Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘That is not the correct description of the situation,’ Janice said. ‘We’re asking you to help protect our political liberties and the Universal Declaration. There are times to be covert.’

  Edith laughed. ‘I don’t know if I am personally bound by the Universal Declaration to involve myself in a conspiracy.’

  ‘Defending Australian political liberties,’ Frederick broke in.

  Edith said, ‘I once joked that that was what the Liberal Party and the Communist Party had in common – if in power, they would ban each other.’

  Frederick put on the face and tone of the party theoretician and lit up his pipe. ‘If the situation in Australia evolved to the point that the Communist Party was able to take power, the Liberal Party and the other parties would by then have withered away. The Labor Party would’ve been subsumed into the Communist Party. The party system, as we know it, would’ve died away. All constructive argument would now be within the Party and not carried on in an antagonistic and nationally divisive, wasteful party system. It would’ve evolved naturally.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Thank you, wise brother.’

  Janice seemed a little impatient with Frederick and said, ‘We thought you could store the stuff under the house or wherever. It could go there in among your own stored possessions.’

  ‘So if the police found it, they would assume that I was one of your secret-list members? Or that I am what is called a “fellow traveller” ’

  ‘A compagnon de voyage?’ Janice said, looking to Edith for affirmation of her French; another attempt to personally connect with her. Trying, perhaps, to make it another of their personal adventures.

  ‘I think it might be compagne de route – feminine – or communisante.’

  ‘What the Russians call a poputchik,’ Frederick said.

  Edith tried out the Russian word. ‘Poputchik. “Malodorous ally” is another term I’ve heard.’

  ‘Never malodorous,’ Janice rushed to say.

  Frederick then said, as if speaking to himself, as if repeating something he had often said, ‘In regards to the question of “fellow travellers”, the question always comes up – how far will he, the fellow traveller, go? This question cannot be answered, not even approximately. The solution of it depends not so much on the personal qualities of this or that fellow traveller, but on the objective trend of things.’

  Edith rolled her eyes at Janice, who shook her head at Frederick.

  ‘Edith, a raid is not going to happen. It’s not worth talking about,’ Janice said.

  ‘You must accept, though, that by now the Security Intelligence Organisation knows about our connection?’ She noted to herself that, of course, Ambrose would have informed the HC of the connection between Frederick and herself. And, of course, the ASIO knew about the connection, although she still hadn’t told Frederick and Janice about the interview.

  Frederick said, ‘We made sure we weren’t followed.’

  Janice said, ‘And the car is registered to Daddy.’

  ‘And what happens when the Party is banned and you two have to flee to Russia or whatever? What happens then to the records?’

  ‘The High Court challenge might succeed and we would be back in business.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘The Myuna flat has been compromised. We have arrangements to go underground and to operate clandestinely, but these are not fully in place here in Canberra. They’ll be in place in a week or so and we will then retrieve the boxes. Or they’ll go to Sydney.’

  She did not quite understand the reference to the Myuna flat. They sat there in silence. It was a clever move. Finally, Edith said, ‘I will do it not because of the Communist Party – I will do it because I think you are both decent. And, of course, you, Frederick, are my brother, and you, Janice, are my friend. And I do not want either of you in gaol. I will do it because I oppose the legislation and the thinking behind it.’ She thought for a moment. ‘And yes, I think it best that Ambrose does not know so that he can honestly claim he did not know; that the legal connection, if discovered, will appear to be – or could be argued to be – between brother and sister. That I was protecting my brother.’

  She was not convinced of the legal strength of her argument.

  ‘We have the stuff in the car,’ Janice said, rising to her feet.

  ‘The tack room is best. Ambrose never goes there. He is a man without tackle.’ He was indeed a man of few possessions and no tackle, except in the slang sense, but, she laughed to herself, even in that usage it could be argued that he was a man without tackle.

  ‘My family called it the mud room,’ Janice said. She patted her large shoulder bag and put it on the low coffee table. ‘I have every penny that our branch owns in this bag. The Party has withdrawn all its money from the banks, but I won’t ask you to look after that.’

  ‘Good.’ Edith felt quite coldly formal towards them.

  As they both went out to the car, she remained in the drawing room and thought, I am also a close friend of the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. What will that mean for him if I’m arrested?

  She thought also that maybe that was why Frederick had arranged for Ambrose and her to have the house – as a possible clandestine storeroom. A sort of safe-house. That was too far-fetched. It was too Machiavellian. That she should have such thoughts showed how a ‘malodorous’ political atmosphere could disfigure all thinking.

  So the Communist Party documents were to be stored in what was, in reality, an annex of the British High Commission. She permitted a smile to dance across her irritation at being used like this.

  The Congress on Regional and Town Planning came and went.

  Edith was formally thanked, and Sir George Pepler told Peter Harrison and her that it was the best-organised conference he had ever been to.

  That was generous of Sir George, because during the Congress there had been power restrictions as a result of the communist-led miners, who were stopping work for one day a week in protest at a new industrial award. She’d had to have the heating at Albert Hall turned off.

