RUDD: The ignorant never lie. But they can be mistaken.
FAULKNER: Not I. Not this time.
GILLARD: See?
Rudd’s expression alters.
RUDD: Look, I’m asking you to give me two months.
This is unexpected. Gillard looks at Faulkner. Faulkner looks down, confused also.
RUDD: If the polls do not turn round by … August 20, I will stand down. As John is my witness.
FAULKNER: (deadpan) And your recording angel.
GILLARD: (rattled) And you’ll … put that in writing?
RUDD: Of course. (Abruptly intense) You owe me … the victory.
GILLARD: Not as much as you owe the party.
FAULKNER: And the union campaign.
RUDD: I will be … (spreads his fingers) … more grateful. I will issue … an apology. (Gillard’s expression changes to disgust) Tomorrow, to those in caucus, and in the movement, I have offended.
Pause.
GILLARD: (surprising herself) I’m inclined to believe you.
RUDD: I do not dissemble.
GILLARD: God, I like your straight face.
RUDD: I’m a professional. I’ve done many auditions.
GILLARD: (looking down) Oh boy …
Pause. Rudd stirs his tea.
FAULKNER: Julia?
Gillard sighs and gets up. Thrusts out her hand.
GILLARD: Okay. August 20. It’s sorted.
Rudd, his expression frozen, shakes her hand.
RUDD: You won’t regret this.
GILLARD: I’ll regret it every day of my life. Probably.
She is leaving.
FAULKNER: (to Rudd) It’s a good outcome.
He shakes Rudd’s hand too, and goes. Rudd goes back to his desk, carrying his teacup. It shakes just a little. He sits. Sighs. Jordan comes in. He looks ashen.
JORDAN: What … ?
RUDD: It’s … okay.
JORDAN: What? It can’t be.
RUDD: It’s okay. It’s a reprieve.
JORDAN: Jesus.
Rudd grasps his shoulder, affectionately.
RUDD: We’ve come a long way, comrade. We have.
JORDAN: We have.
In flashback, round midnight and among streamers and campaign posters, Rudd and Jordan, five years younger, watch on television, in a now deserted political office, an ABC telecast of the 2004 election, which Labor has lost. On screen Mark Latham is violently grasping John Howard’s hand. Then he is shouting at an audience of timber workers, who are shouting back. Then the timber workers are applauding Howard …
The first scenes in an uncompleted miniseries
THE HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
WEDNESDAY, 25 AUGUST 2010
The flamboyant entrance of Oakeshott, Windsor, Katter and Bandt, currently known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – all of them at the National Press Club today looking like better prime ministers than the present shell-shocked candidates – showed in a mere hour how much things have changed. For none of us is talking anymore of how soon we are back in surplus. Or whether Tony and Julia should have another debate. Or who leaked what was said in cabinet and who should be punished for this. Or whether or not Kevin Rudd is too mad to be given a ministry.
No, what we were talking about was jobs in the regions; and solar power; and clean coal; and education in the bush; and the fate of the Earth; and how parliament is run; and how we might reorganise our democracy. We were talking about issues our nation might live or die by. Not Julia’s hair roots or the visible size of Tony’s testicles. We were talking about things of importance. And why did we ever stop? … It now seems we might have the parliament we deserve and not a kindergarten sandpit of who-snitched-on-who and what’s-she-wearing and cor-check-out-his-muscles that those great dumbers-down Rudd and Howard have imposed upon us.
It was Rudd who suggested one could lose one’s preselection for speaking sternly to a waiter or lose one’s party membership for shouting, ‘We’re coming back!’ It was Howard who suggested people were capable of throwing their children overboard without the children saying, ‘Mum, what are you doing?’ and children born from lesbians’ eggs did not deserve to be born. It was their collusion in this dumbing-down (Hanson, Henson, turning back refugees but not illegal whalers) that brought us to where we are.
Free air. It’s wonderful. It’s what we should breathe all the time.
