs are said to be confessional, but as a literary academic of advanced years I exist so far outside her fan base as to be blissfully ignorant of her biography. The lyrics in this case appear to allude to a relationship with a self-destructive partner, but I read them as an ironic fable of the troubled relationship between poetry and song itself. Swift is aware that it’s easy to fall for the louche but charismatic boy poet, yet she knows that his masculine image is passé — like writing your poems on a typewriter — and that he no longer has the cultural authority he once possessed: a cultural authority that she has in spades.

Even so, for all their personal differences, because she still enjoys his “show” and can “decode” him (her words), it’s apparent they retain a creative connection. Towards the end of the song he moves a ring from her middle to her ring finger in a gesture of commitment. Although — as a universally acclaimed, fabulously wealthy, multi-award-winning singer-songwriter — Swift may not be quite so tortured, she implies that she belongs in the same department.

Another literary academic, Sir Jonathan Bate, a Shakespeare scholar no less, has admitted to being a Swiftie, praising the singer’s linguistic flair and literary allusions. “This isn’t just high-class showbiz,” he wrote in Britain’s Sunday Times, “Taylor Swift is a real poet.” But my new book, The Wild Reciter, is not about Taylor Swift and, although the ways in which poetry and song lyrics relate are a significant theme within it, its range is wider and more eclectic.

I begin with Swift because, like Bob Dylan before her, while her obvious skills as a wordsmith invite comparisons with high culture, her phenomenal success as a popular singer simultaneously casts doubt over the value of her words. That’s why Bate’s claim that she’s “a real poet” seems less like a statement of acknowledged fact and more a provocation. Like the image of the tortured poet, poetry still carries page-based, typewritten, elite connotations — even though this privileged meaning has long been underwritten by more popular forms of verse that often, in the past especially, involved performance (including singing).

Against the tortured poet I invoke the amateur reciter, sometimes called an “elocutionist,” who is an equally old-fashioned and eccentric figure, and today almost wholly forgotten. Unlike the typical poète maudit, reciters could be female as well as male, and when delivering their favourite verses in front of an audience could become so unrestrainedly histrionic as to attract the epithet “wild” from one local wit in the 1920s — hence my title, “the wild reciter.”

Now an extinct species, the wild reciter was once so common as to be a pest. For my purposes, he or she is not so much the hero of this book as a symbol of a time long gone when poetry had mass appeal, and was everywhere read, memorised and performed. In other words, a motif for something presumed lost: poetry as a social activity; poetry as a form of entertainment.

Light-years behind Taylor Swift in terms of high- class showbiz professionalism, the wild reciter represents poetry’s neglected and — in the best possible sense of the word — vulgar past, offering a perspective that might also speak to its present and future as a demotic art.

In Australia today most people have hardly any use for poetry in the elite sense at all. If we encounter it in school, it’s apt to be ransacked for its paraphrasable content, or made otherwise assessable in the mandated fun of a creative project, rather than read and enjoyed, privately or in performance, in and of itself as a special arrangement of language and sound. Some of us encounter it at university in comparable ways, to much the same effect perhaps. To approach poetry from a literary-critical perspective can sometimes feel like entering a conspiracy theory that invites you to take the red pill by insisting, “You may think this poem means X, but you’ll soon find that it really means Y.”

Yet, for all that academic study dominates its reception, poetry is undoubtedly still read and still performed in this country without becoming either a hermeneutic exercise or piece of work to be graded, and I dare say that it remains a significant medium through which the young, especially, are given to express their experiences, emotions and identities. Witness the appeal and success of poetry slams, and of Instapoetry. The trouble is that, like casual risk-taking, most people soon grow out of it.

Instead, or in any case, everybody currently hears what amounts to poetry in the words of popular songs, which, facilitated by the gramophone and radio, began to replace page verse as the most common form of lyrical utterance during the early twentieth century. The rhymes of hip-hop imply a still stronger kinship. If few people can now quote from well-loved poems, a great number will recall lines or whole verses of favourite song lyrics — often in the phrasing and intonation of the original singer. (Hence the phenomenon of the mondegreen, or misheard lyric. How many think Jimmy Barnes in “Khe Sanh” sings “The last train” — instead of plane — “out of Sydney’s almost gone”?) For many in the music industry, however, trying to isolate the lyrics of a song from its performance is on a par with murdering in order to dissect.

Similarly, poetry written expressly to be performed is different, more diminished, less vitalised, when read on a page rather than heard as part of a spoken word or slam event. The historic link between song and poetry reminds us that all language was once embodied, that embodiment — through volume and tone of voice, bodily movement, gesture and facial expression — is fundamental in oral communication, that words that are spoken or sung generate different possibilities of meaning than those which live only on the mute page, and that poetry remains an oral, as well as a literate, art form. Candy Royalle (1981–2018) was a headlining performer of her poetry on the Sydney scene, but her posthumous collection A Trillion Tiny Awakenings (2018) can offer only a shadow of her luminous live presence.

I am interested in the ways in which poetry has been created, communicated and consumed within everyday life in this country from around 1890 until the present day: from bush ballads to slam. Of course, “everyday life” is not a static category any more than “poetry” is, and both continue to change with the advent of transformational new technologies. Although the internet now massively facilitates the publishing and performance of poetry, it’s a melancholy truth that, for all this healthy diversity, poetry is no longer regularly consumed across all ages and classes. In that sense, it’s no longer indisputably one of the arts of everyday life, as the genres of popular music are.

That this has occurred shows the ways in which new communication technologies — sound recording, cinema, radio, television, the internet — have transformed audiences as much as they have transformed the ways in which poetry is made. By tracing the changing modes of creation, communication and consumption of poetry over the past 135 years, and by taking account of those new technologies and the audiences generated by them, I’ve aimed to arrive at a larger, more capacious notion of what poetry is.

The Wild Reciter ends with a famous quotation from a well- known British-American poet backhandedly celebrating his art, so by way of sounding a cautionary note I’d like to bookend it here at the start with another well-known example that queries the cultural value of poetry — or, more precisely, what we mean when we say poetry. For, to be brutally frank, it’s very easy to be put off by the stuff. As the American modernist Marianne Moore declared, “I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” And fiddling is what much high literary poetry can seem like: aridly introverted, wantonly obscure or leadenly “playful,” and at times a combination of all three. I myself have long enjoyed an antipathy to any form of “visual” or concrete poetry. In contrast, my partner is very fond of photographing poetic graffiti around inner Sydney. Here’s just one example, stencilled in cursive script in a back lane in St Peters:

This wall has a soul beneath her mission brown skin,
Formed of colour and spray, stencil and sprawl.
She howls of political protest and whispers of loves lost,
A cultural pin-up with stories etched deep in her flesh.

My academic soul might chafe at the sentimental clichés, but this is perfectly effective in its place, and even moving. And its handwritten look and its location are intrinsic to its meaning. By making direct reference to the surface upon which it appears it may be classed as playful, but it’s neither introverted or obscure, and it reads exactly like what a great many people who don’t like “poetry” would, for want of a better word, call poetry. If I have a problem with this, I’m part of a tiny elitist minority, and I need to get over myself if I want to understand the interrelationship that necessarily exists between “poetry” as a specialised genre of interest to a few and poetry as a familiar art form accessible to everybody, as close as graffiti or the lyrics of a Taylor Swift song.

Another sample of poetry written on property, below a rear window overlooking a lane in North Newtown, maybe helps to explain why:

ALICE
RULES
(I WAS NAK’D
WHEN I WROTE THIS)

Somehow this manages to be both sweet and creepy in about equal measure. Yet whatever the author was or wasn’t wearing when they wrote it, the fact is that nobody is ever really naked when they write, because we’re clothed in language as social beings from the moment we begin to speak. The history of poetry is immemorial, but I want to show that — just as a can of spray-paint is able to shape written language in wholly new ways — through wholly new media technologies, poetry also possesses a modern popular history very different from its past.

But can this last example of graffiti be classed as poetry — with or without inverted commas? For its author there were evidently things more important beyond such a fiddling question. As Marianne Moore ultimately conceded about her art, “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in/ it, after all, a place for the genuine.” Again I start to chafe, and want to ask, What is genuine? But then, if it’s a quality to be uniquely attached to poetry, I guess the answer will depend on what you understand by that word too. •

This is an edited extract from The Wild Reciter, published earlier this month by Melbourne University Press.

The post Pursuing the wild reciter appeared first on Inside Story.

A new edition of All in Line, published by New York Review Books with an introduction by the cartoonist Liana Finck and notes by the Saul Steinberg Foundation’s Sheila Schwartz, offers viewers the chance to catch Steinberg as he sets off on a mid-century journey that would be punctuated by delight, surprise, and many an unexpected jolt. This is my afterword to this new edition.

— Iain Topliss

Saul Steinberg’s All in Line was a triumph when it was first published in June 1945. The New York Times praised it, there was a positive notice in Art News, and LIFE magazine reproduced examples of the drawings with comments from the artist (making a drawing “is… like walking along an edge… if you lean in a little too far… you are lost”). In the first month of publication alone it sold around 6000 copies. There followed a second printing, selection by the Book of the Month club, and a Penguin Books (London) reprint on austerity paper for distribution in Great Britain. Within a year Steinberg reported sales of 20,000. In 1947, Penguin Books (New York) issued a much-modified paperback edition with a bastardised cover image for the American popular market. Already well-published in the United States, Steinberg stood on the brink of what would develop into a truly brilliant career.

All in Line emerged from a tumultuous phase in Steinberg’s life. In 1933, following the rise of nationalist and anti-Semitic politics in his native Romania, Steinberg moved to Italy to train as an architect at the Regio Politecnico, Milan. While there, he found his gift as a comic artist, publishing to acclaim in two humour newspapers. But the promulgation of racial laws by the Italian fascist state in 1938 made him an outcast, and by 1940 he was seeking refuge in another country.

Following a six-week internment in a camp on the Adriatic coast in spring 1941, he spent a year in the Dominican Republic awaiting a US visa. In February 1943, now in New York, he received a commission as an ensign in the US Naval Reserve (along with American citizenship), thanks to the machinations of New Yorker editor Harold Ross, already an admirer of Steinberg’s work. Then, after a six-week layoff in Calcutta, he served fifteen months in China, North Africa, and Italy assigned to the propaganda arm of the Office of Strategic Services. By early October 1944 he was back in the United States. Although he remained on active duty for more than a year, eventually being promoted to the rank of lieutenant, his war was effectively over.

Steinberg and Ross apart, three other people helped in the making of All in Line: Victor Civita, at the time acting as Steinberg’s agent; James Geraghty, art editor at the New Yorker; and Hedda Sterne. Sterne, a fellow Romanian expatriate who was making her way in the New York art scene, agreed to take care of Steinberg’s artistic interests during his absence overseas. She and Steinberg had already begun a tentative love affair.

Civita’s role was a vexed one. In an October 1943 meeting with Sterne in New York and later in letters to Steinberg in China, Civita gave the impression that he had come up with both the idea for the book and the publishers, Duell, Sloan & Pearce. Months later, Sterne found out it was the other way round — the publishers had thought of the collection and contacted Civita through Geraghty. This small deception was typical of Civita’s way of pushing himself forward. The publishers couldn’t bear him, Sterne disliked his “noisy vitality,” and Geraghty complained he didn’t think “the way we do.”

Steinberg had more serious reservations. He told Sterne that Civita had insisted “the only way of being able to publish something in New York is just lowering the standard… make a vulgar ‘popular’… kind of drawing.” “Civita,” Steinberg wrote later, “doesn’t know but business for himself… interested only in money.” (Like Sterne, Steinberg’s English at this time was far from perfect.) Nonetheless, it was Civita who, one way or another, drove the project along, making preliminary selections, securing the cooperation — often qualified — of the others, dispatching proofs, and helping fend off a rival publishing offer from Alfred Knopf, one favoured by Geraghty. Negotiations with Knopf continued after the Duell, Sloan & Pearce contract had been sent to Steinberg, but although that contract was dated 17 January 1944 it was probably not signed until later, by which time Knopf was out of the picture.

As first proposed, the book would collect the best and most popular of Steinberg’s work of the previous four years, from satirical, anti-fascist war cartoons in PM and Liberty, which he had begun to publish while still in the Dominican Republic, to humorous “idea drawings” in the New Yorker. Steinberg disliked the hint of retrospectivity in such a selection. He wanted more recent work­­ and opposed the inclusion of anything suggestive of an earlier “European” lack of sophistication, such as characterised, he believed, his work in Italy in the 1930s and even some later drawings.

One instance was the picture of the optometrist asking a client if he could read a floor-to-ceiling-height letter A. Both Civita and the publishers thought it should be included, and Sterne, on pragmatic grounds, agreed. Steinberg did not. “It’s an old old drawing,” he complained, “made maybe two years ago or more, when I made transition from my european style to The New Yorker’s and it sure is a very stupid drawing… drawings like [this] don’t do me any favor.” But as Sterne pointed out, it had attracted much fan mail, and despite Steinberg’s misgivings, was a fair example of his work.

Steinberg relented. The drawing stayed, but he redrew it to make the people look more “American.” For most viewers the difference between the “European” figures in the New Yorker version (30 October 1943), and the “American” ones in All in Line will be easily missed — modifications to pose, body shape, and facial features — but for Steinberg the shift was critical.

During the book’s gestation, Steinberg was on the move — from China to Algiers, from Algiers to Naples, then back to Algiers, and finally to Rome. Frustrated by the slowness of the mail, fretting that Civita “would make some silly combination,” he despaired of ever having a final layout to approve. After getting one roll of thirty-five-millimetre film with more than eighty drawings on it, as selected by Civita and apparently agreed to by Sterne, Steinberg was livid: “Now I’m sure… Civita influenced [you] on choosing the worst drawings… [but] the selection is very casual… I told clear that I don’t want old ones and political and more than half is made out of old and political.” Sterne defended the selection: “If there are cartoons which everybody thinks wonderful… you might put them in even if as a work of art you don’t like them much — People will buy the books and see the ones you like too.” Eventually, unconvinced, Steinberg told Sterne he was sick of the book and thought it best “just to wait.”

Steinberg’s frustration arose not just because he disagreed with Civita’s selection, but from a revelation of what his powers as an artist might amount to. Back in August 1943, after six weeks in a training camp in southwest-central China, Steinberg was posted to Kunming. In his spare time, he drew studies of life in the town. “I made about a dozen… Very special drawings… rather different from my usual. I act like a photographer and sketch what I see… I sit down and sketch with thousands of people around looking behind the shoulder. It works.”

In these drawings he avoided both the overt political character of the anti-fascist cartoons published earlier in PM and Liberty and the wild comic inventiveness of his other works, instead recording off-duty military life and encounters with the local populace. The Kunming drawings were reportage, mimetic but not straightforwardly so, freighted with the artist’s idiosyncratic touches. They were unlike anything he had done before.

By late October he had sent off “thirty to forty” of these drawings to The New Yorker, including the one below. Six weeks later, the drawings arrived, and Ross and Geraghty were overjoyed, promising to publish them in a two-page spread as soon as possible. Once the drawings appeared in print Ross declared them “the strongest pieces of art we have run in a long time… everybody is jubilant about them, including the readers.” Gratifyingly, they were noticed in Washington — “a lot of Air Force people… spoke of [them] proudly, including the Under Secretary of War for Air.”

Steinberg’s war drawings solved a problem for Ross. From its inception, the New Yorker had refused to publish photographs, but after nearly two years of fighting the magazine’s reporting still lacked a visual dimension. The contrast with the pictorial magazines — LIFE, for example, very much on Ross’s mind — was painful. Ross told Steinberg: “Our coverage… in drawings is largely by ear” — that is, pictures drawn by staff artists from descriptions provided by correspondents — “and therefore not as good as we would like to have it.” But with Steinberg’s drawings the magazine not only recovered ground but even gained an advantage over its rivals — “You may save the day for us, in a big way… the hell with LIFE and the other magazines,” as Ross put it. The first of three China portfolios was published on 15 January 1944.

By early February 1944, it occurred to Steinberg that he had material for two books: the book Civita, Sterne, and Geraghty were working on, and a separate book of war drawings. Ross had much the same idea but pointed out that the war drawings would have to be published before the war ended, which he thought could be within months. Steinberg digested this advice. Mindful of how unsatisfactory Civita’s selection had been, he was tempted to abandon the first book altogether, telling Sterne in April, by which time he had been in North Africa and Naples, “I think I better give up the idea of making a book of drawing — I’d rather make one of war drawings which can be ready in a couple of months, some 70 drawings would be allright.” As for the compilation of his humorous work, he continued, “the selection made by Civita is more than one half wrong on my opinion, and I’m sure he didn’t care much for your opinion… So I think war drawings will make a better union or unity.”

It seemed as if the book of witty drawings was doomed. But Steinberg then began to wonder if the war book might not be improved by the addition of a few carefully selected humorous drawings. In the same letter, he then said: “maybe a better idea would be to call the book ‘Soldiers & Civilians’ and include a second part of just a few, about 20… of caption-less… usual stuff.” This sounds like a preliminary version of All in Line. By June, he had changed his mind a third time, returning to the idea of two books. “I’ll take a decision tonight,” he wrote to Sterne, “probably for lack of a better idea I’ll say yes. The hell with it, let’s have books.” This seems definite — “books” not “book” — but from this point on the idea of two books vanishes, never to be heard of again.

Steinberg returned to the United States on 4 October 1944. He and Sterne married a week later (he had proposed back in January in a series of letters and illustrated “newsletters”). He could now manage the book himself, having in hand drawings from all the war theatres in which he had served. Details are not clear, but it is fair to assume that the final choice of drawings and the layout was Steinberg’s alone. His hand is certainly evident in the title. Late in the game, it was still Everybody in Line, as suggested by Duell, Sloan & Pearce over a year earlier. That remained the title in a sketch of the dustjacket Steinberg made in his appointment book on 17 February 1945. But in another such drawing on the 30 April page, it had become All in Line.

The 1945 edition of All in Line is arranged in two parts. First, a forty-eight-page untitled collection of Steinberg’s humorous drawings, many from the New Yorker. Second, a seventy-two-page section, “War,” divided into five sub-sections: some of Steinberg’s propaganda cartoons from PM and Liberty, followed by portfolios based on his double-page spreads in the New Yorker —“China” (15 January and 5 February 1944, and 24 March 1945), “North Africa” (15 and 29 April 1944), “Italy” (10 June, 8 July and 29 July 1944) and “India” (24 February and 28 April 1945).

To “War,” Steinberg added many unpublished drawings, contrasting, for instance, the splendid view of the servicemen in a transport plane flying over the Himalayan Hump with a similar view of the inside of a sampan on a river in China (above). He also used six pages of unpublished Italian sketches, notably a view of the border checkpoint between Rome and Vatican City, a panorama of an occupied Italian provincial town, and a view of Vesuvius erupting, a scene Steinberg had witnessed. In some of these war drawings, we can detect a private meaning.

One addition to the “Italy” portfolio, the drawing he chose to head the selection, alludes to an earlier moment in Steinberg’s life: the obelisk in a piazza with figures is a topographical fantasia, privately dated on the original drawing “Friday June 6, 1941,” that far-off day when Steinberg, then in an Italian internment camp, heard that he would be freed and permitted to leave Italy. Similarly, in gratitude to Harold Ross, Steinberg’s American begetter, he made sure that the book would close with a drawing Ross had singled out as his “favorite,” the convoy in the mountains:

Walter Bernstein’s review of the book in the New York Times pointed out that the best drawings were those “without captions, that do not fit the regular cartoon formula.” He singled out a clock eating itself as time passed, an idea that had “the terrifying quality of the best surrealist work.” This quality is discernible in drawing after drawing: the elaborate doodles of the end-papers; a painter sawing an extended landscape into sellable units (below); a smoker blowing smoke-squares; a man asleep with his shoes, gloves, watch, spectacles, and hat laid out, each in its anatomically correct place, on the floor beside his bed; the counter-intuitive tilt of the horizon in a picture of a GI’s sea voyage.

Steinberg later understood that this sort of effect — the discovery of the unexpected in the familiar, the redeployment of a received idea, an adjustment of scale or perspective, lay at the heart of his work. “I… have always thought that to express certain things I had to transform them into jokes, puns, or… strangeness: so-called humor.” That transformation is epitomised in this drawing of Steinberg drawing Steinberg drawing Steinberg, a motif that even finds its way into the scene inside the sampan.

The drawings in All in Line have a vivacity springing from Steinberg’s exceptional, often startling wit, but they provoke something greater than a passing comic delight. “Your humor is poetry,” Sterne wrote to Steinberg during the planning for All in Line, “because its mostly a tender smile upon things one never looks twice at — Instead of taking away the magic of things that have it — you add where there is none.” The special “poetry” of Steinberg’s humour, as singled out by Sterne, is but one sign of something more momentous, the arrival of a new late-modern sensibility, one that embraced the taking of liberties with habitual ways of seeing and the gleeful dissolution of old forms and fixities.

The range is extraordinary: from bizarre comic drawings (a mis-constructed centaur), to savage political satire (Hitler, a pistol to his own head, orders Mussolini, Hungary, and Romania at gunpoint into Russia, dragging along behind him a child-size Finland, above), to eye-opening visual reportage (a street scene in unwrecked Kunming, also below). It is hard to think of any other artist at the time who could put together such a collection. These drawings extend the viewer’s horizons — whether comical or conceptual, political or geographic — and presage the reach of Steinberg’s later work. •

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Both hymns in praise of meritocracy and criticisms of schooling’s inadequate service have come first and loudest in the United States, global pioneer of “opportunity for all” and of mass secondary schooling and then mass higher education. American commentary on “opportunity” has recently taken a decidedly different turn, however.

Far from sharing the general assumption that meritocracy is right and necessary in a democratic society, an increasing number of these critics argue that it fundamentally damages the social fabric and the body politic. In Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (2014) Joseph Fishkin argued for a more diverse “opportunity structure” rather than more equal opportunity within a “unitary” opportunity system. Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019) blamed the meritocracy for making life an endless and terrible competition. Prominent political philosopher Michael Sandel called his contribution The Tyranny of Merit (2020).

The anti-meritocracy case has recently taken a significant further step toward mainstream thinking with the publication in the Atlantic of a compelling digest of these and other sources. The Atlantic, it should be emphasised, is not just another magazine; it has been a leading voice of US progressivism ever since it supported the anti-slavery cause during the Civil War of 1861–65. And the Atlantic’s chosen author, David Brooks, is not just another long-form journalist; he is a prominent centre-right fixture on the US talk circuit.

The great value of Brooks’s substantial essay is in connecting so many and such disparate dots: family life and child-rearing practices; the shape and preoccupations of the education system; the definition, distribution and use of capability; the psyche of elites; the opportunity structure and inequality; and, above all, the current tumults of American social, cultural and political life. Some of these connections are more securely made than others of course, but Brooks’s scope and ambition are formidable, and valuable.

Shorn of often striking illustrations and elaborations, Brooks’s argument goes like this. In the early 1930s a small group of administrators at Harvard led by its president, James Conant were convinced that America needed “more social mobility and less class conflict” as well as more high-powered expertise in every sphere of life, including government. That meant that the old elite of eastern-seaboard WASP families and their “good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant” menfolk with their “refined manners, prudent judgement and habit of command” had to go. Conant was determined to end admissions based on “bloodlines and breeding” in favour of “criteria centred on brainpower.”

It took two decades, but he got there. And where Harvard went, Brooks says, America soon followed. “It was as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swathes of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.” The “Age of the Cognitive Elite” had arrived. Middle-class parents took to “concerted cultivation” of their offspring to ensure admission to elite universities; working-class families did not. Schools narrowed their curricula so that students could spend more of their day “enduring endless volleys of standardised testing.” Good jobs went to the educated, bad ones to those who weren’t. University recruiters obsessed over prestige: “Number one people,” they assumed, “go to number one schools” (by which he means universities). The “leisured class” was replaced by data-mad workaholics.

Not all of this massive social shift was bad, Brooks concedes. Bigotry declined, among the educated anyway, and productivity increased. But the patrician ethic that gave America (and the world) the New Deal, victory in the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the postwar Pax Americana was lost. Trust in the country’s leadership plunged. Parents, teachers and the students were trapped in a rat-race that robbed childhood of its curiosity and exploration.

The meritocracy, according to Brooks, is guilty of no less than six “deadly sins”: it overrates intelligence; it assumes that success at school will mean success in life; it’s rigged; it is creating a system of segregated castes; it has shrivelled the psyches of elites; and, above all, it has “provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society.” To these six we could add at least two more sins: social mobility is a relative thing, a game of snakes as well as ladders; for every up there is a down. And meritocracy’s incessant talk about equality and opportunity convinces people that if they’re having an unsatisfying life it’s their own fault; meritocracy is a powerful social legitimation device.

What to do? The challenge, Brooks argues, is “not to end meritocracy” but to “humanise and improve it.” Given the chance, he Brooks says, he’d redefine merit around four crucial qualities: curiosity; a sense of drive and mission; social intelligence; and agility (ie. keeping your head when all about are losing theirs, as Kipling put it). This different conception of merit would pave the way to Fishkin’s more diverse opportunity structure.

In this future, society “would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top” but more like a series of pyramids, each constructed around a different definition of merit and therefore offering a different way of being successful. The focus is not equal opportunity but maximising opportunity. With this different social order comes a different elite, people “who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient and” (following Sandel) “committed to the common good.”

For all its brio and generosity of spirit Brooks’s analysis is — what? — not quite solipsistic, but certainly circumscribed, in a familiarly American way (pax Americana!), and by the stratum of American society whence it comes. Brooks’s is another articulate voice in a conversation among the highly articulate Ivy League men. He reports he has spent his working life in and around elite institutions. Joseph Fishkin is a product of Yale and Oxford. Markovits is a professor at America’s top law school, Yale; Sandel, another professor, is just a couple of hours’ drive up the road, at Harvard.

When Brooks speaks of the sins of the meritocracy he is speaking to and about the Atlantic’s readership. Published in the days following yet another election defeat, “How the Ivy League Broke America” speaks to the disappointment and disillusion of an elite reared in one reality but now facing quite another, as personified in Donald Trump. It also speaks well of that elite’s patrician sense of social responsibility. But that comes with limitations. To borrow from Gramsci, the new critics of meritocracy are organic to their class of origin, not to the “broad masses” purloined by Trump. They see some things, even if it hurts, but they are blind to others.

Brooks’s story about the origins of meritocracy in changes to Harvard’s admission arrangements in the 1930s is not just solipsistic; it is hokum. The beginnings of the meritocracy can be found in the middle of the nineteenth century in the confluence of an expanding division of economic labour, a consequent increase in competition for social places, and an expanded role for the education system and its positional good, the credential, in the allocation of those places.

This three-way dynamic revolved around a particular economic form and its relentless expansion and remaking, steadily gathering weight and speed for a century or so before taking off with the postwar economic and baby booms. It was in that postwar world that Harvard changed its admission requirements; those changes were product rather than producer, as was the apparently instantaneous alignment of those filings and filaments. It was at this point too that the new order was apparent enough to be named; Michael Young obliged with his The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958).

“Merit” was not at the centre of the emerging pyramid but a kind of scaffolding around the division and re-division of economic labour. The vision of two, three, several social pyramids, each granted parity with the others, is, sad to say, fanciful at best. Only the very privileged could imagine that the path to a better America leads through a new diversity in life destinations rather than through a radical shift away from galloping inequality of wealth and income.

About schooling, however, Brooks may not be so wide of the mark. He wants schooling to be more embracing of students and of human capacities, and points to American schools with a core curriculum more like the extra-curriculum of current arrangements, schools where students organise their work around activities and projects, where assessments record progress and development rather than a mark, and where assessments combine with a portfolio displaying capacities and achievements rather than rank order position.

That kind of schooling is, in my view, desirable. But is it feasible? Could schooling develop its own broader “opportunity structure” despite ties to meritocracy going back, in the Australian case, to the late nineteenth century? Schooling is both a servant of the wider meritocracy and a meritocracy in itself. It ranks its graduates for external consumption, a practice that schooling’s noisiest clients, the universities, have generally regarded as being what schools are there to do. And schooling ranks students for its own purposes too. Over the course of a century or more it has increasingly come to resemble a cognitive-speed racetrack.

It nonetheless remains the case that many who work in and around schools have never quite lost a hankering for something more, for the “formation of character” (the conservative version), for “educating the whole person” (the progressives’ idea) or for “emancipation” (the left’s hope). By whatever name, that kind of thing is not so far from what Brooks is after. Nor is it far from what in Australia are now called the “general capabilities” or “twenty-first-century skills” or, simply, “non-cognitive” capacities.

Clearly anxious to avoid gilding the lily, Brooks points to two substantial technical problems arising: assessments of “non-cognitive” capacities are inherently less “objective” than the scores generated by standardised tests; and they generate evidence that makes selection for university difficult or impossible. As Brooks points out, admissions officers just don’t have time to study five-page narratives of a students’ intellectual progress and capability development.

Well, no, and maybe no.

As it happens, among the many developments referred to by Brooks is the International Big Picture Learning Certificate, or IBPLC. And as it also happens the IBPLC is an Australian invention. Big Picture schools started out in the US but have been flourishing in Australia for more than a decade. The Big Picture curriculum is organised around each student’s intellectual growth and personal development; students are producers, not consumers. The Australian branch of Big Picture worked with its collaborator, Melbourne Metrics at the University of Melbourne and with MM’s forty-odd partner schools, representative of the system as a whole, to figure out how to assess and certificate that kind of schooling. Hence the IBPLC. (“International” because it is now used in the United States as well as in Australia.) Before elaborating, a disclaimer: Melbourne Metrics is led by my partner Sandra Milligan.

The construction of the IBPLC included developing and testing the “learning progressions” on which both learning and assessments are based; trialling and refining techniques of assessment against those progressions; working out methods of monitoring and reviewing assessments; finding ways to represent each student’s intellectual progress and personal development in profile form and then representing profiles in certificate form; and, finally, devising reliable and efficient ways to warrant certificates.

The first thing to say is that Melbourne Metrics insists that the IBPLC’s underlying assessments are at least as robust, technically speaking, as assessments generated by standardised tests (as well as being a lot more useful). The second: Brooks is not wrong in pointing to admissions officers and five-page narratives, but Big Picture has nonetheless succeeded in negotiating entry for many of its graduates into a wide range of university courses, and it may be that more-or-less one-off negotiations will soon be redundant: Melbourne Metrics has convened a group comprising universities, university admissions centres and other agencies committed to working out whether and how student profiles can be routinely “matched” with the profiles of courses, apprenticeships, and jobs.

Now that the technical problems of assessing and certificating a very different kind of kind of learning and growth have been overcome and associated problems in selection are being addressed, political and institutional obstacles to a fundamental shift have come to the fore. With the possible exception of the South Australian government schools, Australian school systems are moving away from rather than towards that very different form of schooling.

Should we conclude that Australian schooling is finding it difficult to get the necessary degree of independence from the meritocratic social order it serves? Or should we conclude that schooling’s ancien regime — notwithstanding its deep anxieties about “wellbeing,” “engagement,” “school refusal,” “classroom disruption,” “bullying,” “harassment” and “mental health” — has set its face against a kind of schooling that works for the great majority of children and young people, preferring instead to double down on testable cognitive performance? •

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Then I noticed a remark in Clark’s introduction to the first volume. He had focused mostly on printed sources, he explained, because unpublished documents were housed in such diverse places as to be “almost inaccessible,” and the task of finding material was so mysterious and exhausting “that only zealots sustain the quest.”

Odd thing to say, I thought, for a historian. I picked up the second volume to learn if he had elaborated on that. He had. In some quarters, he writes, there is a tendency to treat manuscript material “with reverence and awe — as though it had in some mysterious way the keys to great truths.” He had been “nauseated,” he went on, by this “cult.”

For his selection of documents Clark had found most of what he needed in printed primary sources such as government gazettes, parliamentary papers, newspapers, memoirs and so on, not original manuscript material. In that way, he went on, a researcher could follow up a point and not bump up against the rites of “the manuscript mystery cult” and find they had not the qualifications to be “initiated” into it.

I closed the books and put them on the returns trolley. Fair point about allowing others to follow up with the same records. And yet: cult? What cult? Practised by whom? Clark is famous for gnomic utterances like this, but still, what on earth was he talking about? Nausea? This is strong language even for him.

There’ll be an answer, I thought, as I moseyed upstairs to the main reading room. With Clark everything is personal, so it’s a safe assumption that there was someone, some despised colleague or colleagues, whom he couldn’t resist taking a swipe at in print. Twice.

I was diverted from this mystery by my next library task. I had called up two microfilm reels of the fortnightly newspaper Nation, published in Sydney between 1958 and 1972 and now it was time to read them. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to look at undigitised newspapers and I was half-expecting to find myself back in one of those big old newspaper rooms I remember from my student days.

If you were serious about researching Australian history back when the microfilm reader was king, these hot, noisy rooms and their quease-making machines were unavoidable. Something would always go wrong. You’d work up a temper trying to thread the film. You could never find the right-sized lens. There would not be enough machines that could also print. Or if you found one, it would have broken down.

Oh happy day when someone found a way to instantly produce a digital image from microfilm. Now, you sit in front of a computer with a microfilm spool attached, and although you still have to thread the film on to it, after that the hard work is done. You use the mouse to advance the reel to the dates you want, manipulate the images to your liking, then save them to a USB or send them to the printer across the room. Done.

Of course, you can’t search digitally — it’s still just microfilm — but from a secondary source I knew the date I wanted, 15 December 1962. On that day journalist Sylvia Lawson had published in Nation a piece called “Down to Journalism: The Self-Assessment of Mary Gilmore.” This is what I had come to see. For my own piece on Mary Gilmore earlier this year I had greatly enjoyed Lawson’s mini-biography of Gilmore, published by Oxford University Press in Australia in 1966. Only afterwards, darn it, had I learned that Lawson had previously written about Gilmore, in Nation.

Gilmore had died on 3 December 1962 aged ninety-seven, just twelve days before that piece appeared, and I assumed Nation had asked Lawson, a regular contributor, for an obituary. This is not a standard obituary but it does read as if the author assumed Gilmore would never see it. Lawson argues that Gilmore was a fine poet but it was her journalism that “expressed the whole Mary Gilmore.” It was a bold line to take because by then Gilmore was best known for her poetry and her two books of prose reminiscences. Her twenty-three years as a reforming journalist for the Worker would already have been a distant memory.

Lawson evokes what was going on in Gilmore’s mind and heart during the difficult years she spent living with her husband and small son on a property near Casterton in western Victoria. Despite her marital happiness, Gilmore felt lonely at Casterton until she was rescued by A.G. Stephens, editor of the Bulletin’s Red Page, who in 1903 began publishing her poems. This little bit of literary success, and her correspondence with Stephens (which Lawson quotes at length), meant everything to Gilmore then. “Country life is sweet and peaceful but there are times when the strenuous soul cries out for something more…”

“Something more” finally arrived in 1908 when, still living in Casterton, Gilmore was invited to edit the women’s page of the trade union paper the Worker. Then, writes Lawson, “the journalist… swallowed the housewife in one hungry snap.”

Very good. What captured my interest was that Lawson had obviously seen Gilmore’s original letters. She even notes an emendation made by hand in an otherwise typed letter. Where had she seen them? At the Mitchell Library in Sydney. In 1961, near the end of her long life, Gilmore had transferred great tranches of her papers to the Mitchell. A grandniece worked there and helped Gilmore sort and pack. Some books and papers also went to the National Library. (I discovered all this from W.H. Wilde’s 1988 biography of Gilmore.)

So, in 1962, Sylvia Lawson had gathered pencil and notebook, left her children to be minded by someone else, and taken herself to the Mitchell. There she must also have read the yellowed pages of the Worker in the original. No wretched microfilm for her. All of this must have been a tremendous slog; days of work. Sylvia Lawson, it turns out, was one of Manning Clark’s despised zealots of the reading room. She was not (at that time) an academic, but she obviously managed to initiate herself into the “cult.”

I returned the microfilm reels to the librarian at the desk feeling that my time had not been wasted. I’d learned why, when she returned to the subject of Mary Gilmore for OUP in 1966, Lawson had dedicated most of her thirty allocated pages (all titles in the series were strictly thirty pages) to Gilmore’s early life and her journalism for the Worker. Gilmore’s post-Worker years, during which she transcended writer status to become a much–loved celebrity, Lawson dismisses in little over four pages.

Of course her problem had been how to compress such a long life into a short space with so much manuscript material to draw on. I think it possible that Lawson only gained access to a small cache of Gilmore’s early papers and otherwise had to rely on published material. The result was unbalanced but nonetheless enough to satisfy her editor at OUP, who would have been expecting a fresh interpretation of Gilmore’s life, not a rehash of received ideas and standard opinions.

And this was why I was spending those Saturday mornings footling about at the National Library. In tidying up my own research on Gilmore I’d happened to glance again at the back cover of Lawson’s booklet and noticed that it was part of a series of mini-biographies published in the 1960s and early 1970s by OUP in Australia. I’d never seen them before or heard anyone mention them, and yet here was a long list of titles, many written by significant authors. By my count, OUP eventually produced sixty-three titles in the series. All are uniform in length, design and layout.

Here was I, then, on my own library quest, wanting to learn more about this small but interesting moment in Australian publishing history. Especially intriguing, the Australian Dictionary of Biography was establishing itself at exactly the same time, based at Australian National University in Canberra, with Melbourne University Press as publisher. OUP’s project was a minnow compared to the ADB, but nevertheless for twelve years, from 1962 to 1974, the Great Australians series swam successfully alongside the big fish that was the ADB.

Mary Gilmore and fourteen of her companions in Oxford’s Great Australians series.

Englishman Frank Eyre had been appointed general manager of OUP Australia in 1951 and became a leading figure in the Australian book trade. His papers are held at the National Library so I thought I’d begin by looking there for anything on the Great Australians series. No luck. Odds and sods, nothing especially useful, or not for my line of enquiry anyway.

I turned instead to a history of OUP’s Australian branch that Eyre published — with OUP of course — in 1978. There he describes himself as a “practical idealist of the most incorrigible kind,” full of “determined ideas” for OUP and “relentless in pursuit of them.” To develop OUP’s Australian history list, he relied heavily on his colleague, David Elder, who was an acknowledged expert in history and much later contributed three entries of his own to the ADB. (Charmingly, one of these was on Frank Eyre, his own boss.)

This was when emergent Australian nationalism was driving huge interest in books about Australian history, culture and landscape. To meet the demand, new publishing houses — Jacaranda, Lansdowne and Sun Books, for example — were jostling with established firms such as MUP and Angus & Robertson. OUP was at the more conservative end, but still very interested in Australian themes.

Eyre had identified the impoverished state (his words) of scholarly writing on Australian history at the time and set about tackling it. In 1958 he published Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, and in 1959 Judith Wright’s The Generations of Men. Both were enormously successful. Years later in an interview with the Age (I found a clipping of it in Eyre’s papers) Eyre claimed with obvious glee that eleven publishers had turned down Wright’s book before he took it, and by then, 1975, 100,000 copies had sold.

In 1955 Eyre asked Geoffrey Blainey, flushed with the early success of his book The Peaks of Lyell for MUP, to consider writing a short history of Australia for the general reader. Back in 1916 OUP had published Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia and had reprinted it many times, but it was out of date. When Blainey saw the sales figures and the royalties still being paid to the estate of the long-deceased author, he was tempted. But he turned the offer down.

Biography was the other opportunity spotted by Eyre. He can’t have been unaware of the ADB as an ambitious multi-volume biographical project aimed at academic and general readers, but he and David Elder were interested in a different sector of the market. Their Great Australians series was to be for secondary students. Eyre specialised in educational publishing and children’s books, so this was a natural direction for OUP to take.

However, as Eyre recalled, it was one of his first and lasting surprises that virtually every one of his titles would have to be written from primary sources. There were inconveniently few scholarly works for his authors to draw upon. Looming large in his mind was the experience of Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who in 1949 had published with MUP her influential book, Sir John Franklin in Tasmania. Expecting merely to consult the “recognised authorities,” she’d discovered that there were none. Instead, she’d had to seek archival records in Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart and Cambridge (her trip there was financed by her wealthy father).

First, though, Eyre and Elder made some key decisions about the design of their little books, because if they were to appeal to secondary students, they would have to look good. Book designer Alison Forbes was appointed to the task. Forbes had studied illustration and design at the Melbourne Technical School (now RMIT University), and a talk given there by Frank Eyre inspired her to specialise in book design. After graduating, Forbes spent several formative years as an illustrator with the Melbourne Herald. In 1956 she gained a steady job three days a week with MUP while also freelancing.

By my rough calculation each of the thirty-page stapled booklets carries about 9000 words and six to eight illustrations. The basic cover design and internal layout is unvaried across all titles, but each features its own illustration of the subject, drawn by Forbes, based on an archivally sourced photograph or drawing. The front and back covers are embellished with vertical bands of leaves. The process saw Forbes producing sixty-three original illustrations and identifying a unique colour for each cover. Happily, she is acknowledged in each booklet (although the editor of the text, never).

There must have been countless editorial meetings at OUP’s offices in South Melbourne in which Eyre and his colleagues thrashed out the matching of author with subject. I would pay for a fly-on-the-wall ticket to that. Could Dr So-and-So write about So-and-So, or were they already committed to the ADB? Could they stick to the word limit? Could they deliver on time?

Hold on, a telegram is just in from Professor Brainiac at Sandstone University: he is insisting he is the best author to write on So-and-So because he is already 100,000 words into a biography of So-and-So. But can Professor Brainiac deliver 9,000 words in six months? The alternative is to commission the professor’s sworn enemy, a certain Mr Packet-a-Day, who is a features writer for the Daily Bugle. Should we do that? An uneasy silence descends while everyone remembers what happened the last time Professor Brainiac and Mr Packet-a-Day crossed paths.

