Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  TIBERIUS WITH A TELEPHONE

  PATRICK MULLINS is a Canberra-based writer and academic who holds a PhD from the University of Canberra. He was the inaugural Donald Horne Fellow at the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, and was a research fellow at the Museum of Australian Democracy. His early, brief version of this book won the 2015 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA

  First published by Scribe 2018

  Copyright © Patrick Mullins 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  9781925713602 (Australian edition)

  9781911617860 (UK edition)

  9781947534759 (US edition)

  9781925693324 (e-book)

  A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  scribepublications.com

  To my parents

  Contents

  1. End to End

  2. Building Character

  3. The Ghostwriter

  4. Shelter and the Law

  5. The Central Figure

  6. A Time of Transformation

  7. Rumours

  8. Lowe

  9. Gaps

  10. Red

  11. Disgust

  12. The Colours of Ambition

  13. The Undoctored Incident

  14. Control

  15. Perception

  16. War and Strife

  17. Exposure

  18. Preparing the Way

  19. Lauding the Headmaster

  20. Protection (I)

  21. Protection (II)

  22. The Story and the Fact

  23. Cold Water

  24. Privilege

  25. The New Man

  26. Fragments and Credit

  27. Subsequent Plots

  28. Loyalty

  29. A New Stage

  30. Le Noir

  31. Battles

  32. A Transient Phantom?

  33. A Natural Development

  34. Activity and Responsibility

  35. The Crumbling Pillars (I)

  36. The Crumbling Pillars (II)

  37. The Crumbling Pillars (III)

  38. The Crumbling Pillars (IV)

  39. The Stories Told

  40. Survival Mode

  41. On Edge

  42. Constant Threats

  43. The Unequal Struggle

  44. Dither and Irresolution

  45. Tributes

  46. ‘Where We Are Heading’

  47. Finishing

  48. In Calm and in Crisis

  49. As Matters Stand

  50. In the Wilderness

  51. Never

  52. Persistence

  53. A Liberal View

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix: McMahon government cabinet and ministry

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  CHAPTER ONE

  End to End

  1982–1983

  When he finally started it, the book was late. By 1982, Sir William McMahon was nine years gone from power. He was jaded, frustrated. The ambition and energy that had sustained him through thirty-three years in the House of Representatives — twenty-one of them as a minister, almost two as Australia’s prime minister — had not gone away but, since the 1972 election, they had been without use. His influence had faded. His relevance seemed gone. His time, people said, had passed. For years now, he had languished on the backbenches, ignored by his leader, discounted by colleagues, pitied by opponents, derided by the press, mocked by the public.

  But by 1982 he decided that it was enough. McMahon was angry, frustrated with politics, done with Canberra’s bureaucrats, finished with his prime minister. The last of the famous ‘forty-niners’ — those elected in the wave that brought Robert Menzies to power in 1949 and kept the Liberals on the government benches for over two decades — he resigned his seat. McMahon did not mind that he was causing inconvenience and discomfort. Nor did he mind that his once-safe, blue ribbon Liberal Party electorate was likely to elect a Labor successor.1

  He had decided he would write his book. Long threatened but never started, it was going to be an autobiography, and it was going to be history. It was going to be serious and also sensational. Above all, it was going to be a revelation. ‘When I publish my autobiography and tell of the things I had to put up with,’ he said, ‘none of you will believe it.’2

  McMahon would follow Churchill’s line and write history himself.3 He would bridge the gap between participant and historian, would intertwine his own experiences with the story of the past. Not for him the scattershot ‘reminiscences’ of George Reid, the ‘patchwork blanket’ of Menzies, or the ‘stories’ of Billy Hughes.4 His would be a ‘multi-volumed masterpiece’, a magisterial history that illuminated the ‘substantial issues’: the Menzies era, the Vietnam War, the troubled days of Harold Holt and John Gorton, the Dismissal — and, of course, his own prime ministership.5 He would not be discreet.6 McMahon would be frank; in fact, he promised ‘bombshells’.7 He would supply freewheeling character assessments of Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton, Gough Whitlam, Richard Casey, Billy Snedden, and his longtime foe, John McEwen. The present political elite would not be left unscathed: McMahon promised hard words for Malcolm Fraser and John Howard, too.

  McMahon was not unaware of his reputation; indeed, the supposed falsity of that reputation was one of his hooks. His book would be the real story. It would peel back the veneer. ‘When I write about it one day, people will wonder how we did as well as we did,’ McMahon said. The book would be a rebuke to his critics in the press and in his party. It would be rehabilitation for his derided prime ministership. ‘What we achieved in those twenty months was unbelievable,’ he said, ‘because we left the economy in the healthiest state I have known it to be in the thirty-three years I was in Parliament.’8

  McMahon had been preparing for the book for a long time. For thirty-three years, he had followed the old lawyer’s habit of safeguarding papers, filing away briefings, retaining correspondence, making and remaking aide-mémoires of conversations of significance. Nine years before, he had donated the bulk of his papers to the National Library, in Canberra; now, he requested their return. Using his entitlements as a former prime minister, McMahon retreated to his longstanding office on the nineteenth floor of Westfield Towers, on Sydney’s William Street, close by the offices of his old foe Gough Whitlam. He employed a secretary and an assistant, and, with those papers around him, he began to write.

