Peter Cosgrove Book Launch

ON TUESDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2020, FORMER GOVERNOR-GENERAL SIR PETER COSGROVE RECORDED A DISCUSSION WITH SYDNEY INSTITUTE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR GERARD HENDERSON TO LAUNCH HIS NEW BOOK – YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE JOINED … A MEMOIR.

Gerard Henderson: Peter Cosgrove makes a welcome return to The Sydney Institute; he gave our annual lecture some years ago and spoke again after that. He’s one of the best known Australians so I’ll introduce him briefly.  Sir Peter John Cosgrove, AK, CVO, MC, former Chief of Army, former Chief of the Defence Force, and Australia’s 26th Governor-General. We’re here on the occasion of the launch of General Sir Peter Cosgrove’s You shouldn’t have joined: a Memoir, a fine book with a great cover, excellent colour illustrations and some fine writing. Congratulations. Tell me, why did you write it? You’ve already written one memoir.

Peter Cosgrove: It’s wonderful to be back at The Sydney Institute and with you Gerard. I thought my public life had finished in 2006. I had finished with the military, I was joining boards. I didn’t see that there was any particular, public aspect to those boards. You’re accountable and so on, but you’re not really out there. So, I thought, well, that’s the end of that. Then there was the disaster relief work after Cyclone Larry in Queensland, in 2006. Then the Governor-General job. So that, in combination, I thought, well, somebody ought to write about some of these things. And that changed quickly to, well I’ll have a go, I’ll write another memoir when I finish being Governor-General.

Gerard Henderson: It’s been a while since I read your for first memoir, My Story. It is memoir that starts when you were born in 1947, growing up in Paddington and going off to the Catholic primary school, St Francis in Paddington. Your sister went to primary school in Woollahra? So, were you a working class kid, or a middle class kid?

Peter Cosgrove: Definitely working class. My grandad lived at home, he was a clerk in the Sydney office of the Australian Tax Office. He’d been a World War 1 and World War 2 digger. My father was still in the army, a warrant officer, but we were working class. And we were in a suburb that was salted through with veterans from World War 2, men and women. And, of course, a new wave of migration. To my intense interest, there was an Italian family fresh off the boat from southern Italy, next door to us. They seemed so exotic. This was during a wonderful period in Australia, after the war, when we were starting to establish a strong economy.

Gerard Henderson: So it was well before what Paul Keating called the basket weavers, or what I would call the sandal wearers, moved into inner city Sydney?

Peter Cosgrove: We’d moved out by then.

Gerard Henderson: Would they take you back now do you think?

Peter Cosgrove: I don’t know. I would be interested to meet them. I’ve walked around the streets of Paddington more recently and it is definitely gentrified now. But the one thing you can’t give it is more real estate. So, all those people who own those wonderful, restored and transformed terraced houses still have to park on the street.

Gerard Henderson: You had a look at your own house, your old house.

Peter Cosgrove: I did, yes. That was fascinating. I was going around with a television team who were doing a sort of bio-style show. They wanted me to lean against the fence, from the outside of course, on the footpath. I was being filmed. And a lady came out from the house, a Swedish lady as I recall, and she was quite interested to know why a man was leaning on her front fence being filmed. I was a little embarrassed. But the television crew said, “Oh, well, you should watch the show next Wednesday night.”

Gerard Henderson: We learned a bit about your father, a warrant officer, after service. Where did he serve in the Second World War?

Peter Cosgrove: He served initially in Darwin, in the Darwin mobile force, which was a a quick aggregation of the very small elements of the permanent army at the outbreak of the war, whistled up there to be a garrison force for Darwin. After a while, he joined the Second AIF, and was posted to Nauru Island, where he and his colleagues were bombed soon after the Japanese entered the war through Pearl Harbor. The gunners were already there, artillery battery, to be on the lookout for German Raiders, who might want to steal the coal supplies, or knock out the radio station, that sort of thing. They were the defences. Instead, what came over were Japanese bombers who bombed them. Soon after that, they were evacuated back to Australia on a Free French or Dutch destroyer. And then he was in the AIF during the war, getting ready to go to the islands and so on.

Gerard Henderson: You mentioned your mother was a Labor voter and your maternal grandfather was a Labor voter.

Peter Cosgrove: He was a trade union official. I think he was a member of the Labor Party.

Gerard Henderson: Now your mother would have done what was then called home duties, I guess?

Peter Cosgrove: Absolutely, once the kids were upon her. Especially post war, with Dad in the permanent army. He was posted to wherever there was a job and would commute home as often as he could. So that meant Mum had the parental duties.

