As this insightful and racy memoir makes clear, not only was Murdoch a hands-on proprietor but he was, for a time, quite radical and reformist in his views – promulgated in The Daily Mirror – about apartheid South Africa and in some ways about the parlous situation of Aborigines in Australia.

Armed with a flattering letter of support from Murdoch, who had launched the first national daily, The Australian, in 1964, Mitchell arrived in England on the SS Oronsay in March 1967. He gained part-time work on the London Daily Mirror and then a full-time job at The Sunday Times.

In Fleet Street he became an investigative reporter, taking part in exposes of Soviet double agent Kim Philby; corrupt publisher Robert Maxwell (widely known as “the bouncing Czech”); L. Ron Hubbard’s so-called Church of Scientology; and international offshore funds swindler Bernie Cornfield. After The Sunday Times, Mitchell worked on Granada Television’s weekly program World in Action, where he was the first Western reporter to interview president Idi Amin, “the man who stole Uganda”, after his coup in January 1971.

In England, Mitchell was radicalised politically, becoming a militant Trotskyite. This meant Mitchell took to heart Karl Marx’s 1845 injunction: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Utterly disillusioned with the politics of the British Labour Party and social democratic parties elsewhere but also with the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain, Mitchell became an avid follower of Leon Trotsky, who had been assassinated in Mexico in August 1940 on Stalin’s orders. Influenced by Gerry Healy, a pugnacious Marxist-Leninist theoretician and activist, Mitchell accepted Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” and his notion of uncompromising internationalism.

Before long, Mitchell became affiliated with the Trotskyist Fourth International. Healy drummed into him the fundamental Leninist lesson: “Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary party. Without a revolutionary party, no revolutionary action.”

Indeed, for 15 years, Mitchell worked as a reporter, then editor, of the daily newspaper of the militant Socialist Labour League, later the Workers Revolutionary Party, whose members included British actors Corin and Vanessa Redgrave. Workers Press and then News Line were radical papers of high quality. It was only after his hero, Healy, was expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party, which imploded and split, that in 1986 Mitchell, with partner Judith White, returned to Sydney. He started work for the Fairfax-owned Sun-Herald, although this period is not covered in any detail.

Come the Revolution is, in the main, a compelling read. However, it is rather too long. Mitchell seems intent on including every last detail of his professional and personal life until his return to mainstream journalism in Australia.

For this reviewer at least, Mitchell’s memoirs may have been much better by half.

Review of Alex Mitchell, COME THE REVOLUTION, NewSouth Books, 536pp, $39.95
Review by Ross Fitzgerald, Sydney Morning Herald, January 28-29, 2012 SPECTRUM p 33.

Researching his subjects, MacCallum has leaned heavily on The Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian Prime Ministers, edited by Michelle Grattan, and Colin Hughes’s much earlier book Mr Prime Minister. He has filled in the gaps, often via news reports and what he loosely terms as “anecdotes”, of which he has a stash.

Since Australia became a nation in 1901, we have had 27 prime ministers and for the general reader there is much to enliven and entertain in this group biography of our leaders. It is illuminating to know that our second PM, Alfred Deakin, was an ardent spiritualist and that our first, Edmund Barton, had such a severe drinking problem he was widely known as “Tosspot Toby”. Deakin claimed he received direct instruction from the ghosts of Sophocles, John Knox, Lord Macaulay, Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill. As MacCallum puts it, although “rather out of place in such exalted company”, Deakin was also spoken to by Richard Heales, a former Victorian chief secretary.

During his time as PM, Deakin provided an anonymous account of the workings of his government: first for the London Morning Post and then for the London National Review. Deakin’s columns were witty, comprehensive and, refreshingly, often highly critical of himself.

Barton’s alcohol consumption was so out of control that the proprietor of Truth, John Norton, himself a huge imbiber, wrote of the PM: “I charge you with being very frequently under the influence of drink ever since the [first] meeting of the federal parliament . . . Quite recently you came into [the] chamber so drunk you were scarcely able to stand. On another occasion, seeing your drunken, helpless state, the Speaker generously put an end to the painful scene!”

It is useful to remember that while Chris Watson’s four-month ministry was the first national Labor government in the world, it boasted in its ranks the future Labor prime minister Andrew Fisher as well as the world’s first Labor premier. The latter was Anderson Dawson from the dual electorate of Charters Towers. Dawson’s Queensland colonial government, which had lasted less than a week in December 1899, had contained within its ranks the Scottish-born Fisher who had worked in Queensland as a miner and journalist before entering politics.

