KANGAROO VALLEY: AUSTRALIANS IN BRITAIN IN THE 1960s

Nicholas Hasluck has served as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia and as Chair of the Literature Board. Well-known as a writer, his latest work is Beyond the Equator: An Australian Memoir (Arcadia / Australian Scholarly Publishing) On Tuesday, 4 February 2020, Nicholas Hasluck addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss his latest book and the importance of memoir in the historical record.

KANGAROO VALLEY: AUSTRALIANS IN BRITAIN IN THE 1960s

NICHOLAS HASLUCK

My recently-published memoir, Beyond the Equator, looks at Australians abroad in the 1960s. As the author of a book about myself, I should probably begin with some cautionary words coined by the Hollywood movie mogul, Samuel Goldwyn, famed for the mangled wisdom that fell from his lips occasionally: “I don’t think anyone should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.”

When Goldwyn thought aloud it sounded funny but was often wise. “Include me out!” he said. What better way to describe one’s private feelings about some half-baked scheme that is widely applauded but sure to fail? “Human rights for rivers and trees! Yes! Of course! Spot on! Include me out!” It’s a wise old way of saving face, while saving money.

“The place is always so crowded no one goes there anymore.” Goldwyn again, with some words that bring me back to my topic. Talk about well-known haunts in London – Earl’s Court or “Kangaroo Valley” – may have the unwanted side effect of prompting people to think of a city, still popular, but not the drawcard it once was. Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, Clive James, and so on. These are the luminaries who left Oz before me to see what the wider world could offer. They made their mark. We know their stories. Is there anything more to be said about London in the sixties?

I believe there is, although an echo of my predecessors can probably be heard in my account of arriving in London in August 1964. But is what I say worthwhile? Is the tone closer to farce than to history? A little from the book below:

My post-graduate friends from the good ship Himalaya had taken off to confer with their supervisors in Oxford or to explore various corners of Scotland and Wales. But some of those who had come to England on working permits were still around. Jeff Lea and Bob Ilich, for example. They were staying at the Overseas Visitors Club near Earl’s Court while looking for a flat. I called in to see how they were getting on and finished up in the basement bar of their club, listening to a Jamaican rock band called Jimmy and the Vagabonds.

The blokes around us in the bar were brimful of their not-quite-believable exploits on the Continent. Someone had picked up a swag of steins at the Munich beer festival for resale in Earl’s Court. Another adventurous soul had been running with the bulls in Pamplona. There was a Sydneysider who had left London some time ago to train as a matador. He was now a drawcard in the bullrings of Andalusia under the name El Australiano.

Catching up with Jeff and Bob often led on to a party in a flat or bedsit with a bunch of Aussie or Kiwi “hearts” who formed part of the network in “Kangaroo Valley”. Pommy hearts were sought after, but seldom seen, hence the plaintive drinking song: ”I wouldn’t say no to a nice cold beer / and I wouldn’t say no to a naughty. / The beer over here isn’t fit to drink / and the girls are high and haughty.”

The absence of Pommy hearts didn’t seem to worry Jeff, a laconic storyteller. On the voyage across he had bought some supposedly precious sapphires in the back streets of Colombo. At Tilbury he smuggled the gems ashore in his underpants but soon found out their true value. Nil! They were bits of cut glass. Worth nothing. But not to worry, here he was, only a few weeks later, in the heart of Kangaroo Valley, surrounded by a bunch of good-humoured Aussie girls, admiring a handful of his precious sapphires – worth a fortune in the Far East!

Another of Jeff’s favourite stories went back to our voyage on the Himalaya also. It seemed that his friend Bob sought to chat up some of the girls on the ship. They were mostly sympathetic to these overtures but for some reason couldn’t be persuaded to go any further. What was wrong? Bob was then told by his old mate, the day before the ship reached Tilbury, that early in the voyage Jeff had felt obliged to unfold Bob’s “tragic tale” to most of the presentable women aboard.

The tale, delivered in a solemn tone, on a “strictly confidential” basis, went like this. Bob Ilich, as his surname and looks suggested, was Croatian. He was, as often happened in that part of the world, destined to enter into a marriage arranged by his parents. Jeff was charged with the task of taking Bob back to his home country to marry “Nistitschka”, a woman he had never met but who was reputed to be exceedingly unattractive. Bob’s sense of duty, according to Jeff, obliged him to honour the family arrangement, but deep down he was a broken man. In these circumstances one could sympathise with him, but little else could be achieved ….

