Lockhart Road
Cultural Attache
- Mar 26, 2013
- 5,423
- 27,750
- AFL Club
- Port Adelaide
- Other Teams
- Port Adelaide Magpies
1 July 2021 - Celebrating 50 Years, to the Day, of China-Watching from Close Quarters … with nary a goalless one in all that time.
PART 1 -
OUT WITH THE 1954 DULLES / MENZIES CHINA PLAYBOOK … AND IN WITH WHITLAM’S
The Australian delegation to China flew into Peking near midnight on 3 July 1971 through “a prolonged and spectacular thunderstorm.”
It was the week before (Gough) Whitlam’s fifty-fifth birthday.
The motley crew of Australian politicians, journalists and academics bewildered their Chinese hosts. Their tendency to communicate in rhyming slang compounded the confusion already caused by the Australian accent, “a thing of terror” to Chinese ears familiar with English spoken by Americans.
(Billy Griffiths, Monash University Press, ‘Inside Story’, 22 October 2014.)
EDWARD GOUGH WHITLAM
Whitlam was at the Port Club one night as Guest of Honour invited by Mick Young, Labor Party representative for the Port District and the Club’s No. 1 Ticket Holder. My father derived genuine pleasure from listening to 5AN when Mick Young - as broad in the shoulder as an ex-shearer ought to be, with hair as curly as the sheep he used to clip - rose to his feet in Canberra. Pop could visualise Mick’s targets shrink like the next woolly victim in line while Mick turned them into second-raters. Pop took real pleasure, too, sitting at the kitchen table, gazing into the future as he talked up Whitlam as pioneer of an unforeseen generation of ‘educated’ federal Labor Party contenders, a generation essential to Labor’s recovery and survival, to take over from tired stalwarts like ‘honest but doomed’ Doc. Evatt and the tragic, eminently forgettable ‘two Wongs don’t make a white’ Arthur Calwell.
Another amongst Pop’s intellectual new breed of Labor rising stars was Don Dunstan. Young Don launched his career in state politics in early 1953 with a speech via loudspeaker from our front verandah at 9 Morris Street, Evandale. (In those days the fully-grown trees that now line the footpath were not there to interfere with the carry of Dunstan’s voice.) I was six years of age. I was captured. I recollect that heady summer evening very clearly. Dunstan was an instant hit. He took out the seat of Norwood, then made a point of taking a chair out at our kitchen table to sit down and thank my father for his advice and physical assistance. The red-brick terracotta-rooftile house in Morris Street remains the same. My parents rented it then bought it during the war years, having married in Wallaroo in 1939. I would stop the hire car outside each time I was in Adelaide and check out the place that had been my home for all my school years. The front verandah with its terrazzo floor my father put down one sweaty weekend is still there, the kitchen is around the back. I very much doubt the table is the same, never have I ventured inside to inspect. Once I did knock on the front door, perhaps a dozen years ago. No reply. Nobody was home but memories.
ARTLESS ART
“I do not think we will be beaten. There are no circumstances which would suggest even a remote possibility of the opposition winning 17 seats.”
So said Prime Minister Robert Menzies on the eve of the 9 December 1961 federal election. On the surface, Menzies had every right to sound confident … even if not he, nor anyone, had any right to sound arrogant. But he always did. Labor had fallen out with its own Catholic power-brokers, who broke away to establish the anti-ALP Democratic Labor Party. The DLP consequently gifted to the Liberal & Country Party coalition their second-preference votes, just one of an unnecessary excess of idiosyncrasies in Australia’s idiosyncratic excessively democratic electoral system that clicked in on polling day. Accordingly, when reading the room, any room, Menzies had lapsed into the habit of not fully focusing, of identifying less than what was there to be read. An economic situation called a credit squeeze was making life tough all over again for the working-class, especially those who had lived through the Depression, then had survived the war years. The banks were okay. Oh yes, the banks that Menzies looked after, they were hunky dory; they simply put their rates up and threatened Bluey and Snow and Ocker and Mrs Ocker with bare-faced foreclosure on their mortgages. What really had Menzies not bothering to read all the room all the time, however, was his opponent. The moon would turn blue before Pig Iron Bob dropped an election to artless Art.