Gerard Henderson: You mentioned your mother was a Labor voter, although she did take you to listen to Bob Menzies at Bondi, and your grandfather. You don’t talk about your father’s politics. That’s because he was an army man?

Peter Cosgrove: Yes, he was silent. I think he felt it was the easiest pathway forward. I suspect he may have been conservative. Being a soldier, it was traditional that you didn’t speak a lot about your politics. Not a bad policy to have.

Gerard Henderson: You don’t discuss your politics.

Peter Cosgrove: I try not to. After all, as Governor-General, I had to be ready for a change of government at any one of the two general elections we had. So, I felt it best to vote, and appear impartial.

Gerard Henderson: But even before that, reading through your book, you’ve done so many things, but you don’t express many opinions at any stage of your career.

Peter Cosgrove:  Well, as a servant of the Commonwealth for 40 and a bit years in uniform, I was comfortable keeping my opinions to myself. Of course, I’ll go and vote on election day. I would have an opinion there at the ballot box. But remember also, as a senior officer, I was looking to serve the government of the day. The government of the day, for the entire time I was very senior, was the Howard Government. So, it might be said, I’ve got familiarity with that side of politics. Equally, I had people I liked and respected and had very convivial relationships with on the other side. But in terms of political opinions, I’ve kept them largely to myself.

Gerard Henderson: Even in the period of the 1960s and into the 1970s, when you’re much more junior in the Australian Defence Force than you became, looking back, you don’t reflect on what your opinions were in those days either. But you did have some?

Peter Cosgrove: I’ve offered situational opinions. Let me give you an example. When Malcolm Fraser, in the ultimately unsuccessful re-election campaign in 1983, came to visit in Townsville, he said he wanted to come and see something of the army. Somebody told me he would visit my unit. I was conscious of this very large man that I’d seen on the television quite a bit, in person a craggy giant figure, but looking absolutely exhausted. I’ve been rude enough to say that I didn’t think he should be carried in a limousine but in an ambulance.

Gerard Henderson: And he lost. So there we are. So take us back again to your youth because we’ve got a similar background to some extent. We both went to Catholic schools, Catholic primary schools and Catholic secondary schools. You were quite interested in the Queen’s visit of 1954. I turned up on a couple of occasions, but I didn’t have much interest in the Queen. I was interested in her as a celebrity. But you seemed to be quite fixated on the Royal Family from the time you were, what, seven years old?

Peter Cosgrove: That might well come from whatever I experienced with my family. At least two of them were not of a conservative bent. But they had deep regard for and respect of the Queen, and our constitutional monarchy. There was no particular thought of, you know, “armoured cars and tanks and guns came to take away our sons”. None of that stuff, no republicanism running around in there. But they were socialists. And on my father’s side, still serving, there was this automatic obedience to, and loyalty to the fact that he had taken an oath to the sovereign.

Gerard Henderson: The reference to armoured cars and tanks and guns – as you know, that’s a song of the Irish Republican Army.

Peter Cosgrove: I do know that.

Gerard Henderson: What’s the Irish connection in your family. Cosgrave appears to be an Irish name.

Peter Cosgrove: It does. It comes from County Tyrone. I know this because in preparation for a state visit to Ireland, some people in Ireland, probably our diplomats, checked out the origin of our family. The Cosgroves come from County Tyrone, which, as many will know is just on the fringe of the Republic and Ulster. It’s mostly in Northern Ireland. While I was having lunch with the Irish president, across the table he said, “Where are you from?” I said, “Well, Mr President, my dad’s family is from County Tyrone.” “So you’re a Protestant,” he replied. I said, “No, no. We are Catholics.” I added, “You won’t like this part. My ancestors were in the British Army.” Oh, he went off. But they didn’t ever serve in Ireland. My ancestor joined the British Army and served in Burma, where he was shot in the arm, became disabled in that arm, and then migrated directly to Australia to set up a new life. So, you know, I can tell you all that. So yeah, we’re Irish in background.

Gerard Henderson: That should’ve been good enough, I suppose. As you know, Winston Churchill didn’t think much of the men and women of Tyrone and Fermanagh. He thought the Catholics they were pretty low rank. And he thought Australians were pretty low rank too.

Peter Cosgrove: That was when typifying people by class, by religion, by ethnicity was commonplace. One of the great developments in social behaviour is to downplay that. You can’t get rid of it entirely. But, it seems to me, then it was quite natural. We thought they were quite amusing epithets towards migrants when we were younger, in this country, and we meant them in good humour, but perhaps heedlessly offensive. We have, as a society, evolved away from even the great Churchillian references.

Gerard Henderson: So, growing up, you go from St Francis in Paddington to Waverley College and the Christian Brothers. By then, you’ve moving into the mid to late 1950s and into the early 1960s. Sectarianism, anti- Catholic sectarianism, is fading, but it’s still there. Did you experience much?

