Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  Just as he had absorbed Walder’s religious beliefs, so did William absorb Walder’s political values. The social circumstances of his upbringing were exerting themselves. They must have had a ‘good effect’, William once said.53 And, as he neared the end of his final year at school, Walder’s influence was felt again when William decided to study at the University of Sydney.

  But the end of William’s school years also marked the end of his childhood. On 18 October 1926, his father died.54 Aged eighteen, poised on the boundary of adulthood, William McMahon was now well and truly alone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Ghostwriter

  1984

  Eventually, McMahon agreed that he would have to make changes to his draft. He went to the public service and to the universities, sought advice about form and style, made enquiries about people, asked for recommendations and help.

  Some were forthcoming; others less so. Sir Halford Cook, who had worked with McMahon in the Department of Labour and National Service, was willing to help, but Harry Bland, McMahon’s former permanent head at the same department, gave the request short shrift: ‘No way.’1 McMahon passed a chapter to Cameron Hazlehurst, a biographer of Menzies and research fellow at the Australian National University. ‘My advice is that you should try to tell of what you know that no one else knows,’ Hazlehurst told him after reading it. He suggested that McMahon be more personal: ‘I believe your readers would prefer to read more of your experiences.’2 But wary of McMahon and the book, Hazlehurst begged off assisting further. Another scholar, Mark Hayne, an historian from the University of Sydney, agreed to help but resigned after two months, pleading ill-health.3 Then McMahon approached Ian Wilson, head of the ANU’s political science department, and asked him to find a graduate student who would be willing to help. ‘Someone like Clem Lloyd,’ McMahon said.4

  When he did not hear back from Wilson, McMahon looked around again. Early in January 1984, he eschewed academics and plumped for a journalist — someone who could work quickly and write clearly for all readerships. On a recommendation from the chief of staff at the Sydney Morning Herald, McMahon approached David Bowman.

  Bowman was a seasoned South Australian–born journalist who, in his youth, had been a champion chess player. Since joining the Adelaide-based News in 1949, he had worked his way from a cadetship to the top of the newsroom. Smart and observant, Bowman was as notable for his mop of grey hair as he was for his nose for a story. As managing editor of the Canberra Times and editor-in-chief of the Herald, among other publications, Bowman had been energetic and meticulous, and had shown that he was as skilful with sentences as with managing egos. Finding himself a ‘sort of Kerensky figure’ after a reorganisation of Fairfax management, he had left the company in 1980 and begun building a career as a media critic.5 When McMahon called, Bowman was cautious. He agreed to a six-month contract only, with his task explicitly stated: to edit McMahon’s manuscript to a publishable length and quality.

  Bowman arrived at Westfield Towers on 16 January 1984 to find an elderly man clearing out a desk. Breaking off from his task, George Campbell introduced himself. An historian and former Coldstream Guards officer, he was one of two staffers employed in the McMahon office. In a posh accent, Campbell told Bowman that he would be around for a fortnight or so to help him understand the voluminous files, and then be gone. Campbell was decent and helpful, Bowman thought, with the manner of a retired public servant or schoolmaster. Moreover, he had a thorough knowledge of the files and obvious literary experience. Why was he leaving?

  McMahon arrived in the office at half-past nine. Spritely, friendly, impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, the former prime minister stopped in to see how Bowman was getting on. Their conversation began as work, but turned towards contemporary politics. McMahon chatted about the prospect of an amalgamation between the Liberal Party and the National Party, mooted in that morning’s papers. He was sceptical. ‘Doesn’t believe it ever will or should come off,’ Bowman wrote in his diary that night. ‘The primary producers and the miners both need a National Party, he says.’