Ordinary through and through, narrow of mind, stubborn and a race relations amateur for an ex-immigration minister in the Chifley Labor government was Arthur Calwell. This bloke, however, was a dead set trier. For all his shortcomings and a profile that was inarguably hands-and-heels working-class and the antithesis of anyone in a morning coat and pinstripe trousers on the opposite side of the House floor, he was no lie-down-roll-over member of parliament. Never would a blink of sophistication visit either eye, not the lazy left one nor the other. Never did a rounded vowel make it past his cracked and colourless lips before being ground flat and ugly by the sandpaper Calwell pronunciation. Never could his single buck tooth render him photogenic. Nevertheless, underneath all that camouflage, the Leader of the Opposition had an ambush set to be sprung.
DOOMSDAY ENOUGH
In spite of his portfolio of negatives conspiring against him, in 1961 just one seat, a single swinging parliamentary seat, was the skin-of-the-teeth margin in the Australian federal election that prevented Calwell from beating Menzies. Just the one solitary parliamentary seat kept Labor from embarrassing the grandee who’d founded the Liberal Party in 1944 to within the last palpitation of his political heart. And this result went down despite the LCP coalition coming up short by broad daylight in the national vote in the House of Representatives. More about gerrymandering later.
The sitting LCP member in Moreton Bay eventually fingernailed what masqueraded as a win by a measly 130 votes. Such a hairsbreadth ‘majority’ provoked a panic-stricken Menzies into panic-stricken retaliation. He set about whipping up a hate campaign. His objective was for it to be emotional enough, fearsome enough, doomsday enough, to twist voters enough to guarantee him victory minus photo finish at the next poll.
His retaliative target: the People’s Republic of China.
The notorious Domino Theory: another Big Lie, rendered so by the aftermath of its first test -
South Vietnam. Ironically … renowned Vietnam War correspondent, author and historian Stanley
Karnow was to observe … the real domino to fall was American public opinion. No less ironically,
considering Australia was co-promoter of the theory and the ultimate target for the March of the
Tumbling Dominoes, the LCP coaltion and Catholic-dominated DLP in Canberra looked on aghast
as public opinion Down Under did likewise. And then, in 1979, China turned the simple-minded
theory wholly inside-out by launching a three-pronged invasion into a by-then forcefully unified
communist Vietnam across the two countries’ common border. China came off second-best in a
fight that went on for two months. The PLA have yet to live that down, and should be wary of a
repeat embarrassment in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait in particular.
“With the black cloud of communist China hanging to the north, we must make sure that our children do not end up pulling rickshaws with hammer and sickle signs on their sides...”
For Menzies, the events of December 1961 have been called a ‘near-death’ experience. Anyone who lives through any such phenomenon invariably decides to make changes to their lifestyle. Menzies had long thought he was immortal. He had been since early 1960 not just Australia’s prime minister but also the country’s minister for external affairs (‘foreign minister’ in most other places), itself a full-time portfolio if done properly. This self-important wearing of two very important hats played into Calwell’s hands. Menzies’ near-fatal stumble, if not fall, indeed cometh after his excess of pride, made all the more dangerous for him by his excess of disregard for his Labor opponent, a mistake he never made again.
FROWN OF THE LUCKY COUNTRY
Menzies took his cue for a fresh pitch to the Australian voting public from some dubious scaremongering in 1954 by his perceived Liberal Party leadership rival and predecessor as external affairs minister, Richard Casey - himself formerly Canberra’s ambassador to Washington. (In 1965, aged 75, he would become Lord Casey, governor-general.) This fellow had sure been there, had sure done that, had pinned to his ceremonial tunic a Great War DSO plus a Military Cross that had been awarded to him for being in the right spots at Gallipoli and the Western Front. Casey had not been taking things easy, working his route up the power steps until at the top of his Xmas card list were names such as Ike, John Foster Dulles (U.S. Secretary of State), Anthony Eden (whom he closely resembled) and Winston Churchill on whose WWII war administration Casey had served from Egypt then Bengal, rare air indeed for an ethnic Australian to be breathing.