OUP could tempt its authors with money whereas ADB authors were unpaid. But a typical ADB author was an academic and the time-consuming primary research would be covered by their university salary. Furthermore, OUP was entirely constrained in its choice of subjects by what it thought would sell, whereas the ADB’s work was essentially underwritten by the ANU so it could afford to be bold in its choice and range of subjects. From its inception, as Melanie Nolan has noted, the ADB was committed to representing “all strands” of Australian life, including representative of types: a shearer, a drover, a rabbiter, a barmaid, a landlady.

Not so OUP. Its line-up of “great” Australians is a rather predicable group of governors, politicians, scientists, industrialists, entrepreneurs, merchants, artists and writers. Sometimes the author was almost as notable as the subject. Geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor wrote on Douglas Mawson. Nature writer Alec Chisolm on Ferdinand von Mueller. Novelist Ivan Southall on Lawrence Hargrave. Future governor-general Zelman Cowen on past governor-general Isaac Isaacs. (Manning Clark didn’t write for OUP’s Great Australians but in 1959 had contributed a booklet on Abel Tasman to an earlier short-lived series, a warm-up effort, dedicated solely to explorers.)

Some authors wrote on the same subject for OUP and the ADB: journalist Frederick Howard on Charles Kingsford Smith for instance, and historian Allan Martin on Henry Parkes. Probably there was a little jostling for the best authors but the ADB can’t have regarded OUP as a real rival and in that spirit, its general editor Douglas Pike, wrote for OUP on Charles Hawker and MUP publisher Peter Ryan wrote on Redmond Barry.

Of OUP’s sixty-three Great Australians only two were soldiers: John Monash and Thomas Blamey (both covered by historian John Hetherington). This may reflect a decline in interest in Australian military history in the 1960s. Less easy to explain is the absence of clerics: there are only three out of sixty-three. No sportspeople were included at all.

Such was the state of Australian women’s history at that time that only five women were covered: Nellie Melba, Caroline Chisolm, Henry Handel Richardson, Mary Gilmore and Catherine Helen Spence. Again, these were predictable choices, although it’s a surprise not to see Miles Franklin. More promising was the number of female authors in the series: sixteen women wrote on nineteen subjects. One of these was Edmund Barton, by Martha Rutledge, which was published in 1974 as one of the last of the series. By then Rutledge had begun a long association with the ADB and became one of its most prolific authors.

If the selection of subjects was unremarkable, what distinguishes the series was its fidelity to archives and its high publication standards. A secondary or university student who got their hands on any of OUP’s Great Australians was guaranteed no small thing: freshly researched history by some of the country’s finest writers and historians. And yet it is possible that with its emphasis on elites, the series actually prolonged the invisibility of First Nations histories and the lives of women and people from minority and neglected groups.

I drove back from the library that day thinking again about who Manning Clark might have been aiming at with his remarks about archival zealots. Was it Ernest Scott, professor of history and Clark’s lecturer at the University of Melbourne in 1936? At home I pulled off the shelves my copies of the writings of various historians recalling Scott’s legacy and yes, Scott’s dedication to primary sources was legendary.

In Clark’s 1990 memoir The Quest for Grace he damned Scott as a member of Melbourne’s “Protestant ascendancy” and chose to recount little more than Scott’s eccentric mannerisms during his lectures, entertaining and well-structured though these lectures were. His friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick, also one of Scott’s students, loved and never forgot Scott’s brilliant weaving of archival sources into his lectures, but this appears not to have impressed Clark.

Clark’s pronouncements on archives were deeply silly, of course. All around him historians were delving into original manuscript material and government records. A glance at the footnotes in the later volumes of Clark’s history of Australia shows he also drew increasingly on archives himself, but he had research assistants, archivists (and on occasion his wife Dymphna Clark) to do the initial harvest for him.

While they were eyes down on that, Clark went many times “almost as a pilgrim,” he says, to the entrance of Sydney Harbour at South Head. There he would “gaze over that vast sea” and try to think his way into the minds of those who had arrived there on ships. What, he would ask himself, did they do in the “ancient, barbaric continent” of Australia? For him, unlike the authors of those sixty-three little books, the answer did not lie in the reading room. •

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On 9 December, we reach the centenary of the final of these four works. In 1924, the first serious attempt to reach the peak of Chomolungma (Mt Everest) had ended in tragedy, as the British mountaineer-explorers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine met their deaths near the summit on 8 or 9 June; whether they reached their prize has remained a mystery. Their fatal quest was immortalised in The Epic of Everest, the film made by the expedition’s photographer John Noel that opened in London on 9 December, barely six months from their deaths atop the great mountain. The eighty-seven-minute film’s premiere season was accompanied by a live performance by seven lamas brought from Tibet to perform their traditional music and rituals.

Noel’s Epic was a cinematographic summit of a kind, for two other films had illuminated the world of ice on the big screen in the preceding two and a half years. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, featuring the happy Inuit hunter and his family in the Arctic, had premiered on 11 June 1922 in New York. Herbert Ponting’s Great White Silence, his feature film using moving and still images from Robert Scott’s tragic expedition to the South Pole between 1910 and 1912, had premiered on 5 May 1924. By the end of 1924, the icy realms of the Arctic, Antarctic and Himalaya had been cinematically captured.

By wonderful coincidence, a significant scientific text emerged at the same time, barely registering in either scientific or popular spheres, but influential since. In 1923 a Polish scientist, Antoni Dobrowolski, published a 940-page work in his native language titled Natural History of Ice. In it he coined a term in widespread scientific use today: cryosphere. His definition was a bit wider than generally now used, but he wanted scientists and others to recognise the frozen elements of Earth as an interconnected and distinct object of study. Glaciers and ice sheets, snow, permafrost, sea ice and ice in rivers and lakes form the cryosphere.

Born in 1872, Dobrowolski became a Polish nationalist as a young man, which led first to prison and then to exile in Switzerland and Belgium. While a student at the University of Liège he had the great luck of being appointed to the scientific staff of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition. It set sail in 1897 under Adrien de Gerlache, and included men who would go on to greater polar fame: the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who would be the first man at the South Pole in 1911, and the American Frederick Cook, who would make a fiercely disputed claim to reaching the North Pole in 1908.

Aboard their ship Belgica, the expedition was the first to spend winter in Antarctica (although an exceptionally unhappy one). Dobrowolski helped to collect the first full year’s worth of meteorological data on that continent. After returning to Europe, he spent time studying snow cover and snow crystallography in Sweden, and then continued his geoscience career in Poland.

Dobrowolski’s “cryosphere” concept languished for decades after its 1923 birth. Snow and glaciers were generally studied by different groups of scientists, with meteorologists looking to the atmosphere and its snow while glaciologists looked to glaciers and ice. The term really came into greater use from the 1980s. By this time, the sense of a unified and earth-spanning ice system had intensified, owing a great deal to the emergence of remote sensing through satellites; sea ice, for example, began to be continually monitored with satellites from 1978. The cryosphere was also increasingly a subject of global environmental concern and governance. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included the cryosphere in its earliest assessment work in the late 1980s and early 1990s and published a special report in 2019.

Yet the cryosphere is more than a physical system: it is a cultural matter too. People have always lived with glaciers, sea ice, snow and permafrost, but until the twentieth century that experience and its meanings were relatively localised. With the advent of Antarctic and Himalayan exploration in the early twentieth century, along with the rise of cinema, the cryosphere as a potentially unified global entity could begin to coalesce and be filled with meaning.

The three cryosphere films — Nanook, Great White Silence and Epic of Everest — are famed and remembered for the people at their heart. But in linking them as cryospheric films in this era of climate change, I think it’s worthwhile and indeed enjoyable to look beyond, behind and around the men to the icy worlds they inhabited and traversed. We can view them as an unintentional and coincidental suite.

Try as we might to view them anew and through the concerns of the present, though, they were nevertheless made in a world with particular human attachments. They are undoubtedly products of a high imperial moment, whether in their valorisation of the great British male explorer or in their patronising approach to Indigenous and local peoples. Today, despite our increasing sense of glaciers’ and ice sheets’ fragility and sensitivity to global heating, they remain fields for physical exertion and personal valour and achievement.

Let’s begin with Great White Silence, which had a longer performance history than its May 1924 release date might suggest. The film tells the story of Robert Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition, which aimed to reach the South Pole. While Scott was bested in that aim by Roald Amundsen, he guaranteed his immortality by dying on his return with the other members of his party.

Expeditions of the age were media events, and so Scott brought along as official photographer the “camera artist” Herbert Ponting (1870–1935). Ponting’s exquisitely composed photographs and eye for action have come to define the visual record of this era of Antarctic exploration. The quality of Ponting’s photographs owed much to an extensive career that had produced celebrated images of Japan — including of snow-capped Mount Fuji, which he had climbed.

The opening title of Great White Silence. Internet Archive

Ponting’s images were swiftly published and displayed for a British and global public eager to venerate the heroic Scott and view the wondrous world of Antarctic ice. His first expedition film, the thirty-minute With Captain Scott RN to the Pole, was released in November 1911. Other short films and gallery exhibitions of his photographs would follow. All were designed to make money for the expedition. But they weren’t standalone films as we recognise today, and in the first decade after the expedition, Ponting and others delivered what were called “cinema-lectures.” These lectures — labelled “synchronised lecture entertainments” by Australian literary scholar Robert Dixon — involved an in-person lecturer projecting slides and moving images, sometimes with on-stage physical artefacts and props, accompanied by music. They also sold merchandising: not only copies of various expedition books but also photos and even plush toys including “Ponko the Penguin.” (Ponko was Ponting’s nickname.) By May 1919, Ponting had delivered 1000 of these lectures.

Such a schedule was obviously untenable for a working photographer and Ponting had always wanted to make a standalone feature film. Once he had published his own narrative and reflection on the expedition, Great White South (1921), he began editing the film down from 25,000 feet of 35mm film.

The film tells a simple story in eighty minutes. The expedition sets out from New Zealand in late 1910, it encounters icebergs and sea ice on its voyage south, it unloads its supplies and builds its hut, and the men encounter penguins (which they compare with Charlie Chaplin), seals, orca, and skua birds. Scott and his party attain the South Pole on 17 January 1912, but in second place, and perish on their return. Like other silent films, Ponting used title cards to explain the story and action. The film uses both still and moving images.

Before the tragic denouement, the film focuses on the liveliness of the men and the animals they encountered. The men are hale and hearty, whether dragging their sledges or playing a game of soccer. The animals are curious and feisty, if locked in the great struggle of nature. In one dramatic scene, Ponting captures a mother seal rescuing her pup from the water just as a pod of orca bears down on them. In an extended scene with Adelie penguins, an interloping nest squatter is confronted and despatched.

And all around them is ice. As the photo above shows, Ponting went out on a limb, quite literally, to film Terra Nova’s bow cutting through the sea ice. The film features some of his iconic images of glaciers and icebergs, his mastery of light and shade revealing the intricate faces and textures of these massive and ever-changing blocks of ice. He did not, however, photograph the “polar plateau” — the great expanse of the Antarctic ice sheet — as he was not a member of the pole party. Instead, Great White Silence depicts Scott’s team as small black shapes moving on a diorama.

For Ponting, as for others at this time, ice of this magnitude was still interpreted through the Romantic ideal of the sublime. As the first title card of the film states: “The Antarctic Continent is an ice clad wilderness of dazzling whiteness and appalling silence. It is the home of Nature in her most savage and merciless moods, and it is there that the hurricane and the blizzard are born.” The ice in this film is a stage for heroic action. But it is not exclusively so, since it is also a site of conviviality and sociability among the men of the expedition.

Antarctic ice taking on a different character with colourful film tints. Internet Archive

One surprise for a modern audience might be in the colours of Great White Silence — it was not a simple black and white film. Like other filmmakers of the era, Ponting used colour tints to indicate different atmospheres, times and moods. Some daytime scenes are shown in what might be called sepia, but seem at times a vibrant tangerine and at others a duller yellow. Evening scenes were tinted in a stunning magenta. Some scenes with ice and wind were dyed blue, and several scenes with the wildlife were tinted in emerald.

While Antarctica’s ice was a stage for heroic, imperial action, Nanook of the North follows an Inuit man and his family as they live their everyday lives. The seventy-nine-minute film is known in cinema history as being the first documentary — indeed the word documentary was coined in 1926 to describe it. It has been closely studied and debated, with a focus not only on the colonial and racialised conditions of its production, but also the question of whether it is a documentary or a fiction.

The opening title of Nanook of the North. Internet Archive

Its writer and director, Robert Flaherty (1884–1951), was not a trained photographer or director, but had begun his professional life as a mineral prospector in the Hudson Bay region. Now pursuing a career in documentary film-making, he attempted between 1914 and 1916 to make a film of Inuit life but had burned his highly combustible nitrate film by accident while editing it. He returned north between August 1920 and August 1921 to shoot what would become Nanook.

The film episodically depicts the life of “Nanook” (already the documentary nature of the film begins the disintegrate, as the man’s name was actually Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (not actually his wife, real name Maggie Nujarluktuk) and their children. The first scene shows Nanook and family at a fur trading post, a recent imposition in that part of Arctic Canada but part of a centuries-long Western intrusion. This is perhaps the most controversial scene of the film, given its hackneyed portrayal of the encounter of the simple and cheerfully ignorant native with the advanced Western technology of the gramophone. Yet it is followed by scenes of skilful endeavours in and around ice: walrus and seal hunting, fishing, fox trapping, and building a magnificent igloo. The children play with husky pups; Nanook sometimes seems to ham it up for the camera.

Nanook adds clear ice to his igloo to allow light in, his snow knife made of bone essential to the task. Internet Archive

Nanook is a film of a man and his family in their home. The action of the film happens around the village of Inukjuak, an area long inhabited by Inuit on northern Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula but now also the site of a modern fur trading post. (The fur-trading company Revillon Frères sponsored Flaherty’s work.) As for all Inuit, it was a home made from and with ice. Almost no other people on Earth make their home in ice as the Inuit do, with the result that no other people on Earth know ice as the Inuit do. As climate change undermines the cryosphere, the Inuit today assert their “right to be cold,” as famously argued for by Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier. The tradition of hunting at which Nanook is clearly so skilled is being undermined by sea ice failing to form as it once did or melting quicker.

The final film in this cryospheric trilogy takes us to the world’s tallest mountain. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India had declared Chomolungma the tallest mountain on Earth in 1856 — following surveys at some distance from the peak in the first half of that decade — and imposed the name Everest. The mountain was only more closely approached by European explorers and scientists after European explorers and empires had beaten down the doors of Tibet in the early twentieth century.

The Epic of Everest, which premiered on 9 December 1924, was filmed and produced by expedition member John Noel (1890–1989). Of those on the expedition, Noel had perhaps the longest association with the Himalaya. After taking art training in Florence, he joined the British Army; his regiment was posted to India, where he began to see and photograph the Himalaya. In 1913 he notoriously and illegally travelled in disguise into Tibet, contravening the bar on entry to foreigners; he was discovered and deported having got within forty miles of the mountain. After the First World War, the Dalai Lama relaxed the entry restriction and granted permission for an expedition sent by the Royal Geographical Society of London.

The opening title of The Epic of Everest. Internet Archive

The society’s campaign had several stages. A reconnaissance expedition in 1921 attempted to understand the best route of ascent. The next in 1922, which Noel joined as photographer, aimed to reach the summit, although without success. That expedition led to a film, not so widely distributed or successful, titled Climbing Mount Everest. Without the achievement of the summit, that film depicted Tibetan life and landscapes at greater length.

While ice in Nanook and Great White Silence is omnipresent, in Epic, the mountain and its snow and glaciers seems especially imposing and characterful. While Flaherty did not detail the complex cultural geographies of the Inuit and their home of ice, Noel emphasises the religious and mystical cosmologies encircling the great mountain. Early in the film, Noel uses the Tibetan name: Chomolungma, which he translates (as many have) as “Goddess Mother of the World.” The Australian historian of Buddhism, Tibet and the Himalaya, Ruth Gamble, explains that Chomolungma has undoubtedly been the Tibetan name for the mountain for centuries. It is the abode of the goddess Miyo Langsangma, which Gamble translates as “the immovable, good woman of the willows.”

Noel’s is certainly a superficial reference to the Goddess and her abode of ice and snow rather than a display of reverence. The opening title card of the film emphasises domination: “Since the beginning of the world men have battled with Nature for the mastery of their physical surroundings… In this struggle men have now explored tropical forests, polar ice and lofty mountains, sensing the extremities of heat and cold and reaching the ends of the world at either pole. But one great task still remains, THE CONQUEST OF EVEREST.”

The climax of the film is, perhaps obviously, the thrust towards the summit, followed by the death of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine at or near it. (In macabre timing for the centennial, a National Geographic documentary team discovered Irvine’s boot and some of his bodily remains this past September — Mallory’s had been found in 1999.) These last moments are also among the most distinct visual moments of the film. Noel filmed the final ascent from a distance of more than two miles using a telephoto lens. The climbers appear as moving black specks; the visual overlap with Great White Silence is notable, although Ponting’s black dots were staged and Noel’s miniscule figures where the real thing.

Capturing the epic with a telephoto lens. As The Epic of Everest’s title card claimed: “4,000 ft. above and 2 miles distant this picture is the longest distance photograph of its kind ever taken in the world.”

Like Great White Silence, Noel also tinted segments of his film. Chomolungma, its snowy mists and jagged ice — the main body of ice being the East Rongbuk Glacier on the mountain’s north face — appears not only in black and white, but also in icy blue, turquoise, magenta and dusky red. While Ponting used his still photographs extensively, Noel’s film records the ever moving and frigid airs of the mountains, the changing light and shadows. Epic’s opening scene is a magnificent time lapse of sunrise over the mountain, its closing scene a time lapse of the mountain entering darkness. Noel’s film is, indeed, “hauntingly beautiful,” as one early review put it.

The sun sets on Chomolungma, the lives of Mallory and Irvine, and the Epic.

This anniversary is a good opportunity to look again at these captivating and historic films — or indeed, watch them for the first time, and together. Each is freely available to watch on the Internet Archive, that great hope and repository of out-of-copyright and public domain culture. Great White Silence and Epic of Everest were masterfully restored by the British Film Institute in 2011 and 2013 respectively, to which they added contemporary musical accompaniment.

Looking back to these films a century after they first flickered onto screen, we see them through a profoundly different lens. If Captain Noel considered his filmic challenge was to “make the spectator feel the immensity of [the] struggle of men against nature” (to quote famed film historian Kevin Brownlow), then today’s viewer knows very well that our challenge is to reverse that dominance, the threat that carbon polluting humanity is to the existence of ice. •

The post The flickering cryosphere appeared first on Inside Story.

Today, millions of people around the world crave freedom from authoritarian rule. Yet when they hear almost daily that the liberal heartlands are plagued with inflation, strikes, high crime rates, gun violence and voters who care little about truth, many of them doubt that democracy is the best alternative.

In 2024 more people than ever before are voting in national elections in countries containing nearly half the world’s population. But even where elections are not just window-dressing for authoritarian rule, today’s voters worry that deep-faked misinformation, rigged electoral procedures or outright fraud might drown out their already small voice. And even where authoritarian-leaning candidates suffer apparently legitimate defeats, the fear that they and their supporters might reject election results loomed ever larger — not least in the world-leading democracy, the United States.

“So many people I know are giving up on democracy,” said my new friend Vaibhav when we met travelling through Xinjiang in western China last summer. He worked at an international bank in Hong Kong, and lived there through the pro-democracy protests in 2019–20 and the strict lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the sceptics were Vaibhav’s colleagues from East Asian countries and his native India.

Feeling helpless about politics but wanting to do some good in the world — even bankers worry about losing their souls, Vaibhav insisted — they focus on what they call “development”: improving technological know-how, winning new markets and beating their rivals for the sake of country as well as company. “They think we should give more power to technocrats, or to leaders who offer a clear vision for our country.”

Other doubters were still reeling from the results of controversial popular votes in Britain, the United States and beyond. If democracy can’t deliver leaders or policies that command widespread trust, they ask, how can it help us navigate dangerous global rivalries, brutal wars, climate disaster and digital technologies that mislead citizens and split them into warring camps?

The spread of global pessimism about the superior merits of democracy can be deeply unsettling for people whose political mindsets were configured during the cold war. Growing up in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, I was taught that democracy was unquestionably the best kind of government ever invented, getting better and better each decade. For the time being, it was locked in a life-or-death struggle against authoritarian regimes that controlled most of our neighbours in East Asia and up to the western borders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. But while it was almost impossible to envision how that might change, small signs of resistance fuelled hope.

In 1993, a few years after Soviet-backed communism fell in Europe, I went to work in Warsaw. Although my official brief was to teach anglophone political philosophy, I was more interested in discovering what my students thought about the changes they were living through. Apart from membership of NATO and probably the European Union — affording protection from a humiliated Russia — what did they expect from the new order of liberal democracy? Did it look as good to them as its local and foreign champions said?

We discussed a new book by the American political philosopher John Rawls. When you debate policies and laws in democracies, he wrote, you should make a point of appealing to “public reasons” — respect for everyone’s freedom, for example, or to the common safety of the union — not just make arguments that resonate only with people who share your narrower concerns or ideological repertoire. Could this be our future? My students’ eyes twinkled with friendly irony. “Maybe that’s what people are like in Britain or America,” someone said. “Lucky them.”

Sometimes I took the tram home with a student called Agnieszka. She would race from our classes to tutor schoolchildren in English and German or write articles for a local newspaper, sharing her earnings with struggling parents. Marcin taught English and sometimes drove a taxi. Małgozata’s mother was a nurse in a badly underfunded hospital; privatisation had already cost her father his long-time industrial job. She worked at a cinema and night cafe. How did they manage all that and demanding university studies? Shrugs. That’s life.

My older Polish friends were as relieved as I was to wave goodbye to old ideological-isms. But we were unsure what to think about the brave new world of -isations: “liberalisation” and its sub-isations, chiefly “privatisation” and “democratisation.” Privatisation meant putting industries and agencies that had been owned by the state — housing, food production and distribution agencies, gas and electricity, transport — under private or partially private control. Democratisation meant replacing the one-party state with a pluralist, multi-party, representative system; redistributing power between the big cities and Poland’s staunchly independent countryside; establishing the rule of law, freedoms of speech and press, with church and state separate yet mutually respectful.

When we did speak of two other big -isms, capitalism and communism, it was with a wariness about being dragged back into the either/or, good versus evil ways of thinking about politics that had dominated our younger lives. State-based communism had lost the cold war and was probably tainted forever by its authoritarian exemplars. But did that vindicate capitalism? And was its way of producing and distributing social goods suited to democracy?

As a student, I had an acquaintance who is now an eminent member of the British government. The purpose of democracy, he said, was to protect individual freedoms. Since capitalism left people free to engage in trade and industry for profit, of course it supports democracy like no other economic system. But almost no one I met in Poland shared his confidence that weakly regulated private competition could be good for democracy. Most thought about privatisation much as they thought about God: let’s try to have faith that it eventually rewards the industrious and virtuous, even if we see zero evidence that it does.

While privatisation made already well-connected ex-communists and foreign émigrés stupendously wealthy overnight, my colleagues worked several jobs to pay rent and other bills that their deflated salaries could no longer cover. Some worried that the gap between winners and losers in the privatisation stakes would threaten the delicate work of democratisation. Students spoke of relatives who lived outside the big cities, predicting that insecurities among older and rural voters would make it easy for political entrepreneurs to blame urban and “cosmopolitan” elites and bring out toxic strains, of nationalism.

When I’d go back West and report these conversations to people in Britain, France or Germany, I was struck by how quick some were to dismiss these concerns. Newly liberalising populations had a low tolerance for competition and the insecurities it bred because communism had spoiled them, said one inheritance-rich (West) German friend; expecting government to check growing inequalities was a bad paternalistic habit.

I found even less interest in asking how Western-guided processes of democratisation and privatisation raised concerns about national identity and local control. There was a more convenient explanation for nationalism in postcommunist lands: an old cliche that “Western” democracies have something called “civic” national identities — saturated with rational, individualistic values and open to the world — while “Eastern” peoples have “ethnic” nationalism, a relic of bygone provincialism that global liberalisation was busy washing away. We in the “West” got so used to contrasting our self-flattering free-world mentalities with less enlightened ones elsewhere that many failed to see how similar we all are: in our progressivist communist-or-liberal utopianisms, nostalgic nationalisms and fears of being left behind in hypercompetitive societies.

Few of my Polish friends were surprised when an alternative to liberal democracy emerged in Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary’s liberal-turned-sour leader Viktor Orbán dubbed it “illiberal democracy”; liberal commentators preferred “populism.” It burgeoned after the global economic crash of 2008, then spread westward where it found a warm welcome in the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and other countries around the world. This came as a shock to many in the liberal-democratic West, where most people had accepted gaps in wealth and political influence as normal — even as they or their neighbours were tumbling gown the security ladder.

The easy explanation for illiberal populism in liberal democracies is to see it as a top-down phenomenon, the work of stunningly successful political manipulators who distort rather than reflect reality. Top-down accounts do tell an important part of the story, the part about the narratives people buy into when they support illiberal policies. A trademark populist trick is to blame false culprits — usually immigrants and ethnic minorities — and offer unrealistic cures for voters’ discomforts. Pointing the finger at the even more vulnerable gives anxious supporters an illusion of power by putting them in the same “We’re So Great” camp as successful businesspeople and rich elites — even when these routinely reject policies aimed at checking social inequalities.

But voter manipulation is just the upper layer of a more complex story of the material and psychological insecurities fanned by weak regulation and widening social gaps. You no longer need to be a diehard leftist to talk about the intense competitive pressures of weakly regulated markets and how they produced a handful of super-wealthy individuals who — through media ownership and campaign funding — acquired disproportionate political influence.

In the United States, only the wealthiest families grew richer after the Great Recession began in 2007. From then to 2016, the median net worth of the richest 20 per cent increased by 13 per cent, while that of less wealthy families decreased by more than 20 per cent. It became increasingly evident that a small percentage of citizens in many liberal democracies had far easier access to the prerequisites for a secure existence — housing, education, food, healthcare — and that competition among the wealthy for the best pickings of these goods was driving costs sky-high for the rest.

The connection between these multiple insecurities and illiberal nationalism isn’t always straightforward. Current anxieties about national identity and control have deep, emotional histories in most countries, which makes them highly user-friendly for opportunistic elites. But as I learned from living in Poland and Japan, these anxieties can’t always be dismissed as irrational tribalism.

Identifying with groups not only gives most individuals a sense of social anchoring in times of change; it’s also a key resource for enhancing our sense of power — however illusory — in high-stress situations. Identity concerns loom large when the less equal combine to fight for their share, or when the previously more-than-equal fear falling.

The older powerhouses of liberal democracy were born to the tune of high-flying rhetoric, and their disproportionate global power encouraged overconfidence. People struggling to bring forth or salvage newer democracies aren’t so confident. For two and a half centuries, people from a handful of English-speaking countries and Western Europe have been telling the rest of the world how to do liberal democracy. Now we need people in struggling new democracies to tell us how not to do it. They often have a clearer sense of democracy’s great advantages, but also of the obstacles that can spring up and weaken even well-crafted institutions — material inequalities, clashes between hyper-progressivism and tradition, and gaps between ruling elites and the rest.

To motivate people to keep striving for democracy, we need to go behind modern ideologies and recover some core concerns that democracies are supposed to address. The first founding story of democracy on record has none of the heroics or optimism of most modern founding myths. Rather, it’s a cautionary tale about how hard it is to do democracy right, and how easily it gets subverted if you’re not vigilant.

Before Athens acquired the form of government that its founders called demokratia in 507 BCE, the main political faultline wasn’t tyranny versus the people: it was the ever-wealthier rich versus the vulnerable poor. Wealthy landowners leased property to the poor, who worked it for a living. Every so often the owners would increase their rents. If tenants couldn’t afford to pay, the rich offered them loans at high rates of interest.

The wealth gap widened. Tenants struggled, and defaulted on their debts. Athens’ plutocracy-friendly laws allowed creditors to force debtors into slavery. Eventually, poorer Athenians revolted. In the early sixth century BCE, terrified plutocrats asked a man called Solon to fix things before they got worse. He made it illegal to enslave debtors, created stimuli for a range of new trades and abolished hereditary political privileges.

This wasn’t yet full democracy, and Solon’s new deal soon failed. The plutocrats went back to exploiting their compatriots, who did what the vulnerable always do: turned to a tyrant who promised to fight their corner. Though Peisistratos confiscated some of the nobility’s lands and gave them to the poor, this didn’t lead to democracy, since the tyrant monopolised political power for himself and his family.

When a group of well-born Athenians deposed Peisistratos’s son, they realised two things. First, that very unequal societies are less stable, productive and humane than those where inequalities are held in check. Second, that you can’t trust a single class or party to do the checking in a way that seems fair to all. The reformers put all free Athenian men on a more equal footing than ever before and redesigned government into units where rich, poor and middling citizens were forced to sit together in assemblies, arguing, compromising and rotating positions by lot.

Sometimes it’s good to go back to basics, to the still-healthy roots of ideas and institutions that have grown weak and confused over time. According to the Solon story, democracy was designed as a realistic solution to a concrete problem: how to stop the endless civil strife that came from gaps in personal and social security between richer and the rest. This was common democratic sense for centuries before the modern era introduced a sharp ideological divide — initially within a broad liberal tradition — between weakly and strongly regulated markets.

Democratic freedom isn’t a condition where my private wishes can roam unchecked and I am free to acquire as much power or wealth as I can without considering how this affects others. It’s a key part of a power-sharing scheme called democracy. What makes democratic freedom democratic is precisely that it sets limits on my personal freedoms within this scheme, leaving opportunities and decent options for everyone else.

People in newer democracies often see more clearly how imbalances of power and fears of losing one’s chances in a poorly regulated hypercompetitive world can weaken respect for institutions that are supposed to channel and protect popular power: voting, traditional parties and media, judicial systems, representative assemblies. But they still want the benefits that only democracy can secure, and often have a clearer view of what they are.

Teetering precariously between democracy and tyranny, they see that the best way to tackle problems is to spread political power more widely and evenly, not concentrate it further in the hands of leaders who may or may not care about our personal wellbeing and common future. Having struggled with recent civil wars and seeing the relative peace still found in some democracies, they think that collaboration among multitudes of people can lead to more lasting successes, improve everyone’s quality of life and give individuals a far deeper sense of security than government by a few.

Today, millions around the world are taking to the streets to fight for these modest boons, risking imprisonment, torture and even their lives. A down-to-earth view of what makes democracy better than the alternatives will help us see how best to support it. Instead of going into hard battle modes for old “models,” we need to think about how to promote democratic goals with properly democratic means at home and abroad. On the global front, scepticism about older ways of doing democracy isn’t necessarily a bad thing: the hole where Western models used to be leaves room for creative thinking about what locals need and what kinds of change they can support.

It’s time to abandon the idea that people from powerful countries are uniquely qualified to design and build democracies for others. They may have money and weapons to help new democracies defend themselves. But without knowledge of local histories and sensitivities, money and weapons are useless. When outsiders promote democracy in an impatient or immodest spirit, the predictable result is illiberal, nationalist or authoritarian backlash.

We see the same urgent need to give more effective authority and voice to people on the ground inside today’s older democracies. There are organisations around the democratic world whose members advocate the creation of citizen assemblies, chosen by lot instead of personality-driven or partisan campaigns, to advise and monitor existing branches of government. By avoiding pathological rivalries among (and within) political parties, such assemblies might stand a better chance of coming up with policies aimed at narrowing the gaps in unbalanced societies. Another ancient idea is also enjoying a revival: that of citizen tribunals designed to hold current or former politicians to account for their actions.

But even well-crafted institutions can’t function without popular support. Change has to start with our own attitudes. Take other people’s beliefs and discomforts more seriously than ideologies that preach faith in the inevitable progress of whatever you think best. Work through social movements, social media and the voting booth to call for a more fully democratic regulation of market economies. Fight to take power back, of course, from democracy’s most obvious enemies — extremists, insatiable plutocrats and tyrannical leaders. But also take a more modest, closer-to-home kind of responsibility for getting our own hypercompetitive societies and psyches into better shape. •

This is Erica Benner’s contribution to Democracy: Eleven Writers and Leaders on What It Is — and Why It Matters, published recently by Profile Books and the Financial Times.

The post What the West forgot about democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

Four decades later, the speeches ranged over the evolution of the NFSA’s collection, its place in Australia’s institutional pantheon, and its antecedent history as part of the National Library. Arts minister Tony Burke especially noted the timeliness of its creation as a separate entity in the 1980s. But little was said about the how and why of what happened at that time.

We tend to treat our memory institutions as taken-for-granted features of our naturally evolving social infrastructure. But there was nothing inevitable about the NFSA’s creation. Rather, its ultimate arrival turned on happenstance and a public stoush that became the stuff of legend.

Movie films and sound recordings were inventions of the late nineteenth century and Australians embraced them wholeheartedly. We were the first country to record its formal birth as a nation via the new medium — courtesy of the Salvation Army’s Limelight Department camera at the federation ceremonies in Sydney — and in the Melbourne of 1906 we went on to invent the concept of the feature-length drama.

We were early, too, in realising the value of preserving these audiovisual documents. In 1935 federal cabinet established the National Historical Film and Speaking Record Library, a joint undertaking of the Commonwealth National Library, as it then was, and the Department of Commerce’s Cinema Branch, the government production unit of the day. But the outbreak of the second world war put this promising start on ice.

At the end of the war the National Library joined the new federal network of government-funded 16mm film lending libraries by setting up a film division in Canberra. The division inherited the surviving elements of that prewar archival enterprise, and in 1953, with the identification of a print of the 1919 Raymond Longford/Lottie Lyell film The Sentimental Bloke among those elements, the slow rediscovery of the nation’s film history began. Working in their own time, division head Larry Lake and his successor Rod Wallace waged a search-and-rescue effort to recover what they could of that history. A future administration of the National Library would burnish its credentials by reinventing this personal crusade as a heroic corporate myth.

In truth, Larry and Rod were swimming against the tide. In an institution primarily concerned with books and papers, films were of inferior status. Funding for the embryonic archive was minuscule. Flammable nitrate films were stored in disused explosives bunkers rather than in controlled environments, and not until 1973 were any full-time staff allotted to this archival function. That’s when sound recordings, neglected since the war years, also began receiving tentative attention.

The film division was always a bolt-on to the National Library. Professionally dissimilar and administratively self-contained, it gained no value from the connection. When I joined it in 1968 as a young librarian I soon learned it was considered a career dead end.

So what was it doing in the library at all? The first person to openly raise that question had been division head John O’Hara in 1951. He called for its release from that “hostile administration,” and was sacked for his temerity. It was still a live issue, though only privately voiced, two decades later. By then, however, a reviving film industry and film culture was beginning to see the problem O’Hara saw.

It was the new Association for a National Film and Television Archive which, in 1974, publicly called for the National Library’s film archive to be reconfigured as an autonomous institution in line with international best practice. It was clear that Australia was now seriously lagging in this field, and as other players joined the discussion, and one report led to another, the voices grew louder. In 1981 arts minister Bob Ellicott finally made the National Library Council sit up and listen, and it established an Advisory Committee on the National Film Archive comprised of industry leaders.

By then I was head of the library’s film activities, and my deputy Mike Lynskey, who led the small film archive unit, served as secretary to the committee. Its members analysed the archive’s needs and ultimately proposed that an independent consultant should propound on development options, including the possibility of the archive’s organisational autonomy. On the recommendation of the National Library’s director-general, Harrison Bryan, the firm of Nicholas Clark and Associates was contracted for the study. As the study progressed, though, committee members reached the view that their only use had been as window dressing, and that Clark’s conclusions had been preordained by the library.

The archive’s activities yielded regular good news stories in the media, and when journalist Fia Cumming came looking for a new one, Mike and I took her into our confidence. Whistleblowing wasn’t a word then, so when her article “Film Rescued But Archive in Trouble” appeared in the Bulletin on 16 August 1983 we were ostracised within the library. Among those who read the article, though, was Bob Hogg, senior adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke. He drew it to Hawke’s attention — and was instructed to “fix it up.”

Somehow a copy of Clark’s still confidential report landed on the doorstep of the Australian Film Institute — literally in a plain brown wrapper — and the AFI quickly convened an emergency film industry summit. Its detailed communique condemned the report and called for separation of both the film and the sound archives from the National Library. The observing journalists, representatives of the advisory committee and Bob Hogg witnessed the full force of the industry’s anger.

In the war of words that then erupted in the media, in parliament and via ministerial correspondence, the library and its allies mount a rearguard action in defence of its empire, warning darkly of unidentified “sectional interests” coveting control of the film and sound archives for commercial purposes, and of disaffected staff seeking power and plum positions in a new institution. The spectre of a completely dismembered National Library hung in the air.

After arts minister Barry Cohen announced he would put the archive’s future before cabinet, the wrangling and delaying tactics spread behind the scenes. The objections of the Library Council, then chaired by federal Liberal Party president Jim Forbes, could not be lightly dismissed by a young Labor government. As Hogg recalled, “It was a rather instructive period for myself in observing at close hand the bureaucracy working to thwart the clear objective of the government.” Less politely, an adviser to attorney-general Gareth Evans opined that the library’s “record in preservation and service is lamentable, and exceeded only by its capacity to tell simple, gross and outrageous lies to its staff, the public and the media.”

The rearguard action failed, and on 26 March 1984 cabinet decision 2982 created the NFSA, relieving the library of the relevant functions and assets. Barry Cohen announced the decision in parliament on 5 April.

On 10 April Harrison Bryan assembled library staff for a briefing on the decision. Here was the moment when a neat line could have been be drawn under the saga, allowing everyone to move on in new circumstances that had yielded, not incidentally, an expanded resource base. Bryan declared that the Library Council accepted, without question, a decision properly made by government after the council had been given every opportunity for input, and it would loyally implement it.

He added, though, that there was no point in commenting on the farsightedness of the decision or “the way it was arrived at,” subtly inferring that the process had been illegitimate and that disloyal staff were to blame. There was a crisis of confidence in the library, he said. Harsh things had been aired in the media: “the library has been smeared, and some of that smear sticks.” The possibility that the smear might have been self-inflicted was not open to discussion.

The well would be further poisoned when the library’s 1983–84 annual report was released in November. It reinforced the “sectional interests” claim and hypocritically blamed the now disbanded advisory committee for the Clark report, since it had, technically, chosen Clark as the consultant.

It is impossible to kill a good conspiracy theory, and the scuttlebutt that somehow the library had been deceitfully robbed of its film and sound archives spread insidiously in the profession and bureaucracy, ending up in oral histories and printed publications and continuing to circulate even today. This was aided and abetted in retirement by Bryan himself, from whose writings this 1988 quote is a sample:

That operation had all the characteristics of rape: the cynicism, the utter lack of scruple and the plain treachery that accompanied that particular crime against society. We were outgunned and outmanoeuvred. We were rolled by experts.

The National Library Council has never distanced itself from Bryan’s views or attempted to correct the record.

The cabinet decision required the new institution to vacate National Library premises as soon as possible. But the Hawke government had inherited a heavy deficit from its predecessor, so when Barry Cohen came back with a proposal to erect a $10 million building to house the new organisation he was not entirely surprised that the treasurer gave him short shrift. Paul Keating “smiled at me, as only he can,” Cohen remembered, “and suggested I try again in another five years.” It seemed the NFSA was to be a separate institution but still housed inside the National Library. This was not at all a good idea for a new body that needed a separate physical identity.

In politics, as in life, timing is everything. From his ministerial contacts, Cohen learned that the Australian Institute of Anatomy was ceasing operations and its headquarters could be up for grabs. “It immediately occurred to me that the building, with its upturned saucer shape and superb theatre facility, would be an excellent site for the NFSA,” Cohen wrote in his memoirs. We newly minted NFSA staff were despatched post-haste to check out the iconic anatomy building and reported back that it would be highly adaptable to our needs. Cohen wasted no time in securing it. We were unaware that we were working at cross purposes.

After we had started to move across from the National Library into our new home, Cohen set out on his first official visit to view his prize. He got agitated when his driver took what he thought was a wrong turning. That’s when he learned that he had not given us, as he thought, the Shine Dome of the Academy of Science, but an entirely different — and much more suitable — edifice. His double take as he got out of his car was a moment I’ll never forget.

It’s a story Cohen loved to tell against himself, the perfect example, he said, of Cohen’s law: All the good things governments do are by accident. •

The post Barry Cohen’s “mistake” turns forty appeared first on Inside Story.

By the time the war was over, he had endured massive disruptions that left no aspect of his life untouched. He was divorced from Olive and had married Diana; he had seen his family only intermittently; friends including the photographer and cameraman Damien Parer, his school rowing partner Clarence Glasscock, and Gil Dawe, a pilot with whom he had trained at Bankstown, had been killed.

He had spent years separated from other friends, such as Douglas Annand, Richard Beck and Ernest Hyde, who, like Dupain, were not based in Australia for the duration of the war. Other friends were dispersed across the globe. His friend Jean Lorraine had married an American paratrooper, William Bailey, and later settled in the United States, where she became a journalist and champion of women’s rights. Dupain had also been away from his business since 1942 and had lost the vital connection with it.

Everything had either changed or shifted in significance, a feeling to which photographer Harold Cazneaux, a generation older than Dupain, gave voice in 1947. Having experienced the tragic death of his only son, Harold junior, at the Siege of Tobruk in North Africa in 1941, and of his son-in-law, Hugh Johnson, who was killed when the HMAS Hobart was hit by a Japanese torpedo in 1943, he suggested with dignity and sorrow that “all were plunged into the turmoil of the Second Great War, and now in its passing we are all struggling to re-establish the things that are worth living for. This will be no easy task.”

