Lazarus Rising

John Howard

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780007425549
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

PART 1
EARLY LIFE AND THE FRASER GOVERNMENT

1
THE SOURCE

Towards the bottom of William Street, Earlwood, in the 1940s there was a paddock; it was next to a baby health centre. Later, the paddock disappeared when a library and new baby health centre were built. Near the end of 1949 that paddock was a hive of activity as the nerve centre of the local efforts to re-elect Daniel Mulcahy as Labor member for the division of Lang, in the federal parliament. The Howard household, at 25 William Street, lay diagonally opposite this paddock. Mulcahy was the first member of parliament I had consciously set eyes on. He wore a three-piece suit and smoked a pipe.

The Labor campaign team for Lang had put up a temporary shed on the paddock. Plenty of people, mainly men, came and went, picking up leaflets and generally looking very busy. This was my first contact with local grassroots election campaigning. Although the suburb of Earlwood then produced a Liberal vote of about 45 to 50 per cent, the Labor Party never had much trouble in holding the seat; the other suburbs in Lang, like Campsie, Canterbury and Belmore, were very solidly Labor.

I knew nothing about Mulcahy other than what my mother told me: he lived in Darling Point, in Sydney’s wealthy eastern suburbs, owned a number of hotels and by reputation was one of the most affluent MPs in the parliament.

I once saw him speaking outside the Earlwood Hotel. Later I heard Liberal supporters say that he only turned up at election time, shouted the bar and on the strength of that got re-elected. I am sure that this was quite unfair, and that he was probably a conscientious member, but that was the typecasting of political opponents.

That Labor shed really interested me. I would stand on the edge of the paddock looking at it and the campaign workers milling around. They gave the impression of doing something important. Observing it began a lifelong fascination of mine with politics. This book is my story of that fascination, my career in Australian and world politics and a commentary on the changes in Australian society and national life during the 60 years which have passed since I first gazed at that shed.

Any narrative of politics must include the shaping and implementation of policies which influence the direction of a nation and as well the constant interaction of personalities, particularly within political parties. The regular swirl of ideas, ambition and egos inevitably produces rivalries and, in some instances, alienation.

In this book I explore the public policy issues I grappled with as a member of parliament for more than 33 years. In addition, I endeavour to deal objectively with the key relationships of my years in politics, the difficulties in them as well as the generosity, loyalty and decency which they involved.

Mum and Dad were born at the tail end of the 19th century, my father in 1896 and my mother in 1899. As such, their lives were forever shaped by the three historic tragedies of the 20th century — World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. To this day I marvel at the stoicism of a generation which coped with the trauma, deprivation and sadness of those epic events, but still kept intact the cohesive and optimistic society which later generations were to inherit.

The American journalist Tom Brokaw called the generation which came of age during the Great Depression and World War II the Greatest Generation, and that phrase has resonated powerfully amongst Americans. That same generation of Australians also is owed an immense debt of gratitude by mine and later generations for what they endured for Australia. In Australia, however, the description of the Greatest Generation would have to belong to the generation before the one of which Brokaw wrote. That was my parents’ generation, because it directly experienced the impact of World War I.

Although America joined the Great War in 1917, its effect on that nation was nothing like it was for Australia. For our nation, no tragedy has matched that of World War I. The loss of life was on a scale that today’s generation would find impossible to come to terms with. Many small country towns never recovered from the staggering losses of their young manhood. To lose more than 60,000 dead, with tens of thousands more blinded and crippled, from a male population of no more than 2.5 million, was a terrible depletion of our precious human resources. Les Carlyon, in his book The Great War, wrote, ‘There were so many of them, and we never really, saw them.’¹

Both of my parents left school at the age of 14, as did most children of that era. It was their children’s generation that completed secondary education in large numbers, and often went on to university.

My father, Lyall Falconer Howard, was born at Cowper, near Maclean on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales, the eldest of nine children. He attended Maclean Public School. His parents had very little money, and shortly after leaving school he secured an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner at the Harwood Island Mill, on the Clarence River, owned by Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR). He enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on 27 January 1916 at the age of 19. His first attempt to join up had been unsuccessful because he did not meet the height requirements. He became a signaller with C Company of the 3rd Pioneer Battalion of the 3rd Division.

After several months training in both Brisbane and Melbourne his unit sailed for England on the Wandilla on 6 June 1916. His youngest sibling, Ian, was barely a year old when my father left on the troopship for Europe. The 3rd Division was commanded by Sir John Monash, certainly the best field commander Australia has ever produced. Many rank him and Sir Arthur Currie of Canada as the most talented commanders of World War I. Monash insisted that his men undergo extensive training in England before being sent to the front.

