If a group of “holier-than-thou psychiatrists” can’t get a handle on the country’s most dangerous and subversive comedian, who is also an observant son of Judaism, then those who cast the first stone don’t stand a chance – particularly if they are in his audience.

Austen Tayshus (aka Isaac Cox) is Sandy Gutman’s stage name and Merchant of Menace, by Ross Fitzgerald and journalist Rick Murphy, reveals Gutman’s chaotic life and Austen Tayshus’s remarkable ability to be vulgar, crude, loud, angry, confident, outrageous and pointed.

Recognised in mainstream media as the man who delivered the smash hit Australiana (penned with fellow comedian Billy Birmingham), Austen Tayshus berates and delivers on many political, sociological and cultural levels.

Click here for the full review (PDF format)

Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace. Review by John Andrewartha from the ‘Sunday Tasmanian’, 31 July 2011

This doesn’t please those he attacks like wily former premier Hoogstraden, whose biography Grafton is forced into writing.

Grafton’s day job as Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality is under threat from the economically and sexually rapacious Vice-Chancellor Deirdre Morrow.

And Lee Horton, head of Australia’s newly privatised Secret Service (trading as SpyForce Australia) is worried too. He knows that Grafton has trouble lying.

And nothing is more dangerous than a man who habitually tells the truth.

Grafton Everest is a wonderful creation whom I would place without question in the ranks of Philip Roth’s Portnoy and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. – Barry Humphries

Conquering Everest – Howard Jacobson, The Observer (London)

Fools’ Paradise is Grafton Everest’s most over-the-top excursion—it has more sex than before, crazier politics, more pointless academic life, a tighter net of anxieties. – Carl Harrison-Ford

Grafton Everest … a slob making Les Patterson seem a class act. Broad comedy, very rude and, for anyone liking gleefully scabrous humour, very funny as well. – Daily Mail (London)

“I don’t like it,” Tayshus says, leaving a comedicly deliberate pause.

“No, I do like it. I think they’ve done a terrific job of putting a lot of stuff in there which is untrue.”

Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace by Ross Fitzgerald and Rick Murphy does have at least one positive review, from Tayshus’s mother, apparently.

The book explores the life of Tayshus, also known as Vaucluse resident Alexander “Sandy” Gutman, from his early years growing up with his holocaust survivor father through to his recent foray into federal politics running against opposition leader Tony Abbott for the Australian Sex Party.

Dropping his comedy act momentarily, Gutman praises the book for its insights.

“It’s a good historical perspective on what I’ve been doing and what and how I came to be the comedian I was,” he said.

Austin Tayshus made his most indelible mark on the Australian comedy scene in 1983 with his spoken word recording Australiana. He has since been a stand-up favourite.

Fitzgerald, a friend of Gutman, said Tayshus was a titan of Australian comedy, his only near equal a man in a pink wig.

“I believe that Austen Tayshus and Barry Humphries are Australia’s two greatest … living comedians,” Fitzgerald said.

“Not Barry Humphries so much,” Gutman adds.

Another serious moment, and Gutman expresses his praise for Humphries and his disdain for Australia’s current crop of comedians.

“I actually think he’s the best entertainer in the country, in comparison to the rest of the comedy galaxy in this country, well there is no comparison,” he said.

Fitzgerald says Gutman is strongly influenced by his father’s holocaust experience and, as a result, an aggressive adversary of authority and intolerance.

“I hope [readers] understand what a dangerous performer he is and what a subversive performer he is,” he said.

Gutman hadn’t seen the book before it was released, a proviso of Fitzgerald taking on the project. While it was hard to read about himself, he saw positives in the new novel.

“Ultimately it’s a good thing for my career, which is dying in the arse,” he said.

Adam Priestley, The Wentworth Courier, 11 June 2011

He has a love-hate relationship with his audiences, which he is famous for taunting – recently he made a Japanese audience member get on stage and apologise for World War II in exchange for a cessation of tsunamis and earthquakes – and simultaneously describes his hero Barry Humphries as the gold standard of Australian comedy and a “total snob”.

