Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  Back at school, the darkroom gang hunkered down for the Leaving Certificate, our results the key to Commonwealth scholarships at Sydney University. We were all sixteen going on seventeen, and we were all going for honours. But there was time for one last stunt, which would take place at our own fifth-year farewell. The engineers among us (they went on to careers with Telecom) worked out how to rig the sound system so that, at the flick of a switch, the headmaster’s farewell could be interrupted by a seditious message from our newly devised ‘Rebel Radio’, and readings culled from a new satirical magazine called Oz. The only problem was: who would be the radio announcer? There were no volunteers for this role because none of us wanted to be expelled the week before our exams. We eventually prevailed on a brave but foolhardy fellow student to record hours of subversive content, and waited for the right moment to flick the switch. It came as the headmaster began his traditional speech, which would have been full of Polonius-like precepts about how we should behave in the big wide world, had his words of wisdom not been interrupted by a loud crackling over the loudspeakers in the Assembly Hall and an announcement that Rebel Radio was making its first broadcast. McGregor stood in frozen fury. ‘It must be Robertson,’ he spluttered.

  ‘No, it’s not!’ I jumped from my seat in the body of the hall, unwilling this time to take the credit. I may have come up with the idea, but it had been the electronic genius of Phil Sindel and Pete Darling that had wired the hall so cleverly that none of the teachers could work out how to stop the broadcast. It went on and on and the headmaster eventually gave up. I doubt they went on like this at Fort Street or Sydney Grammar, and I’d say that was their misfortune.

  Then came the exams, in that era when your future depended on how much memory you could cram into three hours of speed writing and how well your teachers had tipped the questions. I cannot now remember what causes I attributed to World War I, or my answer on the economics of autarkies, although I do recall showing off in my English paper the significance of the rape of Miranda and the scansion of Prospero’s injunction to chastity.

  The tension while waiting for the results was unbearable, so the darkroom gang took a camping trip to Surfers Paradise – a male-bonding exercise, although Dan Lunney insisted on taking a girlfriend, whom he deflowered en route, to the wonder of us virgins.

  A few nights before the results we went to the theatre, to laugh at a young comedian from Melbourne, whose Edna Everage (long before she was made a dame) resembled all our grandmothers. To open the show he came on-stage with a long-haired flaxen wig and a surfboard, singing

  I was down by Manly Pier

  With a tube of iced cold beer,

  And a bucket full of prawns upon me knee.

  When I swallowed the last prawn,

  I gave a Technicolor yawn,

  And chundered in the Old Pacific Sea.

  Fifty years later, I was able to recite it back to Barry, our neighbour in North London, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

  The interesting thing, looking back, is that we state school kids had absolutely no idea how good – or how bad – we were academically. We came from a new, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants comprehensive, without a notion of how we would fare against kids from the massively funded private schools, who had bigger and better textbooks. Our teachers seemed good enough, but perhaps they could have been better. My favourite, a charming but anarchic history master named Les Edwards, had once told me to wag school and spend my days in the Mitchell Library. I took his advice, but did not know how it would pan out for my history honours effort.

  As state school boys the only advantage we had was to receive our results the night before anyone else – in a frantic ring-around – because one of our fathers was a compositor on the Sydney Morning Herald. They sent us into a state of shock – the darkroom gang had attained first class in almost all our honours subjects. And, mirabile dictu, I had come second in the state in history. I was so overwhelmed at this achievement that it was several hours before I began to wonder why I had not come first. Later, I put this down to the fact that the other kid’s father was a history professor and had probably set the honours paper. Ironically, we became rivals again in 1975, when our first books were published by the same British publisher. Mine was about the mistreatment of Irish Republicans by the British secret police, and it did not sell well except in Ireland. His book was a hagiography of General Pinochet: thousands of copies were bought by Chilean embassies around the world. Once again, I had come second.

  We were not really disadvantaged by attending state schools – we weren’t bullied or buggered or forced to join cadets. But we were not led to believe we were any good, and we had been made to feel inferior to the confident private school kids we met on the train – until we read our names ahead of theirs in the Sydney Morning Herald honours lists.

  Yet the lack of confidence came out in university tutorials – old school ties, for no rational reason, induce self-confidence and self-assertiveness. That should not be the case: public education should compete much more effectively in the parental marketplace. Not only is it free, it has the great advantage of secularity. In a world where dogma has become the greatest threat to rationality, I still think that this is the most important form of education. Something only state secular schooling can offer is diversity – the value of children and teenagers mixing with a wide variety of fellow human beings from different social classes, different ethnic and religious groups, and different levels of advantage and performance. And there is also the virtue I intuited at age eleven – of locality, and the saving of so much time otherwise spent on buses and trains.

