Bob Ellis

by Ellis, Bob; Brooksbank, Anne;

  WHITLAM: I am the ghost … of Christmases past.

  ELKIN: Ah, I see.

  WHITLAM: And of Christmas, hopefully, yet to come.

  ELKIN: Ah, I’m right with you. So you’ve … er … come for me, have you?

  WHITLAM: (with a certain menace) No, sir. Merely to convey a timely warning.

  ELKIN: Ah, yes. Timely warning. What is it?

  WHITLAM: That greed … corrupts, and childhood ends.

  ELKIN: (taken aback) Childhood ends you say, Jeeves?

  WHITLAM: Yes, sir.

  ELKIN: Well, I’m dashed. But these are grave tidings.

  WHITLAM: I’m afraid so, sir. Soon it will be time for you to comb your hair.

  ELKIN: (reeling back) Aah!

  WHITLAM: (with growing disapproval) And eschew … odd socks and crumpled white shirts and champagne breakfasts …

  ELKIN: (craven, pleading) No, no!

  WHITLAM: (quietly) And do your duty, sir. Assume the mantle of saviour of your country, and a sensible dark blue suit … and (with great finality) crash through or crash!

  A crack of thunder, accompanied by lightning, emphasises that this is the end of the message.

  ELKIN: (recovering) Ah. Well, we … thank you, Jeeves. (Pause) No doubt you have a number of … similar calls to make in the neighbourhood.

  WHITLAM: I have always done my best to give satisfaction, sir.

  He begins slowly to fade out.

  ELKIN: Er, Jeeves!

  He snaps back into full vision.

  WHITLAM: Yes, sir?

  ELKIN: There’s no … er … alternative, is there?

  WHITLAM: (severely) Only a shameful prodigal’s return to the waiting bosom of your true mother, the Australian Labor Party. And service on committees of investigation into incest and asbestos and whales and starfish and threatened species of gum and the thirty-hour week and the five-cent cigar.

  ELKIN: (seeing the logic of this) Ah well, my course is clear then, isn’t it.

  WHITLAM: Yes. But do rest assured, sir, that you will die of it.

  Pause. Elkin’s monocle drops out of his eye.

  ELKIN: (registering what this means) Ah, I see.

  WHITLAM: (fading out again) Adieu, adieu, remember me.

  ELKIN: Remember thee! Aye, thou poor … ghost. I mean, dash it, how could I forget? Er, Jeeves?

  WHITLAM: (snapping back into vision) Yes, sir.

  ELKIN: You’ve, er, never really liked me, have you?

  WHITLAM: No, sir. I’ve always regarded you as a pushy little fellow.

  He fades quickly.

  The Things We Did Last Summer: An Election Journal

  THE MACKELLAR CAMPAIGN

  SEPTEMBER 1993

  My local member, Jim Carlton, announced his imminent resignation from federal Parliament, and a few hours later Bronwyn Bishop said she would quit the Senate and contest the preselection for Mackellar. A few minutes after I heard on the seven a.m. news that this was her intention – my territory, my turf, my Peninsula – I determined not only to take her on, but also the wording of my slogan: We will fight her on the beaches.

  In my public declaration, which was written for the Australian, then after a stuff-up, published uselessly by the Melbourne Age, I wrote – of a woman who was then on 63 per cent as the preferred prime minister – the following:

  I did not seek this confrontation, this absurdist battle for elective office with a character from my own recent fiction, and one who, in a perpetual egocentric fury, speaks only in capital letters. Nor until now did I harbour, when sober, significant political ambition, having never joined a Party branch, nor handed out leaflets, nor spoken in a political campaign. But the threat posed to Australia by a Bronwyn Bishop Prime Ministership – which is what, of course, despite her amused disclaimers her current exocet run is all about – and even worse a Bronwyn Bishop economy, has left me, I fear, as a concerned and watchful citizen seventeen years resident on the Northern Beaches, with no other choice.