Among the prime-ministerial also-rans, MacCallum deals briskly with the Queenslander Frank Forde who served for eight days; Earle Christmas Grafton Page, after whom the city of Grafton was named, who enjoyed 19 days in power; the long-serving Country Party treasurer, Arthur Fadden, another Queenslander who was PM for 40 days and 40 nights; and John “Black Jack” McEwen, who held the top job for 23 days when he was aged 67.

Unfortunately MacCallum badly underestimates Tasmanian Catholic PM Joe Lyons, who is dismissed as a Labor “rat”. MacCallum would have benefited immensely had he had the chance of reading the excellent recent biographies – both written by Anne Henderson – of Lyons and of his wife Dame Enid, with whom he had 11 children.

However MacCallum is on the money when he regards William McMahon – a Liberal and notorious leaker to the press – as a prime minister whom it was difficult to take seriously, even by his increasingly disillusioned colleagues. McMahon’s self-pitying prime-ministerial lament to the party room that “I sometimes think I must be my own worst enemy” provoked Jim Killen, who had been ousted from the Navy portfolio, to reply: “Not while I’m alive.”

It is useful to be reminded that when John Howard was swept from office, he became only the second PM in history to also lose his seat (that of Bennelong) in the same election. That humiliation had occurred 68 years earlier to the conservative Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a politician more English than the English, who was best known for wearing plus fours and spats.

Although some pundits would plump for Robert Menzies, Gough Whitlam or Bob Hawke, perhaps our most fascinating prime minister is Billy Hughes, widely known as the “Little Digger”, who suffered throughout his political career from chronic dyspepsia and deafness. A member of parliament for 58 years, 51 of them in the federal sphere, Hughes who began as a Laborite, was the leader of five political parties, a minister in four, and ratted on three. As MacCallum justly concludes, “this is a political record unlikely to be beaten”.

When asked why he had joined every major political party in Australia with the exception of the Country Party, Hughes famously replied: “I had to draw the line somewhere!”

The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers, By Mungo MacCallum, Black Inc, 213pp, $29.95

Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University and the author of 35 books. The Weekend Australian January 28-29, 2012

Intriguingly, unlike Barry Humphries’s hugely successful and ever-evolving creation, in My Life in Shorts the real person behind the comic character doesn’t crack a mention. This is consistent with the character but also a bit frustrating.

Never mind. As for the veracity of it all, does it really matter? As the late British playwright Harold Pinter wrote in Old Times: ”There are things I remember which never have happened, but as I recall them so they take place.” Approaching this fairy story of a 1950s and ’60s Barossa childhood in a similar vein and with a more or less willing suspension of disbelief, this reviewer was soon sucked into the savagely raucous account of what H.G. calls his ”growing pains and painful growths”. This is despite whether the story is ”true” or not.

Beginning to root around to uncover his early ”life in shorts”, H.G. claims to have ”put the Holden ute into reverse and backed the wheels down the tree-lined driveway and on to the road of memory”. He can’t quite control the car but the results are highly entertaining.

A retired cemetery worker offered H.G. the soundest advice about how best to construct this account of his early life history. According to Tony (”Junior”) McTillet, now in his 90s, the past is like a ”bloody big outdoor screen that you see at open-air rock concerts or royal weddings”. On to this screen is projected our visions of the past. It is, ”Junior” said, ”a moving picture that borrows from our fears, disappointments and aspirations. If you made it all up, who’d know the difference?” Well, some of the people involved might but readers would be none the wiser.

My Life in Shorts is a rollicking tale of how a very different Australia from the one we now experience shaped a country boy who was to become one of this nation’s foremost sporting commentators. Once an aspiring footballer, boxer and overweight apprentice jockey riding horses saved from the abattoir, H.G. confides he still keeps in shape – just in case one of our top sporting teams urgently needs someone to fill a gap.

A rather slow student and awkwardly aspiring Aussie rules footballer for the Penrice Quolls and later the Moculta Parrots, H.G. also writes about his many siblings.

His brother Trevor, who loved being loose with the truth, talked through his hat and his arse at the same time. According to H.G., Trevor’s hat-and-arse conversations ”often made more sense and were more interesting than anything else he said”. His beloved brother could ”rhubarb on for hours at a time”. Eventually the Nelson family would shout in unison: ”Trevor, shut up! Just shut up!” Yet as H.G. records, ”this never slowed the flow of [Trevor's] blithering piffle”.

Early on in this energetic and captivating ”memoir”, H.G. claims that the past ”haunts everyone alive today”.

Indeed, that is what the past does best and Australia’s most outrageously over-the-top sports guru, social observer and loud-mouthed heckler is no different.

The past casts ”an unsettling shadow” over his subsequent years, at least until March 1984 when, at the Dapto Dogs one Thursday night, his soon-to-be co-worker and outlandish broadcasting colleague on radio and TV, ”Rampaging” Roy Slaven, kicked H.G. up the bum.