The purpose of a play in the theatre, Mike Nichols used to say, is to remind us of things. Yesterday at the Press Club, in great theatre, these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse did just that. They reminded us of our humanity, our civic decency, our role as neighbours, and carers, and town planners. As parents. As communitarians. And there should be a statue of them sitting there – Bob Katter laughing – on parliament lawn.
Suddenly, Last Winter
TO BOB CARR, A TOAST, 2014
Bob Carr rose early, did talkback, and by 7.15 was touring his office and comforting with jovial buoyancy his hardworking staff, assuring them of their personal worth and the value of what they were doing. Like all great leaders, he both excited and relaxed you. He made you feel that the journey you were on, though not necessarily one you in detail might have chosen, he nonetheless would navigate well, through the subtle shoals of the media cycle, and the triple-A rating, and the Tampa era, and the money Howard and Costello skimped, and the fiscal horror of the Olympic Games, paid for in full before it started.
In an average day he would give three important speeches, have lunch with some theatrical knights, prevail with terse and scornful eloquence in Question Time, chair six difficult meetings, survive with rehearsed and repetitive caution a press conference from hell, eat carrots, drink lemon and hot water as recommended by Marcus Aurelius, go to a Labor Party function, like this, and auction the underpants of an athlete he had never heard of, and be, by 9.30, brisk-walking Maroubra Beach, and by 10.30 reading, attentively, for thirty or forty-five minutes, a novel by Anthony Powell, or Proust, or Vidal, or Mailer, or Tolstoy, or his twenty-fifth book about Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt, or the Kennedys.
He had the ability that all politicians yearn for, to sleep soundly for six or seven hours. Though often cursed with back pain, he exercised assiduously, ate wisely, drank frugally, and, of course, took notes. He had a voice, most famously, that was unlike any on the planet – classless, calm, assured and leaderly, what I called a decade back a manicured baritone – and a swiftness of utterance that put him unbeatably ahead of any mischievous interviewer and endeared him to at least two generations of voters, who never tired of hearing him, with authoritative tenderness, explicating, and pondering the issues, global, and local, and conscienceful, of the day.
He was the most professional of our politicians since Nifty, and the most learned since Gough. He was persuadable, and changed his mind, most famously, after much personal pain, on heroin, and, I believe, though I cannot prove it, drifted slowly leftward under the guidance of certain busy, persuasive young staffers, into an internationalism, critical of America and Israel, and a doctrine of unstrained mercy across oceans and systems and philosophies and religions, that would have surprised his younger self.
He did the research. He put in the hours of thinking. He argued the toss with the large minds of his day: Mailer, Kissinger, Vidal, Hague, Miliband, Natelegawa, Hanan Asrawi, Bill McKell, Gareth Evans, Kim Beazley, and Rodney Cavalier. And – and this is worth saying – he set it down. He wrote a memoir as eloquent as that of Henry Adams, as exciting as Dr Hunter Thompson, as lucid as Roy Jenkins, and let us into a world, called once by Harry S. Truman ‘splendid misery’, of history improvised through jetlag and body ache and fuddlement and foul-hearted fury, in a book that will endure.
I, and most of his hirelings, and his fellow Roman scholars, esteem him on this side idolatry, but I hold him in my heart, and in my feeling mind, as a good captain to have served under in stormy, cantankerous times, an elegant navigator of impossible journeys to ever-receding goals, a man for all seasons we will val
ue more as his age dwindles in time, and memory, and seems more marvellous, as the scrambling munchkins of the present era grow more mischievous and malign.
To Bob. He’ll do.
Previously unpublished
‘THIS OLD MAN’, 2015
NOEL PEARSON AT GOUGH WHITLAM’S FUNERAL
Fifteen years ago I called Noel Pearson ‘Australia’s best orator’ after sharing a stage with him in Mosman. He proved it again before a vaster audience in the Town Hall with an oration rich in wile and fury, almost Elizabethan in its intimacy, clarity and beauty, in which, being now himself a man of no party, he extolled ‘this old man’ to whom he, his people, and Australia, owed so much.
