Rather His Own Man

by Geoffrey Robertson

  It was censorship, as ever, that propelled me onto the student political stage. Nineteen sixty-four was the year of the infamous conviction of the Oz magazine editors, Richard Walsh and Richard Neville, and the man brave enough to print their work, Francis James (my mother’s old schoolmate): they were jailed by a moronic magistrate for publishing satire he did not understand, and some weak puns. (‘Get folked’, a pun advertising a folk festival, was one the magistrate thought obscene.) Even more obscene, to his perverse mind, was a savage cartoon by artist Martin Sharp (who was jailed as well) titled ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’, which satirised drunken and loutish behaviour by privileged hoons in Sydney’s upmarket eastern suburbs. The same stupidity that had censored Prospero’s adjuration against pre-marital sex in The Tempest was now putting artists in jail for condemning immoral conduct by their peers. I made my first public political speech, on the front lawn of the main quadrangle where protest crowds gathered, to raise money for the Oz appeal. This was to pay the high fees of its defence team, John Kerr QC and Neville Wran.

  Inexorably, I was drawn to student politics, conducted on the third floor of the MacCallum Building, an unattractive modern extension to the Gothic surrounds of the main quad. The offices bore traces (kicked over) of the recently departed Robert Hughes; the main meeting room would resound to the grave tones of Michael Kirby; and along the corridors would slouch the lean and hungry figure of Bob Ellis, who had been at the university for years (I was studying Chekhov, and imagined him as Trofimov, the eternal student in The Cherry Orchard ). There was a small office for the student newspaper, Honi Soit – I walked in to find Laurie Oakes, a cadet at the Mirror, enthusing students about tabloid journalism. The MacCallum Building was to be my base for the next three years, as I rose from orientation week director in 1965 to Commem director in 1966 to president of the Students Representative Council in 1967.

  My first big event – orientation week – was a success on which I could build a student political career since I took the opportunity every day to speak or to chair a debate. I liked the role of provocateur, and enjoyed refereeing a fight among four of Australia’s leading crazies: Frank Knopfelmacher, a paranoid Czech psychology lecturer from Melbourne University who bore an intellectual resemblance to Dr Strangelove; ‘Red Ted’ Wheelwright, from our Economics department; W. C. ‘Billy’ Wentworth MP, an obsessive right-wing jingoist; and Dr Alex Carey, a social psychologist vehemently opposed to Vietnam but prominent (and popular with students) for declaring that ‘chastity is just another form of malnutrition’. I took them to lunch and was amazed at their geniality: they were contrarians who knew that they needed opposite numbers in order to be taken seriously.

  My orientation week also featured debates on conscription, on censorship (I arranged for ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’ and other offending Martin Sharp cartoons to be transferred to slides and shown on a large screen in the Wallace Theatre – the police turned up too late to seize the evidence), and reports from Charlie Perkins and Jim Spigelman, who had exposed discrimination against Aboriginals in outback towns. There was, of course, a lighter side: the week was opened by ‘Mavis Bramston’ from the Channel 7 satire show, and ABC personality Diana Ward chaired the sex session, which was dressed up as a debate ‘That chess is the only way to find a perfect mate’. Michael Kirby was everywhere. So was the media, avid for scandal about loose-living teenagers, although they found none.

  When I became SRC president I found myself regularly in the papers denying absurd allegations or hosing down provocations. When the Telegraph reported that ‘Methods of contraception are described in detail in a three-page supplement in Honi Soit’ (only in Australia could this be news, or a sensation, in 1967), I had to explain that ‘students stand four-square behind the publication of information about contraception … they come to university with no real sex education [so much for those ‘Father and Son’ evenings] and the problem of the unmarried mother is a real one at the university.’ It was – and I dared not mention that I had authorised our welfare services to pay for impecunious students to have illegal abortions.

  Then there were repeated scares that malevolent university chemists were manufacturing LSD. My denials were not helped when Keith Windschuttle published an article in Honi Soit lauding the effects of LSD. This was condemned in Parliament, press columns and by the police, and my defence of free speech had little resonance with the right-wing factions that now, fifty years on, buy Mr Windschuttle’s magazine, Quadrant.

