Born to Rule?

Paddy Manning

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780522870794
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After wresting the prime ministership from long-term adversary Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull's term at the Lodge was brutally short. It traversed a soaring electoral honeymoon to the marathon 2016 election, to the compromises of a government with the slimmest of majorities and finally death by political sword. Why? Was it collateral damage for a Liberal Party tearing itself apart, or a consequence of the man himself? Born to Rule?, by esteemed journalist Paddy Manning, is the updated bestselling biography of one of Australia's most celebrated overachievers, charting his very public highs and lows in technicolour detail. Based on countless interviews and painstaking research, Born to Rule? charts Turnbull's relentless progression from exclusive Point Piper to Oxford University; from beating the Thatcher government in the Spycatcher trial to losing the referendum on the republic; from defending the late Kerry Packer in a Royal Commission to defending his own role in Australia's biggest corporate collapse. It gives forensic accounts of him striking it rich as co-founder of OzEmail, his spectacular misstep with the Utegate affair, and the hotly contested battle for Wentworth on his grand march towards become prime minister.Turnbull may be out of parliament, but will he ever be out of politics?

PART I

Proving Grounds

CHAPTER 1

Malco

WHEN MALCOLM TURNBULL’S ancestor John Turnbull arrived at Sydney Cove, he was met with sarcasm. ‘One foot in the grave and the other out of it,’ quipped governor Philip King. ‘What brought you here old man?’¹ It was 1802, Turnbull was fifty-four, and the penal colony at the bottom of the world was in its infancy.² Turnbull, however, would have the last laugh. The Scottish-born tailor’s cutter from London, who had emigrated with his wife, Ann, and four kids under ten, would outlive the third governor of New South Wales by a quarter-century, in the process fathering three more sons and gaining fifty-three grandchildren.

Presbyterian by faith, the Turnbulls had set sail with seven like-minded families, determined to escape British restrictions on religious dissenters—non-conformists were unable to attend Oxford University and could be barred from public office or even denied a christening or lawful marriage. The eight families aboard the Coromandel were known as the Coromandel covenantors and were part of only the second shipment of free settlers to Australia. Sailing into Port Jackson was a glorious moment, but one diarist among the group recorded that on being taken upriver to Parramatta a few days later, they ‘had a large bread bag stole full of wheat and other things of value, rum seized by the soldiers, great trouble in getting our goods in stores and saving them from being stole’.³

After serving a farming apprenticeship in 1803 at Toongabbie, west of Sydney, each settler family took up a grant of 40 hectares at Portland Head, on the Hawkesbury River to the north of Sydney. Turnbull chose well, picking elevated land at Swallows Rock Reach that sloped down to the river flat, so avoiding the worst of the damage when devastating 14-metre floods arrived in 1806—the Hawkesbury flooded often and would not be tamed for more than a century. Besides land, the settlers were promised a year’s food and clothing from the public stores and the labour of two convicts maintained by the government, plus farm tools, a pot, a musket, powder and shot. They lived in slab huts with a bark roof and walls, and an earthen floor.

As Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River describes, the Hawkesbury opened the eyes of settlers to the charm and promise of the new country. Taking over the land of the Dharug Aboriginal tribe bit by bit—between atrocities and hand-wringing, raid and counter-raid—the Hawkesbury farmers grew everything from wheat to corn to hemp, and bred livestock such as sheep, goats and pigs. Within a few years, the fertile Hawkesbury accounted for more than half the agriculture in the colony. Turnbull was selling pork within three months of settling, and he was one of the first to plant a commercial orchard; some claim he was first to sell peaches in Sydney.⁴ One historian pondered whether the Turnbull grant was on a river bend

not troubled by the Aboriginals, or did John bear their assaults on his cornfields with unusual patience? He was by all accounts a good-humoured man. And industrious too, the Governor had to concede. With the help of his growing sons, the old tailor-turned-farmer proved adept at agriculture; his peaches gained him quite a reputation.⁵

Amid the natural bounty, Sydney was running wild. Under military rule, both emancipists and exclusives (those who rejected full rights for freed convicts) were at the mercy of the infamous Rum Corps of army officers, subject to kangaroo courts and with no elected representation or free press. The first serious convict uprising took place in 1804 at Rouse Hill, and the following year there was a stand-off between governor King and ex-officer John Macarthur, the fabulously wealthy wool pioneer and land monopolist who was in cahoots with the army. Governor William Bligh, who succeeded King in 1806, became a hero to the local farmers when he banned the use of spirits as payment for produce. It was a brave move, tackling the army head-on: Bligh was arrested for his trouble in the Rum Rebellion of 1808. Turnbull co-signed a Hawkesbury petition in support of the ousted governor, who had suppressed the Rum Corps’ ‘system of monopoly and extortion’.⁶ He even named his fifth son, born the following year, William Bligh Turnbull—a cheery lad, he was nicknamed ‘Whistling Bligh’. So began a family tradition that has spanned two centuries: Bligh is Malcolm Turnbull’s middle name, and also that of his son Alexander.