Peter Cosgrove: Not at all. Waverley was a power in its own right. When I left Waverley and joined the army, within my peer group there was a mixture of faiths and those who were of no faith. Nobody cared, nobody knew. Perhaps when you did church parade, you might note “here come all the tykes over here”, and there go all the other denominations into the other chapel, and there were a small number who didn’t do anything. But it didn’t matter because you’re in the same PT class, falling off the apparatus just the same way as the Protestants. You were all in one company.

Gerard Henderson: You had a bit of a problem with the apparatus?

Peter Cosgrove: I proved not to be a vaulter. Well, a very poor vaulter. I only knew one vault called the “thief league”. Some who know me better said the name was appropriate. The thief league is a basic vault. There were much more complicated vaults we were supposed to master.

Gerard Henderson: You caused a bit of damage to the vaulting horse, I guess.

Peter Cosgrove: Well, imagine a fairly primitive vaulting horse that you build up with sections, and it dismantles. Well, I dismantled it by dint of vaulting into it rather than over it. And every time I destroyed the vaulting horse, it would take time to re-establish it, and the PT instructor got very annoyed with me. In the end, he understood that no matter what vault he gave me, I would do the thief league. That way his apparatus would stay assembled.

Gerard Henderson: At Duntroon, you describe yourself as a not very distinguished student, or cadet or whatever the term there is, but you graduate. Many of your colleagues don’t. About two thirds graduate each year?

Peter Cosgrove: Yes. 110 started, 66 walked out the door at the end.

Gerard Henderson: What happened to that lot?

Peter Cosgrove: Well, they variously might have failed exams to the point where they weren’t able to continue at Duntroon. There might have been an injury which was simply going to preclude the service. And there was a number of people who said “this is not for me”. And we’re talking over four years. The attrition rate was pretty high. But we were the biggest class ever to go through Duntroon. We were there on the early cusp of Vietnam, with the army at war. Youngsters like me were flooding in with the thought of baby boomers in the shadow of the war generation, going and serving their country.

Gerard Henderson: Obviously, the ones who stayed, and you were one of them, could accept, clearly, the discipline that army life requires.

Peter Cosgrove: Accept or go. It’s a sort of, do your job, get into the consistent behavior that the army wants out of its leaders or go do something else altogether.

Gerard Henderson: In private conversation, you’re a bit irreverent. You’re not that serious a type. Yet, in your military and other career, you are. How do you park your irreverence outside your official duties?

Peter Cosgrove: It comes like a rabbit out of a hat sometimes, even when I’m in the job. I have found good humour to be enormously important when I was the Chief of the Defence Force many years later. Even with the most serious subjects, and to find time with colleagues, very professional colleagues, to enjoy light heartedness. And to break the mood of very serious contemplation. Then you can return to the serious stuff. So, I parked it, but I never banished it.

Gerard Henderson: Let’s just go back a bit. Your father’s Cosgrove and that’s an Irish background. In a sense, your irreverence is a little bit Irish to me. What about your mother’s background? What’s her maiden name?

Peter Cosgrove: Henrys.

Gerard Henderson: So where’s her family from?

Peter Cosgrove: The Henry surname comes out of England. That was one half of her family line. But there’s a bit of Irish there too, because she had an Irish temper, I can tell you.

Gerard Henderson: Well a lot of the Irish went into England. She had an Irish temper, did she? But you managed?

Peter Cosgrove: She was a lovely lady, loved by all, but feisty. I remember once when a lady from up the road was putting used liquor bottles in our dirt tin which was out for the garbo and mum caught her out, and a discussion ensued.

Gerard Henderson: She didn’t do it again, right?

Peter Cosgrove: I don’t believe that lady ever came back.

Gerard Henderson: We mentioned discipline. You graduate from Duntroon and your father’s very proud of you, being a warrant officer. Your mother’s probably a bit concerned about your future.

Peter Cosgrove: Yes, because she’d been a daughter of a soldier, the wife of a soldier, now the mother of one. She understood that with Vietnam, we had a serious shooting war. If I ended up there, well, we’d all be on tenterhooks.

Gerard Henderson: But you wanted to go there. You were in a hurry to get there.

Peter Cosgrove: Yes.

Gerard Henderson: Where did you go first?

Peter Cosgrove: Malaya.

Gerard Henderson: What happens there?

