by Mark Colvin
I had little awareness of politics at first, beyond the burning issue for people of my age of conscription. My sister Zoë had a schoolfriend called Sally Burns. Sally’s father was a professor of political science called Arthur Burns, a vigorously free thinker and vocal anti-communist, and her mother, Netta Burns, was a senior policy adviser to a string of leading Labor Party figures, up to and including Bill Hayden. They and their children kept open house, and Arthur in particular was always keen to stir up debate among his children’s friends, an intellectual atmosphere which I relished. Their son Jonathan would soon challenge his own army call-up on the grounds that he was a genuine pacifist: when it came to court, he had so many witnesses to his lifelong gentleness and peaceful nature that his was one of the rare so-called ‘conchy’ cases that succeeded.
When it came to conscription, I thought I’d be OK for a while: I wouldn’t turn eighteen until I was studying at Oxford, a valid reason for deferral. But who knew in 1969 whether conscription would still be in force by 1973, when I was due to graduate? The Liberals had just won the 1969 election, albeit with a much reduced majority, and although the conservative coalition was apparently riven by infighting, the surge that swept Labor under Gough Whitlam into power in 1972 was only just beginning.
It may seem odd, but not wanting to fight in Vietnam was no barrier to a harmonious home life, even though my stepfather was now a rear-admiral in the RAN. Tony Synnot was an equable and tolerant man, though he had an occasional barrack-square yell that could freeze your blood when he needed it. He was extremely intelligent but chose not to flaunt this: you just became aware of his brainpower by degrees. He also had an exceptionally good way with people: former sailors who had served under him inevitably remembered him fondly, and more than once, ex-RAN traffic cops let him off speeding fines when they saw the face behind the wheel.
In his naval role, he was a man of complete integrity. In 1970 his job involved buying ships and their equipment for the navy, so he was constantly besieged by manufacturers who tried to shower him with gifts: gold pens, cases of wine and more. There were very few formal guidelines in public life about this at the time, certainly no compulsory gift registers, but Tony set his own rule, which was to accept nothing more valuable than a few dollars: a perspex paperweight, a set of branded pencils, a calendar, that sort of thing. Even these he only accepted so as not to offend, and brought them home for the kids. This absolute determination to play straight and resist corruption became over time the gold standard for me.
As did his resolute sense of duty. In the Christmas holidays of 1974, we scarcely saw him because he was coordinating the Defence response to the great disaster of Cyclone Tracy: he dropped in at home for about an hour, for Christmas lunch, then went straight back to his offices in Russell Hill. Tony worked on the Tracy response almost without interruption for ten days, then came back hoping for a long sleep, having decided things were now sufficiently well coordinated to leave it briefly in the hands of others. I think he was having a well-deserved whisky that evening, 5 January 1975, when news came through that a bulk ore carrier had crashed into the Tasman Bridge, killing twelve people and dividing Hobart in two. With hardly a murmur, he went straight back to work.
Later, in journalism, I would come to regard Tony Synnot as the finest role model I could have had for any form of public life. Among other things, I’ve always tried to follow his example and refuse freebies and junkets, which in my view can hardly fail to sway even the most determined reporter’s work.
I’ve never been particularly good with my hands, but Tony was also a patient teacher as we built together an aviary on the front porch for a pair of Burke’s parrots. He either had astonishing self-control or a very, very high pain threshold: he’s the only man I’ve ever seen hit himself hard on the thumb with a hammer without swearing. I’ve never emulated that feat myself, but at least trying to live up to that degree of stoicism proved useful to me on occasion in subsequent years.