  Soon, he had an agent. The author and journalist Michael Morton-Evans offered representation after hearing from McMahon that a manuscript was almost complete. Morton-Evans spread word among Sydney publishers. Thomas Nelson, which a decade before had published a satirical compilat
ion of McMahon’s utterances, The Wit and Wisdom of William McMahon, was the first to bite.9 But when they caught sight of the manuscript that McMahon had been working on, they were aghast. Why? According to Morton-Evans, they were daunted by the manuscript’s size. ‘It was huge,’ he said. ‘It would have run to four volumes.’10

  As ever, intransigence was McMahon’s first response. He waved off concerns about the size of the book. He would not countenance cutting, and he would not allow another hand to intervene. He had ploughed through the files, and this was what he had produced. ‘The whole concept of someone fiddling with his words was anathema to him,’ said Morton-Evans. The book had to be done his way: ‘It was all or nothing.’11 Believing the book unpublishable and McMahon unpersuadable, Thomas Nelson backed away.

  In August 1983, the publisher at William Collins, Richard Smart, expressed a guarded interest. Invited to Westfield Towers to discuss the possibility of a deal, Smart arrived accompanied by his two-year-old-daughter. With her, McMahon was gentle and polite. He offered her biscuits while he and Smart talked. They discussed the scope of the book, the style of its telling, the title. End to End: Menzies to McMahon caught the budding author’s ear.

  Eventually, McMahon asked Smart if he would like to see the autobiography. To Smart’s nod, McMahon guided him out of the office and through a labyrinth, ‘a dark Russian gulag’ of a corridor, into a room whose walls were lined with twenty-seven cheap metal filing cabinets, each stuffed full of the papers that had been returned by the National Library. ‘There it is!’ McMahon said.

  Smart did not understand. Where was the book?

  ‘It’s in the files,’ McMahon told him.

  Smart had had concerns before the meeting. McMahon was no Menzies, no Whitlam. Publishers were not queuing at his door the way they had for those giants. McMahon was not renowned for his way with words, and he was not remembered in terms that suggested a wide, waiting readership. If this book was to work, Smart knew, it would have to be good. It had to be about the story.

  McMahon had an interesting one to tell, didn’t he? His life, conceivably, was a thread that weaved through the twentieth century, running from Chifley and post-war reconstruction to Menzies and the communist scares; it was entwined with Holt and Vietnam, and the feuds with McEwen and Gorton; it knotted around the clash with Whitlam, and it twisted through the Dismissal and Fraser, and the emerging order of the 1980s. McMahon’s life was coloured with dramatic oppositions — of tragedy, farce, triumph, failure, tenacity, and disregard. And he had been prime minister!

  With a proper writer to help him, Smart thought, McMahon could produce something worth reading. He could produce something of value. A whole chronicle of Australian politics and history could hang on the thread of McMahon’s experiences. But, as matters stood, there was nothing to publish.

  The publisher decided to be polite. ‘Let me know when you’ve got something,’ he told the former prime minister, and left.12

  CHAPTER TWO

  Building Character

  1908–1926

  The McMahons were well known when William was born. By 1908, wagons emblazoned J. McMahon & Co. had been trundling through Sydney’s streets for nearly forty years. Whether loaded with guns, livestock, clothes, or heavy sacks of greasy wool, those wagons had ensured that the McMahon name was recognisable to all.

  For Sydneysiders awake early, the most famous owner of that name was a familiar sight.1 James McMahon would drive his Abbott buggy to his yards in Redfern at four o’clock each morning, ready to supervise the first departures for Darling Harbour and Circular Quay. His dark beard was always neatly groomed, and, though his customary trilby suggested otherwise, the burly Irish carrier never had an air of frivolity or gentility about him. Mornings were for work, and he tolerated no slacking off. ‘I am uneasy if I think there may be stores or goods exposed to the weather lying on the wharves or elsewhere,’ he said.

  James was the source of the McMahon family’s considerable wealth and power. As a child of nine, he had fled County Clare and the misery of Ireland’s Potato Famine to come to Australia with his parents. He had been working almost since his feet had touched the shore. He had earned seven shillings and sixpence a week as a baker’s boy on George Street before moving on to work for a wine merchant, a railway contractor, and then a carrier named Patrick Murphy. While working for Murphy in Parramatta, he saw a team of carriers’ wagons, five of them, all laden with wool and pulled by teams of sixteen or eighteen bullocks. He was deeply impressed: ‘The great wool teams were a very fine sight.’

  It kindled his ambition. Beginning his own carrier’s business with one horse and a rented, dilapidated dray, he expanded it to 250 workers and some 500 horses. Contracts grew from the ordinary — ferrying guns and railway sleepers — to the larger, more notable. His big break was the awarding, in 1871, of a monopoly contract for shifting wool between the railway station where it had been delivered and the warehouses from which it could be exported. In the absence of a rail connection to the wharves, this was a lucrative victory.

