WRITING BIOGRAPHY IN THE 21ST CENTURY – THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MCMAHON AND OTHERS

Today, biographies seek to reveal and understand the lives of their subjects, shedding light on both their times and the people who rose in them, while avoiding the temptation to indulge in flights of fancy or amateur psychological assessment. So how do the political biographies of Australia’s prime ministers and public figures stand up? Dr Patrick Mullins is Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Canberra & author of Tiberius with a Telephone: The Life and Stories of William McMahon. On Wednesday 26 June 2019, Patrick Mullins addressed The Sydney Institute to shed more light on the subject of biographical writing.

WRITING BIOGRAPHY IN THE 21ST CENTURY – THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MCMAHON AND OTHERS

PATRICK MULLINS

I want to begin by thanking you for inviting me tonight. During the four years that I spent working on my biography of Billy McMahon, my answer to the question, “What are you doing at the moment?” would be met (but for a few honourable exceptions) with varying degrees of horror, concern, and mirth.

Most people could not fathom why on earth I would do it. What would be the worth of studying someone so venal, so embarrassing, so incompetent, so momentarily in office? Others would wonder whether there was something wrong with me. Why would you do that to yourself?

That reaction has not altered all that much since the book came out last year. A fortnight ago, I was introduced to a woman as Billy McMahon’s biographer. She looked shocked, then embarrassed, then laughed: “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ll be racing out to read that.” So, for the invitation and your presence here tonight, then, I am very grateful: thank you for having me.

The question of why write about Billy McMahon was an acute one. From the distance of 50 years, McMahon seems unworthy of attention. What Henry James called ”the hand of death” has smoothed McMahon’s image. 

He is, reputedly, this country’s most incompetent prime minister, disliked and derided even by his own colleagues.

But this immediately raises a paradox. How – if McMahon was so incompetent – did he endure for so long near the centre of power in this country? After all, he was a minister for over two decades, seemingly cemented in the ministry despite the antipathy of more than a few prime ministers. Moreover, if he was so incompetent and (one might add) so disliked, how did he become prime minister? Then another paradox: why did the qualities and talents that had allowed him to stay in the ministry for so long, and to rise to the top of the greasy pole, desert him once he got there?

In short, how did he become prime minister and then lose it?

In 2014, after finishing a PhD on political biography as a form of writing, I came to the view that these questions demanded answers. I also came to believe that, in writing about McMahon, I could offer a broader view of Australian political history.

Biographers often observe that there are two tracks to biography: there is the interest in the subject his or herself, and there is the interest in the historical arc of that life: the way that life is woven into a particular period of history.

This second track was pronounced: McMahon’s life wove through the twentieth century, through pivotal events in this country’s history, knotting around significant figures of Australia’s political and cultural landscape. It seemed to me that a whole chronicle of Australian politics and history could hang on the thread of McMahon’s life,

 and there was considerable worth in pursuing that.

Tonight, I want to see if I can shed some light on both tracks. You might have surmised from the book that I can be rather prolix, but tonight I am under a time pressure – so if I skip lightly over some areas, please, forgive me.

McMahon was born in 1908 to a wealthy family but his life was blighted early by death: his mother died when he was ten, his elder brother when he was eleven, his father when he was seventeen. In this, McMahon aligns with a discernible pattern of politics: of politicians who have been bereaved at a young age. Studies of this phenomena – which is palpable in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia – suggest that the child, bereft of the security and comfort of a parent’s love, aims to find it again in positions of power and in positions where the acclaim of the public might be felt.

The most immediate consequence of this childhood insecurity, however, is that McMahon came into the care of his uncle, Sir Samuel Walder,

 a significant figure in the United Australia Party, which came to prominence in the 1930s, and from whom McMahon absorbed his conservative political outlook. This also had the effect of taking McMahon from the Catholic church of his father’s family and bringing him to the Church of England.

At Walder’s hand, McMahon had an establishment education: Sydney Grammar, then Sydney University, where he studied law. By virtue of his attending Sydney Grammar, he was able to join Allen Allen & Hemsley – a cornerstone of Sydney’s legal scene – as an articled clerk; and subsequently became a partner, aged thirty-one. The conservative politics that McMahon had absorbed from his uncle were reinforced at Allens. McMahon worked closely with big commercial clients including the Bank of NSW and the Commonwealth Bank. Prominent non-Labor politicians were coming into that office day-in, day-out: former NSW premiers such as Bertram Stevens and Sir Thomas Bavin, former prime ministers, in the form of S.M. Bruce – and even a future prime minister, in the form of Robert Menzies, during litigation over reinforced paper bags.