The Turnbulls were one of the fifteen families who contributed a then-hefty £10 each to build a church at Ebenezer in 1809, now Australia’s oldest existing church. Descendants of the founding families still gather there—Turnbull was a guest of honour at the church’s bicentenary in June 2009 and led the prayers, bareheaded in the misty drizzle.⁷ He donated $35 000 for the church’s restoration fund.⁸

Arriving in 1810 to retake control of the wayward colony for the Crown, Lachlan Macquarie recognised the Hawkesbury settlers as a beacon of progress, founding the five towns of Castlereagh, Pitt Town, Richmond, Wilberforce and Windsor on higher ground to support the growth of the region. Turnbull was granted more land, and in 1817 he took out only the sixth mortgage from the new Bank of NSW, borrowing £25 to build a sandstone home that is still lived in today.⁹ (Almost two centuries later, the original loan document would be presented to Malcolm Turnbull by Westpac, which grew out of the country’s oldest bank.) In 1824, another 80 hectares were promised to each of Turnbull’s five sons by governor Thomas Brisbane, including a parcel at Sackville North which remains in the hands of their descendants today, marking six generations of Turnbulls on the Hawkesbury.

When Ann Turnbull died in 1819, ‘Old John’ soldiered on alone. There was more tragedy in 1825 when his eldest daughter, Mary Ann, mother of four kids, was murdered with an axe by her second husband, ex-convict James Wright, who was promptly hanged.¹⁰ Old John was a tough character. In the late 1820s, when he was well into his seventies, Turnbull ‘was taking a cart of peaches into the markets at Sydney and was “stuck up” by that notorious bushranger of the time, Russel Crawford, on the Parramatta road … The old pioneer held his own and beat the ruffian off until assistance arrived.’¹¹

According to the faded copperplate handwriting in the Turnbull family bible,¹² in which births, weddings and deaths were faithfully recorded, John Turnbull died in 1834, aged ninety-one. His tribe then pushed north into the Hunter Valley, buying land off the Crown at Doyles Creek. The Turnbulls had big families and generally lived very long lives. John’s youngest son, William, married at Wilberforce in 1839 and had eleven kids. He helped his father from a young age, plying the Hawkesbury River trade down to Sydney until he moved north in 1868 to farm in the Macleay River district. He died in 1892, aged eighty-three. William’s son James Bligh Turnbull married in 1878 and had fifteen kids. James moved around, from Kempsey to Orange and back, and died in 1930 aged eighty-two. His son Frederick Bligh Turnbull—Malcolm’s grandfather—was born on the NSW north coast in 1893. Gassed on the Western Front towards the end of World War I,¹³ Captain Turnbull returned home to marry Mary Agnes Brown in Bondi in 1921. The couple, who wound up teaching in the Hunter Valley, had only two children—Flora Jean Turnbull, born in 1922 and Bruce Bligh Turnbull, Malcolm’s father, in 1926. Fred died in 1968 aged seventy-four.

Malcolm Turnbull scoffs at the ludicrous suggestion that his ancestry somehow makes him Scottish. On his mother’s side of the family, Turnbull’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, First Fleeter Owen Cavanough, aboard the Sirius, was at the prow of the boat that rowed Captain Phillip to shore, and was said to have been the first person to set foot at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. The National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, which has compiled many family trees on its website, described Turnbull’s family tree as their ‘most complicated to date’. Amazingly, the centre recently discovered that ancestors on both sides of Turnbull’s family came out on the same ship, the Coromandel. Turnbull’s mother’s ancestors, William and Sarah Stubbs, arrived with John and Ann Turnbull, and lived opposite each other in the Hawkesbury region. Turnbull also has many convict ancestors, back to the First Fleet: the centre found ten, without counting aunts and uncles. None did anything terrible—their crimes were of the ‘stealing a watch and chain or pair of gloves’ variety—and none were political prisoners. According to the centre, Turnbull is not the first PM with convict ancestors: Kevin Rudd had a few (including one on the Second Fleet), John Howard had two and Malcolm Fraser had one.¹⁴ Turnbull is both a fifth- and a seventh-generation Aussie, as his mother wrote in one of her book dedications (but not a sixth-generation Australian, as Robert Hughes implied when he dedicated The Fatal Shore to his nephew and godson Alexander).¹⁵ As Turnbull said during this year’s Cabinet debate on citizenship, ‘the only people who’ve lived in Australia longer than my family are Aboriginal’.¹⁶