Don’t be surprised if, in the next instalment of his fictional autobiography, the bold H.G.’s search for lost time – and his cleverly constructed remembrances of an innocent life that has not yet evaporated – begins with their legendary meeting.

MY LIFE IN SHORTS, H.G. Nelson, Macmillan, 269pp, $34.99. Sydney Morning Herald, January 14, 2012, Spectrum p. 39

But is this true? Peter Hartcher’s new book has something to say about all this and the subtitle contains a warning: ‘How Australia Made Its Own Luck – And Could Now Throw It All Away’.

After reading ‘The Sweet Spot’ I’m still unsure that we are or ever have been a land of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Also I am far from convinced by Hartcher’s championing of Adam Smith. In his 1776 work ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, Smith put it thus about private enterprise: A man “intends only his own gain, and he is in this …led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

This mechanism allegedly turns “selfish pursuit of money into the greater good of the society, individual greed begetting a social good. “ Admittedly though, Hartcher does see the need for some forms of government intervention, especially in times of economic crisis.

He reports that the United Nations and OECD rank Australia as having the world’s best living conditions. We are “the only developed nation that has not suffered a recession in the last two decades, with an unemployment rate at half that of Europe or America, and a higher average income than the US or UK.”  Yet perversely, Australians don’t reward the prime ministers and treasurers who have helped bring about this sweet situation. In 2007 and 2010 – for the first time since 1949 – we voted out federal governments at a time of economic growth.

Although ‘The Sweet Spot’ boasts a helpful Index, there are neither maps, nor endnotes nor any bibliography. This is a shame, because there is no easy way of finding the sources for many of Hartcher’s claims in this contentious book.

For example, writing about cricket, he says that 1882 “was the first time that anyone had ever beaten the British at their own game.” Has Hartcher not heard, for example, of the Australian Aboriginal cricket team that toured England in 1868? Inspired by Johnny Mullagh who scored 1,698 runs and took 245 wickets, the team won 14 matches, lost 14 and drew 19.

Hartcher uses an English-Australian Test Match played at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 2007 to illustrate what he regards as our entrenched egalitarianism.  A queue outside the Members’ Stand included Prime Minister John Howard; the then leader of the opposition Kevin Rudd; and the Catholic archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell. Ignoring the fact that entry to the Members’ Stand is quite exclusive, Hartcher states that “The three holders of high office took their places and waited patiently with the other patrons. None made any attempt to claim special privilege, pull rank, or send a security detail to clear a path. And none of the ordinary mortals in the line felt any obligation to step aside for their leaders.”

This example is typical of the strengths and weaknesses of Hartcher’s approach, which seems biased to characterizing us in the best possible light in terms of fairness, tolerance and egalitarianism – especially vis a vis other countries. Yes, the line forming outside the Members’ Stand does make a point, but at the same time it ignores the fact that those in the queue are not “ordinary mortals.” Indeed most Australians cannot afford to be members.

There is much to enjoy in ‘The Sweet Spot.’ Early on, Hartcher explains that, two centuries before the British landed at Botany Bay, Europeans “speculated that the mysterious Great South Land might be the biblical Ophir” – the source of gold that had “been lavished on King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.”

When in 1568 the Spanish “happened upon a group of tropical islands near the equator”, believing that they had discovered this fabled source of gold, they named them the Solomon Islands! How that impacts on Hartcher’s thesis I’m not sure, but it makes for fascinating reading.

Hartcher is certainly on the money when he explains that it was Bob Hawke and Paul Keating who, last century, opened our economy to the world and, in the process, “delivered the start of the Australian-style Thatcher-Reagan revolution.” Then, Hartcher argues, the Liberal-National Party coalition largely continued Labor’s program, building an “impregnable financial defence” by paying off public debt and leaving us in the relatively favourable economic situation in which we still find ourselves.

In his penultimate chapter “How To Blow It”, Hartcher points out that we did not have success thrust upon us. We overcame our “inauspicious beginnings” as a penal colony and then, in 1901 as a nation founded on racial discrimination. Our seeming good fortune in 2011 is, he argues, not because of luck but is the result of thoughtful economic policies.

Even though Hartcher claims that the importance of mining in our economy is overrated, he maintains that “active and prudent management is urgently required.”  While the mining boom cannot provide an enduring basis for our economic success, it has “the potential to be the basis for economic disaster.” This is because it brings big profits and huge risks, both of which need to be guided by politicians who demonstrate national leadership.

Like the economy in general, the mining boom and its consequences need to be managed intelligently. Put simply, Australia “needs to extract the maximum advantage from the surge, minimize the harm and prepare for its ending.”