With the voyage almost over, the stoic Bob was left with nothing to say to his helpful friend but “Thanks for that, mate. Where would I be without you?”

In the midst of all this, as I explored various corners of the city, and became adept at riding trains on the underground system, I gradually got to grips with the political situation. Britain was having to reconfigure its role as a former imperial power and deal with consequential issues such as immigration and the status of its former colonies, especially Rhodesia. The Tories under Prime Minister Macmillan had sought admission to the European Economic Community but had been rebuffed. The John Profumo/Christine Keeler scandal had led to Macmillan’s resignation. In October 1964, his successor Sir Alec Douglas-Home was ousted at a general election by the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson.

Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, died shortly after the election. I stood in The Strand to watch the funeral procession on its way to the City of London and to all those assembled in St Paul’s Cathedral. The Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, was one of the twelve pallbearers. The coffin was placed in a gun carriage after the service and conveyed to a pier nearby. The water-borne procession up the Thames left a lasting impression when ships’ cranes were dipped to honour the wartime Prime Minister. He was to be buried in the Bladen churchyard, near his birthplace at Blenheim Palace, the home of his famous forbear the Duke of Marlborough.

In the meantime, Menzies had gone down to the crypt of the Cathedral to give a talk about Churchill, for the two leaders had worked closely in the early years of the War. They shared other links. They had both been forced out of the office of Prime Minister in their respective countries, but had come back. Both were honorary Benchers of Gray’s Inn.

In the course of his address to the BBC audience throughout Britain, Menzies said this of Churchill: “In the whole of recorded modern history, his was, I believe, the one occasion when one man, with one soaring imagination, with one fire burning in him, and with one unrivalled capacity for conveying it to others, won a crucial victory not only for the forces but for the very spirit of human freedom.”

It struck me as significant, and as evidence of the continuing links between Britain and Australia, that Menzies was invited to play such a central role in the proceedings. I had, by now, been to Gray’s Inn myself and visited the Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand. I had seen some of the leading judges in action including Lord Denning, author of the Denning Report on the Profumo Affair. These visits and my course at Wadham College, Oxford, were a reminder of the links between Britain and Australia embedded in the common law, from Magna Carta to parliamentary rule and judicial independence.

My legal studies began to occupy most of my time but, as the son of a Minister in the Menzies government, and because I harboured some latent political and literary ambitions of my own, I was determined to keep in touch with broader concerns by attending debates in the Oxford Union.

The Oxford Union’s mystique is due principally to the fact that many of the undergraduates who have become prominent in the affairs of the Union have subsequently appeared again on the political stage in London, their appearances suggesting a causal link between the two places.

Debates at the Union usually included 2 or 3 visiting speakers, often politicians of the first rank. I have a vivid recollection of the evening when Lord Hailsham spoke. He had been one of the contenders for leadership of the Conservative Party in the aftermath of Macmillan’s resignation. The prevailing mood of the under-graduate audience was always left of centre, and therefore to have a leading Tory spokesman in their midst was a chance to become especially vociferous. To everyone’s surprise, however, Hailsham treated those present to the most astonishing feat of oratory I have ever witnessed.

At the beginning of his speech the audience was totally against him and, with catcalls and interjections, constantly abusive. But he won them over. He had presence. He had wit. He was cogent. Above all, he was passionate. “Freedom can only be won at the expense of tyranny,” he declared, “by concern for the common good.” At the end of it all the students rose to their feet in a standing ovation, and when the vote was taken his team had won. It is the only time in my life that I have seen an entire audience persuaded from one point of view to another on a political subject in the space of twenty minutes or so. I doubt that I will see it happen again. That, too, was a characteristic of the Oxford Union, and perhaps of Oxford generally: open-mindedness.

