Bob Ellis

by Ellis, Bob; Brooksbank, Anne;

  A great ship ran aground, meanwhile, on the Tamar. Five kids died in a car crash, locally. A local man, Brian Green, died in a plane crash. And nobody noticed. While the primal tale continued, and the Jonah hours lengthened under the earth, and the songs were written and the television contracts haggled, there was no other story to be told.

  *

  Bill Shorten hit my life like a cluster-bomb. Any one day with him was like eight with anyone else, Teddy Roosevelt, I suspect, included. He flew in, did two mass meetings, had the crucial aggressive facedown with management, tied up the deal, got the miners to agree to it, was in the pub by six, did eight phone interviews and then a house party with home-cooked, excellent Chinese food, among new and old working-class acquaintances, making intimate blood-brothers of practically everyone there – a brotherhood I sensed he would honour – drank some more with me at the motel, then slept eight hours while I stayed up all night recasting a speech he had to give to some capitalists at eleven a.m. in Melbourne. He said, ‘Thanks, mate,’ flew out and – I was told later – wowed them.

  *

  I stayed on for two days after Shorten went, didn’t meet Brant or Todd who were off bemusing America with their Stan-and-Ollie camaraderie and puzzling accents, met Larry’s brother Shane, a handsome, blond, restless small businessman from Queensland who looked like Errol Flynn and had, like most of the town, a neatly-clipped small moustache-and-beard, the Vagina Cut I called it. But it felt wrong somehow to draw him out, and I befriended instead Gavin Cheeseman, a sombre, dark-eyed, bearded, chunky man, who was shift manager on the night and so sent Larry, as it happened, to his death on a shift he didn’t usually do. Cheesey was drinking a good bit now and not sleeping, turning over in bed, looking at the wall, thinking of Larry. In the daytime he’d be at Larry’s place. ‘Been doing a bit of landscaping,’ he said. ‘Putting fences up. Shovelling bark around.’ Larry’s wife Noeline had a baby twelve months old. A son about ten.

  We had a few more beers. He was seasoned, he said, in this sort of tragedy. His brother started falling over when he was a kid, went through high school on crutches, graduated from law school in a wheelchair, could think but not talk in his last year, died at forty-two. And his daughter, now eighteen, had the same incurable motor-neurone disease. ‘I don’t, but she does. Poor kid.’

  I asked Cheesey what he reckoned about the cave-in. ‘Money rules,’ he said. ‘It was nothing to do with underground seismic activity. Money rules.’ The company, instead of putting in natural pillars – in which there was contained, of course, a tempting modicum of gold – put in weaker, costly, artificial pillars instead. And so they made their money, Cheesey noted. And Larry died. I talked to him about my dead sister, and survivor’s guilt. His big dark possum eyes widened, reflecting on this. ‘I’ll get through it,’ he said, ‘if I keep busy.’

  We talked about Treblinka, which he’d visited, and My Lai, and the war in Iraq, and all the dead, the needless dead, stretching back through history. And Dublin, where his daughter lived, and the west coast of Ireland, which we both loved, not least because it resembled Tasmania. His goodness and his tragedy and his guilt, his unmerited guilt, hung over my journey back, by ferry and train to my eagle’s nest above Pittwater and blue, wide peace.

  Beaconsfield, I knew, would stay with me for a good few years.

  So It Went (first published in The Australian Worker, July 2006)

  4.

  POLITICS

  CURTIN AND CHIFLEY

  From the screenplay of Newsfront, set in the ’50s, about newsreel cameramen and two rival newsreel companies. In this scene Len, the older cameraman, is driving the camera car with Chris, his young Cockney assistant, beside him.

  CHRIS: Aw, well, you know how it was … Down there in the Underground, all the Londoners in their sleeping bags, coming up in the morning to see whose house got bombed. Felt really chipper some mornings, looking at the devastation, knowing you were still alive – till Mum copped it of course. But every day, you know, there were the cameramen getting it all down. Wherever it was happening, there they were. And I thought, well, this is for me, innit? And that’s why I come here. Take too long in bloody England. Everything takes too long there.