  Once McMahon was gone Bowman began reading the manuscript. As he had been told, it was huge. He counted words and pages, and took notes. He made considerable progress, but by mid-afternoon he was sleepy. Though it had a good opening sentence, the book was oddly structured and seemed full of irrelevancies. A prologue on political ideology and the dangers of socialism was followed by an abbreviated account of McMahon’s childhood that diverged into a long section on Billy Hughes. Given his grandfather’s history, a discussion of Hughes might have been appropriate in passing, thought Bowman; but at such length and so early on, it was simply confusing. This was followed by a chapter on the family background of McMahon’s wife, Sonia. ‘Not appropriate for here. Later, with marriage?’ Bowman wondered. The manuscript then jumped several decades, to McMahon’s political career. It was not an improvement. ‘No good,’ Bowman jotted in his notes, of a discussion of McMahon’s period as minister for labour and national service. ‘Various aspects might be transferred somewhere else. Tells us nothing we don’t already know.’ It was not all bad. There were bright spots. A chapter on Menzies had ‘some excellent stuff’, and a thumbnail sketch of Evatt was ‘good’, but then a long section on foreign affairs was ‘dull’, ‘hollow’, and ‘incomprehensible’. On the Vietnam War, Bowman was scathing: ‘No insight. Not worth using!’ Overall, the editor was disheartened by what he had read: ‘It is very badly done.’6

  Late in the day, McMahon called past to give Bowman a copy of the Age, and the two men got to chatting again. Bowman told McMahon that there had been no problems so far. ‘Oh, I don’t think there will be,’ McMahon replied, and Bowman suddenly realised that the former prime minister thought he was talking about the autobiography.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, pointing at the manuscript to correct McMahon, ‘there’s problems in this.’

  McMahon said nothing but, Bowman noticed, his eyes narrowed to ‘small blue spots’.7

  It was a warning sign, but the former prime minister seemed intent on being friendly. Three days later, he invited Bowman to dinner. He had the logistics all worked out: ‘The car can drop you back and you can catch your bus.’8 Though he cancelled the next day, McMahon kept up the invitations. He asked what Bowman liked to drink in case they got to talking on Friday afternoons. He invited him to his country property, boasting that it was a picture.

  McMahon was opening up to Bowman, looking back over his life and allowing him to see it, to help him understand it. Over a scotch in the first week of February, McMahon talked about his childhood. While riding a big draught horse when he was twelve, McMahon said, an official of some kind had stopped him. How long, asked the official pointedly, had the horse been away from her foal?

  ‘This morning,’ McMahon said.

  ‘Well, she’s in pain, you’d better help her,’ the official told him.

  McMahon hopped down and ‘sucked and sucked’ until the official was satisfied. ‘Surely you’ve got the lot now,’ said the official.

  When he went home and told his aunt about it, McMahon said to Bowman, ‘She laughed and laughed and laughed.’9

  On days like this, Bowman could have been forgiven for thinking that his job would be simple. McMahon seemed forthcoming, trusting, energetic, and on task. But if Bowman ever thought this, he was quickly disabused. In repeated conversations, Campbell enlightened Bowman about McMahon’s oddities. On one occasion, Bowman was told, Campbell had been ordered to find a file that he just knew was sitting on McMahon’s desk, but which McMahon refused to recognise. After McMahon left for the day, Campbell retrieved it, copied it, put the original back, and the next day handed the copy over as though he had found it. McMahon took it without question, without comment.10

  Joyce Cawthorn, the other staff member, was likewise full of stories. A thickset and formidable woman in her late fifties who managed the accounts and
calendar, she told Bowman of the man who telephoned to say that he had lent McMahon a slide-viewer a few months before. Could he have it back, please? McMahon refused without explanation. The slide-viewer would have to stay in the office over the weekend, he told Cawthorn, despite having decided to go that evening to the Isle of Capri, on the Gold Coast. She made no attempt to conceal her embarrassment when she relayed the decision. The caller was indignant, declaring that he would think twice before lending anything to McMahon ever again.11

  Bowman tried not to be distracted. His concern had to be the book. By his reckoning, the voluminous work that had dissuaded publishers was nowhere close to the oft-stated 400,000 words. A proper reading revealed duplication and extraneous material such as letters and unabridged speeches: ‘By the time it’s cut into shape we shall probably have no more than 50,000–60,000 words,’ he wrote. But even cutting this away would be insufficient. A simple edit would not do, he decided. To address the problems he saw, the manuscript needed to be almost entirely rewritten.12

  In coming to this view, Bowman apprehended that the terms of his employment would have to change. No longer would he be merely editing. Now, he would become a ghostwriter, writing a book that McMahon, it seemed, could not write for himself.