Dad’s unit spent several months encamped on Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, undergoing rigorous training. It left for France late in November. My father spent his first day in the horrible trenches of the Western Front on 1 December 1916, near Armentières.

While my father was at the war, his parents and the remaining eight children moved from Maclean to the suburb of Petersham, in Sydney. My grandfather, who was a marine engineer, had a number of very different jobs in his working life, from harbourmaster at Coffs Harbour to starting what was believed to be the first motion picture show in northern New South Wales, at the Caledonian Hall in Maclean. I suspect that the reason for the family leaving the Clarence during the war was that my grandfather would have found it easier to obtain work in Sydney.

In July 1917, and at the age of 44, my grandfather, Walter Herbert Howard, also enlisted in the 1st AIF. He wound up in the 56th Battalion of the 5th Division, arriving in France during the early part of 1918. Meanwhile, my father had been gassed during a German attack near Messine Ridge, in Belgium, in July 1917; he returned to the front after a brief hospitalisation. For the rest of his life he would experience the aftereffects of the mustard gas he ingested, in the form of weakened lungs and recurring bouts of dermatitis.

The Australian divisions to which my father and grandfather were attached both took part in the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918. The gratitude of the villagers from there to les Australiens, who halted a major German advance during the liberation of the town, persists to this day. Villers-Bretonneux is the site of the giant Australian War Memorial to those who perished on the Western Front, and the place where a special Anzac Day ceremony is now held.

Later that year, by a remarkable coincidence, my father and grandfather met near the French village of Clery on 30 August 1918, on the eve of the battle of Mont St Quentin, in which my father’s unit participated. Just three days later my grandfather was wounded in the stomach, evacuated and took no further part in the war.

Eighty-two years later, as Prime Minister of Australia, and with the assistance of the very helpful army defence attaché, Colonel Chris Galvin, from the Australian Embassy in Paris, I was able to establish roughly where my father and grandfather had met up all those years ago.

One of the journalists who accompanied me on that visit, Tony Wright of the Age, described the scene thus:

On Friday, at the village of Clery, between a farmhouse and the great marshes and ponds and swiftly-flowing streams of the Upper Somme River, those experts found for him the most likely spot where his father and grandfather had met. Howard carried with him excerpts from his father’s wartime diary. The entry for August 30 1918, reads simply ‘Met dad at Clery'. Here in Clery, close to the slopes of Mont St Quentin, the site of one of the great battles of World War I, Howard experienced a sort of coming home of the heart. You could see it in his face as he peered intently at the map laid out before him, not heeding the rain falling or the small crowd milling about him.²

Wright had captured the emotion of the occasion for me.

I had attended the 85th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, at Anzac Cove, and then called to see President Chirac in Paris before visiting the battlefields. French gratitude for the huge sacrifice of Australia in defence of France, so many years before, was not forgotten. At the beginning of our discussion, the President expressed the thanks of his nation for the war service of my father and grandfather.

It was fairly unusual to have father and son fight in the same war. My grandfather died when I was only nine, and it was only occasionally that I talked to my father about his wartime experiences. His generation were a reticent lot. Who could blame them? They had lived through unimaginable horrors, and to come home alive and intact would have been a miracle to celebrate in itself. All those years ago, veterans were encouraged to forget about things, and not talk about their experiences. That was thought to be the right therapy. There weren’t too many counsellors then, but returned soldiers were welcomed home as heroes, and in addition to repatriation benefits a variety of special schemes were set up to help them.

My father usually marched on Anzac Day, in Sydney, and the family would go and watch the march. The last Anzac Day that he was alive was in 1955. He hadn’t been very well that year so didn’t march. Instead he stayed at home, propped himself up on the couch in our back room, and reminisced with me, his youngest son, about his time on the Western Front 40 years earlier.

He told me of being detailed to escort an Australian officer back from the front, towards the end of the war. When they came under heavy attack the other man panicked, telling my father that he had been at the front for three years and was going on extended leave, and feared he would get hit before he made it to safety. There would have been numerous stories of men who had dodged bullets for several years, only to be hit minutes from the relative safety of being away from the front. I recall the story so vividly because Dad rarely spoke about the war. Like most Australians who served in that conflict, he thought that Australian soldiers were the equal of, or superior to, any others. Dad had no hostility towards the Germans who had been his enemies.

When my father came back from the war, he resumed his apprenticeship with CSR, only this time it was at Pyrmont, in inner Sydney, as his family had decamped there. According to my mother, he was retrenched in the early 1920s, during a slump, when the company had a policy of giving preference to the retention of married employees. My father was then still single.

After my mother left school she was employed doing office work with Nock & Kirby’s, then a well-known Sydney department store, which disappeared as a separate entity in the 1980s. Two of Dad’s sisters also worked in the office at N&K, and it was through them that my parents met.