In April 1954 Casey brought the frown of the Lucky Country to Geneva for the international conference which would, consequent to the imminent massacre of the French military at Dien Bien Phu, determine what a partitioning of Vietnam might look like. Prior to leaving Melbourne, according to Paul Ham, historian and author of ‘VIETNAM - The Australian War’, published by Harper Collins in 2007, Casey warned a crowded room: “The world is very disturbed … The United States of America is on our side. It is on the side of democracy, decency and right, and the forces of darkness opposed to it are very apparent and very powerful.” Heavy stuff, but mild compared to what he came out with on returning home, having been thoroughly spooked by Zhou Enlai.
A RED HOT BLAST OF EAST WIND
Dulles and Casey looked on, or tried to, as behind closed doors Zhou - who spoke French as fluently as he did English - played like a piccolo the French prime minister, who was facing an election at home and negotiating under the added pressure of a self-imposed schedule as tight and touch-and-go as a noose around his neck and a trapdoor beneath his feet. The international compromise at the 17th parallel went against the demands of Ho Chi Minh whose forces had won the war, and who sought no compromise short of 100% of Vietnam. Imagine the state of panic Casey would’ve brought home if Zhou had been thoroughly on Uncle Ho’s side, instead of just being determined to keep the North Vietnamese under control. Imagine if Zhou had secured for Ho a lower parallel, or even the entire country. Zhou Enlai, it would seem, without the two having communicated via much more than a glance, had delivered a red hot blast of east wind up Casey’s fundamental orifice. So hot was Zhou’s performance at Geneva that Casey lost all sight, all grip, of reality. On landing back in Melbourne, his mood no doubt exacerbated by Dulles’s characteristic and flagrant hatred of all things communist, Casey lost everything else that hitherto had been tremulously holding together inside of him.
He started to rant and rave. One classic, again as quoted by Paul Ham, was:“With the black cloud of communist China hanging to the north, we must make sure that our children do not end up pulling rickshaws with hammer and sickle signs on their sides ...” China, ‘rickshaws’ and ‘hammer and sickle’ all in the same sentence? This was a long way short of Richard Casey‘s finest moment. A hammer and sickle was in fact the insignia of the PKI, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, the ‘largest non-ruling communist party in the world‘ at the time, its genesis dating back to pre-WWI when it was formed in opposition to the colonialist Dutch administration of the East Indies. Casey went on, as if to overcorrect himself: “International communism might be on Australia’s doorstep within eighteen months.” In other words, by the end of 1955 - in the excited and fatalistic judgement of this ‘external affairs’ expert, this imperialist Australian patrician whose first love was not Australia but the British Commonwealth as a whole - both the USSR and the PRC would conceivably, and jointly, be positioned, ready and able with sufficient hardened military personnel, machines of war, munitions, materiel and support services to invade and capture Australia, having already in just that year and a half gobbled up for the Comintern (Communist International) in quick-fire succession South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, Singapore, Borneo and Indonesia. This was just the sort of glossy ‘Eagle‘ magazine Dan Dare fantasy that Menzies was looking for, to over-emphasise and plant firmly in the mind of his geographically isolated, worldly unwise and vulnerable public - thereby insulating his one-seat majority for at least two years after 9 December 1961 … until he could safely call for a recount via a brought-forward follow-up election.
Having a giggle at Geneva in 1954 - while Zhou Enlai was off negotiating in
French and getting the job done on Vietnam - are (from right) Australia’s
Richard Casey, America’s John Foster Dulles and Belgium’s foreign minister.
Neither Dulles nor his protege Casey had ever had any regard whatsoever
for the Chinese. Dulles infamously refused to shake Zhou’s hand in Geneva,
an affront that broadcast much about Dulles and his weaknesses, and also
gifted Zhou extra motivation to outwit the USA. As for Casey, he viewed the
Chinese, according to a paper published in Melbourne in 1931, as having ‘no
national spirit and no genius for government (but) sees prospects in China
for the Australian trade in wheat since “taste for bread … once on the palate
of a race, is liable to supplant the rather flat and insipid taste of rice.”’ This
observation by Casey was only slightly less absurd than his “our children …
pulling rickshaws with hammer and sickle signs” on his return home after
Geneva in 1954.