  Bowman had a long talk with Campbell about how to approach McMahon and handle him. The elderly historian was supportive. He had already confided that he thought little of the manuscript. The plan that Bowman laid out would require big changes, but they were necessary, both men agreed, if there was to be any prospect of publication.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shelter and the Law

  1927–1939

  ‘As I read I noticed that a particular factor cropped up over and over again,’ wrote Lucille Iremonger.1 While studying the lives of British prime ministers, Iremonger, an historian and novelist, observed a characteristic shared by almost two-thirds of her subjects: the loss of a parent in childhood or early adolescence.2

  Theorising that the deprivation of a parent’s love in childhood manifests in later life as the desire to find it in the embrace of voters and political power, Iremonger decided upon a name for her observation: the Phaeton Complex. It was named for the illegitimate son of Apollo, whose unyielding demands for love and recognition led to his being struck from the sky. Disaster, as with all Greek myths, was the fate for Iremonger’s Phaetons.

  The deaths of McMahon’s mother and father mark him for inclusion in Iremonger’s pantheon. The isolation of his childhood; the influence of Samuel Walder; the unconditional love that McMahon found in his aunt Elsie Walder; the heated religious beliefs that led to McMahon’s description of himself as ‘twice-born’; the fervent declarations of love for his wife, Sonia: all of these, too, align with Iremonger’s catalogue.

  There are differences, however. There is little to suggest that McMahon grieved ‘extravagantly’ for the dead, but his silence on the existence of his elder brother, James, is conspicuous. No demonstration of reserve is on the record, though McMahon’s feelings of injustice always coloured his statements and conduct. Nor does it seem that McMahon sought the love of the public in quite the same fashion that Iremonger suggests. McMahon was vain and needy, certainly — but more for the recognition of his peers and the trappings of power than crowds.

  From any reading of his life, William McMahon did not allow his father’s death to affect him. There is no notable change recorded in his behaviour after his father’s death. He seems to have carried on just as he had for the decade before.

  He skied. He rowed. He boxed. He swam in the surf at Bondi. He attended the ballet and the theatre. He became involved in horseracing to the point of owning a few horses. McMahon was happy to bet, and profligate about it. His religiosity did not restrain him. He was not particularly lucky. By his own admission, he lost often and he lost big. But he hardly worried about it. For McMahon, the thrill of watching loss and success contend around a grass track could outweigh the prospect of financial loss or gain. It could make him careless. On one occasion, police raided a party that he was attending. A friend who had been gambling at the tables and who was about to be arrested passed McMahon £1,000 and told him to use the money to bail him out in the morning. McMahon decided on a different course of action. He took the money out to the racetrack and bet it all on a sure thing. Luck, this time, smiled on him.3

  He had gained admission to St Paul’s College, a residential hall for male Church of England students of the University of Sydney. The austere sandstone buildings in Newtown, designed in the 1850s by the architect Edmund Blacket, were the home of many establishment figures before McMahon. Clergymen, solicitors, politicians, and doctors had passed through its doors and established traditions to accompany a cultural philosophy that emphasised involvement in Australian society. The college’s motto, Deo Patriae Tibi (For God, Country, and Thyself), foregrounded this involvement and the influence of the Church of England.

  McMahon’s attendance at the college caused some dismay within his father’s family, who were not aware that he had been received into the Church of England.4 Yet the decision to attend St Paul’s was as much attributable to his religiosity as it was for his choice of study.