… Raised next to the wood heap of the nation’s democracy, bequeathed no allegiance to any political party, I speak to this old man’s legacy with no partisan brief. Rather, my signal honour today on behalf of more people than I could ever know is to express our immense gratitude for the public service of this old man …
… And thirty-eight years later we are like John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin’s Jewish insurgents ranting against the despotic rule of Rome, defiantly demanding ‘and what did the Romans ever do for us anyway?’ Apart from Medibank and the Trade Practices Act, cutting tariff protections and no-fault divorce in the Family Law Act, the Australia Council, the Federal Court, the Order of Australia, federal legal aid, the Racial Discrimination Act, needs-based schools funding, the recognition of China, the abolition of conscription, the law reform commission, student financial assistance, the Heritage Commission, non-discriminatory immigration rules, community health clinics, Aboriginal land rights, paid maternity leave for public servants, lowering the minimum voting age to eighteen years and fair electoral boundaries and Senate representation for the territories. Apart from all of this, what did this Roman ever do for us?
Only those born bereft truly know the power of opportunity. Only those accustomed to its consolations can deprecate a public life dedicated to its furtherance and renewal. This old man never wanted opportunity himself but he possessed the keenest conviction in its importance.
For it behoves the good society through its government to ensure everyone has chance and opportunity. This is where the policy convictions of Prime Minister Whitlam were so germane to the uplift of many millions of Australians …
We salute this old man for his great love and dedication to his country and to the Australian people. When he breathed he truly was Australia’s greatest white elder and friend without peer of the original Australians.
Quickly hailed as the ‘best Australian speech, ever’, it became, like Lincoln’s second inaugural, a new benchmark of the language well used in a great cause on a high occasion. Kelly and Carmody then sang ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ in an atmosphere charged like none since wartime.
Faulkner’s tribute and Tony Whitlam’s thanks then swiftly followed, and the first chords of ‘Jerusalem’, as always, had me in tears. I remembered Gough at Margaret’s funeral theatrically steering his wheelchair out of the church as the choir sang ‘I shall not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’, and knowing, I think, precisely knowing, that this was the last that most of us would see of him, heroically engulfed in this great Labour anthem, tragically leaving, making his exit, the job unfinished. And here was the song again. It was swiftly sung, and that was it. No coffin was carried out. There was silence. The orchestra conductor stood undecided. Would there be more? No. An inconclusive, shuffling silence. And that was it.
It was an occasion memorable for its reticence, proud good taste and almost Anglican harmony of soul. No humorous montage of wacky television moments was projected. Gough’s own voice did not occur, though the imitations of others, on stage and at the party afterwards, were many and usually good, Mike Carlton’s, as always, the best. There was a feeling not so much of sadness, or even happiness at a great life well concluded, but of an enormous, high-vaulting life interrupted, diverted, dislocated, and of thirty-eight years then somewhat, though not altogether, hobbled or diminished in a sort of haughty nightclub act of a stand-up elder statesman for a nation’s regretful posterity.
‘For language honours and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives,’ as Auden said of Yeats. Lincoln, Churchill, the Kennedys, Obama had varying successes and great failures in war and peace, but their gift of language, of the smooth, self-mocking utterance, of bringing the house down with gales of laughter, made up for their failings, while millions died.
Whitlam’s record was better than theirs. He embarked on no new war. He ended one. He uplifted three generations to a possibility of personal excellence like none before him, or after. He fought the good fight; he finished, or almost finished, the course. He kept the faith.
From the blog Bob Ellis Tabletalk, 2014
TURNBULL, THE DARK SIDE, MARCH 2016
A FINAL PIECE ON POLITICS, WRITTEN TWO WEEKS BEFORE BOB DIED, ABOUT MALCOLM TURNBULL, WHO HE HAD KNOWN SINCE MALCOLM WAS NINETEEN.