The south-eastern Queensland seat of Moreton in 1961, and those 130 LCP votes, precipitated what would turn out to be the strategic yet token assembly and delivery of an Australian Infantry battalion to South Vietnam. Menzies had to get the Army to grow in a hurry - and so be able to, in addition to supporting the USA in Vietnam, help Britain deal with the tense situation in Borneo where Indonesia and Malaya were in conflict over ownership of Sarawak and North Borneo (Sabah). Thus evolved the reintroduction of conscription of select young men to serve in uniform … none of whom, Menzies assured with forked tongue, would be sent off to war. A few years later I would be one of those young men, despite there existing in Canberra an eyes-only ‘red file’ with my father’s name on the cover. In December 1961 the Australian Communist Party was still an unbanned institution; it received 25,429 votes. How ‘select’ was applied to me upon call-up, considering the regulation pre-enlistment security vetting - three background checks, each different, on each and every conscript - Pop never understood. He took it personally.
MORE REBEL THAN RED
Pop was not a communist. Impressed with what he said and the hard yakka he put in for the ALP, the SA branch of the communist party did what it could to recruit him. His decision in the end was not to trust them. They drank too heavily, womanised too openly and were only in the caper to party every night. My mother made sure Pop accepted that the ACP was no place for him. If he didn’t, she said, he would be there on his own. I recall the sparkling clear October night in 1957 when Pop took my brother and me out on the back lawn to watch Sputnik traverse the starlit sky. He was a proud man that night, proud of the fact that somebody - in this case the Soviets, but it could’ve been the Siamese for all he cared - had stuck it up the Yanks. And what did we all get as a consequential reward decades later? The Internet. No, Pop was more rebel than red, and much of him, looking back, rubbed off on me. As a result, through my life I have bucked the prevailing trend, disdained the beaten path, detested any retreat into mediocrity and barracked for Port Adelaide. My father was born in November 1904, in Wallaroo, and thus had watched Harold Oliver, Shine Hosking, Punch Mucklow, Bull Reval, Big Bob McLean and Bobbie Quinn play before I arrived on the scene by accident as a baby boomer when Pop was already 42.
He was a self-taught carpenter, cabinet maker, electrician, brickie and plasterer, and building site foreman. He taught me to drive on the firm sand of Wallaroo’s North Beach in the column-shift EH Holden that materialsed in the Morris Street driveway to announce Pop’s appointment as SA Carpenters’ Union Organiser. During the war he’d worked at Parafield repairing and refitting, rebuilding even, the insides of all-wood all-Australian-made Mosquito fighter-bombers that had malfunctioned and / or crashed during training flights; there were a lot, the plane was a death trap. He could sign-write, too, for kitchen money, and drew Disney characters on sheets of butcher’s paper and pinned them up on the bedroom wall so silently that they came to life as if by Disney magic the moment my eyes opened in the morning. Pop possessed one or two ornery West Country genes via his dad and a lot of artistic Shetland Island genes via his ma. Ever the atheist when he wasn’t being agnostic, he would quote in his mother’s accent this beloved line from Robbie Burns: “Oh wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us.”
Robbie Burns mug shot.
A “monster brought forth to swallow and devour your Liberties and equal Rights”.
JERRY MANDA & PIG IRON BOB
A close second on Pop’s wish list of gifts from on high was to possess a vivid imagination and, most importantly, be able to put it to work. Imagination minus opportunity is a curse, like inheriting a Ferrari whilst serving a life term in prison for whatever. Pop, disillusioned, put down, roughed up and honed by the Depression and the war years, could nevertheless see through his mind‘s eye a world that was perfect - a world in which the Liberal & Country Party did not exist. Even more perfect: a world where the Master Manipulator … some bloke who’d never been caught on camera, whom no-one had seen, who reduced Pop to a snort when I asked him to draw this bloke’s face on butcher’s paper … a crafty cheating ruling-class bastard, the LCP’s ultimate infallible political fixer who hid behind the name of Jerry Manda … was caught, given a fair trial, stood against a wall, and shot through his non-existent heart.
Genesis of the dreaded Gerrymander
University of Vermont, Joshua E. Brown, March 22, 2018:
In 1812, the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, approved a narrow and winding voting district for the
state senate that curved from Marblehead around to Salisbury. It looked like a long-necked salamander,
Federalist newspaper editors declared. They labeled the district “The Gerry-Mander” and the Salem-Gazette
warned that it was a “monster brought forth to swallow and devour your Liberties and equal Rights”.
