James, William, Sam, and Agnes were split up and juggled between their aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins. They would change home as their relatives needed, always subject to the whims and desires of their elders. On occasion, siblings would end up in the same house — but it was never permanent. It was always ad hoc.
The children drifted across Sydney, moving from the Catholic homes of the McMahons to the Church of England homes of the Walders. They lived in Kensington, Killara, Redfern, Centennial Park, Beecroft, and Point Piper. There were so many homes that William later said he would need a full half-hour to list them all. It was an errant life, insecure, always in flux. The children were conscious they were never in a home of their own. They were aware that they were always guests, wherever they went. Knowledge of these circumstances makes it possible to see why the siblings, in later life, were not particularly close; moreover, it becomes possible to sense that this constant movement would have inhibited the feeling — at least for William — of belonging among his immediate family. What is likely to have grown from this is the anxiety, insecurity, and isolation that William’s colleagues would observe in his adult behaviour, and the urgent, needful ambition that would compel him to dangerous prominence.15
Yet William would also observe that there was one place where feelings of belonging did exist: at his maternal aunt and uncle’s. Samuel and Elsie Walder’s home offered as much material comfort as other relatives’ did, but available in that home was much more than bed and bread. The Walders were the emotional ballasts that William’s parents could not be. William knew that whenever he went to see Elsie, it was with the constant assurance that she loved him. In the absence of his mother’s presence and comfort, Elsie was everything. Samuel Walder, meanwhile, was support and strength, generosity and care. Walder guided William to do better, to make something of himself.
Yet the nature of William’s life, of moving from home to home, often without a consistent authority to restrain him, led the boy to manifest a headstrong and often carefree attitude. He was adaptable, yes: ‘I think by nature I was probably a child who learned to adjust himself pretty quickly to changing circumstances,’ he said later.16 But he was also undisciplined and reckless. It came from wanting attention — most particularly, from his father.
Caught up in his work and trying to make a name for himself, his father was a gadfly. William once went to see him in Penrith, and had to wait four hours for him to make the time. When he finally did appear, it was with another man in tow, and they took William for a beer.
The relationship between father and son was amicable, but it was never close. William’s father was happy to provide help but never presence in his children’s lives. He was preoccupied with his own concerns.
In 1913, William’s father decided to turn his standing as a solicitor into a political career. He stood under the banner of the Liberal Party for the New South Wales state seat of Camperdown: solidly Labor and, despite suggestions to the contrary, unlikely to change. He was beaten soundly. He could muster barely 30 per cent of the vote. His poor showing was compounded by the knowledge that the defeat was at the hands of the brother of his own articled clerk. He hardly felt comfortable standing for office, though. On the stump, he told his audience that he felt like a cat on a hot tin roof. Hearing the speech, the five-year-old William was arrested by this image: he simply could not imagine his enormous father tiptoeing on anyone’s roof.17
A year later, in November 1914, as the storm of the Great War started to rage, the patriarch of the McMahon family died unexpectedly. James left a monumental business.18 His teams were transporting 750,000 bales of wool annually. His employees numbered in the hundreds. Drafted in to settle the estate, William’s father became enmeshed in a drawn-out and taxing process. The extent of the McMahon holdings — all the pockets of land that had been snapped up, the assets, and the contracts — was huge and complex. The final valuation, of £236,325, was controversial. Some thought it was unearned: by the Bulletin’s reckoning, the McMahon family’s wealth had come about only ‘by the grace of the Congestion policy of N.S. Wales’.19
Two years later, after returning to the law, the desire for a political career compelled William’s father to make a futile stand as an independent in the 1917 New South Wales election. The humiliations of electoral politics were even more visceral this time. In the 24 March ballot, there were more informal votes than there were for his candidacy. With only 1.46 per cent of the vote — just sixty-five ballots — he was soundly defeated once again.20
Worse followed. Little more than two weeks later, on 9 April, Mary Ellen died.21 Tuberculosis had kept her from her husband and her children for years; finally, it took her from them completely. But she had always been a ghost to her son. Much later, William professed not to have any memory of his mother. He could not recall seeing her at all, he would say.22 When prompted for more, he could only state the most mawkish and romanticised things: that she was beautiful, that she was lovely, that she was extraordinary.
For William, her death was never fixed to a particular date or year. He told some interviewers that he was three-and-a-half when she died; he told others that he was four, or six.23 He was, in fact, nine — old enough, it would seem, to remember. The indecision and inconsistency is a suggestion both of the regular disruptions of William’s childhood and how little that childhood altered after Mary Ellen passed away.
William’s father wanted little to do with his four grieving children. Mourning the loss of his wife, aware of his tendency to work to the exclusion of everything else, he decided to formalise the arrangements already in place. Agnes would live permanently with her aunt and namesake in Redfern. Samuel would live with the Blunts — Elsie Walder’s family — in Lucknow. William would live with Samuel and Elsie Walder. Where James went is unknown.
To ensure their security, their father organised to have his portion of James’s estate held in trust. His children would inherit it when they were old enough to look after it.