Peter Cosgrove: I was a platoon commander in an Australian infantry battalion on garrison duty in Malaya. But that garrison duty had us training out in the jungle quite a bit. I was actually learning a great deal about what you do in jungle warfare, while I was in Malaya, where nobody was shooting at us. I was in the presence of very experienced soldiers, because a lot of them in the battalion were just back from Vietnam. They’d been through Tet. They’d been through the Battle of Coral-Balmoral. They were my NCOs. I couldn’t have wished for a more experienced practicum before getting into the real stuff in Vietnam.

Gerard Henderson: For those watching who are not familiar with the history of Vietnam, Coral-Balmoral was a very big battle. The Tet Offensive was important. Just briefly summarise what they were about.

Peter Cosgrove: In 1968 around May, in the Buddhist liturgy, there’s the Tet festival, and it’s a national moment in Buddhist countries like Vietnam. So the opposition North Vietnamese Army Qazvin, the political entity in South Vietnam that was for unification, they decided to have a major offensive and many thousands of North Vietnamese Army and VC [Viet Cong] assaulted various, apparently secure parts of South Vietnam, including Saigon. The battalion that I had now joined, had been on one of those routes of marching to the battle in Saigon, and were assaulted in a turn by thousands of VC and North Vietnamese Army. Major battle. And there were a lot of those people in 1RAR in Malaya, having come home and then come up to Malaya, and they were the people who trained me.

Gerard Henderson: And then Coral-Balmoral? It was a big offensive.

Peter Cosgrove: Coral was. It happened after Tet at a fire support base where 1RAR was located. And that’s where these mass attacks on the wire took place. A lot of my colleagues were veterans of that. I would sit listening to them talk about their experiences. This is even before I went to Vietnam. So, I went into Vietnam with that advantage over other officers who’d gone there, like me, inexperienced. I had vicarious experience with these people.

Gerard Henderson: So you knew all about Coral, you knew about the Tet Offensive, you knew all about what Vietnam was like. In Australia, at the time, some opponents of the commitment said it was all about fighting the Vietcong. But, as you make clear in your book and in your earlier book, you were also fighting the North Vietnamese Army which is a very well trained and equipped army.

Peter Cosgrove: Absolutely. And, of course, the communist powers, China and Russia in particular, were sponsoring North Vietnam. They had access to technology that made life tough in the air for the United States Air Force. That’s fine and fair because the US Air Force was dropping bombs on them. But it was jungle warfare against the guerrilla enemy.

Gerard Henderson: So, you’re in Malaya. You know all about Vietnam from talking to the NCOs who spent time there. But you still want to get in and you move quickly to try to get in, right?

Peter Cosgrove: I let my career planners know I was eager as anything to be up there. And, lo and behold, in the middle of 1969, I’d only been out of the college for about seven months, and I got an order sending me to Vietnam as a reinforcement officer. I was jumping out of my skin, both apprehensive and excited. My company commander in 1RAR in Malaya said, “You’re going in three weeks so you are going to go through the most intensive preparatory package I can design for you”. He was a veteran of the tour of duty in Vietnam. A mighty man.

Gerard Henderson: The English writer, George Orwell, once wrote that he met many a young child who wanted to want to play with a toy soldier, but never one who wanted to play with a toy pacifist. Obviously, you had a similar drive yourself. You wanted to be a real soldier in a real battle?

Peter Cosgrove: Until you’ve been in a battle, you don’t know what it really is. I suppose, in some ways, it’s a bit like an old Western movie, where you used to shoot somebody and they’d fall to the ground, no sight of blood, and they just lie there looking angelic. That’s not battle, and you soon find out about that. Once the scales have been removed from your eyes, you have that realisation. I can quite understand the many who have said, “Well, I’ll do my duty, but I don’t really want to do any of this in the future.” Then there are those who say, “Well, I got through that. I know I can do it. I’ll stay on and have a longer grip.” I was one of the latter.

Gerard Henderson: Tell us something about what you weren’t prepared to tell your mother. You won a Military Cross. You talk about a bit in your earlier book. You don’t say much about it here. What do you want to say about that?

Peter Cosgrove: Well, I told my mother nothing because I thought she had enough worry knowing I was there.

Gerard Henderson: But you never even told her what you did when you came back, did you?

Peter Cosgrove: Well, I would soften it. She didn’t need to know that at the end of the battle, you were standing there and looking around at the remains of your opponents, dead. I wouldn’t tell that to anybody outside the military as it would be gratuitous. They don’t really want to know that detail.

Gerard Henderson: But it’s in your military citation. Yes?

 Peter Cosgrove: Yes.

Gerard Henderson: But there’s not much of your citation in your book.

Peter Cosgrove: No. Those events are part of the experience of being there. I was there for some 365 days, and we were in battle on all but a handful of days. That’s the nature of jungle warfare. But we were looking for a fight on just about every other day, looking for a fight. Out there patrolling, looking for our adversary. And if we didn’t find them by moving and searching then, at night, we would conduct an ambush in the expectation, or the possibility, they would walk along. So that was our duty. And we did it assiduously. And pretty successfully.