  The SRC supported more than eighty clubs and societies, and those concerned with drama and music actively promoted the new, the classic and the avant-garde – the latter, in the case of works by Pirandello and Alfred Jarry, often occasioning visits by the New South Wales vice squad, whose members sat stoically through Ubu Roi, with its chorus singing loudly (and in their direction) the refrain ‘Arseholes to you’. The student revues were brilliant, building up a tradition of acerbic, sledging satire very different from Beyond the Fringe, but just as funny. My SRC was quite keen on culture, and we were approached to sponsor what promised to be the great Australian movie. The promise was made by its proposed director and writer, Bob Ellis. We voted him £50 to begin work immediately. Although £50 was a goodly sum in 1967, it did not appear enough to create a classic of Australia cinema, and Bob returned every month for another handout, entrancing council members with his account of the filming in progress. Aware of Bob’s capacity for imagination, if not invention, I finally demanded some proof of his cinematic genius and insisted that he screen an offcut for us. Projection facilities were arranged, and three minutes of the classic flickered onto the screen, taken by a single camera panning monotonously around the baroque ceiling of the university’s Great Hall. We voted, unanimously, to end the funding. My treasured memory, as I left the meeting, is of Bob Ellis at the other end of the MacCallum Building corridor, shaking his fist at me and shouting ‘Philistine!’ This is the trouble with sponsoring great art: the great artists will always bite your hand when it refuses to feed them any longer.

  I do not want to give the impression that beyond the campus lay a cultural desert. True it is that the sixties did not begin really to ‘swing’ in Australia until 1972, with the election of Whitlam. But the city sustained some excellent, if occasional, theatre, especially at the Old Tote – a small student-ish space at the University of New South Wales, with a company that could rival any in the world. That is where I saw my first, and arguably best, Hamlet, the lead played by an unknown young actor called John Bell. There was Reg Livermore as Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest; Jacqui Kott was sensational in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and the immortal Gordon Chater was serious as Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard and superbly funny in the Phillip Street revues. There were foreign imports – notably Robert Speight in A Man for All Seasons and the young Judi Dench in a refulgent RSC Twelfth Night. But the most important foreign imports were from Melbourne: not just Barry Humphries, but a new play – The Removalists – by David Williamson, who spoke truth to power through excoriating accounts of police brutality and bogus ‘mateship’.

  Opera, in the days before the Sydney Opera House, was provided by the curiously named Elizabethan Theatre Trust. It had an amazing scheme involving ‘youth nights’. During its seasons, every opera would be performed on a Monday ‘youth night’, which youths (defined as anyone under twenty-six) could attend for the impossibly low cost of five shillings. The casts were generally good – many were from Sadler’s Wells or Covent Garden – and when Donald Smith was singing, the high notes were as high as any tenor’s in the world and even sweeter. Smith was a small, plump man with a hare lip, who preferred to perform at RSL clubs rather than La Scala, but once he was in costume and make-up his plangent voice transformed him into the most romantic of stage heroes. (I can never forget his appearance as Cavaradossi in the second act of Tosca, igniting the audience with ‘Vittoria!’ – victory over the torturers). I soon discovered an interesting thin
g about the ‘high C’ which Smith would effortlessly hurl from the stage, whence it would enter at the base of my backbone and run tingling up my spine to explode in my head: it had a mysteriously erotic effect on a female partner. I would wait until just before I knew the note was in the offing and then hold and gently stroke my partner’s hand. It worked every time.

  My literary activity in this torrid period, after I had started at law school in Phillip Street but kept rushing back to the main campus to play student politics, was confined to editing law magazines and writing satirical bits and pieces for Oz. My targets were scattergun – Arthur Calwell at the time was a joke; Gough Whitlam’s ambition was naked and Archbishop Gough was comical. There were all too many targets on the right – hanging-happy Victorian premier Henry Bolte, the ‘expert necrologist’; ‘Mr Ed’ Clark, the US ambassador (‘Mr Ed’ was also a talking horse on a TV comedy); anti-communist lecturer Frank Knopfelmacher (I wrote a spoof of his report to ASIO – about a Vietcong spy ring at work in the Engineering Department of Sydney University); and the range of incompetents who vied to lead the country after Menzies retired (‘A Nation Mourns’) in 1966.