During World War II, McMahon enlisted; afterward, he took an economics degree at Sydney University. By the late 1940s, he was really a model political candidate.

His law degree and experience at Allens, his education at Sydney Grammar, his membership in the right clubs, his network of acquaintances, his degree in economics: all of these were considerable points in favour. He came to politics with impeccable connections and training for a life in politics. And, of course, his Anglicanism: when he was approached to stand for the seat of Lowe at the 1949 election, the first question he received from his preselectors was, “Are you a tyke?” That was the moment where Samuel Walder’s guidance was redeemed. At the election that year, Chifley was swept from power and two decades of Liberal Party rule began. McMahon was there at the start of it and there at the end.

The two decades that encompass the Menzies, Holt, Gorton, and McMahon governments are at the heart of my biography. They tell how McMahon worked his way from the backbench, in 1949, to the very pinnacle of power.

McMahon’s actions illuminate the tools of politics, they tell of how to get ahead. He leaked selectively; within a few months, he had won a fan in Alan Reid, who believed him to be one of this country’s first “professional politicians” – that is, that McMahon had all the skills and knowledge of what was required in politics. He treated it not as an indulgence or leisure activity but as a battle to be won.

McMahon’s close relationship with Reid would become notorious, but of particular value too was McMahon’s relationship with Sir Frank Packer. That relationship was already two decades old: in the 1930s, while doing his articles at Allens, McMahon invested in a small company named Sydney Newspapers Ltd, which had been formed by a young Sir Frank to take over an ailing, union-run newspaper, sell it to a competitor for a huge windfall, and to use the earnings to found the Australian Women’s Weekly – which became the jewel in the crown of the Packer media empire. Packer never forgot that investment and he would wield considerable clout in service of McMahon for years.

Within eighteen months of being elected, McMahon was on the frontbench as Minister for the Navy and Air, and was displaying the characteristics that would become all too familiar to his colleagues: a willingness to manipulate and background, an ambition unbound by notions of loyalty. His betrayal of Frederick Osborne, a colleague who had been mooted for the Navy and Air ministries in 1951, was indicative of this approach.

But he also showed a willingness to work hard, to contribute to debate, to persist in spite of obstacles that would have waylaid most. He was adept with the media, aware that it could be used for publicity. While Minister for Social Services, for example, he seized on the opportunity to present, in person, government grants for the construction of aged persons homes. They would always be photographed and were, in today’s parlance, a public relations coup.

In Cabinet meetings, McMahon would often be one of the best-informed ministers present, and he showed, on occasion, an ability to analyse a situation with prescience. In 1956, when the Suez crisis erupted, McMahon was one of only three ministers to argue against Menzies’ involvement in the negotiations with Egyptian president Nasser; in the early 1960s. McMahon was heavily involved in efforts to have the government provide state aid to independent schools; in 1964, at the vital Cabinet committee meeting where the decision was made to commit military forces to Vietnam, McMahon was there arguing against it, on grounds that the strategy and purpose was unclear. But he would, of course, attract derision and dislike from his colleagues, who could not stand his grandstanding and his condescension, his leaking and his backgrounding.

Paul Hasluck, most of all, would come to regard McMahon as a “tick”, and as a “contemptible creature”.

  He saw a small, insecure man who wore platform shoes and suits with padded shoulders, who was petty and vain and unable to perceive what others thought of him. To many of McMahon’s colleagues in these early days, he was a comic figure only – but, rather like Widmerpoole, in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, McMahon kept rising through the ranks.

Colleagues always wondered why McMahon was never sacked. Certainly, there were grounds for doing so. In the 1950s, Menzies managed to extract from McMahon a signed confession that he had leaked a cabinet submission.

Menzies kept that confession locked in his office, reputedly for use should McMahon ever again displease him. And though there were a considerable number of occasions where it seems that was warranted Menzies never did. Instead, McMahon was able to consolidate his positions, to keep moving upward through the ranks: from the Navy and Air to Social Services to Primary Industry – that is, agriculture – to Labour and National Service, to the Treasury, to External Affairs, and finally the Prime Ministership. He did this by exercising his capacities for administration, by relying on his department, by adept use of the media, by a fine degree of political judgment – and by taking advantage of the flaws and foibles of his colleagues.