He’s as comfortable doing gigs in “toilets” – Gutman’s colourful description of the backwater pubs where he often plies his trade – as he is bewildering audiences at legendary comedy haunts in Los Angeles and New York.

On the surface, he is as Aussie as a Southern Cross tattoo, but his anger and cynicism bely his larrikinism and, unwittingly for most, inform his humour.

The son of a Holocaust survivor, Gutman’s split personality embodies, allegorically and also literally, the struggle of the second-generation survivor to assimilate. His shtick is, at its heart, outsider art.

“That’s why I’ve adopted the persona that I have [Austen Tayshus], a fairly aggressive persona, It’s a survival mechanism,” Gutman says of his alter ego.

“I’d go out into a beer barn full of idiots and that’s the way I learnt to do the job. I still do a lot of work in pubs and shitholes, I enjoyed it and now I can work in any milieu. I can work in front of Jewish crowds, I can work in front of intellectuals at universities and Jew-haters.”

Gutman has been performing this delicate balancing act for more than three decades, but far from tearing him asunder in some sort of Woody Allen-style existential crisis, he says his ability to easily reconcile the duality of yobbo and immigrant has given him the ability to work with all people and in the process become one of the most vaunted figures in Australian comedy.

“Most of the time when you’re working in Australia, if you’re working publicly, you work for f–k-wits,” the Sydney-based comedian says of his audience.

“But when I do the Jewish shows, and I’ve done hundreds of them, it’s like coming back to Shabbos dinner. I feel so comfortable and so familiar with the Jewish crowd because they understand chutzpah; it’s something that goes without explanation. When you’re working with the goyim, they don’t really know what that is.

“If I’ve got a smart crowd then it’s a much more interesting show. If it’s an idiot crowd then I’ve got to resort to old stuff.”

One of the golden oldies Gutman refers to is his 1983 smash hit Australiana, a spoken word piece full of puns written by Billy Birmingham of 12th Man fame that was the country’s top-selling single for eight consecutive weeks. In 1999, there was a follow-up single Footyana.

Gutman’s mother, Margaret, has been active in the Sydney Jewish community and in 1993 received an Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday honours for her communal work.

Gutman’s life is now the subject of a new biography, Merchant of Menace, co-written by author-broadcaster Ross Fitzgerald, who is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University, and comedy writer Rick Murphy.

It was launched earlier this month at Sydney’s Jewish Museum, where Gutman saw it for the first time. “It ain’t easy, buddy,” Gutman says of reading a book about himself.

“But, you know, try stand-up for 30 years, that’s not the easiest job either, particularly in the toilets that I work in. But it’s also complimentary that somebody wants to write a book about you.”

The book includes amusing stories and events from interviews with prominent Australians who have worked or had dealings with Austen Tayshus, including Andrew Denton, Baz Luhrmann, Rodney Rude, Akmal Saleh, Wilbur Wilde, George Smilovici and Vince Sorrenti.

The cover of the book trumpets the high praise: “Australia’s most dangerous and subversive performer.”

It’s a fitting plaudit for a man whose incendiary, dissenting voice has endeared him to the Australian public, even if he does like to goad, make fun of and, at times, offend them.

Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace by Ross Fitzgerald and Rick Murphy, Hale & Iremonger, $29.95 (rrp).

ADAM KAMIEN, Australian Jewish News, June 15.

By April 27, 1904, the party’s progress was confirmed by the installation of the world’s first national Labor government. Led by Chilean-born J. C. (Chris) Watson, it lasted longer, slightly less than four months.

The Watson government included future prime ministers Andrew Fisher, who had been a member of the Dawson government, and W. M. (Billy) Hughes, who later came to be reviled as a Labor rat for deserting the ranks and forming his own Nationalist federal government in 1916 over the issue of conscription. Watson’s minister for defence was none other than Dawson, by then a Labor senator for Queensland, who a few years later died in Brisbane from rampant alcoholism, isolated and alone.