  LEN: It’s not overnight here either, digger. I loaded film rolls for two years. Cleaned out the dunny …

  CHRIS: Ah, but there’s more chances here, aren’t there? More chances in a new young country …

  LEN: (interrupting) What do you think of Ben Chifley?

  CHRIS: Ah … he’s a bit … you know, common, like.

  Pause.

  LEN: Common.

  CHRIS: Yeah.

  LEN: Why don’t you go to buggery?

  CHRIS: I mean, six years ago he was still an engine driver, wasn’t he …

  LEN: Yeah, well, six years ago you were still a snotty-nosed kid, weren’t you. Stuck in the British working classes, scared shitless, wondering how to get out. That’s why you came here, to Chif ’s new young country where even an engine driver can make it up the ladder to prime minister. Chif ’s the second best prime minister we’ve ever had, mate, and don’t you forget it.

  CHRIS: Ah yeah, who’s the first?

  LEN: Eh?

  CHRIS: Who’s the first? Just so I know … you know … for purposes of social intercourse.

  LEN: Social intercourse. John Curtin. And about John Curtin you don’t get witty, you get me?

  CHIFLEY IN BATHURST

  From the play A Local Man, written by Bob Ellis and Robin McLachlan. Ben Chifley is alone at night in his small house in Bathurst. He is recording notes for a memoir on a dictaphone.

  BEN: Jack Curtin was the luck I had as a friend and colleague. We were like long-lost twins. Both the same age, both Catholics who married outside the church, both footballers and football club managers, punters, students of economics, union men, both involved in Labor newspapers, readers of trashy detective novels, both of us … maritally dislocated, both of us country boys who had it hard in childhood. Both of us the same height. We could talk without talking. We could stroll through the Canberra sheep in silence and speak volumes. I was his rock, and he was my pillar of fire. And we ran World War II together.

  Though it nearly didn’t happen. Doc Evatt tried to thieve my preselection in 1940. Jack nearly lost his seat, waited two weeks for the late postal votes that saved him. I nearly died of double pneumonia, laid up in a Sydney hospital for the whole campaign. My most successful campaign, from which I was almost entirely absent, with other men doorknocking for me – Gus Kelly, Dan Clyne, Norman Flynn out in all weathers on his crutch. The old faithfuls. There may be a lesson in that.

  And … by August 1940 I was back at the Kurrajong, and with Phyllis and Belle and Jack, playing bridge over tea and corned beef sandwiches, no beer anymore, Jack was off it. And the Battle of Britain happened, the London Blitz, the Battle of the Atlantic, the Rats of Tobruk, the loss of Crete, with all those Australian boys dead. And we were two seats short of government, with Doc Evatt jumping up and down wanting a coalition with the Tories, wanting to get on with it. But we held off. And Menzies went to England, holding the view that he should replace Churchill, or something, and four months later he came back saying we must ban the Communist Party and outlaw strikes, and his mob rolled him, and pretty soon the two independents came over and we were the government. And eight weeks later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and Darwin, and Singapore, and Labor had got the booby prize again.

  He comes forward into the dark area in front of the lounge room, lights play on his face as in the cabin of the engine of a train. A brass band, distantly heard, plays ‘A Brown Slouch Hat with Its Side Turned Up’.

  11 NOVEMBER 1975

  It’s like a blurred video playback now: the phone ringing in the non-members bar, ‘Whitlam’s been sacked’, and the running, running up the corridors and the feeling of predestination, and the booing crowds in Kings Hall as Fraser came through, and Mungo MacCallum coming back from the Lobby restaurant and sayi
ng, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ and John Hepworth with him, and Annie weeping the way she did when Dubcek fell, and the crowd shouting up at the Liberal senators on the balcony, ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’ and the Liberal senators shouting back, ‘You can’t take it, can you? You’re sore losers!’ And Whitlam coming into the House red-faced and laughing, and someone beside me saying, ‘He’s mad, he’s gone fucking mad.’ And Alan Reid saying, ‘This is a turn-up for the books, this is a turn-up for the books,’ and someone saying, ‘Let slip the dogs of war’, and someone else saying, ‘It’ll end in a bullet, that’s for sure.’ And Fred Daly moving that the Member for Werriwa, meaning Whitlam, be allowed to move a vote, and someone calling out: ‘The Budget just went through the Senate on the voices!’ No-one in the Senate had been told in time to hold it up.