McMahon’s election to the deputy leadership of the Liberal Party when Menzies retired in January 1966, is an example: he mustered support from all and sundry, including from outsiders, to cajole, lobby, and convince colleagues to support him over the more reluctant Hasluck.

McMahon thus became Treasurer to Harold Holt, and was a fixture, often a catalyst, in the tumultuous and bitter five years that followed.

The Holt Government began to dismantle the White Australia Policy – a pillar of what Paul Kelly termed the Australian Settlement – and set about responding to the British decision to withdraw forces “east of the Suez”. The Holt Government escalated Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam, and won, in convincing fashion, an election fought on support for that involvement.

McMahon, moreover, became locked in a sustained and poisonous battle with Country Party leader John McEwen over the tariff and protection for Australian industries. McMahon was seeking to bring down that pillar – another in the Australian Settlement – in the name of improving economic efficiency and increasing prosperity; McEwen was seeking to continue the long tradition of protection for Australian primary and secondary industry, not least because these were his constituency. McMahon’s fights over the tariff and protection were part of a much longer struggle that goes back to Federation;

 it was a faultline in those early governments of Deakin and Reid; and McMahon’s willingness to force that fight, when all others squibbed it, is very much to his credit.

Then Holt disappeared, in the waters off Cheviot Beach, and McEwen had the upper hand: he vetoed McMahon’s candidature for the prime ministership, said that neither he nor his party would serve under McMahon. And he helped to swing support behind John Gorton, a senator from Victoria of only a few short years’ Cabinet experience. Gorton became prime minister, and ushered in his own changes, his vision: a nationalism that was evident in decisions to protect Australian companies from foreign takeovers, an attempt to legislate for Commonwealth government control of the continental shelf, and a decision to establish a film and television school. There was antipathy all around: McMahon and McEwen were still locked in their battle over the tariff, McMahon and Gorton were at loggerheads over economic policy.

 And, in public, the government’s fortunes were on the wane.

Gorton went to an election late in 1969; was returned, with a swing against the government; and immediately faced a challenge to his leadership from McMahon and Minister for National Development David Fairbairn. He survived, but only for another sixteen months. In an affair likely triggered by McMahon, Malcolm Fraser resigned from Gorton’s ministry, savaged him in a speech in Parliament, and catalysed the tied vote of confidence in the Liberal party room that Gorton swiftly decided was in the negative. McMahon was elected prime minister. It was March 1971. He came to office with arguably the best preparation any prime minister has ever had: he had twenty years’ experience behind him – and 20 months in which to use it.

The very qualities that had enabled him to attain the prime ministership, in spite of all the obstacles and dislike of his colleagues, became also the flaws that handicapped his attempts to hold that office. His years of manipulation ensured he was untrusted by his colleagues. His years of leaking to the press meant his pleas for secrecy and solidarity went unheeded. His reliance on his departments meant that he could not cope when they failed. His paranoia led him to refuse to delegate, to involve himself in everything. And his long-sustained belief that he alone was responsible for his advances,

 that he alone had fought and won to have his way, left him unable to grasp that his own weaknesses.

To be sure, McMahon confronted a world in considerable flux. The certainties of earlier eras were at an end. The Keynesian consensus of the past 30 years on economic issues was giving way. The unquestioned alliance to the United States was in question. National security was no longer quite the electoral plus for the government. Societal changes were in abundant evidence. Students were taking to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam. Germaine Greer was galvanising the women’s rights movement with The Female Eunuch. The greens movement was beginning in Tasmania. Neville Bonner was taking a seat in federal parliament – the first indigenous Australian to do so.

And disunity and division – which had for so long crippled the Labor Party – was now afflicting the Liberal-Country Party government.

 McMahon now reaped what he had sowed. There was considerable bitterness, throughout McMahon’s time, over Gorton’s deposal. Cabinet meetings would proceed in a state of suspended hostility. Gorton, holding his cigarettes so that the smoke would blow right into McMahon’s nose, would puncture suggestions with a pithy, “Well, that’s got to be fucking stupid, doesn’t it?”