I liked it in Australia, and I was by no means totally committed to giving it all up and going back to take my Oxford place. I could just as easily have stayed in photography, or applied for a place at the ANU or the University of Sydney. And I had some kind of social life in Canberra, however relatively small the national capital was at the time. My hangout at the time was the garage under John Langtry’s house. John was a lanky Canberran on his way to becoming an engineering student, who spent much of his time taking apart and putting together motorcycles while listening to music. John was crazy about Bridgestone motorcycles, the last of the high-performance two-strokes. I started off with no idea even of how an engine worked, but by September 1970, through osmosis if nothing else, I did at least know the difference between a head gasket and a carburettor. I also owned a small and very noisy Bridgestone, which John helped me choose and maintain. And since he’d been to school in Canberra, there was a circle of John’s male and female friends with whom I went to see acts like Tully, Jeff St John and Wendy Saddington when they were in town.
John eventually switched from engineering to Japanese, went to live in Japan, combined his interests by racing motorcycles there, then joined the Department of Foreign Affairs. At the time of writing he is Australia’s first-ever resident ambassador in Mongolia, a country I had barely heard of in late 1970 (it was more commonly known as Outer Mongolia then) when I returned to the UK to begin my time at Oxford. I was soon to get a crash course.
Not long after I began my first term at Christ Church, eating my meals in the hall you would almost certainly recognise from the Harry Potter films, drinking in one of Britain’s oldest pubs, The Bear, and reading set texts in the glorious Radcliffe Camera extension of the Bodleian Library, my father, true to form, announced another move. Despite his solemn promise to see me through university, he had instead accepted another posting in one of the world’s most inaccessible places. He was to be Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Ulaanbaatar, then better known as Ulan Bator, and would be leaving for Outer Mongolia in a few months. I would be left in the guardianship of my aunt Prudence (or Pooh), his sister, and uncle Colin, who very kindly made a room available for me in their house for holidays, but made it clear that this wouldn’t extend to the long summer vacation, when a job would be required.
And so it was that, halfway through my second term, I was sitting prelims, the exams that determine whether you will stay on to complete your Oxford degree, when I looked up from the Anglo-Saxon translation paper (extracts from Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Dream of the Rood), noted the time on the clock, and thought, ‘Dad, Moranna, Joanna and David [my toddler half-sister and baby half-brother] must be taking off from Heathrow about now.’
* * *
At Christ Church, I lived in Canterbury Quad, on a staircase directly above the college’s extraordinary collection of drawings and painters by old masters—Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini, Albrecht Dürer—a collection which I discovered years later had first been catalogued in 1902 by Sidney Colvin, nephew of my great-great-grandfather John Russell Colvin. It was so easy to saunter down two flights and spend a few hours hunched in the low light over the glass cases, admiring the extraordinary draughtsmanship, the charcoal and red and white chalk, of people who had seemed to see so clearly into the lives of contemporaries. And yet there was so much else to do: lectures in which JRR Tolkien’s son Christopher talked about the finer points of Old English, or where the great Richard Ellmann could be equally inspiring talking off-the-cuff about James Joyce or Oscar Wilde.
There was the famed Oxbridge tutorial system, in which you wrote an essay (often scribbling through the night), then went, half-drunk with fatigue, to read it to your tutor and another student, both of whose duty it then was to tear it apart. The sting was taken out of the process by the knowledge that, next week, it would be you trying to pick holes in your colleagues’ work. If nothing else, it got me used to the process of editing early on, and the idea that my prose was never going to be sacrosanct however
much passion or effort I had put into it: a useful lesson in journalism.
I remember coming out early on one of those mornings, having been up writing an essay all night, to find the great expanse of Tom Quad filled with a thick white mist, to a height of about a metre. The raised walkway around the quad, originally planned as a cloister by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey but never covered because Henry VIII decided he had grown too powerful, was entirely free of the soft cotton-wool cloud: the mist was all in the lower, grassed area. Only the statue of Mercury in the middle of the quad floated above it, seemingly flying free with its bow and arrow. It was a perfect, once-in-a-lifetime shot, and I rushed back to my room to get my camera. But by the time I returned—a matter of two or three minutes—the mist, the moment, and the picture, were gone.
