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

To cater for cashed-up returning lugger crews peopled by an assortment of mavericks and desperadoes, the ”Roey’s” amply proportioned manager, Terry (”Top Cat”) Cullen, would ”roster on additional barmaids just to cater for the two-day drinking spree that normally followed (their) landing on the spring tide”. As Dodd recounts, in the late 1970s and early ’80s there was seldom a dull moment at the Roebuck Bay Hotel.

As well as being a personal memoir, The Last Pearling Lugger is an evocation of Australian history. It is impossible to tell the story of pearling and Broome without including the Japanese. Dodd puts it thus: ”More than 900 headstones in the Japanese cemetery in Broome, not to mention numerous other lonely graves scattered around the Kimberley coast, are testimony to the courage of the Japanese divers, who used to be paid part of their fee before the season began because of the high risks of their work.”

There were so many Japanese workers there that Chinatown was known as ”Japtown”. Indeed, by 1919, 1200 Japanese dominated the pearling workforce, constituting almost half of the residents of Broome. However, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 meant that local Japanese and their wives were rounded up and interned at camps as far away as Tatura in Victoria. The lugger fleet was dismantled, with some vessels commandeered by the Australian military and later used in ”high-stealth resupply and rescue missions in Japanese-occupied Timor”. The rest were either sent south or were torched ”to prevent their being seized by the enemy in the event of a full-scale attack on Broome”. It took years for the pearling industry to recover. But even then, the increasing use of plastic instead of pearl meant life on the luggers changed dramatically.

Early on in The Last Pearling Lugger, Dodd writes about how, aged 24, he camped at Tunnel Creek, a cave above a watercourse that was ”home to freshwater crocodiles, thousands of flying foxes and a slice of Australia’s early bloody European history”. In the 1890s, the cave had been the base of Jandamarra – also known as ”Pigeon”- who waged a protracted guerilla war against encroaching white settlers and the police. His pursuers failed to realise there was a breach in the cave roof, through which the bold Aboriginal warrior could escape to the bluff above. As Dodd explains, Jandamarra’s campaign ”ended in a shootout at Tunnel Creek in 1897, when he was hunted down and killed by a black tracker”.

The powerful story of this great Aboriginal freedom fighter is recounted in a new edition of the 1996 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award winner, Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance. Written by Howard Pedersen with help from Bunuba elder Banjo Woorunmurra, this true tale, set in the unforgettable Kimberley landscape during the late 1800s, is published by Magabala Books – a Broome non-profit Aboriginal corporation that preserves indigenous Australian culture.

Although it’s hard to tell how different this 2011 edition is from the first, published in 1995, this thrilling story of an Aboriginal freedom fighter deserves to be etched in our consciousness. As Bunuba woman June Oscar writes in a new preface to this finely produced book, Jandamarra is a hero not just to Bunuba people but to many other Aboriginal nations.

Told in absorbing detail, Jandamarra’s story of resistance and rebellion is aided by scores of illustrations. Extremely revealing are two black-and-white photos – one of an imperious, European, Sub-inspector Ord, sitting on horseback in Derby in 1898, a year after Jandamarra’s death, and another of the Broome police station in 1918 featuring white Native Mounted Police and a black tracker who, significantly, is unnamed. But, for me, the most powerful illustration is a brilliantly coloured photograph of red-ochre paintings that are still in Jandamarra’s hideout cave at Tunnel Creek – known to local Aborigines as ”Baraa”.

THE LAST PEARLING LUGGER, Mark Dodd, Macmillan, 256pp, $34.99
JANDAMARRA AND THE BUNUBA RESISTANCE, Howard Pedersen and Banjo Woorunmurra, Magabala Books, 220pp, $24.95

The Sydney Morning Herald, SPECTRUM, November 5 -6, 2011, Books p.36

The judgement of Adele Horin (no fan) was that Abbott was ”easy to hate” but also ”easy to like”. Mia Freedman – whose reaction to Abbott’s accession to the leadership was: ”PS Libs, are you on crack?” – said after actually talking to him: ”I did like the guy. In person, it’s hard not to.”

It’s instructive that Mitchell never sought to interview Abbott or anyone close to him in preparing this vicious polemic. She did interview him for TV 17 years ago when he was a new MP but, that aside, has assembled this ”biography” by homing in on almost every published criticism or known error and exaggerating it.