  I have no quarrel with Jim Carlton, the present Liberal Party local member, who is a decent, intelligent, thoughtful, civilised man and a shrewd local member, and I would never have thought to stand against him. Nor, should a person other than Bishop secure her party’s preselection, will I pursue my present onerous candidacy. But the intrusion of this perfume-drenched and ideologically insufferable woman into a region I long have loved, and her avowed aim to use it, and us, as a blast-off pad for her plans to subjugate the planet, along with her stated positions favouring the lifelong punishment of the less fortunate, and the less driven, leave me, sadly, as a patriot, no other option but my duty …

  Ms Bishop has, it can easily be admitted, several of the talents needed in the leadership of nations – a fine speaking voice, dauntless confidence, unflagging energy, a piercing glance, a large head, a momentarily pleasing personality, and the immense athletic discipline required to survive a crushing schedule of furious, continent-crossing self-aggrandisement. She can recite by rote many Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics, ride a bicycle, terrify a bureaucrat and impersonate, with conviction, one who has no ambition but an overwhelming desire for public service.

  In short, she presents well, and acts decisively and colourfully and magnetically. But, like her preferred role model Margaret Thatcher, she is formidable and charismatic without being actually intelligent (in my view) – intelligence being, at its heart, an ability to assess and, in a significant measure, to predict the future. An intelligent dog, for instance, will not cross a road roaring with semi-trailers. An intelligent leader, similarly, will not needlessly declare war, gaol dissidents, burn cathedrals, storm parliament with tanks or hang Opposition leaders live on television, because both dog and man have predictive intelligence enough to adjudge this course of action probably suicidal.

  Senator Bishop, however, like Thatcher before her, does not appear to have this minimal predictive intelligence, and is therefore likely, in my view as a political dramatist of some experience and standing – seventeen major awards: AFI, AWGIES, Cook Bicentennials, Premier’s Awards – to wreck her country’s culture and economy as implacably, self-righteously and surely as did her idol. If Thatcher had had this predictive intelligence, Britain would not now be the divided, bankrupt ruin it became under her rule. If Bishop had had it, she would command by now more than one vote in her parliamentary party room. But she does not, alas (in the view of most pundits at any rate), because as she is, like Thatcher before her, a purveyor of attitudes, not ideas …

  It was attitude, not thought (her maiden name, significantly, was Setright) that led her to so unjustly pillory on television the tax commissioner Trevor Boucher – an action now censured by her Liberal committee members – to mindless national applause. Oh, she stands up for what she thinks. She doesn’t take any nonsense. But public prominence is not administrative ability, or experience. Or thought. Or vision. Or academic achievement. Or peer esteem. Her ideas, if they exist, are hand-me-downs from the royal and pretentious Menzies – like her, a fair-weather friend of Apartheid – and the abrasive, unbending and economically catastrophic Thatcher. Sado-monetarist and punishing, assertive, elitist, Anglo-Saxon and largely unthinking, she had thus far because of her attitudes not been scrutinised by the voters. Not in a real electorate, with real streets, and shops and gutters.

  That moment has come, and she will be. It is possible that she will not know what hit her …

  I started ringing around and asking for help. I was without party, or campaign management, strategy or hope of party endorsement, I had a campaign fund of a hundred dollars, but, one way or another, I was on my way.

  JANUARY 1994

  ‘Your Benefit Concert, sweetness,’ said Jane Cameron, my agent, ‘looks like showing a loss’ …

  ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ said Fred Daly on the phone, ‘if you took her to preferences.’

  ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘I’m going to beat her.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope you do.’

&nbs
p; The campaign was hotting up. Humiliated by her increasing media profile and rating as preferred prime minister – it was 33 per cent ahead of his – John Hewson made Bronwyn Bishop Shadow Minister for Everything in General, or, as he called it, Urban and Regional Strategy, and let her rip, empowering her to speak on all subjects …

  MARCH 1994

  Election day dawned grey and hot. I drove all round the electorate, calling at polling booths. Mine were always the better staffed, many Liberal branches having boycotted Bronwyn out of dislike of her hubris – she was already in the Senate, what was all this nonsense? – thus forcing her importation from Canberra of thick-necked, steroidal bodybuilders, known locally as the Bronweenies. I coincided with her at Narrabeen and she gave me the Look. My car broke down – I could not help but think she had put a curse on it – and I felt silly, and hot, and angry and futile …