  But I experienced state education in the sixties, when it was still reasonably well funded and respected. I have watched from a distance and with some distaste the way in which successive governments have pump-primed church schools at the expense of the state sector, and how state teachers have become whipping boys and girls for all sorts of ideological grievances. The state education that shaped my life, and currently shapes the lives of 70 per cent of young Australians (including the great majority of those with learning and cultural difficulties) should be supported and celebrated. Secular education started as a direct inheritance from the Gladstonian era of improvement, introduced here by the visionary autodidact Sir Henry Parkes (the premier whose dinners were cooked and served by Agnes Dettman). It should be a matter of pride. Yet I have never heard an education minister, in federal or local government, say the simple words ‘Put state schools first.’ First among equals, of course – parents have a right to choose the kind of education to be given to their children, and competition in education, as in other professional services, must be accepted (although it is less acceptable to give non-government schools tax breaks on the pretence that they are charities). But unless governments ensure that state schools are sufficiently funded to set the standard for excellence, we will never have equity in our educational system.

  I sometimes wonder whether I would have turned out differently had I accepted my parents’ offer to attend Sydney Grammar. I somehow doubt it – our faculties are fixed and our destiny spun (according to the latest learning) at a much younger age. I might have topped the state in history, but then again I might have topped myself, like my old friend Ian Campbell, who won a scholarship to Grammar. He was the closest to a genius I ever met, but in a frenzy of fear at his inadequacy, bullied by his fellows, ignored by the staff and the injustice covered up by the school, he committed suicide. In the air of Epping, amid the gum trees and kikuyu grass, I could not imagine him suffering such mental desolation.

  I am inclined to think that schools make little difference to the adult we learn to be at our mother’s knee. Some years ago I defended A. S. Neill’s famous school, Summerhill, from the UK government’s education inspectorate, which was trying to close it down. One of Neill’s basic beliefs was that children come to embrace education – but only when they want to. Hence they must not be forced to attend class. Of course, the
government inspectorate had decided to close the school because its pupils were not being forced to attend class. The case, which became a TV movie, challenged bureaucrats who could not tolerate difference, or parents who genuinely believed their children would thrive in a different school. I called evidence from former Summerhillians – an astrophysicist, a philosopher and a Hollywood actress, whose relaxed education had done them no harm. That, I think, is the best thing that can be said about a school, and it could probably be said about Epping Boys High in my day.

  Now when I talk to teachers I advocate courses in human rights, which should be introduced (perhaps in the space now allocated to religious studies) in all secondary schools. I recite the story of the headmistress who sent all her new teachers this letter:

  Dear teacher,

  I’m a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness, gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burnt by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is to help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated morons. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

  It’s surely time to put that insight back into and onto the public school curriculum. Human rights are not history because they aren’t past; they’re not law because they’re still in flux; they’re not philosophy, although they do provide ethics for our time. Nor are they religion because they pay no heed to the supernatural; and they’re not politics because they’re not populist. They are, however, drawn from all these disciplines, and more, in their effort to define and enforce human values. Values which a democratic society can’t be neutral about. For students in our state schools, and teachers as well, they serve to show that privilege is an anachronism, dogma a distraction; that freedom is a birthright and discrimination a wrong that should never be suffered. To the advantages of state education with its secularity, diversity and locality, let us now add humanity.

  5

  Ming’s Kid Goes to Uni

  In 1964, aged seventeen, my acne on the wane, finances secured by a Commonwealth scholarship and confidence boosted by my Leaving Certificate results, I entered the Gothic archway to the main quadrangle of the University of Sydney. I was bewitched by the promise of intellectual excitement for the next six years (I had signed up for a course in arts followed by law), and the orientation week debates presaged a world in which excoriating satire, rude jokes and subversive thoughts would not require grovelling apologies.

  The place had a colonial whiff of Oxbridge, in its architecture and its motto, Sidere mens eadem mutato (‘The same spirit under a different sky’). Not to mention the sandstone lions at the entrance, said to roar at the approach of a virgin (this joke seemed funny to a seventeen-year-old male virgin). The place was full of recent ghosts – an orientation revue had scripts by the newly departed Clive James, and my philosophy tutor arrived very late for his first class, explaining as he wiped away a tear, ‘I’ve been at the airport, farewelling Germaine.’ Whoever she was, I felt sorry to have missed a woman who could have such an impact.

  All the excitement in our first weeks centred on a young English lecturer newly arrived from Cambridge, who looked and sounded just like a Beatle and was lecturing on D. H. Lawrence. It was a hot summer and the Wallace Theatre was filled with hundreds of scantily clothed females in open-mouthed adoration of the leather-jacketed Howard Jacobson (nowadays a grizzled Booker Prize–winner) who could not believe his beginner’s luck.