Dupain was in complete agreement, writing that “the war in Europe overwhelmed all and it was not until the mid-forties that we could even think straight again.” Decades later he candidly acknowledged how hard it was to settle down after such “a gigantic upheaval,” elaborating on this situation in his book Max Dupain’s Australia in language that is direct, almost confessional:

The unstable war years, the grudging adaptation to ever-changing surroundings, the thousands of impressions both good and bad of varying environments, all added up to long-term shock. I just needed a settled emotional life for a while in order to get my life and work into a new perspective.

Nonetheless the task from September 1945 onwards was clear — to return to the studio and resume a civilised life, which Dupain knew would require his full conscious effort.

Dupain’s library contained volumes of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry, but because its contents were never fully documented, it is not known exactly what he owned. It is very likely, however, that he was familiar with Lawrence’s poem “Phoenix” (1929). Lawrence wanted the phoenix as the heraldic emblem for the free community he hoped to establish, and his biographer Frances Wilson has suggested that the emblem of the phoenix rising came to represent Lawrence himself. The poem begins with a powerful rhetorical question that was bound to have captured Dupain’s attention:

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

There is no question that Dupain wanted his wartime experiences and fraught emotional state to count for something, and phoenix-like he was determined to be reborn. This required active reinvention in his three worlds: in his personal life — represented in his marriage to Diana — and in both his professional and creative work as a photographer.

First, however, he had to honour Parer and his legacy. In 1946 Dupain published “A Note on Damien Parer” in the first issue of his friend Laurence Le Guay’s bold new venture, Contemporary Photography magazine. (Le Guay had only recently returned to Sydney after serving as a photographer with the RAAF.) Dupain’s tribute was infused with his intimate knowledge of a man he summed up as “unassuming and sensitive.” He noted how inspired Parer was by his first forays into the film industry, an experience that “had put a dash of elixir into his being. His voice was louder as it hollered out his latest favourite poem ([Hilaire] Belloc or [G.K.] Chesterton preferably) from the dark precincts of the laboratory while, detached and mechanical, he rocked a tray full of films or prints.” With pride Dupain recalled the alteration in tone in Damien’s letters from the Middle East as he became more confident about his work and his capabilities, and he stressed Parer’s deep involvement in the documentary movement, which grew out of his work in film in the late 1930s.

The postwar development of Dupain’s approach to photography had several components that he had formulated while serving as a camoufleur. He announced them publicly in a flurry of publications that reappeared after the war, notably in his contributions to Contemporary Photography and Australian Photography, edited by Oswald L. Ziegler and conceived as an annual (both 1947), and Art and Design: A Ure Smith Publication, edited by Sydney Ure Smith and Professor Joseph Burke (1949).

These articles amounted to a series of provocations and rallying calls. In Contemporary Photography, for example, he made a spirited address to his fellow photographers who, like him, were attempting to settle down to business again.

It’s back to the yakka now, boys! The studio grind again, but with a fresh outlook, new ideas and possibilities. I want to use more sunlight in my work. The studio has an odd flavor about it now and the artificial quality of half-watt lighting does not ring true alongside sunlight. We have it here all the year round — so why not make use of it! Maybe it is just a habit I have got into after four years of Rolleiflex and sunshine.

The point is that photography is at its best when it shows a thing clearly and simply. To fake is in bad taste. The studio is synonymous with fake.

This passage marks Dupain’s conscious break with his prewar work and a commitment to a new philosophical position and new way of working. The crux is realism, which was paralleled in other areas of the arts, especially painting, printmaking and film. Dupain was adamant that he “did not want to go back to the ‘cosmetic lie’ of fashion photography or advertising illustration” and studio fakery. Instead, he had embraced what he termed the “mechanistic” aspect of photography.

Before the flood: a Max Dupain self portrait from 1938. National Library of Australia

“Let it be automatic as much as possible,” he declared, “the human element being selection of viewpoint and moment of exposure, subsequent technicalities being performed skilfully and scientifically.” Although he did not state it publicly, his new stance meant repudiating the highly imaginative Man Ray and surrealist-inspired studio experimentation he had embarked on in the second half of the 1930s.

Equally importantly, Dupain revealed his conceptualisation of “a national photography [that] will contribute greatly to Australian culture.” He exhorted readers of Contemporary Photography to “let one see and photograph Australia’s way of life as it is, not as one would wish it to be. It is wasting the dynamic recording capacity of the camera to work otherwise.” The use of sunlight rather than artificial studio lighting was central to his vision.

He reiterated the commitment to realism in his aptly titled “Factual Photography,” the lead essay in the book Australian Photography 1947, also edited by Le Guay. Dupain’s essay roughed out a colourful history in which true photography had become lost “in the slimy depths of the half-arts for nearly a century” as artist photographers disastrously imitated the effects of other media. Only recently had hopeful signs started to emerge, eliciting some of his most impassioned and polemical writing.

The period of revolution is at hand and we are rediscovering the virtues of the old pioneers and applying them to our own ways of life. We have learned to respect the photograph for its own sake and to recognise its mechanical limitations. We wish to play no trick or indulge in fake or make-believe. We do not wish to be classified as “artists” or “pictorialists” but are bent on developing the aesthetic of the light picture with reference only to natural phenomena and not to the other graphic mediums.

Within this context he also sympathetically reviewed the photography of Douglas Glass for the magazine Art and Design 1, highlighting the intersection of their concerns: “It is the underlying truth about life that fascinates him [Glass], and his problem is to reveal this in pure photo-form.” Glass, who lived in England, had taken a lightning-fast trip across Australia, photographing people and places as he went. His subjects included what Dupain described as “aboriginals in their native state, the machine impinging on their domain,” which probably refers to Glass’s relatively positive representations of Aboriginal people for the time. (Now, such images are more likely to be understood as paternalistic, based on the assumption that Aboriginal culture in the 1940s was in a premodern state that was more desirable than the culture of a modern and decadent settler society.)

Glass’s photograph of an Aboriginal man posed in front of movie posters in Broome has the caption: “This shot shows the impact of imported rubbish on the natives. What a sordid lot the film stars look alongside the aboriginal.” The Aboriginal man depicted is in a semi-naked state, and is photographed in a heroic mode, from a low vantage point looking upwards and out of the frame.

Dupain was certainly not the only practitioner involved in rethinking the kind of personal or creative photography suitable for a postwar world. His former employee Geoffrey Powell also championed realism but from a politically explicit position that was informed by his Marxist and communist beliefs. In contrast to Dupain he saw himself as a social realist photographer rather than a documentary photographer, and argued that a politically and socially oriented approach was needed to help achieve productive change in society.

For the politicised Powell it was imperative that the conditions of the working class be documented by the best possible photographers in Australia — those willing to “pick up… [their] lenses and films for the more constructive purpose of helping mankind.” E.L. Cranstone was another committed documentarian whose social realist approach aligned with Powell’s.

A vastly different perspective was offered by the older Harold Cazneaux, who did not want to see contemporary photographers becoming “caught up in the new ‘speed up’ of life, with all the new cults and ideas, and the so-called modern art movement.” He hoped more enduring traditions would prevail and put his case in an essay, “Landscape Photography,” which followed Dupain’s “Factual Photography” in Australian Photography 1947.

“In our grand open spaces,” Cazneaux wrote reassuringly, “will still be found the beauty of sunshine and shadow, the waving grasses on the hillsides, the winding stream, the towering gum. Sincere art comes from heart and mind, and we will find such inspiration in the work of yesterday even if we are all involved in this super progress of so-called modern life and art.”

Dupain respected Cazneaux’s vision but did not share it. He wanted to look forwards, not backwards, and be a provocateur, not a mediator. But unlike Powell, Dupain did not have a direct or specific political agenda; he saw himself as a progressive photographer, not a political activist. In this capacity he was hugely disappointed that his provocations were ignored.

Regarding the lack of interest in his “Factual Photography,” he wrote: “Nobody wrote me threatening letters, nobody took me to task, nobody was emotionally stirred to even say one word against my stand. Negative response. Total negative. So you withdraw and consider. Stuff the lot says I. I will do what I have to do and keep on doing it until the very last.” He would, however, make a couple more public interventions. In 1950 he introduced a twist to his advocacy of realism and objectivity in another essay, arguing for “the emotional factor” in photography, which allowed for a psychological dimension.

While Cazneaux and Dupain thought differently about photography, their fondness for each other shines through their correspondence. Four of Cazneaux’s letters, written between April 1945 (when Dupain was in New Guinea) and November 1952, have survived. They are thoughtful and direct, with the older man affirming the younger’s abilities and prospects for a future that he knows he himself does not have.

In one (undated) letter Cazneaux marvels at Dupain’s success with miniature film: “Your eye sight must be jolly good and as you are a young man I suppose it is natural to work miniature film — I used this size 25 years ago & could not make a go of it — of course those days did not hold Superxx stuff & modern equipment.”

In his longest letter, written in February 1947, he recognises the shifts occurring in Dupain’s approach after the war. He hopes “things are working out for you in the way you would wish — I know that “the Studio” has left you cold & — it’s a great game this battling with Nature’s direct light — the possibilities are beyond our imagination.”21 And he is pleased that they have both been published in Le Guay’s Contemporary Photography magazine.

The letters are, however, suffused with poignancy. Cazneaux, whose health had begun to fail, asks for Dupain’s help in obtaining maps for a possible trip to Central Australia. He describes it as “an imaginative mind journey” for the present, but if his health improves he plans to set off for the Flinders Ranges and Alice Springs in the forthcoming winter months. “It may,” he acknowledges, “be too late for me but there’s no harm in thinking of it all the same.” The trip did not eventuate.

Touchingly, Cazneaux refers to discussions about photography both men hope will happen in the future. In a postscript to his 1945 letter, he assures Dupain, “Yes we will have that chat some day my lad,” deferring to a time when he will not be so busy and “free to look at pictures again.” Seven years later, the topic resurfaces, and Cazneaux generously responds to Dupain, saying: “Yes some day we could have a good chat over photography. I know we are together in the real spirit of the game despite differences in its practice — this is only natural.” Cazneaux died in 1953.

Once Dupain returned to his business in 1947 the immediate problem was to build up his clientele again and earn a satisfactory living. The environment was competitive, with Monte Luke, John Lee, Laurence Le Guay and Noel Rubie operating commercial studios specialising in portraiture, fashion and advertising illustration in Sydney. Russell Roberts was still Dupain’s most substantial rival.

The difficulties facing Dupain were highlighted by photographer David Moore, the son of architect John D. Moore, whom Dupain knew well. The twenty-year-old Moore approached Dupain asking to join his studio in 1947, motivated by his belief that Dupain was “producing the most interesting photography in the country.” Moore especially admired his documentary photographs of the city, and of people at work and leisure.

Much to Moore’s disappointment, Dupain was not able to take on additional staff, but he secured a job with Russell Roberts, working as assistant to photographer Margot Donald, whose creative talent he admired. Moore lost his job with Roberts in 1948 — due to the business’s financial difficulties, a number of staff were retrenched — and he approached Dupain once again. Only when Dupain’s sole assistant unexpectedly gave notice could Dupain offer him a role — photographing industrial subjects, architecture and products for advertisements.

Moore relished the three years he spent at the studio: “Working with Max released energy in me I didn’t know I possessed. The days were too short.” •

This is an extract from Max Dupain: A Portrait, published this month by HarperCollins. Special price $44.99 from Readings.

The post The phoenix appeared first on Inside Story.

The incident being probed dates back to the late 1970s, an era of shaggy haircuts and flared trousers. Large amounts of cash still circulated through payroll deliveries, retail tills and bank branches, inevitably attracting the attention of armed hold-up men and safe-crackers. Powerful new detective squads were set up in its Central Investigation Branch dedicated to ambushing and apprehending them.

It was, as criminologist Robert A. Dielenberg has written, the tail end of the era of “physical” policing aimed at “putting a man in cuffs.” But while that battle still raged on the streets, he says, “gentleman-like” corruption extended “all the way up to government and back down again.”

Nearly half a century later, the detectives from that time are in their late seventies and early eighties. Many require walking sticks and other aids, but as they testify in the Chief Secretary’s Building it’s not hard to imagine them as the young hulks they were in their CIB days.

What happened in February 1979 was outside their usual work of dealing with hard-bitten criminals. Suddenly they had to grapple with ancient Balkan rivalries and hatreds transplanted to the suburbs of Sydney. This was the “Croatian Six” case. At the time it looked like the biggest terrorism plot in Australia’s history; now it looks more like our biggest miscarriage of justice.

In February 1981, after an extremely long trial, the six young Croatian-Australian defendants — Maksimilian Bebic, Mile Nekic, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Anton Zvirotic, Ilija Kokotovic and Joseph Kokotovic — were each sentenced to fifteen-year jail terms by the NSW Supreme Court’s Justice Victor Maxwell. Each failed in their appeals to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal and the High Court of Australia.

The jury accepted police evidence that all six of them had plotted to plant bombs around Sydney to advance the cause of Croatian independence from the Yugoslavia of Josef Tito’s communist regime. The plot was thwarted at the last minute when a seventh alleged plotter, Vico Virkez, tipped off police on 8 February 1979.

A hurried raid on the Lithgow house of Virkez and his tenant Bebic did indeed find crude gelignite bombs loaded up in Virkez’s Chrysler Valiant. After Virkez gave the police more names, they raided three more houses across Sydney where they allegedly found the other men in possession of gelignite, detonators and improvised timers.

But ASIO records released in early 2018, nearly forty years after the alleged plot, cast a cloud over the prosecution case. They showed that phone taps over the preceding six months had found Virkez was in touch with an official at the Yugoslav consulate-general in Sydney whom ASIO believed to be an officer of the Yugoslav Intelligence Service, or YIS.

More than that, this information had been relayed to an assistant commissioner of the NSW Police, Roy Whitelaw, about three weeks after the arrests, along with an assessment that Virkez was an agent or possibly even an officer of the YIS. Whitelaw told ASIO he was worried this information would “blow a hole” in the police case if it got to the “opposition” — in other words, defence counsel. ASIO said he could tell police prosecutors about it as long as it wasn’t sourced to them.

But this vital piece of intelligence never surfaced at the trial or appeal. Indeed, Crown prosecutor David Shillington QC assured the jury there was “not a skerrick of evidence” that Virkez was a Yugoslav agent.

After their release in 2018 the ASIO documents helped launch a fourth application for a judicial inquiry into the convictions by members of the Croatian Six. In August 2022, after sustained opposition from a Crown-appointed legal team, Justice Robertson Wright ordered an inquiry. He cited “questions or doubts” about several aspects of the original case, including the truth of Virkez’s evidence for the Crown, the confessions and physical evidence allegedly got by police in the Sydney raids, and the alleged withholding of crucial evidence from the defence.

In March last year Chief Justice Andrew Bell appointed Acting Justice Robert Hulme to conduct the inquiry. Hulme, a lawyer and retired Supreme Court justice, brought to the job a thorough knowledge of criminal law from both the defence and the prosecution sides —including an early-career exposure to a dodgy police operation when he was secretary to justice James Wood’s 1984 inquiry into the Ananda Marga trio’s convictions in 1the 978 Yagoona bombing, which were overturned.

Since hearings began last December, the inquiry has heard forty-three days of testimony. Searches ordered by the inquiry have generated some 52,000 pages of documents that have been digitised and made easily available on computer terminals, and proceedings have been  live-screened and transcribed for public access.

Facing Acting Justice Hulme are four rows of legal talent. In front is counsel assisting the inquiry Trish McDonald SC and a phalanx of juniors and solicitors. Alongside is the team representing three of the Croatian Six (Bebic, Brajkovic and the late Mile Nekic, who died in 2022): David Buchanan SC, a defence counsel in the original trial who has come out of retirement for the inquiry, barrister Sebastian De Brennan who led the application for review, and solicitor Sharon Ramsden.

In the second row are Greg Woods KC, hired by the NSW Police Association to represent some twenty of the surviving members of the arresting police, and Gabrielle Bashir SC, separately representing James Bennett, another former detective. Bennett left the police soon after the original case for a career as barrister and judge in the NSW District Court, where he still sits post-retirement as an acting judge.

On the third and fourth rows are Alex Brown for the NSW director of public prosecutions and Catherine Gleeson SC for the NSW police commissioner, plus numerous supporting lawyers. ASIO (and latterly the prime minister’s department) are represented by Peter Melican and Jake Silove.

Their fees must be chewing up a bomb — except for Buchanan, De Brennan and Ramsden, who are being funded on drip-feed by the Croatian-Australian community and other crowd-sourcing but have largely appeared pro bono.

The role of the NSW police’s former Special Branch, whose task was to anticipate political violence and spot subversion, came under particular scrutiny. Assistant Commissioner Whitelaw, a previous head of the Special Branch, has died, as has Inspector John Perrin, its head at the time of the arrests. But Victor Jefferies, its Croatian specialist at the time of the arrests, is alive and well enough to stand up to several days of questioning.

Jefferies was quizzed repeatedly about an interview he conducted with Virkez in Lithgow two days after the arrests. During that encounter, he says, he quickly deduced from Virkez’s real name, Vitomir Misimovic, that he was not a Croat but a Serb and not a separatist but an ardent Yugoslav. Virkez admitted to warning the Yugoslav consulate as well as the police about the bomb plot, and having earlier given the consulate reports on Croatian activism, but denied contact with YIS.

Jefferies wrote all this up in a report, he said, which he then gave to Perrin and showed to detective-sergeant Ted Turner and detective senior constable Alister Milroy, leading figures in the Lithgow raid who were putting together the police brief of evidence. But Jefferies said his interest wasn’t sufficiently piqued to explore whether Virkez was an agent provocateur. Nor did Milroy (later chief of the Australian Crime Commission) feel the need to delve into Virkez’s double life when he prepared an “antecedents” or background report on him.

Jefferies also said that the ASIO information about Virkez’s links with the YIS that so alarmed assistant-commissioner Whitelaw would have been circulated to Special Branch and shown to him as the officer watching the Croatian community.

None of this emerged in his statements and testimony at the committal hearing in August 1979, at least according to transcripts shown to him by counsel assisting. Jefferies even denied he had written a report on the meeting or that it had revealed intriguing new information. Why? He’d been in the witness box a long time, he now says, and was “slightly confused.”

Jefferies said he had probably taken the names of the Kokotovic brothers and Mile Nekic from Special Branch records, added them to those of Brajkovic and Zvirotic, who had been named by Virkez in Lithgow on 8 February 1979, and of Joseph Stipic, a young student activist whom a magistrate would later clear of charges because of botched police evidence. This list had then been passed on to teams hurriedly assembled at the CIB to fan out across Sydney late on the evening of the raids.

But Jefferies denied he and his chief, Inspector Perrin, had seen Virkez’s information as an opportunity to “roll up” the members of a strident new activist group, the Croatian Republican Party. These young nationalists had mounted heated demonstrations at Yugoslav national day events, and in one case had nearly rolled a police car containing Perrin after he had arrested Brajkovic at a demo outside the Yugoslav consulate.

Despite the decades that have elapsed, the ex-CIB stalwarts who appeared at the inquiry all stood by their evidence at the original trial. Yes, they had found the gelignite at the Sydney homes. No, the defendants had not been bashed during questioning back at the CIB offices in the old Remington Building facing Hyde Park. Yes, their evidence of confessions was true.

They had heard the term “verballing,” they said, but mostly from defence lawyers trying to wriggle their clients out of confessions. They’d never done it themselves, or seen it done. Same for “loading up” suspects with guns, explosives or drugs. Same for bashing. If they’d noticed the Wood royal commission report on police corruption in 1997, they were shocked or felt it generalised from isolated incidents. Some still attended an ex-CIB get-together held three times a year; while they may have mentioned to each other that they’d been summoned to this inquiry, they definitely didn’t discuss what they were going to say.

At one point Acting Justice Hulme professed himself puzzled by this combination of gaps in memories and vehement denials of misbehaviour. “If you have no recollection, what’s the basis of your denial?” he quizzed one ex-detective.

James Bennett, the detective turned judge, gave the narrative some refinement. He took issue with the proposition that a load-up could only succeed if all the police involved in a raid knew about it. He agreed with his counsel, Gabrielle Bashir, that an officer, unaware of a load-up, could be shown an incriminating item planted by another officer at the raided premises and then give corroborating evidence of having seen it there.

Justice Victor Maxwell was clearly not thinking of such a scenario when he told the jury in January 1981 that the trial came down to a “black and white” proposition: the word of the six defendants with a motive to exonerate themselves against that of thirty-nine police who would all have had to be involved in a conspiracy to plant or fabricate evidence.

Could such a scenario be applied to Bennett’s own role in the Brajkovic arrest? More senior police allegedly found a white plastic bag of explosives on the ground outside the house where Brajkovic was found and detained, brought the bag inside and invited Bennett to look at it. Bennett was not asked about this possibility.

Also raised quite a few times during questioning was the term “scrum-down,” which describes officers conferring on their evidence ahead of trials — a practice that could be used for good or bad, Wood found. Although most of the ex-detectives looked baffled by the term, counsel assisting, Trish McDonald, thought she had found one example..

After his arrest and questioning, Brajkovic showed signs of a severe bashing to medical staff at Long Bay Jail. Their testimony at a non-jury hearing during the trial caused Justice Maxwell to throw out the “admissions” police swore he had made voluntarily. Brajkovic also wrote to premier Neville Wran, who also held the police portfolio, and the police Internal Affairs Branch was ordered to investigate.

McDonald found it “beyond coincidence” that four officers accused by Brajkovic, when questioned by Internal Affairs, used almost identical language to allege Brajkovic must have willingly taken the blows from the other alleged plotters, sometime between being put in the Central Police Station cells after questioning and delivery to Long Bay, as part of a plot by the prisoners to discredit police. “This is an instance of a scrum, for corrupt purposes,” she put to one of the officers, which he denied.

Nonetheless, a Detective-Sergeant Shepard of Internal Affairs found that prisoners inflicting injuries on a willing Brajkovic “would not be beyond the realms of possibility” and dismissed the complaint. Brajkovic said he never received this finding, and when shown it at the inquiry appeared shattered by it. It was noted, Shepard delayed his report until after the trial to see what Judge Maxwell made of the allegations. Yet, as Acting Justice Hulme noted, Shepard didn’t mention that Maxwell had excluded the record of interview with Brajkovic because of the revealed injuries.

“Curious,” Hulme commented.

As for admissions to the media in 1991 by the leader of one of the raids, Roger Rogerson, that verballing and loading were standard procedure — well, this was just big talk. They had never seen Rogerson practise those techniques; he became “bitter and twisted” only after being transferred out of the CIB. (This despite some of them having been with Rogerson in June 1981 when he shot dead drug-dealer Warren Lanfranchi in highly contentious circumstances. Four of them also worked with Rogerson on the discredited Ananda Marga case).

Rogerson, who was serving a life sentence for murder, died in jail in January this year. Though he might otherwise have been called to testify to the inquiry, it seems unlikely, even with nothing left to lose, that he would have broken ranks and given a different version of events from his former colleagues.

One striking thing the testimony to the inquiry has revealed is a general lack of what nowadays would be considered sound detective work when the original case was being investigated. None of the explosive material allegedly seized in the Sydney raids was fingerprinted or even photographed in situ. Only the Scientific Squad had cameras, and they had gone home for the night. The “elite” CIB squads had no tape recorders for their interviews, not that they wanted them. Accounts of where the explosives were stored were vague, putting the custodial chain under intense scrutiny.

And despite the raids supposedly being targeted at suspected terrorist bases — the briefing at CIB had warned about the risk of trip wires, booby traps and primed explosives, one ex-detective said — the CIB squads failed to call in army bomb experts, clear the neighbourhoods or take any precautions. Most of the detectives attended in suits rather than protective attire and didn’t even have torches to search for the alleged explosives.

Buchanan, for the Croatian Six petitioners, put it to the police that they had pulled the incriminating explosives from stashes kept to load up suspects and brought them to the raided premises. Lydia Peraic, who was married to Joseph Kokotovic at the time, told the inquiry she had never seen the two half-sticks of gelignite that Rogerson’s team had allegedly found in the attic workroom of the Kokotovic family home at Burwood and showed the family.

But if any of the officers had thought of confessing to concocting or withholding evidence, Hulme at one point reminded counsel that unlike a royal commission, an inquiry like this under Section 79 (1) of the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act 2001 gave him no powers to compel answers or to grant certificates of immunity against self-incrimination. “It’s an unfortunate state of affairs,” Hulme said. “I do not understand why parliament would choose to exclude the power, but they have.”

The testimony extended beyond the actions of NSW police. Veteran lawyer Ian Cunliffe was given the chance he’d been awaiting for more than forty years to expound in court about the questionable handling of the Croatian Six case by the Australian Federal Police (known until October 1979 as the Commonwealth Police) and security officials, suggesting that the suppression of evidence reached right into Canberra. (It was from Cunliffe, at a coroner’s hearing in 2007 on a different matter, that I first learned of doubts about the original trial.)

Cunliffe, who had been attached earlier to Justice Robert Hope’s inquiry into the intelligence agencies, was a middle-ranking legal advisor in the prime minister’s department. The Croatian Six case came across his desk in March 1980 in the form of a letter from the jailed Virkez to prime minister Malcolm Fraser. It was accompanied by a “whitewash” response drafted by the Australian Federal Police’s assistant commissioner, Roy Farmer, once a detective in the NSW Special Branch.

Cunliffe’s interest was piqued by Farmer’s response, which pointed to negotiations under way between Virkez and prosecutors. Virkez would eventually plead guilty in a separate trial, receive a short sentence, and then testify for the Crown in the trial of the other six in return for early release and deportation to Yugoslavia.

Throughout this time, AFP civilian intelligence official Roger Cavanagh (now deceased) had been visiting Virkez in his cell and meeting Detective-Sergeant Turner, the NSW officer running the case. Cavanagh’s career had flourished on the back of alarm about Croatian political violence, most publicly when he accompanied Labor federal attorney-general Lionel Murphy on his controversial “raid” of ASIO headquarters in Melbourne to see if the security service was hiding material about Croatian terrorism.

Cunliffe detailed the workings of a high-level interdepartmental committee convened to discuss the Virkez letter. Cavanagh told the committee that evidence about Virkez’s YIS connections would be made to disappear if it was subpoenaed, that Turner was not interested anyway, and that Crown prosecutor Shillington was “fully informed.” ASIO’s representative, Michael Boyle, disputed draft minutes of the committee meeting in order to “water down” his comments about Virkez having serious YIS connections.

Later, when he read a press report of Shillington’s “not a skerrick” comment in the closing stages of the trial in early 1981, Cunliffe wrote a memo to his superiors in the prime minister’s department warning that the federal government could be seen as “standing by” while a miscarriage of justice occurred. Either Shillington (who died in 2018) had misled the court, or communications had broken down.

Cunliffe also contacted a defence lawyer to tell him that evidence existed that would help an appeal, though he didn’t disclose what it was. Although he received a subpoena to appear at the appeal, he was not ultimately called. After taking up a new job as secretary of the Australian Law Reform Commission he raised his concerns about the miscarriage of justice in 1984 directly with the Hawke government’s attorney-general, Gareth Evans. He was passed on to acting federal crown solicitor Tom Sherman, who showed him the relevant files.

But Sherman’s report on this meeting said Cunliffe was “satisfied” that all relevant documents had been provided to the court. “I am very confident I didn’t say that,” Cunliffe told this year’s inquiry. Instead, he was expecting a full federal probe. But that didn’t happen, despite further confidential correspondence involving Evans’s successor, Lionel Bowen.

During Cunliffe’s testimony, Acting Justice Hulme asked him whether he thought that not only had a miscarriage of justice occurred but also that the Croatian Six should have been acquitted.

“If the jurors were told what I knew, they might have been acquitted,” Cunliffe said.

“Not withstanding other evidence?”

“Yes,” replied Cunliffe.

Michael Boyle, the now-retired ASIO official involved in the 1980 Canberra meetings, denied he had watered down the assessment of the Virkez from “agent” or possible “officer” to “informer” for the YIS. It was simply a reappraisal as further information was gathered, he said. An agent was someone who was managed or controlled by an intelligence service.

Unlike the Soviet spy agencies, the YIS was not a priority target of ASIO interest. “They weren’t actually threatening Australia’s national interests,” Boyle told the inquiry. “They were threatening Croatian interests. The Yugoslav government was a neutral but friendly power, and there were very close diplomatic relations with them. We were aware of the Yugoslav Intelligence Service interest in the Croatian militant organisations, and we were aware of the threat that the… those organisations occasionally posed to the Yugoslav government and its interests.”

Yet an ASIO report written in 1984 by an analyst identified only as S5-A and tendered to the inquiry, concluded that Virkez was an “agent” of the YIS reporting to YIS officers at the Yugoslavian consulate-general in Sydney, rather than a “low-level informer” as claimed by the Australian Federal Police (and put to the appeal court in 1982 by AFP intelligence officer Cavanagh). A 1982 report from a redacted source (probably an allied intelligence agency) quoted a YIS officer as saying Virkez had been “planted” into the Croatian community by the consulate.

While there was no evidence on file that the YIS “masterminded” the Lithgow plot, the analyst S5-A said,

It is my opinion (based only on professional judgement) that Virkez was central to a YIS plan to discredit a potentially violent Croatian organisation, the HRS [Croatian Republican Party]. I don’t believe the YIS actually wanted bombs to be planted but I do believe they wanted HRS leaders arrested with bombs or implicated in the plot. The aim, ie that Croats, particularly HRS members, be discredited, was very successful. The arrests and trial split Croatian separatist groups and destroyed the HRS. No separatist group operates without the fear of YIS penetration, following the exposure of Virkez as an informant. Suspicion amongst separatists, of each other, has meant that cooperation and unified action is impossible.

In the last days of the hearings, Brajkovic underwent hours of intense cross-examination by counsel assisting the inquiry, counsel for the police, and counsel for Bennett, about his narrative of the arrests, the interrogation, the police inquiry, and his own political history.

He stuck to his account, and gave a sense of what it felt like at the time for the Croatian Six as they awaited committal. “We are very, very deeply surprised because we are so much have our Australian way of life… at our heart, and after the things happened we couldn’t believe it,” he said. “We thought originally it will go probably one, two, three weeks and after that we’d be released, but it kept continuing, kept mounting new charges, and we lost any hope.”

Whether hope is revived for the surviving Croatian Six and the Croatian-Australian community may become apparent after counsel assisting Trish McDonald SC makes her written submission in mid-December, counsel for the petitioners and other parties write submissions in reply, and then all make final oral submissions in the open inquiry over 5–7 March. Forty-six years after the events under scrutiny, it will then be up to Acting Justice Robert Allan Hulme. •

► Hamish McDonald’s account of his involvement in the successful effort to reopen the case

The post Is this our biggest miscarriage of justice? appeared first on Inside Story.

It is 1928 and Australia’s greatest sculptor, Lindsay Norman, has a big idea. He wants to carve the heads of four of Australia’s greatest statesmen into a mountain that he spotted in an isolated corner of the Australian Alps on his latest honeymoon. Inspired by an American mountain with a similar appellation, Mount Rushless would be named in honour of Australians’ laidback ways, but it was just right for what Norman had in mind, not least because he worried that a lackadaisical people would disappear from the face of the earth unless it mended its ways.

Modern art was degenerate. Puerile ideas from the old world were poisoning the national bloodstream. The manly white vigour that had made the nation — expanding the reach of the British race over an entire continent and even into New Guinea — was being sapped of its virility. The nation was becoming weak and effeminate. Even its cherished racial purity was under threat in a world where covetous aliens demanded Australia open its vast open spaces to inferior races. So said Norman in his 1924 manifesto, Salvaging the Nation.

Lindsay Norman had been thinking about whose heads would need to appear on Mount Rushless. William Charles Wentworth was there, not only because he had helped found the University of Sydney and become the country’s greatest statesman but also because in 1813, with some companions, he had found a way through the Blue Mountains and thereby paved the way for the wool kings. Here was a nation-builder in every sense of that word.

Then there was Henry Parkes, the working-class radical who saw the light, moderated his opinions, and became a founding father of the Commonwealth of Australia, the name he wanted for the new nation. Norman — who was himself originally from Victoria — had Alfred Deakin in view, too. He was favoured because of his role in making the White Australia Policy, and for taking over Papua as the foundation of an Australian empire. Norman cared less about his supposed achievements in progressive social and economic legislation, for they had only made Australians soft.

The fourth head, however, worried Norman, giving him many a sleepless night. Norman was no Labor man: far from it. He thought Labor’s social legislation, and its pretence that ordinary folk rather than talented elites made history, had weakened the nation. But Norman knew that he had to find a Labor man, not least because he hoped to screw a few thousand pounds for his work out of the wealthier unions.

The obvious Labor star was Billy Hughes, and what a joy it would be to work in stone on that formidable nose. But Hughes was a hated figure among union people because he had split the Labor Party and, in any case, he was still in politics. Clearly, he would not do. Then fate intervened. That sturdy former coalminer Andrew Fisher, thrice Labor prime minister, died in London. Fisher was a Queenslander, too, which was as convenient as his recent passing, and he had done much to build the Royal Australian Navy. It had to be Fisher.

I have invented this story — obviously, an Australian adaptation of the story of the Mount Rushmore monument in the black hills of Dakota — to underline both its plausibility and unlikelihood. It’s plausible to the extent that so many of the ideas that had motivated Gutzon Borglum’s project in the United States were shared with Australians. Both countries were the products of settler colonialism. Both celebrated histories of territorial expansion they saw as synonymous with progress. Those heads on Mount Rushmore — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — were chosen for their role in expanding the continental reach of the United States.

But this grand symbol of Manifest Destiny was built on the lands of the Sioux nation, supposedly protected by a treaty. If there had been any similar monument in Australia, where there was no treaty at all with Indigenous peoples, the result would have been the same. The racist, masculinist and elitist ideas that motivated Borglum’s Mount Rushmore project were common enough in Australia in the same period. Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory (1995) shows that Borglum resisted feminist efforts to have Susan B. Anthony included; we can be sure that if there had been an artist such as our fictional Lindsay Norman at work on an Australian project, any proposal for the inclusion of an Australian suffrage leader such as Rose Scott would also have received short shrift.

In another respect, my thought experiment is quite implausible. If you are old enough, you might recall an advertisement that ran on television in 2001, around the time of the Centenary of Federation. It featured a young boy, doing his homework, who asks his father the name of the first US president. That gives Dad no problem: “George Washington” — head number one on Mount Rushmore. But then the boy asks the name of the first prime minister of Australia. Tough one. Dad now looks a bit embarrassed. “Go and ask your mother,” he suggests. “What kind of country would forget the name of its first prime minister?,” asks the voiceover as the boy heads off to see if Mum knows. We then meet a diverse range of Australians, none of whom knows the first prime minister’s identity.

There are extenuating circumstances for this formidable display of historical ignorance, we are assured: “Perhaps it’s because in 1901, our nation was created with a vote, not a war, in peace, not in anger, that we take our beginnings for granted.” Eventually, we meet a man and woman, each elderly, who can name Edmund Barton. The boy — now perhaps enlightened by his mother, although that’s not explained — returns to his father to give him the answer. Dad replies that he knew that; the son looks appropriately sceptical.

Just what civic purpose was served by simply being able to name-check Barton is not explained, but one has to start somewhere, I suppose. The slogan “Australia. It’s what we make it” — perhaps reflecting uncertainty about why knowing about the past might still matter — appears on the screen with a dynamic rendition of the Centenary’s official logo (a multicoloured stylised map of Australia) brought into existence by a kind of shooting star — although with one too many points to be the Federation Star.

At around that time the late historian John Hirst, who published a history of Federation intended to help overcome such startling ignorance. He spent several pages of The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (2000) dealing with how Federation had failed to capture the Australian imagination, why it had been “forgotten.” He had no simple answer. One reason, he suggested, was that when Australians were members of the British Empire, the history they knew celebrated the rise of British liberty. Once those ties were broken, the nation’s “civic consciousness” became “impoverished.”

Certainly, as late as the 1950s, it was the Ancient Constitution, Magna Carta, the civil wars, and the Glorious Revolution that provided the most solid foundations of an Australian political history. When Labor leader H.V. Evatt fought his battle against the Menzies government’s attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1951, his appeal was frequently to “British justice.” And in the following year, at considerable expense, the Australian government bought a version of the Magna Carta from Britain.

In 1988, though, when an Australian visit for Lincoln Cathedral’s Magna Carta — Lincoln has one of four copies of the original — was organised by Australian expatriate clergyman Rex Davis, it was a financial failure. That didn’t discourage the ACT branch of the Australia–Britain Society from choosing Magna Carta in the mid 1990s as the theme for a Centenary of Federation monument in the capital. Funding of over half a million dollars came from the British government, so we now have a Magna Carta monument and a Magna Carta Place in Canberra, but I’d suggest that most Australians no longer consider this political history their own. Revisionist historians in the wider Angloworld have also exposed the mythologisation of Magna Carta in political efforts to craft a celebratory and expansive history of British constitutionalism.

The political heroes of Australian democracy included the odd “local” such as Peter Lalor, the Eureka rebel, but they were more commonly the heroes of English political and constitutional history. Names such as John Hampden or John Pym — heroic figures in the struggle of the English parliament against Charles I — will mean nothing to most Australians today, but for earlier generations they were the progenitors of Australia’s own political freedoms.

Hirst concluded his Federation study with his own answer to the question of what kind of country doesn’t know the name of its first prime minister, “The answer is a country that is not quickly going to place Barton and Deakin alongside its real heroes: Ned Kelly, Phar Lap, and Don Bradman — a bushranger, a horse, and a cricketer.” Here, Hirst’s remarks recalled, consciously or not, those of an earlier historian, one of more radical leanings. Brian Fitzpatrick, writing in The Australian Commonwealth: A Picture of the Community, 1901–1955 (1956), noted that Australia had “no Jeffersons and Lincolns… The Australian people made heroes of none, and raised no idols, except perhaps an outlaw, Ned Kelly, and Carbine, a horse.” But for Fitzpatrick, that was a good thing: they had “still made of Australia a home good enough for men of modest report to live in, calling their souls their own.”

The implied contrast in much of this kind of discussion is with the United States, even allowing that it, too, had enjoyed a favourite Depression-era racehorse, in Seabiscuit. There is a longstanding impression that Americans have a stronger sense of national identity than Australians, and that they are much more engaged with their own history.

It is certainly easier to find American institutions, and monuments, devoted to promoting an approved version of the nation’s history. A notable example is the phenomenon of the presidential library. In his book Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (2006), Benjamin Hufbauer argues that these grand institutions — beginning with the first devoted to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 — reflect the growing power of the Office of President itself, the tendency towards an “imperial presidency.” They are about “how power is remembered and how these constructed memories of power shape contemporary and future presidential authority.”

Australia has followed to some extent in establishing a series of prime ministerial libraries and centres. These are devoted to Alfred Deakin, John Curtin, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, John Howard and Robert Menzies. And we are evidently not done: there was an announcement in late October of a Julia Gillard Prime Ministerial Library, to be located at the University of Adelaide. And the Malcolm Fraser Collection within the University of Melbourne Archives arguably approaches prime ministerial library status. All of these prime ministerial libraries are located within universities, which can create financial vulnerabilities, and Gideon Haigh writing some years ago wondered how willing they were likely to be to ask really tough questions about the subjects to which they were devoted.

By way of contrast, each former American president pursues large-scale philanthropic support for their own library and has a hand in its creation, with the National Archives and Records Administration playing the central part in administration. They are necessarily central to critical research on their respective subjects. Presidential libraries, more generally, are in a much stronger position to shape historical consciousness and collective memory than their Australian counterparts. Perhaps in this field, as in other aspects of our national life, we have been too enthusiastic in a desire to follow an American model. Prime ministers are not presidents — and the leadership churn of recent years would have been a great boon to the building industry if every prime minister were to have a library.

The British scholar Michael Billig coined a term that can help us understand some of the matters I am exploring, “banal nationalism,” the hardly noticed, taken-for-granted ways that communities express their national identity. And it involves processes of both remembering and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion — even as the boundaries shift with changing values.

For example, we have, as the Americans do with their presidents, sometimes placed the faces of Australian prime ministers on our stamps. We name federal electoral divisions after politicians, as well as Canberra suburbs, and the odd country town, university, road, building or bridge. The renaming of the Victorian federal electorate of Batman as Cooper, and of Murray as Nicholls — after the Yorta Yorta men and Aboriginal political activists William Cooper and Doug Nicholls — expresses an expanded sense of what practising politics has meant.

All the same, Australia has only begun the process of honouring the rich traditions of Indigenous political activity in public ways, although both Cooper and Nicholls have public monuments. One place First Nations politics does figure is in the aural and visual record: I am thinking here, for instance, of Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s celebration of the struggles of the Gurindji for better wages and their land in “From Little Things Big Things Grow,” a political story also powerfully evoked in Mervyn Bishop’s photograph of Gough Whitlam pouring sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hand — even if that was apparently staged for better effect after the actual ceremony.

Political memory happens informally, too, rooted in folklife, culture and conversation. My former doctoral student and colleague, Emily Gallagher, has uncovered children’s engagement with everyday politics in their imaginative play — their writing and drawing, for instance — while another of my students, Gary Humphries, who is also a former Liberal parliamentarian, recalls a rhyme that his mother taught him about the political leaders of the day, a product of the streets of 1930s Leichhardt:

Lang, Lang, brave and bold
Oughta be, oughta be dipped in gold

Stevens, Stevens, bah, bah, bah
Oughta be, oughta be dipped in tar.

Folklorists have long drawn attention to the rich tradition of protest song, playground rhyme and political graffiti. And today, we need to consider the online world, where memories of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership, now global, will likely be dominated forevermore by her famous “Misogyny Speech,” always at hand on You Tube.