  I just saw a replay of the election night on video, and the moment when it seemed we might actually win, with a primary vote of 33 per cent our way and all the preferences still to come in, and certain feelings came over me. They included, I suppose, that, as in the Seven Ages of Man, one should in one’s lifetime appear on stage, and go to a war, and write a book, and make a film, and run for parliament, and know in one’s time some good and charming people, and I had done all of these things in some small way. I would not command a great army in the field – and neither to their chagrin would Les A. Murray or Kim Beazley Junior – but I had some sense that night of generalship, commanderhood, celebrity and even worthiness …

  Eventually I rose and stood on the stage, with the swing now at only 5 per cent first-party-preferred, and we needed ten, and said to those assembled:

  ‘I think the bad news is that we’re gone. And the good news is that Bronwyn’s gone. She will never again be plausible as a candidate for the leadership of the party. And she will never again seem so perfect, or so irresistible, or so inevitable. She is gone as a candidate for the leadership of the country she would have destroyed had she won it.

  ‘Our primary purpose has therefore been achieved. As the late General MacArthur said, but never practised: “If you fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, the enemy will always be a little surprised, and the enemy will always be a little damaged. If you do not fight, the enemy may overwhelm you. If the ground that you choose to fight on is unsuitable, nevertheless the fight will hurt him. Fight if you can” … I just made that up.’

  Much laughter, relieved applause …

  That night I went to bed appalled and feeling a fool, and a spent force. And I woke up a national hero. ‘It’s the spin you put on it that counts,’ David Britton, Bob Carr’s minder, said, and quickly the news of Bronwyn’s diminishment – it had to be either that or her onward surge to ultimate national leadership – was unconnected with the actual figures and the story that was running …

  ‘Egg all over her face!’ Bob Carr, with much laughter, said on the phone. ‘It could have been better,’ Jeff Kennett said of the result. A cartoon appeared showing Bronwyn standing with her uplifted hands in V signs and a custard pie in her face exclaiming, ‘And let that be a lesson to you!’

  She was appointed Shadow Minister for Health, and in her first press conference asserted that, if there was convincing evidence of a connection between lung cancer and smoking, ‘I have yet to see it.’ The AMA said they wouldn’t work with her, and, a few weeks later in a circling aeroplane, she first attempted to use a mobile phone and, when stopped by the crew, tried to invade the pilot’s cockpit.

  ‘Don’t you realise who I am?’ she was reported to have said, and this got out.

  Goodbye Jerusalem

  MIKE RANN

  ELECTION DAY, THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN STATE ELECTION, OCTOBER 1997

  The knees of the seventy-nine-year-old paraplegic went up into the air, and he and his motorised wheelchair vanished with a crunch beneath the white official car we were travelling in. Malcolm, the driver, promptly, guiltily, tardily trod on the brakes.

  ‘Oh my Christ,’ said Mike Rann in the front seat.

  ‘I think we’ve killed him,’ said Malcolm huskily.

  ‘This is your Chappaquiddick,’ I said to Mike, unhelpfully perhaps.

  ‘This is a disaster,’ said Peter Chataway, his chief of staff.

  It was 11.40 a.m. on election day.

  We scrambled out. Mike’s mobile rang, and Peter Chataway answered it.

  ‘How’s things going?’ asked Bruce Hawker on the mobile.

  ‘Not too flash. We’ve run somebody over.’

  ‘What?’ said Hawker. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No,’ said Chats with his usual delicate Anglican sadness. ‘I’ll call you back.’

  The motorised wheelchair enclosing the aged corpse lay squashed and crumpled between the road and the also crumpled grill of the car. An elderly woman, clearly his wife – or widow by now – stared shocked.

  The corpse’s eyes popped open.

  ‘Hello, Mr Rann!’ he yelped happily in a high, near-falsetto voice. ‘I was just going off to vote for you, and you ran me over!’

  ‘Sir, I’m so sorry,’ said Mike with sincerity …

  One of the witnesses was a Labor-voting doctor, and she bent over the victim.

  ‘I think I’ve got feelings in my legs,’ said the elderly resurrectee. He started manfully – impossibly – to get to his feet.