It was a neat arrangement that would not last. In 1919, when William was eleven, his elder brother died. James was thirteen. According to his death certificate, ‘exhaustion’ and ‘a cerebral disease’ were the causes of death.24 Whether it was caused by the influenza pandemic that spread across the globe after the Great War is unknown. Certainly, the effect of the pandemic was pronounced: in Sydney, more than 4,000 people died, and the disease affected 40 per cent of the city’s population.25
James’s existence consists of two brief flashes: one for his birth and one for his death. William never mentioned James. He was always treated as the eldest child. The grief of the McMahon families, so far as it appears on the public record, was restrained. But for a notice of his funeral and burial in the family vault in the Catholic section at Rookwood Cemetery, there is nothing. On the same day, The Daily Telegraph editorialised:
After a war involving practically all civilised mankind, carried on for nearly five years with unexampled carnage, and stopped at last only by the exhaustion of one of the belligerents, the world could not be expected to regain its normal condition merely by the signing of some names to a Peace Treaty.26
William’s father could easily have made the same lament. Within the space of five years, the world had plunged into war; his father had died; his wife had died; and now his eldest son had died, too. The normal condition of the world, to him, would surely have felt to have passed.
He returned to his practice. A political career was not for him. But, as his son would later say, William Daniel knew the law. And that was where he would find his keep. He was intelligent enough to get by. He was good enough to win more often than he lost. But his ambition softened. He became louche: he drank heavily, and he gambled heavily. He was loose with his attention and his work, so much so that he was sued by one of his own clerks for unpaid wages.27 His reputation suffered. He became a source of family embarrassment.
AS an adult
, William spoke of his father with some wariness. There were occasions when he claimed to have inherited his interest in the law from him: ‘Naturally I went into law because my father had been a lawyer, and I just accepted that I would be one too.’28 At other times, he dismissed the idea of having absorbed anything from his father at all. Shame seemed to tinge his statements about the man. He did not even see physical similarities, he said. They had bypassed him completely, going to his own son instead.
He was not entirely wrong. From youth to old age, William did not look much like a McMahon. Thin where his father was immense, short where his father was tall, the blue-eyed boy had missed out on the family’s rugby-appropriate build, and was always thought, because of his slender frame, to be susceptible to the disease that had claimed his mother’s life. He was a small kid with a thin neck, a messy mound of dark hair, and ears that jutted from his head like round flowers.
Possibly to develop his physical resilience, William was dispatched to board at Abbotsholme College when he was thirteen.29 Located in Killara and well regarded in Sydney’s society, the school considered development of the body as important as that of the mind. Virtute non verbis ran the school’s motto: By deeds, not by words. Students were made to do military drills and play rugby, cricket, and tennis each afternoon for two hours. They slept in dormitories that were open to the night, ate produce grown on the school grounds, and studied in open-air classrooms, all to build their health. The school had a military ethos that was thought suitable for ill-disciplined and unhealthy boys. Frank Packer was sent there; Harold Holt attended, and knew William.30 Abbotsholme boasted that it aimed ‘at the highest development of body, mind and character. Send us the boy,’ the school said, ‘and we will return you the man.’31
Yet William only attended Abbotsholme for two years before transferring to Sydney Grammar School in 1923. The change is beguiling. Despite producing a prime minister in Edmund Barton and counting many of the New South Wales elite as alumni, the Darlinghurst school was not an attractive proposition at the time.32 An exodus of staff during the war had damaged Sydney Grammar’s standing, and results from its students had not yet returned to their earlier lofty levels. Enrolments had dropped, prompted by high fees and run-down facilities that even the school magazine admitted were not ‘worthy’.33 Its ageing headmaster had just resigned and been replaced by Herbert Dettman, a gentle professor of classics who believed that a ‘schoolmaster’s business is to sympathise with his boys’.34 Stern when the occasion warranted, this bespectacled, unruly-haired fellow rarely used the cane.35 Dettman encouraged study of the classics and extra-curricula activities; he increased hours for tuition, and reduced free periods. He believed that the glory of education lay in ‘character building’.
In this respect, William’s character was a work in progress. He studied the classics — Latin, Greek, French, English, and History — and deliberately eschewed study of mathematics and the sciences, subjects that would demand a total commitment. Aside from a prize for French when he was in third form, his academic record was undistinguished. He was a rowdy student, and he enjoyed himself. His peers regarded him as an extrovert, always talkative, always up for some fun. As a member of the school debating team, his contributions were limited to the comic. On a trip to the Hawkesbury Agricultural Institution, his peers recorded, William gave an insistent rendition of ‘Thanks for the Buggy Ride’, and came stomping around his slumbering schoolmates at four o’clock in the morning wearing a pair of military boots. Apparently intent on milking some cows and ‘banishing the spirit of sleep from his neighbours’, William then ‘betook himself to the arms of Morpheus’.36 Areas where discipline might have seemed certain, such as the senior cadets, were lacking. Uniforms were scarce; rifles with which to practise were non-existent; the schoolmasters who led the training were themselves untrained. As the school itself admitted later, its cadet training was ineffective, an irksome obligation observed only by perfunctory routine.37
‘I couldn’t say it was an unhappy childhood,’ William said later. ‘That would be wrong.’38 But it was a lonely childhood. Isolated from his siblings, kept from his father, moving from school to school, he learned to rely on himself, to follow his own desires, to do what he wanted. It led to a very firm belief in the virtue of going in his own direction, always on his own: ‘I received very little guidance as to what I should or should not do. You had to make your own way.’