Gerard Henderson: Very successfully. What was your position?

Peter Cosgrove: I was a platoon command. That equals about 30 men.

 Gerard Henderson: Of the 30 men, some would have been regulars, some would have been national service? Any difference between them?

Peter Cosgrove: No, no. My signaller – he’s now passed through an illness – was a wonderful man. I got to know him quite well because he was behind me every step I took, with the radio. He was an economics student, I think with honours, out of the University of New South Wales. He had delayed his call-up until he graduated, that was conventional. and then he had gone to his training. And here he was as my radio operator and what a fellow he was. When a battle was happening, I would have senior officers on the radio wanting to know what was happening. He would come up with the most elegant prose about why it was very difficult to get me right at that moment. He was a wonderful fellow. And he was emblematic of the national servicemen. They were fantastic.

Gerard Henderson: And there was no conflict between the two?

Peter Cosgrove: The regulars were enlivened by having these fellows who came in with that typical Australian cynicism, you know, respect must be won, not granted. It’s that sort of stuff. The mingling between the regular soldiers and the natios was automatic and profound.

Gerard Henderson: So your tour of duty ended, but you wanted to go back in again?

Peter Cosgrove: I did. But I went back to Australia.

Gerard Henderson: That’s right.

Peter Cosgrove: A more senior officer, when he heard that I wanted to extend, counselled me that if I went back with one of the other battalions, I’d be a lieutenant instead of being a platoon commander. I would likely be made the company second in command. I wouldn’t be out there sneaking through the jungle but doing a logistic job which I wouldn’t want. He advised me to come home and immediately apply to go back with the Australian Army Training Team, which was mentoring Vietnamese soldiers on operations, battles and such there. That sounded all right. But he spoke with forked tongue because when I got back from Vietnam, and made my request to my posting people, they said no chance as Vietnam was on the way to closing down. They were sending people who had not been there, and the jobs were filled. Years later the same commander told me he knew I’d been put in for a medal and he thought if I went to another battalion and back to Vietnam I would get my head shot off. They preferred me to stay home.

Gerard Henderson: I haven’t checked this. There was a story that some of your colleagues, maybe truthfully or untruthfully, said that when you went to Vietnam, you wanted to get a medal.

Peter Cosgrove: That’s a throwaway line. What I wanted to do was to keep my people safe. And I wanted to win. Winning is not dying. I didn’t want a series of nil-all draws, or “soccer comes to Vietnam”. I wanted to ensure that, in any battle, if we were the aggressors we were much more likely to overcome and keep our own lives. What that meant was that platoon commanders don’t sit back and say, “You should do this and you should do that.” You’re up there saying, “Come with me.” With a platoon commander who’s pretty aggro, their concern was that, here we go again, “going hunting”. I understand it, but that was never in my mind.

Gerard Henderson: But in one of the actions, that led to your Military Cross, you were pretty well on your own.

Peter Cosgrove:. But that wasn’t planned.

Gerard Henderson: But it happened.

Peter Cosgrove: My platoon sergeant took a group of soldiers from our perimeter, after we’d fought our way into a bunker system, the previous afternoon. We’d evicted the previous tenants with prejudice. And now we were there, the rest of the company closed up. So we had about 100 soldiers in a big wide circle. My sergeant had to take some people to get water. Instead of taking one or two men, he took a whole block of people from the middle of my part of the perimeter. I found this out only after they had gone. So I told the soldier who was left behind to stay there. I wouldn’t be far away. I went off to speak to the company commander when shots rang out from the hole in my perimeter. I took off like a scalded cat and found myself down amongst a bunch of Vietcong who’d come in. A soldier who had snuck away from the water party saw them, but he was way over there while I was in in amongst the Viet Cong. It was a bit like the gunfight at the OK Corral.

Gerard Henderson: So, the soccer score had finished three zip.

Peter Cosgrove: I’m glad there was zero on one side.

Gerard Henderson: So you didn’t go back?

Peter Cosgrove: I was home for a while.

Gerard Henderson: It was all pretty dull. Nothing was happening. No one wanted to fight?

Peter Cosgrove: Some interesting things happened. I did a wonderful instructional job where I learnt how to be a teacher. That put me on my hind legs in front of lots of soldiers in a classroom or lecture theatre environment. It was very different from being a platoon commander in combat. I was learning to develop my personality in order to impart learning. And then I became the ADC to the Governor-General.

Gerard Henderson: We’ll come back to that. Earlier on in your book, as a young man, you were shy. Is that right? Are you still shy?