  I turned on Challis Professor David Armstrong when he supported the war in Vietnam (‘The callous professor of philosophy, a leading exponent of naïve realism …’). I manifested a particular dislike for Minister for Public Works Davis Hughes, who sacked the architect Jørn Utzon from the Opera House (‘ How to bring a Great Dane to heel – the stamp of a genuinely creative jackboot’). My wordplay was laboured, over-intellectual and unmemorable – it was a joy to meet Kathy, years later, whose puns are effortless and survive in quotation dictionaries (‘Monogamy is what men think dining-room tables are made out of’ etc.). My work for Oz did garner one particular accolade, thanks to Garry Shead (now a renowned painter), who illustrated my ‘Birdwatchers’ Guide to Vietnam’ (politicians as doves, hawks, etc.) by putting genitals on several ornithological caricatures. This could not be allowed in the backward state of Victoria, so the Oz distributors put a large black line over the testicles before they crossed the border.

  There were two dominating older figures in student politics, whose influence was greater than any teacher’s. One was Michael Kirby, who was still around – student senator, student solicitor, saviour of students in any sort of trouble. The dissent over Vietnam grew apace, and many students were arrested when they blocked the motorcade carrying President Lyndon Baines Johnson on his tour through Sydney. (‘Run the bastards over!’ shouted LBJ’s companion, the incorrigible and incorrigibly corrupt Premier Robin Askin.) Michael was a workaholic who would wake at 4.30 am, do three workers’ comp cases and then turn to defend the arrested anti-Vietnam protestors I sent his way, followed by anti-apartheid protestors and Aboriginal rights protestors. He was always there for the underdog – our veritable Atticus Finch. Michael had made all the right moves for a political career – he sounded like Menzies but thought like Evatt, wore double-breasted suits, sang hymns (lower church – ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, which was Sullivan without Gilbert) and was a staunch monarchist, but had cultivated close Labor connections. No one had the slightest idea he was gay – several young women of my acquaintance fell utterly in love with him. Homosexuality was illegal in New South Wales until 1984, when Neville Wran’s government abolished the sodomy laws just before appointing Michael as president of the Court of Appeal, but I suspect that his sexual orientation was the reason he abandoned progress towards a brilliant political career in favour of a brilliant career in judicial politics.

  Then there was Richard Walsh, who edited Oz magazine and wrote acerbic scripts for The Mavis Bramston Show while completing a medical degree. He was in many ways the opposite of Michael, most obviously in his determination to slay sacred cows and his catch-cry that ‘Traditions are made to be broken’. He inspired a group of progressive students including Nick Greiner, Joe Skrzynski, Meredith Burgmann, Jim Spigelman, Denis Harley and me; together we planned, with almost military precision, our first attack on the university’s sclerotic traditions. We would take over the Student Union – a conservative body that spent our fees on its own board members and their elitist interests rather than providing facilities for the ‘shit, shower and shave’ that students were demanding. We wanted more than that, of course – nutritious food at reasonable prices, the best coffee in the theatre foyer, lots of free cultural events, an end to subsidising the expensive black-tie functions that the union board favoured. In the long term, we would strike a terminal blow against entrenched sexism by amalgamating the men’s and women’s unions – a step so radical that it had never before been suggested.

  To take over the union, we put forward the Honi Soit ticket, promoted by the student newspaper we controlled. My role was as propagandist, through the weekly ‘State of the Union’ column I wrote, under a pseudonym to avoid the risk of defamation action. Not that I needed to have worried – the scandals of waste and mismanagement under the ancien régime were all too easy to expose. (I obtained a printed menu for the six-course monthly board dinners, which began with oysters Tsarina: a dozen oysters topped with Beluga caviar dipped in cream with a sprinkling of shallots and chopped parsley, a dish enjoyed at the Savoy in the thirties by Hitler’s ambassador von Ribbentrop – later hanged at Nuremberg – that gave a hint of the fascist tendency of our opponents.) In 1966 the Honi Soit ticket swept the board elections, and the very first thing we did was to abolish this culinary extravaganza. I recall Nick Greiner grinning like a true revolutionary after the vote, while one of the old guard – later a Sydney silk – left the table sobbing. The plan to amalgamate the two unions was set in train immediately.