  He had been aggressive throughout. Scornful of unionists and unionising employees, James crossed swords with Billy Hughes and railed against the forty-eight-hour workweek. ‘It makes a man feel that the moment his eight hours are up his responsibility is done,’ he said, in 1906. He had no time for the Labour Party, which he regarded as a den of demagogues living ‘at ease while workers toil’.

  Violence was second nature to James. Nicknamed ‘Butty’ for his tendency to head-butt antagonists, he had nonetheless made an exception for the picketers and strikers who had blocked his yards during the maritime strikes in 1890. Picking up a stave from a cask, he rushed at one and beat him around the head with it.2 In another notorious incident, he ‘prepared’ — as he termed it — three men for the hospital, and cheerfully declared that it was ‘just a little bit of the spirit of the Donnybrook Fair’ that had made him to do it. When the court summonses came, he bought off his victims with £25 and a bottle of whiskey.

  James had augmented his ambition and aggression with a sharp eye for a deal. ‘I foresaw the rapid progress that Sydney was certain to make, and began to invest in city property,’ he boasted. He snapped up land in the city and the country, raised sheep in Amaroo, agisted horses in Cowra and Mount Druitt. He improved his land by building on it, and lined his pockets by insisting that his workers rent lodgings from him or work elsewhere. He bought hotels near his yards and stables to recoup his drivers’ wages when they went for drinks. He was poorly educated, but he was not poor and he was not stupid.

  James was gruff and proud, fixed in his ways and unwilling to change. ‘He would carve the roast on a silver salver, and no one ever got to ask for the first helping,’ a grandson later said.3 Everything James had done was for his family. ‘I have come through a life of hard toil, but I have succeeded,’ he said. ‘I do not want my children to have the struggle without the same prospect of reward.’

  James had looked after his six of his children by involving them.4 He trusted his eldest son and namesake to manage the extensive and unwieldy business. He expanded into farming to allow sons Thomas and John to engage in ‘pastoral pursuits’.5 He employed the twins, Ernest and Joseph, as foremen. His sole daughter, Agnes, had been put to work collecting rents for the McMahon properties. With an armed guard at her side, the work would take her five days — a testament to the size of the empire James was building.

  But James’s fourth son, William Daniel, was different. Educated at the Jesuit-run St Aloysius’ College on Milsons Point, he wanted no part of the family business.6 He seemed intent on making his own way. A ‘rationalist’ in a family of devout Irish Catholics, he crossed religious lines when he married in 1903.7 His wife, Mary Ellen Walder, was from a respectable family that manufactured sailcloth, tents, and canvas in a steam-powered factory a little way from the McMahon stables in Redfern. Her family was English in faith and English in out
look, with a proud adherence to the British Empire and a belief in the virtues of making good through hard work.8

  It was an unusual match. The Walders were thrifty teetotallers who were well aware of the way chance governed life: Mary Ellen’s father had died young and left them adrift until the eldest son, sixteen-year-old Samuel, rescued the family business. The McMahons, in turn, were rough, ambitious, and physical. All James’s sons played rugby union. They were built for it: bulky and heavy, thick-necked and big-shouldered. William Daniel did not have the skill of his eldest brother — whose exploits playing full-back for Randwick saw him represent New South Wales for twelve years, and subsequently manage the 1908–09 Wallabies tour of England, Wales, and North America — but he refereed club matches on weekends to stay involved.9

  However mismatched William Daniel and Mary Ellen might have seemed, their marriage was working. They were making their way. Their family was burgeoning. Though their first child had died shortly after birth in 1905, William Daniel and Mary Ellen had welcomed another, James, the following year.10 By 1908, Mary Ellen was pregnant again, due late in February. William Daniel’s years as an articled clerk were soon to finish. He would take the exams for a certificate of Supreme Court practice in November. Assuming he passed, he would open a legal practice in Sydney’s inner north, and handle civil suits and minor criminal matters. Work there would earn William Daniel his own name, one that could provide for his family and compete with the fame of his father’s wagons and his elder brother’s football prowess.11

  And so, on 23 February 1908, as summer rains washed out the weekend and Mary Ellen gave birth to another boy, they gave this child his father’s name: William Daniel McMahon.12

  THREE years later, there were four children. James and William had been joined by Sam and Agnes.13 The law practice was doing well: William Daniel McMahon’s name was becoming well known in and of its own right.

  But there was a problem: Mary Ellen was sick. ‘She was never very well,’ Sam later said. ‘They said she had tuberculosis.’ Cures of all variety were tried. The Walder family put up a tent in their garden in Kensington. ‘She used to sit out there, and they would lift up the sides to let the air in,’ Sam recalled.14 The ineffectiveness of these treatments worried the family. Eventually, the fear of contagion spurred the decision to keep the children away from their mother. William Daniel, still working away at making his name, did not take charge of them. Though he employed a guardian to care for his children, he had them sent to live elsewhere.