Cambridge Dictionary: ‘gerrymander’ - to change the borders of an area in order to increase the number of
people within that area who will vote for a particular party or person.
Politics for the underdog was Pop‘s passion in life. That and Port Adelaide Football Club. He subscribed to no religion, had no passion for any church, just the opposite. And he was no racist, not by the standards of my childhood. He often told me about the freak athleticism of Jesse Owens in Berlin in 1936, and about the five balls of pure lightning Eddie Gilbert flung in 1931 at Bradman who saw not one en route to his dismissal off the fifth, a bumper hooked in blind, desperate self-defence that went straight up in the air … and he took me one balmy night to Memorial Drive to sit enthralled at the antics under outdoor lights of the Harlem Globetrotters. He looked up only to his fellow rebels, and down on any human demographic that dared to look upon itself as superior, or who interfered uninvited with the lives of others. Particularly deserving of Pop’s invective was Pig Iron Bob Menzies. He hated Menzies’ guts. In vain he dreamed of the opportunity to tell the despotic monarchist bludger all about it. Ne‘er had there been an instant, and never would there be, Pop would mutter, when Menzies dared to see himself as others saw him.
But perhaps he did. Perhaps there were moments when Pig Iron Bob did see himself as others saw him, and it was not a pretty sight. Menzies, born in 1894, was twenty years of age himself when the Great War broke out in Europe. Both his brothers enlisted, but he never did. He never tried to explain why, though he was asked many times. It was as if he had something in his closet that had to stay shut away. It is rumoured that his mother decided sending two out of three sons overseas to war was enough commitment for one ruling-class family. Bob was required, instead, from 1914 to 1918, to go through with his Law studies and content himself with compulsory this and that with the Melbourne University Rifles. Straight after the war he entered pupilage en route to admittance to the Bar as a barrister, specialising in constitutional law. But the twist in all this is that Menzies was a vocal supporter, during the war, during his studies, of conscription - just so long as it didn’t include him. Come the 1950s, as prime minister, he again supported conscription and saw that it was made law. In 1964 he did it yet again - and for the third time in his seventy years conscription was for others, not him. He was absolutely determined that conscription be reintroduced to bolster the Army and impress the Americans, and he imposed his will on his cabinet with all his might. There was a dictator lurking inside Bob Menzies, and in 1964, having been safely re-elected, he let it loose.
Did Australians see Menzies as a fellow Australian? In February 1966 decimal currency was introduced Down Under.
I can recollect working through an entire weekend on triple-time in the accounts department at the Repat converting
war pension cards by hand from pounds, shillings and pence into dollars and cents, whilst a transistor radio gave out
ABC commentary of Bob Cowper grinding his way to 307 in the 5th Test versus England at the MCG. There had been
extended and intense debate in Canberra prior to the simple, logical nomenclature ‘Australian Dollar’ being decided,
under considerable public pressure. Menzies? Knighted by the Queen in 1963 he did his royal damnedest to make our
new national currency into the ‘Royal Dollar’ having at one time had it on the cusp of being christened, with blatant
disregard, the ‘Royal’. Oh no, no Aussie was the Pig Iron B.
Whitlam’s trip to China started as an adventure
and ended with a coup
Stephen FitzGerald
(Excerpts from his opinion piece - published in the Australian Financial Review on 1 July 2021 - in italics below, with each excerpt separated by a personal commentary.)
FitzGerald, 1 July 2021:
It’s not the first time China has been “coming down” to “get” Australia, or “the Chinese” seeking to overrun us. It’s a paranoia that goes back to the 19th century of course, variously dormant or active depending in part on how much political oxygen it’s given.
In 1971 it was fed by a clamorous government invocation of a “downward thrust” (originally former prime minister Robert Menzies’ words) bent on invasion of Australia and now blending the old bogey of race with the new one of communism.
And with the Vietnam hot war on top of the Cold War, the politics were rough and often dirty. The anti-war movement, and Labor’s part in it, excited the government to frenzied attacks on Labor as dupes of Asian communism. In that environment, it was not an attack easily met with rational argument.