  I found Bill Hayden walking up and down a corridor holding a folder above his head and crying, ‘Top secret documents going cheap! Going cheap!’ And I helped him move out his papers lest we were all arrested soon and they might be used against him. And reality went into overdrive, and Smith was proroguing parliament, and Whitlam was behind his shoulder. And then he was speaking, and Annie and I were six feet away from him. And when he said ‘Kerr’s cur’, I winced, thinking, No, stop that, and when he said ‘Maintain your rage’ I knew we were in trouble. Mick Young didn’t think so, saying we’d win it in a walk … And I thought up a slogan: Tell the hijackers where to get off, and they said, no, we’ve got a better one: Shame, Fraser, Shame …

  And then it was late, and by lamplight we were singing ‘Solidarity Forever’ on the steps, and it was Labor, and it was a fuck-up and we were history. Soon we were all drunk as shit, and people driving home were running into trees and rooting total strangers, and that was it, the end of an era. The end of hope. The beginning of a new professionalism, the Wran Rethink, the Richo machine.

  I was in Canberra for the opening of my rumbustious and over-long musical, The James Dossier. Written with composer Patrick Flynn, it followed the differing lives of Francis James and Gough Whitlam from their shared schooldays down through wars and peace to the moment when Whitlam, having got James out of incarceration for espionage in Red China, meets him again in his office in 1973. The play’s last scene, written two years before, and based on what they actually said to each other then, gained power and eloquence from the surrounding enormous events:

  WHITLAM: Plenary indulgences.

  JAMES: Ye-es. Is this room bugged?

  WHITLAM: How would I know? They never tell me anything.

  JAMES: You should assert your authority.

  WHITLAM: In time. In good time.

  JAMES: Well, what are you doing these days, Gough?

  WHITLAM: I’m … Prime Minister.

  JAMES: And I’m the most famous man of the week.

  WHITLAM: The week will end.

  That night at the dress rehearsal, actor Bill Ginnane, who was playing Whitlam, came to the line, ‘I’m … Prime Minister,’ then, extemporising, added, ‘At least I was’, and in character delivered a diatribe on the death of democracy to an empty, echoing theatre. The play opened the next night but not, as agreed, in front of Whitlam and Kerr, because of subsequent engagements.

  WHITLAM: (very regal now, sings) When I am wearer of the laurel crown,

  I’ll give the peasants land.

  FRANCIS: (sings) And I, like William Gladstone, tell the Irish I understand.

  BOTH: (sing) And the League of Nations will

  doff their hats whenever I happen by.

  But I worry, I worry that a far better

  chap will apply,

  And I look to the stars,

  I look to the stars,

  I look to the stars,

  and I ask

  of the moon

  and the night

  who am I?

  The ways are more to the shore of praise

  That all the dreams of our vintage day

  But only one is mine, yes,

  Only one is mine.

  Goodbye Jerusalem

  GOODBYE, E.G. WHITLAM, 1977

  Dazed, I watched through that election midnight on 10 December 1977, as the huge, restless, red-faced, compassionate, stubborn man, who, for half my life, had been much of my hope, strode up and down, up and down, a half-glass of beer undrunk in his hand, from television set to grieving corridor, corridor to lonely office, returning shy embraces, accepting sloppy kisses, responding eagerly and stoically on the incessant phone to even John Ducker.

  ‘John! So nice of you to call … Oh, all right. You roll with the punches, you know.’ Agreeing with all who ventured to dream it wasn’t over. ‘No, of course we go on. Comrades together.’ Playing to the bitter end of this cruel personal and national tragedy the noble part because he knew no other. In him the noble part was bred in the bone and thoroughly believed. It had led him even to hire John Kerr as governor-general instead of some affable party hack. John Kerr was a qualified man. It was the right thing to do …

  ‘Come on, old person,’ said Margaret Whitlam to her husband tenderly. ‘What do all those bloody figures matter? Come home.’