Review of the week by Ross Fitzgerald” The Sweet Spot by Peter Hartcher, Black Inc, pp 289, $29.95. Spectrum Christmas Edition, pp 22- 23. Sydney Morning Herald, December 23-25, 2011.

After walking from our deeply suburban home in nearby East Brighton, we positioned ourselves on the cheapest part of the racecourse, known as the Flat. On Dad’s urging, I had two bob each way on the favourite, Grey Boots, with a gnarled old bookmaker who scribbled down some hieroglyphics that looked to me indecipherable.

Ridden by the legendary Neville (”Nifty”) Sellwood, Grey Boots won the race. Ever since I went with my ticket to collect, I have been fascinated with thoroughbred racing and especially with the voices of the race callers and commentators, who still seem to have retained the sound and timbre of the ’50s.

As Les Carlyon points out in his fine and idiosyncratic chronicle,The Master, it was in 1950 that an immaculately dressed, 23-year-old Bart Cummings strapped the locally bred Melbourne Cup winner, Comic Court, for his shrewd father Jim Cummings. With Pat Glennon on board, Comic Court won in a canter. Although it could not happen now, young Bart won a poultice on the horse, which he backed at big odds.

In his personal portrait of the famously laconic 84-year-old trainer, who has a tally of 12 Melbourne Cup wins, Carlyon confides that he first interviewed Bart Cummings in 1974. For almost 40 years, this highly accomplished author has been an intimate observer of the career of someone he convincingly argues is the greatest racehorse trainer in Australian history.

In some respects, The Master is an unusual book. At the beginning, Carlyon explains he is not writing a biography of the famous trainer. Nor is this an ”authorised” work. Indeed Cummings published his own life story, Bart, in 2009. This book, Carlyon claims, is ”a memoir that is skewed … towards events that I was fortunate enough to witness firsthand”. This also applies to people and horses that Carlyon has come to know, especially since the early ’70s.

Complemented by more than 100 superb illustrations, The Master is an anecdotal account of Cummings’ many ups and downs. In the nadir of his career in the ’90s, when Carlyon explains that the great man ”was beset by financial troubles that would have crushed a lesser spirit”, Cummings managed to win three more Melbourne Cups.

This was a feat only equalled by the three Cup wins that Cummings achieved when he was a young trainer on the rise to a fame that sometimes baffled him.

My favourite photograph in the book is that of silver-haired Governor-General Sir John Kerr presenting the 1977 Melbourne Cup, won by Cummings’ Gold and Black. His slurred and swaying performance suggested that the GG was under the influence of alcohol. Yet in his typically understated way, Cummings, who was close to the action, offered the following wry observation: ”There was a strong wind blowing that day.”

Carlyon’s prose in The Master is a pleasure to read. Much of his insights are deceptively simple. Hence he recounts Cummings’ formula for success: ”Lots of good feed, lots of hard work.”

Towards the end of this satisfying book there is a colour photograph of Cummings, his grandson James and son Anthony, who is a successful trainer in his own right. Carlyon writes: ”Anthony says that his father has taught him everything that he [Anthony] knows but not everything that Bart knows.” Bart explains that there is a reason for this: ”Anthony is a competitor!”

Carlyon writes that, in the early ’40s, a young Bart Cummings was an unwilling student at Sacred Heart College in Adelaide. When he turned 14, he told his parents he’d had more than enough of school. ”I must have been really bad,” Cummings says, ”because they didn’t argue.”

The reality is that Cummings remains a difficult man to know. Jockey Roy Higgins spent 16 years riding for Cummings, including winning the 1965 and 1967 Melbourne Cups on the relatively tiny Light Fingers and on the big-hearted Red Handed. Higgins, who retired from riding in 1984, confides: ”I’m not sure I got to know him 100 per cent … or learnt everything about him … I think that’s how Bart wanted it.”

Higgins concludes that, with the exception of Cummings’ wife Valmae, there is no one who can truthfully say they really know him.

Yet, despite a wealth of fascinating and often arcane information about the elusive Cummings and the sport of kings, Carlyon’s book still hasn’t answered my often-asked question: Why do we train racehorses in the early morning when they usually race in the afternoon?

Review of THE MASTER by Les Carlyon Macmillan, $59.99
The Sydney Morning Herald December 17-18, 2011, SPECTRUM pp 26-27

With that in mind I suppose it’s no surprise that neither Bob Hawke nor his second wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, were interviewed for the book; that no photograph of d’Alpuget appears; and that the final chapter is titled My Mother, My Hero.

This means this biography, written with the assistance of Hazel Flynn, is much closer to hagiography than to objective analysis and that’s understandable, in human if not critical terms. Admittedly, Pieters-Hawke says right at the beginning: “I make no claims for balance in this account of her life.”

