Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  She was happy to see Frank again. The squadron was now based at Biak, on the northern coast of Papua, and his skin had turned yellowish from malarial infection. His shirt was dirty, his trousers ragged. ‘I think the first thing we should do is get you some new clothes.’ The first sign, perhaps, that she cared for him. She also liked, very much, the fact that he was the only officer who did not smoke.

  By this time, she had made friends among the local traders, who were happy to discount liquor for the boys on the front line. Rationing would be no problem, they explained to Frank: ‘Any friend of Joy Beattie’s can have whatever she wants.’ My mother had learnt from the Plymouth Brethren members of her family to be personally abstemious, but also reacted against them to deplore those killjoy officials who would deprive fighting men of their main solace. Thanks to these grog runs, approved by his respected squadron leaders, the two became closer, attending the open-air cinema, finding places in the headland where they could look over the beach, and taking more trips to Magnetic Island.

  Then for my father it was back to the war – to Moresby and Milne Bay and Morotai, flying over islands occupied by Japanese troops who would have cut off his head with a ceremonial sword if he once again crash-landed. Malaria was endemic, as were dengue fever and gastroenteritis: pilots flew with an empty gumboot in the cockpit to serve as a toilet. There were bullets to contend with in the air from ‘Zeke’ – the zippy Japanese Zeros – although it was worse to be caught on the ground by a surprise attack with bombs that sprayed shrapnel pieces of Australian pig-iron.

  My father flew from 1943–44 with 75 Squadron, slowly dislodging the Japanese from their boltholes on the northern New Guinea coast and adjacent islands. His logbook is full of the hazards of flying in the area – the low cloud, storms and rain squalls that would suddenly put pilots in peril over Japanese-occupied islands. Much of his work was on successful bombing and strafing raids on enemy positions, keeping a wary eye on the lethal Zeros that came out of the sun and onto their tails, and on the anti-aircraft guns shooting tracer and the ground troops’ bullets from below. The Allied forces were frequently bombed and strafed – the war at this point was not one-sided, although the US forces were slowly getting the upper hand. My father found the Americans fascinating, if rather naïve – they were always trying to barter their new automatic weapons for old Australian revolvers which reminded the Yanks of the guns in cowboy movies. He got on well with them, and as an officer of an Allied force he was always treated generously. On one occasion he brought his flight into an American base, all four pilots low on fuel after battling turbulent weather. He was welcomed in the officers’ mess, but was surprised to find that his NCOs were sent elsewhere. Australian pilots did not pull rank, and on the ground, as in the dogfight, all were equal.

  Although flying was often a lonely business, there were occasional moments of pride and patriotism. In his logbook my father fondly recalls his role, on 16 May 1944, flying cover to a massive American operation to invade and recover Hollandia – ‘ships of all descriptions as far as the eye can see’. He noticed through his binoculars that two of them ‘were flying the good old Aussie flag’, so he took his formation down to waggle their wings at HMAS Shropshire and Australia. The sailors waved back – a small patch of national identity in a Yankee sea. It was a most exciting way to live, but as the young pilot had learnt from the fate of his brother, it could be a dreadful way to die.

  Frank’s tour of active duty ended when he was made an instructor – at the grand old age of twenty-two – and sent to the Central Flying School at Point Cook in Victoria (and, later, Parkes) to teach nineteen-year-olds how to handle their war machines in the tropics. He was rated ‘above average’ as an instructor: teaching new recruits about night-flying and forced landing must have seemed very old hat to the survivor of the crash at Chiltern. It was in this last phase of the war that he experienced the thrill of flying a Spitfire – the plane Churchill had denied Australia until the Nazis were all but beaten. It flew like a dream, and he flew it like a dream from the first. I note in his logbook a certain number of solo flights which he would have taken for the joy of flying, in this craft that was so light to his touch after the ponderous Kittyhawk.

  On these private excursions, high above the plains of southeastern Australia, he lived the poem he later taught me:

  Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun spit clouds – and done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung

  High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

  I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

  My eager craft through footless halls of air …

  Up, up the long delirious burning blue

  I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace.

  Where never lark, or even eagle flew

  And, while with silent lifted mind I’ve trod

  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand and touched the face of God.7

  My father, tossed in the storm before his crash at Chiltern, had a vision of his mother – not of the Virgin Mary or a bearded man with a halo. These young Australians were fighting for their mothers and their families, not for religion or politics. Frank was a gentle youth deeply affected by the debriefing photos of all the bodies he had shot and bombed in his strafing raids on Japanese trenches – seventy years later he could still recall his recoil at the sight. But this was a war which threatened to destroy his family and had already taken the life of his beloved big brother: it had to be won. Which is why, midway through 1945, he was prepared to leave his comfortable and safe work as a Spitfire instructor in Parkes to join the impending invasion of Japan. The word in the RAAF was that General MacArthur had no need of Australian squadrons to defeat the enemy: the only way to see action was to enlist as a naval pilot and fly off the British aircraft carrier that would be part of the invasion fleet. My father volunteered, and was ordered to report to naval headquarters in Melbourne on 15 August 1945.