  ‘What about the cold?’ she said after accepting his praise. ‘Not that I’m to blame for the temperature.’ She wanted to say, ‘However, my brother is to blame.’

  Sir George had leaned in close to her ear and said, ‘The trick, dear, is to leave your pyjamas on when you rise in the morning. Just get dressed over them. I’m still wearing my pyjamas.’

  ‘I will tell you a Canberra secret for keeping warm if you ride a bike – fill the handlebars with hot water before you set out.’

  He liked that.

  She added, ‘Of course, I am not the bicycle-riding type of person.’

  Other delegates had brought rugs or blankets from their hotels – she had requested that these be offered to the delegates by the hotels.

  Holford had not talked about Canberra in his paper and instead had spoken about the new towns in the UK. She had the impression he had given the same paper a few times before. The British Council had paid for his visit and he was an official guest of the High Commission, but he had declined an invitation to stay with them at Arthur Circle, staying instead at the Hotel Canberra. She found he did have a talent for persuasion, especially with the Prime Minister.

  She was disappointed that Daley, the Assistant Secretary, who was something of an ally for her ideas, had gone along with the abandonment of the east lake, which in conversation at the Congress she had stridently opposed. She had opposed it on the grounds that it was in Griffin’s original plan and, anyhow, ‘you cannot have too many lakes – in Australia we yearn for expanses of water’.

  She had also argued that the lake would bring moisture to the air. And once she heard herself say, in desperation, ‘A lake intrigues people – suggests that there is something of interest to be seen on the other side.’

  In conversation, she managed to introduce people to The Beautiful Necessity by Claude Bragdon, and pointed out that architecture was ‘froz
en music’ – that in so far as music is expressed by means of harmonious intervals of time and pitch, so architecture is expressed through arrangement of the intervals between solidity, height and width. She pointed out that music and architecture alone of all the arts were purely creative, since they presented not a likeness of some known idea, but ‘a thing-in-itself’. Neither a musical composition nor a work of architecture depended for its effectiveness upon resemblances to natural sounds in the one case, or to natural forms in the other.

  When she had drawn Gibson’s attention to the book, he said he thought it could be argued that music derived from song birds and that some architecture began with the cave. ‘And borrowed from the burrow and the bird’s nest.’

  She stopped pushing the book on others. She realised that an enthusiasm for formulas and simple maxims had overridden her judgement. She was like a schoolchild with a new subject.

  After the Congress, Gibson kept her on as some sort of dogsbody, despite her continuing to argue against just about everything he wanted to do with Canberra.

  While Gibson complained he disliked the ‘grand manner style’ of Griffin, she said that what he considered grand she considered distinctive. They argued over the reduction of Griffin’s street and avenue widths. She said that the width of streets and avenues not only planned for a future of more traffic, but also gave the city distinctiveness.

  Gibson worried about the car accidents, which he felt came from Griffin’s street pattern. He said that there were more traffic accidents in Canberra than in other cities, but he had to agree that the accidents themselves were minor. Edith predicted that once people knew that Canberra’s streets were ‘different’, they would stop their cars and study their maps; within a few years, every Australian would be proud to know how to navigate the grand, sweeping streets of Canberra.

  ‘That will be the first thing they experience,’ she said. ‘The streets will say to them, “You are not back in any old town – this is the capitol. Even the streets are distinctive.” ’

  She kept on saying capitol instead of capital. Not that anyone noticed.

  Judgement Day

  The boxes remained in the tack room during the preparation for a High Court challenge to the bill. There had been no raid on the house.

  Edith had sometimes become conscious of the boxes and one afternoon had gone down to look into them. She felt she had earned the right to inspect them. Apart from minutes of meetings and pamphlets and booklets, she had noticed that two sets of initials kept recurring on the party discussion papers. They had CSIRO next to them, and she assumed that they were scientists on the staff of that organisation.

  She hoped the boxes would soon be taken away.

  Frederick, Janice, Ambrose and she took sleeping berths on the Melbourne train to hear the High Court hand down its decision. She booked and paid for Frederick and Janice’s twinette compartments as something of a gift. The HC paid for her and Ambrose’s sleeper. Ambrose had wondered briefly if it might be best for the boys and girls to share a compartment each. ‘Who knows? Your brother may talk in his sleep.’

  She had replied, ‘Who knows? You may sashay in your sleep.’

  She observed that Ambrose was more relaxed in Melbourne, where he felt incognito, something he never felt in Canberra – something no one could ever feel in Canberra. The anonymity of the big city suited him and he shed some of his diplomatic demeanour. He was more unbuttoned.

  At the High Court, she saw for the first time John Latham on the bench in his wig and robes, presiding as Chief Justice. He was very buttoned and bewigged.

  The court was packed, spilling into the corridors, but was orderly, and the crowd sat quietly while uniformed police guarded all doors.

  Latham read the court’s decision, and she was shocked when it appeared that he alone supported the banning of the Communist Party. The other four justices had gone the other way.