As long as we take all this into account, ‘Hazel: My Mother’s Story’ presents some illuminating insights into the life of one of Australia’s most admired public figures. Indeed, her down-to-earth approach as the prime minister’s wife, one who pushed for social inclusion and support for the disadvantaged and underprivileged, including indigenous Australians, won her widespread approval from all sides of politics. But this was only one side of her complex personality.

In an early chapter, Pieters-Hawke recounts that Hazel, who was born in Perth in July 1929, had a backyard abortion before Bob, as a Rhodes Scholar, went to Oxford University, where she shortly joined him. After almost eight years together and a six-year engagement, they were eventually married on a very hot day in Perth, with a reception held in a church hall where there was no grog to drink, only warm orange juice.

Less than a year later, the author was born in Canberra in January 1957. Even then, Bob’s drinking problem seemed entrenched. When they moved to Melbourne, for Bob to work at the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Hazel was increasingly isolated and alone while her husband’s drinking started to spiral out of control. At the same time, Hazel became aware of his numerous sexual infidelities. To make things worse, their fourth child Robbie died when he was four days old.

Even when Bob was ACTU president, he and Hazel were still paying off a large mortgage and had children to educate, sometimes at private schools. In a key chapter, The Lowest Ebb, the author is frank about Hazel’s own, often solitary, binge drinking as a short-term “solution” for despair and loneliness; and also about how, in 1977, she had cosmetic surgery, which may have been an attempt to deal superficially with her own self-image.

Pieters-Hawke details the flows and ebbs of her parents’ difficult relationship, especially during Bob’s lengthy prime ministership (March 11, 1983 to December 20, 1991), when they had to deal with daughter Ros’s heroin addiction.

Pieters-Hawke also points to the fact that Hazel overcame her dependence on the booze and stopped smoking in 1983, which showed she had considerable strength of character.

However, it is in dealing with her beloved mother’s failing memory, increased disorientation and advanced Alzheimer’s disease, about which Hazel went public in 2003, that this tenderly written book hits its straps. This is not surprising, given the author is the inaugural national ambassador for Alzheimer’s Australia and co-chairs the federal Ministers’ Dementia Advisory Group.

Talking about Hazel moving into the fog of dementia, Pieters-Hawke poignantly puts it thus: “As we slowly and painfully lose her, I have had the privilege of spending a year immersed in her life, rediscovering the woman she was.” The author has done so “with real curiosity as to how the times in which she lived shaped her, how key people and events in her life helped form her character, influenced her values and affected the choices she made”.

Established in 2003, the Hazel Hawke Alzheimer’s Research and Care Fund is a lasting tribute to Hazel. Fittingly, donations to this important fund support dementia grants for research into quality dementia care, prevention and management.

Now 82, Hazel has since 2009 been living in a care facility for dementia patients. In telling the life story of her mother from this unique perspective, Pieters-Hawke has done so with love and with “an immense sense of gratitude” that Hazel is her mother. In this sense, Pieters-Hawke has done her mother proud.

‘Hazel: My Mother’s Story’, By Sue Pieters-Hawke, Pan Macmillan, 470pp, $49.99 (HB)
Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University and the author of 35 books.
The Weekend Australian December 3-4, 2011

It’s important that we have Kirby’s personal side of the story and this memoir affords a fascinating insight into the career of a one of Australia’s most controversial figures.

As his great teacher, Professor Julius Stone, taught him at Sydney University, to pretend that the law was wholly objective might be “a comforting fiction to which many (particularly conservative) proponents of the vocation adhered.” But it was not what actually happened. In fact, judges, including those in our highest courts, have considerable scope for discretion and for choice.

A PRIVATE LIFE traces Kirby’s career from his school days to more recent years in which his ‘coming out’ as a high-profile homosexual subjected him to virulent attacks on his character.

In what he usefully calls these “fragments of memory”, Kirby’s collection of reminiscences ranges far and wide. But central to all his finely honed essays is Kirby’s acute awareness of acts of discrimination perpetrated against the outsiders of Australian society, be it on the grounds of race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference. Kirby’s own experiences as a homosexual made him acutely sensitive to all forms of discrimination. As he explains: “If you have tasted irrational discrimination, you do not like it. And you do not want others needlessly to be on the receiving end.”

In 1957, when Kirby was 18, the report of the ‘Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’ was released in the UK. Usually known as the Wolfenden Report, after the chairman of the committee, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading, Sir John (later Lord) Wolfenden, it recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence”. The Report powerfully reasoned thus: “Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by a society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.”

In two touching chapters, Kirby’s remembrances of his unrequited infatuation with 1950s film heartthrob, James Dean, whose hometown he visited in the year 2002, morphs effortlessly into the great love of Kirby’s life.