Some of the above is covered in the plainly expressed and well-illustrated A Little History of the Australian Labor Party by Nick Dyrenfurth and one of his PhD thesis examiners, Frank Bongiorno. Much of the material in the first book also appears, but much less successfully, in the rather laborious and strangely titled Heroes and Villains, which deals with the ALP from its beginnings until 1919. Unlike the engaging little history, it reads like a slightly rejigged doctoral thesis, which indeed it is.

And, annoyingly, although there is no bibliography in this second book, there are hundreds and hundreds of endnotes, which occupy 38 pages of the total of 281. Comparing the one with the other, less is certainly more.

From its genesis, as Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno write, there was considerable dispute about whether Labor’s prime aim was to “civilise capitalism”, to improve the lot of Australian workers and their families, to end or ameliorate the rule of a “cruel and relentless capitalist class” or, more extremely in the case of those influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, to nationalise key industries and even install something like a dictatorship of the proletariat. Since its formation in 1920, the latter was one of the aims of the Communist Party of Australia.

However unpalatable it may seem, it is also important to acknowledge that one matter on which, in common with all other political parties at the time, most Laborites and members of the Labor Party agreed, at least up to the mid-1960s, was the promotion and protection of a distinctly White Australia.

The most illuminating chapter in Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno’s fascinating book deals with the period from 1972 to 1995. Headed Old Labor or New?, it canvasses the rise to power of the charismatic Edward Gough Whitlam, who was first elected to federal parliament in 1952, aged 36. Whitlam’s memorable 1972 It’s Time campaign, “with its singing celebrities, hip T-shirts and dazzling leader’s increasingly fluffy mane”, embodied new Labor.

The reality, the authors point out, is that between Whitlam’s election in 1972 and Paul Keating’s electoral demise almost a quarter of a century later, Labor “ruled federally for 16 years — roughly equal to its meagre performance over the previous 70 years”.

It seems indisputable that Whitlam and flamboyant South Australian Labor premier Don Dunstan, who had risen to power in 1970, had much in common. The authors put it particularly well: “Elegant and well spoken, and paying attention to the environment, urban planning, consumer protection, education, the arts, equal opportunity and Aboriginal affairs, Dunstan, as much as Whitlam, epitomised the party’s changing image and policy orientation.”

Prime minister Whitlam and his senior ministers were supposedly progressive but in 1972 not a single woman sat in caucus, let alone in the federal cabinet. As opposition leader, Whitlam had described his leadership style as “crash through or crash”. It is hard not to agree that this phrase applied equally well to Whitlam’s style of governing.

Moreover, like an earlier, short-term, Labor prime minister, Jim Scullin, Whitlam significantly raised expectations about what he could deliver, while confronting a “global economic crisis, an obstructionist Senate and powerful vested interests that were hostile to his agenda”.
Much of this heady material is traversed in Brian Carroll’s Whitlam. But do we need another book about the great man, especially as Carroll’s biography does not seem to contribute anything new?

Nevertheless, there are interesting bits in Whitlam. Carroll writes well about the two-man government of Whitlam and his deputy leader of the parliamentary party, Lance Barnard, which was sworn in on December 5, 1972. Remarkably, they were in charge of 27 portfolios: 13 for Whitlam, 14 for Barnard. This duumvirate abolished conscription, freed all jailed draft resisters, recalled troops still left in Vietnam and applied to the commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to reopen the equal pay for women case. It also appointed Edward Woodward to begin an inquiry into Aboriginal land rights and “began moves to set up diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China”.

Carroll usefully puts the spotlight on Whitlam’s trouble-prone attorney-general Lionel Murphy, who in March 1973 led “raids” on ASIO offices in Canberra and Melbourne. In his book The Whitlam Venture influential Canberra-based political journalist Alan Reid rightly called Murphy “a political bungler of considerable eminence”.

Although Graham Freudenberg’s magisterial exegesis of Whitlam’s role in Australian politics, A Certain Grandeur, is mentioned in a section on suggested reading at the end of Carroll’s book, it seems strange that there is not one mention of Freudenberg in the footnotes.