Another striking debate took place towards the end of my first term, when Malcolm X, the American Civil Rights extremist, joined a group of speakers at the Union. Malcom X was a leading figure in the so-called Nation of Islam, a political maverick who had made a tempestuous journey from back-street hustler in New York to radical preacher. He had come to speak in favour of the motion that: Extremism in defence of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

In the course of the debate, the dark-suited, heavily-bespectacled Malcolm X, the first of three speakers on the affirmative side, was quick to apply the motion to forces wrapped in the red, white and blue colours of the American flag, a tattered relic of imperialism, he claimed, which kept black people from their kin on the African continent and should be torn to pieces. “When Americans bomb villages in the African Congo,” he rapped out, “this is undoubtedly extremism. But it is never referred to as such because it’s financed by America and endorsed by the West.” Malcolm X, the Islam activist, was assassinated in early 1965, some two months after I saw him tearing stars and stripes off the trio opposing him in the Oxford Union.

The most controversial President of the Union was undoubtedly Tariq Ali, a leading figure on the far Left of British politics, both then and for many years to come. He presided over a much-publicised debate on the topic: That this House would not fight for King and Country.

This was a re-run of a debate which had taken place in 1933 and was said to have encouraged Hitler and Mussolini to believe that England lacked the will to oppose their acts of aggression. At Tariq Ali’s insistence the debate was held as opposition to the US presence in Vietnam was gaining ground. It was not yet clear whether the Wilson Labour government would support the Americans, so the topic was thought to be overly provocative. The furore petered out, possibly because Tariq Ali was a man of considerable charm and had presided over the televised debate with equanimity and good humour.

Jeffery Archer and Jonathan Aitken were prominent students at that time: fine speakers and both flamboyant. Perhaps it was this, and the presence of the applause they attracted, that led them astray, for after reaching the House of Commons in due course they both became embroiled in fiercely-contested libel actions and finished up serving short terms in prison for misleading the courts.

For the irrepressible Jeffrey Archer this, of course, was only a momentary set-back as he continued to enjoy vast success as a best-selling novelist. The equally talented Jonathan Aitken was inspired by his prison sentence to write a biography of the ill-fated American President, Richard Nixon and, later on, became a priest.

An opportunity arose for me to contrast the somewhat cavalier proceedings in the Oxford Union with proceedings in the House of Commons when I was persuaded by my housemate to join him on a trip to Westminster. This was hosted by his local member, a Labour backbencher from West Hartlepool called Ted Leadbitter. While walking on the terrace overlooking the Thames we were introduced to one of the luminaries of the Wilson government, Richard Crossman, formerly an Oxford don. By this time the Conservative Party was led by Ted Heath with Iain Macleod as Shadow Chancellor.

When we sat down for afternoon tea the room around us suddenly began to empty out, because Macleod was about to speak. “We have to watch this!” Leadbitter exclaimed. He jumped up and within a few minutes had found a place for us in the public gallery. Macleod was one of the few speakers who could fill the parliamentary chamber, we were told, and he did so on this occasion, with a searing attack on the government. He praised the late President Kennedy for being an idealist without illusions, and derided Prime Minister Wilson as being simply an illusionist without ideals – an aphorism that has now become an oft-quoted political quip. A potential leader of the Tories, Macleod died soon afterwards, his promise unfulfilled.

I digress to say that in the course of the Brexit imbroglio we have seen some rowdy debates in the House of Commons on TV. These scenes, with John Bercow as Speaker, immediately took me back to undergraduate debating days in the Oxford Union (and sometimes even to the Mad-hatters Tea Party, a scene concocted by an Oxford don).

When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, some commentators seemed to think that he would be overwhelmed by his opponents in the House. This I doubted. As a former President of the Oxford Union, and with a fine mop of hair in need of a hat, Boris seemed perfectly equipped for shouting matches and shenanigans in the House.

At Oxford in the mid-sixties, of course, politics was not the only area of controversy. One evening, I found my way to a crowded hall near the Oxford Union. I took a seat as the chairman of the meeting introduced the two speakers who were to press the respective claims of the candidates for the coveted Oxford Chair of Poetry – the modernistic American poet Robert Lowell and the elderly English bard, Edmund Blunden, who had made his name in the aftermath of the Great War. The audience was told that the champion for each of the poets – the two contenders not being present in person – would read from the works of their preferred candidate. A vote would then be taken. The vote would not be decisive, we were reminded, this being largely a student audience, but the evening’s verdict might well be influential when votes were cast officially in a few days’ time by graduates of the University.