  English was a joy to read, although the faculty was savagely split between the Leavisites – disciples of the Cambridge don F. R. Leavis, who believed that the text must speak for itself without reference to the author – and everyone else, who favoured putting literature into some kind of context. Leavis had a black mark in my mind because he had refused to give evidence for the defence in the Lady Chatterley trial, but the bearded and intense lecturers he inspired (Jacobson was one) were the more entertaining. Professor Goldberg, the head Leavisite, revitalised the student literary society and I will always be grateful to him for introducing me to The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart, who had been the star witness for Lady Chatterley. I thought the division all a storm in a literary teacup, although it split the faculty down the middle. Of course you should be able to appreciate Saint Joan without bothering about Shaw’s liking for Stalin, or read Mrs Dalloway without knowing that Virginia Woolf wanted to exterminate the mentally handicapped. But context can add meaning and understanding and enjoyment to a text, as I had to point out, at risk of failure, to my examiners in my BA honours exam. They had set a paper requiring the appreciation of two unattributed and anonymous poems – one clearly superior (it was W. B. Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’); the other the verses my father had taught me, which had inspired fighter boys throughout the war (Magee’s ‘High Flight’). I could not imagine these boys ever reciting the dour Yeats poem as they went into battle, so I felt almost duty-bound to point out to the examiners that the less accomplished verse at least offered some meaning and hope to those experiencing war in the air. My paper, presumably marked by an anti-Leavisite, received a distinction.

  The study of literature, once past Beowulf, never seemed a chore. I marvelled at Marvell (even more, many years later, when I studied the Civil War era during which he wrote) while John Donne’s sensual images (and he a priest!) superseded the crudities of Catullus in my erotic imagination. Then the poets of our twentieth century – Auden, of course, and T. S. Eliot, whose ageing Prufrock still comes to mind whenever I walk on a beach (I shall never wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled) or dare to eat a peach (was it, I wonder, a fear of dribbling, or of indigestion?). There was Christopher Brennan, too, although not on the syllabus (he was Australian): his poetry still comes to mind in time of trouble (‘I Said, This Misery Must End’). I was much taken with George Orwell, although my admiration for this hero of the British Left has been somewhat dimmed by the recent revelation that he was an informer – on his fellow writers – for MI5. When speaking at the George Orwell Memorial Prize recently, I joked that he was ‘just another Blair’. It did not get many laughs from an audience largely unaware that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair.

  The subject that fascinated me was philosophy, in the teaching of which Sydney University had a notable pedigree by virtue of the lengthy tenure of John Anderson (from 1927 to 1958), who had given his name to a description – ‘Andersonian’ – which I never fully understood, although its remaining disciplines, by the time I arrived, seemed to be pissant libertarians. His place had been taken by David Armstrong, whose political views were somewhat reactionary but who was an impassioned lecturer who imparted with clarity not only the teachings of the masters but also the intellectual excitement of their subject. But it was history that remained my true love. We studied revolutions, through the spectacles of an American author, Crane Brinton, who likened them to fevers – with early symptoms, high temperatures and long periods of recovery. His metaphors never convinced me, although later they struck me as a useful analogy for litigation, which can become a kind of disease. I immersed myself in the French and Russian revolutions, and the 1848 eruptions from which my great-great-grandmother had fled Berlin.

  My first essay, I decided, would be on an early French revolutionary, perhaps the first socialist, one Gracchus Babeuf. I took myself, as had been my school-day wont, to Sydney’s Mitchell Library, from whose bowels I extracted what appeared to be the only book ever published on Babeuf, and indeed was one of only two copies of this rare book which had ever reached Australia. I thought I was safe, and copied it prodigiously. When I visited my lecturer to receive his congratulations on my erudite essay, I noticed with some horror the other copy of the book, on his desk. It turned out that he was finishing his own work on Babeuf, and he read me a lecture on plagiarism. It ha
d the desired effect, and by the end of the second year I had an offer to do an honours course.

  But by this time I was anxious to help make history rather than to study it. The Menzies government was now sending young men of my generation to fight a real war in Vietnam, where the ‘yellow peril’ was waiting to descend, as if by gravity, on our whites-only civilisation. National service was conducted as fairly as a lottery: only those whose birthdates were drawn out of a barrel were called up, and then only if they could not make it to university, where you were exempt. An old friend from Epping, Bernie (a.k.a. ‘Judy’) Garland, became the first of my schoolmates to be blown up in South Vietnam. I remember him as a kind and decent mate, always willing to help, and now he is just an entry on the wall at the War Memorial. There were 580 others who died, and 3000 wounded (including John Fairley, my cousin from Dapto, whose stark photographs of this wretched conflict are now on display at the War Memorial). I suspect that Menzies did not give a proverbial toss for the South Vietnamese (whose leaders included the hideous Madame Nhu, who exulted in what she called ‘the Buddhist barbecues’). He just wanted to do what he thought America wanted – although ironically, as it now appears, America thought that Australia truly wanted the US there. Ming misled America – he had no insight and little concern for the kids he put in harm’s way.