I took a part-time job with that store in the late 1950s whilst going through university. I was in the pet section for a time, which resulted in Bill Hayden as Opposition leader, years later, dubbing me a budgerigar salesman. The description amused me.

My parents married at the Presbyterian church, Marrickville, on 11 July 1925 and honeymooned at the still-standing Clarendon Guesthouse, Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

My mother, born Mona Jane Kell in 1899 in Smith Street, Summer Hill, an inner suburb of Sydney, always found immense security in the familiarity of her home environment. She would often say to me that if she started early in the morning, she could walk to all of the locations in which she had lived and be back at home by lunchtime. Whilst a bit of a stretch, the point being made said a lot about my mother. Mum did not like straying far from her roots, either geographically or the value system by which she lived.

To my mother, family was everything. From her immediate family of husband and four sons to the very large extended Howard family, my mother’s life was all about the welfare and, importantly, the stability of her family. Her early family life had been far from happy: losing her mother to a brain tumour at age eight, and having a father whom she clearly adored, but who was a heavy drinker, she plainly found in my responsible and sober father a source of security and dependability.

The heavy drinking of my grandfather had a lasting impact on my mother. She retained throughout her life a real dread of alcoholism and virtually anything associated with drinking. I enjoy a drink but realised, as the years went by, how deep and understandable had been my mother’s reaction.

Many years ago, drinking habits were different; women drank a lot less. It was very much a male pursuit. Men got drunk at hotels and staggered home, often to the great public embarrassment of their families. There was much less drinking at home than is the case today. For many women and children, the local hotel was anything but a place associated with warm conviviality.

Something else was to touch Mum’s younger years: that was sectarianism. She was a child of what was once called a ‘mixed marriage'; that is, her father was a Protestant and her mother a Catholic. After her mother’s death, although Mum had been baptised a Catholic, her father sent her to a Church of England Sunday school. There was subsequent estrangement with her mother’s family and, given the Catholic/Protestant divide of the time, that action of my grandfather had likely been a cause.

Mum was a good Christian, totally lacking any pretensions in her dealings with others. She was privately devout. Every night she would kneel at her bedside to say her prayers. Sadly, however, she was always self-conscious about the fact that she had been born Catholic, but raised Protestant. For people of her generation, regrettably, those differences mattered much more than would later become the case. For all of her life she retained what I thought to be an unreasonable suspicion of Catholicism. Then I was of a generation which, in the 1960s, would experience the welcome disintegration of sectarianism.

Mum had a sister, May, and a brother, Charlie, and after her father’s remarriage following her mother’s death, two half-brothers, Ted and Arthur. She spoke frequently of her affection for her stepmother, and how fortunate she had been in having her after losing her mother at such an early age.

Premature death returned to Mum’s family in a particularly tragic way, several months before I was born. Ted, who had been diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 16, suffered a seizure while standing on Newtown Railway Station, in inner Sydney, and fell under an oncoming train. He died from the terrible injuries he sustained. To add to the family’s grief, May, Mum’s sister, was a passenger on the train.

Mum’s family never owned their own home, and always lived in rented accommodation in and around Petersham and Lewisham, inner suburbs of Sydney. I suspect that my grandfather was an unsuccessful punter, and that his gambling habits were strongly disapproved of by both his wife and his elder daughter. Whenever I visited their home as a young child there was a sad atmosphere. As I grew older, and learned more of the background, I understood why.

Grandfather Joe Kell was a great walker. When over 80 he would regularly walk from his home in New Canterbury Road, Petersham, to his daughter May’s place in Wardell Road, Earlwood, a distance of almost 4 kilometres. That is something he passed on to one of his grandsons.

Mum’s brothers, Charlie and Arthur, had both fought in World War II, Charlie in the army, and Arthur in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Charlie had been part of an army unit guarding the Cowra prisoner of war camp when the Japanese breakout occurred The experience permanently clouded his attitude towards the Japanese because of their behaviour during the breakout.

Charlie’s marriage had broken up by the time I was in my teens, and his only close family were his two sisters. Charlie had always drunk heavily, and his failed marriage only made this worse. I respected the way in which Mum tried to help him, having him home regularly, despite Charlie often being the worse for wear. Her tense reaction whenever he was affected by drink showed just how strongly her childhood experiences of alcoholism had affected her. She often told me that she thought Charlie had had a tough life, frequently mentioning the fact that he had spent the night of his 21st birthday sleeping under a bridge, whilst on the track for work in the Shepparton area of Victoria in the mid-1920s.

My mother and her sister May (Roberts) were very close. May did not marry until her early 40s and had no ...