The intersection of the official and popular can, in unpredictable ways, generate rich political memory. Names of prominent leaders sometimes attach to a whole period, as in phrases such as the Menzies era or the Whitlam era. That even happens at the state level, with Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen era. There, the political landmark of the Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct — a mouthful of unlikely material for political memory — now works in historical consciousness through casual references to the commissioner, Tony Fitzgerald. “Before Fitzgerald” and “After Fitzgerald” are common phrases, rich in an imagery that extends well beyond what we usually think of as politics. A contemporaneous Bicentennial event, Expo 88, is sometimes recalled alongside “Fitzgerald” as when Queensland “came of age.” “After Fitzgerald” was also “After Expo.”

Some institutions have as their very mission to shape understanding of political memory. That is true of the National Archives Australia. Its eventually unsuccessful legal battle with Jenny Hocking over release of the Palace Letters is a reminder of how reliant we are on access to original documents if we are to undertake honest, well-informed appraisal of our political history.

The Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House also seeks to shape understandings of both the political past and the possibilities of our system. As democracy around the world and even sometimes at home has been subjected to assault in recent years, it has assumed a more active role in civics education.

Local institutions can also play a role. Ballarat has its Prime Ministers Avenue, an assembly of busts in that city’s Botanical Gardens. That golden city has long had a keen sense of its own national importance, representing itself through the Eureka uprising — a much mythologised political event in its own right — as the cradle of Australian democracy. The original commissioning, and funding, of Prime Ministers Avenue came from Richard Crouch, a local politician who had been both a federal Liberal and Labor parliamentarian. The city council provided money for a time, but there is now a philanthropist, a local resident, once again paying the bills, and possibly looking nervously at national opinion polls as I speak. The site has also seen protest: an environmental activist group installed CoalMo in May 2022 — in “honour” of Scott Morrison — during the election campaign, but he survived only a few hours.

Ballarat might remind us that collective memory is also collective forgetting. Eureka has a place in the stories Australians tell themselves about the evolution of their democracy. Yet, as Clare Wright has shown in The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (2014), women’s role had long been underestimated in an overwhelmingly blokey national legend. Nor is there collective memory of the demonstrations of Chinese diggers in the 1850s on the Victorian goldfields against discriminatory taxation, which enjoyed some success. We recall in mainstream history the sufferings and oppressions of the goldfields Chinese but not their brave and resourceful political resistance. That sits alongside our failure to appreciate the deep history of deliberative forms of decision-making among Australia’s Indigenous people as an integral part of this country’s democratic history. Perhaps voters might have been more willing to accept the Voice proposal at last year’s referendum if they had a warmer appreciation of those long-standing practices and traditions.

Forgetting can be facilitated by literal destruction, whether by design, greed or indifference. The Earlwood home in which John Howard grew up is now the site of a KFC restaurant, and the Bankstown fibro in which the young Paul Keating lived was demolished to build units. More recently, the Deakin holiday home, Ballara, in Point Lonsdale, has been subject to a campaign led by Deakin descendant, Tom Harley, against a decision by the relevant Victorian planning authority to allow its sale for subdivision. By way of contrast, the Chifleys’ modest home in Bathurst has been a house museum since the 1970s, and the Curtins’ home in Cottesloe, Perth, is available for short-stay accommodation. That hardly turns it into a national shrine, but it is better than a Zinger Burger with chips.

Perhaps we are getting a little better in these matters. A recent and successful campaign for state heritage listing of the building that housed Elsie Women’s Refuge, the country’s first, honours and preserves a site of great historical significance for Australian women and the feminist movement. Michelle Arrow in The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (2019) has shown how efforts such as this one exemplified the personal becoming the political; domestic violence and other matters excluded from the public sphere were drawn into everyday politics through feminist action. Elsie, a Glebe property occupied in 1974 by a group of Sydney feminists that included Ann Summers, Jennifer Dakers and Bessie Guthrie, is as much a site of political life as any parliamentary chamber or cabinet room.

Prime ministerial homes, too, have fared better in more recent times. The Morrison government provided funds for the purchase and preservation of the home Bob Hawke lived in as a child in Bordertown, South Australia: like Curtin’s home, it has become tourist accommodation. Recently, through a marvellous initiative led by former NSW premier Barrie Unsworth, some Labor people banded together to raise the million dollars needed to buy the former Whitlam family home at 32 Albert Street, Cabramatta. The Morrison government subsequently provided $1.3 million to support this effort. It is a lovely mid-twentieth-century modernist home that doubled as a de facto electorate office for the young but fast-rising western Sydney MP. And it was where the family, their friends and Labor supporters celebrated the party’s famous victory in the 1972 election. Just as the Chifley house museum works as a reminder of the lifestyle of the respectable provincial working class, the Whitlams’ place — designed by a local architect Roy Appleton — registers something of the continuing modesty of middle-class taste in the mid 1950s. It is now part of the Whitlam Institute within the Western Sydney University.

The phenomenon of the political memoir is beyond the scope of what I can say tonight, but my colleague Joshua Black has explored how memoirs and the wider context of media coverage, book tours and literary festivals have promoted particular understandings and images of Australian politics. The more successful of them, such as Bob Hawke’s and John Howard’s, have been widely read and the most sensational, such as Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson’s Whatever it Takes and Labor leader Mark Latham’s The Latham Diaries, have contributed to a wider cynicism. “Whatever it takes” has become a description of a certain way of doing politics, one most of us dislike.

Certain television documentaries have reinforced this image of politics. Labor in Power, with Richardson prominent among the interviewees, screened in 1993 and was arguably the most accomplished of them. It paid attention to personal rivalry as a dynamic of Labor’s time in federal office from 1983, but the wider story was a serious effort to transform the nation and the Labor Party along with it. The more recent documentaries, The Howard Years, The Killing Season and Nemesis, were each accomplished examples of documentary-making, but they presented Australian political history in a rather more sinister light. Personal ambition overshadowed policy agendas. In Nemesis, the camerawork — with its use of empty, semi-darkened rooms for the interviews — hinted at danger, as if even now someone might emerge from the shadows to stab a political rival in the back, like one of those final scenes that they used to include in James Bond films: the surprise attack from a character such as Nick Nack, the main villain’s sidekick, just when you think the drama over.

It was not always thus: through the 1970s and 1980s there was a boom in fictionalised accounts of Australian history in the form of live theatre, feature films and television mini-series. Fuelled by both the cultural nationalism of the era and tax laws that generously rewarded investors in film and TV, there were dozens of them. Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis’s play The Legend of King O’Malley had its premiere in 1970. Notable films also dealt with aspects of Australian politics with less levity, such as Phillip Noyce’s Newsfront (1978), but political history really found its genre in the multi-part television series. Any Australian viewing these programs would have received something like an extended course in national history, although possibly not one that would pass muster in a high school classroom or university lecture hall.

By the time True Believers, a 1988 drama about Australian politics, appeared on our screens, I was a nineteen-year old history student at the University of Melbourne and I found even the advertisements for the program so risible that I refused to watch it. I have done so more recently and must confess to having been entertained and informed, amid quite a few laugh-out loud moments.

True Believers is a melodrama, with a decided leftward slant, to put it mildly. The eight-part series begins with John Curtin on his deathbed and Ben Chifley present to accept the mantle — reluctantly, it is emphasised, since reluctance to set yourself apart from your mates is the Labor way and Chifley is the quintessential Labor bloke. What follows is a lot of old suits and hats, and generous applications of Brylcreem, with the occasional homely wife, sassy journalist or devoted secretary thrown into this very manly world. Chifley, played by Ed Devereaux of Skippy fame, is salt-of-the-earth, the kind of bloke everyone would want as their uncle, while Bert Evatt is brilliant, thrusting and unstable, child-like rather than villainous. An appropriately ruthless Bob Menzies — extravagantly eyebrowed — is not without sensitivity or principle, though neither can outdo his opportunism. Bob Santamaria, Catholic activist, is a zealot with mad eyes who seems more like a dangerous cult leader than the amiable fellow of later times enquiring of viewers “How do you do?” on his Sunday morning TV program Point of View.

True Believers was just one of many such programs. The Dismissal screened in 1983, when memory of the sacking of the Whitlam Government was still raw and Labor had just made it back into office. Indeed, the first episode was screened on 6 March 1983: the Sunday after Bob Hawke’s election victory. Labor-aligned lobbyist David Combe was annoyed when his new friend Valery Ivanov, the Soviet diplomat — and, unknown to Combe, a KGB agent — arrived at his Canberra home for a chat just as he was settling down to watch. If there was any sense of lineage between Whitlam and Hawke being evoked in the screening of The Dismissal at this time, the rightward course of the new Hawke government, which in the coming months grappled with the sensational Combe–Ivanov espionage affair, would soon dispel that impression. The Dismissal works as a story of grand ambitions, thwarted ideals and flawed visionaries, a story told against a background of relentless conservative bastardry and a governor-general who seems almost single-handedly to be propping up the nation’s whisky industry.

What was happening here was the rise to cultural power of the creatives who had first come into their own in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Whitlam generation. Mother was Britain, and young Australia needed to throw off her overbearing influence. But there was an older, bigger, more powerful and rather ruthless relative waiting in the wings. When Uncle Sam was not suspected of killing our best racehorses, as in Phar Lap, he was pulling us into immoral and unwinnable wars, as in Vietnam or else menacing our national soul, as in Newsfront.

If the left seemed to be winning the culture wars as each of these films and programs rolled off the assembly line and on to our screens, the environment of recent years has been rather more sharply contested. Oddly, a rather old-fashioned bearer of collective history has taken much of the brunt: the statue or monument. Some statues, including here in Sydney, have been vandalised or graffitied — although, unlike in Britain, none has yet been dumped in the sea. With the authorities’ approval, they have occasionally been moved, or removed, or they have been reinterpreted through new inscriptions.

Yet despite the movement against statues seen to be entangled in the brutal history of colonisation, they are also still being erected. In Victoria, a Kennett-era initiative designated the threshold for a Victorian premier to have a statue commissioned in their honour as 3000 days. The result has been a nice mix: the Country Party’s Albert Dunstan, the Liberals’ Henry Bolte and Rupert “Dick” Hamer, and Labor’s John Cain Junior were “in.” Daniel Andrews has also qualified, while Kennett did not.

In the ordinary course of events, most of us probably barely notice such statues. The first I remember taking any notice of was that of Tommy Bent. That’s what my parents called him. If you were driving through the genteel suburb of Brighton in Melbourne, Tommy was hard to miss at the busy intersection of Bay Street and the Nepean Highway. Tommy was a man connected in my mind with weekends and beaches. And my father always had some dad joke to share about him, which persistently involved old Tommy coming down to visit the loo.

The statue of Tommy — actually Sir Thomas Bent, premier of Victoria from 1904 until 1909, the year of his death — has been perched on a granite pedestal of twelve feet since 1913. The statue itself, accompanied by a small drinking fountain, is a further nine and a half feet tall. A press report of the dedication called it “an excellent likeness.” The commission, supported by public donations, went to a woman sculptor, Margaret Baskerville: the Melbourne Argus believed this was the first time in Australia that a woman had received such a commission.

Bent is a fine example of nominative determinism. Bent by name, bent by nature, is the accurate and telling subtitle of Margaret Glass’s 1993 biography. He’d have kept a whole team of ICAC investigators permanently employed, for he seamlessly combined the role of minister for railways and land boomer, relentlessly exploiting his political clout to enrich himself. Bent was so bent that he was accused even of deeds that he was unlikely to have committed — notoriously, the theft of the splendid Victorian parliamentary mace, which went missing in 1891: there were claims that it was later used in a pseudo-parliamentary ritual in a nearby brothel.

A married man, Bent did assault one of his many reputed girlfriends; the case mysteriously disappeared, settled out of court. Graeme Davison tells us that monumental history’s role is to celebrate, honour and commemorate, not to analyse or explain. It does not remember bruised women or fleeced investors. Statues do often lie; they proclaim the deeply flawed as flawless heroes, the slaver as a philanthropist, the crook and thug as the model of a self-made man.

It is easy to satirise this heroic tradition of statuary. A group of Ormond College students at Melbourne University in the 1980s did just that with a politician named George Ievers. Ievers was a minor local worthy who belonged to a family that included other minor local worthies, also honoured with statues. Once a year, the students faithfully made a pilgrimage to the Ievers monument in Royal Parade, listen to a speech by some distinguished person, and then returned to college for the George Ievers Dinner. Sadly, unlike the Ievers statues themselves, that tradition did not endure. Satire, like protest, is more fragile and ephemeral than men in stone. So are traditions.

It is possibly because stone endures that we so worry over it. Recent campaigns have sought better representation of women and women’s political activism. Melbourne has a monument commemorating the Monster Petition of 1891 with its 30,000 signatures calling for women’s suffrage. Designed by Susan Hewitt and Penelope Lee and commissioned for the centenary of Victorian women gaining the vote at the state level (1908–2008), it takes the form of a scroll that evokes the original petition held in the Public Record Office of Victoria. While that sculpture avoided drawing attention to any particular woman — an elision that perhaps speaks to the masculinist character of traditional statuary — an organisation calling itself A Monument of One’s Own has now successfully campaigned to have a statue of Zelda D’Aprano, the equal pay campaigner, represented by a life-size bronze outside Victorian Trades Hall.

In Sydney, Catherine Freyne, historian, and Julie Bates, sex worker activist, have led an effort to secure the return of Joy, a statue of a sex worker, to the City of Sydney. The Loui Fraser sculpture was briefly in Darlinghurst in the mid 1990s before being moved to Macquarie University after some objections from locals. Now, Joy may be on her way home, as a replica — Macquarie wants to keep the original. Here is a battle over politics and history: are sex workers’ rights and history to be acknowledged publicly, or to be tucked away safely on a campus in North Ryde?

In Canberra, sculptor Lis Johnson’s Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney — who both entered parliament in 1943 — were recently unveiled. The timing was poignant: Parliament House had been exposed as an unsafe place for women. Lyons and Tangney stand as a response to the Peter Corlett statue of Curtin and Chifley, making their way from the Hotel Kurrajong to (Old) Parliament House. They amble along like any other yarning mates, everymen in a society that likes to think itself laid-back and egalitarian. Corlett also sculpted Menzies, who walks alone by Lake Burley Griffin, evoking his party’s individualism. Adjacent to what is called Robert Menzies Walk, this statue, commissioned in 2012, makes a more explicit connection with the development of Canberra itself. (The lake was a product of the Menzies era.)

Since the 1990s, the Liberals have done more to address their party’s own history. Menzies’ “The Forgotten People” broadcast — his eloquent 1942 celebration of the middle class — now features regularly in a Liberal Party discourse that those concerned sometimes inflate into a “philosophy.” The words are, of course, no more a philosophy than Ben Chifley’s “Light on the Hill,” or the phrase “True Believers” — taken up in Labor circles in the wake of the television series, most famously by Paul Keating, triumphantly, on election night in 1993.

For the Labor-leaning, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke have acquired a kind of modern folk hero status alongside older heroes such as Curtin and Chifley and probably now overshadowing them. Whereas for Whitlam, collective memory once seemed bound tightly to the Dismissal, it has been different in the last decade or so. His death in 2014 became an occasion for reflection on the expansive possibilities — and achievements — of the Whitlam government when compared with the straightened politics of our own times. A popular “memory” of the Whitlam government is one in which he is seen as responsible for getting one a university education. Whether literally true or not, it functions as a certain kind of political memory, an intersection of ordinary people’s lives with the wider world of politics.

For Hawke, whose government reintroduced fees for tertiary education, collective remembrance is more centred on personality: the reformed larrikin who was said to have had a “love affair with the Australian people.” John Howard is probably as close as the right has to a modern folk hero comparable with these figures — that famous tracksuit of his remains evocative of a kind of affectionate dagginess. Others, such as Scott Morrison, have tried to win hearts as well as votes but failed.

Still, it is worth pausing over the way certain policies of the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Howard governments have come to do symbolic work of a kind surely anticipated at their inception. Whitlam’s abolition of university fees overshadows aspects of his government’s legislative achievement that he and his colleagues regarded as far more important at the time. Fraser has been reimagined, especially but not only in the Vietnamese community, as a friend of the refugee, not Big Bad Mal of the Dismissal, or “Kerr’s cur.” Medicare, an early Hawke-era achievement, and gun laws, the product of Howard’s first term, now epitomise Australians’ differentiation of themselves from Americans. These reforms have grown in stature as other reforms have shrunk, disappeared or — in the case of several once much-vaunted economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s — have become connected with contractions of social opportunity and widening inequalities.

We are also more conscious than a generation or two ago of Australia’s fair electoral administration, compulsory voting and preferential voting as points of difference with other countries. Democracy sausage, synonymous with peaceful, Saturday voting in community spaces as the citizen’s basic duty, now embodies a distinctive historical experience, even a national identity.

A modern Lindsay Norman with a commission to adorn Mount Rushless would have plenty to work with, but he would find himself on Country now well understood to have a deep history of First Nations place-making, politics and sovereignty. Modern political memory can only be layered in such ways, alive to both the inscriptions and erasures that still pervade our collective sense of Australia’s political history and heritage. •

The post Making their political mark appeared first on Inside Story.

While parts of the novel haven’t dated very well, The Abortion helpfully questions and reimagines the idea of what a library is, and what it could or should be.

Before I wrote a PhD on how library collections are being reimagined in an era of digital and social media, I worked in libraries for around a decade. I arrived at my PhD topic partly because I was fascinated by the anxiety I sensed among many library administrators and some of my colleagues about the library’s role in an age of online information.

When I started my first library job in the late 2000s, Google had recently become the most visited website in the world. Managers, abuzz with the liberatory promise of “Web 2.0” and “tech” in general, declared “we need to be more like Google!” I shuddered. “No,” I thought, “libraries need to be less like Google.” The future of the library, as a conceptual space and physical place, was wide open, it seemed.

What would it mean to operate a library of, and for, the internet? Many libraries have struggled with the transition to a digital information environment. They were established and gained legal protection during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a media landscape centred on a particular media artefact: the book. The word library comes from the Latin librarium meaning “book-case, chest for books.” When some tech boosters framed the popular uptake of digital technologies and the internet as marking the end of the book, they predicted the library’s days were numbered too.

Over the past thirty years, libraries have significantly amended their programming, collections and spaces to show their relevance in a “digital age.” In doing so, they have had to apply and adapt existing collecting frameworks to a context that operates on different principles and brings in a more diverse array of actors with different interests and intentions.

The British Library, for example, provides access only in its reading rooms to web pages it has preserved. What was accessible yesterday to anyone with an internet connection becomes today, in its archived form, accessible only within the walls of the library. Until our archaic legal deposit laws were changed in 2016, the National Library of Australia had to contact creators of websites to ask permission to collect their page, an enormously labour-intensive process. If the creator wasn’t forthcoming, the library couldn’t proceed. Who knows what we lost in the meantime?

If the internet does have a central library, it may well be the Internet Archive. Launched in 1996, the Archive comes from the same social and cultural milieu that produced Google and other tech behemoths, the San Francisco Bay Area (which was also where Brautigan established himself as a writer in the 1960s). Yet it operates on radically different principles. Instead of being “more like Google,” the organisation considers — and is creating — what a library of, and for, the internet would be.

The Archive’s innovations are considerable. It is constantly “crawling” the web, collecting content as it goes, and making it publicly available at a scale few libraries would fathom. Its Wayback Machine, which contains over 800 billion web pages, is the definitive record of the web’s past, with content dating back to the early web.

Like Brautigan’s library, the Archive’s collection development policy is voracious, collecting and providing access to all manner of born-digital and digitised content in line with its utopic mission to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.” In pursuit of its founder Brewster Kahle’s goal of building the Library of Alexandria anew, it has gathered and provides controlled access to millions of digitised books, audio recordings, videos and software programs.

The Internet Archive was “born digital.” It was also born Californian, in all its confidence and (sometimes) naivety about the liberatory power of technology. Through its operations, it has pushed the boundaries of what a library could or should be. As it faces lawsuits and cyber-attacks, the question is: has it pushed these boundaries to breaking point?

The past five years in particular have not been easy for the Archive. Reports have emerged since 2018 that it is being used by Islamic State, far-right groups and Covid-19 conspiracists to host extremist propaganda long after it has been taken down from other platforms. Unfettered openness to information has consequences.

Its critics are now disputing the idea that it is a library at all. Earlier this year a consortium of major publishers sued the Archive over its National Emergency Library, which saw the Archive suspend its online lending restrictions on 1.4 million digitised books during the COVID-19 pandemic. The publishers claim the Archive “badly misleads the public and boldly misappropriates the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.” The Archive, in their mind, is a “pirate site” branding “itself as a library.” In September, the US Court of Appeals upheld a ruling against the Archive, forcing it to reconsider the scope of its digital lending. Then, last month, the Archive was hit with a massive cyber-attack that took its services offline for days. Stabilising the site was a mammoth task.

Yet, in pushing the idea of the library, the Archive has become a key infrastructure that underpins so much of the contemporary information environment. Libraries and other collecting organisations around the world rely on its Archive-It service to curate their own web archives. Wikipedia has an “InternetArchiveBot” that finds broken citations in Wikipedia articles and replaces them with links to the Wayback Machine. The Archive builds software and expertise that underpins and sustains web archives globally. It runs an interlibrary loan system, lending out-of-print and rare works to library users around the world. It is cultural infrastructure for a digital age.

The thing with infrastructure is that you often don’t notice it until things go wrong. As sociologist of science Susan Star writes, infrastructure “becomes visible upon breakdown.” Things sitting in the background — the mundane, the ordinary — become taken for granted, and our reliance on them becomes starkly apparent only when they are no longer there. We had a glimpse of this when the Archive was taken offline last month, and the lawsuits from major publishers continue to threaten its very future.

The Internet Archive takes risks that few libraries would dare contemplate. Sometimes those risks have negative consequences. But it takes those risks on behalf of all libraries and their users. It needs our support. •

The post What is a library? appeared first on Inside Story.

It is usually a one-way street. In the decades since 1945, Billy McMahon is the only foreign minister who has gone on to win the prime ministership. Doc Evatt became Labor’s opposition leader but failed to enter the Lodge. Of the others, the more intellectually prepossessing — Dick Casey, Paul Hasluck, Bill Hayden — were appointed governor-general. Others — Gordon Freeth, Alexander Downer, Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd — were given a good ambassadorship.

Then there is Australia’s recent succession of female foreign ministers. The first two — Julie Bishop and Marise Payne — battled to get heard in cabinet, in part because of the blokey mansplaining that pervades Australian politics (as much else).

Bishop has said that colleagues started looking at their phones when she began speaking, and then sometimes repeated her idea as if they had thought of it themselves. She was forced to diminish her department by dissolving AusAid and absorbing its remaining staff, though she did get the New Colombo Plan started.

Marise Payne was too factionally moderate to hold much clout with her prime minister, Scott Morrison. She had a hawkish adviser inserted into her staff to ride shotgun, and then that ex-robodebt enforcer, civil servant cum Army Reserve general Kathryn Campbell installed as her department secretary despite possessing little foreign experience.

But Wong is different.

On moving from Sabah to Adelaide as an eight-year-old with an Australian mother whose marriage to a Malaysian architect had broken up, she won a scholarship to a top private school. She excelled at studies and debating then took a good law degree, advocated for a trade union, and from 2001 gained and held a seat in the Senate, elbowing aside senior colleagues on three occasions to get a winning place on the ticket.

She aligned herself with Anthony Albanese’s powerful left faction and was instrumental in his selection as Labor leader after Bill Shorten’s defeat at the 2019 election. When Labor won office in May 2022 she was given her pick, foreign affairs, but retained a second role as government leader in the Senate that kept her across most policy areas. Coming into government with authority, she immediately had Campbell replaced as her department secretary.

Unusually for a foreign minister, her next moves on foreign policy could conceivably turn the 2025 election, which is widely predicted to result in narrow margins and enhanced power for crossbenchers.

After the atrocious Hamas break-out from Gaza and the harsh Israeli military response, Labor has come under intensifying pressure to recognise a Palestinian state. The young Western Australian senator Fatima Payman quit Labor over the issue. Muslim voters in hitherto secure Labor seats have threatened to run separate candidates. The NSW Labor machine worries that more seats will opt for a locally based candidate, echoing the election of independent Dai Le in Fowler in 2022 after the party complacently parachuted former state premier and senator Kristina Kenneally in from her northern beaches home.

In a wide-ranging speech at ANU’s National Security College in April, Wong said the international community was “now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution.” Norway, Ireland and Spain had recently recognised Palestine, and reports suggested Britain’s then foreign secretary, David Cameron, was considering following their lead.

Speculation intensified that Australia might follow suit, possibly alongside Canada and other allies. Wong depicted recognition, and a reformed Palestinian Authority, as the way to rob Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran of their cause and ultimately help secure Israel. Recognition would come at the start, not the end, of serious negotiations.

Having flown that kite, Wong and the government have hung back in public, focusing on immediate goals: ceasefires, release of hostages, aid to civilians. But intense work on recognition continues behind the scenes in consultation with other governments.

Labor’s former foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr urges the Albanese government to move quickly. “It would be a major failing of the government if it goes to the next election and it hasn’t recognised Palestine,” he tells me. “If they face minority government it would be an indigestible piece of unfinished business. If they move then it will look like they’re only doing it to get support from the crossbenches. It will look like the election result forced them to do it.”

If she agrees with that timetable, Wong hasn’t been able to convince her cabinet colleagues. On one hand, the government has come under fire from the Israel lobby and an almost unprecedented campaign by the Australian for “betraying Israel” and failing to protect Jews from antisemitism. On the other, Wong was heckled off the stage last week and accused of condoning genocide by pro-Palestinian protesters during a speech at the University of Tasmania.

That must have felt doubly unfair. Getting deeply involved in the Middle East snake-pit was never part of the agenda Wong set herself as foreign minister. In her six years as shadow foreign minister she’d had long talks with one of her Labor predecessors, Gareth Evans, with eminent former foreign policy and defence officials Hugh White, the late Allan Gyngell and Michael Fullilove, and with ANU economist Peter Drysdale and other academic specialists.

They instilled a deep appreciation of Labor’s post-Vietnam tradition of “security in Asia, not security from Asia,” active engagement with the region without a constant desire for American approval, and an emphasis on diplomacy rather than a defence–security approach. For much of this time her staff included a persuasive exponent of that viewpoint, the former senior defence official and Indonesianist Allan Behm.

Wong started work with an emphasis on the “centrality” of the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, making Indonesia her first destination and then visiting each of the other member states save for the junta-ruled Myanmar. Steadily she clocked up visits to all the members of the Pacific Islands Forum. Her aim was to re-engage on more respectful, less prescriptive terms than the previous government.

“She had a lot of mopping up to do,” says Janelle Saffin, a former Labor federal MP now in the NSW parliament who has deep connections in Myanmar, Timor-Leste and other parts of the region. Wong’s ethnicity undoubtedly helped, especially in Southeast Asia.

No problem more urgently needed attention than relations with China, which had been put into a deep freeze under Malcom Turnbull and Morrison. Ministerial visits had stopped, and China had blocked about $20 billion worth of annual Australian exports. Wong laid down a goal of “stabilising” the relationship, a term used again and again.

“When the Coalition was in power it was like every backbencher would talk about China — everyone chipped in,” says an insider who watched the transition. “When the Labor government came in, only very senior ministers were authorised to talk about China. The message was super-disciplined.”

The shift steadily yielded dividends for Wong and trade minister Don Farrell, another South Australian senator, helped perhaps by a growing realisation among China’s leaders that their punishment had failed to do anything but make unnecessary enemies. For them, Labor’s arrival was a convenient off-ramp.

Beyond “mopping up” and stabilising, though, Wong’s efforts to widen and deepen Australia’s interests in Asia have had limited success. She commissioned former Macquarie Bank chief Nicholas Moore to investigate why Australia’s investment in Southeast Asia was lagging that of Canada, the United States and other comparable economies, but big companies and banks don’t seem to have rushed to follow up his recommendations. She asked former Victorian premier Steve Bracks to come up with a plan for the long-stalled Greater Sunrise gas project shared with Timor-Leste; a year later, the deadlock remains. Indonesian-language studies continue to dwindle in schools and universities. An offer from Jakarta for teacher exchanges has not been taken up.

Meanwhile, media coverage of Southeast Asia has shrunk, most recently with the shuttering of the Australian Financial Review’s Jakarta bureau ­— once sustained by the Judith Nielson Institute — despite the looming presidency of the notorious Prabowo Subianto.

To be fair, these are all long-term trends, and they will take sustained effort by many arms of government to turn around.

What Wong has won is an expansion in her department’s total budget, from $7.68 billion in the Coalition’s 2022–23 budget to $8.93 billion in the current 2024–25 year, with staff numbers growing from 6475 to 6949. But Behm says it would take an extra $3 billion to restore the real spending power of the aid program alone to where it was before the Coalition took power in 2014. With many understaffed posts, Australia’s diplomatic footprint remains quite thin. The defence budget, by contrast, rose by $7.4 billion to $55.7 billion over the same years.

Behm, who is now at the Australia Institute, thinks Wong and her department are battling to prevail against the views of the Office of National Intelligence, or ONI — still led by Andrew Shearer, who was described by Labor as “too partisan” when he was appointed by Scott Morrison but nevertheless retained by Albanese — and of the China-hawkish wing of the defence establishment, echoed by defence minister Richard Marles.

“Senator Wong knows that the so-called China threat is over-played,” says Behm, whose recent book The Odd Couple argues that a US retreat is a more pressing risk to the rules-based order. “China generates lots of risk, but the idea that it’s threatening invasion is farfetched. Yet she finds it very difficult to hose down that narrative. My feeling is not that Penny is captured by ONI and the right, it is that she hasn’t got enough support in the cabinet to push back hard enough against them.”

Albanese’s focus on the factional demands of federal caucus adds to the problem, says Behm. “He’s a good bloke to deal with, but way too cautious and not quick enough on his feet: you can feel that from his language. Put those things together, too much caution and too little agility, it’s pretty hard for somebody who is brainy and agile, like Penny, to get much cut-through.”

What the defence–intelligence combine is pushing is counter to the foreign policy Wong spelt out at the ANU National Security College. Hers is a policy that is active, exercises agency and contributes to “the balance of power in our region — so no country dominates, and no country is dominated.” Her aim is “a region free of hegemony. A region in balance. Where countries, large and small, have the freedom to decide our own futures. Where we operate by the same rules, and we have space to agree and to disagree.” She paid tribute in the speech to America’s “leadership” rather than its power.

This dichotomy in Australia’s strategic policy was picked up recently by former departmental secretary and top intelligence official Peter Varghese. “On the one hand, our foreign policy embraces a multipolar future where no country dominates,” he told Melbourne University’s Asialink. “Our defence policy, on the other hand, quietly conflates US leadership and US primacy, and is increasingly fixed around doing what we can to ensure the retention of US strategic primacy.”

Yes, Chinese hegemony has to be opposed, “but constructing a stable China-constraining balance does not turn on the retention of US primacy, although it certainly requires the US to be a keystone of that balance,” he said, adding: “Or to put it another way, the loss of US primacy may be regrettable, but it does not pose an existential threat to Australia. To assume it does is to handcuff ourselves to whatever the US decides it must do to retain its primacy. Those strategies may make sense for the US, but they might not always be in Australia’s national interest.”

No aspect of this defence push has been more contentious than the tripartite AUKUS agreement that Morrison sprung on Albanese some twelve hours before he announced it in a videolink with US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Boris Johnson. The pact has since been hammered by a host of Labor eminences, including Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Bill Kelty and Bob Carr, as well as by Melbourne University’s Ross Garnaut, Sydney University’s James Curran, the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen and other strategic thinkers.

These critics see the pact abandoning the post-Vietnam “defence of Australia” principle in favour of the old “forward defence” model of helping big allies counter distant threats. If American nuclear submarines are spared for Australia’s navy, they say, it will be on the understanding that they operate as part of the US Navy, against China if required. As for the future British–Australian submarine, it may never happen, say defence technology experts like Derek Woolner, given that British shipbuilders have other priorities.

As well as a loss of sovereignty, critics see other downsides. “We have not only withdrawn from confident interaction with China, but from deep interaction with other Asian and Pacific countries as well,” Garnaut said at a recent Australian Academy of Sciences forum on AUKUS, adding: “We have drawn closer to US defence and strategic policy, which has had positive elements, but has also contributed to reduced intensity of interaction with our closer neighbours. Some strands of support for AUKUS can be seen as a contemporary reflection of yearning for security in the old and familiar [in] a changing world.”

While Wong herself is appreciated in Asia, says Behm, “they can’t work us out. My contacts in Malaysia and Indonesia are telling me they are very puzzled by us. They can’t see why we are welding ourselves even more to the declining ascendancy of the United States,” and still more to a wider Anglophone embrace including Britain. Curran, who is also the Australian Financial Review’s international editor, recounts the remark of a French official: “I can understand why you went back to Uncle Sam, but I cannot understand why you have gone back to Mummy.”

This is a fence Wong has had to sit on. But she has managed to make some gains against those who see everything through a military prism.

In June, she led a ministerial team to Papua New Guinea with attorney-general Mark Dreyfus and then home minister Clare O’Neill. The focus was on domestic security, programs to build up the capacity of PNG’s police and judicial system, and human development. Marles, and worries about the Chinese, were conspicuously absent.

Albanese was also persuaded to have Varghese review government funding for security and foreign policy think tanks. Seen by Canberra hawks as an effort to “get ASPI” — the government- and defence industry–funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute that has been hearing the same “drums of war” detected by disgraced home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo — Varghese’s report is imminent. While it is not expected to recommend cutting ASPI’s funding, it is likely to suggest its leadership be appointed by an independent panel rather than the defence minister.

But the AUKUS agreement remains. What happened inside the meeting of Albanese and senior frontbenchers when Morrison sprung the AUKUS plan is known to few. One source close to Wong tells me that Albanese mainly focused on avoiding a “wedge” on national security, a field traditionally seen as a Coalition strength. Wong favoured holding back, suggesting a response along the lines of: well, this is an entertaining idea; we’ll look at it when we’re elected. “But they didn’t want to look at it,” this source said. “They didn’t want a continuing fight in the first six months of their government, and to be left with the original bloody albatross, reeking, around their necks.”

If this version is true, there must now be regret that Wong’s idea was not taken up, or that the AUKUS plan wasn’t scrutinised rigorously once Labor took office. It has still not been explained fully and justified, either to parliament or the public. The conditions Albanese sought for his assent — that the submarines would not be nuclear-armed, that non-proliferation would be upheld, and that no onshore nuclear reactors were required — pale beside the ongoing criticisms.

And Morrison was in a weaker position than they knew. He had assured Biden he had bipartisan agreement. Had Labor demurred, the announcement might well have been postponed. “It was a gamble on Morrison’s part,” said one retired senior foreign policy official. “Albo could have said: we can’t answer by 7am tomorrow. If you’ve told Biden otherwise you have to tell him we’re still thinking about it. Maybe Morrison could not have gone ahead.”

Inevitably, word would have got out and French president Emmanuel Macron might have found a way to scupper the project. America’s respect for France, a power in Africa and the Middle East as well in Europe, is often underestimated in Canberra. While Morrison might have had wedge possibilities in mind, he and his tight circle may also have considered an ambush the best way to get Labor across the line, avoiding a Labor backlash engulfing Albanese if assent was delayed.

For Wong, Albanese’s embrace of AUKUS and his obvious enjoyment of mixing with American, British and allied leaders — as well as a seeming tin ear for patronising statements like being “left the lane” for police development in the Pacific by US official Kurt Campbell — must rub uneasily against her personal loyalty. “Loyalty to him as a factional chief blocks out a left-wing instinct to challenge a federal Labor government on these security issues,” said one Labor figure. “None of his career prepared him for being prime minister.”

But that’s Albanese, “a political operator rather than a visionary,” as Curran puts it, whose “inability to persuade and sustain arguments is beginning to show.” Having appointed an international ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed, Wong would have been particularly struck by the PM’s failure in last year’s Voice referendum.

Being foreign minister may be the apex goal she has set for her political career. Going further, if she desired it, would require a switch to the lower house, which her factional position would make possible. She may be respected rather than liked: her biographer Margaret Simons reports epithets including clever, aggressive, ruthless, emotional, hard-working, chip-on-shoulder, sensitive on race and gender, different, smart, having integrity, a control-freak and scary. But a lot of that is in the make-up of many leaders.

Some of her mentors sense she has been downcast in recent months, with “the fight gone out of her” as one put it, and unusually quiet, as another said. Simons reported that she was thinking of leaving politics after the 2019 election defeat. With two daughters getting towards high school, she must be drawn more to home and family as well. If Labor, and Australia to her way of thinking, suffers the ignominy of a Peter Dutton win next year or goes into even more timorous stasis, she will no doubt think again.

But another term would allow her to pursue her ideas for deeper engagement in the region, to look beyond “stabilisation” and maybe pick up on opportunities for a major diplomatic exercise, as Gareth Evans did with Cambodia. The setbacks for the Burmese military and the hedging of support by China and India suggest one such possibility, perhaps by persuading Indonesia’s Prabowo to have a hard general-to-general talk with the junta’s Min Aung Hlaing.

Should Donald Trump become president again, she would be in the thick of regional efforts to save free trade, international law and alliances. For a time at least, this side of the Pacific would be like Byzantium keeping the faith after the Goths and Vandals invaded Rome and Western Europe.

On balance, as Simons found, she seems likely to be one for “staying in the room.” •

The post Staying in the room appeared first on Inside Story.

Did Hawke really swim in University House’s moat? Day’s book includes a three-page piece of micro-history that tries to understand the incident and related behaviour of a group of partying postgraduates on Sunday night and early Monday morning of 25–26 February 1957. It is the latest, and one of the best, accounts.

In 1957 both the university and its premier hall of residence were still developing, the former distinctive in that only postgraduates attended and the latter modelled on Oxbridge traditions and design. University House took itself seriously; Latin grace was said before dinner in hall (or as Day put it in one of his few slips, Latin mass).

The university, furious and fearing scandal, was initially divided on how to respond to the incident. Reports of heated verbal exchanges with alarmed female students, several senior academics and one or more Anglican bishops staying at University House at the time added spice to subsequent tellings. An investigation was conducted, the main participants disciplined and ringleader Hawke banned from the House, fined and forced to resign as one of the University Council’s student representatives. Abject apologies and the protection of his doctoral supervisor professor Geoffrey Sawer helped prevent expulsion. What did get out was a story starring Hawke, quickly adding to his reputation as an irreverent, hard-drinking good bloke, sporty and brainy but not a snooty intellectual.

If we add the fact that Hawke’s young wife Hazel was at home with a five-weeks-old daughter, this incident alone could encapsulate the character of the future prime minister. Though already twenty-eight, a former Rhodes scholar and current doctoral student, his “work hard, play hard” tendencies were well developed. He could be an aggressive drunk and enough corroborating recollections exist to suggest that some female postgraduates felt unsafe that night. Sawer recalled that Hawke tried to climb over the transom above one student’s door.

The Duke of Wellington famously compared the history of a battle with that of a ball — difficult for any one participant to fully comprehend or recall the sequence. More than two dozen academics, students, guests and fellows of University House were in various ways involved that Sunday evening and in the hours after midnight. They interacted for more than four hours on several floors, in corridors, stairwells, rooms and terraces. The complete detail would elude us even if we conjured H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and The Time Traveller and gave them an iPhone and a map showing the enclosed quadrangle, students’ and fellows’ rooms and the shallow, elongated ornamental pool.

Down the years, historians and biographers have tried to recreate the who, what and when of that night, to pin down, following von Ranke, “how it really was.” Jill Waterhouse’s official history of University House (2004) and biographies such as Day’s draw on decades-old student recollections, not the most reliable kind of evidence. Hawke himself must have been able to recall — more or less — his own part in the revelry; he was known rarely to suffer hangovers, though when interviewed by the official disciplinary committee the next day, several times said he could not recall. Whatever he told Hazel the next day, in her 1992 Autobiography she dutifully repeated he had “jumped into the lily pond.”

Subsequent biographers including John Hurst (1979), Blanche d’Alpuget (1982) and Troy Bramston (2022) benefited from interviewing him, and each referred to the legend that he swam in the pool, Bramston then refuting it and d’Alpuget stating outright that he did. Hawke’s own memoir (1994), running to 600 pages, dealt with his ANU years in a paragraph and ignored University House.

Both the university and University House came to relish and embellish the riper accounts, especially as Hawke’s fame grew. In an essay titled “The File on H” (2012) I quoted a former House master, Ralph Elliott, making light of it all:

You probably all know by now the story of Bob Hawke’s adventure in the gold fish pond… Early in 1957,… a conference of Anglican bishops resided in University House. During the night a noisy, somewhat inebriated group of students stripped naked before the Episcopal eyes and proceeded to swim up and down the length of our precious waterway. Legend has it that the chief culprit in this escapade was that future prime minister of Australia, Robert Hawke. He was certainly a happy participant.

On visits to ANU, Hawke himself joined in. In his commencement address in 2010 he skirted around the details. While urging students “to drink hard,” he recounted that “a few of us” had been “exuberant” that night, and when they were confronted by a professor and some of his religious friends whose “life experience” needed enhancing it was suggested, “playfully of course,” they might have a “dip in the pool… assisted by us.” A decade later, an item on famous alumni in ANU Observer repeated the key “infamous” details, noted they were frequently disputed and shrouded in mystery, but added (wrongly) that the University House historian confirmed them.

So, the “archival truth”? An ad hoc disciplinary committee convened by no less than the vice-chancellor met on the day after the incident and reconvened two and a half weeks later. With Sir Leslie Melville were the heads of the four research schools, professors Mark Oliphant, Oskar Spate, Geoffrey Sawer and Hugh Ennor, minute-takers led by the registrar and, by invitation, two eyewitnesses to some of the shifting drama, temporary University House resident professor Leicester Webb and House fellow and permanent resident Dr Bill Stanner. They were judge, jury and executioner.