  That very day, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender, telling his people the reason – ‘The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb.’ Without Hiroshima, my father would have been part of a bloody finale to war in the Pacific certain to have cost hundreds of thousands of Allied and Japanese lives – possibly his own.

  The war was over, and there was dancing in the streets. Frank Robertson decided that he would not report for naval duty. Instead, he telephoned Joy, the WAAAF corporal he had taken out in Townsville. Since the war had ended, he said, they might as well get married. She agreed, and they did.

  The photos show my mother outside St Michael’s Anglican Church in Wollongong in a full and flowing white bridal dress, my father in his blue RAAF uniform replete with medals, still sporting his Errol Flynn moustache.

  There was nothing to stop me now, my potential existence having survived the Wirraway crash and been saved by the bomb. In due course I was born – on 30 September 1946. Coincidentally, on that day, 12,000 miles away on a foggy morning at Nuremberg, and at much the same hour, the judges entered the courtroom to deliver their historic judgment on the Nazi leaders who had started the war. As they came in, I came out.

  That is a crude way of saying that happenstance had me born on the day of the Nuremberg judgment, and that the length of my life still provides a precise temporal measure of the extent to which the international community has failed to deliver on the momentous promise of that day, namely that crimes against humanity would henceforth be deterred by punishment of their perpetrators. The judgment upon the Nazi leaders – perpetrators of the Holocaust – created the law that I came, in time, to practise, to judge, to write about and generally to try to develop. From the iniquity of crimes so heinous that the very fact a human being could commit them demeans every other member
of the human race must arise an international jurisdiction to try to punish those who would command or organise or abet such crimes. Since the scoundrels who do so are generally above or beyond the law in their own states, the Nuremberg legacy depends for its fulfilment on the establishment of international institutions of justice with power to end their impunity. My affinity with the day of the Nuremberg judgment was no more than a curious coincidence, but perhaps providence was once again at work.

  The two abiding influences on my parents – and no doubt on their generation – were the war and the Depression. It was the latter that left an indelible mark on my father: even after he became quite well off, he would walk miles rather than pay for a taxi; although generous to his children, he found it difficult to allow himself any luxury. We joked about his ‘Depression mentality’, but it must have been traumatic to see his father sacked from a good job and reduced to seeking odd jobs to provide food for his family. The out-of-work men in those times looked for support wherever it was offered – in my grandfather’s case by the Methodist Church and the Freemasons, whose Annandale branch (where my grandfather was a grandmaster) organised what help it could for members’ families. I remember as a small child enjoying their parties, although as a teenager I laughed at the Masonic oaths and rituals (the gizzard cut out at low tide and all that nonsense) and could not understand why my grandfather bothered. Now I do: in industrial Sydney, at least, this was a harmless fraternity which gave poor men some self-esteem and helped to save their children from hunger and unhappiness.

  My mother’s memories of those years were more dismal, because she noticed the hurt of others – the kids who came to school shoeless and in rags, the unemployed men who could not afford the money for dentures. Harry Beattie worked as a teacher on a reduced salary, but at least it was a salary: in the country areas outside Wollongong, the economy descended to a barter system, with payment for his services as the local Justice of the Peace made in milk and eggs. The young girl saw in their eyes the defeat and the lack of self-belief. When she became a mother, she applied a necessity test to her children’s requests: ‘Is it really necessary?’ she would always ask, and usually decide, certainly in the case of sweets, that it was not.

  The war left scars on my father. Ron’s death was a permanent painful memory and Frank refrained from attending celebrations each Anzac Day. During the fifties and sixties these were drunken festivities organised by the Returned and Services League (RSL), then a xenophobic and racist organisation which urged the reintroduction of conscription to send my generation to fight in Vietnam. It was not until 1992, when I made an ABC documentary, 44 Days, about the founding of 75 Squadron and its heroic performance in the 44 days between the fall of Singapore and the battle of the Coral Sea, that he took an interest in remembering his part in the war and marched with survivors of the squadron on Anzac Day.8 I walked proudly beside him.

  My mother was more relaxed about remembering and every year she would meet her Townsville girlfriends for a catch-up luncheon. They would begin by toasting Claire Stevenson, their remarkable leader, who proved that a woman in wartime could be a more capable administrator than any man. Otherwise she was philosophic about her time in Townsville, and became less and less convinced of the ‘yellow peril’ that the Menzies government conjured up to bring back conscription and to send several of my schoolfriends to their death, fighting people of a colour they had never seen in the playground. My parents, for years the embodiment of middle-class conservatism, shifted to the left, and by 1969 were voting for Whitlam, as were their children.

  3

  Baby Boomer

  My very first memory is of sitting in the sunshine on the sand of Bondi Beach, overlooked by the tall Norfolk pines that grew there in 1950. I heard a bell, and then saw a great wave of people erupt from the breakers and swarm towards the shore. ‘It’s the shark bell,’ my father explained, introducing me to the great Australian fear of death in the water. If you grew up in Sydney, the terror would be magnified by the young Rupert Murdoch’s afternoon tabloid, the Daily Mirror, with a series called ‘Famous Shark Deaths’ which would be rerun whenever the paper needed to boost its circulation. I can still recall the gory details – the actress taken (victims are always ‘taken’ not ‘eaten’) in two feet of water at Middle Harbour and so on. Hence the sense of relief and joy for Australians at their first plunge in the Mediterranean, as they realise it is the only sea they can swim in without fear of people-eaters.