Since 1949, the invocation of a communist threat by conservative governments and the tarring of Labor with a communist brush had contributed to keeping Labor out of government. As then-prime minister Billie McMahon candidly boasted in 1971, China was “a political asset to the Liberal Party”. It was a liability for Labor.
We had no diplomatic relations, we voted regularly against Beijing taking the China seat in the United Nations, we recognised and promoted the defeated Chinese nationalists (Kuomintang / KMT) in Taiwan as the government of the whole of China. We had troops fighting in Vietnam, a war constructed by the government as prosecuted by China, and so by this construction we were actually at war with China.
Ramifications
Now for the coincidence that has prompted me to not only research these parallel yet interconnecting stories of not just Whitlam, China and me, also Menzies, Vietnam and me, and all their ramifications, but also format them into a single account and write it. As Gough and his party, including FitzGerald, were en route to Peking, to where there were no direct flights from capitalist airports outside China, certainly not Hong Kong, and would not be for a long time, I had landed at Kai Tak Airport - my fourth landing in the Pearl of the Orient. My first touch-down had been in May 1969 on a short R&R from Vietnam, my second in September that same year on pre-discharge leave for two weeks. My third had been in March 1971 when I took a month‘s holiday care-of the Repatriation Commission (now DVA) in Pulteney Street, separated from M.S. McLeod Tyres by a laneway in which I parked my white Morris 1100 prior to Army service, then my fire-engine red Triumph Spitfire Mark III post discharge. The Repat became my first employer when I qualified for my Leaving Certificate after four years at Norwood High, then did as the certificate suggested. I left.
In January 1964 I’d started work at the murky bottom of the mineshaft, not in the hub of bureaucracy called Registry, in the file room out back of the beige three-storey building (originally two-storey per photo below) that housed the men, women, clerks, comptometrists and paraphernalia of the Repatriation Commission, the good ol’ ‘Repat’ … the irony of which has never escaped me: I would be able to find my own thin file in there ere long. My fourth Hong Kong landing, at the start of July 1971, had been set up, though imperfectly as would soon become evident, during my month-long return holiday earlier that year. The adventure that I’d imagined and assiduously saved up for had been plotted well in advance.
The Repat - Repatriation Commission, 186
Pulteney Street, Adelaide, next to McLeod
Tyres and directly across the road from the
Somerset Hotel.
Prospecting for gold
I landed with a six-month working visa stamped in my passport, issued on the guarantee of an American pyramid scheme shyster by the name of Chuck McKinley, who operated out of Asian House in Wanchai under the cover of an insurance company called Piedmont International. I did not pay the HK$1,000 deposit McKinley was due as part of the deal. I did not take delivery of the initial batch of BCI brand detergent I was supposed to on-sell. I stepped instead on to a different path, one not yet trodden, and went looking for a legitimate and permanent job in an East-meets-West wonderland that had far more possibilities in my imagination than it did in reality.
That job search turned into harder work than I thought possible. Actually, I didn’t think, I simply charged ahead from one contact to the next. As far as I was concerned I was prospecting for gold, digging into every crack in every wall I came across. Eventually I happened upon a flukey situation that I would massage into the perfect career for myself, but only after five hypertonic and hyper-educational months of priceless hyper-networking. By then all that remained in my pocket was a solitary red HK$100 note (as narrated in full in a previous ‘docudrama’ thread titled ‘Up the China Rabbit-hole’).
Somehow I managed not to be deported when I fronted up at Immigration to apply for a new working visa to replace the one whose restrictions I had not complied with. My fourth landing in Hong Kong thus was my last as a non-resident. My local ID card, first issued in October 1971, has since before the 1997 Handover to China classified me as ‘Permanent’.
To secure a convenience
FitzGerald 1 July 2021 (cont’d):
(July 1971 was not) the best moment to be launching a bid to engage (with Peking) some might have ‘thought, and many in Whitlam’s party said it was mad, and likely to lose them the next election, within Labor’s grasp for the first time in 23 years. He was the first Labor leader with the courage to take up this challenge. It not only flew in the face of Australia’s foreign policy, and Washington’s, it was at great risk to his own and his party’s fortunes. But his decision was calculated, and consistent with ALP policy since 1955 to recognise Beijing. Whitlam himself had first called for recognition in his maiden speech to Parliament in 1954. He saw this as rational, logical and in the nation’s interests. He believed we must accept that China is a permanent and significant part of the international landscape, whatever its government or what we think of it, and like Churchill he believed “the reason for having diplomatic relations is not to confer a compliment, but to secure a convenience”.