  Wet-eyed, Whitlam turned to her from the television set. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for Tony? He said he’d be along.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s coming anymore,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  He nodded, took a deep breath, and with his other children, Nick and Cathy, began with courteous finality to leave the building.

  As they neared the door, there was Graham Freudenberg, as always looking up.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Whitlam, shaking his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ Whitlam said.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow night,’ said Freudenberg.

  ‘Any time,’ said Whitlam.

  ‘We have heard the chimes of midnight,’ said Freudenberg to Margaret.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, and gave her great lascivious smile. ‘There’s a few good years in us yet.’

  Freudenberg looked all the way up at her, and she looked all the way down at him, and then he said, wryly, ‘The earth moved for me too, Margaret.’

  Soon the Whitlams were at the door of the lift and the era was over.

  In its last moments, a woman – not one of his staff and not meant to be there – came up and spoke a little hysterically to him.

  ‘So nice to have met you,’ he said.

  The lift doors opened, and he was gone. And the world never felt so empty.

  Letters to the Future

  (first published in Nation Review, 5–11 January 1978)

  THE YOUNG MALCOLM TURNBULL

  Annie just reminded me of the afternoon long ago when Malcolm Turnbull, then aged twenty, kicked in the back door of our flat in Darling Point. It had been a day, she said, of frustrating, interrupting visitors, all of whom wanted help or collaboration on a writing project of their own, and none were easy to refuse.

  ‘In the late afternoon we saw Malcolm getting out of his car in the street below,’ she said. ‘Our fifth visitor for the day. We didn’t answer the door when he knocked, but hid out in the kitchen. We were standing there when the back door burst open with a single kick, and there was Malcolm with the script of his musical play Lang Is Right! under his arm. We all looked at each other, then I think I offered him a cup of tea.’

  After that day, she reminded me, we decided we’d have to leave the city if we were ever to get any work done. Other writers were moving to the Blue Mountains. We went to the Northern Beaches.

  ‘That day made a big difference to us,’ she said. ‘To what happened to us. What our lives were like. Even who our children were.’

  It did, I thought, remembering things past, a big difference.

  One Hundred Days of Summer

  THE INTERVENING YEARS, 1983

  Some of us prospered in the bad years, and felt wrong in our prospering, on the green hill above Palm Beach with our barbecues and our flagons and in the clear winters nursing our children round
log fires and talking in the cold with remembered pleasure of revolution, and assassination, and new political parties and old religions, more attractive now in our middle years. But soon we talked of other things …

  BEGINNING OF AN ABANDONED NOVEL, 1981

  We left the taxi and came down the track with the luggage, past the earthly fortress, bamboo-fenced and enclosed, of Peter Weir, and the crumbling old stone house of Captain Goodvibes – in which in secret exile, over that wonderful view, Vladimir Petrov was said to have lived for seven years, after his name had destroyed for a generation the Labor Party and all its reasonable hope – through the bananas and elephant’s ears to our fibro, wood and sandstone refuge.

  We had, for seven bad Fraser years, made a life here, waking up every morning to beauty but insecurity. The lighthouse nightly blinked, and parrots came and fed on our verandah. In all weathers Pittwater, to the left, and the sea, to the right, were beautiful and consoling against the terrors of the world outside. We had tried to keep up with theatre, and films, and friends, and almost had, but in the end we had nestled deep in our warm escape, in the oxygen, under the stars, with our children and German beer to console us, almost, for the world that was lost.

  I had written a play set here called A Very Good Year, which was in part a memorial to Whitlam, and in part a threnody to dreams foregone, and in part a look at the technological holocaust that was overwhelming the world. At the end of it, in a kind of nightmare, the Ellis character, called Elkin – transformed by drink and childhood ache to a kind of Bertie Wooster – wakes up to find an ominous figure in the room.

  ELKIN: Aah! Who is it? Is that you, Jeeves?

  WHITLAM: Not … exactly.

  ELKIN: (Bertie Wooster accent) Well, dash it, you look like Jeeves. Who are you?