There were also afternoons, evenings, nights spent drifting away smoking dope, mostly in the rooms of one accommodating friend who had an open-door policy for all, listening to Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Floyd, The Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Leonard Cohen. And next door at Corpus Christi, in Peter Saugman’s rooms, something similar, only with Dr John the Night Tripper on the turntable, New Orleans rhythms with a voodoo backbeat, and James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. One afternoon in summer, someone rigged up big speakers on either side of Christ Church’s Georgian Peckwater Quad and blasted out Terry Riley’s seminal minimalist work A Rainbow in Curved Air. I sat on the steps of the Christ Church Library for forty-five minutes and soaked it up in the sunshine. No-one complained. That was the kind of year it was, 1971. And if that didn’t suit, you could wander down to Folly Bridge and hire a punt for a picnic on the river. Time slid away like mercury skittering across a floor.
In the summer vacation I went to Cornwall and worked as a photographer on the Falmouth Packet, a harbour-town newspaper which also published editions for the villages of Helston, Camborne and Redruth. I travelled there under the impression that I was going as what we would now call an intern, expecting to shadow the paper’s main photographer, Denis Jory, for most of the summer, but I arrived to find that Denis was soon going on holiday and I was supposed to be stepping into his shoes. This was a tall order, because I had no press experience, and perhaps more importantly, no driver’s licence. I did my best, cadging lifts, taking public transport and doing whatever I could to get to jobs. By the end of the summer, I was perhaps approaching somewhere close to halfway competent, but certainly no more.
The strongest lesson that time instilled in me was that accuracy in journalism really matters. In local papers, even if you’re photographing someone’s prize vegetable marrow or the carriage clock they were given after forty years’ loyal service, they really care that you get their name and age right, because that photo and that caption are going to stay in their scrapbook for a lifetime. And as an aside, having been quite savagely bitten by a farm dog when I was invited to photograph a man’s prize bull, I learned the value of wearing a pair of stout boots, preferably quite high-sided ones, when out on jobs in the country.
I made a significant mistake towards the end of my first year at Christ Church: the college told me that due to lack of space, I could not remain in my rooms the next year, and I was too disorganised and perhaps fatalistic to appeal the decision. I’m almost sure in retrospect that, had I appealed to them on the grounds that both branches of my family were overseas, they would have relented and let me stay. But I let things slide too long, and when a friend named Charles Lillis told me he was going to rent a tiny fifteenth-century cottage in the village of Stanton St John, time had run out and I had few choices left but to join him.
I’d reckoned without a number of things, my own lack of a driving licence being one of them. Charles had a licence and a car, but I couldn’t rely on him for all my transport. The second thing was the infrequency of buses to and from the village into Oxford. The third—which I could not have foreseen, to be fair—was that this was to be a winter of rolling power blackouts. Edward Heath, as Conservative prime minister, was engaged in a running battle with the unions, and while what we went through was nothing like the later and far more serious Three-Day Week (where commercial electricity users could only switch on for three consecutive days each week), there were eight-hour periods—sometimes in the day, sometimes in the evening—when we had no electricity. The cottage, which had once housed a family that left for America on the Mayflower, was pretty but very cold in winter, and on the days when there was no power for the heaters or the stove, even colder. It was a damp, chilly year, and towards the end of it, I began spending more time on the sofas of friends in Oxford, having missed the last bus home.
My favourite of these overnight stops was River House, a brick place on the towpath of the River Isis, where I had a number of friends and there was a constantly shifting flow of visitors. It belonged to the artist Nikki Greswell, daughter of friends of my parents, and the other inhabitants included Amit Pandya, son of exiled Ugandan Indians and an intellectual powerhouse with interests spanning politics, history, literature and more; Ken Hylton, then pursuing a thesis on Ezra Pound, whose eclectic musical tastes ranged from Herbie Hancock to Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, with huge doses of Hendrix and Captain Beefheart in the mix; and Mike Grieve, who was doing his thesis on the philosophy of David Hume. Another friend, Alex Monnas, was an English-educated Greek quantum chemist with an extraordinary gift for explaining subjects like black holes and Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and whose hobby was post-Wittgenstein philosophy. I often say that I gained as much of my general intellectual education talking to friends like these as I did in any lecture, seminar or tutorial. The atmosphere, despite the reasonably frequent ingestion of hashish, was as often one of fairly rigorous intellectual debate as it was of all-night games of Monopoly or chess, though sometimes the two things happened simultaneously.