The wheat silos at Wallaroo. I can remember, as a child, watching the first one being built.
Wheat. Richard Casey had foreseen a market for it in China as far back as 1931, but taste
had less to do with it than cost and availability. Australia’s wheat export to China could be
turned off or on at Peking’s whim. When Whitlam went to China in July 1971 it was off and
the Wheat Board was in a flap. When Whitlam left China a week later it was on.
“Would you mind travelling economy class?”
… Whitlam, and ALP Federal Secretary Mick Young, had seen an opportunity. Quarantined from the politics of enmity and fear, Australia had quietly been selling wheat to China since 1960, worth over $100 million a year. But the Australian Wheat Board had returned empty-handed from China in late 1970, and this was public news. For the first time since 1949, the government was in difficulty on China.
If the trigger was trade, the opportunity was diplomatic engagement, and in the ALP’s cable to Premier Zhou Enlai, it sought discussion of diplomatic relations, not just trade.
Whitlam had also been reading the signs. Some other countries, notably Canada, were moving to recognition of Beijing, there were indications the US might be about to shift, and China itself had signalled a willingness to engage, inviting the US table tennis team to Beijing, the start of what became known as ping-pong diplomacy.
I was neither politician nor Party official, and had no expectation that I would be part of this adventure. But the day after the invitation arrived from China, Whitlam tracked me down in the Curtin pub, where I’d gone to meet Mick Young … . He asked me to join as China adviser, then added, with his familiar irony: “Would you mind travelling economy class?” Would I what! I spent the six weeks before departure and the two weeks on the road trying to meet the demands of (Whitlam’s) prodigious thirst for knowledge.
Stephen FitzGerald
Confronting the beast
(Edited excerpt from the docudrama ‘Up the China Rabbit-hole’, narrated by Lockhart Road, published on BigFooty, 9 April 2019) :
Desperation is the mother of downsized ambitions. I’d been interviewed, had cold-called and applied in writing for all sorts of vocations: clerical, administrative, assistant-to, manual, a police cadet (eyesight failed me on the spot), TV newsreader, nightclub bouncer (two years infantry sounded good, but no), sub-editor for United Press International, reporter for an English-language newspaper - Hong Kong published four such dailies, the most prominent being the ‘South China Morning Post’ - then went back to ‘go’, virtually, via the Australian Commission and (another) Commonwealth Public Service-issue office desk, in admittedly a different hemisphere, that had fallen temporarily vacant.
This time, armed with a written introduction from somebody - it could have been Keith Hooper of Far East Advertising, previously with ‘The Advertiser’ - when I called on the Commission, 9th Floor, Union House, I’d been taken eastward down Chater Road to lunch at the Hong Kong Cricket Club (a year later I’d be myself a formally-introduced member, saddled with a HK$500 joining fee which today stretches to six figures) by senior administrator, Bruce Denham. He read to me the riot act - not in the least unreasonable in view of the DUI cropper of my predecessor and the fact that I was boarding in a house of ill repute: Chungking Mansions on Nathan Road, Tsimshatsui (TST).
Looking west down Peking Road circa 1971 towards Chungking
Mansions, facing camera from the other side of Nathan Road, on
which British Leyland double-deckers travel to (south) and from
the Tsimshatsui waterfront and, next to the ‘Star’ Ferry pier, the
Kowloon-Canton Railway terminus of which only the clock tower
still stands.