  Glory be to God, I thought, a miracle. The radiant dove of peace has arrived on the shoulder of the candidate and the lame are walking …

  Chats went with them to the hospital. Several kerbside witnesses wished Mike well in the election. We stood there on the corner of the freeway, around midday on election day, candidate and Labor historian, looking for a taxi.

  One came. We got in it, and soon it was involved in a high-speed incident that was nearly, though not quite, a crash. We got out at a polling booth in a schoolyard. There a branch off a big ghost gum fell twenty feet and hit me on the head. Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, I thought as I fell to the ground, they kill us for their sport. Soon Mike and I were sitting on the grass and laughing helplessly, bonded by our preposterous adventure …

  Round three in the afternoon we groggily bought flowers and a box of chocolates and turned up at the hospital to confront the chirpy septuagenarian casualty of battle.

  ‘Hello, Mr Rann!’ said the familiar falsetto voice. ‘I was going to play a trick on you. I was going to tell the nurses to tell you I was dead, and when you came in to view the corpse I was going to open my eyes and say “Surprise!”’

  We stayed with him a while. He had been a jockey, and he genially told us what he believed really killed Phar Lap. It was the slow accumulation of a booster, he said, made up in part of molasses, oats and arsenic, known as the Anderson Mixture, which most racehorses ate in those days since it made them fast although it finally killed them. It was a drug that may have been administered in greater proportion that year to Phar Lap, who was doing very well, administered perhaps by the Australians, a crime they then hid under the American paranoia of the day: the Americans killed Phar Lap, they killed our Australian hero. The Anderson Mixture, he told us, enlarges the horse’s heart. He told us some other racing stories too. We had a nice half-hour.

  LATER

  When the great Canadian thinker John Ralston Saul enquired if Mike Rann might be prime minister some day, after just thirty minutes in his company, I, for one, was unsurprised. I had known the shrewd, beguiling Cockney–New Zealander for two years by then, and had already thought him – and spoken of him publicly – as Australia’s finest political tactician, evidenced by his 9.4 per cent swing in the 1997 election, the nation’s biggest since Jack Lang was comprehensively mauled in 1932.

  I had watched from a few feet away the debate with John Olsen – the only one the fraught perspiring premier permitted – four days before the poll.

  ‘Win or lose next Saturday,’ Rann had said, his Tommy Steele–Jack Kennedy face firmly fixed in a d
eadly, pleading smile, ‘I’ll work with you for the good of South Australia … for the good of the kids. Will you work with me, John?’

  Olsen, looking like a contract player for Hammer Films – Sherlock Holmes one week, the Human Earthworm the next – could only sweat and stammer evasions, till Ray Martin primly admonished his negativity. And a hundred thousand watching housewives thought: what a nice man, and how wrong of Mr Olsen not to shake his hand …

  On election night Labor’s representation jumped from ten seats to twenty-one, in a hung parliament that, unlike Bracks’s last month, went the Coalition’s way. Mike tetchily emphasises that what Victorian Labor achieved in two elections, he achieved in one, and with twice the swing.

  FRIDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2002

  ‘Good news, Bob,’ said Malcolm, the puce-faced driver and menace to paraplegics from 1997. ‘I’m driving you and Mike around tomorrow, Election Day.’ My face fell. ‘Just kidding,’ he said and walked on down the corridor, chuckling …

  SATURDAY, 9 FEBRUARY

  … And then it turned around. The Hartley figures were right the first time, too close to call, and Vini Ciccarello might be cactus in Norwood, and the whole thing might be lost.

  ‘What do you think?’ Mike said.

  ‘I’m apprehensive,’ I said, ‘for the first time.’

  We drove on silent. The lights of Adelaide drifted towards us …

  ‘Ring the independents,’ Scott Bates, Mike’s American Democrat adviser, in Adelaide for the campaign, said sharply. ‘Ring them now.’

  Mike did so, and got through to both of them. Peter Lewis, he said, seemed accessible, Bob Such maybe not.

  ‘A handshake with Peter Lewis has meaning,’ Mike said. ‘I trust him.’ The rumpled, shaggy, blond-beared Lewis, a notorious parliamentary ‘eccentric’ with an army and (apparently) espionage background, propitiously, said to reporters he felt bound to go with the party that got the greater number of votes.