Hawke was the first of fourteen students summoned. The minutes show the vice-chancellor explaining their procedures to him before going straight to the point: was he the swimmer? Instant denial followed. (“Did not go in pool — think only 1 went in” the minutes summarised.) The likelihood of the minute-taker mishearing, or of Hawke lying despite knowing the committee was cross-checking stories with other participants, is remote. As the student interviews continued, the committee kept questioning accounts until it was certain of the identity of the swimmer, J.M. Roderick. University House historian Jill Waterhouse got it right, and so did David Day.

Some stories grip from the beginning and can barely be moved; they morph but are never decisively demolished. As the saying goes, it is easier to slay a dragon than kill a myth. Even writers citing accounts refuting “Hawke in the pool” go on to repeat the opposite. Evans, quoted above, somehow misunderstood Day’s research, as did journalist Mike Welsh when he quoted Waterhouse to suggest the opposite of what she intended.

More puzzling still is the National Archives of Australia’s 2021 guide to sources on Hawke compiled by archivist Paul Dalgleish and Hawke biographer Troy Bramston. Having referenced the disciplinary committee minutes held by the ANU Archives and cited a guide to prime ministerial archives held by the ANU that discussed the pool incident in detail, Bramston bafflingly stated: “In February 1957, Hawke and other students drank to excess and, among other disruptive revelry, decided to take their clothes off and swim in a goldfish pond at University House.” No, not really.

Not that it changes anything, but we might end by noting, first, that all along, almost certainly, Hawke knew the truth. For a research paper on the ANU’s halls of residence, Ian Walker contacted the then University House master, professor John Richards. “I ran into Bob Hawke in Boffins last night,” Richards emailed Walker on 3 February 2011 — Boffins being the University House restaurant — adding “He confirmed he was ‘the encourager’ and not ‘the swimmer’.”

Finally, our 1957 story has an uncanny precursor. Last year Cameron Coventry published the wonderfully titled “Sedimentary Layers: Bob Hawke’s Beer World Record and Ocker Chic.” There he summarised his research into the drinking feat and its long afterlife thus:

The quoin stone of Hawke’s larrikinism was a world record for the fastest consumption of a yard glass of ale (2½ pints/1.4 litres) when he was an Oxford undergraduate in the 1950s, a record still much admired seven decades later. However, the record is apocryphal: its location and time remain uncertain; there are no known witnesses; the field of competition was exclusive and with no scientific accountability; the record was first published in a beer pamphlet; and Hawke’s recollections were unreliable.

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Strung out over 200 kilometres in the middle of Queensland, the three towns are all history hotspots, and all three trade on the fact. Barcaldine’s big selling point is of course the Tree of Knowledge (now reduced, sadly, to the Stump of Knowledge) under which the Australian Labor Party is said to have been born. Longreach claims to be the birthplace of Qantas (known then as Queensland and Northern Territory Air Services) and has the Qantas Founders Museum in support; it is also home to that figure of legend, the Australian Stockman. Winton has Banjo Paterson and the composition of Waltzing Matilda, along with a counter-claim for Qantas. The three towns share the great shearers’ strikes of the early 1890s and associated drama, including the troops sent up from Brisbane to protect the scabs and defend the squatters (“Up came the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred/Down came the troopers one, two, three”).

Longreach does best at monetising (as the heirs to the squatters would say) this history. The Qantas Founders Museums offers Business, First and Captain’s Club tour packages for $99, $150 and $230 respectively; simple entry to the museum itself comes at $39. The Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame, boasting more than a million visitors since opening in 1988, does at least as well. The galleries-only option (each of ten galleries depicting “an important aspect of our pioneering history”) is only $40; the Stockman’s Experience Package covers the lot: galleries; a “fully immersive Cinematic Experience” that lets viewers “get in touch with the essence of the Australian stockman”; and the Show (actual sheep, dogs, horses, stockmen). It is $99, or $270 for two adults and two kids.

Longreach is bigger than Barcaldine and Winton combined and its two grand institutions tower over the region’s history industry. A total of 140-odd monuments, memorials, museums and the like range from The Drovers, a group of life-sized figures on Longreach’s main street, to Barcaldine’s 125th Anniversary of the Great Shearers’ Strikes monument to the Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton.

This ubiquitous public history is, however, less than comprehensive and very much less than candid. With the partial exception of the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame, on which more in a moment, none of those 140-odd markers records or even acknowledges, except in the most oblique way, that that there was a world before “settlement” or that it was swept away in the 1860s and 1870s when “explorers” and “pioneers” roamed around and across the country looking for “good land”; that the Queensland frontier was moving west at an estimated 300-plus kilometres a year; that this extraordinary movement was made possible by the efforts of the notorious Queensland Native Police and the “Queensland method” (pre-emptive eradication and intimidation as well as the more familiar reprisals); that these efforts were routinely supported and supplemented by squatters and station workers; that two of the many hundreds of massacres (the deliberate killing of five or more non-combatants) committed in Queensland were in the region, one of them, the infamous Skull Hole Massacre of 1870 costing 200 Aboriginal lives.

The sole exception to the rule — or partial exception — is the Stockman’s Hall of Fame. Its Songlines & Stock Routes Gallery deals with “the ways in which the adoption of Indigenous pathways into the present-day stock route system have most likely occurred,” thereby “grounding” its storytelling “in deep-time, linking the past to the present, and paying respect to Australia’s First Peoples.” Particularly notable is an account of the role of Aboriginal stockwomen in the pastoral industry “as told by Koa stockwoman, mother and Doctor of Philosophy” Tauri Simone.

But “Songlines & Stock Routes” is only one of ten galleries, scarcely proportionate to the realities of the pastoral industry. There is no indication of how the world of songlines was replaced by the social order of the stock route. Nor in this peak institution of memory in a region strongly identified with the pastoral industry and its industrial history is there any mention of two historic industrial actions by stockmen, the longest-ever Australian strike (in the Pilbara, 1946–49), and the Wave Hill walk-off (1966). Might that be because the strikers weren’t just “stockmen” as stockmen are assumed to be in the Stockman’s Hall of Fame? The strikers were Aboriginal stockmen.

Even the historian often accused of propagating rather than documenting the Australian Legend does better than this. Writing sixty-odd years ago, just as the great Australian silence was beginning to crack, Russel Ward insisted that the typical Australian bush-worker was no “noble being sans peur et sands reproche” — he was, among other things, “callously brutal to the Aborigines to whom he owed so much of his knowledge of the country,” and an habitual abuser of Aboriginal women.

If a “detailed analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum and related social and political attitudes” is to be believed, truth-telling will be a lay down misère. The referendum vote, this ANU study finds, “did not signal a lack of support for reconciliation, for the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders having a say in matters that affect them, for truth-telling processes, or for a lack of pride in First Nations cultures”; in fact “all of these notions were supported by around eight-in-ten Australians, or even more.” The “vast majority,” we are assured, “think that the federal government should help reconciliation and roughly the same number (80.5 per cent) think that Australia should undertake formal truth-telling processes to acknowledge the reality of Australia’s shared history” (emphasis added).

In which case, what to make of the public history of Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton — a total of 140 installations in three history-conscious towns, many installed during the past three or four decades of noisy recovery of “the reality of Australia’s shared history,” none of which, with a single and partial exception, make any reference to those recovered stories?

And what to make of the fact that Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton are by no means chalk to Australia’s cheese? Australia now has something like 41,000 monuments, plaques, memorials and the like, many of them (as in Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton) installed over the decades of intense “truth-telling” by thousands of Aboriginal people in evidence to royal commissions, commissions of inquiry, courts of law and land claim hearings as well as in biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, these many tellings backed up by the work of hundreds of historians — and yet only a handful of our 41,000 markers of memory refer to Indigenous place, people or events, with only a fraction of that handful referring to conflict between black and white, of which a yet-smaller fraction refer to the long history of violent conflict?

As the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner put it when he named the great Australian silence, “inattention on such scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness.” But what can it be explained by? There are some clues in the Voice vote and in the ANU study. Voters who opposed the Voice were more likely to be older men, to have “low levels of education,” to live in low-income households and to live outside the capital cities. They voted No, they told the survey, because “they didn’t want division” and because they “remain sceptical” of rights for some Australians that are not held by others. In other words, many No voters didn’t and don’t understand who the Aboriginal peoples are or the history that produced them. That at least some of these voters would accept “formal truth-telling processes” is no real surprise. Truth-telling processes in some distant place have come and gone; why worry about another one?

But this is speculation. Whatever the reasoning, the fact remains that decades of truth-telling have had little or no impact at all in an entire realm of story-telling and history production. What is the point of more truth-telling? It’s not more telling that we need. It’s more listening, learning, thinking, discussing and acting upon. We can hope that those “formal truth-telling processes” now under way in several capital cities will deliver long-denied reparations and treaties, which would be no small thing, but as vehicles of a substantial shift in our default view of ourselves and our story they will be water off the proverbial duck’s back.

What would or might work? Certainly not telling the recalcitrants that this time they “must listen to the historical truths told by First Nations people” as two academics recently demanded. In my book Telling Tennant’s Story I suggested a national project to encourage and support towns and communities to work with Indigenous people and local and professional historians to audit the public telling of their story and decide whether and how it might be more fully and truthfully told. Such grassroots work would not be an alternative to revamping peak institutions such as the Australian War Memorial (now entrusted to that amiable temporiser Kim Beazley); it would be a crucial complement to it.

That idea still seems to be worth considering, but with Longreach, Barcaldine and Winton freshly in mind, here are some suggestions about rules of engagement.

First: remember that the story is not simply or only one of violence, conflict and destruction, although it certainly includes all of those. Somewhere in the vicinity of even the worst moments will almost always be found white support, kindness, even resistance to what was being done to the Aboriginal peoples. Don’t demonise.

But don’t sentimentalise either, as Stanner reminded his comrade-in-arms Nugget Coombs. Those brutal killers of the Queensland Native Police (for example) were Aboriginal men, coopted, often coerced, always led, paid and supplied by the Europeans and their government, engaged to kill those who were to them “foreigners,” but brutal killers of tens of thousands of people nonetheless.

Third rule: don’t diminish the Man from Snowy River and its myriad equivalents, but do as Russell Ward did, in his time and in his way: expand and complicate the story, and distinguish between mythology and history.

Fourth: no holier-than-thou history! No enlightened present condescending (as E.P. Thomson put it) to the benighted past — a certain route to the misrepresentation of both.

And perhaps most important of all: listen to anyone who wants to have a say about the story and its telling. An honourable exception to the rule of public history: graffiti on the back of the dunny door at Attack Creek in the Northern Territory, contesting the whitefellas’ version, given on a nearby monument, of that celebrated moment in 1860 when John McDouall Stuart’s epic trek across the continent was stopped by “hostile natives.”

All this is work for a Makaratta Commission — in fact it’s hard to see it being done otherwise — and it’s important work. Public history comes from the past; it is the past’s preferred version of itself. But it is active in the present; it is the history curriculum of everyday life. What will it teach? Answering that question comes with added benefits: it could generate listening, thinking and learning in ways that mere telling cannot hope to match.

It comes also with an opportunity to remind the Albanese government that John Howard’s setting of the “practical” against the “symbolic” was disingenuous and self-serving, and so is Labor’s recent toying with Howard’s device. The symbolic matters even when it’s not “practical” (note the effort Howard put into it!), but often it’s practical as well. How could a sea-change in public history not change how First Nations people are seen and see themselves and those around them? And how could that not be “practical” — and we should add, “practical” for our sense of ourselves too?

It would not be a small undertaking, of course. It would big, long and expensive. What might it cost? Perhaps the bidding could start at the half a billion spent on extensions at the Australian War Memorial? Better: why not aim at the total spent by Howard and subsequent Coalition governments on public history installations telling the story we’d already heard over and over again? •

The post Monumental silence appeared first on Inside Story.

In the first half of the twentieth century, white folk from the economically depressed regions of the United States, especially Appalachia and the South; Black folk from the South and east-coast cities where wages were low and jobs hard for Blacks to get; Poles, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Germans, and people from the Middle East and the countries of Central America — all were drawn to Detroit by the unstoppable car industry and the promise of five dollars a day. Now a little over half a million people live in a city which in 1960 was home to 1.8 million, the fourth-biggest city in the United States. And 82 per cent of the population is now Black.

Detroit gave America millions of T-Model and A-Model Fords. It gave the world the methods of mass industrial production known as Fordism by which the cars were made. Fordism owed something to the scientific management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, something to the disassembling of cattle on the meat-processing chains of Chicago slaughterhouses, and something to the ruthless genius of Henry Ford. The assembly line did more than produce goods efficiently: it changed common human experience, the relationship between human beings and machines; between the mind and the body, Jean-Paul Sartre said, and Charlie Chaplin demonstrated it on film.

Fordism was more than the assembly line. Inspectors from Ford’s “Sociological Department” routinely visited employees’ home to make sure they were meeting company standards of cleanliness and sobriety and living the “American lifestyle,” which was to say the essentially petit-bourgeois ideal of “normal” nuclear families and regular churchgoing. Henry Ford believed in a melting pot of cultures from which standardised Americans would emerge like his standardised cars.

In pursuit of this ideal in the thirties he offered something like a corporate alternative to Roosevelt’s New Deal — which he hated. He provided low-cost food, low-interest loans for houses and home improvements, and he built schools. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote that the dependence created by these measures fostered in turn the discipline and compliance workers needed to withstand the pressures of sped-up production lines. The process by which the capitalist ruling class gained the “consent” of labour, and society more broadly, he called hegemony. Forty years later the “invisible power” that ruled minds and bodies became a central concept among New Left theorists, and in fragments, a trope of spaced-out hippies.

“Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913,” Jeffrey Eugenides said in his novel set in Detroit, Middlesex. Fordism was taken up in all the advanced capitalist countries, and by Joseph Stalin. Stalin admired the “indomitable efficiency” of the American industrial system. He had no Marxist or any other kind of misgivings about subjecting workers to stupefying repetition, reducing them to cogs in a machine or alienating them from the product of their labour — albeit, in the US at least, with the prospect of buying it on hire purchase.

Ford built a plant for Stalin in Gorki (Nizhny Novgorod). Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany also studied and adopted Fordism, and Hitler took further inspiration from Henry Ford’s antisemitic propaganda. Detroit was also home to the country’s other leading antisemite, the Catholic priest Charles Edward Coughlin, “Father Coughlin,” whose anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-Black, pro-fascist radio programs reached upwards of thirty million Americans, a quarter of the population. Naturally, the fascist governments of Italy and Japan, which, like the Nazis, sent emissaries to Detroit to learn from Ford’s methods, were not put off by the company’s violent repression of unionists, the system of spies and thugs it employed, and its nasty puritan snooping on the private lives of employees.

Ford’s assembly line was famously memorialised by Diego Rivera’s colossal murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts. That Henry Ford’s only child, Edsel, should have commissioned a Mexican communist is surprising enough. The strange twist is that he did it in 1932, the year Ford’s 3000-strong machine-gun toting security department shot dead five striking workers and injured a couple of hundred others at the River Rouge plant.

But nothing that happens in the United States is ever truly surprising. In the incessant swell of cliché-riddled patriotism and dutiful observance of social rituals, its peasant-like provincialism and maudlin religiosity, it is easy to forget that America’s sharpest critics have generally been American, and that the visionary, the iconoclast and the rebel are prized constituents of the culture.

And sons turn against fathers sometimes. Edsel Ford was a bit of an aesthete. He changed the shape of his father’s cars. And he liked art. In the 1930s, he was president of both the Ford Motor Company and the Detroit Arts Commission. He commissioned Rivera and took him to Ford’s famous Albert Kahn–designed Rouge plant — a complete production system operating in ninety-three buildings on 2000 acres. The artist saw the forges and steel mills, the coke ovens, the glass factories, and the railways and the ships that crossed the lake with the raw materials to feed them; the foundries where, in smoke and steam, men — mainly Black men — converted the iron into engine blocks and cylinder heads, and thousands of other men on the assembly line performed their allotted tasks in the few seconds apportioned them: tasks so simple, Henry Ford declared, a worker needed to be “no smarter than an ox.”

The cars rolled off the line and out into the world, where Americans drove them into the sunlit American future. At least the advertising agencies portrayed it that way. This was modernity. This was the United States.

On four walls of a great hall at the Institute of Arts Rivera painted murals honouring the technology and the multiracial workers, and even the besuited boater-wearing managers and time-and-motion men, the technocrats. He captured the immense scale and complexity of the operation, all of it, and much more. He painted the car plant as the seething heart of industrial capitalism, a sort of supervised bedlam with its roots in history, and with branches reaching into lives in the furthest corners of the globe.

The plant was the epitome of modern capitalism, the car — stately, gleaming freedom machine and most desired thing — was not only the engine of the economy, the shaper of worlds and mighty creator of wealth, but the indispensable component of consumerism, capitalism’s core ideology. Good Marxist that he was, Rivera saw the contradictions and tempered admiration with foreboding, reverence with satire.

Pre-war, Detroit was in the vanguard of America’s burgeoning global pre-eminence. During the war, when the US became the self-styled “arsenal of democracy,” the car companies of Detroit flew the flag with gusto, manufacturing prodigious amounts of military equipment, from tanks and planes to artillery and ammunition. One Ford plant turned out a B-24 bomber every hour. Once the war was over, the combination of new models and smart advertising made Detroit not just an industrial engine room but a smart, desirable, essential American city.

When Henry Ford II (grandson of the original and known as “The Deuce”) took over the company in 1945, he set out to repair relations with Jewish Americans. He began in Hollywood, where the damage was illustrated by Harry Warner, who had forbidden any employee of Warner Brothers, including Gary Cooper, to drive a Ford on the company grounds. The Deuce also gave up his grandfather’s other, more visible means of gaining the “consent” of his workforce, the anti-union thuggery of the 1930s. In 1937 four leaders of the United Auto Workers handing out leaflets headed “Unionism not Fordism” were brutally beaten outside the River Rouge plant. In 1949, Ford and one of the victims of that attack, Walter Reuther, agreed to terms that became a model of collective bargaining, and a sign that capitalism could serve everyone’s interests. In return for the company providing full pension benefits, medical and hospital insurance and wages linked to inflation, the union contracted to provide five years of industrial peace.

Soon after, Chrysler and General Motors also gave up their union-busting and put their names to the agreement. It became known as the Treaty of Detroit. Fortune magazine wrote that the treaty “made the worker to an amazing degree a middle-class member of a middle-class society.”

Impressed by Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, Walter Reuther became an anti-communist social reformer — an American social democrat — and an irresistible (and incorruptible) force in both the union movement and the Democratic Party. In 1948 a shotgun blast through the window of his home put him in hospital for three months. He used the time to work out a better union medical benefits scheme.

As he took worker entitlements beyond wages and conditions into pension benefits, health insurance, early retirement and even profit-sharing, Reuther led unions into social reform, civil rights and national politics. He was pushing for the Peace Corps years before Kennedy made it a signature policy. In the early 1960s he urged the big three car companies to join forces and make a smaller, more economical American car. He was close to both Kennedy and Johnson and campaigned for civil rights, both in Detroit and across the country. Brimming with American optimism and bright ideas, Reuther, said one journalist, was the only man he knew who could reminisce about the future. In a parliamentary democracy he might have been elected prime minister.

Jeffrey Eugenides wrote that “most of the major elements in American history are exemplified in Detroit.” Race, immigration, the suburban dream, corporate power, class, capital and labour, dream and disillusion, corruption, crime. (The mafia was a persistent presence, but in what big city was it not?) No doubt the same could be said about a few other cities, but for a couple of twentieth-century decades no city came closer to embodying the American ideal.

A city of a million and a half people, a mighty manufactory with a spectacular waterfront business district, a powerful and progressive union movement; a young and popular Democratic mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, and a socially progressive Republican governor, George Romney; a city of art and culture from the Institute of Arts’ fabulous holdings to Motown, a cultural phenomenon founded by Berry Gordy, who modelled his music business on the Lincoln–Mercury assembly line where he’d worked. Motown was built on the talents of Black songwriters and performers like Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5. Yet for all their talents, under Gordy’s Quality Control, the artists were “a means to an end,” the end being the Motown sound. And roughly equivalent to Ford’s Sociological Department, Motown hired an “etiquette coach” to make the Black artists more acceptable to white audiences. It worked. Motown moved the world.

It also moved Americans, even southern Americans: when Motown artists performed in the South in the early days, the audiences were segregated, but a “common love for the music” changed things when they went back. “People wanted to dance,” Mary Wilson of the Supremes recalled. “But when they started dancing, they forgot where they were sitting. And that segregated audience became integrated.”

In 1963 the city that gave the world the Ford Mustang and Stevie Wonder united in a bid for the Olympic Games. President Kennedy came and enjoyed a tumultuous reception. Half a million, 40 per cent of the population, were Black. Martin Luther King led thousands on a Walk for Freedom down Woodward Avenue, flanked by Reuther, Cavanagh, Rosa Parks, civic leaders, union leaders and church leaders. George Romney would have joined them, but it was a Sunday and he was a devout Mormon. He sent a representative in his place, and a few days later attended a small civil rights march in the exclusively white suburb of Grosse Point.

Of course they don’t make Republicans like George Romney anymore, and if they did they would be political outcasts like his son Mitt. King’s speech turned out to be a rehearsal for the immortal version he gave at the Lincoln Memorial. He called Detroit “a herald of hope.”

In the same year, two sociologists at Wayne State University published a seventeen-page study called “The Population Revolution in Detroit.” Hardly anybody noticed, but their research discovered that, on “present trends,” the city would lose a quarter of its population over the next decade. Amid all the buoyancy and optimism, Detroit was already on the way down.

For years a steady stream of white people had been leaving the city for new satellite suburbs linked to downtown by new highways. After the riots the stream became a torrent. Stores closed. White workers, white businesses and white families deserted. They took their dollars with them, leaving the city with a rapidly shrinking tax base. The Black middle class followed.

Cars, which had made Detroit a great city, played their part in its fall. Cars being the future, nothing was invested in public transport. Who wanted railways when highways were the thing? Well before the riots, and well before manufacturers began moving their plants to China and Mexico, they had begun to move them to non-union towns. Then Toyota came, with its “lean,” “just-in-time” Toyota Production System. Soon the Camry would be the top-selling car in the country, American cars that had epitomised modernity became symbols of decline, and Fordism a relic of an earlier stage of capitalism.

Capitalism churned and governance churned with it. Corruption seeped into city hall, the administration and the (rapidly dwindling) unions. Detroit became a shrinking city of the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and the unskilled. A city of crime: corrupt in its high places, its streets plagued with violence, theft, arson, prostitution, drug dealing and addiction.

Today downtown Detroit belies all the above. The towers positively gleam. The art deco interiors are stunning. The streets are clean, the monuments well maintained. There are cafes and bars. A tram runs down Woodward, making it cheap and easy to get to the Institute of Arts, the Library and Wayne State. In a city notorious for crime, it feels remarkably… nice, if a bit like a museum. The people are not the unnerving part; it’s the absence of them.

A bar I found one evening was packed, and it had that feeling of fellowship which all good bars have. It was not a particularly big bar, but it seemed like the entire downtown population was there, and when I walked out onto the empty streets the sense grew stronger. Detroit seemed plain empty, and all the emptier for the acres of carparks where once there must have been buildings.

Had all the city workers swept home along the freeways? Or do they work from home anyway? Out the window of the hotel that night the buildings standing in their paddocks of concrete were lit in red, white and blue, but it felt like I was the only person looking at the show.

Drive beyond downtown and the story of Detroit unfolds in images of ruin. Streets lined with long empty, collapsing, weed-infested houses. Places that were once suburban blocks and home to countless families grown over with full-blown woodlands. Ghosts of streets where kids played, and their parents parked their Fords and Chryslers and lived their version of the dream.

Freeways being an American speciality, Detroit’s are impressive. They are brutal. Their builders made no compromise with people or with nature and now they evoke the same melancholy as the abandoned factories they barrel past. Some of the old industrial plants are getting a new life as apartments. Artists are moving in. Websites recommend tours of abandoned streets and factories — dress “post-apocalyptic chic.” Gentrification is coming to Detroit, but, at first glance at least, it’s not convincing.

“Detroit these days depends on the kindness of strangers,” says Steve Babson, a labour historian at Wayne State. He admires Joe Biden for his pro-labour, pro-union commitments, and for the social investment of “Bidenomics.” Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan and probable presidential aspirant, he thinks “okay,” but she is, he says, another corporate liberal, a term he prefers to neoliberal because there is nothing “neo” about the idea of governments doing the bidding of capital.

It is not just the prospects for corruption of individuals, parties, cities and democracy itself. Even if the relationships were between parties of impregnable integrity; even if we accept that converting wealth into power is inevitable in a progressive capitalist democracy and needs to be managed rather than discouraged; and even if corporate endowments and investments were sufficient to rebuild cities and communities, how can it be done without replicating the imbalances of wealth, power, education and amenity that destroyed them? By calling his program “Build Back Better,” Biden at least seems to have grasped the nature of the problem.

Detroit was the definitive American city, the pinnacle of American innovation and industry. For a city like Detroit to fail was more than a disaster, it was a humiliation for the country. American capitalism and American society broke down simultaneously, making the city that symbolised greatness a symbol of failure, an engine of hope, an engine of despair. If you want to know America, know Detroit. If you want to fix America, fix Detroit. •

This is an edited extract from High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, Don Watson’s latest Quarterly Essay, published by Black Inc.

The post If you want to fix America, fix Detroit appeared first on Inside Story.

International relations can seem ordered and manicured on the surface, but the reality is much more provisional and blurry. In Papua New Guinea’s case, as in the days of old, much of the story seems to be playing out in bars and restaurants that attract as many fortune-hunters, do-gooders and assorted flotsam as ever.

McCrann’s — a place where the government secretary could most reliably be located “beautifully tight by four o’clock” and a sign warned patrons not to sleep on the billiard table with their spurs on — is long gone. All we know is that it was somewhere “in town,” as the locals call the city’s original site around the fringes of Fairfax Harbour. Fairfax was the first name of the father of navigator John Moresby, who surveyed the area in 1871 and whose memory is also preserved in the name of a challenging “premium” whiskey.

It’s overlooking the harbour, in the stylish Edge by the Sea restaurant, that I begin my tour of this central setting in the Pacific’s great game. Nestled inside one of Moresby’s many gated communities, the Edge is separated by a channel of brackish water from the Royal Papua New Guinea Yacht Club, where I can see expats jogging around inside the fence. A tasty modern Australian-style place, the Edge offers excellent coffee and even more exemplary people-watching. It’s a mostly expat scene, with just a few breakfasting members of the PNG elite — the occasional member of parliament, the head of the revenue service, one or two bankers.

Most people taking breakfast here are the worker bees in the new great game. Most identifiable are the uniformed, barrel-chested Australian police officers gathered together in conversation. Australia has been throwing money at their counterparts in the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary for decades, providing so much training that the force must constitute the best-instructed in the world. Well-equipped too: Canberra has financed everything from jet skis to a swimming pool.

Is all that time and money working? If it were a business, there’s an argument that this police-reform effort should have been closed years ago. Port Moresby remains a city too dangerous for most to navigate on foot, which explains why the joggers are behind the Yacht Club fence. Things became even worse in January when local police downed tools after a computer glitch cut their pay, precipitating a day-long riot in which at least twenty people died and businesses lost hundreds of millions in orgiastic looting.

But creating an effective Papua New Guinean force is not Australia’s sole objective here. The Australian police presence is as much about geopolitical shadowboxing and currying favour with elites to try to ensure that China doesn’t get too much of a foothold. Every time a PNG government minister utters an oracular hint that Chinese policing support is being considered, Australia promises more kit and kaboodle. The Aussie cops are in no hurry to finish their coffees. Why would they be?

In more of a hurry should be the huddle of French-speaking men — Port Moresby’s expat scene is very male — asking the waiting staff to ferry them more espresso. These will likely be men from the French energy company, Total, managing the Papua LNG project that is planned to extract and pipe gas from the riverine swamps of the Purari delta, a place that has attracted speculators ever since the days of the steamship. Estimated to cost US$10 billion, it’s the second in a line of mega-projects touted to reap almost unimaginable fiscal windfalls when it comes on line. Or perhaps that should be if it comes on line. The project has been delayed many times; the final decision on whether it will go ahead is due next year.

While these projects are spruiked as game-changers by PNG leaders, they seldom deliver transformational benefits. As the World Bank commented in a no-nonsense review of its in-country programs over the past fifteen years, “Papua New Guinea has abundant natural resource wealth, but this wealth has not translated into welfare gains for most citizens… [T]hree-quarters of the population live in multidimensional poverty.”

Most of the people at the Edge are ostensibly engaged in trying to turn around that bleak statistic. Close by is the office of a major contractor implementing parts of the Australian aid program, home to advisers who work out of government offices and project managers who oversee construction of schools and develop plans focused on goals like gender, disability and social inclusion.

This is tough work. Because it’s paramount for Australia to maintain good relations with the PNG government, contractors are under unyielding pressure to deliver results and work in an environment where it is made clear they should remain silent about the challenges of doing so.

I know this world well, having worked in it for years on and off as an adviser in various government offices and as a jobbing consultant writing interminably dull technical reports that always had to outline “progress.” The work is good for generating hangdog tales and replete with gallows humour, but it is also unsatisfying and intellectually demanding in its own perverse way.

There’s a quasi-research pretence to all the reporting, but little academic sensibility. Drafts are handed up to junior diplomats who comb through them for anything they deem to be transgressing “sensitivities.” Personal contracts are precarious. A friend of mine has likened the profession to being laden with all the precarity, unequal power dynamics and ennui of a Joseph Conrad novel.

As an example of what a small world it is, I am on at least nodding terms with many of the people at the Edge this morning. The shorthand for people who work in the Pacific is misfits, missionaries and mercenaries but there is only the most partial truth to this. Dropkicks, booze hounds and egomaniacs are there as well, as they are in any profession, but the vast majority are trying their best.

A veteran of the contracting scene is sitting at a nearby table finishing a milky coffee. Ashley (who asks to be pseudonymised because candid observations in this cramped world are not a shrewd career move) is one of the many unsung heroes of the aid program in Papua New Guinea. An unshowy, adroit and empathetic operator, Ashley has been doing this work for years, covering everything from drafting letters to taking minutes to writing speeches about local ownership for government ministers to ventriloquise.

Is the increased geopolitical attention making things more difficult? Many of Ashley’s counterparts are being courted by phalanxes of diplomats offering new programs and new opportunities for travel to Australia, China or the United States (and even less time at their desks). This is doing more harm than good, says Ashley emphatically. “What we have seen is an increase in donor competition to be seen to be doing. That has led, in many cases, to duplication. And this contributes to a drain of an already fragile system.” Despite the years of support thus far, “there is a very little absorptive capacity.”

Incapable of drinking any more coffee, I return to my car aiming to visit some of the sites of the new great game. As I do I’m reminded that Port Moresby is pocked with the imprints of efforts past and the once-important but now largely forgotten people who tried to make them.

Just outside the gates of the complex that houses the Edge is the Hubert Murray stadium, named after the man who ran the territory for Australia for more than thirty years from 1907 until his death in 1940. His name is everywhere in Port Moresby: on a highway named in his honour, on an army barracks and on the international school where diplomats and the elite send their children, although details of his tenure aren’t on any curriculum. His name may be resonant but his record is fading from view.

An Oxford boxing blue and Boer War veteran, Murray took a vow of temperance in his early twenties after besting someone in a brawl in a Sydney street. Upholding the pledge was no mean feat anywhere, but especially in a place like this that was filled with an inordinate number of old soaks. A prodigious writer, he left behind an extensive collection of papers that, in ascending order of readability, consisted of government reports, books and the candid letters that he wrote to his brother Gilbert, who was a founder of the League of Nations.

Murray’s most poignant letters reveal that he was lonely, stuck in a role that he didn’t want to give up because he feared he had nowhere else to go to: a plight shared by at least some of the people at the Edge. His principal sources of anguish were the changing whims and interests of Australian politicians and the attitudes of fellow bureaucrats who bore bitter grudges against him for reasons based entirely on personality differences exacerbated by proximity.

The letters also show how today’s geopolitical moment has its antecedents. Murray began his career fretting about the Germans taking over the territory and died worrying about the Japanese. Japan did indeed invade, only to be repelled by Australians, Americans and Papua New Guineans recruited to the Allies’ cause. The irony that Japan was once an enemy and is now the English-speaking world’s staunchest friend in the Pacific is seldom remarked on.

Just past the stadium is a brown plinth with the bird of paradise atop a spear and drum — the symbols of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea — along with space for two official portraits. Prime minister James Marape is on the left and a picture of whichever dignitary has visited most recently is on the right. It’s a constantly changing picture, for Papua New Guinea’s leader is constantly being courted by world powers. Over the past two years the leaders of India, New Zealand and France have come to pay him a visit. US president Joe Biden was meant to come too, but had to cancel at the last minute because of political ructions back in Washington; his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, came in his stead to sign a defence cooperation treaty. The Chinese foreign minister has visited too.

Australia keeps a close watch. In April, Anthony Albanese came north, hiking part of the Kokoda track with Marape, both to get additional facetime and, as one diplomat told me in this city of sotto voce asides, in the hope that poor phone reception would stop the Chinese from sending Marape WhatsApp messages. Each country’s flattery is designed to convince Papua New Guinea’s politicians to be in “their camp,” but much more benefit accrues to the MPs from artful hedging.

Marape has been prime minister for nearly five years now. He is a Sabbath-observing Seventh Day Adventist whose stated aspiration is to make his country the world’s “richest Black Christian nation.” Australia seems to like him, bestowing on his government at least a billion dollars in soft loans so far, as well as high-blown sobriquets. Pacific and international development minister Pat Conroy went as far as comparing Marape to Nelson Mandela when he proposed a national team to participate in Australia’s NRL, an idea that struck Australia so forcefully that it will foot the entire bill.

How long Marape continues in the top spot is dependent on his ability to command a parliamentary majority. This is easier said than done. Many MPs are inveterate political philanderers, happily allowing themselves to be enticed by economic benefits from one suitor to another.

Having assembled his own majority to oust his predecessor Peter O’Neill, Marape is familiar with the arithmetical ruthlessness of PNG politics. What was done unto others, others are now trying to do unto him. Periodically his opponents convene a “camp” in a Moresby hotel, which serves as both a show of strength and a means to entice MPs away from Marape’s coalition. The opposition camp is known as the Crown Camp, named for a hotel in the centre of the old town in which they assemble to plot and develop policy. Peter O’Neill, still an MP, is a vigorous member.

Marape has his own camp, at the more swish Loloata Island resort; a snap of Marape there with a Chinese embassy staff member in the background was forwarded endlessly around on WhatsApp.

My drop-in at the Crown comes just a few days after the last camp broke up, the campaign to eject Marape having ended in almost tragi-comic circumstances. Efforts to force a vote failed because the speaker of parliament ruled that opposition had failed to ensure the correct number of signatures on the relevant parliamentary motion.

I used to spend time in the Crown twenty years ago when it was the old Crowne Plaza — it was one of the few hotels in Port Moresby to have a reliable internet café — but I haven’t been back for a while. But I hear that it still has excellent food, especially at its Sunday afternoon curry buffet.

The new owners don’t seem to have changed much about the place apart from lopping off the silent “e.” The entrance is still a brilliant-white marble effect, with two vertically erect wooden facemasks standing guard. A staircase leads up to a dimly lit, carpeted bar in which I encountered one pot-bellied Papua New Guinean in a Broncos shirt drinking an early morning eye opener and reading the paper. Restocking the fridge is a distinguished man whose dress shirt and black trousers make him resemble a major-domo at an imperial house. We could all have been from the time of Murray.

While less busy this day than the Edge, what goes on at the Crown is probably more representative of how politics and governance gets done in the PNG capital. The “camps” are worthy of anthropological enquiry, and with the ubiquity of jerky smartphone footage circulated via social media and WhatsApp, one can almost feel transported here, and to Loloata, when they are occurring. The narrative arc is that members who affect not to have seen each other for a long time give each other extravagant greetings while presiding over solemn press conferences heavy on oratory and lighter on details of how to get Papua New Guinea to get out of the hole it is in.

For the country really does seem to be in a hole. On the bar table, a copy of the Post-Courier, one of the country’s two daily newspapers, gives the details in its reliably breezy style: about how foreign exchange issues were affecting fuel supplies which means planes don’t run reliably, about women being accused of sorcery and tortured medievally, about an earthquake in the highlands province of Enga where thousands of people were feared buried alive. For so many of its citizens Papua New Guinea can be a brutally tough place.

The Post-Courier also contained ample signs of how much Papua New Guinea is being courted these days. Many a page is replete with photos of foreign diplomats opening things, launching a hefty document, speaking at a seminar or handing over equipment swaddled in their national flag. Would any of these activities and gifts influence MPs? This statecraft seemed animated by a different, more legal-rational set of logics than the quest for money, power and title that seems to drive the camps.

I head out, drive down the hill to APEC Haus, a beauteous glass-fronted building with a roof sculpted to resemble the billowing sails of a traditional sailing vessel. Now a conference centre and wedding hall, it was built for the 2018 APEC summit, which attracted a rolodex of world leaders including Chinese president Xi Jinping and US vice-president Mike Pence, whose microphone was memorably cut during his remarks.

As is the norm, leaders came bearing announcements. The most eye-catching was an Australia–New Zealand–Japan–US plan to electrify large parts of Papua New Guinea, a clear geopolitical play to balance Chinese inroads into the sector. This “transparent, non-discriminatory, and environmentally responsible” project would “promote fair and open competition, uphold robust standards, meet the genuine needs of the people of Papua New Guinea, and avoid unsustainable debt burdens,” gushed Scott Morrison.

Nearly seven years later power generation is as bad as ever. A soundtrack to the city is the chug-chug of the generator. The reasons why the “partnership” — in reality, four separate initiatives — floundered are multifold, but at least one important and salutary factor is that the PNG government agency responsible for electricity seems curiously uninterested in doing its job. Analysts have found “chronic crisis” and “general dysfunction.”

Back through town I drive, past supply vessels for oil and gas projects in the harbour, past the Yacht Club and past the new American embassy, a towering testament to Washington’s increased interest in the Pacific’s largest nation. Then I low-gear up the vertiginous hill to the Waigani section of the city where most government offices and embassies are located.

I pull into my hotel, the Holiday Inn, for a bite to eat. I’m so nostalgically fond of the place: in my decade or so of going back, little about it has changed. The club sandwich is reliable, the red wine room temperature and the amount of food being piled onto buffet plates stupendous. It tickles me that there is still a dedicated line item for safari suits on the laundry list. I can almost see the ghosts of encounters past.

The first person I run into is James Tanis, former president of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a region attempting to break loose from Papua New Guinea. Bougainvilleans voted with near unanimity — 97.7 per cent of votes cast — in a 2019 referendum to secede, yet progress on implementing the result has been glacial. The vote itself was non-binding and Papua New Guinea seems in no hurry to progress the issue.

Tanis is in town to try to develop a job description for a “moderator” to unstick the logjam. Also passing through is a delegation from the region’s Constitutional Planning Commission, charged with developing a new charter for the region upon independence.

Bougainvilleans love the Holiday Inn, or the “Bougainville embassy,” in James’s deadpan expression. They’ve been coming here for nearly a quarter of a century now; it was one of the places they were housed in during the years it took to negotiate the 2001 Peace Agreement.

“It offers simplicity that attracts some of us,” he says, listing such additional benefits as its hospitality, its proximity to government offices and shopping, its flexibility on late payments and the easy access to a spot to enjoy a smoke outside. Frequent stayers also like using the hotel’s rewards points program, and no doubt some of them have high-tier status.

James is telling me he’s confident about the overall direction of the secession process when some young Australian diplomats come over to pay him homage. They are wearing the standard young male diplomat tropics outfit in the tropics: long sleeve shirt with achingly tight trousers narrowing off too early before they reach polished R.M. Williams boots. They shake hands with me without interest and turned their bonhomie squarely onto James.

With the average diplomatic posting being two to three years, James would comfortably be on around his fifteenth cycle of envoys getting to know him and most likely reporting his every prognostication back to Canberra. Officially, Australia is even-keeled on the Bougainville question. Its policy is to support whatever the parties decide. Sometimes, though, Australia’s leaders tell a different story. On separate occasions, Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles have made clear that their money is on Papua New Guinea.

The old Inn seems emptier than it has on previous visits. In an unsentimental city, some of its most reliable guests have peeled away. The development crowd and visiting delegations are now more likely to be found at either the Stanley (which announced recently it would be rebranding as the Sheraton) or the Hilton, which was just up the road.

I’d been to the Hilton the night before. It’s another exemplary people-watching location. As I sought to discern the notes of gooseberry in my sauvignon blanc, I’d typed into my iPhone the scene in front of me: three Indonesian soldiers in uniform watching videos on their phones; conclave meetings involving Asian men and Papua New Guineans; some advisers I used to work with looking well-mottled even in the dim lights; and finely suited politicians who I recognised from photos in the Post-Courier sashaying in and out with a retinue of men carrying a large number of phones. While the camps were having a hiatus, politicking was not.

“Oooh, that’s Sam Basil Jr., I wonder who he’s meeting,” one of my companions cooed, neck craning. Basil’s father, Sam Sr., had been a member of parliament and was deputy prime minister when he died in a car crash the day before nominations in 2022. His son won his seat in his stead. When we spotted him, Jr. was walking purposefully to the sort of open-air balcony perfect for semi-public intriguing to get the attention of diplomatic corps, who also constituted most of the people sitting around.