Peter Cosgrove: Yes. And no.

Gerard Henderson: So what happened?

Peter Cosgrove: You get forced to step forward. I probably eradicated my shyness at Duntroon I have to say. My Duntroon colleagues would say I was boisterous, or flamboyant. Certainly, nobody near me would be absent of my opinion.

Gerard Henderson: So you worked at Government House in Canberra with Paul Hasluck the then Governor-General. What are you doing there, bowing and scraping?

Peter Cosgrove: You’re bowing and scraping. You’re one of the three ADCs at any given time.

Gerard Henderson: So ADC stands for?

Peter Cosgrove: Aide-de-Camp. The Governor-General has three. Navy, Army and Air Force. They do one year each. The change over time is staggered, so that you’ve always got a more experienced person to mentor the new arrivals. I came in as the junior guy, took over in November 1971 and rotated out November 1972.

Gerard Henderson: How did you find Paul Hasluck?

Peter Cosgrove: I found him to be a wonderfully intellectual man. But, also, Sir Paul was shy. While he could do all of his public duties with apparent ease, it struck me that he was a reserved man. I heard him give numerous speeches. He would write them all; in those days there wasn’t anything like a speechwriter. He’d sit down and away he’d go. Mind you, I think, governors-general then were more housebound. We didn’t travel nearly as much in those days. The speeches he gave were masterpieces. I’d sit in the audience and they were so thoughtful. But he was shy; he was not naturally gregarious. When he interacted with a room full of people, you could see that he was holding back a bit, he wasn’t exuberant. But boy, did he have gravitas. And because he’d been a senior politician, when MPs came Paul would know what was going through their minds.

Gerard Henderson: We were talking of bowing and scraping before, and we’re coming soon to when you’re Governor-General. Growing up, I remember that in some middle class, eastern suburbs of Melbourne, there was a front gate and there was a separate tradesman’s entry. I think Barry Humphries’ mother had a tradesman’s entry. At Government House, you have a public entry and a private entry.

Peter Cosgrove: That’s just the tradition. I was aware of that when I was at ADC. We didn’t have a Royal visit while I was there. But the rules are the rules, you see. The rule would be that the people who use the private entrance are the Governor-General and his immediate family and the Prime Minister. If the Prime Minister is a man then the Prime Minister’s wife, and vice versa, as for Julie Gillard.

Gerard Henderson: And the Queen?

Peter Cosgrove: The Queen.

Gerard Henderson: But someone went out the wrong door in recent times, who was it?

Peter Cosgrove: The protocol bunny almost had a heart attack. A minister arriving for a swearing in. I was happy enough for the tradition to be maintained and for it all to be organised. Political leaders understand there is difference. It is part of the mystique.

Gerard Henderson: At certain times you don’t name people.

Peter Cosgrove: Exactly. I’d prefer not to name them if there is a mistake. If there’s high praise, I’ll name them all day and all night.

Gerard Henderson: Doors have opened for you a lot – just when you think retirement is around the corner, along comes another promotion. How does that happen? I mean, you’re sort of getting ready to pack your bags and someone rings you up and says, “Can you do another gig.”

Peter Cosgrove: It’s only when you get into the latter half of your career and the pyramid gets narrower. A lot of it was my peers from Duntroon, my own class and the classes just above and just below. Some of them were hugely capable people and I’d always opted or preferred jobs where I was in command and had people for whom I was responsible. By the time I got to be CDF, I’d had some 13 separate commands. I was not interested in hanging around Canberra. I was always off somewhere else doing command jobs. At the end, I fell on my feet. I was commanding at Duntroon which I thought would be my last job, and out of the blue I was sent to command the First Division as a major general. That had me in the position where I went to East Timor. And that became a success. The rest is history, as they say. I became a well-known and a successful soldier, and I got promoted.

Gerard Henderson: You were talking about how you don’t name people with whom you’ve had conflict, but you don’t seem to have had all that many disputes in your life, although you’ve obviously had some. In regard to East Timor, some in either the army, or the Australian Defence Force more generally, say that the logistics weren’t good enough and we just scraped through. And you say what?

Peter Cosgrove: I thought to say that was to downplay, unfairly, the huge resilience and resourcefulness of our resisting planners and commanders who kept looking with dismay at what would need to be done and crucially found a way to do it. The people who said we didn’t have enough of this or that seem to think that we should have so much redundancy for an army of our size, that when we do something like that it all just flows easily. We are a defence force, not an expeditionary force. I have to point out, too, that by the time we got through Timor, which was at long arms reach, but still close to Australia, we were set up for a challenge of supporting our forces in the Middle East. There, we were plugged into a big pipeline of logistics out of the United States. But the Australian staff was operating over thousands of miles on ships, our ships, our aircrafts, and stuff we’d paid for. So, I want people to understand that, let’s not downplay the genius of our logisticians back in 1999/2000.