Each mistake that Abbott has made is presented in the worst possible light. Every accusation that’s been peddled is treated as self-evident truth. Every misjudgment or over-the-top statement by an associate proves Abbott’s guilt by association. Hence, this book reads like a succession of parliamentary censure speeches – but all from the one side.

During his time in Federal Parliament and before that as a journalist and student politician, there has been much that Abbott could have done differently and better. It is the fate of senior politicians to be damned for faults they don’t have and, less frequently, praised for virtues they don’t possess.

At least by the standards of public figures, Abbott is more than usually thoughtful and self-aware. He’s also a tough and unrelenting political advocate but this is hardly a vice in the leader of a political party.

His politics are not mine. Any sneaking sympathy I currently might feel for the federal Opposition is much more a function of dismay at the state of the contemporary Labor Party.

Yet Abbott is arguably the most substantial conservative politician of his generation: a senior and effective minister in the Howard government, in which he was often cast not just as parliamentary enforcer but as philosopher in chief; the author of three books and innumerable magazine and newspaper articles; and the principal reason the Coalition did not descend into chaos after Kevin Rudd became the prime minister.

Throughout, Mitchell not only talks up the leader Abbott deposed, Malcolm Turnbull, she also becomes a defender of Pauline Hanson. To Mitchell, Abbott’s campaign against Hanson’s One Nation party was not a defence of principle over populist conservatism, it ”was always the powerful woman he had in his sights”.

It is hard to imagine a sillier charge against someone who has many women advisers and whose worst moment as Opposition Leader came from attempts to win party support for a generous paid parental leave scheme.

Mitchell’s ”biography” is riddled with factual errors, just one of which should puncture its ambition to be taken seriously.

Mitchell claims Abbott was against ”RU486, the morning-after pill” but she has confused two different drugs: the morning-after pill, which has long been available from pharmacies and – in Abbott’s time as health minister – became available without a prescription, and a very different drug that, under legislation passed long before Abbott became minister, could only be imported with ministerial permission. Abbott never had cause to block any such application because none was ever made to him.

As a supposed work of non-fiction, Tony Abbott: A Man’s Man is neither fair nor accurate. It’s hard to know how much the Labor Party will try to make of it. My feeling is that any attempt to do so would make them look increasingly shrill and desperate.

Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, October 15, 2011

“This is just the book to give to your sister – if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.” wrote the Irish playwright and drunkard, Brendan Behan, of Irish novelist and fellow drunkard Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The same might be said of Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordan’s Fools’ Paradise (hereafter, ”Fitzgerald”, the joint authorship never being explained, though the two have co-authored A History of Alcohol in Australia).

The hero, or anti-hero, or protagonist of this novel is one Grafton Everest, PhD, non-drinker and professor of life skills and hospitality at the University of Mangoland, and commentator (from bed) every morning on Australia-wide breakfast television.

‘Fools’ Paradise’ begins benignly enough: ”’When you don’t sleep, you need a lot of rest,’ said Grafton Everest to his dog Tao.” But those who have followed Everest’s career – if that be the correct term for a life that has done little but career – since his first appearance in Fitzgerald’s 1986 novel, Pushed from the Wings, will not be deceived. That novel began: ”Grafton Everest examined his cock.” This sentence inflamed sisters less generous than those alluded to by Brendan Behan; indeed, it inflamed the whole sisterhood. Fitzgerald, not in the least abashed, began his second Everest novel: ”Grafton Everest examined his cock again.”

”Nothing succeeds like excess,” Oscar Wilde quipped, and that would seem to suit Fitzgerald’s satirical brush. That’s ”brush”, not ”blush”, for a blush would never mar Everest’s outraged and outrageous cheek.

Fitzgerald quotes Gore Vidal as an epigraph to chapter four: ”The Establishment may be immune to satire but the meat axe gets their attention.” Chapter five’s epigraph is from Frank Dalby Davison: ”You need a skin as thin as a cigarette paper to write a novel and the hide of an elephant to publish it.” Those two quips get Everest, not to mention Fitzgerald, to a ”T”. One of Everest’s colleagues sums him up thus: ”I don’t know, Grafton. You’re confused, venal, you give in to all temptations, you’re slothful, and a little greedy, but at least you’re sincere. In this ravenous, moonlight state there is no room for sincere and honest people.”

