(From Goodbye Jerusalem)
Many a heart is aching,
If you could read them all,
Many a heart is breaking,
After the ball.
– Charles K. Harris, ‘After the Ball’.
Tuesday, 5 March 1996
They were moving everything out of cardboard boxes and filing cabinets on trolleys and big removal vans, not exactly like Bosnian refugees but somewhat, when I arrived as usual, or it seemed as usual, at the minsters’ entrance of Parliament House on the Tuesday after the lost election in bright autumn sunlight. I went in as usual and to the right, and the left, and along and then left past the hurrying evictees, and then left again, and wound up as usual in Beazley’s office. The Deputy Prime Minister had a .303 rifle on his lap and was waywardly pointing it and laughing in his high infectious share-misery way. He looked like a sadly jocular amalgam of Falstaff and Fatty Finn. I asked him how his count was going in the West where his seat was threatened. ‘Oh, I’ll lose,’ he said heartily. ‘There’s no way I can win. I’ll be beaten, I calculate, by thirty-two to forty-eight votes.’
People came in and out of the office, taking things away, and I lingered and watched the bouncy despair of the big soft affable hard-nosed man who now was Labor’s last best hope of revival. He drank coffee and laughed and sighed and spoke with clarity in his long, ornate and perfectly grammatical sentences, his boyish basso soprano slicing the ambient melancholy, occasionally pointing his rifle, a cadet .303 he said, and a good one, unloaded of course, at the courtyard out the window and notionally potting off one or other detested arriving Liberal, saying he had his imminent retirement all figured out. Six months lying on a beach, then three or four years writing the definitive history of the American-Australian alliance in the second Great War, then a big think about things.
He was staggered, he said, when he looked it up, by the amount he’d be getting as a pension, pretty undeservedly, he added, from the coffers of government nostalgia, and there would by God be time for another life, and his new young family. I’d watched him on the phone to his little daughter in Perth. ‘Hello, little person,’ near tears at the distance, and now that would be over. He’d have a life instead of a peripatetic neurosis full of intrusive welcoming lunatics. He could, moreover, tiptoe at last into the Roman Catholic Church, long his moral destination. There was a world elsewhere.
Appalled by this I and some other staffers – Owen, Johnno, Karen, Lucinda – begged him to stand for Keating’s vacant seat of Blaxland if he lost his own, move everyone to Sydney, keep the family close, but he said he’d thought of that, and he’d thought it through. Listen, he said, or something like it, the Speaker would inform the Parliament of Keating’s departure some time in April and call, if he chose, and of course he would, a by-election as late as August. By which time Beazley – an absentee leader, a corpulent phantom holding press conferences where? at Aussie’s Coffee Shop? in the lost property office? – would have been without a parliamentary seat for five months, emphasising with his every edgy television apparition the paucity of Labor’s available leadership talent and thus increasing the despondency everywhere. No, he said, better let Gareth or Simon have it and slip out quietly. Leave it all behind. The mannerly thing to do.
…Jim Killen decided to film a sequence of Goodbye Parliament House (neurotic director, Bob Ellis) in the parliamentary office he had for seven years occupied as Minister for Defence and the then incumbent, Kim Beazley moved out for the morning. It was May 1987, and Jim, with whiskery ardour and rectitude, paced and reminisced and Roger Lanser, later Branagh’s cameraman, filmed him among the toy aeroplanes and strategic maps and souvenir shelves and bullets, all of which Beazley had lovingly enshrined. Around 11 a.m. I noticed the large bulky form of Beazley pacing up and down a trifle haggard in the hallway outside. He continued to do so for twenty minutes, like a gloomy buffalo, glancing from time to time at his watch.
Eventually I went out and, embarrassed, asked him if he wanted his office back. ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said, ‘it’s just that there’s been this coup in Fiji, and I should make a few phone calls.’
I later learnt he had been keen to send in battleships and blockade the main island and rescue the ousted Labor government there from its unconstitutional usurpation. But he was too well-mannered to interrupt our filming for a mere international crisis. The office was ours for the morning. He stood by his word.
– From Notes and Memories, May 1987.
The afternoon wore dreamily on and whisky was drunk and Kim’s buoyant stoicism (if that’s the phrase) had us nearly convinced that his dropping out of politics, quickly and neatly now, was the best, the only option. Then a lightbulb appeared above my head and I asked him if there was any constitutional reason why he could not lead the Opposition from the Senate – if a casual vacancy arose, for instance, in a Senate seat whose occupant had a .303 rifle, say, put to his head. Kim looked thoughtfully at the rifle and said no, not that he knew of.