  My parents had no money when they married, and at first lived with my father’s parents in the family home in Drummoyne. Subsequently they managed to acquire a small flat in a dilapidated building in Francis Street, Bondi, overlooking a park, not far from the beach and close to the job to which my father had returned, as a teller at the Bellevue Hill branch of the Commonwealth Bank, where he earnt a meagre wage of £320 per year, less tax and insurance, but with a promised annual increase of £1. My mother, in her later stages of pregnancy, one day became so worried about how they would cope with the cost of a baby that, for the first (and last) time in her life, she bought a lottery ticket. The Plymouth influence on her upbringing had inculcated the belief that all forms of gambling were evil – she would never in later life even flutter on the Melbourne Cup or buy shares (which she regarded as a form of gambling), but the impending cost of a child drove her to this desperate extreme. She won £10, and put it aside to pay for my nappies.

  I was delivered by the local GP, who also performed my circumcision. This male genital mutilation was routinely inflicted on baby boys at the time – ‘Dirt might get under the foreskin,’ doctors would say, or ‘You must admit that the Jews know about hygiene.’ The fact that it might diminish sexual pleasure in later life was not, in those prudish times, a worry.

  On the subject of sex, I should mention my only memory of abuse. It happened when I was four, undergoing in Camperdown Children’s Hospital the unnecessary (but then routine) operation to have my tonsils taken out. It was worrying to be separated for the first time from my parents, although my handsome father would come from work every night and charm the nurses into allowing him to stay after visiting hours. There was no such thing as television, but he would bring with him a hand-held magic lantern and project onto the wall the frames of a ‘Tiger Tim’ cartoon for the pleasure of all the children on the ward.

  The day after I emerged from the anaesthetic, an unknown doctor came to my bedside. I can recall him vividly – he was small, with black hair and glasses, wearing a brown cardigan. After a perfunctory chat, he put what seemed to be a leather finger-glove on his right index finger. Instinctively I felt terror and then unbearable pain as he violated me. Perhaps it was just another unnecessary medical procedure to which kids were subjected at the time. Perhaps it was not. I will never know. But I still recoil whenever a doctor suggests a prostate examination, and it may explain why I have never been drawn towards being made love to by a man. I was not assaulted again: although I walked past public toilets to and from school, I was an ugly, acne-strewn youth who was never invited in. Not until I went overseas was I solicited, with invitations I always refused – probably from the subconscious fear that gay sex would be like having my tonsils out.

  All other memories of Bondi – where we lived until I was six – are unalloyedly happy. I did not realise that my parents were poor; their attention made me feel quite rich. I ran on the sand at Bondi Beach, and was taught to perform that ceremonial wriggle handed down by Australian fathers to their sons: how to hold a beach towel over your privates while extricating yourself from wet swimming trunks. (On no account in the 1950s could a penis, however tiny, be displayed on a Sydney beach.) I would paddle (holding my father’s hand) in the rock pools, then venture with him into the old bathing sheds to inhale the warm tang of sun-burnished flesh. I would watch superbly muscled young men in posing pouches play handball, then walk up to Waverley Oval and climb on the big World War I cannon. It was removed some years ago by pacifist killjoys, who fooli
shly feared that it would turn small children into militarists.

  It was at Waverley Oval that I observed my first sporting hero, the fast bowler Alan Davidson, whose run-up was poetry in motion. Later, at age fourteen, I was privileged to watch him (along with Benaud and Meckiff) attack the West Indies batting one afternoon during the legendary 1960–61 Test series. There really was ‘a breathless hush’ – not in the close at Eton, but at the Sydney Cricket Ground. I listened on the wireless to every ball bowled in that series – the first nail-biting match had ended, incredibly, in a tie, and the fourth was a draw after an amazing last-wicket Australian partnership withstood attacks from the terrifyingly fast bowler Wes Hall. Such were the joys for small citizens of a sporting nation.

  There was no preschool on offer for poorly-off parents in those days, which was fortunate for me because mine occupied their spare time reading to me. My mother disapproved of comics, but found the money, at 2/6d a time, to buy the range of Little Golden Books in which I could follow the illustrations and hear of the adventures of Scuffy the Tugboat and the Five Little Firemen. We progressed to Enid Blyton’s Shadow the Sheepdog and I became very fond of the local strays I would pat in the park, until a mastiff bit me, severely enough to induce a life-long anxiety about big dogs. We progressed to larger books – Blinky Bill, of course, and I cried over his daddy’s cruel death, shot by a man for pleasure, while Blinky was hugging a gum tree. Such stories are thought to induce in children the desire to be kind to animals, but since the conceit was to create animals that are human, it may be that my sorrow over the pointless killing of a koala sparked an embryonic interest in human rather than animal rights.