That is the ”moonlight state” of a couple of decades ago. Everest is embracing corruption to write a biography of former Mangoland premier Sir Otis Hoogstraden, who can only be the late Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Another prominent character is the eponymous founder of ”Marnie Miller’s Aussie Pride Party”, described thus: ”Asked what her policies were, the auburn-haired new-woman-on-the-block, dressed in a green Chanel suit, said, ‘I don’t know much about politics but I know what I like. People just can’t do the right thing to each other at the moment and there are too many deviant sexual practices coming into this country, along with infected fruit and vegetables.”’

Like her perfume, Marnie is surely redolent of the younger, emerging Pauline Hanson. There is a smell of mothballs about Fools’ Paradise.

Indeed, Everest is engaged in anti-feminist rants that seem distinctly to belong to an earlier decade. His vice-chancellor, a former, very former, girlfriend driven by Everest’s appalling male chauvinist-pig behaviour into sapphism, seems nothing so much as a mixture of Germaine Greer and Margret Roadknight, and who blackmails Everest into surrogate fatherhood with her, the v-c’s, girlfriend. Success in this venture will guarantee Everest’s department’s funding and viability. The plot may seem hysterical; it seems to resemble nothing so much as the path described in a trough of water by a lump of phosphorus.

The most incisive summation of Everest’s character, or lack thereof, is proffered by his wife: ”Where shall I start? Gluttony! Indolence! Sloth! As Janet was carefully enumerating his academic incompetence, chronic torpor, pathetic child-like need for media exposure and chocolate, naive hydraulic attitude to sex and, most alarmingly, his barely budding tendency to what seemed to be corruption, his beeper blared.”

Doubtless we have not heard the last of Everest. When the universities close down, perhaps he will, in forced retirement, emerge as the editor of Quadrant, for ranting is his forte.

FOOLS’ PARADISE
Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordan
Arcadia, 233pp, $24.95
Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, October 1-2, 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)

It is virtually impossible to overrate the importance of the Mitchell Library. Former NSW premier Bob Carr calls it the “DNA of Australia”. It is also hard to disagree with Carr’s contention that Mitchell’s massive collection can be viewed and interpreted as “an expression of Australian patriotism, just like the appreciation of the Australian bush that came from the painters of the Heidelberg School and the first generation of bushwalkers; or the appearance of the Australian writing of the 1890s; or the political impulse towards a federation of the Australian colonies.”

In Book Life: The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell 1836-1907, Eileen Chanin charts the life and times, and contributions, of David Scott Mitchell to our cultural and intellectual life in an utterly compelling way. Chanin does this by adroitly telling Mitchell’s life story primarily via documenting and examining the vast number of books Mitchell read and collected and also through his contemporary correspondences with many influential legal and university friends and colleagues, as well as with a wide circle of leading intellectuals, professors, poets (including Henry Lawson), newspaper proprietors, journalists, booksellers, stationers and publishers. The latter included the Melbourne-based George Robertson, often regarded as the first important book publisher in Australia, who from 1861 distributed catalogues of books for sale.

As Chanin explains in her beautifully illustrated book, as well as producing numerous textbooks, Robertson also published some 600 books by writers as diverse as Marcus Clarke, James Bonwick, Henry Kendall and the incomparable Adam Lindsay Gordon. Chanin rightly concludes that Robertson’s catalogues “noting the details of these publications, were important references to mid-century colonial writings in the days before a consistent overall picture of this literature existed”. Among many useful illustrations, Book Life boasts a superb photo of the ground floor of Angus & Robertson’s bookshop in Sydney in 1895.

Chanin usefully relates how Mitchell found it difficult to find a house large enough to take his much-beloved books and how, to this end, he finally settled on a substantial property at 17 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst.

From our vantage point in 2011, it seems remarkable that from one man’s collection a “national” library of a distinctly Australian nature was born and gradually grew to life. This came from Mitchell possessing “every work of note published in Australia from 1810 to 1900″. The value of his splendid library is, in a cultural sense, inestimable. One leading authority on early Australian books, recording his sorrow after Mitchell’s death in 1907, rightly wrote that “as years go on, Australia will realise how great a bequest has been made to Sydney”.

Mitchell was interred in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery. All past, present and future lovers of books, of libraries, of ideas and of Australian history, especially of the 19th century, owe him an incalculable debt.