Back at the Inn, I have a burger for lunch and kick myself that I’d forgot to ask them to leave out the egg (in a sign of Australia’s imprint on so much, burgers come with the default Aussie fixings). Then I drive through the rest of Waigani, past another plinth for pictures of leaders outside the Vision City mega-mall and the Stanley-cum-Sheraton, and towards the heart of Papua New Guinea’s government.

The prime minister’s office is at Sir Manusupe Haus, named for a former leading public servant but more colloquially known (because of its shape) as the Pineapple building. During Port Moresby’s riots in January an angry mob tried to break in past the Pineapple’s gates, which seemed to be fastened together with a tiny padlock. The riots roiled Port Moresby yet no one has mentioned them during my visit or seems to have reflected on what they might have intimated about the state of the public realm.

The most striking feature of this part of the city isn’t the buildings but how many people there are, lolling up and down the streets, hawking everything from betel nut to cotton buds at stop lights. According to the country’s National Research Institute, more than 60 per cent of young people are unemployed. This everyday precarity was a contributing factor to the January riots.

At a roundabout proclaiming “Amazing Port Moresby” I turn left and drive past a giant building being constructed by China. This will be the country’s new Supreme Court. Past the nearby parliament, my plan is to pay a visit to the country’s National Museum, refurbished a few years ago under the Papua New Guinea–Australia Partnership, one of those delightfully opaque appellations that hides the fact that Canberra stumps up all, or most certainly the preponderance, of the money.

The museum is a quite amazing collection of statues, bark cloths, canoes, masks, adzes, headdresses with birds of paradise plumes, axes and statues that reached the ceiling. At least some objects in the collection are on loan from Australia’s Papua collection in Canberra, which was collected by Hubert Murray.

I’m driving to the museum more in hope than expectation. On the last few occasions I tried to visit I found it shut. And so it proves to be this time, too. There’s no power, the caretaker tells me. “Maybe the Australians will pay,” he says. He pauses. “Or the Chinese.” “Why not?” I think. These two countries seem to be paying for almost everything else.

I go to the National Library instead. This was another independence gift from Australia, and the brutalist architectural style reflects its mid-1970s completion. The noticeboards are in red felt, the signage old-fashioned and the building’s interior corners are shrouded in demi-darkness. About half the shelves are filled with books, but this is no easy metaphor for decline or atrophy. This is a functioning, quietly thrumming and well-frequented place, albeit a poorly resourced one.

The PNG collection is cloistered off from the main library in a separate room whose most prominent feature is a collection of forty wooden boxes containing handwritten cards cataloguing the capacious collection. The cards themselves are packed together so tightly there’s no room for my fingers to manoeuvre from one entry to the next. When I find a chink of space in “Ab” a card directs me to articles written by Tony Abbott, among them a thundering piece from 1997 titled “Papua New Guinea at the Crossroads.” The “crossroads” is a favoured trope for outsiders writing about PNG; the country always appears to be on a teetering point but never goes past it, muddling through from one crisis to the next.

I call up a book on the Purari area, where one of those new mega projects is planned. A missionary, J.H. Holmes, wrote of the Purari River that “since my early days upon its waters, it has loomed as the highway to rich dividends in the minds of white man.” It might be my colloquy with the old papers, but I felt drawn, more and more, to the conclusion that the patterning between past and present here is tightly stitched.

Also lodged in the 1970s is my last stop-off, the South Pacific Motor Sports Club, which everyone knows by its shorthand, “the Car Club.” The Car Club is a hidden gem, accessible only if you happen to be fortunate enough to know a member. Bedecked in the green-and-yellow logo of SP Lager, filled with happy, mostly Papua New Guinean patrons, the club consists of a series of large wooden tables and the beer comes in a choice of draft glass, jug and “tower,” a large dispenser that looks like it should contain bubble-gum balls. Only the most death-or-glory sorts should consider scaling such a challenge.

I stick to a glass and catch up with old friends who, while they would count as middle class, aren’t finding it easy in a city where costs are on a par with Australia and wages most assuredly are not. Like almost everyone else up here, they are avid students of rugby league. They’re also the sort of people Australia wants to influence. Yet they seemed flat about the idea of a local team. It was already expensive enough to go rugby league matches, and having an NRL team would surely jack the price higher still. And had I heard about the lavish compound? Apparently $100 million had been allocated to build one for the players and their families. Madness, they concluded.

It’s twilight when I drive back to my hotel. Waiting at an intersection I buy a USB cable from a young man with deadened eyes wending his way through the traffic. I nervously roll down my window just enough to hand over my cash. This is a city still far too dangerous to have car windows down as a matter of course. I look at the young man as he moves from car to car, scurrying to the traffic island just a second before the lights change. He would have seen many motorcades swoosh by over the last years, and he had the look of a person still waiting for all the attention to trickle down. •

This week James Marape survived his fifth vote of no-confidence, 75–32, and remains prime minister of Papua New Guinea.

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Since January, the Court has delivered orders and decisions in three Palestine-related cases. Together they give an insight into how international law sees the violence and how countries including Australia are obliged to respond.

The first of the cases was launched in December 2023 when South Africa alleged that Israel had violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention of 1948. South Africa argued that Israel’s acts and omissions are “genocidal in character” and had been committed with the intent “to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”

States that have signed the Genocide Convention (including Israel and Australia) have the obligation to prevent, and punish, genocide — even if it is being committed somewhere else. Committing or attempting to commit genocide is punishable, as is inciting genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide. Also punishable is complicity in genocide — namely, the provision of material, strategic, or political support for genocide. This last point is particularly important for governments that might have military and economic ties with a state allegedly committing genocide.

The ICJ’s final judgement on whether Israel’s actions amount to genocide seems likely to be years away. But South Africa also requested “provisional measures,” similar to an urgent injunction in domestic law. At this stage of proceedings, the court need not make a definitive ruling about whether a genocide is occurring — instead, it needed to determine whether the rights being asserted by South Africa were plausible. In late January 2024, the ICJ did make such an order, and essentially found that there is a plausible claim that genocide is occurring in Gaza.

By an overwhelming majority, the court ordered Israel to adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention and “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission” of all genocidal acts. In relation to Palestinians in Gaza, Israel must stop killing members of this group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to them; deliberately inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about” the destruction of members of this group; and “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within this group. The court also ordered Israel to take immediate and effective steps to enable humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza.

Only a few days later, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered further military action in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. South Africa again approached the ICJ, this time with an “urgent request for additional provisional measures.” In March, the court handed down a new order reiterating the earlier provisional measures and outlining additional measures. These included a unanimous order that Israel adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention by taking “all necessary and effective measures” to ensure the provision of “urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” including “food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation” and “medical supplies and medical care.” Israel must also ensure that its military doesn’t commit a genocidal act by preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

In May, South Africa returned to the ICJ to request further provisional measures. On 24 May, the court ordered a halt to Israel’s military offensive in Rafah and insisting that the Rafah crossing remain open for humanitarian assistance.

These orders make Israel’s obligations clear. But what do they mean for Australia and other countries? As a party to the Genocide Convention, Australia has the obligation not to commit or be complicit in genocide, and to prevent and punish genocide occurring elsewhere. In earlier cases, the ICJ found that the obligation to prevent genocide requires any governments that is aware (or should be aware) of the serious risk of genocide “to employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide so far as possible.”

What about states that provide military support to Israel? This question was raised in the second Palestine case at the ICJ this year. In March, Nicaragua sought an ICJ declaration that Germany had failed in its obligations under the Genocide Convention and “contributed to the commission of genocide” in violation of the convention. Nicaragua also claimed that Germany “has failed to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law” by providing assistance to Israel.

Nicaragua sought an provisional measures order that Germany immediately suspend military aid and exports of military equipment to Israel to the extent that it could be used in violation of the convention and other rules of international law. The court declined the request in terms that will be of interest to officials in Australia for a couple of reasons.

First, the ICJ relied heavily on the fact that German manufacturing, marketing and exporting of military equipment must be approved by an “inter-agency process” involving at least two ministries. Export licenses are granted only after a formal “assessment” of whether the item would be used in the commission of genocide or other crimes. The ICJ also found that the value of military export licences had fallen significantly since November 2023, and Germany had not yet acted on some pending requests from Israel. As a result, the ICJ concluded, provisional measures were not needed at this stage.

But the ICJ did make several clear points about the situation in Gaza and the responsibilities of states. It reiterated that signatories to the Geneva Conventions — regardless of whether they are a party to a specific conflict — are required “to respect and to ensure respect” of the conventions and comply with them. It also recalled that signatories must “employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide.” Finally, the court considered it “particularly important to remind all States of their international obligations relating to the transfer of arms to parties to an armed conflict” to avoid the risk that these arms be used to violate the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. The message from is clear: signatories including Australia need to be very careful to comply with their legal obligations.

This year’s third ICJ decision concerning Palestine — an advisory opinion on the “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” — was delivered on 19 July. The action dates from December 2022, when the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ to advise on “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory.” Unlike the two other cases, this advisory opinion relates to Israel’s actions in the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territories, not only Gaza.

The ICJ concluded that Israel’s occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories is unlawful. It violates the right of Palestinian people to self-determination; imposes a comprehensive regime of restrictions on Palestinians that “constitutes systemic discrimination” on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity; violates the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid); and facilitates a systematic practice of unlawful settlement that is part of a broader policy of annexation.

Once again the ICJ pointed to the obligations of governments, including Australia’s, “to abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel” that may “entrench its unlawful presence” in the occupied territories; to “take steps to prevent trade or investment” that assists the illegal situation in the occupied territories; and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence there. All parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention — which include Australia — have the obligation “to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law.”

In light of these three cases, how can we summarise Australia’s obligations? Put simply, Australia has clear international obligations: to act to prevent the plausible genocide occurring in Gaza; to punish genocide if it is established; to ensure that it is not complicit or involved with any genocidal acts (by providing support to Israel); and to ensure Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law throughout Palestine.

How compliant is Australia with these obligations? What are the economic and military ties between Australia and Israel? What defence industry partnerships are in place? What arms are being sent to Israel – perhaps via third countries? What military intelligence is being provided (including through the Pine Gap surveillance base near Mparntwe Alice Springs)?

Publicly available information is scarce but concerning, and suggests continued Australia support for Israel’s military activities in Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine. While Australian officials have denied that Australia is “supplying Israel with weapons which are being used in the conflict in Gaza,” the landscape of military technology and bilateral trade is complex.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, notes that “Australia continues to broaden bilateral cooperation with Israel” and that “in recent years, there has been significantly increased engagement across a range of sectors, including innovation, security and defence.” The bilateral economic relationship between Australia and Israel is strong and “continues to grow,” according to DFAT. Two-way trade between the two countries was worth $1.34 billion in 2021.

Particularly since 2017, “Australia and Israel have expanded cooperation on national security, defence and cyber security,” according to DFAT, and a memorandum of understanding “on defence industry cooperation” was signed in October 2017. Even into 2024, the military trade between Israel and Australia continued to expand: for example, in February 2024 a new joint venture agreement worth US$600 million was concluded between the Australian Army and Israeli military company Elbit Systems.

Permits are required under the Defence Trade Controls Act 2012 to export Australian military goods and technologies. Military and “dual-use” goods and technologies are listed on the Defence and Strategic Goods List and the permits are issued (and may later be revoked) by the Defence Minister. Without a permit, a supplier would face ten-year imprisonment or $825,000 fine.

For a permit to be issued, the minister must be “satisfied that the supply would not prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia.” To determine this, the minister “must have regard” to criteria set out in the Defence Trade Controls Regulations 2013, which gives domestic expression to Australia’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty. One criterion is the risk that the goods or technology may become available to a country where “it may be used in a way contrary to Australia’s international obligations or commitments.” Another is the risk that the goods or technology “may be used to commit or facilitate serious abuses of human rights.”

How does this system measure up in light of Nicaragua’s case against Israel? At the provisional measures stage the ICJ believed Germany’s inter-agency process was sufficient to avoid breaches of international humanitarian law. But Australia’s system is different in several ways from Germany’s, including the difference between an “assessment” and “having regard” to certain criteria, and the German requirement for more than one ministry to be involved. For these reasons, Australia’s system doesn’t appear to be as robust as Germany’s.

Defence minister Richard Marles has revealed that eight export permits have been granted for Australian shipments of defence goods to Israel since 7 October 2023. Of these, seven were for “items which have gone to Israel to be worked on and then returned to Australia.” This suggests that the export permits were not provided for goods destined solely for Israeli use — but also that a two-way trade in military technologies continues between the countries.

Marles’s figure doesn’t capture the number of export permits granted before 7 October 2023 that are still in place. In June, it was confirmed that around sixty-six such permits are still operational. Marles has stated that these permits are for “dual use” technology, but this is a murky area: while the goods might be suitable for civilian use, they may also be used in commission of a crime. This was recognised by a Dutch Court that in February 2024 ordered the Dutch government to stop the export of fighter jet parts to Israel because there is now an “undeniable” and “clear risk” that these parts would be used in violation of international law.

Of particular concern is Australia’s role in a broader supply chain of component parts that then go to another country for integration into a product to be supplied to Israel. One example is the component parts made in Australia for F-35 fighter jets. Lockheed Martin, the manufacturers of the F-35s, noted in a now-deleted website post that “every F-35 built contains some Australian parts and components.” In June 2024, Israel’s defence ministry signed a $3 billion agreement with the United States to acquire twenty more of these fighters. The Israeli military has confirmed that F-35 aircraft are being used in its attacks on Gaza.

A related concern is Australian export of military goods and technologies to another country, which then sends it to Israel. In August 2024 Australia “streamlined” its weapons trade to the United States and Britain as part of the AUKUS military partnership. From 1 September, around 900 export permits previously required under Australia’s system are no longer necessary, representing around $5 billion worth of military exports per year.

Goods can therefore leave Australia without a permit, bound for the United States or Britain, which both have significant miliary trade with Israel. Just days ago, Britain withdrew some of its export permits given the “clear risk” that military exports might be used in violation of international humanitarian law. This may seem reassuring: Britain has its own permit system, and a risk was identified the permit has been revoked. But this change suggests that goods may have previously left Britain while at risk of being used in violation of international humanitarian law.

Given all this, Australia’s military and economic ties to Israel appear to remain significant, and Australia is at risk of providing military and economic support to a state that is plausibly committing genocide and violating international law — thereby making Australia complicit in these crimes.

For these reasons, more than one hundred Australian international lawyers recently called for “a comprehensive arms and energy embargo on Israel that covers the export, import and transfer of weapons, including parts, components and other dual-use items as well as military jet fuel.” The lawyers (I was among them) also called for Australia to “urgently suspend all investment, trade and scientific, technical and technological cooperation in these areas and engage in a systematic evaluation of all economic ties with Israel.” These lawyers are not alone: Save the Children, Amnesty International, the Jewish Council of Australia and the Australian Centre for International Justice have all made similar calls. More than 5500 Australian citizens signed Petition EN6141 to “Impose Trade and Arm Sanctions on Israel.”

In its decision in the South Africa v Israel case, the ICJ took note of a statement by a United Nations official: “Gaza has become a place of death and despair… its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence — while the world watches on.” In the face of this plausible genocide, Australia must comply with its obligations: to prevent further genocidal acts, and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law. •

The post Gaza at The Hague appeared first on Inside Story.

It was, however, a commitment woefully unfulfilled. The near-decade of Coalition government that followed was defined by leadership turmoil and abject public policy negligence. The least distinguished governing period in modern Australian political history culminated in Scott Morrison’s prime ministership, an exercise in vacuous performative leadership. It spoke to the good sense of Australians that they swiftly saw through Morrison’s legerdemain and came to loathe him for it.

It has taken another Labor government, led by Anthony Albanese, to resume mature administration. Compared to the delinquency of its predecessors, Albanese’s government has been competent, unified, collegial and scandal-free. It has also been legislatively productive. Less than twelve months from the next election, though, the opinion polls suggest a government struggling to survive.

Having come to power in May 2022 with a century-low primary vote of 32.6 per cent, Labor won increased favour in the electorate during its first year in office. Too tepid to be properly described as a full-blown honeymoon, the government’s primary support nonetheless climbed towards 40 per cent and Albanese enjoyed solid though never stratospheric approval. The electorate appeared to wish him and his government well.

Since the winter of 2023, however, Labor’s vote has slid back to the low thirties or lower and the prime minister’s leadership rating is anchored in negative territory. Providing “grown-up” administration has not been enough to spare Albanese Labor from the common fate of governments since the end of John Howard’s reign: early loss of public goodwill amid a climate of disenchantment with politics. How do we explain this apparent conundrum — and how much does it owe to the prime minister’s limitations?

Anthony Albanese’s prime-ministerial origins are unusual. Unlike many of his predecessors he was not consumed by a sense of destiny: in a quarter-century-long parliamentary career he came late to the view that he could be leader. His “log cabin” backstory, the leitmotif of his political vocation, is unusual too among modern prime ministers. He never tires of referencing his childhood in public housing, where economic frugality was made emotionally secure by a mutually adoring relationship between his single mother, reliant on an invalid pension, and her son.

Intriguingly, intense maternal investment is a trait Albanese shares with Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. In their case it encouraged overweening self-regard and a sense of boundlessness. They were men who would not be held back, zestful and abundant. For Albanese, self-belief was crimped by harder realities: his mother’s poor health and the absence of a father and siblings. The pull effect of his relationship with his mother vied with the pressing necessity for self-reliance. Journalist turned Albanese government media strategist Katharine Murphy discerned a “lone wolf”: a collaborator in politics who is also faithful to his own instincts and resources.

Labor became Albanese’s tribe before he was out of short pants. Later, studying economics at Sydney University, he was a firebrand student activist, his chip-on-the-shoulder resentments softened by a knockabout geniality that drew others to him. Aligned with the party’s left, he was initially employed as a researcher for the faction’s grand old warrior, Tom Uren.

The two men filled a void for each other. Albanese became a kind of surrogate son for the childless Uren, a former boxer and survivor of the Burma railway, and Uren — as Albanese has acknowledged — became a father figure for the future prime minister. They were alike in many ways — compassionate, sentimental and loyal, yet steely where required. The latter was a vital attribute in the party’s right-dominated NSW branch, a place of brutal, occasionally violent, realpolitik.

By the end of his twenties, Albanese was assistant general secretary of the branch. In that role, he grew adept at the hard-nosed game of transactional persuasion and forging networks of support in inhospitable circumstances. His friends attest, however, that his toughening did not come at the cost of his core decency. And, while politics was his path to influence and respectability in life, he was not a monomaniac. Travel, rugby league and rock and roll were passions. A frequenter of the Sydney pub band scene, he thrilled at the raw energy of punk. Its rage against establishment injustice echoed in him, though not its dark nihilism.

Albanese was fundamentally an optimist. Given his practical-mindedness and external orientation, serious reading doesn’t seem to have figured prominently among his pastimes. He is not a collector of ideas nor does he have an evident facility with them. In this respect, he is not alone among the modern crop of politicians. Formally educated to a level unattainable to many of their predecessors, they lack the erudition of the voracious autodidacts of the past.

Albanese’s rapid advance in Labor politics saw him win preselection for the seat of Grayndler and enter parliament, aged thirty-three, in 1996. It was the beginning of the Howard era and he had little choice but to learn how to wait. Early on, though, traces of the enfant terrible remained. During the Coalition’s first term, the upstart Labor backbencher derided the prime minister as “yesterday’s man, a weak man, a little man, a man without courage and a man without vision.” Gradually over the next decade, though, Albanese developed a sneaking admiration for Howard’s indomitability and dogged effectiveness.

When Labor finally returned to office under Rudd in 2007, Albanese assumed the senior ministries of infrastructure and transport. He was a fixture in those portfolios during the six subsequent years of tumult. As an able and tenacious administrator, he could point to the creation of Infrastructure Australia as one of his legacies. But his chief talents were as negotiator and conciliator. A Rudd loyalist who presciently foresaw that the Queenslander’s overthrow by Gillard would destroy two prime ministerships, he nonetheless conscientiously served the latter as government leader in the House of Representatives. He was integral to guiding through her minority administration’s busy legislative program.

Having waited upon two Labor prime ministers, Albanese arrived at the belief that he had the stuff of a leader rather than a mere “counsellor and kingmaker.” Though he was the preferred candidate of the rank and file after the 2013 defeat, the numbers were against him in the party room. During Bill Shorten’s two terms as opposition leader he was again responsible for the portfolios of infrastructure and transport.

Even allowing for the likelihood that Shorten was quarantining his rival, dallying for a dozen years in the same areas suggested a want of policy ambition or curiosity. He was coasting and in danger of being regarded as a spent political force. When Shorten retained the leadership uncontested after performing better than expected at the 2016 election, that indeed seemed Albanese’s lot. Yet history was always against Shorten: no first-cab-off-the rank opposition leader has attained the prime ministership since the second world war. Three years later, with Labor badly demoralised by its front-runner defeat and the party’s next generation wary of stepping forward, the fifty-six-year-old Albanese was the sole candidate to succeed Shorten.

Not since the middle of the twentieth century has a first-time opposition leader come to the job later in life or having served longer in parliament. He was a safe, seasoned pair of hands. He embodied the virtue of durability and was persuaded by the possibility of progress through patient attrition. The closest recent parallel was Howard, who had waited and waited until he was Liberals’ last man standing in the mid-1990s.

Albanese’s chief tasks in his new position were to overcome the two handicaps Labor’s post-election review identified as having cost the party office in 2019. These were a deeply unpopular leader and a cluttered policy program that had unsettled voters. Albanese has never had the voter turn-off effect of the unfortunate Shorten. Where Shorten had a baked-in reputation for shiftiness originating from his complicity in the prime-ministerial downfalls of Rudd and Gillard, attitudes towards Albanese were benign: he excited neither enthusiasm nor antagonism.

In common with most opposition leaders, he was only a vague presence in voters’ minds. He also had the great advantage of being up against a prime minister, Morrison, who by 2020 was synonymous with duplicity and inauthenticity. The 2022 Australian Election Study subsequently found that Albanese out-rated Morrison on eight of nine leadership characteristics. The gap was widest on compassion, honesty and trustworthiness, and narrowest on “inspiring.” Voters assessed him as fundamentally decent, if underwhelming.

One reason for this lukewarm response was the circumspect policy project Albanese took to the public in May 2022. Redolent of Howard’s second coming as opposition leader, Albanese’s approach was monotonously described as a “small target” strategy.

A frustrated Coalition government portrayed him as a thief in the night trying to steal his way into office on a threadbare program. This was not entirely fair. Albanese’s Labor offered significant policy differentiation. Its 2030 carbon emissions–reduction target of a 43 per cent cut, for example, was substantially more ambitious than the Coalition’s 26–28 per cent. Albanese pledged that a Labor government would fulfil the Uluru Statement from the Heart agenda in full: a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, truth-telling and treaty.

Still, reassurance was the overriding note in Albanese’s pitch for office. Campaigning in prose rather than poetry, he abandoned the contentious redistributive measures Labor had taken to the 2019 election: the curbing of negative gearing, capital gains concessions and dividend imputation. He also promised not to repeal the third tranche of tax cuts legislated by the Morrison government, which principally benefited high income earners, and emphasised asylum-seeker boats would continue to be turned back.

Probably most momentously, he also vowed to stick with the Morrison-conceived AUKUS defence agreement with the United States and Britain. Desperate to avert being cast as unreliable on national security, Labor had adopted this position with an indecent haste that negated the chance to subject the arrangement to due diligence. To those who cavilled that he was surrendering the party’s ideals, Albanese’s riposte was blunt: “One of my Labor principles is for Labor to win elections.”

A cliché of electoral politics is that governments lose elections rather than oppositions win them. This was unequivocally so in 2022. The Australian public reviled Morrison and longed to be rid of him. Their embrace of the alternative, though, was tentative to say the least. Entering office with that century-low primary vote, Labor’s was a loveless triumph. Together with the party’s low-octane campaign and attenuated program, the result raised as many questions as it answered about the new prime minister and his government.

Machiavelli counselled that a successful prince must be able to modulate leadership styles, to know when to be a lion and when to be a fox. Did Albanese have the capacity to switch to a more galvanising style or would the caution that defined him in opposition shackle him in government? Was he instilled with the driving sense of purpose and the knowledge and imagination to achieve major reform that meaningfully shaped the nation? Would Labor’s thin mandate, which Albanese was determined to adhere to, emaciate the government? And was the tepid voter response to Labor — and Albanese — a function of the lack of ambition of the campaign? As John McTernan, a former key adviser to British Labour prime minister Tony Blair and later to Gillard, wisely observed, “There is a cost to crouching too low.”

Asked which of his predecessors he would take a leaf from, Albanese galled Coalition members by mentioning Howard, the man he had observed closely from across the despatch box. More orthodox was his nomination of Bob Hawke, the gold standard of modern Labor prime ministers. Following Hawke’s lead, Albanese aspired to be an agent of community consensus who ran his administration in an orderly, collegial fashion. In his election night victory speech, he declared his faith that “it is a show of strength to collaborate and work with people, not weakness.”

If we take a cue from the leadership typology designed by political psychologist Graham Little, this attitude made Albanese a “group leader,” a relatively rare figure in the ranks of Australian prime ministers. Armed with soft skills, group leaders value solidarity and interdependence. They are typically self-effacing and empathetic. They tend to rise to the top following periods of strife and upheaval, when there is a yearning for respite and healing. The risk with this type of leader is passivity — that they don’t lead. Things can drift on their watch.

Needless to say, Albanese is no Hawke. The latter was far more than a chairman of his government, much more than an orchestrator of collaboration. He was a leader of rare alchemy: in Little’s terms, a compelling combination of “group leader” inside his government and “inspirational leader” outside it. The latter was manifest in a radiating exuberance that had a multiplier effect in the community.

There are other pronounced differences between the two men. Though his energies diminished over the term of his government, Hawke possessed extraordinary drive and stamina. A man of earthly excesses and coursing emotions, he was nonetheless intellectually rigorous and had an eye for policy detail. Albanese is altogether more mortal. Visceral rather than cerebral, he appears less engaged by policy. He is also prone to wandering into verbal marshes and, as the 2022 campaign betrayed, he is not always across his brief.

Instilled with a mighty sense of providence from childhood, Hawke had the inordinate confidence of a leader acting out his destiny. Albanese, on the other hand, insists that he never had a sense of entitlement. Hawke was blessed by an intoxicating blend of charisma and an effortless ability to convey the ineffable quality of authenticity. The unique “love affair” he enjoyed with the Australian people replenished the well of political capital his government drew on to sustain its sweeping reform agenda. Albanese boasts nothing like Hawke’s emotional connection with the public. He is workmanlike and inoffensive rather than magnetic.

Hawke had another vital asset: his double act with Paul Keating. Rivals as well as partners, the two men had complementary talents and generated a fertile creative tension. Keating supplied the audacity in the Hawke government, along with being its most captivating storyteller. Albanese has Jim Chalmers, a student of Keating and arguably the best communicator and keenest thinker in the government, who is said to chafe against his prime minister’s caution. Yet, where Keating was a ferocious political flamethrower, Chalmers is measured and amiable in public. Where Keating was prepared to act as an in-house insurgent, Chalmers is a patient team player.

As the prime minister had promised, the Albanese government began in methodical style. Experienced observers describe it as the smoothest transition to office of any recent administration, including Howard’s long-term government.

As it steadily went about ticking off election commitments, the government appeared a genuinely collegiate project in refreshing contrast with the overbearing style of recent prime ministers. During its first twelve months, Labor created a National Anti-Corruption Commission, formally committed to the United Nations for Australia to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels, struck an agreement with the Greens that smoothed the imposition of a hard cap on the nation’s largest carbon emitters, steered through a substantial lift in the minimum wage, increased the childcare subsidy for low-income earners, enabled trade unions to negotiate multi-employer pay deals, and implemented some of the recommendations of the aged care royal commission to improve conditions in nursing homes.

The government’s conscientious attendance to what the German sociologist Max Weber described as the “slow boring of hard boards” that is democratic politics bucked the chaotic trend of the previous decade. The contrast with revelations about the Coalition’s convention flouting (Morrison’s secret commandeering of ministries, for example) and scandalous practices (robodebt among them) reinforced the impression that ethical respectability was finally returning to Australian politics.

Despite the indisputable early progress, though, there was a nagging feeling that something was missing. Politics, as Weber also observed, was about both “perspective” and “passion” — achieving the possible also required reaching for the impossible. An element of the heroic was necessary. The government’s actions had an unfortunate resemblance to a laundry list of modest measures which, while undeniably necessary, fell short of capturing the imagination and weren’t in any way paradigm shifting.

With dreams of social transformation supplanted by well-meaning but bloodless managerialism, Labor was suffering the curse of modern-day social democratic parties. The neoliberal revolution, with its assault on collectivism, had emptied out these parties’ belief system and left them muddled about the appropriate balance between the market and state, between capital and labour, and between rights and responsibilities. The confusion of purpose was not alleviated by neoliberalism’s own exhaustion. To the contrary, what was left in its wake was uncertainty about the next great policy regime.

The dilemma of social democrats is exacerbated in a landscape in which right-of-centre parties have pivoted towards aggressive conservative populism, a lusty, grievance-driven, frequently irrational politics. In response, social democrats have hewed to the sensible centre, a safe harbour but an emotionally desiccated place. It is almost as if the two sides of politics have swapped clothes. While an ardour-filled right claims the mantle of subversive enemy of established “elite” power, the mainstream left is pushed towards an earnest maintenance project.

That dichotomy is to some extent embodied in the contest between Albanese and opposition leader Peter Dutton. Albanese wanted his prime ministership to usher in a tranquil national political conversation but Dutton was having none of it. A foreboding political strongman, he relentlessly and recklessly pushes the hot buttons of fear and resentment in the electorate, especially on issues of race. Responding to Dutton’s incitements with a restrained stoicism, Albanese rebukes the opposition leader more in sorrow than in anger.  This temperance might be statesmanlike and designed to douse social fires, but it can leave Albanese appearing limp next to Dutton’s muscularity.

The impression of stolidity is compounded by Albanese’s performance as communicator-in-chief. He is accessible to, and busy in, the media. Though he doesn’t shy away from serious outlets, journalists have noticed his predilection for “hokey” interviews on commercial FM radio designed to reinforce his everyman persona.

Nobody expects Albanese to sound like Robert Menzies or Gough Whitlam. In this demotic age, silver-tongued oratory is as likely to engender suspicion as to inspire. Yet one wishes the prime minister was a more effervescent communicator capable of striking an intense pitch. As Gillard did to her cost, he seems to operate on the premise that his government will be known by its deeds rather than through emotionally freighted words or gestures. He is mostly wooden, inhibited in body language and devoid of memorable or moving phrasing. Where Keating had the Redfern address, Rudd the Stolen Generation apology and Gillard, after provocation upon provocation, the misogyny speech, it is hard to imagine Albanese delivering anything comparably stirring or enduring.

The lament that governments lack an overarching narrative is commonplace in contemporary politics. Philosophical uncertainty and societal and media fragmentation militate against cohesive storytelling. But Albanese has showed little or no proclivity for weaving a compelling tale for his government, to joining the dots between its actions. In that absence, each measure risks disappearing into the ether as fast as the warp-speed media cycle.

Twenty twenty-three was the pivotal year of the Albanese government’s first term. Two things were defining. The first was Albanese’s March meeting in San Diego with British prime minister Rishi Sunak and American president Joe Biden to put flesh on the bones of the three nation’s AUKUS agreement. Under its terms Australia was to acquire eight nuclear submarines between the 2030s and the middle of the century at a gargantuan cost of up to $368 billion.

The announcement, made with the three leaders standing in the glistening sun against the backdrop of a symbol of American military might, the USS Michigan, was perhaps the apotheosis of Albanese’s journey to conventional respectability: the boy from council housing made good. Back home, though, opponents of the pact believed the prime minister and his government had been gulled by the nation’s traditional “great and powerful friends.” They raised a host of questions about the pact’s impact on Australia’s strategic autonomy, the likelihood of the submarines actually being delivered given questions about Washington’s future political reliability, and whether they would be obsolete by the time they arrived.

Yet caucus was conspicuously compliant. The noisiest critic of the agreement was Keating, who condemned it as the worst international decision by a Labor government since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription during the first world war. Declaring that Albanese and his ministers had “no mandate” for AUKUS inside the party, Keating forecast a major backlash at branch level. But the grassroots protests never amounted to more than a whimper.

This acquiescence in a far-reaching decision that went against the grain of Labor’s radical nationalist tradition said volumes about an often unremarked shift with the party. In a de facto split that has maimed both parties, Labor’s left has effectively migrated to the Greens. Untethered from moderates, the Greens veer towards strident — often breathtakingly cynical — exhibitionism; Labor, meanwhile, has lost an internal ginger group and a source of creative tension.

But the truly totemic battle of Labor’s term, also during 2023, was the Voice to Parliament referendum. When Albanese emotionally promised on election night to implement the Uluru Statement, he briefly let down his guard after three years of studious caution. Here is not the place to rake over the causes of the referendum’s emphatic defeat: suffice to say that the dismal record of referendums on this constitutionally “frozen continent” made it a long shot from the start, and it was virtually doomed once it was denied bipartisan support first by the Nationals and then by the Liberals. Afterwards, conservative proponents of the Voice naively accused Albanese of fatally wounding the referendum’s chances by not doing more to woo the opposition parties. The reality is that special rights for First Nations Australians, especially if constitutionally entrenched, were anathema to Dutton and the Queensland-dominated Coalition joint party room.

The opposition had another incentive to oppose the Voice: beating the referendum would wound the prime minister. Albanese had embarked on an exercise in defying history. He was the risk-averse leader attempting the quixotic.

The referendum defeat was indeed wounding for Albanese’s prime ministership. On the night of the vote he struggled to camouflage his bitterness at the people’s verdict. In the days and weeks after, he appeared demoralised and disorientated, as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him. Undoubtedly, the issue was close to Albanese’s heart. He had deeply wanted to deliver the Voice to Indigenous Australians.

While he vowed continued support for national truth-telling and a treaty, he realised their prospects had also been badly damaged. His recent “crab-walking” away from establishing a  Makarrata Commission to oversee truth-telling and treaty-making suggests an unwillingness to spend further political capital. Painfully, he is joining a line of prime ministers who raised the expectations of the First Nations community only to let them down. Hawke, Albanese’s leadership model, acknowledged that his failure to fulfil his promise of a treaty with Indigenous Australians was the profoundest regret of his time in office. Albanese knows this sorry history, but seems unable to avoid repeating it.

In a larger sense, the defeat meant Albanese had lost the opportunity for an achievement that would have been etched in history, conferring on him authorship of a landmark step in the chequered march to justice in this country. It also effectively cruelled the chances for other heroic advances by his government. That the goal of Australia becoming a republic, for example, was now seen as a lost cause was confirmed by the dropping of the portfolio of assistant minister for the republic in a ministerial reshuffle in July 2024.

In the absence of movement in these areas, Labor would mostly be confined to prosaic tasks such as curbing cost-of-living stresses. Hardly the stuff to stir the soul or make Albanese a memorable prime minister. His post-referendum funk perhaps owed something, too, to a loss of confidence following a lacklustre and meandering campaign performance in which he had been outpointed by the Coalition’s fear-mongering opposition leader. That performance only accentuated questions that had lingered since Labor’s small-target election victory. It seemed to confirm that Albanese lacked the magic to inspire the electorate on a path of transformative change.

Nor could it have helped Albanese’s state of mind that the referendum campaign had coincided with an ebbing of support for his government. Conducted against the background of worsening cost-of-living pressures and a crisis in housing affordability and supply, it was a setting in which worried Australians were susceptible to the view that the Voice referendum was a prime-ministerial indulgence and a distraction from what ought to be the government’s priorities.

Albanese failed to convince them otherwise. Polls showed that by the time of the referendum Labor’s primary vote had fallen to the low thirties and disapproval of his performance outstripped approval. Likewise, surveys indicated declining levels of trust in government and a ratcheting up of dissatisfaction with democracy. Once more Australia was spiralling into the cycle that had plagued the country for most of the twenty-first century: a precipitous loss of support for national governments and deep-seated public disenchantment with how politics worked.

In the almost twelve months since the referendum Albanese’s prime ministership has reverted to subdued incrementalism. The government roused itself from its post-referendum doldrums at the beginning of 2024 by announcing the recasting of the third tranche of the Morrison government’s tax cuts to provide a far more equitable spread of their fruits. It seemed like a Labor thing to do. Tellingly, however, the initiative was reported to have come from treasurer Chalmers, who had long been agitating within the government for the change.

Albanese had only belatedly agreed, concerned that reneging on his election promise to keep the tax cuts intact would hurt his standing. Far from rounding on the prime minister, the public understood and welcomed the move. Soon after, in a by-election in the Melbourne outer-suburban electorate of Dunkley, he and his government received a fillip when the party’s primary vote held up and it comfortably retained the seat. That result at least punctured any notion of an unstoppable Dutton-led Liberal conquest of outer suburbia Australia.

Even so, political momentum has eluded the prime minister and his government in 2024. The May budget featured cost of living relief measures and a centrepiece $23 billion, A Future Made in Australia, designed to revive domestic manufacturing, spur the nation’s transition to a net-zero economy, and integrate Australia into a global economy that Chalmers declared to be undergoing the greatest transformation since the Industrial Revolution. The policy provided funding for a vast array of projects, including $20 billion under the grandiose banner of the “renewable energy superpower.” Labor’s headlining of the package evinced that its activities in the field of climate change, though not without limitations and contradictions (the government continued to approve new fossil fuel projects and extend the lives of others), was the one field in which it believed it could nail its colours to transformative change.

Labor enjoyed no electoral dividend from either the budget or the delivery of the tax cuts from 1 July. For the government it must have been especially disconcerting that polling suggested its actions were barely registering with the population, let alone inducing feelings of gratitude.

Three reasons suggest themselves. First and foremost, the measures were too modest to have a significant effect on the lived experience of many Australians in an environment — by no means unique to Australia — of stubborn inflationary pressures and relatively high interest rates. Perilously for Labor, voters were defaulting to their traditional habit of seeing the conservative side of politics as the better manager of economic affairs.

Second, a decade of policy indolence by the Coalition had left Labor with a backlog of problems resistant to quick or easy fixes. Housing was a prime example. And third, Labor’s messaging was confounded by a balkanised and highly polarised media landscape. Whatever credit it claimed — or deserved — the audience was scattered, often out of reach, in online rabbit warrens. Needless to say, social media’s influence as a transmitter of (mis)information and a platform for inflammatory opinion formation is proving ever more inimical to persuasive engagement with the electorate. It is instead consummate at engendering impatience and inciting grievance, which rapidly and capriciously deprive leaderships of community goodwill. In a vicious circle, governments are sapped of a willingness to embark on major reforms.

With less than a year to the next election, the time for governing is closing. Labor has continued to eke out worthwhile reforms, including protections for gig economy workers and efforts to put the National Disability Insurance Scheme on a sustainable footing. In other areas, though — for example, banning gambling advertising, or whether the census should include questions on expanded gender options and sexuality — it has looked timorous and vacillating. The latter episode was reported to have begun with a “captain’s call,” not only something that recent prime-ministerial history indicates rarely ends well but also a breach of Albanese’s standard practice of collegiate decision-making. Worse, it revealed a prime minister lacking confidence in his ability to shepherd public discussion and jumping at the opposition leader’s shadow.

By now, the entrenched view of Albanese within the public is that he is well intentioned — he does not elicit animus as Morrison did — but also insipid and weak. The fact that focus groups are landing on the word “weak” to describe the prime minister is evidenced by how Dutton and Coalition shadow ministers have fixed the term on Albanese. He is regarded as a hostage to, rather than a shaper of, events.

Dutton, by contrast, is perceived as “nasty” and divisive but strong. Far from shying away from that reputation, the opposition leader is leaning into it, as exemplified by his recent provocative call to block all Palestinian refugees from war-ravaged Gaza. His inflammatory brazenness has more than once left Albanese looking defensive and leaden. That some polling is finding that Dutton is the preferred prime minister — a position seldom enjoyed by opposition leaders — suggests that a proportion of Australians equate “strength,” even at the cost of social cohesion, with leadership.

Anthony Albanese has demonstrated that he is a different type of leader — one whose modus operandi is to doggedly nudge the country along. In a leader-centric era in which alternative authority  figures have melted from view, we expect much from our prime ministers — too much. The challenge is arguably amplified for Labor office-holders. They are inheritors of the party folklore that its leaders are weather makers, exalted figures in a pantheon of great reformers. Filling those historical shoes is no easy thing. Moreover, there is a habit on the political left of devouring its own, of railing against the sacrileges and pusillanimity of Labor prime ministers and governments while they are in office only to appreciate their value once they are gone. Progressive frustration with Albanese has elements of this.

When he won office in May 2022, Albanese declared a hope that his “journey in life” — the boy reared in council housing who rose to be prime minister — “inspires Australians to reach for the stars.” Thus far inspiration has been missing from Albanese’s repertoire.

Today’s United States is hardly a reference point for democratic leadership, yet the emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential candidate has illustrated the possibility of joy to lighten and energise the political mood. Similarly, the British political writer and broadcaster and former politician, Rory Stewart, has identified the importance of humour leavening the mundane but essential work of centrist leadership. Joy and humour can be powerful antidotes to the menacing catastrophising of right-wing populists like Trump — and Dutton.

Albanese and his ministers have provided grown-up administration, worthy and sensible, but it has also been dour work, a government of grinding necessity. Albanese sits atop, a decent and sincere man yet a model of prime-ministerial staidness and a dampener of political passions. He has also been wanting in explaining the journey the nation is on, why it matters, and what lies on the horizon. Dare we say, the vision thing.