The chairman rang a little bell. The contest had begun. John Wain, a poet himself, went to the rostrum first and began to read from Lowell’s recently published collection For the Union Dead. The graphic, contemporary images were laid before us. “A savage servility / slides by on grease.” “Hiroshima boiling”. When the long-haired, dishevelled poet at the rostrum finished, the audience applauded rapturously, as I did. We were fiercely partisan. Robert Lowell was the confessional voice of the here and now.

Blunden’s so-called champion was an academic from a college nearby. Pale, prissy, bespectacled, he was given to introducing poems about pikes and glades and meadows with over-elaborate explanations. These unwanted footnotes were accompanied by nervous coughing fits and the flutter of a lily-white hand. Here was a remote and ineffectual don incarnate. It was intolerable! He of the lisping voice and the pallid brow was pathetic, his presence an absurdity, an embarrassment, an insult. There were mutterings.

The chairman rang his little bell and called for order but to no avail. Blunden’s popinjay sidled away from the rostrum to a background noise very close to jeering. We waited smugly for the vote to be taken. Everyone present seemed to be of one mind. Our man, Robert Lowell, had won!

But what was this?

John Wain had wrested the book of Blunden’s verse from the popinjay’s grasp and was back at the microphone demanding a second go! The chairman’s little bell tinkled in vain. The impromptu speech came at us in a rush but the message was clear. Wain was indignant, angry, upset. He was for Lowell, but he admired Blunden too. What we had just heard wasn’t Blunden, not Wain’s Blunden, a poet of the Great War who had lived long enough to tell the truth about the Western Front. What about hearing some more? And he began to read from Blunden’s poem Never Such Love in the strong, fervent voice of one who has savoured the lines for years. “Better in love to seal the love-sure lips: / for truly love was before words were, / and no word given, no word broken ….”

 

As it was on the night I saw Lord Hailsham in action, this was a moment of reversal. Swept to its feet by a passion equal to the poet’s final stanza, the audience rewarded Wain with a standing ovation, and thereby honoured Blunden in absentia. The whole notion of casting votes for poets seemed suddenly ridiculous. The contest had ceased to matter. Wain’s impulsive gesture had conjured up, brought back to us, that other deep-seated realm where what matters is the poetry and the age-old hunger for it, the power of language to enchant, and by enchanting, to dissolve preconceptions and remake the world afresh.

Blunden won the official contest with a handsome majority. Some days later, by an unlikely but pleasing quirk of fate, I had the opportunity to congratulate him in person. I had managed to get a ticket to the first night of a production of Christopher Marlowe’s masterpiece Dr Faustus. When interval came, I saw Blunden in the foyer, an elderly, white-haired fellow standing meekly by himself. He seemed to be fumbling with something and, a moment later, he accidentally dropped some tiny capsules on the floor. I came to his aid and retrieved the pills, for which he thanked me. We exchanged a few words in the course of which he asked about my studies in a kindly way.

In the confusion of the moment, I missed my opportunity and failed to congratulate him. I have always regretted this failure because the student newspapers had probably left him with an impression that the younger generation was all for Lowell, and news of John Wain’s extraordinary intervention may not have reached him.

There were many other notables in the foyer that night for this was a stellar occasion. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were then at the height of their fame as a consequence of their well-publicised affair while making the film Cleopatra a few years earlier. Richard Burton’s former tutor at Merton College, Neville Coghill, had finally prevailed upon his former pupil to come back to Oxford for a season featuring Coghill’s production of Dr Faustus, with Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy – in Christopher Marlowe’s words “the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium”.

I found the play enjoyable but in the end the critics weren’t as kind. Elizabeth Taylor was admittedly very beautiful, as she moved quietly about the stage as a kind of apparition, but I was surprised to find that Richard Burton was shorter and stockier than I had imagined, and somewhat overweight. His physical appearance was redeemed, of course, by the resonance of his magnificent voice.

Close to 20 years later, in a very unusual setting, I was called upon to recapture my evening with Helen of Troy. I had joined a small group of Australian writers who travelled to China at the invitation of the Chinese Writers Association. This was shortly after the downfall of the infamous Gang of Four and the mood around us was very strange. On the day after our arrival in Beijing, while still feeling like visitors to another planet, we were invited to a banquet at the Beijing Duck Restaurant.

After the banquet, we were told that we were privileged to have been invited to the apartment of a distinguished editor, Professor Yang Xianyi. When we reached the cars outside the restaurant, there was a good deal of milling about. In the end, as leader of the Australian party, I found myself sitting in the back seat of a car beside a man I understood to be Professor Yang Xianyi, but without the interpreter to assist me.