He met his long-time partner, the young ex-mariner Johan van Volten who had migrated to Australia from the Netherlands, at the Bottoms Up Bar of the old Rex Hotel, near the El Alamein fountain in Kings Cross. During the 1970s, a regular highlight of their time together was to frequent in suburban Kensington, the famous gay venue the Purple Union. There, the hugely talented drag queen, David Williams, would perform as Carmen – “hilariously flashing those long eyelashes as he went through his (outlandish) paces.”

A PRIVATE LIFE is a reflective, generous, and eloquent book, which ranges far and wide. Simply written, it also canvasses Kirby’s advocacy for human and civil rights as well as essaying his support for those, throughout the world, who are dealing daily, not just with HIV and AIDS, but with systemic poverty and disempowerment.

At once a committed Christian and a strong supporter of the Salvation Army, Kirby is certainly right on the money when he says that anyone, male or female, straight or gay, who has managed to maintain and nurture a long-term loving union is fortunate and blessed indeed.

A PRIVATE LIFE, Michael Kirby Allen & Unwin, 200pp, $35
Ross Fitzgerald, Sydney Morning Herald, November 26-27, 2011, SPECTRUM, p 33.

In the largest massacre of Europeans on the Australian frontier, in October 1861, rampaging Aborigines killed 19 European men, women and children who were encroaching on their tribal lands. This occurred on Cullin-La-Ringo, near the present town of Springsure, inland from Rockhampton. Predictably, the Aboriginal people paid many times over for these murders.

As the prolific Thomas Keneally makes clear, the leading slain settler, Horatio Wills, was the father of Rugby-educated cricket star Tom Wills who, fortuitously, was 80 kilometres away when the massacre occurred. This was the same Tom Wills who, in May 1859, helped codify what is now known as Australian Rules football. Advising against ”a slavish imitation of the game then known as rugby”, Wills insisted on establishing ”a game of our own” to be played with an ovoid ball. Remarkably, given his family’s fate, in the summer of 1866-67, Wills gathered and led a team of Aboriginal cricketers from the Western District of Victoria in a path-breaking tour of England.

This highly readable general history, which has benefited immensely from the work of chief researcher Jo Kildea, follows on from Keneally’s powerful work Australians: Origins to Eureka.

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It is pleasing to note that, as well as focusing on the heavy-drinking lyricist Henry Kendall, pride of Australian 19th-century literary place is given to Adam Lindsay Gordon, whose poetry contributed mightily to making the wattle our national flower. Yet as Keneally argues, Gordon was ”no tender philosopher-poet”. He was a boxer, a mounted trooper, a politician and an extraordinary horseman who once won three steeplechase races on one afternoon, two on his own horse.

In March 1870, Gordon fell badly in another chase, suffering a severe head injury. Although some contemporary critics, most notably Michael Wilding, now dispute Gordon’s alcoholism, it is certainly the case that in June 1870, Gordon committed suicide on Brighton beach by shooting himself in the head. This was just before a favourable review of his Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes appeared. Although no fan of Australian poetry in general, Oscar Wilde said Gordon was ”one of the finest poetic singers the English race had ever known”, while the Euro-centric Kendall described him as, ”A shining soul with syllables of fire who sang the first songs this land can claim to be its own.”

As Keneally points out, in 1934, Gordon’s bust was ”placed in Westminster Cathedral to represent Australian poetry”.

Moreover, for many Britons, the following lines from Gordon exemplified the moral force of what it meant to be a stoic Australian:

Life is mainly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

In demonstrating how ”the Australian harshness and otherness could permit poetry”, Keneally also features the radical-nationalist writer Henry Lawson and, later on, the serious-minded Sydney poet Christopher Brennan, both of whom undeniably shared ”a tragic thirst for liquor”.

Keneally explores the influence of the popular balladist Andrew Barton (”Banjo”) Paterson, who played such a pivotal role in the creation of Waltzing Matilda. In stark contrast to the proletarian Lawson, Paterson was educated at Sydney Grammar School and the University of Sydney and worked for much of his life as a city solicitor.

Keneally rightly stresses the centrality of the search for gold in the psyche of 19th-century Australia. Intriguingly, he points out that the mining town of Charters Towers, south-west of Townsville, had, by the late 1880s, become ”so massive a source of gold that its proud miners and citizens referred to it as ‘The World”’. Throughout the early 1890s, Charters Towers was arguably Australia’s richest goldfield and, apart from Brisbane, Queensland’s most important city.

Indeed, it was the dual-electorate of Charters Towers that produced Anderson Dawson, who, for a week in December 1899, led the first Labor government in the world. After then becoming Queensland’s first senator and the minister for defence in Australia’s first federal Labor government, Dawson died impoverished and alone, yet another victim of alcoholism.