Yet as Whitlam’s brilliant speechwriter, close adviser and confidant, the chain-smoking Freudenberg helped Labor to power in that heady year of 1972.

He also was instrumental in keeping in the public eye what he regarded as the main contributions that the short-lived Whitlam government had made to Australian life.

A Little History of the Labor Party, By Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno, New South, 217pp, $24.95
Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party, By Nick Dyrenfurth, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 281pp, $44
Whitlam By Brian Carroll, Rosenberg Publishing, 256pp, $29.95

Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University. His most recent book (with Rick Murphy) is Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace.

He had been developing a series of word-play jokes and ironic taglines that added a new dimension to the character – who now became part Jewish kvetcher. The routine was laced with venom and cunning. Comedy writer Trevor Farrant seized on the subject and, together with Gutman and Michelle Bleicher (Gutman’s then girlfriend and whip-smart manager), wrote the spoken-word comic song Highway Corroboree. The single came out in early 1988 amidst celebrations of Australia’s Bicentennial, without coincidence. The track debuted on Channel Nine’s Sunday program. Host Jim Waley announced the video with considerable respect, prefacing Austen’s wild reputation and hinting at the song’s timely nature.

Gutman wore dark face make-up for the performance, yet in no other way strove to appear Aboriginal. A backing band that included indigenous actor and musician Ernie Dingo on didgeridoo provided the jangled reggae soundtrack as Gutman’s character took us on a tour of colonial Australia. The piece was taped at the Harold Park Hotel in Sydney and is regarded as Gutman’s best, if not most popular, recorded track.

Despite an initial burst of positive reviews and the video being picked up by most current affairs shows, radio stations struggled with the track’s length. At seven minutes, Highway Corroboree was too long to be a hit single, and too “adult” for Top 40 rotation, yet the track sold well. “It was an important record,” Gutman says, “and is still considered an important comedy record. It was probably the best thing I’ve done, because it came at a time when we, as Orstralians, became consciously aware that the Aborigines were pissed off… Still a lot of redneck racists around, but there was a shift in attitude right across Australia. Everyone knew something about the Aboriginal people, and for the first time in our history it wasn’t hip to deny the injustice; you’d look like a hillbilly.”

Criticism of the track centred not on the lyrics but whether Gutman had a right to perform as an Aboriginal character. Political correctness had become an important tool in countering all kinds of isms. “I think Ernie Dingo had a problem with Highway Corroboree, or a problem with his role,” Gutman says, pondering the idea of tokenism.

Gutman recalls that Dingo had once said in the press that he was sick of being used as the token Aboriginal character in other people’s well-meaning sketches. “He was right,” Gutman agrees. “We didn’t write parts for Ernie, we wrote parts for Ernie the Aborigine. It would piss me off if ¬people only ever wrote parts for Sandy the Jew.”

Gutman confused the issue further by introducing a routine that mocked Midnight Oil frontman, and now federal government minister, Peter Garrett. Onstage, Austen Tayshus would claim a long-time friendship with the singer – an activist on Aboriginal and environmental issues – before satirising him as an over-serious zealot. “We agreed on almost every issue,” Gutman smiles. “We’d played together many times at festivals. I just found Midnight Oil to be a bit humourless. It was all taken so seriously. If you were in conversation with people and the name Midnight Oil came up, everyone would act very serious and mutter words like ‘integrity’ and ‘commitment’. I really didn’t have anything against the band or Garrett, just that cult of seriousness that had built up around them. It had to be good for a laugh.

“The Peter Garrett jokes initially shocked audiences, I think. You could tell because they’d laugh faster and at a higher pitch. It was the first time someone had dared make fun of Midnight Oil. It was a f..king sacrilege.” As Garrett’s long-time “friend”, Austen Tayshus let the audience in on a different side to the singer’s personality. “There’s nothing Peter Garrett likes more than venturing out into the wilderness and clubbing a baby seal to death with a piece of wood from an endangered Queensland rainforest. Not a lot of people are aware of this.”