The last illustration in Chanin’s biography is the interior of 17 Darlinghurst Road. Fittingly, Mitchell’s work table is as he left it when he died.

Book Life by Eileen Chanin, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 477pp, $59.95
Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, 25 -26 June 2011

“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.

Named after St Francis of Assisi, Farrell was a devout Roman Catholic of distinctly Irish heritage. The future infamous Sydney policeman and legendary captain of the Newtown rugby league team gained his nickname from his habit, as a teenager who often walked barefoot, of picking up discarded cigarette butts, or bumpers, which he broke open, using the tobacco to make his own cigarettes. Indeed, throughout his eventful life Farrell was a chain-smoker and a staunch imbiber of the booze.

As a hardline copper who didn’t mind bending the rules, Farrell’s heyday covered the latter half of the razor gang years in the late 1930s, Kings Cross and inner-city Sydney during World War II and the ferocious 1950s and 1960s in places such as Darlinghurst, where he became head of the Vice Squad.

Larry Writer writes evocatively about the fights between Sydney brothel keepers Kate Leigh, who was Farrell’s most valued informant, and Tilly Devine, who loathed Farrell with a passion and who, at her 50th birthday party while carving the roast pork and plunging in a knife, remarked, “I wish this ‘ere pig was Bumper Farrell.”

Strong as an ox, with gnarled nose and cauliflower ears, Farrell’s beat from 1938 to 1976 involved dealing with such infamous gangsters as Lennie McPherson, Abe Saffron, and John (“Chow”) Hayes.

As a rugby league player, he captained Newtown to the premiership in 1943 and represented Australia against England and New Zealand. His football career began at Marist Brothers Kogarah, where he developed into a tough front-row forward playing against the likes of the legendary Frank Hyde. Yet for all of Farrell’s sporting achievements, he was best known for biting off the ear of a St George rival, Bill McRitchie, in an infamous match in July 1945.

On completing an apprenticeship as a boilermaker at Garden Island naval dockyards, Farrell joined the NSW Police Force in 1938. Soon he was at home in Darlinghurst and the Cross, which along with Surry Hills and Woolloomooloo became his domain for decades.

Throughout Farrell’s police career, it was accepted that the owners of gambling dens and sly grog houses who paid substantial bribes were rarely raided, and almost never without a tip-off. As Writer explains, either the proprietor paid a senior politician or policeman directly or police “bag men” were sent to the clubs, brothels and gaming houses and ”collected their superiors’ money in proverbial brown paper bags”. By the 1960s, this system was “ratcheted up to a streamlined and vastly more profitable level by Premier Robert Askin and a succession of corrupt police commissioners and senior officers”.

Yet when he was allowed to organise surprise raids, Farrell did so with considerable physical verve and gusto. Like many of his generation, Farrell loved a fight.

One of the most fascinating sections of Bumper deals with his years working at News Ltd in Surry Hills after he retired from the force.

When Ita Buttrose was editor-in-chief of The Sunday Telegraph in the early 1980s, she was experiencing considerable problems with a stalker. Farrell soon fixed this problem by contacting the notorious Roger Rogerson, then in charge of detectives at Darlinghurst police station. Predictably, the stalker was quickly dealt with and thereafter left Buttrose alone.

Buttrose has fond memories of Farrell. “He had a huge reputation as the toughest cop ever, yet he was the most courteous man in that very policeman-like way,” she says. “His courtesy and friendship made it easier for me to be a woman executive at News Limited, a place where you could smell the testosterone when you walked in the front door.”

In this fine biography, perhaps not enough is made of Farrell’s love for his children and of his undying affection for his artistic wife, Phyllis, an Anglican who converted to Catholicism and who in marrying him sacrificed her career. Certainly Phyllis’s death left Farrell bereft.

To the end of his days, as he had done as a child, each morning on waking and each evening before he slept the plain-spoken Bumper said his prayers while bending on his knees.

In April 1985, Farrell died in his bed, at home alone. In his right hand he held his rosary beads. As Writer evocatively concludes: “His left arm was raised, reaching back, the hand clutching a slat in the bed head, as if he had suffered a painful spasm and grabbed something solid for support.”

The Life & Times of Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell by Larry Writer , Hachette, 402pp, $35