  McMahon later said that Law was an automatic choice for him. According to him, he never considered any other study. It is not quite true. His ambitions almost went another way:

  I was a balletomane. I adored the ballet and music. But I realised I had to be totally committed. I did a fair bit of ballet dancing and then after that I had high falutin’ ideas of being a good ‘ordinary’ dancer.5

  At university, he was a lax student, a libertine, content to party and live leisurely. What regimentation college life tried to impose did not bind him. ‘He would sally forth about nine o’clock,’ wrote his peers, ‘returning in the small hours to clatter about the corridors … Morning revealed him lying in a tumbled bed in improper relation to his pillow.’6 Richard Kirby, president of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission when McMahon was minister for labour and national service, knew him in these ‘party days’: he was ‘quite the man about town’, Kirby recalled, often seen at nightclubs and parties.7

  Years of taking in the sons of the wealthy and well-off had developed an unofficial culture in St Paul’s that was heavy on sport, excess, and chummy, boyish humour. St Paul’s, one student suggested, developed in its fellows ‘a sense of the value of things’:

  Here there is freedom of conscience and freedom of speech: here is legislation healthily ignored: here one may grow a beard seven days together and lunch, sockless, in a torn blazer; work silently, drink noisily, laugh hilariously, moan lugubriously — and always will be found company to fit the mood, and none to say one nay. Surely this is Utopia! I can conceive of no greater freedom nor of any better soil in which to sow the seeds of individuality.8

  McMahon would have enjoyed his Fresher year, but it is unlikely that he would have found much that was new in it. The ‘delights of its newly discovered liberty, the novelty of its experiences and the absence of responsibilities’ that ensured college men regarded their first year as the happiest in their college life would have been, to McMahon, passé, everyday. He would have already been well accustomed to this kind of living, for he walked on the same path as his father. He dated, partied, was wild and disordered. ‘You could do what you liked,’ he said later. ‘If you wanted to work you did; if you didn’t, you didn’t. If you wanted to go out at night, you went out at night. I think I was a pretty wild sort of bloke when I was there.’9

  He was the same gregarious, charming young man that his school friends had observed — if a little louder and prouder. ‘He would talk volubly and hyperbolically on most subjects, with or without knowledge of them, and his remarks were the more vivid on account of complete, if temporary, self-conviction,’ wrote his peers in the Pauline.10 McMahon was fun and merriment. He rowed cox for the Eight in 1928, swam in 1930, and was on the college
sub-committee for dance between 1929 and 1931.11 He won a round of golf at Killara Golf Club; had a ‘paternal look’ when a guinea pig was presented at a Seniors supper in 1929; and fell into a yawning trench between the main building and garage when some copper piping was being installed. ‘As Fortune had it, Bill McMahon was the only person to fall down, and he did not kill himself,’ his peers snickered.12 The wealth his uncle had begun to entrust to him allowed McMahon to dress fashionably. He bought and wore clothes with free abandon, not minding to take care of them or keep them in order. The ‘sundry pots’ he kept by the mirror of his dressing table showed the attention he paid to his appearance.

  He was healthy and happy. Playing his gramophone incessantly, grinning from ear to ear, talking with a ‘spluttering utterance’ and walking with a ‘swaggering gait’ around the university, clad in his blue-flannel college coat with brass buttons that tinkled on the sleeve, McMahon was carefree.13 St Paul’s was a shelter from the outside world, ‘an asylum for the sane,’ one old boy wrote,14 and it inured McMahon to the economic calamity that, by the middle of his first year of Law, began to engulf the world.

  INITIALLY, the Depression did not affect McMahon. He said later that it had not worried him. He possessed all the money he needed. Ensconced in the libertine sphere of St Paul’s, his life seemed hardly to change as the Depression deepened. The only effect it had, it seemed, was in conversation: his aunt and uncle might occasionally bring it up. To McMahon, the Depression was simply something that happened to other people.

  For many other people, the Depression was change — of a dramatic, absolute, and unequivocal kind. In Australia, it fuelled the ascendancy of the non-Labor parties and the predominance of their orthodoxies in economic and financial policy. Under Joseph Lyons, who deserted Labor to lead the United Australia Party to victory at the 1931 federal election, a fiscal straitjacket — of honouring overseas debts, of cutting government spending, of reducing constraints on business ventures — would be coupled with devaluation and cuts to wages and the entitlements of lenders, and would eventually lead to Australia’s economic recovery and stability in the subsequent decade.