Gorton would resign the deputy leadership in August 1971 after a series of articles cast aspersions on his colleagues, but the bitterness over his fall would persist and discontent with McMahon would bubble on. Early in 1972, the MP for Wakefield, Bert Kelly, would write of McMahon, “How do we get rid of him? I suppose the only hope we have is that he suddenly drops dead one day.” A group of ministers, drinking one evening in August 1972 in the Cabinet anteroom, canvassed putting Doug Anthony into the top job, with McMahon retiring with a “diplomatic illness”. Rupert Murdoch would encourage Billy Snedden to challenge McMahon, promising support from his press if he did.

 Right up until the House was dissolved for the election in 1972, it appears, there were moves and whispers about unseating McMahon.

In world affairs, there was tension between means and ends, between what was possible and what was courageous. The People’s Republic of China was emerging from a long self-imposed exile, moving to engage with the world. McMahon was aware that the relationship with China needed to be considered but believed himself bound. He did not want to get in front of the United States, whose China policy Australia had followed for almost two decades.

Nor did he wish to expose himself to criticism from the anti-communist DLP.

 In his efforts to satisfy both of these he left an opening for Whitlam to exploit. When the Labor leader visited China in June 1971, McMahon sought to play politics – criticising Whitlam for betraying Australia’s allies – only to find that the United States had moved decisively to follow. McMahon was aghast. Flailing, he complained to the Americans about their secrecy, suggested Nixon would lose re-election, sacked his own foreign minister, Les Bury, blamed his staff and told colleagues that China was ‘a failure’ of his prime ministership.

That word was becoming a catch-all. Successes were overshadowed, dogged by error. McMahon had moved to withdraw Australian combat troops from Vietnam – and did; by December 1971, all combat troops were gone from the country

 – but he would get little credit for this. Battles with the Country Party would be exacerbated by changing terms of trade and battles over the currency. A tough budget in 1971–72 would win no friends, no admirers; a generous budget in the following year would be regarded as a desperate cash-grab.

Even a trip to the United States and to the UK, late in 1971, would turn sour. Nixon would forget how to pronounce McMahon’s name; would rebuff his pleas for reassurance of the importance of the ANZUS Treaty; and McMahon’s visit would become defined, it seems, by an over-revealing dress and a toast that mangled Shakespeare. The British high commissioner to Australia was scathing of McMahon; he told his superiors that McMahon “seems perennially surprised to find himself Prime Minister of such a solid and substantial country as Australia.

  Both his countrymen and – to an embarrassing extent – he himself, know that he is not much good in the part.”

Amid growing economic problems and eroding confidence in the government, McMahon turned on colleagues and staff. Whatever the public statements about politicians changing and growing and learning, one point that becomes clear in almost any biography is that the way a person works stays the same throughout their life. It was so of McMahon. He reaped the distrust he had sown for so long: he refused to delegate, he meddled and interfered, he manipulated and backgrounded.

McMahon was mercurial, prone to panic. His opinions shifted with the breeze.

 On Indigenous land rights, McMahon variously supported establishing a traditional association with the land as a basis for claims, then backtracked; then reversed course again; then again. When he announced on 26 January 1972 that his government would not legislate to have a traditional association with the land as a basis for claims, he explained that he had not done so because the government could not foresee the consequences. The next morning four Aboriginal activists were on the lawns outside Parliament House beneath an umbrella holding signs: “Aboriginal embassy”. They are still there today.

He blundered, he stumbled. He baffled, he infuriated. “What is wrong with him?” asked one Liberal MP. “I’ll be loyal to him because he is the leader,” said another. “But, Christ, he must be mad.” Journalists, too, grew infuriated with McMahon. “For god’s sake, behave like a prime minister!” Alan Reid told him.

McMahon blamed the Treasury and the Treasurer, Billy Snedden, for continued economic woes; he heaped blame on Sir John Bunting, the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, for giving him too much work. He told Bunting that “he would crack up if he went on with the work at the present rate”. He lashed out at his staff, blamed them for his problems. He was despairing of the press, and its turn to more critical coverage. Writers such as Mungo MacCallum and Bob Ellis, cartoonists like Leunig and Bruce Petty, and magazines like National Review: all of them gave him grief, and the growing prominence of TV compounded it.

In younger days McMahon had been adept on the new medium; now, he seemed wooden and stilted.