What is Turnbull doing? His twinkling, kindly personality had conquered the middle ground, but lunatics seem to have taken over his mind. He needs a treasurer with gravitas but Morrison cannot say anything that is not a wrangling, hectic contradiction of what he said before. Will the GST go up? I said that? Only the Labor Party says that. Costello had a calm manner and an appearance of consistency. Frydenberg would have been fine, Sinodinos better. Yet Turnbull is stuck with the least convincing numbers man in twenty years. He is also stuck with an immigration minister who sends newborn children into hell for ninety years and is proud of his track record. Better lifelong exile on Nauru than drown at sea. This has put Turnbull on the Dark Side, in many views. How can a twinkling, humorous, kindly man do this to children?
It is hard to think of a Turnbull policy that is a good one. Gonski zilched. The ABC decimated. The best agricultural land gouged for minerals by the Chinese. The CSIRO abandoning climate change. He seems entrapped in ancient, Old Testament thinking while pretending to be a modern, moderate man. When his deeds are added up, who will forgive him? Who would he defeat in any contest with Xenophon? Turnbull no longer has a government. He has a shambles. Discuss.
From the blog Bob Ellis Tabletalk, March 2016
5.
WAR
BANGLADESH, DECEMBER 1971
The broken concrete bridge gaped like a mouthful of broken teeth. In front of it, the new prime minister of the new state of Bangladesh smiled with similar broken teeth out of the closed window of his bullet-proof Chevrolet. The Chevrolet then slid down the mud bank onto the pontoon bridge with which the Indian army had forded the river in two hours flat, crossed over while the people cheered and got bogged on the other side. Soldiers pushed the Chevrolet up the opposite bank, while the new prime minister grabbed hands with the overjoyed throng, and then went on into the village square, where he addressed them in loud, incantatory shouts.
The British–Australian photographer I was with climbed onto the bonnet of a jeep to get a better shot. He handed me down a lens and told me to hold it. I walked around the excited crowd to get a better look at the prime minister. A soldier shouted behind me and pulled back the bolt of his rifle. The rifle was pointed at me. My instantaneous recognition that he thought the lens was a hand-grenade, and I was about to throw it at the prime minister, was all that saved my life. I put the lens up to my eye and smiled. He lowered his rifle, not altogether convinced. I walked slowly away, the lens in my hand. All the people I met were looking at the lens in the same way. I realised that I was literally carrying a time-bomb. I walked the half-mile back to the bus believing every step I took could well be my last. I could have thrown the lens away, but I knew that when I told the photographer why, my story would have sounded too far-fetched. I was therefore willing to risk my life to avoid being thought a fool. And I would do it again. It wasn’t a fact I was at all proud of.
In Jessore Town Hall, which was in fact an outdoor arena, the ecstatic crowd couldn’t see their
new prime minister for the cameramen, but when a camera was turned on them, they cheered exultantly. They too were learning that the world watched through the lens of the camera. The prime minister raised his fist and shouted Jai Bangladesh! – Hitler’s ecstatic simplicities worked just as well, it seemed, on the side of elective democracy.
*
‘General,’ said the reporter, ‘is there any chance that we’ll get any battle figures that even faintly approach reality?’
The general raised an eyebrow. ‘What good would it do if you did?’ he said. ‘The Pakistanis would use our figures against us, and keep on lying about their own. So what good would it do?’
‘Well, at least we’d know a part of the truth.’
‘And your need, of course, is greater than India’s, I appreciate that. Next question.’
*
In Jessore’s dingy hospital a small thin lad in Pakistani uniform looked up from his pillow with scared brown eyes.
‘How old are you?’ I asked, while a doctor interpreted.
‘Twenty,’ he said.
‘What happened to you?’
‘The shells kept pounding down, and I ran away, and the people of the town caught me, and they beat me.’
‘What will happen to you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘Yes. I just want to go back home.’
In the bed next to him was a Bangladeshi guerrilla fighter of the Mukti Bahini. I looked at the young Pakistani man carefully, trying to fix his thin, scared face in my mind. It was not unlike my own. I wondered how long the Mukti Bahini in the next bed would allow him to survive. And then I went on my way.
*
Bob Ellis Page 14