In mid-1989, Austen Tayshus released the single Put Down that Stubbie, a parody of Midnight Oil’s Put Down that Weapon. The lyric portrays Australian binge-drinking as akin to nuclear devastation, and is sung with Gutman’s deadly impression of Garrett’s distinctive voice.

It fared well as a novelty song. Garrett expressed dismay at the unprovoked attack, and questioned Gutman’s taste and originality. Gutman, meanwhile, had put so much time and money into developing his records that he rarely had anything to show for it. He had to tour to pay for the film work in development, and he had to make films to break away from the strange anonymity of touring. And now Peter Garrett hated his guts.

Billy Birmingham and Rodney Rude were selling records by the truckload. Austen Tayshus had released two live albums and a string of singles, most to mixed reviews, with many critics suggesting it was a brand of humour that could only be enjoyed live. Gutman’s live material often dealt with issues of the moment, on many occasions subjects of the day. As such, it had a comic shelf life of 24 hours.

For all the years at work, he had only ever used a small percentage of scripted material in his act. The 1989 Austen Tayshus album, Whispering Joke, contained solid material from collaborations with writer Morris Gleitzman, now a respected children’s author, and Trevor Farrant, who had written some of Gutman’s strongest routines. But Farrant escaped the Austen Tayshus circus halfway through a series of gigs in Sydney that followed. “Things were going well,” Gutman says, “until I gave him the shits so badly he just disappeared.” Then Gutman’s girlfriend and manager, Michelle Bleicher, packed her bags. “She left me. Or maybe she just wanted her own life … which is a bit selfish, don’t you think?” Gutman laughs. “Everyone was leaving me.”

Now Gutman faced another problem. He was known to be careless with money – reckless, generous and wasteful. Committing time to film projects, he used his credit cards to survive. When they maxed, he hit the road. Without Bleicher’s sure head, Gutman made a few strange decisions in the desperate grab for cash, one of which led to the most talked about Austen Tayshus story of them all. Almost everyone mentions it, and most comedians assume it is known: “You have heard the Fairstar story?… You know about the cruise ship, right?”

In November 1989, Gutman approached an agent who booked acts on cruise ships. The agent laughed. Gutman would have to do it himself. Working a cruise ship is regarded as a sure sign that a stand-up comedian is not at the height of his or her powers. It suggests the beginning of the downward spiral. The line would have to offer a proud comedian a lot of money to step onto one of their ships. In Gutman’s case, it was $12,000 for a two-week cruise on Fairstar, the notorious floating party that had entertained a generation of drunken, horny 18- to 25-year-old suburban Australians.

The ship’s management had promised headline acts and they were happy to pay. Gutman needed the money, and legendary rock band Mental as Anything must have needed the considerably larger cheque they took to be the house band. The gig sounded good to Gutman: if Mental as Anything thought it a good idea, that was enough for him.

That an entertainment manager for a large and popular Australian cruise liner could book Austen Tayshus without question now seems strange. “I didn’t have any trouble getting the booking. It was pretty simple,” Gutman says. “Everything was fine until I got on board. I was right on time to meet the guy … the bursar. He acts as if I’m late and starts telling me what I can’t say and do on the stage, which was mainly about cutting back on the swearing. He actually said, ‘Can you cut back on the swearing?’ Apparently there were a couple of kids on board. Guests of the captain, I think. Thirty minutes later he bales me up and says that under no circumstances should I say anything derogatory about the captain, who was an angry bastard not given to bursts of spontaneous humour.” The bursar and his team hounded Gutman with pleas and orders to agree to their terms. “I think someone must have told him about me between signing the contracts and the start of the cruise, ‘Arghhhh, f..k mate, I heard you booked Austen Tayshus. F..kin’ hell, you’ve got guts.’”

This was Gutman’s first time on a cruise ship since he was an infant, and his stomach was now, if anything, even more sensitive. He didn’t much like the look of the passengers, either. “It was like one big western suburbs leagues club disco. F..king horrible.” The bursar couldn’t locate Gutman. He’d barricaded himself in his room and put out the do-not-disturb sign. “I knew it was a bad idea as soon as I got there,” Gutman claims with powerful hindsight, “and I’d probably struggle to last two weeks.”