  She was surprised at herself that she felt the shock – at how involved in the issue she had become. She turned to Ambrose. ‘Did I understand correctly? Is John the only judge who is for the banning?’

  Ambrose nodded and said, ‘It seems to be a matter of his legal thinking about constitutional matters. Latham has taken a different attitude to that of the others on the bench. He grants an overriding authority of parliament in these matters. I will have to study it.’

  She thought he should have sided with political freedom and the Universal Declaration. But at least the legislation had been thrown out by the court.

  They remained seated in the courtroom after the justices had left, as did some others. They were trying to digest the decision. Frederick stood up and said he would get copies of the opinions and judgement. Ambrose said he had arranged for his copies to be sent to the Windsor.

  Frederick and Janice were obviously surprised and pleased, although maybe, Edith thought, Frederick would have wished for outright conflict with the ‘system’.

  She spent the morning of the next day reading the judgement. She needed to understand it, feeling her friendship with Latham had been pushed off-balance. In a low, self-serving way, she also felt, despite the judgement, that she might still need his protection if her relationship with her brother ever became an issue with the Security Intelligence Organisation.

  She could see how Latham had argued himself into his position of deferring to the role of parliament in deciding such matters as an ‘enemy in our midst’ and ‘war-time emergency’, and that this role and authority was given to the parliament in the ‘defence powers’ clauses of the Constitution.

  In times of war, she understood that the government sometimes had to act quickly. That meant that, in times of emergency, the oversight bodies – such as the High Court – themselves had also to act quickly. And, of course, if the emergency were cataclysmic, resulting in overnight, unforeseeable upheaval, then emergency powers had to be swiftly assumed and action taken for the defence and survival of the polity. In that sort of situation, some safeguards may have to be disregarded. But she could not see that there was any need for rush in the prevailing circumstances, despite the Korean War and the workplace ‘unrest’.

  In the evening, the four of them went to celebrate the decision at a party at Turner’s house in Glen Iris, where Frederick and Janice were staying. They had bought drink in the city beforehand because Glen Iris was dry.

  At the party were people who had fought against the legislation, but she assumed that they were mostly communists. Again, she felt an odd, secret superiority that she should know the Chief Justice of the High Court and at the same time be having drinks at a party of communists, that her life combined such things.

  She did not enjoy the party. She found that most communists had replaced the art of conversation with an unflagging thumping of their line, although Frederick and Janice, at least on most occasions, had passed that stage in their conversations with Ambrose and her back in Canberra. She sometimes thought it might be possible that they would abandon the Party. More likely, Frederick and Janice hoped that, one day, Ambrose and she would come over to their side, especially her.

  She met Ian Turner again and Amirah, his wife. They all laughingly recalled the football bomb at the Causeway meeting. She found them both charming, and she sensed that Turner found her appealing also.

  After a while, Amirah drifted away, and Frederick and Janice, who knew many of the people there, went into zealous huddles in other rooms. She found herself talking one-to-one with Turner. Leaning on one shoulder against the wall, he was drinking from a bottle of beer. She had been given a glass, as had all the women, but her beer was flat and she hated flat beer.

  Although Turner was a true communist, she found his conversation a little more flexible than the others. The other curiosity was that Turner had met Latham at the funeral for the poet Shaw Neilson.

  She told him she had quoted Neilson to mark her taking-over of her new office.

  ‘Which lines?’

  ‘ “The young girl stood beside
me. / I saw not what her young eyes could see: / A light, she said, not of the sky / Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.” I won’t tell you the context. Story too long. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

  He said, ‘Another time, perhaps?’

  She raised her irritation with Party jargon with Turner. ‘I know it’s a kind of shorthand for those in the know, but it is rather difficult for the rest of us. Embarrassing, even,’ she said.

  He said to her that he was trying to tone down the jargon in the Party. ‘I want us to say “of majority concern” rather than “broad masses”. I am not winning,’ he joked.

  She praised him, but thought privately that ‘majority concern’ was not a huge leap forward in the jargon question.

  Turner said he was already coming to believe that there was a necessary and positive dialectic between what is innovative in art and radical politics. ‘I confess to a love of jazz.’

  ‘Why confess?’

  ‘American imperialist music,’ he said, disowning the expression as he said it. ‘The Party has to learn to see it as the music of the oppressed Negroes.’

  She queried the connection – the dialectic of the arts and communism.

  ‘They both offer fresh ways of seeing the world and fresh ways of living. Radical art is needed to temper the collectivism of radical politics. I could be shot for saying that.’

  She asked Turner why the Soviet Union had not signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ‘Was it because of the private-property clause?’

  Turner ran his hand through his hair. ‘Where to start?’ He hesitated, gathering his thoughts. ‘You’re right. It’s the inclusion of a right to private property. The individual gets “property” by selling his life to the boss, who then lets the worker buy a house by lending him money from capitalist banks. The worker spends his life paying for the house. If he loses his job, he can’t pay the mortgage and the house is taken off him. The banks always win. “The vampire will not lose its hold on him so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” ’