The 2025 election will test whether Australia is tipping into a zone of ungovernability: whether an able administration can endure beyond a single term. Little can be taken for granted in our fractured, volatile electorate, but my hunch is that Labor will survive the election — as it deserves to — albeit with serious prospect of being reduced to minority rule.

For a number of reasons, historical, cultural and institutional, the centre holds better in this country than it does in many other parts of the globe. I also suspect that the nation is neither as fearful nor as paranoid as Dutton is banking on, with women and young voters likely to prove major obstacles to his ambitions. An Albanese mantra is that he has been underestimated all his life. For him, winning a second term will be further affirmation of that. The temptation in those circumstances will be to continue to trudge along towards a far off promised land, heading a government of honourable but modest deeds and pinched emotions.

Our best prime ministers have learned on the job and grown in office. With a lifetime in politics and hardboiled into a wily, flinty operator, does Albanese still have growth in him? Having acquired comfortable respectability in adulthood, is there anything left of the passionate incandescence of his youth for him to draw on? Can he yet spread his leadership wings? •

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Judith Allen was one such historian whose sudden and untimely death in London on 4 July has shocked and saddened many historians. Productive to the end, her death left unfinished a number of books that promised to have her signature game-changing effect on how we think about the history of gender and sexuality.

Judith Allen was Distinguished Professor and Walter Professor of History at Indiana University (Bloomington), where she had worked for almost three decades. She was researching in London, her cultural-historian husband Peter Bailey’s home city, when she died.

I first met Judith in 2006 when I was working at the Menzies Centre at King’s College London. Thrilled to have struck up a friendship with a scholar whose work had been indispensable to my History PhD, I was invited to their London flat for brunch. I was a little surprised (disappointed, even) to discover on arrival that this would not be an intimate occasion, but the crowd made sense when our hosts announced that this was not an ordinary brunch gathering but their wedding. It was a warm and hospitable celebration and there was a lot of laughter.

Some months later Judith was keynote speaker at a conference on feminism and the body I convened. Her lecture packed the venue, a testament to the interest in her topic, “Cultural Genealogies of Anovulation: Revisiting Abortion, the Pill and Feminist Sexual Politics,” and her reputation in Britain. Ours was a fleeting friendship in Judith’s richly connected and intellectually vibrant life, but her generosity and insights have lingered with me.

When I returned to Australia, her ongoing companionship took the form of books, chapters and articles that have always been close to hand. When I had started my PhD in 1999, Allen’s writings were models of feminist history, both empirically and theoretically, that made it seem possible to write my own history of the pregnant body. Her feminist agenda and her embrace of poststructuralist approaches to historical research offered a language and conceptual toolkit for charting the changing nature of the pregnant body in Australian medicine, law and feminism. As I resumed this line of inquiry post-PhD, her historical interventions continued to inform and guide me.

I am hardly alone in finding Judith’s work a continued inspiration. Allen’s chapter “Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the Limits of History” in Feminist Challenges (1986) has long been a classic text on feminist methodologies. For me and many of my peers that essay sits alongside its contemporary, Joan Scott’s “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis,” as key to our emergence as feminist historians.

Scott argued that all historical research was impoverished without due consideration of gender in all its expressions, material and metaphorical, “as a category of analysis.” Throwing caution aside, Allen went further and proposed jettisoning a discipline, history, that she saw as a moribund site of enquiry for those keen to understand the situation of women.

No doubt she believed the respect she had garnered from historians in Australia — men and women alike — meant she could afford to make such claims, and perhaps they anticipated her move from history at Macquarie University to Griffith University, where she became the inaugural professor of women’s studies in 1990.

In 2017 Kathryn M. Hunter’s article “Silence in the Noisy Archives” called for renewed attention to Allen’s feminist caution against conventional historical methods in the context of transformations in archival research brought about by digitisation. This revisiting of Allen’s essay almost twenty years after its publication was testament to what Mary Spongberg recently described as her “paradigm shifting” on evidence and silence that “changed the way in which women’s private lives were studied in Australia and beyond,” including in women’s studies. But Allen’s ties to history remained.

In the same year she moved to Griffith, Allen published Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880, which applied the philosophical and methodological lessons imparted in “Evidence and Silence.” This was the major work on the history of abortion in Australia and remains the most comprehensive account of the subject in the period up to the mid-twentieth century. Like its forerunner, “Octavius Beale Reconsidered” (1982), Sex and Secrets introduced many students of Australian history in the 1980s and 1990s to the politics of gender and reproduction in the Australian colonies and the new nation. This is true also of the book’s discussions of infanticide and domestic violence.

In recent years Australian historians have revisited the theme of domestic and family violence, reflecting a growing awareness and sense of urgency about this phenomenon in the present. This field of feminist history had been almost dormant since Sex and Secrets, which was the culmination of a decade of Allen’s research and publishing on this topic alongside her peer Kay Saunders.

Allen’s compelling work on the history of domestic violence in Australia was undertaken in the early stages of her career. When her book chapters were published in the 1980s and 90s, they attracted scholarly engagement as well as contributing to policy conversations within the federal government. To begin with, Allen and Saunders found the domestic violence sector more receptive to this work than Australian historians. Both empirically and conceptually, Allen’s work was both ground-breaking and extraordinarily mature and influential for someone so early in their career. It continues to inform the direction of this field.

Scholars since have opened up histories of domestic violence to questions of race and a fuller range of expressions of masculine status, areas that Allen was criticised for not having adequately attended to. Yet, as I work with Ann Curthoys and Zora Simic on a major history of domestic violence since 1850, Allen’s publications remain foundational and illuminating. They were also a touchstone for Elizabeth Nelson’s 2014 book Homefront Hostilities: The First World War and Domestic Violence.

With her next major book after Sex and Secrets, Allen knew she had a challenge on her hands — how to write an exciting history of first-wave feminist Rose Scott, best known perhaps as a wowser who fiercely opposed mixed-sex surf bathing and railed against the “animal in man.” Not only was she up for it, having first studied Scott for her honours thesis, but Allen produced one of the most enduring works of Australian feminist history.

Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism 1880–1925 illuminated the general character of Australian feminism in this period, introducing other key figures and describing their cultural milieu and strands of political thought. Allen’s interest in feminism’s changing political critiques of heterosexuality and strategies for combatting its role in determining women’s identities and statuses saw her trace Rose Scott’s growing awareness of the differences between women.

Rather than reject the likes of Scott as second-wave women’s liberationists had done, Allen approached her and other feminists of the time on their own terms. I learned from her close friend, Stephen Garton, that in Bloomington Allen cultivated an impressive rose garden in honour of this significant Australian.

While Allen began her career in Australia, her biography of Scott was the last of her Australian studies. In our conversations in London, Allen critiqued Australian historians for their false sense of exceptionalism, a critique that she was well placed to make given the direction her research had taken since the mid 1990s. Her subsequent publications established her reputation as an expert in British and US histories of feminism and sexuality; they included a 2009 biography of American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman that picked up some of the themes in her account of Scott’s later feminist thought.

In 2019 I was delighted to have the opportunity to preview a section of the manuscript Black Market in Misery: Criminal Abortion and British Sexual Cultures, 1780–1980, which promised to be the first major history of abortion in Britain. It showcased Allen’s outstanding empirical research, evocative storytelling and compelling analysis. If this book is published it will surely be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the cultural, medical and legal histories of sexuality and reproduction in Britain and elsewhere.

For example, Allen analyses in unprecedented detail the introduction and early implementation of the far-reaching Ellenborough Act, so crucial to an understanding of the status of abortion in British colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Australia, placing it in the context of changing British sexual cultures that looked to post-Revolution France for inspiration and with trepidation. As ever, she sets her analysis within a wider international frame.

Allen also had a number of book projects underway dealing with the legacy of US sexologist Alfred Kinsey and signalling her emerging status as our foremost expert on this key figure in the history of sexuality. Her contribution to this field was facilitated by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, where she served as the senior research fellow for the final decade of her life. Her work towards Kinsey and the Feminine is a robust challenge to the standard narrative of Kinsey’s second report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — the view that it was of less interest to him than the first, and thus a further indicator of strands of misogyny in his character and work. It prompts a thorough rethinking of standard perceptions of Kinsey, tracing how he assembled his evidence and exploring the wider context of relationships that influenced his interpretations. Allen’s longstanding interest in the implications of this history for sexual politics strengthen its contemporary relevance for scholars and the wider public.

An abiding theme of Allen’s work is the history of heterosexuality and marriage. As well presenting her paper “Desperately Seeking Solutions: Battered Women’s Options since 1880” at the 1985 National Conference on Domestic Violence, she made a provocative closing speech imagining a culture with “woman-centred values” that would identify and regulate marriage “as a dangerous trade, just like coal mining or working in a nuclear plant.” Its health hazards for women would be advertised in the same way as those associated with smoking. Where these hazards manifested as domestic violence, perpetrators would be “disenfranchised and lose citizenship rights.”

This brilliant utopian vision was presented in the spirit of feminist solidarity. Its rhetorical purpose was to place in sharp relief the masculinist world inhabited by women. It remains salient in 2024 as some of us arm ourselves with Allen’s insights to advance histories of domestic and family violence, a problem that can seem intractable, in ways that speak to present concerns.

Allen sought to shift the nature of inquiry and to unearth and spotlight assumptions that have dulled the quality of historical understanding. She often gave overdue recognition to the intellectual and political work of important historical figures. Scholars with the power to persuade their colleagues to reflect on closely held truths, reconceptualise research problems and take new approaches to their craft are rare and invaluable.

She maintained a handful of significant friendships with historians in Australia, but for the most part the profession here adjusted to life without her embodied presence. Elsewhere the loss of Judith Allen is registering daily. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, her colleague at Indiana, wrote to me recently of her grief and the extraordinary impact of the friendship and mentoring Allen offered her when she arrived in Bloomington in 2005:

She quickly became not only a dear friend, neighbor, and colleague, but a savvy mentor who dispensed humor, insights, and advice in equal measure while always having my back. She openly acknowledged the misogynoir I faced… I will always picture Judith sitting at one of our favorite tables at a local restaurant called C3, listening to Peter play piano on the patio with various jazz trios. Wearing one of her trademark, jewel-toned dresses with matching lipstick and holding a glass of “Troublemaker” red wine, she would regularly break into one of her big, buoyant, show-stopping laughs while slapping the table and yelling “Oy!” My God, how I miss her. She was one of a kind.

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Night after night, thousands of young men willingly flew off into the war’s heart of darkness knowing full well how short the odds of survival were, how any moment over enemy-controlled territory they might be shot down, blown apart or, having miraculously survived the jump from a crippled or burning aircraft, held for years in a German prisoner of war camp.

Much has been written celebrating the quiet heroism of these men, and rightly so, but much less has been heard about those who failed to meet the exacting standards demanded of them through their tours of duty — the unaccounted casualties of a relentless conflict.

“Each year there are about 3000 cases of nervous breakdown in air crew and about 300 cases of lack of confidence,” reported the RAF’s director-general of medical services, Sir Harold Whittingham, in April 1945. “A third of the neurosis cases occur in Bomber Command.” A large proportion of those cases were in training units where the men had yet to be exposed to the perils of combat operations but were being tested in extreme flying conditions. More than 8000 airmen were killed in training accidents or other non-operational flying during the war.

“Lack of Moral Fibre,” or LMF, was the punitive designation promoted by the RAF leadership throughout the war to stigmatise aircrew who refused to fly on operations, avoided operations or did a boomerang — flew home early from a sortie without a persuasive excuse.

By early 1940, senior officers had become concerned that medical staff were excusing too many men from flying duties. A memorandum issued by the air ministry to all commands in April sought to limit the definition of mental incapacity by promoting the alternative, if unspoken, diagnosis of cowardice. A revised version in September 1941 stipulated that airmen, “who though not medical cases, come to forfeit the confidence of their Commanding Officers without having been subjected to any exceptional strain of operational flying … must be proved to be lacking in moral fibre.”

The service records of those classified as LMF cases would be stamped with a large red “W” for “waverer.” All would be stripped of their flying badges, sometimes publicly in front of their peers. Officers would lose their commissions and be refused ground jobs in the RAF. Non-commissioned officers would be demoted to aircraftmen second class — the lowest rank in the service — and assigned menial tasks for at least three months.

From 1944, LMF cases could be sent to work in coal mines or drafted into the army. Many RAF psychiatrists, while accepting the policy’s deterrent effect, thought it was wrong not to take account of individual conditions and mitigating circumstances. Their disquiet was ignored. Senior commanders, including Bomber Command chief Sir Arthur Harris, regarded it as an essential measure to maintain discipline and aircrew numbers.

Christopher Kingdon of the University of Chicago would write in the Chicago Journal of History in 2013: “RAF Command had an obsessive predilection, based upon Freudian concepts, that rises in neurotic rates were attributable to the character deficiencies of its wartime recruits, and not to the combined effects of prolonged exposure to combat stress and high attrition rates.”

In a report to Air Command in July 1943, Edward Jewesbury, an RAF psychiatric specialist, articulated the force’s intolerance and lack of sympathy for those airmen who suffered severe combat stress: “The airman thereafter developed symptoms of an anxiety state and was treated in sick quarters for a month without improvement. In previous wars he would probably have been shot for cowardice. Today he is a ‘medical case’, albeit a medical nuisance.”

The rules were often ruthlessly applied. The authorities ignore the reality that the mental trauma causing some airmen to be unwilling or incapable of flying was often well beyond their control. Historian Richard Overy, in The Bombing War, describes the official embrace of the notion of LMF as “a stigma designed as an emasculating deterrent to any sign of weakness.” As with the victims of “shell shock” in the first world war, the label often became a cover for the reality of a mental condition yet to find a name, post-traumatic stress disorder.

While relatively few of the tens of thousands of men who flew with Bomber Command were sidelined or disabled by trauma, there is little doubt that many of them were deeply affected by the terrible things they were required to do and experience night after night, day after day in the skies over German-occupied Europe. Not to be afraid was not to be human — and not to be afraid could expose crews to even greater levels of danger than were part of their basic job description if it sapped the confidence and focus of men whose survival often depended on it.

Many aircrew would simply sublimate the stress or become fatalistic, according to Bruce Buckham, a highly decorated Australian pilot who flew on two tours of combat operations with Bomber Command and took part in the final raids to sink the German battleship Tirpitz in Norway in November 1944.

“There was no counselling,” Buckham recalled. “If the boys felt the need to talk to someone then sometimes they might go along to the padre and have a bit of a chat with him and a cup of tea. But I don’t think I saw too many people looking for relief that way. It’s an unfortunate thing that so many had reached the point where they said, ‘Ok. It will be up any time now.’ But others would say, ‘Bugger that. Let’s have another beer. We’ll forget about it and let it stay forgotten.’ But it was hard for some.”

Life at the Bomber Command stations was deliberately structured if not to condition airmen to the almost daily toll of death then to at least avoid as much as possible contemplation of that fact by those who might be next to fall. Early each morning the names of those crews that had failed to return from operations were quietly scrubbed from the blackboard where they had been listed for operations the night before.

Funerals and memorial services were never held for those known to have been killed over Europe. The slender hope that all or some of a missing crew might have survived crashing or bailing out of a stricken aircraft to be taken prisoner often was embraced to avoid having to confront the probability that they were dead. For those known to have perished, a glass raised quietly in the mess or at the pub would be their farewell.

When an airman failed to return, a group of officers known as a Standing Committee of Adjustment, would gather the missing man’s personal effects and forward them to a central RAF depository, eventually to be returned to the family. Frequently the empty bed would be filled by a new crew member within a day or two.

While these rituals could seem callous, many airmen already too aware of their own mortality appreciated not being required to dwell on the fate of those whose luck had run out. Bruce Buckham was one: “We honoured them silently in our own minds. We’d have a drink the next night and the equanimity of life was restored straight away. You wouldn’t dwell on it. You couldn’t, because you had to keep going.”

Part of the answer to why these men were able to stare death in the face and carry on lies in who they were and why they enlisted. All aircrew were volunteers, many from throughout the Commonwealth who signed on as patriots determined to fight an enemy that threatened the freedom of the mother country and therefore the freedom of their nations.

Training bonded them, not least the Australians, whose mateship that infused their national identity was strengthened by the sense of mutual responsibility that flourished in the Australian squadrons of the RAF. But that spirit would be severely tested at times when the airmen thought the commanders were indifferent to the losses of their comrades, according to Bruce Buckham.

“There was no evidence, any sign at all, of sympathy when things went wrong and a lot of crews were lost,” said Buckham, who died in 2011. “The attitude seemed to be, ‘Oh well, too bad, we won’t do that again,’ or it was, ‘Well, let’s try something else.’ The force was only a number of bodies who were sent out to do a job. That’s the way they looked at it. We had bigger and bigger forces going out. They built up a thousand-odd planes for Hamburg. They burnt that out. There were a couple of thousand-bomber raids on Cologne. There were many other raids of 800 and 900 aircraft. To the commanders it was just bodies and numbers of bodies that were involved.”

Early in his operational career, Buckham would keep a diary noting the losses of other aircraft after each mission. He soon concluded that this was not a constructive exercise.

“After about half a dozen trips I stopped. I realised this was crazy. All I was doing was taking a note of the ‘birds’ that were not coming back. And I tell you what, it was a bit heart rending when you have to go down to the flight next morning and wipe out half the names on the board where the crew were listed. The board had three lines for each crew and not many were able to fill those three lines — thirty trips. I didn’t like it. There was no time differential between life and death. I worked out that I was worrying about something that wasn’t manageable. And so I stopped keeping a count. I never thought about luck and I never thought about the lack of luck. I couldn’t. Every split second of life out there had to be dealt with at the time as you saw fit.”

***

Many airmen were convinced they had no hope of survival. Don Charlwood would write in his celebrated memoir No Moon Tonight: “We even became accustomed to the idea that to reach thirty ops was no longer possible, that home was a place for which we could afford no longings.” Phil Eyles, who was the navigator of later Pathfinder Force commander Don Bennett when they were shot down over Norway in early 1942, was another fatalist: “Everybody seemed to have the impression that they were going to cop it. That is why, right from the start when I joined up, I wanted twelve shillings and sixpence a day [as a sergeant] instead of being an AC2 [aircraftman second class] on a shilling a day, and that was all I wanted. There was going to be a pension for my wife and child.”

Many airmen relieved the intense stress of operations by drinking hard and playing hard in their free time. The Australians were notable for their excess on both counts. RAAF 463 Squadron commander Rollo Kingsford-Smith liked to drink and found that teetotallers who were often alone when not flying did not cope as well with the stress of operations as those who drank.

“Drinking (draught beer only — spirits were nearly unprocurable), the company at the bar and forgetting about the war was important therapy,” Kingsford-Smith would write in his memoir, I Wouldn’t Have Missed it for Quids. “Many misinformed English people did not really warm to Australian aircrews’ hijinks when not on duty. My enduring memory of most of my aircrew is of young men who, between fighting and dying, lived wildly, played exuberantly, and loved sometimes imprudently.”

The exhilaration of battle while dicing with death would drive a lot of airmen to perform the super-human feats they often carried out. But even the toughest and most stoic of airmen could be brought undone by dramatic events.

Jamaican Billy Strachan flew a tour as a wireless operator/air gunner before retraining as a pilot and joining 576 Squadron, based at RAF Fiskerton near Lincoln, in the final months of the war. His flying career came to an abrupt end one night, soon after his Lancaster took off carrying a 12,000 bomb.

“Our flight path was over Lincoln Cathedral,” Strachan would recount. “It was a foggy night, with visibility about 100 yards. I asked my engineer, who stood beside me, to make sure we were on course to get over the top of the cathedral tower. He replied: ‘We’ve just passed it.’ I looked out and suddenly realised that it was just beyond our wingtips, to the side. This was the last straw. It was sheer luck. I hadn’t seen it at all — and I was the pilot! There and then my nerve went. I knew I simply couldn’t go on — that this was the end of me as a pilot. I flew to a special ‘hole’ we had in the North Sea, which no allied shipping ever went near, and dropped my ‘big one.’ Then I flew back to the airfield.”

Strachan’s navigator that night was Len Dorricott, who had earlier won the Distinguished Flying Medal on operations with 460 Squadron RAAF aboard the fabled “G for George” Lancaster. In his flying logbook, Dorricott would note with great understatement, “Pilot ill.”

Following the incident, Strachan was sent to a large country house in Coventry where he stayed for forty-eight hours. A psychiatrist who interviewed him attributed his breakdown to “war weariness,” a gentler variation of LMF. Billy Strachan never flew again and was never awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross that undoubtedly was his due after such long and brave service with Bomber Command. After the war he became a famous communist and leader of the black rights movement in Britain. •

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For all that, his government had every reason to think it had a friend in the Australian Constitution. Whitlam himself had long considered that document to have potential. Now, faced with a bitter opposition and an intransigent Senate, Labor was determined to make full use of section 57 to pursue its program.

Shaped by the colourful history of Australia’s colonial politics and much older traditions of British bicameralism, section 57 was designed to resolve deadlocks between the two houses of parliament. Under its provisions, a bill defeated twice in the Senate (with a three-month interval in between) can be put to the people at a double-dissolution election; if defeated a third time, the matter can be decided at a joint sitting of all parliamentarians.

The government had used six bills, each twice rejected by the Senate, as the basis for the election. The Commonwealth Electoral Bill (No. 2) was designed to reduce the allowable variation in the number of voters between federal divisions from 20 per cent to 10 per cent. The Senate (Representation of Territories) Bill and the Representation Bill were intended to grant two Senate seats each to the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory, and to exclude those new senators from the constitutional “nexus” that requires the House to be roughly double the size of the Senate. The Health Insurance and Health Insurance Commission bills were intended to establish a system of national health insurance, Medibank, along with the commission that would administer it.

The sixth of the bills — which aimed to establish a Petroleum and Minerals Authority to cultivate greater national ownership of Australian resources— faced a particular obstacle. There was some doubt as to whether it had been properly “rejected” when first put to the Senate in December 1973, before its further defeat the following April.

Labor had been returned in May with a reduced majority of five in the House, while the Senate was evenly split. The government and opposition had twenty-nine senators each, and the two independent senators were both former Liberals with very different dispositions. Although the government would continue to suffer in the Senate, it could muster a majority of three in the event of a joint sitting even if both independents voted with the Opposition.

The six double-dissolution bills were guillotined through the House and defeated again in the Senate in mid-July, by which time Australia had a new governor-general. Paul Hasluck’s successor, the highly ambitious former NSW chief justice Sir John Kerr, had spent much of his life on the peripheries of party politics.

Kerr’s vice-regal correspondence tells us just how discomforted he was by Whitlam’s request for a joint sitting to decide the fate of the bills. He worried especially about the Petroleum and Minerals Authority Bill and the uncertainty over its original defeat. Kerr was also unsure about the legitimacy of storing up multiple bills under section 57. But the government had its own legal advice and Kerr begrudgingly accepted their counsel. On 30 July he issued a proclamation requiring all parliamentarians to attend the House of Representatives at 10.30am on Tuesday 6 August to “deliberate” and “vote together upon each of the said proposed laws as last proposed by the House of Representatives.”

That proclamation was immediately challenged in the High Court of Australia by two opposition senators who hoped either to invalidate it entirely or confine the joint sitting to deliberation on a single bill. They sought to exclude the Petroleum and Minerals Authority Bill on the grounds that it failed to meet the three-month requirement of section 57. The conservative Queensland government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen attempted to join this case against Whitlam and his attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, but ultimately lacked sufficient standing.

On the eve of the sitting, the court ruled that it could go ahead. But some justices were critical of several aspects of Kerr’s proclamation and troubled by the “extraordinary lawmaking power” afforded to a joint sitting of parliament. Further legal contests were to come.

Nothing about the logistics and practicalities of this first joint sitting was self-evident to anybody. No fewer than thirty-six issues needed settling beforehand, and few international precedents existed. The leader of the House, veteran Labor MP Fred Daly, quipped that with so few established rules it was “just like a Surry Hills preselection.”

Preparing for the sitting offered a brief reprieve from the bitter partisanship of the era. The government and opposition quickly agreed on four debates spanning four hours each. The Speaker of the House, the venerable and witty Jim Cope, would be elected chairman unopposed and then dragged to the chair in line with the customary ritual that followed the selection of a new Speaker. Bills would be put up for affirmation (or rejection) without proceeding through a first, second and third reading. Seating plans were to be made to squeeze all 187 parliamentarians on to the green benches of a lower house that normally accommodated sixty bodies fewer. The event was to be captured in colour by four cameras stationed in the chamber, and the government’s intention was that this footage would constitute an “an audio-visual archive” of great significance.

In a novel experiment, the sitting would also be broadcast on ABC television. MPs were required to speak from rostrums on either side of the chair to convey to viewers a “balanced presentation of the affirmative and negative arguments.” Temporary lighting facilities were set up in the chamber (prompting a couple of MPs to don sunglasses) and a broadcast van sat on the Senate side of the building. The chamber resembled a movie studio as never before. The television coverage was, of course, still in black and white; colour would only arrive the following year.

The twenty-ninth parliament made for unusual television. In addition to the thirty-odd new MPs on the backbenches, two former prime ministers, John Gorton and William McMahon were among the assembled parliamentarians. The party leaders of both houses sat at either side of the table. David McNicoll, in the Bulletin, thought “the members were buffed up to a degree I have not witnessed before.”

But the need for a joint sitting was not a matter of satisfaction for Whitlam, at least by his own account. “[T]he reasons for it,” he explained in his opening address, “are not a matter for pride.” Rather, the joint sitting was “a last resort” in the face of repeated obstruction in the Senate. It was fitting, then, that Whitlam’s speech would also open the debate on the Commonwealth Electoral Bill (No. 2), which would, he explained, “enshrine the principle of one vote, one value” and enhance the quality of Australian democracy. After all, this was a goal that went back to the very earliest years of the NSW Labor Party, whose original platform in 1891 began with a commitment to “equal electoral districts on adult population basis.”

In reply, Snedden taunted Whitlam with the prospect of another double-dissolution election and described the joint sitting as “an anticlimax,” rather like the Russian parliament “discussing the colour that the… clergy should wear while Lenin was taking over the country.” It took education minister Kim Beazley to point out, somewhat pedantically, that Snedden had his aphorism all wrong: it was the synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, not the parliament, that had been so occupied during the revolution.

The lists of government and opposition speakers were carefully organised. David McKenzie, whose Diamond Valley electorate was particularly affected by rapid population growth and infrequent redistributions, spoke in support of one vote, one value. Ministers and MPs who represented the ACT and the Northern Territory were allocated to the debate on Senate representation for mainland territories. A combination of senior stars and rising talents argued the case for and against the Petroleum and Minerals Authority. The distinctive political swagger and biting turn of phrase were already in clear view in the case of thirty-year-old Paul Keating.

Three of the five newly elected women featured in the health debate, and it was arguably Joan Child, Labor’s new member for Henty, who made the strongest contribution. MPs tended to agree, though, that Liberal MHR Jim Killen, with his rhetorical flourishes and sparkling putdowns of daring interjectors, was the most effective performer overall.

The television cameras temporarily cooled the atmosphere of parliament. With his opening speech, Whitlam struck a deliberately statesmanlike posture. His Labor colleagues invoked Enlightenment philosophes, modern American jurists and Australian government reports to bolster their arguments on electoral reform. Bill Hayden, as social security minister, and Rex Connor, the large and formidable minister for minerals and energy, were both remarkably measured despite the lengthy scare campaigns they had faced over the Medibank and petroleum bills. Some commentators judged the SA Liberal Movement senator Steele Hall, who evoked the “atmosphere of an early Frank Capra film,” the “star” of the broadcast, but his televised contribution comes off as a little grand, perhaps even a bit sanctimonious. He was really no Jimmy Stewart.

In an effort to make political capital out of the joint sitting, Snedden’s contributions to the electoral and health debates were heavily punctuated by gesticulations and theatrics. Coalition speakers described the electoral bills as Labor’s attempt to secure itself in office through a “Dalymander,” in ironic homage to Fred Daly, the minister in charge of them. The member for Kooyong, Andrew Peacock, warned that if the government granted Senate representation to the mainland territories it might allow “one man on a met station” in the Coral Sea Islands to become his own senator too.

For his part, Liberal MP Bruce Lloyd hypothesised that Labor’s health scheme would allow “dictatorial power” over religious care institutions, which would be forced to provide abortions. In their attacks on Connor’s petroleum bill, the opposition raised the spectre of covert nationalisation, bureaucracy and socialism, and an all-out assault on states’ rights. This seemed like the 1947 campaign against bank nationalisation all over again.

Newspapers, which still played a dominant role in the reporting of political news, gave the sitting generous coverage, exploring the legislative substance of the event as well as its quirkier human side. Journalist Alan Fitzgerald noted that the bald head of Labor’s Gil Duthie gleamed under the harsh lights, and a young Niki Savva reported that it was five hours before a member, Bill Wentworth, nodded off. There was no want of energy, though, in Wentworth’s attempt to disrupt proceedings with an urgent debate about inflation and industrial relations, which was promptly shot down by the chairman. (Daly suggested that the idiosyncratic MP was posturing for the cameras and the “strange people in his electorate” who kept returning him to parliament.)

Commercial media companies exercised their right to use soundless video of the debates, but they had to submit their scripts to the relevant parliamentary committee for vetting lest the footage be used for improper purposes such as satire. Not every portion of the footage made for great television, though, and it was noticed that when telecasting ended members who had seemed “alert and interested” before “suddenly found they were wanted elsewhere” — notably in the private members’ bar.

In the days after the joint sitting the Australian Broadcasting Control Board surveyed a sample of 146 Melbourne residents by telephone to gauge their reactions to it all. Fifty respondents reported that they had viewed part of the broadcast, while a further fifty-odd said another member of their household had done so.

Sydney’s Daily Telegraph hinted that viewers at home saw the sitting as “a great big yawn.” Housewives were said to have “preferred the soap operas and daytime movies”; some reported watching for a while and then switching over to something else because it was “too boring”; and one woman declared that Number 96, the risqué late-night soap, “was far too important to miss for a parliamentary debate on electoral boundaries.” Certainly the Joint Sitting featured no Number 96-style nudity, although the secretary of the Old Age and Invalid Pensioners’ Association, Albert Thompson, suggested that MPs might consider appearing “in the altogether so their constituents can be more intimately acquainted with them.”

The joint sitting effects on Australia’s political affairs were immediate. An older Paul Keating later reflected that the occasion had “something of a salutary effect” on Labor MPs, for whom “the constitution was seen to have worked.” That seemed to matter not least because Labor had often, until the 1970s, been at war with the limitations of that document. The events of 1975, however, would prevent any complete reconciliation.

In the longer term, the sitting led to “senators for the Territories,” “one vote one value” and “regular redistributions of electorates,” changes that strengthened democratic norms both within and beyond the federal political sphere. It also established the forerunner of today’s Medicare.

The Petroleum and Minerals Authority was less fortunate, falling down in the High Court on a section 57 technicality. But when conservative state governments came knocking in the hope of nullifying the Senate (Representation of Territories) Act and the Commonwealth Electoral Act (No. 2), the justices upheld both bills. The court also established the precedent that multiple proposed laws could be legitimately “stockpiled” for the purpose of a double dissolution and a joint sitting, and that no “temporal limitations” could be invoked to circumscribe that process.

With the joint sitting, the Whitlam government displayed its characteristic commitment to using the institutions of Australian democracy to the fullest extent to advance meaningful reform. For a brief moment, it was possible to imagine that joint sittings might even become a more common process of government, in what the constitutional scholar Geoffrey Sawer called “government by double dissolution.” That has never come to pass. Nonetheless, this historic occasion continued the adaptation of British traditions to Australian federal demands and gave flesh to the bones of a section of the constitution whose day might yet arrive again. •

This is an edited extract from Frank Bongiorno and Joshua Black’s fiftieth anniversary Legacy Paper, That “Historic Occasion”: The Joint Sitting of 6–7 August 1974, published by the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University. It follows the extract published yesterday by Jenny Hocking with Allison Cadzow, “The Election That Never Was.”

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It ended where no one had predicted. By the end of 1974, Labor had won a historic second election victory — the first under the same leader — at the double dissolution election of 18 May 1974; the hostile Democratic Labor Party had been consigned to electoral oblivion; both houses of parliament had for the first time sat jointly under the constitutional provision that enabled the election; and, most significantly, the six bills that triggered the election had been passed by that sitting.

Those six bills — two establishing Medibank, two relating to the granting of Senate representation for the ACT and Northern Territory, a bill to reduce the permissible variation in electorate population size from 20 per cent to 10 per cent to ensure “one vote one value” and another establishing the Petroleum and Minerals Authority — were central to the Whitlam government’s legislative program. The PMA, for instance, aimed to introduce a degree of public ownership and control over the minerals and energy resources that previous governments had subsidised at over $341 million a year.

The passage of these six bills was the very outcome the opposition had sought to avoid when it twice rejected or “failed to pass” them in the Senate. For these transformative outcomes alone the 1974 double dissolution deserves closer scrutiny than it has received. Otherwise, as Whitam himself commented in 1985, “the 1974 election is in danger of taking its place in Australian political memory as the election that never was.”

The Labor Party’s re-election campaign was unusual and in some respects difficult to manage. It called for an uneasy mix of positive and negative messages: optimistically reciting what the government had achieved and how much more was still to come while also conveying a sense of the opposition obstruction that had driven the government to an early election. This polarisation between progress and obstruction was reflected in the respective themes adopted by the major parties — “a fair go” being central to Labor’s campaign in contrast to the Liberal Party’s anodyne and reactive “think again.”

Several campaign slogans were considered, ranging from the alliterative: “Give Gough a Go” and “Great Going Gough,” to the functional: “Go Ahead — Mathews for Casey” (which was adaptable to every candidate and every electorate) to the more directive: “Go Ahead — Vote Labor.” What they all had in common was a sense of movement, of advance, and of a government that had not yet been given a “fair go.” These positive slogans were juxtaposed with others framing a more personal attack on the prospect of Liberal leader Billy Snedden as prime minister: “I’m dreadin’ Snedden” and “Snedden PM — You’ve got to be joking” were popular bumper stickers.

In the end, the slogan most commonly used was the simplest: “Give Gough a Go.” It captured the “fair go” element while also portraying a sense of momentum, of a government moving ahead and looking to the future. The fairness mantra became a key focus of campaigning over the next five weeks.

As the campaign began in earnest the biggest problem for the Coalition was that, despite pushing the government to an election for months, it was unprepared for its own campaign. Snedden was effectively forced to pause the campaign during the first week in order to undertake that basic policy rebuilding, handing Labor a highly effective campaign target: an opposition, unprepared for government, that had devoted just three days to drawing up its key policies, some of which risked inflaming inflation.

As the opposition dealt with its policy issues, Whitlam left for Palm Cove, north of Cairns, for a short break over Easter to prepare the campaign launch and key speeches away from the distractions of Canberra. There was another, more sinister, aspect to that move:  as Whitlam and his wife Margaret were now under twenty-four-hour police guard following a series of anonymous kidnapping threats.

Whitlam delivered Labor’s policy launch at the Blacktown Civic Centre on 29 April — the same venue where, eighteen months earlier, he had given the “It’s Time” speech launching the 1972 election campaign. The hall was once again full, with more than 2000 people inside and hundreds more crowded at the windows straining to see Whitlam speak or gathered outside to listen. Labor president Bob Hawke was a popular warm-up, stepping on stage to thunderous applause to remind the crowd of the Liberal Party’s absent policy platform: “The Liberals had to slink to Melbourne, lock themselves up for three days and try to find some policies!”

The 1972 It’s Time song was performed by Col Joye and the Joye Boys to loud cheers — although this time the enthusiasm of the party faithful was tempered by an edge of restrained anger at having to face another election so soon. As Whitlam reminded them:

The government you elected for three years has been interrupted in mid-career… Everything we promised, everything we have achieved, everything you expected of us — all this is suddenly threatened. It is threatened by the actions of men you rejected a mere seventeen months ago. It is threatened by the actions of men elected to the Senate not in 1972 but in 1967 and 1970. It is threatened by men who refused to stand by the umpire’s verdict — your verdict — to give us a chance, to give you a chance, to give Australia a new chance.

Beyond that opening salvo, the focus was on achievement, on the progress already made in the implementation of “the program,” and on the reforms achieved in the face of obstruction: women’s rights, Aboriginal people’s rights, greater equality of opportunity, electoral reform, and improvements in the arts, education and health. The government’s greatest achievement, Whitlam said, was in education, with preschool and childcare provisions, a fourfold increase in expenditure on education and free tertiary education.

The Coalition’s campaign initially focused on the economy and declining economic conditions. Inflation was running at 11 per cent, unemployment was just starting to rise and wages had increased significantly in the last year, bringing Labor’s economic credentials into question. Opinion polls reflected the early success of the Coalition’s focus on inflation as voters swung away from the government in the first two weeks of the campaign.

In early May, Labor strategists called an emergency meeting to assess the problems emerging in the campaign. Labor’s national secretary and legendary campaign manager Mick Young excoriated the campaign as too negative, not giving sufficient emphasis to the government’s achievements and failing to call out the divisions and weaknesses in the Coalition. The strategy was adjusted to focus more clearly on economic matters, with new proposals to restructure tax for low and middle-income earners and additional anti-inflation measures.

The “fair go” was to become less prominent in the final weeks of the campaign as inflation and the cost of living took centre stage. Whitlam pledged to deal with excessive wage demands and to make greater use of the Prices Justification Tribunal to control prices and profits.

The polls shifted again, and a Morgan Gallup poll released that week showed the strategic adjustments to Labor’s campaign were having an effect. After the initial swing to the Coalition, the opposition was falling behind. The Bulletin reported that “the PM was holding his position in elector favour while opposition leader Snedden was slipping back.” The magazine noted in the final week of the campaign that support for Whitlam was “rock solid” and his approval rating just over 50 per cent.

The Coalition’s campaign was beset by internal divisions — over state and federal issues, personalities, policy direction and campaign strategy. The conservative NSW branch and premier Robert Askin endorsed a series of incendiary advertisements highlighting the fearful spectre of the “socialist Labor government.” Devised by Sydney advertising mogul John Singleton, they featured several “vox pops” of apparently random disaffected Labor supporters speaking to camera of their experiences of socialism — which they now saw as mirrored in the Labor government.

The (in)famous “Estonian woman” was one of these, and her high-rotation televisual spectre of fear turned voters away:

I come originally from Estonia, the Baltic State… I have lived enough under communist regime, so I left and came to Australia… Then about sixteen months ago the Labor Party came to power, and I thought so, it is still a free country, but now I can see how wrong I was. Today I can see Labor is disguised socialist but for me it is disguised communist.

As the Age’s Creighton Burns remarked, “plausibility is the critical test of the effectiveness of any political campaign.” These attempts to link Canberra circa 1974 to Soviet Russia failed that test.

Singleton and a variety of unnamed business interests raised $250,000 for the largest-ever television advertising spend in any election, running their thirty-second “socialism” claims as an adjunct to the Coalition’s campaign. With $2 million available for its own advertising, the Coalition outspent Labor by two to one. Its television ads were broadcast across every channel several times an hour, augmented by Singleton’s “socialist” sound bites, which ultimately served to annoy rather than persuade the voters.

The Country/National Party’s campaign slogans failed to gain traction. The simple “Vote National Party” was hardly inspiring, and it was difficult to know what the slogan “Let’s Live Like Australians” even meant. As the impact of its economic focus waned the Coalition campaign became increasingly driven by fear and division — fear of the government, of socialism, of immigration and of urban privilege against rural constituents. It sought a return to the past, a pre-Whitlam restitution, vowing to remove the new national anthem, prioritise private health insurance, reinstate the superphosphate bounty and increase support for the mining and resources industry.

Country Party leader Doug Anthony claimed that a future Labor government would “endanger the way we live.” Italian-Australian voters were targeted with leaflets in Italian claiming the “socialist” Labor Party was going to take their farms, their houses, and their businesses.

These extreme claims reflected and encouraged an unsettling and at times dangerous element in this highly polarised campaign. They fuelled existing divisions over immigration and multiculturalism, which had flared with the government’s introduction of a range of measures broadening immigration and supporting people of non-English speaking backgrounds. Groups agitating against those changes called for the reintroduction of the white Australia policy and funded overtly racist campaign advertising fliers. Racist advertisements proliferated in papers in the NSW Riverina district, where Al Grassby had been the Labor member since 1969. Grassby was seen as “the father of multiculturalism,” having presided over the removal of race and nationality from immigration and citizenship laws, among many wide-ranging reforms.

Grassby had proudly announced that “the white Australia policy is dead. Give me a shovel and I’ll bury it!” For this effrontery he and his family received hate mail and death threats and were assigned a bodyguard for twenty-four-hour protection. The volume of hate mail increased dramatically after the election was announced and Grassby’s wife, Ellnor, collapsed after taking a telephone call in which the caller threatened to cut their daughter’s throat.

A week out from the election, the Age reported its latest polls showing Labor and Coalition still neck and neck. But polling in twenty-five key seats over the final week suggested a better outcome for the government. Factors cited by swinging voters pointing to the success of the government’s campaign strategy: Whitlam had only had seventeen months in the job and should be given a fair go, and it was their support for Whitlam that was critical in their voting decision. “Mr Whitlam became part of the reason why Labor ‘deserved’ a fair go,” concluded political scientist (and future Liberal MP) David Kemp.

If it could hold its seats in the cities then Labor could afford to lose a couple of rural seats, while the Coalition needed to gain five seats to form majority government. These figures were complicated by the addition of two new electorates following a redistribution, with the new seats of Tangney created in Western Australia and Fraser in the Australian Capital Territory. Both these seats were seen as nominally Labor gains, assisting the government in its quest for a second term. With eighteen- to twenty-year-olds voting for the first time, the usual polling inferences were further confounded.