Yet despite such individual tragedies, many thinkers still continued to regard Australia as ”the workers’ paradise”, at least until the outbreak of the so-called ”Great War”.

As befits the No. 1 ticket-holder of this year’s NRL premiers, Manly-Warringah, it is no accident that Keneally writes so knowledgeably, not just about politics, culture, economics, religion and warfare but also about the intimate and intricate connections of Australian society and sport, including horse racing and cricket, as well as all four codes of football.

In such a grand narrative as Australians: Eureka to the Diggers, there are inevitably occasional mistakes. For example, the radical/reformist Queensland Labor premier from 1915 to 1919 and later Sydney-based federal MP T.J. Ryan is wrongly rendered as P.J. Ryan in the text and also in the endnotes.

It is, however, pleasing to note that Keneally rightly stresses the major role played by the Australian Natives Association in the creation of Australia’s federation, which occurred on January 1, 1901, and which is arguably the most appropriate date to celebrate ”Australia Day”.

Founded in 1871, the ANA was a largely Victorian group of citizens, born in Australia, who, from the early 1880s, actively engaged in promoting Australia as a single nation made up of all the previously diverse colonies.

Keneally also gives due prominence to the temperance movement. Although it largely came to advocate total abstinence, the ”temperance movement” was one of the major forces to mobilise women politically and was also at the forefront of the campaign to afford Australian women the vote.

The making of a nation, Review By Ross Fitzgerald, November 12, 2011
AUSTRALIANS: EUREKA TO THE DIGGERS, Thomas Keneally, Allen & Unwin, 464pp, $59.99

An only child born in 1943, Grahame Bond is best known for two of his comic creations: the incredible Aunty Jack and butcher extraordinaire Kev Kavanagh.

Bond was born and bred in Marrickville in Sydney. His first hero was a neighbour from across the road, the legendary boxing trainer Ernie McQuillan.

As Bond recounts in this quirky memoir, two decades later, ABC TV chose McQuillan’s Boxing Gymnasium in nearby Newtown as a location to shoot a segment of The Aunty Jack Show.

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On the day of the shoot the only area for Bond to change into his costume was downstairs in the men’s locker room. Watched by half-a-dozen tattooed Tongan pugilists, he put on his blue dress and fat-lady padding. He then entered the shower area to find a mirror to adjust his wig and apply some rouge and lipstick.

At that point McQuillan yelled out: ”Where’s that young Bondy? Bondy, where are you?” Bond puts it thus: ”Fully frocked and partially made-up, I stepped out from the shower recess and greeted him. Poor old Ernie stopped dead in his tracks, looked me up and down and said, ”F— me dead! Bondy. Tell me you’re earning a quid out of this?”

Jack of All Trades, Mistress of One is certainly packed with amazing characters, including Bond’s quite indulgent parents; his Falstaffian maternal grandfather, Benny Doyle, who was a heavyweight boxer; his beloved dogs, both called Rusty; and especially his sadistic Uncle Jack.

After performing with distinction in architecture revues at Sydney University, Bond’s most memorable creation – Aunty Jack, replete with trademark golden boxing glove and threats to ”rip yer bloody arm off” – burst onto Australian television screens in the 1970s.

As Bond tells it, it was on stage and screen he found an imaginary (and, in the main, supportive) ”family” of other writers, musicians and performers.

Over the years these included Peter Weir, Kate Fitzpatrick, Charles Waterstreet, Rory O’Donoghue, Red Symons, Garry McDonald of Norman Gunston fame, Sandy Gutman (aka Austen Tayshus) the marvellous Margaret Fink and Australia’s most talented writer for comedy, the incomparable Bill Harding. Yet this often moving memoir makes it clear that, especially since the 1970s, Bond’s life and career have been a long way from easy.

Indeed, as well as working as an actor he has, 30 years after the fact, used his skill as an architect by appearing in lifestyle television, including presenting Better Homes and Gardens. He has also carved a more-or-less-successful career in advertising.

From time to time, in this finely illustrated book, Bond takes his revenge on those who have hurt him along the way. Thus he cleverly attributes the following telling quote to one of his lesser-known comic creations, Mervyn Whipple, Man of a Thousand Faces: ”Beware the wounded satirist; you could become part of their repertoire.”

Although much of Bond’s memoir is affectionate and caring, at the same time some chapters of the intriguing Jack of All Trades, Mistress of One demonstrate with clarity just how true this is.

What is especially fascinating is the revelation that what many think of as Bond’s best creation soon became a burden. As he writes: ”Aunty Jack was the 800-pound gorilla in the room … It became absurd when press and radio were only interested in interviewing Aunty, not me. Some even requested that I put on the dress to appear on radio.” In the end, that’s why Bond killed Aunty Jack.