Sydney comedian and long-time associate Vince Sorrenti takes up the story, which he learnt from an associate: “They didn’t see him all the first day. He missed rehearsals and sound-checks. Then he missed his first engagement to welcome dinner guests. Showtime and still no sight of him. Then he appears and walks straight up to the microphone and says, ‘Good evening, ladies and gentleman. Sorry I’m late, but I was just upstairs f..king the captain up the arse.’ That was it; he just walked off. They never saw him again.”

Gutman takes up the story. “I went straight to my cabin and 10 minutes later they came to place me under arrest. I was considered a risk to the safety and wellbeing of the passengers. The captain went off his nut.” Gutman spent 24 hours in a small room with a bunk, a sink, a toilet and a sealed door. He preferred it to life on deck. “They decided to put me off at Fiji,” Gutman says. “They paid me the full contract fee and gave me a plane ticket home, which was a bit of a surprise. As they led me down the gangplank, everyone had lined up on the deck, hundreds of people. Some were yelling out, ‘Good on ya, Austen’, and ‘Sorry it didn’t work out, Austen’. Like I could give a f..k,” Gutman says with great joy. “I went to the Fiji Sheraton and met the manager. He was a German guy who’d heard about me. “Oh, yis, I know zis Austen Tayshus.” He offered me a room for two nights if I’d do a show. It was great: nice room, good food, and a good show. I got stuck into the Germans like you wouldn’t believe.”

NO PRISONERS
Three vignettes from the book show Gutman’s fearless streak
IN July 2010, Gutman was endorsed as the Australian Sex Party’s candidate for the federal seat of Warringah on Sydney’s northern beaches. This endorsement posed a problem for the sitting member, Tony Abbott, leader of the federal opposition. The threat of a comic showdown was real and unacceptable; the chance of a reasoned debate, zero. Abbott took the safe option, with a dismissive “no comment” his only response. Austen Tayshus, on the other hand, let it all hang out. He was photographed in his underwear on Manly Beach, a dig at Abbott’s much publicised Speedo fixation. He then announced he would go one better and campaign door-to-door naked, all the while drawing attention to the issues as he saw them.

THERE was a method to Gutman’s seeming madness, with much of his public pranking leading to stage material … He’d walk into a deli, or any public space, and start doing everything in slow motion. His voice would sound like a warped tape recorder: “Helllooo, hoooowww arrrrrre youuuu”. He slowed his motions down… people were genuinely scared of him. Others wanted to kill him because they assumed, quite correctly, that he was taking the piss out of them.

IN mid-1984, Gutman accepted an offer to perform at a mixed outlaw motorcycle club function … the air was thick with marijuana. “Good evening motherf..kers!” Gutman bellowed. Never, he shouted, had he seen so many brain-dead mechanics gathered in one place. He bristled with disgust when describing the assembled biker elite as enfeebled idiots obsessed with dressing as pirates… The room was completely under his control; even the waiters stopped work to take in the spectacle. At show’s end he received a standing ovation and farewelled the crowd with one last insult: “I’m Austen Tayshus, the smartest comedian in Australia, and you are the dumbest pack of c…s I’ve ever met!”

Edited extract from Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace, by Ross Fitzgerald and Rick Murphy (Hale & Ironmonger, $29.95), out Monday.

STREWTH THE AUSTRALIAN March 15 201

Unlucky Day

And happy birthday to rogue stand-up comedian and Outdoor Recreation Party candidate Austen Tayshus. The self-styled biggest threat to O’Farrell in

Ku-ring-gai turns 57 today. Historian Ross Fitzgerald notes St Patrick’s Day has a chequered history in Australian politics: in 1948, Queensland police gave Australia’s only Communist MP, Fred Paterson, brain damage during a street demonstration, and in 1922 “Red Ted” Theodore abolished Queensland’s upper house.