His uncle may not have agreed. Samuel Walder’s hand is evident in many of William’s later choices, and it is difficult to ignore the work, habits, and loves that his nephew shared with him: politics, art, and devotion to physical exercise. A believer in the virtues of sport, Walder pushed William to play tennis, to box, and to golf. He made him swim regularly at Sydney’s beaches. Notably, he pushed William in rowing: when William was seventeen, Walder told him he had to get out of Fours rowing, that it was now time for the Eights.
The obstacles to success here were many. Rowing Eights demanded a physical strength that William simply did not possess. He was only sixty kilos, lean as a length of wire.39 He was not a natural-born athlete. But when convinced of a course of action, he was doggedly determined. The knowledge that he had to do things for himself met with a deep hunger to prove himself, to demand attention. Walder hurt his back helping William train, but the result was worth it: the handicap of William’s slender build was overcome by the disciplined and resolute work.
William came home one night while in his final year of school, and was offered a glass of wine and congratulations. He had made the Sydney Grammar School Eight, Walder said. Though the team was unsuccessful in competition that year, the training had paid off in more ways than Walder knew. William had developed a good technique: ‘He had a free movement, with a good length of body swing,’ the team’s coach wrote. ‘The hands were smart and the blade work clean. Although on the small side he rowed a powerful blade.’40
Walder’s efforts had also unearthed a strength that William’s political rivals would grudgingly acknowledge: his persistence. ‘He was tenacious alright,’ recalled John Courlay, the number-two oar in the Eight. ‘He had to battle mighty hard … What he lacked in weight,’ Courlay said, tapping his chest, ‘he made up for in what it took here.’41
Walder also influenced William’s decision to convert to the Church of England. Though he had been baptised into the Catholic Church at St Vincent de Paul, in Redfern, on 20 March 1908, William’s association with Catholicism was only slight.42 He did not attend Sunday school, and he later doubted that he had even read a Bible before he was seventeen.43 He certainly had not studied religion at school: religious teaching was not introduced to Sydney Grammar until the year after William left.44 When he was asked about it later in life, he claimed that he had not converted from Catholicism so much as not having had a connection with it in the first place. ‘There had been a vacuum there before,’ he said, ‘a pretty big vacuum.’ He attributed it to the ‘strong divisions’ between the two families from which he had sprung.45
According to William, this changed when he was sixteen or seventeen. He met the son of a rector named Rook, and, through Rook, became interested in the Church of England.46 With a seriousness of intent that belied his other actions, William investigated, read, thought, and decided. It was an unusual process for one so young, and the fervour of William’s faith was surprising. Taking the words of the theologian John A.T. Robinson, he later described himself as ‘twice-born’.47 He believed. ‘I sort of proved to myself that there was a God,’ he said, ‘and that I was … able to make up my mind about it.’48
When William discussed his faith some forty years later, he named the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, as among the most influential figures.49 The vigorous, action-based Christianity that Temple recommended in Christus Veritas and Christ’s Revelation of God appealed to him greatly. ‘The Christian who, on whatever grounds, has accepted the Gospel … is engaged in working out what is
involved in that assumption,’ Temple wrote. Debate was not the way to test and strengthen one’s faith. That could only come about ‘by the life of active and practical discipleship, in prayer and service,’ Temple argued.50 It was a message that William absorbed, and years later he would return to it in politics.
Walder’s influence was similarly evident in William’s developing political and philosophical beliefs. After consolidating his family’s business, Walder had made its name supplying tents to the army during World War I. His business acumen and values — which had a clear affinity with those of James McMahon, and were the common values of Sydney’s commercial world — were extended to politics. These included fewer and less cumbersome restrictions on the exchange of goods and services, a dislike for the power of trade unions, and a conservative approach to financial matters.
Achieving financial security by 1924, Walder switched his attention to politics, declaring his desire to serve ‘the interests of the city’.51 His initial foray was local. He stood for the Sydney Municipal Council, running for the Citizens’ Reform Association in a by-election, and served as an alderman on the council until 1927, and the party’s secretary from 1925.
Living in Walder’s home, witness to the prominent identities who came through the door, already aware of the lure of public life through his father’s defeated ambitions, William gained a close familiarity with Sydney politics. In old age, he could recall the teetotaller Sir Bertram Stevens and the reserved Sir Thomas Bavin, future New South Wales premiers, visiting Walder’s home; through Walder, he became friends with Billy Hughes and a host of other notables.52
Tiberius with a Telephone Page 2