We smiled at each other enigmatically for several minutes. He then cut short my opening gambit, made in stilted pidgin, by enquiring in impeccable English: “I believe you were at Oxford in the mid-sixties?” I agreed that I was. “What did you think of the Neville Coghill production of Dr Faustus starring Taylor and Burton?” he asked.

“The two stars seemed shorter and fatter than expected,” I replied. He chuckled at this. It turned out that my Chinese companion had been at Oxford in the 1930s. While studying under Burton’s tutor, Neville Coghill, he had met his English-born wife, Gladys Yang. In the Cultural Revolution they were sent to a remote corner of China, tainted by their time at Oxford, perceived as intellectuals corrupted by their learning. To meet them, after all of this, was a poignant reminder that links to Oxford exist throughout the world.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Some years later, in June 1989, within a few days of Chinese tanks entering Tiananmen Square to crush the emerging democracy movement, I heard the voice of Yang Xianyi on the BBC World Service. With extraordinary bravery the elderly editor denounced the Chinese leadership as “bloodthirsty criminals”. He and his wife were immediately condemned to further exile. They are not forgotten by those who knew them.

There are many other stories in my book: travels in Europe, a romance that enriched my time at Oxford, visits to the Vatican and various royal sites, an account of working for The Police Review in Fleet Street – the journal of the British bobby – after I completed my degree. So much to say, but time is against me, and thus, in closing, I feel obliged to return briefly to the question I posed earlier: whether a memoir of this kind can add anything worthwhile to our understanding of times past or of times to come?

Probably not, because human memory is fallible and, in any event, this is not a carefully documented work of history. Nonetheless, within the jumble of public and private events, an attentive reader may well perceive some themes, or interesting ironies at least, that bear upon memorable issues, both then and now.

Rebuffed in the early 1960s, Britain joined the European Community eventually. It will now withdraw, but for better or worse? What exactly did Macmillan’s “winds of change” speech achieve in Rhodesia? What has been the overall effect of widespread immigration? What can we learn from the building of the Berlin Wall and the fermenting of the cultural revolution in China? Did the rhetoric of Malcolm X and others like him set the scene for the terrorism of today?

Questions of this size can’t be answered easily but they may bring with them a look at smaller and more personal issues. According to some historians, the motivation underlying significant events is often referable not to policy or purpose but to self-interest or quirks of personality, moments of the kind reflected in diary entries and occasional memoirs. I named some well-known Australian writers who went abroad in the 1960s to see what the wider world could offer. To what extent, if any, do their writings cast light upon the issues mentioned above or upon the historic links between Britain and Australia?

In these post-modern times, when so many Australian academics query the value of western civilisation, using identity politics and the weasel word “inclusion” to fashion orthodoxies incompatible with freedom of speech and the rule of law, what is one to make of the open-mindedness that was once a feature of debates in the Oxford Union? Will political correctness become so pervasive that as to some feverish new campaign – human rights for rivers and trees perhaps – we overlook our freedom to say: Include me out?

During the cultural revolution my Chinese friends, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, were tainted by their time at Oxford, and sent away, as if what they learnt in Britain, their exposure to the best that has been thought and said throughout the ages, from Christopher Marlowe to Winston Churchill, might seriously weaken the Orwellian mind set of those in power. Perhaps it would. It appears from the stand taken by the Yangs after Tiananmen Square that their experience of the wider world had broadened their outlook and strengthened their capacity to speak truly.

My memoir, Beyond the Equator, may not amount to history but it gives glimpses here and there of what was happening in another era and what could happen again if people fail to protect their freedoms or lose their concern for the common good. I will close with a passage from the book in which I touch on some of the themes mentioned in this talk.

Like many of my companions on the Himalaya I carry in me traces of what happened in the past that point to what the world has now become. And so, my Oxford days are over, but not gone. The ancient university lives on in the imagination of those who have been there. Year after year, students of one kind or another, who have been lucky enough to spend a portion of their youth in that fanciful place, have been enriched by its unusual ways. They have left behind in their turn a touch of vitality and a little of their personal aspirations, so that the city of dreaming spires is not like a city revered because it embodies the past, but revered because it has kept alive a youthful and ever-present spirit of adventure.