  Eric Pearce, a newsreader for Channel GTV-9, in Melbourne, came and offered McMahon advice. But after a fruitless few sessions he left, telling McMahon’s staff that it was “fucking hopeless” trying to work with the Prime Minister. This Day Tonight brought McMahon no end of heartache: it was sharp and satirical, merciless in its depiction of his dithering and his irresolution. Folk singer Eric Bogle summed it up with a briefly popular song:

Ah, poor wee Billy McMahon, he’s certainly no Superman,

He tries to be with it, and he dresses quite moddy,

But with his big ears, and his skinny wee body,

He looks like a cross between Big Ears and Noddy,

Poor wee Billy McMahon.

At a time when the press was increasingly focused on leaders – presidential politics – the contrast with Whitlam was too telling for McMahon. He was short where Whitlam was tall; thin where Whitlam was broad-chested; faint-voiced where Whitlam’s was sure; bald where Whitlam sported a full head of hair. He was abuzz and flighty where Whitlam was deliberate. And, where Whitlam spoke of a promising future and change, McMahon seemed a figure of the past.

But McMahon – amid all his difficulties – was trying. He pushed through changes.

 His government passed the Childcare Act (1972), which provided for Commonwealth intervention in the childcare sector, transforming it to a profession supported by research and grants. His government adopted the “polluter pays” principle for environmental protection; established the National Urban and Regional Development Authority; instituted an enquiry into poverty (what became known as the Henderson enquiry); passed the Foreign Takeovers Bill to prevent foreign takeovers of Australian companies; greatly expanded spending in education for independent schools, universities, and public schools; more than doubled the number of scholarships available for students attending colleges of advanced education.

Under McMahon, Australia entered into the Five Powers Defence Arrangement; accelerated independence for Papua New Guinea; and joined the OECD.

 It was a substantive record. As Donald Horne was to write, the years before Whitlam might have seemed an “interregnum period, rather shapeless, a little silly, not leading anywhere”. But this was false. These were the years of critical change. In terms of objective results, Horne claimed, McMahon had modernised the political agenda, and given voice to the changes underway in Australian society.

McMahon went to an election in December 1972. He found that the planks on which Liberal Party re-elections had been based for so long had gone rotten. State aid to private schools; the support of the business community; the spectre of communism; the reassurance of national security: all had given way. Even vital allies had deserted McMahon. Frank Packer sold The Daily Telegraph to Rupert Murdoch and Murdoch went all out for Labor. Nugget Coombs, whom McMahon had declared “his guiding philosopher” – and hit in the face with a squash racket – appeared to throw his support to the ALP.

McMahon’s own ministers seemed to desert him; then McMahon went on television and retaliated. “Well,” said one journalist, when he heard McMahon criticising his ministers, “he’s fucked himself now.”

  Few had any hope that McMahon could win the election, though McMahon himself expressed every confidence. As Graham Perkin, the Age editor, wrote to a friend, “The funny little man has convinced himself that he is a brilliant success and sees himself winning handsomely … and remaking the nation in the following three years; leading them to victory in 1975 and then retiring with honours thick upon him. God save us all!”

Whitlam emerged from the election victorious, with a nine-seat majority. Some have called this – wrongly, I believe – a landslide. But 2,000 votes, spread in just the right way, would have seen McMahon retain office. It’s Time would have gone down in Australian political history as one of the most hubristic slogans to have been adopted by a political party. And McMahon’s reputation would likely have been very different.

As the years went on, as the small achievements of McMahon’s government were built over by the Whitlam government,

 and overshadowed by that government’s successes and dramas, McMahon’s time as prime minister was consigned to the dark.

McMahon was always conscious of what was happening to his reputation and to his legacy. He was determined to correct it. He stayed in parliament for ten years after the election loss, hoping for recall to the front lines of politics. When that hope finally ran out, he retired and set himself to writing an autobiography that would tell all and would put things the way he saw them. He would not succeed. He died in 1988, his reputation as this country’s worst prime minister apparently confirmed.

The story of that failed autobiography – the ghostwriters who sought to help McMahon, the publishers who failed him – is woven through my biography. That story, I think, is important for what it reveals of how history is written: how the experience of the participants may not match up with the record; how in playing the game the participant sees, paradoxically, less of the game.

 From a spectator’s position, I hope, my book seeks to capture that whole game, the long sweep of history:  from the emerging years of Australia’s federation, to the turbulence of the Depression-wreaked 1930s, the turmoil of the Second World War, the unrealised nightmares that pervaded the 1950s, the flowering change of the 1960s, and the “time of hope”, as Donald Horne called it, of McMahon’s time in office in the 1970s.

I hope that I have given some taste of that to you tonight. Thank you.