  Taking over a reactionary body that should have been catering to students was easy; doing anything to tackle social discrimination in the wider community was much more difficult. The SRC had a compulsory levy to support our work so we were able to dedicate funds to ABSCHOL, which provided Aboriginal scholarships and had helped to establish a law centre in Redfern to serve the Indigenous community. But the most celebrated of the sixties activities we helped to fund was the Freedom Ride. The charismatic Charlie Perkins, who was about to become the first Aboriginal man in Australia to graduate from university, was a campus identity. It was always a delight to meet him, football boots around his neck, and to talk both of soccer and of the oppression his people were suffering in Moree and elsewhere in the Deep North of New South Wales. Jim Spigelman had taken a year off from university to travel in America and experience the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, and together they devised the idea of a Freedom Ride – to desegregate swimming pools, cinemas, pubs and other civic centres to which Aboriginals were not permitted entrance. It was an apartheid almost as entrenched as in South Africa, enforced not by petty laws but by redneck police and prejudiced local councillors. They were inspired by Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus in the American south. It was a dangerous mission, and the SRC contributed to the hire of the ‘freedom bus’ and offered to support any student who might be arrested.

  The ride succeeded in arousing public attention to discrimination in health and education and housing, although it was less successful in encouraging Aboriginals to organise resistance: as Jim commented at the time, ‘To put it bluntly, there are just not enough Charlie Perkinses to go around.’

  Honi Soit was edited in my term as SRC president by Hall Greenland, a congenial communist, and Keith Windschuttle, who seemed to be in 1967 some sort of Trotskyite. They caused shock and horror in the right-wing newspapers by sending a correspondent to Hanoi (which any good newspaper should have done), and in the wider population by using Honi to raise funds for medical assistance to the Vietcong. It was humane, I suppose, for Australian students to pay to save the lives of jungle fighters, but paradoxical if, thereby nursed back to health, they were to kill more Australian soldiers. I spent some time quoting Voltaire (‘I don’t like what you say but will defend to my death your right to say it’) in defence of t
he editors, but eighteenth-century French philosophers did not carry much weight in a country that supported this war against gravity (the yellow peril descending inexorably from the north) and dominoes (the countries above us would sequentially collapse if Vietnam fell over).

  As part of my progress towards the student presidency I’d served as director of Commem Day – a festival of fun at which students inflicted their sense of humour on the often uncomprehending citizens of Sydney. Sometimes they could be all too comprehending – the previous year, puerile stuntsters had unnecessarily upset people by hanging dirty washing on the Cenotaph, the memorial to our fallen. My Commem Day would have to be different if some goodwill was to be restored.

  My plan to regain it, while at the same time having fun, was to stage a ‘More Pay for Police’ demonstration – to confuse the gendarmerie, and to focus on raising money for a worthwhile cause that was not in the public eye. I visited Inala, a small Rudolf Steiner school in semi-countryside, and admired the commitment of its staff and the progress they had made, especially through teaching art and pottery, in bringing happiness to severely damaged lives, mostly of children who had been rejected as ‘too retarded’ by state schools and institutions. It was unpretentious and relatively unknown, and desperately in need of new classrooms. I did not particularly think that Steiner offered a cure: it was enough that the school made hapless children happy.

  We needed a lead stunt that would not put anyone offside, and we found it in the state election due to take place just before Commem Day. For a small deposit, we stood a candidate for the ‘Boston T. Party’ (we formed it for the purpose). First I selected Bob Ellis, but the ABC, his employer at the time, refused him permission to stand – which we condemned as an attack on his democratic rights. He was replaced by Richie Walsh, whose assault on the sitting member (Pat Hills, the deputy premier) was good-natured (‘Hoist Hills’) but had a remarkable impact on the police: when I met the assistant commissioner he told me that his orders were to show us ‘utmost tolerance’. This new ‘kid gloves’ policy, which went so much against the grain of the New South Wales police, who loved nothing better than bashing students, had come from the Labor premier – perhaps he really was mindful of the electoral prospects of the Boston T. Party.