We then fantasised for maybe ten minutes on a double-shuffle and sting by which he replaced a startled senator and occupied his seat for the four months till the Blaxland by-election was called and then resigned it and let the hypothetical, patient, long-suffering intermittent senator back in. It had a kind of zany plausibility to it and he was cheered for a while, then he fell back into chuckling, despondent fatalism.
It was the fucking forged letters, I said. The voters were sleepwalking back to Labor as they always did and they stubbed their toe on the letters, and that was enough to focus their accumulated insecurity for three or four days, and that was all that was needed.
‘That’s right,’ said Beazley. ‘It was the letters that did for me.’
…‘We who are in politics in Western Australia know,’ Kim Beazley said on the day he hired me, ‘that we’re going to end up in strife. That’s a given. It’s part of the deal. And it’s all right in a way. Because once you know what your fate is, you feel empowered to do things, and do good things, in the short meantime you’ve got left. I plan to use my moment. And I aim within my limits to do good, before the steel doors clang.’
His jovial mocking frankness intrigued me, along with his offer out of the blue of a job occasionally writing his lines. He seemed both bigger and younger than his pictures, and blonder and fresher-complexioned, like a hereditary monarch long accustomed to power and amused by its appurtenances, a Crown Prince of Bavaria, say in 1623, or any postwar German Chancellor. Unlike Keating he was in the game, I sensed, for the long haul as his father Kim senior was, who succeeded Curtin after his death in 1945 in Fremantle and held it till 1977, never however achieving the prime ministership, for which he was superbly equipped, because his tall ironic mirror image Whitlam was luckier and more available and impulsive and less ideologically burdened in the fifties. ‘God save us, Gough,’ he would say from time to time with a hint of satiric bitterness, ‘from another of your inspirations.’
Like all charismatic politicians Kim the Younger had the power of simultaneously relaxing and exciting you. It was good to be in his presence, inspiring to be there, but safe as well. He would look after you, and the country too. He had, perhaps, the answers.
– From Diary (lost) and Memories, August 1995.
I went to Keating’s final speech to the parliamentary staffers (some didn’t, believing the Bankstown butthead’s impulsive hydrophobic wrongheadedness and vendettas on Packer and others had cost them many seats), then back to Beazley and found him and his staff in an elegiac mood, mentally toasting and farewelling great times now gone.
‘Listen,’ I said with a certain fury, ‘when my country needed me I was there to stand against Bronwyn Bishop. I did the gig. I turned up. And your country now,’ I gave a fair impression of the cross-eyed finger-pointing poster of General Kitchener, ‘needs you.’
Kim then laughed, and his mood shifted. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said.
Almost immediately Tim Fischer, long and gangly, appeared hat in hand in the doorway like the young John Wayne and craved to be admitted, as the next Deputy Prime Minister, to his new office.
‘Come in, Tim,’ said Beazley, ‘have a cup of tea.’
We trooped out and watched the tall preposterous figure amble in, passing me (‘G’day, Bob,’ he said to my alarm), like a supporting actor from ‘On Our Selection’ and close the door behind him.
‘It’s clear,’ said Syd Hickman, Kim’s blond sad-eyed chief minder, his voice more doomful than usual, ‘that this is a day on which we are to be spared nothing.’
There was a dinner after that, in a Chinese restaurant, and a speech from Kim paying tribute to each of his numerous staff – including, to my considerable surprise, myself, with special thanks for my lengthy list of the great battle sequences in world cinema – then a dialogue of some spirited warmth between me and what I now realised was my former employer.
I put it to Kim that it all went wrong that day in 1984 when Bob Hawke disrupted his long three-month election campaign by bursting into tears at a reference to his daughter’s heroin addiction. And the film of that emotional occasion, more self-pity than fatherly compassion, took from Labor its historic opportunity of a huge majority which, though dwindling in successive elections, has kept them – us – in power for twenty years. Beazley was cautious in his response – Hawke had after all been his significant mentor – but allowed there were serious stuff-ups in the era that followed, stuff-ups that should have been avoided, and could have been avoided. (Hawke, it was rumoured, had lost the plot soon after, in a period of near breakdown for him, and Keating had begun with far less populist precision to run the government from Treasury after that.)
One that was on his mind, I rightly or wrongly surmised, was the day five ministers including Kim had tried to talk Hawke into standing down for Keating, and he said he wouldn’t, and the five ministers had then aberrantly defended his decision to stay.
Yes, Bob Hawke and Labor went back a long way, I decided, over the fried icecream that ended the concluding meal of Beazley’s staffers of that era, and so did Bob Hawke, and loads of trouble.
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