When my second year at Oxford came to an end, and Amit was leaving to go to the USA (where he eventually became a lawyer and an international humanitarian aid specialist), the others offered to let me have his room for my third year, and I gladly accepted. In the meantime, I was packing to spend my second summer vacation in the most exotic way possible: I was going to join my father in Outer Mongolia.
Chapter 16
Foreign Devil
MY ROUTE TO Ulan Bator was not the most direct or obvious one, which would have been through Moscow. Ten months before, Britain had expelled ninety diplomats for spying, and UK–Soviet relations were at one of their many lows: going through the Soviet capital was not considered a safe option. The way in was therefore through China. I flew to Hong Kong, was met at the airport by a junior Foreign Office official, spent a night in a hotel, and was taken to the station for the train journey to what we now know as Guangzhou but was then, in its much less expanded form, called Canton.
The first part of the trip—to the border of communist China—was short and uneventful. My long hair, fair skin, height (192 centimetres) and King’s Road–fashionable wide-lapelled lightweight suit had drawn no particular interest in British-ruled Hong Kong, where gwai lo (Western ghosts/foreign devils) were commonplace. On the mainland, though, I was soon going to experience what it was like to be utterly foreign—an object of scorn, curiosity, even disbelief. But first I had to get across the frontier. The Hong Kong train stopped there, and all the passengers had to get off. I was faced with a no-man’s-land—from memory about 200 metres—across which I had to lug my suitcases.
Since I had brought my Oxford set-list summer reading, including Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, half of Dickens, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and a few other massive tomes, and since there were then no wheeled suitcases on the market, this was no mean feat. In fact, I recall lugging one bag 20 or 30 metres, then going back for the next, repeatedly, until I reached the Chinese Customs shed on the other side. Four blank-faced People’s Liberation Army soldiers, automatic rifles slung forward for easy use, if necessary, watched this spectacle without apparent emotion: they may for all I know have been
trying to conceal their contempt or stifle their laughter at this gangling, decadent, imperialist running-dog. Inside the shed, there was at least a trolley, and I endured the thorough rifling of my cases before boarding the train to Canton.
Here it was that I first encountered the two middle-aged Queen’s Messengers—special diplomatic couriers—who were to be my travelling companions all the way to Ulan Bator. My diary of the trip is long-lost, so I regret that I can no longer remember their names, but I believe one was a retired colonel, and the other a former Colonial Special Branch officer. Both wore the official Queen’s Messenger’s tie, carrying the service’s symbol: the silver greyhound. Both carried red diplomatic passports, and told me that they always had several of these on the go, though not on their persons: usually two or three were in various foreign embassies in London, waiting for new sets of visas. They were stolid, brave men, in a service where those qualities were needed. Their job was to carry the sacrosanct, heavily sealed diplomatic bags, big off-white canvas sacks made by prisoners in the UK, containing the despatches and ciphers considered too secret to entrust to any more-insecure means, along with other embassy necessities. They were never, under any circumstances, to leave the bags unattended: if possible, both should be with the bags at all times, and if one needed to use the bathroom, the other would have to take extra precautions—they used handcuffs or shackles, if necessary, to ensure the bags could not be taken away from them.
This was not always hypothetical: not long before, they told me, at the hysterical height of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, two Queen’s Messengers had had to drag the bags bodily through a screaming mob of young revolutionaries who kicked and punched them all the way onto the train. One of them had been in the British embassy in Beijing in 1967 when it was besieged and much of it set on fire by Red Guards, who then manhandled the diplomats and frog-marched them around for over an hour before the idly watching People’s Liberation Army soldiers could be persuaded to intervene.