Yet even though he swore never to play her again, time after time he has ”brought her back for several reincarnations, each one more painful than the last”. Sadly, Bond was never happy revisiting and reprising her, because he no longer enjoyed playing the character.

Gloves are off in a ripping Aussie yarn, Review By Ross Fitzgerald, November 12, 2011
Jack of All Trades, Mistress of One, Grahame Bond, NewSouth Books, 336pp, $32.95

Fitzgerald and Jordan (who also collaborated with ‘Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia’) offer a raucous comedy of public, private and political life in the state that they call Mangoland.

Eight of Corris’s more than 60 works of fiction have been set in the past. The Colonial Queen is a shapely murder mystery set in 1886 which gathers its cast on a Murray River paddle-steamer of that name as it journeys downriver towards Adelaide. A number of Corris’s
interests are on show. One of the passengers is a boxer (Corris has written a history of prize-fighting in Australia, Lords of the Ring), ”Stoney” Stoneham (the novel can’t make up its mind whether his first name is Sydney or Stanley) who has been reduced to fighting in exhibition bouts after being jailed for manslaughter in an illegal bout. This is also a crime story, whose context is the anxiety of police that no more bushranger heroes should follow
the Kellys into public sympathy. A resourceful whore and her ne’er-do-well brother are also on board, together with a smart newspaperman and a drunken Scottish doctor. Corris keeps the show rollicking on, but it feels like the work of his left hand.! Lurie’s first, and perhaps still greatest, success was his novel Rappaport (1966). Since then he has written prolifically – more novels (most recently the poignant To Light Attained, 2010), short stories (numbers of them first published in magazines overseas), books for children. In Hergesheimer Hangs In, the protagonist is a writer of such material as the above, who has enjoyed middling success. His work is fitted into a hectic round of eating with old friends, jogging in the Botanic Gardens, enduring the demands and ingratitude of family members. A good deal of what we are given here – characters, events – is familiar from Lurie’s earlier writing. In common also is that tone of jaunty indomitability that scarcely masks despair.

Fitzgerald and Jordan’s ‘Fools’ Paradise’ reintroduces Grafton Everest, Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality at the University of Mangoland and – to the envy of his colleagues – a radio and television pundit as well, whose daily exhortation is ”Wake up, Australia”. In the world to which his audience wakes, security services and universities are being privatised: most of the state’s resources (reefs, beaches, rainforest – that sort of thing) are being sold to the autocratic and kleptocratic Asian country of Kelemping; the current premier is being blackmailed and his fundamentalist Christian predecessor, Sir Otis Hoogstraden, has coerced Everest into writing his biography. There’s lots more in this exuberant, but dishevelled, satirical performance.

The parlous state of Australia’s universities (especially in what long ago used to be called their arts faculties) continues to exercise Michael Wilding, for long our finest (but no longer our only) practitioner of the campus, or perhaps that should be anti-campus, novel. He’s back in form with The Magic of It, the usual ingredients this time being mixed with panache. We again encounter the supposed ubiquity of spying in Australia, the wretched sell-out of our tertiary institutions, the stench of betrayal around human and professional relationships. Journalist and private investigator Keith Plant is back to find the culprit in death threats against Professor Archer Major, purportedly an academic authority on magic, who perhaps has his own sinister uses for it. Wilding gleefully and adroitly moves Plant from Sydney to Oxford on the trail. Satisfying entertainment is there for all. The most ambitious and accomplished of these five novels is Garry Disher’s Play Abandoned. It involves the social comedy generated when families from rural South Australia translate themselves to a beachside suburb of Adelaide for their summer holidays. But this is also a lost child, or children story, centred on the grieving Marian Parr (a former academic – Disher’s is the most acrid and incisive of the three treatments of the moral decay of university life considered here). It is through her acute eyes that the relationships of the characters – more exposed and fragile when away from home – are scrutinised: between mother and daughter, wife and mother-in-law, husband and wife. There is plenty of rough humour, especially to do with shonky performers at a writers’ festival, but the abiding impression of the novel is its probing of pain and solitariness.

Peter Pierce is editor of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. The Canberra Times, 5 November 2011

THE COLONIAL QUEEN. By Peter Corris. Arcadia. 285pp. $24.95. HERGESHEIMER HANGS IN. By Morris Lurie. Arcadia. 209pp. $24.95. FOOLS’ PARADISE. By Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordan. Arcadia. 233pp. $24.95. THE MAGIC OF IT. By Michael Wilding. Arcadia. 344pp. $24.95. PLAY ABANDONED. By Garry Disher. Arcadia. 260pp. $24.95.