Sydney Morning Herald, March 17 (St Patrick’s Day) 2011

Now that the labyrinthine corridors of Old Parliament House have been opened to all, climb the rickety staircase to the press gallery, Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt’s book in hand, to reach the cramped den of power of their vulpine subject.

Among the evocatively recreated rooms and the very pipework of the building that, we learn, literally leaked the scoops from the House of Representatives below, the cigaretteaddled voice of ‘The Red Fox’ still crackles out alongside the recorded clang of typed keys. Alan Reid, journalist, author, and political communications spin doctor before the term was even invented, died the year prior to Parliament’s move up the hill. But the old building’s new title as ‘The Museum of Democracy’ fittingly stamps the need to focus attention back on one wily fox, who ran free but unelected at the heart of the democratic process, and who has until now escaped scholarly assessment.

Reid’s career covered more than a half century of Australian politics.

Since Reid reported on fourteen prime ministers, it is perhaps understandable that the authors dispense with the first twenty-five years of his life in fourteen and a half pages. Even so, the task of shoe-horning this run of political history into the remaining 300-odd pages is a considerable one. The punchy and engaging style works best in the chapters on the early days of Canberra. In the latter half of the book, following the twisted threads of political embroilments proves heavier and drier going.

One indicator of both Reid’s and this work’s historical reach is his sobering view on the enthusiastic crowd surrounding Gough Whitlam on the day of
the Dismissal. Reid told a parliamentary library staffer to temper his hopes; he had witnessed ‘Lang’s monster rally in 1932, which was followed by a heavy election defeat, and [could recall] Chifley’s enthusiastic audiences in 1949, which did not presage victory either’. Reid the workaholic, political obsessive virtually lived within Parliament House, which may be why his family does not live within the pages of this book. Reid’s marriage and domestic life are dealt with in little more than a page. Fair enough perhaps, and Reid did insist that family life and work should be kept as separate as possible.

But the only other contexts in which his wife, Joan, a former stenographer, is mentioned concern the typing of his manuscripts and, in his declining years, the administration of his correspondence.

Her voice and insights are not discussed. Alan Reid Jr has cooperated with this project, allowing access to those records that his father did not (in a wary attempt to throw researchers off the scent) assiduously cull. The best material provided by Reid Jr and the family is the evocative photographs. But one senses that a fascinating personal story is missing. We are told that, ‘Despite its adverse effects on his family life, nothing could cure Reid’s addiction to politics.’ We learn how his young sons went through a tearaway period, setting fire to the hedge outside Parliament House, and how Reid’s own crucial ‘resolve to give up alcohol ultimately prevailed when he came home late one night and almost started a blaze after he knocked a candle into his son’s cot’.

Sobriety in an environment lubricated by booze is a powerful tool for any political animal. Notwithstanding popular opinion, it has been a feature of significant figures who have carved successful careers in the world where politics and the press intersect. In just one example of the private advice offered to many prime ministers, Reid helped to persuade Bob Hawke of the benefits of giving up alcohol. Ross Fitzgerald himself has previously written of the effect of alcohol in Australian history and of his own battle with alcoholism.

In the most perplexing passage in The Red Fox, we learn that Reid turned down the chance to stand for election since he felt himself ‘likely to become morally corrupted more swiftly than the average politician’. Seen in isolation, this sentiment may be commendable. Viewed in the context of Reid’s fascination with Machiavelli and of his success in manipulating the political process, it is distinctly troubling.

The old adage for those managing political communication is ‘never become the story’. In the UK Alastair Campbell did, and his career as unelected powerbroker at the heart of government was cut short. We have Fitzgerald and Holt to thank that Alan Reid’s story, in punchy, illuminating, and often healthily sceptical analysis, has finally been told.

After all, this is a story of manipulated leaks, factionalism, opportunistically timed book publishing, and media proprietors who meddled in the democratic process. As such, it is utterly relevant to today’s politics. This is a tale that, unfortunately, is no museum piece.