Gerard Henderson: You’re a very Australian character. And a very practical person.

Peter Cosgrove: I want to be.

Gerard Henderson: Which is very Australian, in a way. Because we’ve got to make do with what we’ve got. You seem to embody that.

Peter Cosgrove: Well I’m a very proud Australian too. The other thing that might be said is the brooding presence of the United States that’s across the horizon was a major factor in the relatively peaceful time we had when we got to East Timor. With my knowledge of it, that was a vestigial brooding presence. The brooding was a very long range brooding.

Gerard Henderson: We’ll tackle a couple more issues and we’ll finish up with your time as Governor-General. In Iraq, you say thought that the errors came after the United States authorities decided to demolish to Ba’ath Party, the senior Iraqi police figures, army figures and so on. In a sense, that’s a very serious political error. Can you reflect briefly on that and why you went there, and as someone who has looked at the intelligence that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

 Peter Cosgrove: Possibly did. And that possibility combined with an express willingness to use any and all weaponry available to global terrorists. That phenomenon had impressed itself on us. We had an outlaw regime in Iraq, which had used WMD against the Iranians and also against the Kurdish people. The intelligence suggested that WMD were still there and not under control or destroyed, which is what the UN wanted. You’re estimating risk. The risk is that WMD could fall into the wrong hands, and then be applied in the subway in London or the MCG or the Yankee Stadium in the United States and so on. Somebody might let off a chemical weapon and now you’re in big trouble. I was pointing out, in that part of the book, that intelligence will always be imperfect. But we had perfect intelligence about Pearl Harbor, a bit after 8 am on that Sunday morning 7 December 1941.

Gerard Henderson: And the political errors with the Ba’ath Party, were they essentially made by United States civilian figures rather than the United States military figures?

Peter Cosgrove: I don’t know for sure, but I know it was US policy. Look, we’ve been to school on this. We have to look at what happened after World War II when, in Germany, the Nazi Party was outlawed. But the occupying powers there understood that so many of the national functionaries were former members of the Nazi Party who had renounce their Nazism and gone back to work. That was the problem. The other thing was disbanding the Iraqi army, trained soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them, many of them conscripts. The total disbanding of them sent home people disgruntled, deflated, defeated, lacking the pride in their uniform, whatever pride they had, and very biddable by people who wanted to resist further.

Gerard Henderson: I remember then foreign minister Alexander Downer talking to me at The Sydney Institute shortly before the invasion and saying that the aim of the allies was decapitation, as you know, remove the top leadership. But what you’re saying is that didn’t happen.

Peter Cosgrove: The top leadership, fine. But I’m saying that, permeating down to all the arms of administration in the country were so many people who were in the Ba’ath Party.

Gerard Henderson: Your time on the Qantas board is an interesting chapter in itself because the airline closed down for a week and that was all pretty tough. But you seem to give pretty strong support as a board member from management.

Peter Cosgrove: Well, we were bleeding money but the impact of the campaign by the unions to reflect through the votes that we were on the nose, didn’t occur. In the aftermath, the union reps were giving door stops outside and signalling that the industrial campaign against Qantas would continue. Doing Qantas slowly. We just thought we cannot keep going. So management proposed, and the board agreed, that we would use the one tool left to a company under the industrial laws and propose a lockout. I think you had to give 48 hours notice so that the workforce could make arrangements – school and all the things that people do. And because we were an airline, flying people around, and we had people talking about the safety of our customers, we grounded the airline with immediate effect.

Gerard Henderson: It was a tough decision but it worked in the end.

Peter Cosgrove: Well we were sent to arbitration which is what we had been anxious to have. We wanted to go to arbitration. The unions weren’t willing because they were keen to press their case through industrial action. And the government wasn’t interested.

Gerard Henderson: In your book you don’t say which government it was.

Peter Cosgrove: It was the Gillard government.

Gerard Henderson: But in your book you don’t say it.

Peter Cosgrove: No.

Gerard Henderson: Well you say it was the government in 2011.

Peter Cosgrove: Well, it is a matter of history.

Gerard Henderson: Now, reading your book, I tend to think you’re a bit tough on  former Governor-General John Kerr. You had to deal with Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. But Sir John Kerr, 45 years ago in 1975, had to deal with Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser who were not such reasonable people. You had Fraser who wanted to block supply and Whitlam who wanted to govern without supply. Neither was backing down. Supply was running out. Kerr dismissed Whitlam, as you know, and you say well he should have consulted more. But the prevailing view, including that of some quite prominent people, is that if Kerr had told Whitlam what he was going to do, Whitlam would have sacked Kerr and then the Palace would’ve become involved, and Kerr’s principle position always was to keep the Palace out of it. Whitlam in 1975 wasn’t quite like the older Whitlam we all got to know in the 1980’s/1990’s.