As polling closed at 6pm on 18 May 1974, the only certainty was that this was going to be close.

The El Toro Motel, an incongruous faux-Spanish establishment with internal courtyard, archways, bougainvillea and white-washed brick in Sydney’s west, was the setting for Labor’s election-night vigil. Whitlam and the party entourage were nervously ensconced before a bank of televisions as the results came in. In the early hours of counting the result looked like a victory for the government — until at around 10pm the trend unexpectedly started to change. Postal votes and rural electorates were much stronger for the Coalition, and three of Labor’s seats in Queensland seemed endangered by a strong swing in that state.

As counting continued over the weekend, the result remained unresolved; although the government increasingly looked to have been returned, a number of seats remained too close to call. By Monday, though, Labor had clearly won a historic second successive victory under the same leader, and Gough Whitlam became the first Labor leader to achieve that distinction. The government’s majority was reduced from nine to five, with Labor losing five seats, including Al Grassby’s, and picking up four, including the two new seats. Most importantly, the government was returned with sufficient numbers in the House and Senate combined to ensure the passage of the six trigger bills at the subsequent joint sitting.

In many respects the double dissolution was a typical Whitlam move — bold, brash, and politically fraught — that succeeded on several levels: the government was returned; the six “trigger bills” were be passed in August; the DLP was despatched to electoral oblivion and finally, while the Senate result — twenty-nine Labor, one Liberal Movement, twenty-nine Coalition and one conservative independent — fell short of Labor control it also denied the Coalition a majority.

Whitlam had dealt with the obstruction, delivered the reforms, faced off the opposition’s threatened refusal to vote on Supply in the Senate, and taken the great risk of a new election for the entire parliament — and won. And yet, the obstruction would continue unabated. It was eleven days before Snedden acknowledged Labor’s victory, and even then his concession was hardly a concession at all: “We were not defeated. We did not win enough seats to form a government,” Snedden told astonished reporters.

Within days of that historic second victory, the Coalition was already acting as though the 1974 election had never happened. As Whitlam wrote later, “Our opponents no more accepted the people’s verdict of 1974 than they did of 1972.” •

This is an edited extract from Jenny Hocking and Allison Cadzow’s fiftieth-anniversary Legacy Paper, “The Election That Never Was”, published by the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University.

► Frank Bongiorno and Joshua Black on the historic August 1974 joint sitting of parliament

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But this colonial surgeon was merely the last in a line of Hobart surgeons who together donated around twenty Tasmanian skulls to British museums. In fact, collecting Indigenous body parts had been integral to the colonial project from its beginning in 1788, and it was driven by the man whose statue still stands proudly in the Sir Joseph Banks Park at Botany Bay.

Joseph Banks was a man of omnivorous curiosity whose mania for collecting reached around the known world. As his friend Lord Hobart admiringly observed in 1793, “Wide as the world is, traces of you are to be found in every corner of it.” His most distinct traces were to be found on the continent he had visited with Captain Cook in 1770. Having lobbied strenuously for a penal colony on the coast of New Holland, Banks had exerted influence over every particular in the creation and administration of the New South Wales colony. It was no mere flattery that he was dubbed “the father of Australia.”

Late in 1787 Banks received a letter from a German friend, Göttingen anatomist Johann Blumenbach, asking if he could procure skulls from New Holland. The First Fleet had already departed for Botany Bay, so Banks felt his best hope lay with William Bligh, a young protégé he had recommended to captain the HMS Bounty on an expedition to transplant breadfruit plants from Tahiti. Banks assured Blumenbach that Bligh would “collect crania for me wherever he touches,” and that was sure to include a landing somewhere on the coast of New Holland.

On 19 August 1788, Bligh dropped anchor at Adventure Bay, on that part of the far southeast coast of New Holland marked on the map as Van Diemen’s Land. He had visited Adventure Bay on Cook’s 1777 voyage and hoped to make contact with the same friendly people Cook had encountered. But Bligh caught only fleeting glimpses of the locals through his telescope and had no chance of procuring any skulls.

Banks sent a similar request to the inaugural governor of New South Wales via the Second Fleet, which eventually straggled into Sydney Cove’s beleaguered penal settlement, loaded with sick and dying convicts, in June 1790. Banks’s outsized influence was evident in the harried governor’s response to the request. “I shall send skulls by the Gorgon,” Arthur Phillip wrote on 26 July 1790, adding that “I shall always be happy in receiving your commands,” as if — with so many convicts to bury and so many more mouths to feed out of the colony’s almost extinguished food supplies — he had no more pressing matters to handle.

Commands from Banks were not so easy to oblige, Phillip discovered. But opportunity presented itself in December 1790 when his favoured game-shooter was fatally speared by the formidable Eora warrior, Pemulwuy. Watkin Tench believed the game-shooter had given serious offence to the Eora, but Phillip was having none of that, and insisted the killing was entirely unprovoked. Tench was instructed to lead an expedition to Botany Bay to bring back Pemulwuy, as well as the heads of another ten men.

Shocked and surprised, Tench tried to reason with Phillip. But he was only able to reduce the head requirement from ten to six. He set off at dawn on 14 December with fifty or more armed men carrying hatchets for decapitation and bags for the heads. When it finally reached Botany Bay, however, this insect-ravaged party could find no men to decapitate. Back they trudged to Sydney Cove, only to be ordered out again, to no better advantage. “To our astonishment,” Tench recorded, “we found not a single native at the huts; nor was a canoe to be seen on any part of the bay.”

The governor’s overreach had the effect of enshrining Pemulwuy as a dangerous enemy. The head of this resourceful warrior was the trophy Phillip dearly wanted to present to Banks, yet Pemulwuy continually managed to evade capture. “I am sorry that I cannot send you a head,” Phillip wrote in his next letter to Banks in April 1791, eliding the sorry headhunting expedition.

When Phillip returned to England early in 1793 he took with him many crates of specimens addressed to Banks. A general description of the material given to customs officials indicated two sets of “bones” — as distinct from much animal and plant product — but nothing more specific. We can only guess that the crates contained the skulls Banks would distribute within months of Phillip’s return. One went to Blumenbach at Göttingen, a second to a professor engaged in a similar pursuit in Leiden and a third to the museum of Banks’s good friend, the surgeon John Hunter.

Phillip was succeeded as governor by Philip Gidley King, a Banks protégé who was also on the hunt for human specimens, especially the head of Pemulwuy. On 15 April 1794, Pemulwuy led an attack on a government farm beyond Sydney in which several warriors were killed. The diary of David Collins records that “the head of one is brought in… as a present for Banks’ friend Dr. John Hunter.” This was not Pemulwuy, who was badly wounded but made a miraculous escape; it was eight years before Governor King was able to get that prized trophy.

On 24 November 1802, the owner of the whaling ship Speedy sent Banks a letter to report the delivery of a head preserved in spirit as a gift from the governor of New South Wales. The customs records don’t mention a spirit cask containing a human head, but we know that it was inspected by customs officers because it made the news in a local paper, the Bury and Norwich Post, on 15 December 1802. The paper reported that a customs officer had felt an obstruction during the gauging of a cask of spirits and “to his great surprize… found a head of one of the natives of Port Jackson… the deceased being one of the most desperate and atrocious offenders of that country. On investigation, it proved to be a present from Governor King to Sir Joseph Banks.”

Banks was both amused and grateful to King. “The head of one of your subjects, which is said to have caused some comical consequences when opened at the Customs House… makes a figure in the museum of the late Mr. Hunter,” he wrote on 3 April 1803, adding that the “manifold packages you have had the goodness to forward to me have always… come safe and in good condition to my hands.” The traffic in curiosities between Banks and the colonial governor — none of which were ever listed in the customs records — was clearly sizeable.

Vice-regal appointees were not the only officials hunting on Banks’s behalf. A small army of would-be naturalists hoping to curry favour with the great man were hard at work seeking out botanical, zoological and human specimens. One such was the colony’s assistant surgeon, Denis Considen, who took the first opportunity in November 1788 to ship cases of botanical specimens, birds and animals back to London and continued to supply Banks until his return to Britain on extended sick leave in 1793.

Another was William Paterson, a passionate collector who owed Banks for his appointment to the colony as senior officer of the NSW Corps. Patterson served as administrator of the colony for nine months in 1796 before returning to England on sick leave the following year; soon after, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, just as Banks had promised. Patterson returned to the colony in 1799 as the commanding officer of the NSW Corps.

Banks’s interest in New Holland extended far beyond the precarious penal settlement at Sydney Cove. He was therefore delighted to hear of the coastal explorations undertaken by Matthew Flinders and George Bass, especially the revelation that Van Diemen’s Land was an island separated from the mainland by the wide and wild waterway they had named Bass Strait. He was eagerly receptive to a proposal from Flinders to complete a full survey of the coastline of the whole continent and lobbied for Flinders to be given command of HMS Investigator for the voyage.

Banks paid for all the expedition’s scientific equipment and rations, as well as providing wages for a naturalist with a gardener to assist, a botanical illustrator, an astronomer and a landscape painter. The naturalist was Robert Brown, a young man in his twenties who was to be Banks’s eyes, ears and hands, exploring the untold botanical and zoological richness of the great southern land, collecting, analysing and classifying botanical and zoological specimens, and gathering ethnographic and anatomical material from the human inhabitants.

Brown kept a detailed journal throughout the journey, penning intricate descriptions of the voyage and the items he was collecting. On 23 July 1802 he recorded a landing at Sandy Cape, later named Fraser Island. He took a small exploratory party deep into the island and came across a burial site marked by three tall sticks with branches covering what was revealed to be the skeleton of a man. “The skull being tolerably perfect I brought it off,” he recorded.

Five months later, Brown recorded another landing, this time in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where a group of the local men ignited a violent altercation and one warrior was shot trying to escape in his canoe. Brown’s journal entry noted that the body “washd up on the beach.” He wrote no more about the incident but it’s clear from Flinders’ journal that a party was sent to retrieve the dead body for what he described as the “anatomical purposes [of] the naturalist and the surgeon.” It was the gardener-assistant who recorded that “the Surgeon Cut off his Head & took out his Heart & put them in Spirits.” Another witness, a sailor, described how the butchered body was then “hove overboard & seen to be devour’d by Shirks [sharks].”

Given Brown’s meticulous records, his silence about this instance of anatomical collecting might appear an anomaly, but it wasn’t. Keeping quiet about the collection of human specimens was Brown’s general practice in his journal and in reports to his patron. At one point he wrote a very detailed account of his collecting for Banks with no mention of the carefully preserved head from a dead warrior in Arnhem Land or the skull he picked up from the burial site at Sandy Cape. His reticence suggests he may also have collected human specimens as the Investigator travelled along the southern coast of New Holland — specimens that might have been included among the boxes he sent to Banks from Sydney in May 1802.

Brown’s journals reveal an intense interest in the First Peoples. He made carefully detailed notes about their bodies and always sought to record the local language for the various body parts of those he encountered. The “anatomical purposes” obliquely noted by Flinders suggest that Brown also sought information in their actual bodies, while prudently leaving this morally suspect activity out of his notebooks or letters.

Banks was a man with a keen sense of public relations who would have understood the strategic importance of concealing the actual business of acquiring such rare collectibles. Desecrating dead bodies and stealing body parts was not only considered morally abhorrent but was also a crime (the sole exception being for those who had been sentenced to be executed, whose bodies were available for medical science).

Flinders had to abandon the mapping of the west coast to sail back to Sydney Cove in the summer of 1803, his crew members debilitated by months of brutal heat, cloying humidity and battalions of voracious mosquitoes. The Investigator was condemned and Flinders, unaware the British were now at war with France, took a small ship back to England. His misfortune was to sail into Mauritius, where he was imprisoned for six years

The close proximity of the French in Mauritius had always posed a potential threat to British interests in New Holland, as did the several French scientific expeditions that lavished attention on Van Diemen’s Land. In September 1803, Governor King sent a detachment of the NSW Corps to establish a base in Van Diemen’s Land at Risdon Cove, several miles upstream on the Derwent River with confidential instructions to assert His Majesty’s claim to the whole island should he encounter any Frenchmen. The commanding officer was given no instructions about what to tell the people who already occupied the land.

Back in London, meanwhile, the colonial secretary had ordered that a new outpost be created, facing into Bass Strait, at Port Phillip. Once again Joseph Banks used his influence to secure the appointment of David Collins as lieutenant-governor. Collins arrived at Port Phillip with a party of 400 convicts in late October 1803 and promptly declared the chosen site utterly unsuitable. When the Lady Nelson was ordered to sail from Sydney Cove to collect Collins and his party and transport them to the Derwent, Robert Brown seized his chance to get to Van Diemen’s Land. He arrived there with Collins and his retinue in February 1804.

It quickly became apparent to Collins that the chosen site at Risdon Cove was also unsuitable. He moved his party about five miles down-river where the wide estuary could provide a deep harbour. Left to do as they pleased, the soldiers at Risdon Cove set about drinking, shooting birds, hunting kangaroos and taking leisurely excursions into this wild, new land.

Brown found the military camp a most congenial environment and formed a fast friendship with the military surgeon, Jacob Mountgarrett. Sometimes for weeks at a time, the two men made long expeditions up various rivers to explore the unknown reaches of this new territory.

Brown was away exploring in early May when Mountgarrett witnessed the alarming sight of a mass kangaroo hunt — more than a hundred men, women and children of the Oyster Bay Nation — approaching Risdon Cove. When men carrying long spears and wooden clubs came close to the camp and began making aggressive motions towards a convict who was holding a brace of dead kangaroos, the panicked commanding officer ordered soldiers to disperse the people with guns and a short-barrel cannon and sent other soldiers to defend a nearby hut.

Despite being a civilian, Mountgarrett took it upon himself to lead the soldiers in hot pursuit as the terrified mob retreated up the valley. Later that day, he sent invitation to Reverend Robert Knopwood, chaplain to Collins, to christen “a fine native boy who I have… poor boy, his father and mother were both killed” and to watch while Mountgarrett dissected “the body of a man that was killed.” He gave no explanation of how he came to have the boy or why he was so confident that the father and mother had been killed — or indeed, of the identity of the man he intended to dissect.

Knopwood declined the invitation but came to Risdon the following week to christen the child. There, he formed the opinion that some five or six of the mob had been killed in the affray, even though the officer in charge had specified the number as three. No record was made of the disposal of the bodies. Many years later ex-convict Edward White, an eyewitness to the event, gave sworn evidence to a committee of inquiry that a great many people were killed and “some of their bones were sent in two casks to Port Jackson by Dr. Mountgarrett.” The bones were sent on the HMS Ocean, he testified, a transport ship that arrived in Port Jackson from the Derwent River on 24 August 1804. According to the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, the Ocean was carrying the full detachment of the NSW Corps together with “Mr. Jacob Mountgarrett, Surgeon, [and] Mr. Brown, Naturalist.”

Within weeks of his arrival in Sydney, Mountgarrett was appointed surgeon for a new colonial settlement at Port Dalrymple near the mouth of the River Tamar on Van Diemen’s Land’s north coast. William Paterson was appointed lieutenant-governor on Banks’s advice, and Mountgarrett on the advice of colonial surgeon-general Thomas Jamison. Mountgarrett may well have leveraged his two casks of bones to secure the appointment.

Tantalising clues about the role of the bones can be found in the correspondence of George Johnston, who succeeded Paterson as commander of the NSW Corps. Johnston, not a man given to discretion, was unusually frank about the hunt for viable human remains in his letters to his old friend Denis Considen. Writing jubilantly on 1 April 1805 he explained that he had “prevail’d on Jamison to send you the skeleton of a native he receiv’d from Van Diemen’s Land, & I have added the skull of a native of this country.” No great leap of imagination is necessary to believe that Jamison had received this skeleton from Mountgarrett, whom he had favoured with recommendation for an advantageous appointment.

The same could be said of the governor who confirmed his appointment, who was also in the business of sourcing skulls for Banks. In early January 1805 King reported to his patron that he had sent “one box and one cask from the Derwent River.” As was invariably the case, material sent to Banks was not inspected by Customs and the only evidence I can find is two skulls from Van Diemen’s Land, undated and unsourced, that were given to the museum by John Hunter sometime before 1806. These could be the remains taken by Mountgarrett and sent by King to Banks, then given to Hunter, just as Banks had previously given the preserved head of Pemulwuy.

A third skull from Van Diemen’s Land that came to Banks through Governor King’s good offices was described in the Hunter collection as being “from Port Dalrymple 1806.” The place and date provided a potent clue that the source was lieutenant-governor William Paterson. Documentary evidence was found in a private letter to King, dated 14 November 1805, in which Paterson stated that he was sending specimens of plants, ore, soil, birds, as well “a very perfect native’s head.”

Writing to Banks on 1 November 1806, King reported that these boxes of specimens from Port Dalrymple would accompany him when he returned to England on HMS Buffalo. The customs inventory for that ship listed only sixteen boxes of “natural curiosities” destined for Banks, but King’s more detailed list of personal baggage included “six boxes of war Instruments and other articles, Human Bones and Head, Animals, Skins.” It is safe to surmise that the human head, if not the bones, went to “the late Mr Hunter’s museum.”

So, should Sir Joseph Banks be pushed off his pedestal too? •

The post Joseph Banks and the stolen skulls appeared first on Inside Story.

“Dear Miss,” begins Letter to a Teacher. “You won’t remember me or my name. [But] I have often had thoughts about you and about that institution which you call ‘school’ and about the boys that you fail.

“You fail us right out into the fields and factories and there you forget us.”

The Letter was addressed to every teacher, every school, the whole system. The “us” (and the “I”) were eight boys in their early teens, sons of Italian peasant families from a hamlet in the backblocks north of Florence called Barbiana. They wrote, nearly sixty years ago, for all of Italy’s poor.

Schools, they said bitterly, are like hospitals that tend to the healthy and reject the sick.

Schools are reserved for those who can get their culture at home.

Schools make boys like us hate study, so the best years for learning are spent “fooling around with sex or fooling around with sport.”

Schools don’t let the poor understand because they’re not allowed to talk about poverty. It’s not nice to talk about such things.

Schools turn maths, history, languages, science, “fine things,” into pathetic exercises, learning for marks, learning for the profit of individuals.

The boys, the authors of Letter to a Teacher, had been required to go to school until they were fourteen. They’d done their five years at elementary school but then there was nowhere for them to go — there was no media inferiore in or near Barbiana. The gap was filled by the local priest, Don Lorenzo Milani.

Barbiana was a huddle of little houses with just one glimpse of riches, a beautiful fourteenth-century church. Don Milani was there because he was a troublemaker. Head office (aka the bishop) had no time for troublemakers, especially not then, in Italy, in the mid 1950s.

The war, defeat and fascism were only a decade away. Then, and for twenty more years, Italy was in transition, or perhaps turmoil or pre-revolutionary ferment, depending on your angle of view. This was the world of Elena Ferranti’s fierce Neapolitan quartet, the first and most famous of them My Brilliant Friend.

Two institutions fought for politico-cultural supremacy, the Church and the Partito Comunista Italiano. Both were anti-fascist (although the PCI had its well-founded doubts about the Church) as well as anti–each other. Within each was an almost comically similar conflict between institutional power and faith. On the one side New Testament Christianity struggled with a hostile Vatican; on the other humanistic Eurocommunism struggled in the coils of the Kremlin. The faiths met in the middle; the institutions did not.

Coming to the priesthood from the high bourgeoisie after a road-to-Damascus experience, Milani was among the new wave of insurgent priests, deeply committed to the Church but not to its orthodoxies. He told a correspondent that he would join forces with the communists to fight against the rich on behalf of the poor but would part company the moment the battle was won.

He’d written a polemic when young with the arrogance of his class and the zeal of a convert; it went straight onto the Index of Prohibited Books. He was controversial, vilified for his “exhibitionist ecclesiastical activism” as a “Jacobin despot,” a demolisher of the Italian school, an inspirer of intolerant classism. And he was lionised, a darling of the left.

On schooling, Milani was at one with many of a broadly left persuasion — including communists such Loris Malaguzzi, founding genius of early childhood education in Emilio Reggio — in believing that children and childhood were to be respected, listened to, and encouraged toward understanding and action in their own lives. The reading list at Barbiana included The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, a founding leader of the PCI and a casualty of Mussolini’s prisons.

Milani did not like to give religious instruction; his schoolroom bore no religious iconography so that even communist and atheist parents would see that this was not “the priest’s school.” His mission wasn’t to proselytise, or not directly anyway. It was to give the poor what was theirs by right, the right to know and to understand.

Milani’s students came to him resenting both the schooling they’d had and the schooling they hadn’t. “During the five years the State offered me a second-rate education,” they seethed. “Five classes in one room. A fifth of the schooling that was due to me.” They’d been (as they put it in the Letter) chopped out. Look at this pyramid diagram, they instructed. “It looks as if it is chopped out by hatchet blows. Every blow from the elementary years up,” they added, “is a creature going off to work before being equal.”

For the girls of Barbiana the blow came before they even got to school. Why didn’t they come, the boys wondered? Because the walk to and from school was dangerous? Or was it the fathers? “Males don’t ask a woman to be intelligent,” they observe acidly.

Boys and girls alike, this was the “slaughter of the poor” that disposed of Lenu’s brilliant friend Lila in My Brilliant Friend and made Lenu herself fight and battle and fight again until one day, eventually, she arrived in that mysterious world, the university. Like Lenu and Lila the boys resented being excluded from “the culture.”

They had a very Italian view of schooling, as did Milani. His school (in reality just a room in his house, plus himself) was in some respects hyper-traditional. Students worked very long hours, seven days a week. They worked their way through the fundamental disciplines and through reading that included the Gospels, Socrates, Plato and a biography of Gandhi as well as Gramsci.

In other ways, however, Milani’s school was an affront to the system that surrounded it. In a culture that drew an inviolable line between teacher and taught, the boys worked side by side with their teacher and they themselves taught as well as studied.

One visitor found that there was only one copy of each book and the boys used to crowd around it. “It was hard to notice that one was a bit older and was teaching.” Another (one of the book’s English translators) coincided with a group from a nearby orphanage; some of the “old” Barbiana students, now aged sixteen or seventeen, were teaching the younger children. “Gathered around rickety tables, under the trellises, in the kitchen — children of all ages were hard at work everywhere.”

Increasingly Milani and the boys ran a “hospital” that made a point of welcoming the “sick” — the failed, the ejected, the bitter who came to Barbiana as its fame grew. “They had never heard that one goes to school to learn, that to go is a privilege,” the boys report. “The teacher, for them, was on the other side of a barricade and was there to be cheated. It took them one hell of a time to believe that there was no marks book.”

Some of these children who came to a school that welcomed them loved it straight away. “Sandro became enthusiastic about everything in a short time”; for Gianni it was harder. “He had come to us illiterate and with a hatred of books. We tried the impossible with him.” Eventually Gianni came to love not every subject “but at least a few.”

Surrounded by a school system devoted to exams and the advancement of individuals, Barbiana held no exams. Learning for marks and for individual advancement were contemptible, hostile to real learning. What does learning for marks produce? “Masters in the production of hot air and warmed-up platitudes.” Students lose interest in all the fine things they are studying. Languages, science, history — everything becomes purely pass marks.

The best learning is done not by individuals but by individuals working with and for the group, and from doing things for real. How does good writing happen, they ask? “Have something important to say, something useful to everyone or at least to many. Know for whom you are writing. Gather all useful materials. Find a logical pattern with which to develop the theme. Eliminate every useless word. Eliminate every word not used in the spoken language. Never set time limits.”  As they worked they helped each other — until all understood, “the others would not continue.”

Each contributed to the labour of all, especially Giancarlo. “Giancarlo took on himself the job of compiling statistics. He is fifteen years old. He is another of those country boys pronounced by you [they turn to face the “teacher”] to be unfit for studying. With us he runs smoothly. He has been engulfed in these figures for four months now… [W]e offered him the chance to study for a noble aim: to feel himself a brother to 1,031,000 who were failed… he was to taste the joys of revenge.”

Letter to a Teacher came from a year’s relentless labour. The project had been suggested by Milani and he came first in the boys’ acknowledgements. “Father Milani… trained us, taught us the rules of writing and supervised our work.” Then came parents (“who helped us simplify the text”), secretaries, teachers, priests, union officials, newspaper men, civic administrators, historians, statisticians, jurists.

The little book was so fierce, so passionate in its defence of the poor and so angry in its assault on the dominant order that the boys feared its reception. “Newspapers of the left and the centre have always applauded any publication on the school of Barbiana,” they said. “After this book, they may join with the right and start hating us.” But, they didn’t, or not at first anyway.

Published in 1967 Letter to a Teacher was an instant sensation, first in Italy — its statistical achievements won a prize usually reserved for promising physics students, and it was even credited with triggering the student uprising of 1968 — and then, as it was translated into one language after another (around forty eventually) a source of astonishment and inspiration to hundreds of thousands around the world, including me.

In the longer run, though, the boys were right to worry. They had worked and written in that brief moment when the world was young and all seemed possible. In Australia, even an august national body could quote Chairman Mao, urging that “a hundred flowers bloom.” But history’s wheel soon turned. Insurgency provoked counter-insurgency, articulated most powerfully by the Reagan administration in the United States.

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America a mediocre educational performance that exists today,” a Reagan-commissioned report thundered, “we might have viewed it as an act of war.” “Liberal” and “progressive” schooling had placed the nation’s very security at risk. The antidote was spelled out in What Works: Research about Teaching and Learning, another little book, brilliantly designed and written, as sensational in its time and place as Letter to a Teacher had been, and far more consequential.

The “research” on which What Works relied found unanimously in favour of the tried and the true: subjects, classrooms, timetables, teacher and taught; standards; testing; “performance,” and accountability — not for systems or governments, but for schools and teachers. Ninety-nine flowers could die; one would provide for all.

The movement for more “effective” schools and “evidence-based” teaching gradually seeped through the policies of Australia’s state and federal governments until in 2007 it surged. Accusing the Howard governments of dragging the lead, the incoming Rudd–Gillard government promised an “education revolution.” Within a year or two it had installed NAPLAN, My School, the national curriculum, ACARA and AITSL (now joined by AERO), all institutions that are still with us. The revolution’s language, precepts and policies still dominate official minds.

The substrate of What Works and of all that followed is a bloodless vision of schooling, an agribusiness dream of neat rows of schools and teachers and students sitting up straight, taking what’s put on their plate and doing what they’re told, the kind of schooling that makes students lose interest in all the fine things they study, that turns languages, science, history into the pursuit of marks, that chops out the poor and euphemises them as “welfare families” or “the disadvantaged” or “the long tail.”

On a midsummer’s day in 2017 the papal helicopter landed in a field just below the little hamlet of Barbiana. The Pope had come to Barbiana to pray at the grave of Don Lorenzo Milani and to address a gathering that included some of the boys who’d written Letter to a Teacher, now men in their sixties.

“I rejoice at meeting here those who were pupils at Barbiana,” he said. Milani’s life was accompanied by much bitterness and yes, the Pope conceded, some of it came from the Church. He was in Barbiana to come to terms, to reconcile. “It is not a question of cancelling out history or denying it, but rather of understanding the circumstances and humanity at play.”

The Pope wasn’t going to bag the bishop who’d rusticated Milani or the Vatican operatives who’d put Milani’s writings on the Index (or stir up his own hornets’ nests), but he was going to take Milani’s part. Milani, he said, understood that “one cannot teach without love or without an awareness that what is given is simply a right, that of learning”; Milani was intent upon “giving the word back to the poor because without the word there is no dignity, nor is there freedom or justice.” And then the Pope quoted from the Letter: “I learned that the problem of others is equal to mine. Finding a way out together is politics. Finding a way out alone is avarice.”

So, history’s wheel had turned again, in the Vatican anyway. But in the rather less exalted world of Australian schooling?

Down on the ground, in between the orderly rows of agribusiness schooling, things are happening. Some schools are looking for ways out of the orthodoxy, toward what not always clear. At a recent national conference of government secondary school principals — most of them schools for the poor and the excluded — there was much talk about what they, the principals and their schools had to work with and had to work against; they couldn’t do the right thing by the kids.

Australia’s 9500 mega-schools aren’t about to shatter into tens of thousands of Barbiana-sized schoolets, each with its own charismatic teacher, any more than they’re going to put Year 9s on a diet of Plato and Gramsci (especially not Gramsci!). Agribusiness will not be replaced by permaculture. But there are plenty of schools wanting to edge away from one end of that spectrum toward the other.

They would go for peer and cross-age tutoring of a broadly Barbiana kind (for example) had that been on offer when the post-Covid panic drew billions for “catch-up.” And, what’s more, they would go for it not just because it can be more effective and very much more cost-effective but because it teaches new skills, develops a sense of responsibility, and encourages kids to work on things together.

Nor are too many schools going to bin the marks book. But increasing numbers are trying to use “learning progressions” (or “developmental continua”) to shift from organising student and teacher work around competition based on cognitive speed toward a “student experience” organised around the intellectual progress and the personal and social growth of each.

And while there is no Australian school that could venture the kind of militant collectivism of Barbiana (“finding a way out alone is avarice”!), there are schools, and probably a growing number of them, trying to turn “group work,” “projects” and the like into the systematic development of capabilities in communication, collaboration and learning to learn.

Signs of a turning wheel are harder to find at HQ. The bishops of Australian schooling are not malevolent; if they had an Index they wouldn’t use it. But they are handcuffed and then befuddled. They persist in trying to work through the fantastically complex and ineffectual machinery of the “national approach” and the intimidating, counterproductive apparatus of performance extraction. And, to try to understand what’s going on, they peer through the lenses that came with the machinery.

Why are we no closer to the top five on OECD league tables than when that target was legislated in back in 2012? More: what is to be made of a small blizzard of new and alarming developments? The vocabulary of outcomes, performance, accountability and all the rest is now joined by talk about “classroom disruption,” “discipline,” “school refusal,” “early leaving,” “bullying,” even “violence.” From HQ these look like “problems,” “issues,” “developments,” “trends,” each to be “addressed” by its own “program” or “initiative” or “intervention.” The dots do not connect.

Connected up, what do we see? The look and feel of schools has changed (for the very much better) but the content and organisation of the daily work of students and teachers has not. The “dominant grammar” of schooling has never worked very well for a lot of young people and it is not working for increasing numbers of them for an increasing number of reasons. The dots are disaffection, boredom, resentment, disengagement, humiliation, resistance, sometimes outright defiance. They are canaries in the mine.

Please do read Letter to a Teacher. Those 100-odd pages from another time and another place remind us of how far we’ve come and how far we haven’t, of what kids can do if they’re given half a chance, and of the kind of schooling that every kid should have. •

The post How far we’ve come, and how far we have still to go appeared first on Inside Story.

Federal Court justice John Halley delivered the decision at Huckitta station, sitting on a plastic chair under the river gums on the banks of the Plenty River. Based on an agreement between the Central Land Council (representing the native title claimants) and the NT government, it confirmed the native title holders’ exclusive possession of the claim area. Henceforth, they will have perpetual title to their country and enjoy the statutory protections laid down in the Native Title Act.

It’s been a long haul for the claimants and their forebears. The 1976 act gave them the right, for the first time, to make land claims in the Territory, but it met with strong resistance from pastoral and mining interests, particularly when Aboriginal communities sought control of pastoral leases. The Fraser government responded in 1982 by proposing a prohibition on claims over purchased pastoral leases, but that move was opposed by Justice John Toohey when he reported on the act’s operation the following year.

Pressure from pastoralists and miners continued, and in 1987 the Hawke government legislated a ten-year deadline for finalising all claims. From 1997 it would no be longer possible for an Aboriginal group to purchase a pastoral lease and convert it to inalienable title under the Territory act.

In 2010, nearly a quarter-century after the Hawke legislation, Huckitta station was purchased for Eastern Arrernte traditional owners by the Central Land Council. The purchase was funded from the Aboriginals Benefit Account, which receives an equivalent of royalties paid for mining on Aboriginal land in the Territory, after vigorous lobbying by the CLC under its then director David Ross. Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin’s approval for the funding implicitly acknowledged that the widespread take-up of pastoral leases by non-Indigenous interests had limited the Eastern Arrernte’s access to their traditional lands.

While the Huckitta buyout is of enormous significance to its traditional owners, it resonates in a quite different way within legal policy circles.

On New Year’s Eve 1978 a group of three Aboriginal children, Mark Collins, aged twelve, Kevin Stewart, thirteen, Joylene Williams, fourteen, and two Aboriginal women, Josephine Woods (who was intellectually disabled) and Janice Edwards, stole a vehicle and a rifle from the store in Amoonguna fifteen kilometres southeast of Alice Springs.

En route to Queensland, the group drove into the Huckitta homestead to repair punctured tyres. Huckitta was owned by three brothers named Webb, one of whom, Quintin, was resident manager accompanied a single station-hand. After a radio call was made to a nearby station for a spare inner-tube, Edwards accompanied the station-hand to check some baits at a nearby dam. When they returned, they found Quintin Webb had been killed by a single shot to the chest. The three children and Woods were gone in the station’s Toyota.

Police called from nearby Harts Range quickly apprehended the children. All four of them plus were arrested, as was Edwards, and the weapon was recovered. The following day, some nineteen hours after the arrests, police from Alice Springs arranged a series of photographed re-enactments of the alleged events with each of the suspects. Sometime later, all five were brought before a magistrate and charged with Webb’s murder.

The Huckitta Five, as they came to be known, were defended by the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service. Pam Ditton, CAALAS’s principal solicitor, arranged for separate representation for each of the defendants; among them were Melbourne barristers John Coldrey and Frank Vincent, both destined to be Supreme Court judges. In his retirement speech in 2008 Coldrey recounted the events leading up to, and following the arrests, and the approach adopted by the defence.

With no independent witnesses to attest to the circumstances of Webb’s death, the police case rested entirely on the defendants’ alleged confessions and the photographed re-enactments. The defence case was based largely on the question of whether the confessions and re-enactments were voluntary and whether the delay between the arrests and the charges (which arguably constituted an arbitrary deprivation of liberty) were justified.

Following an extended pre-trial hearing, Justice John Gallop decided not to admit the records of interview but to allow into evidence the photographic re-enactments. All four of the defendants who had been present when Webb was killed were convicted and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. Janice Edwards was acquitted.

John Coldrey takes up the story:

On appeal to the Federal Court, Justice Brennan ruled that the re-enactments had not been shown to be voluntary and were therefore inadmissible. He pointed to the conduct of the police in taking the appellants back to Huckitta without their consent; leaving them at the scene for many hours without informing them of the reason for their presence there; providing a prisoner’s friend who was unknown to them and who virtually acted as a police agent; and requiring them to perform re-enactments without any adequate caution. At no time were the children’s parents notified of their predicament.

Justice Brennan was in the minority, however, and the convictions were upheld. The High Court refused leave to appeal.

NT legal aid lawyers Suzan Cox and Russel Goldflam argue that Justice Brennan’s dissenting judgment in the Huckitta case “served as one of the foundation stones of the jurisprudence developed by the High Court” after Brennan joined that court, “culminating in Williams v The Queen, which considered and constrained the lawful limits of post-arrest police detention.”

Cox and Goldflam go on to outline the sorry history of police powers of detention in the NT. Subsequent legislation aimed to bypass the High Court’s explication in Williams v The Queen of the common law rights of citizens not to be arbitrarily detained. As of 2019, NT police had the broadest powers of detention without charge of any jurisdiction in Australia, a situation that does not appear to have substantively changed since then.

Apart from the common link of Huckitta station, these two narratives — the lead-up to the determination of native title over Huckitta pastoral lease and the repercussions of the murder of the owner of Huckitta station — seem to have little in common. Yet there are intriguing resonances within and between each narrative, both individual and institutional. These interconnections don’t amount to a theory of causation, but do suggest the existence of deeper and more complex factors in play in relation to the precursors and indeed the ongoing consequences of any policy initiative.

One example comes in Sir Edward Woodward’s 2005 memoir One Brief Interval, in which he recounts his appointment by the Whitlam government in 1973 to head the royal commission into Aboriginal land rights in the NT. Among his recruits was Gerard Brennan, then a barrister at the Queensland bar, whose job was to act for the nascent Northern Land Council, which had been established to represent Aboriginal views. Woodward’s reports provided the basis for the design of the Whitlam government’s NT Aboriginal Land Rights Bill, which was enacted by the Fraser government in 1976.

When Brennan later came to write the lead judgment in the Mabo Case, which established a new form of land title within the common law, native title, and overturned centuries of judicial precedent based on terra nullius, he would undoubtedly have drawn on his experiences during the Woodward royal commission and the Huckitta Five case. Each involved the interplay of Indigenous societies’ traditional, linguistic and cultural ways of seeing the world and relationships to the land and the wider Australian legal system.

The public servant who oversaw the preparation of the Whitlam–Fraser legislation was former patrol officer Bill Gray. Gray went on to lead the drafting of the legislation that created the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and as that organisation’s first chief executive he established a close working relationship with its inaugural chair, Lowitja O’Donoghue. He subsequently served as the Australian Electoral Commissioner.

One of the Woodward’s recommendations was for traditional owners not only to have a veto over mining on their land but also to have access to the royalties that flowed from mines on their land. These were to be shared between the land councils and the Aborigines Benefits Trust Fund, which had been established in 1952 during Paul Hasluck’s time as territories minster. Woodward’s recommendations were largely accepted and the  subsequent legislation established the Aboriginals Benefit Account, which played a crucial role in facilitating the purchase of Huckitta for its traditional owners.

Subsequent to his months-long involvement in the Huckitta Five case, John Coldrey decided to spend time working as principal legal officer for the Central Land Council alongside Patrick Dodson, Marcia Langton, David Ross and other Aboriginal leaders and CLC anthropologist Jeffrey Stead.

The work of expert anthropologists is crucial in land claim processes. Justice Halley’s Huckitta determination refers to the NT government’s appointment of Stead as an expert anthropologist. Highly regarded in native title circles, Stead has deep experience across the Territory, having worked with both major land councils, the sacred sites authority, and on numerous land claims. He began his career as a patrol officer on Pintubi country near Papunya.

In Take Power, Alexis Wright’s edited anthology of essays celebrating twenty years of land rights in Central Australia, Coldrey describes the CLC’s campaigning against the Fraser government’s efforts to strengthen the interests of miners and pastoralists within the legislative framework of the NT Land Rights Act. As head of the land rights division of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Bill Gray played a key role in drafting and negotiating the required amendments. The proposals emerged in mid-1982 only to lapse with the defeat of the Fraser government in March 1983; but elements were legislated by the Labor government in 1987 after pressure from WA Labor premier Brian Burke and pastoral and mining interests persuaded it to drop its national land rights legislation.

One of the most astute and influential Indigenous leaders of his generation, the low-key David Ross held key executive roles within the CLC over a period of almost forty years, and was a member of the team that negotiated the Native Title Act with the Keating government. At various points he was also an ATSIC commissioner and a director of the Indigenous Land Corporation. His aim in pursuing the Huckitta purchase was to open a pathway to inalienable title for the Huckitta traditional owners via a native title determination, an opportunity opened up by the Native Title Act but withdrawn from the NT Land Rights Act.

In 2011, not long after the pastoral lease was purchased, the CLC began researching the native title claim that ultimately led to the recent Federal Court determination. Of course, the Native Title Act would not have existed but for the High Court judgment in Mabo and the Indigenous leadership’s pragmatic negotiations with the Keating government.

What emerges from these examples is a different appreciation of the nature of the two policy issues — native title and police powers of detention — that we began with. Yes, they can both be linked to Huckitta. More substantively, though, they were phases in the lengthier evolution of land rights and access to justice.

In fact, each of these processes is arguably an element in the other. As constitutional lawyers Guy Aitken and Robert Orr note in the latest edition of Geoffrey Sawer’s The Australian Constitution, Justice Brennan’s repudiation of terra nullius rested on the view that “the doctrine was not simply at odds with history; it was racially discriminatory and ‘morally repugnant’” and “the court should not perpetuate a doctrine which was unjust, did not respect Australians as equal before the law.” The links between the two issues are reinforced by their joint reliance on the role of networks of engaged individuals to find ways to reframe and resolve apparently intractable issues.

In relation to land justice for the Eastern Arrernte, Ross’s vision was supported by the combined influence of a cadre of legal and policy advocates, of which John Coldrey and Jeffrey Stead were members, and facilitated by the legal professionals and judges engaged in tackling the untenable notion of terra nullius. Despite the frictions that inevitably permeate institutional change, these networks built on the work of patrol officers mediating between customary societies and the colonial attitudes of governments of all persuasions. It is noteworthy that former patrol officers such as Gray and Stead (and others, including former NT Administrator Ted Egan) have continued to play roles in shaping policy through to the present day.

Still unresolved is the need for guaranteed access to justice for Territory citizens arrested but not charged within a reasonable period. Here, a similar cadre of legal advocates — Pam Ditton, Ross Howie, John Coldrey, Frank Vincent and judicial visionaries including Gerard Brennan — have played an outsize role in seeking to hold police and the courts to the principle that citizens have a right to due process, even where they might be guilty. The fact that the Northern Territory has yet to fully accept this notion is testament to the propensity of political and legal cultures to resist change and defer hard decisions.

In its report on the Huckitta native title determination, ABC News quoted one of the newly recognised native title holders, Raymond Webb, as providing this advice to his community: “Get strong, get together. We gonna be all one mob then.” Perhaps this is advice all Australians might take to heart.

Might Raymond Webb be a descendant of Rosie Webb, listed in the 1957 Northern Territory Register of Wards as having been born Aranda (Arrernte) with the tribal name Argi in 1909? By 1957 she was living at nearby Mt Riddock station, which had been owned since the turn of the century by the Webb brothers’ father, Ben Webb. On the banks of the Plenty River, as across the nation, the complex entwinement of processes of colonisation, amelioration and the exercise of pre-existing Aboriginal ownership continues into the present. •

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