What we know of Bruce Turnbull comes mainly from his son, but there is some prior public record. He was born in Tumut, to the west of Canberra, and grew up in Maitland in the lower Hunter Valley, where he attended St Ethel’s Public School before moving with his sister, Flora, to Cessnock High. He showed early talent on horseback, joining the Maitland Riding and Hunt Club in 1938, aged twelve, and placing second in the polo ball race.¹⁷ Horseriding would become a lifelong passion.

Bruce had a less-than-promising start to an adult career as an electrician:

When he touched a live electric wire yesterday morning, Bruce Bligh Turnbull, 21, of Church Street, West Maitland, received burns to the back of his right hand and right fingers. An electrician employed by Maitland City Council, Turnbull was working at Turton’s Brickworks … Maitland Ambulance took him to a surgery.¹⁸

He soon switched to selling real estate and wound up specialising in buying and selling pubs. He would remain a hotel broker for the rest of his life, eventually making a small fortune out of it.

With the Japanese threatening Australia, Flora joined the Women’s Army Service and was a gunner at the time of her engagement to a Maitland man in 1944.¹⁹ Bruce, however, did not fight in World War II. He was still enrolled at a Maitland address for the landmark 1949 election that ushered in the Menzies government, steering Australia decisively away from communism and towards a new era of unprecedented prosperity—and the Cold War. Friends reckoned Bruce leaned towards the conservative side of politics: certainly the new federal electorate of Maitland returned a local Liberal Party candidate in that election, war veteran Allen Fairhall, who would hold the seat for twenty years.

Bruce hauled himself off to Sydney, then a provincial outpost of not quite two million people. Having gravitated to the fashionable eastern suburbs, the handsome twenty-something was swimming in the sparkling harbour at Lady Martins Beach, at the tip of Point Piper, when he caught the eye of a young actress who lived there. Many years later Turnbull asked his mother what had drawn her to Bruce, and she told him he had ‘swum up and down outside her apartment, diving up and down, pretending to be a porpoise’.²⁰

If Bruce Turnbull was no-one in particular in 1953, Coral Lansbury was already a budding radio star. The years 1935–55 were a golden age for radio drama, then far and away the most popular form of entertainment in Australia.²¹ Coral was precocious: a child actress in productions for the legendary theatrical agency J.C. Williamson, she established herself as a promising writer from an early age; her first radio script was accepted when she was just thirteen.²² A brilliant student, enrolled at North Sydney High, her mother wanted her to leave school at eleven, by which time Coral had already completed her intermediate certificate, but the education department wouldn’t allow it.²³ Coral had finished her schooling by the age of fifteen, but never matriculated. At seventeen she’d written her first play—she would write eight more over the next few years.²⁴ Coral kept performing, too, picking up roles in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever and also The Critic. As one regional paper put it in 1947, ‘the vivacious young actress … is rapidly making her name for herself in radio’.²⁵

Enrolling in an arts degree at Sydney University in 1947, she soon met a handsome young Neville Wran, who was studying law but was also a student actor.²⁶ Wran was a heart-throb, and his friendship with Lansbury would have a lifelong impact on her son. As an adult, Wran would often tell Turnbull he knew him en ventre sa mere—when he was in the womb.²⁷

In 1948, the second year of her arts degree, she won the Henry Lawson poetry prize for Krubi of the Illawarra, a verse-play broadcast soon afterwards, starring herself. When Coral was twenty-one, the ABC produced her first radio serial, The Red Mountain, a children’s tale set in the Kimberley for which The Sydney Morning Herald was full of praise.²⁸ By the early 1950s Coral was playing the lead in significant radio productions like Escape Me Never, a love story about a wealthy English girl and a struggling musician which ran for fifty-two episodes of fifteen minutes each.

Coral had showbiz in her blood. Her father, Oscar Lansbury, who was Australian-born but moved to England as a kid, was an opera singer. He and Coral’s mother, May, were both in the cast of the touring musical Showboat but were stranded in Australia during ...