Peter Cosgrove: Of course, I am using 2020 hindsight. But I wanted to think of the full range of responsibilities, and we call them rights, but they are a convention – to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn. These three describe in particular the relationship with the Prime Minister of the day. To be consulted, you do not want to hear from the leader of the Opposition. To encourage, you will not be encouraging other than to your Prime Minister. And to warn, well that is the relationship between you and the Prime Minister.

Why do I say warn? Well did Sir John add to or subtract from the reputation of the governor-generalship? That’s an easy question. With the controversy, people became suspicious of a person intruding into what is a democratic process. So, I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree that he intruded illegitimately. But I would have perhaps thought it was reasonable to do one more step. Let’s think of the situation in that period. The Whitlam Government had been through several elections and was in full uproar and tumult in the last half of 1975. You had what was essentially a device come upon by the Fraser opposition to block supply. The Prime Minister was not of a mind to go to the polls to try to procure a different Senate. So that was an impasse. And Sir John Kerr knew that.

I think if Sir John Kerr had said, “Okay I am proposing something which will be radical.” We know that because he did it and it was a radical outcome. I would say to the Prime Minister, “I’ve watched this, we’ve spoken, you’re confident it will be resolved but I’m not seeing it being resolved. I see that government is not functioning. I will call you in a couple of days if this has not been resolved and I will be terminate your commission.” If he’d said that, it is quite possible that Mr Whitlam would have done a few things. One was take it seriously, go back, find a way forward, called an election or to do something within his party to unblock supply.

Gerard Henderson: But you’re missing one important point. John Menadue has said that Whitlam would have sacked the Governor-General.

Peter Cosgrove: Yes he might have done that. He might have then gone to the Queen and said, “I’ve got a problem here. I’ve got the Governor-General who wants to sack me.” And that would have involved the Queen. And although I have upmost respect for the Queen, Kerr was the Governor-General of Australia. He was not on guard in a century box in Buckingham Palace. The Queen would have been terribly distressed that she’d been asked to intervene to sack a Governor General. I know that. On the other hand, in Australia what would have happened to a government which had said that to the Queen? That would have been very serious. It would have been the total destruction of the government of the day.

Gerard Henderson: But it would have damaged the Palace too because Kerr’s position was always to keep the Palace out of it. That’s why he didn’t get deeply involved with it.

Peter Cosgrove: I’m thinking not so much of Sir John Kerr, nor even of the Palace. I’m thinking about the prosecution or application of the office of Governor-General.

Gerard Henderson: Now of everyone that has been Governor-General since then, it seems to me you’re the only one who was ever possibly going to be in the position of a kind similar to what John Kerr was in. If you look at Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir, he says that he was going to go down to Government House and call an election in order to resolve his political problem. It turned out that he was removed from the Liberal Party leadership before he got there. But he was either dreaming or he was serious and he could have rocked up to Yarralumla and asked for an early election while he didn’t have the support of the majority of his own party. It seems to me, of all the prime ministers since Whitlam, in temperament, the one most like Whitlam is actually Turnbull.

Peter Cosgrove: Interesting. Well it is a moot point, because he did not come to Yarralumla and ask for an election. In dealing with the hypothetical it’s important not to further hypothesise about whether you’d say yes or not. There had been an election in 2016 and it was a double dissolution. I also recall something interesting. There was a governor or a governor-general, going back in time, who saw something controversial come the executive council and decided he would call the whole federal executive council, every last one of them, to a meeting. And he canvased them around the table, one by one, to say yay or nay on the issue. That’s historical. I only mention it to say how one of my eminent predecessors, at either federal or state level, decided to do that because that person became worried that this was not something the entire ministry felt.

Gerard Henderson: I must say that would have been a lot of fun. Either way, I’m glad you didn’t have that excitement. But you had a lot of fun in your career. And it’s all down here and how does the joke go? You shouldn’t have joined … if?

Peter Cosgrove: If you couldn’t take a joke.

Gerard Henderson: And obviously you can take a joke.

Peter Cosgrove: That ironic saying is to remind everybody that being in the army is arduous, and mostly not a lot of fun. But if you keep your sense of humour, you’ll stay be a human being.

Gerard Henderson: And you’ve shown that today. So many thanks. And good luck with the book.

Peter Cosgrove: Thank you very much Gerard.

The Sydney Papers Online Issue 52 | October – December 2020