Alan ‘The Red Fox’ Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt New South $49.95 hb, 378 pp, 9781742231327

Tom D.C. Roberts is a PhD candidate and Associate Member of the Centre for Media History, Macquarie University. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW, February 2011, pp20-21

But at another, deeper, level it is a compelling tale of what happened to scores of young women after the dramatically unexpected fall of Singapore to the Japanese. It is also a powerful counter-factual history of what might have been had things been different.

Among hundreds of evacuees scrambling to the docks to escape Singapore were 65 members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, led by matrons Olive Paschke and Irene Drummond. All boarded the coastal freighter Vyner Brooke. Named after the third and last White Rajah of Borneo (Sarawak), the ship, captained by Richard “Tubby” Borton, made it only as far as the waters off Banka Island near Sumatra when it was attacked by Japanese bombers.

The small ship sank within a half hour. Those who survived the sinking of the Vyner Brooke included 22 Australian nurses who, after drifting at sea, some of them for days, found their way to Muntok, the largest settlement on Banka Island, which now boasts the world’s largest tin smelter. Having been escorted to Radji Beach, a few kilometres to the west of Muntok, the nurses were ordered into the sea by a senior Japanese officer, Captain Orita Masaru, and executed in a hail of machinegun bullets.

The gruesome events of that morning left a sole Australian survivor. She was the remarkable Vivian Bullwinkel who, covered in blood, remained up to her waist in the sea until the Japanese had left. Significantly, like Bullwinkel and many other Australians at the time, most of Masaru’s troops could not swim. Although later interned, Bullwinkel, born at Kapunda in South Australia and trained at the Broken Hill Hospital, survived the starvation and disease that killed many of her friends. She was eventually able to bring to light the truth about the atrocities committed against Australian nurses on Radji Beach and elsewhere in the Pacific.

Author of a brilliant work of social history, The Bloodbath, about the 1945 VFL grand final, Ian W. Shaw has turned his talents to this powerful tale about a much more important bloodbath. Some of the most riveting and revealing material in On Radji Beach comes from surviving first-hand accounts. Thus nurse Betty Jeffrey described the doomed city of Singapore as she boarded the Vyner Brooke: “There were fires burning everywhere behind and about us and on the wharf hundreds of people trying to get away, long queues of civilian men and women, and a long grey line — us. Masts of sunken ships were sticking up out of the water, but there were no ships in sight other than forlorn-looking barges.”

Looking back at the blazing city, Veronica Clancy wrote: “In the distance, Singapore appeared to be just ablaze, the flames almost reaching the sky. The planes of the enemy caught in the searchlights looked like silver moths around an enormous light. The smoke from the burning oil dumps seemed to hang in dark clouds overshadowing everything.”

Most poignant of all is Bullwinkel’s account of the slaughter of her comrades. At the end of the line of Australian nurses, Alma Beard said to her: “Bully, there are two things I’ve always hated in my life, the Japanese and the sea, and today I’ve ended up with both.”

Unable to reply, Bullwinkel thought: “How can something as dirty and evil as this be happening in a place that is so beautiful?” As a believer, one thought gave her comfort; that she would be reunited with her dead father and some time in the future with her mother, and brother John. As the line of 22 young Australian women began to move forward, she heard the indomitable Irene Drummond call out to them: “Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.”

Shaw powerfully describes the situation seconds before the nurses were murdered: “There was a moment of almost supernatural silence as they set off. Several of the girls looked across and made eye contact with friends, but most just looked straight ahead, seeing something that no one else would or could ever see. And then the killing began.”

Is it any wonder that the sole survivor of the massacre on that beautiful beach couldn’t explain why she was spared, other than to be able to recount this terrible tale, or that Shaw often visits Bullwinkel’s corner in the Australian War Memorial because he finds it inspirational? At least in part, it hints “at lives cut short, of sacrifice and self-sacrifice”. It also highlights, as the author of this unforgettable book concludes, “just what the families of those who did not return actually lost in Banka Strait, on Radji Beach, and in the camps of Muntok and Sumatra”.

On Radij Beach, By Ian W. Shaw, Macmillan, 346pp, $34.99
Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University.
The Weekend Australian October 9-10, 2010