Home to me was one big concrete box, a high-rise network of neon signage, a beacon, a kaleidescope, a place to be, a place to be from. Chungking Mansions was a multinational vertical Greenwich Village. The air I breathed was a living thing, marinated with a bittersweet cocktail of curry, kimchee, durian and Chinese medicinal herbs and cooking spices, the sound and sight effects of hustling Indian custom tailors, crammed-to-the-ceiling mini electronics marts, pop, rock and jazz music stalls, Cantonese opera stalls, girly magazine stalls and whatever other sorts of stalls, and that was just the lobby. A piquant muskiness of marijuana circulated, resupplied from skinny elevators when their doors opened, having travelled through floor after floor after floor of original sin. In spite of this smudge on my reference, Bruce Denham took me on as ‘local’ labour, nothing special, and had me paid HK$2,300 per month. What hooked me up to the gig was my instant availability, plus inbuilt employer’s insurance of sorts in that I was still on Canberra’s books as being absent on a year’s ‘special leave’ minus pay, could be checked up on, even intimidated. When I’d flown up to Hong Kong for my fourth landing, you see, I had not, in fact, burnt all my bridges behind me.
My six weeks under Bruce’s wing and Doubting Thomas eye brought with them a memory that has endured. There was the morning I was on my way to work, sitting next to the rail of the ‘Star’ Ferry as it filled up at the Tsimshatsui pier on Kowloon side with a boatload of commuters and tourists - including American servicemen on R&R as the war … though rapidly scaling down as far as Washington was concerned, maintaining artillery and air power but handing the fighting on the ground and even disastrous sortees into Laos over to the locals in what they called ‘Vietnamisation’ … was still in progress. My row wasn’t occupied, apart from me, until suddenly it was. A human shape featuring familiar white hair and thick bent black caterpillar eyebrows loomed from starboard, and lumbered with the help of a walking stick across the deck towards me.
You guessed it.
It was Bob Menzies … assisted by his better half, Dame Pattie.
The ‘Star’ Ferry’s green and white Northern Star circa 1971 steaming south
across Victoria Harbour to Central pier and the CBD, Hong Kong Island.
Nobody worse to elevate
They deposited themselves right next to me. Menzies nodded, said “Good morning,” as he’d seen that I’d recognised him; Pattie said something similar, quite sweetly. I said nought. Here was the very ex-prime minister who’d reintroduced the draft, who’d drawn my birth date out of a barrel and sent me off to war. (In fact, I’d indirectly volunteered for service in Vietnam by transferring myself from 7RAR, which in April 1968 was on its way home after its first active service tour, to 9RAR which would be going to war that November, but I won’t dwell on that.) Here was the bastard, the very one, who’d slid open the first of my adult sliding doors, to have me, after twists and turns, detours and forks in the road, being sat there at the port rail on the ‘Star’ Ferry right up next to him … close enough to slip a sharpened bayonet under his ribs, give it a twist, and get away with it.
Menzies hadn’t been PM since January 1966 when he passed the poisoned chalice to Harold Holt. Holt was gone by the end of 1967, and now John Gorton was past tense to boot, usurped by Big Ears Billy McMahon and Sonia, his ubiquitous handbag with legs attached that swept upwards to her armpits and were the only agenda item Nixon would recall from the McMahons’ regulation visit in 1971 to Washington, DC. The LCP coalition was embroiled in an internal duel: McMahon versus the rest - the inevitable legacy, for them, of Menzies’ asphyxiating twenty-one-year grip on absolute power, as Liberal Party founder and leader since 1944, and as prime minister since 1949. If McMahon had his over-ambitious way he would’ve imposed himself as PM the instant Holt was declared a missing person. Paul Hasluck, essentially Menzies’ war minister when it came to Indo-China, had not a nice syllable for McMahon … ‘contemptible creature’ being two words too many in his assassination of the character McMahon didn’t have. To think that Big Ears Billy, prior to being grudgingly made acting PM by his party in early 1971, there being nobody worse to elevate, had been foreign minister: Australia’s caricature of an envoy to a world that knew nothing worth knowing about Australia and which, having experienced him, was glad of it.
For the McMahons’ White House attendance in 1971 the dress Sonia chose to almost wear was indeed split all the way
up to her armpits, a two-inch gap at the hips there to render her anatomy a straightforward street map for Nixon to
read. The strategy to this, knowing McMahon’s reptilian predilections, may have been to use his wife as a distraction,
to render Nixon speechless enough to be incapable of discussing America’s withdrawal from, and defeat in, Vietnam.
Part of Menzies’ own and LCP coalition strategy was to not only get American combat troops into Vietnam in 1965,
but to keep them there indefinitely for Australia’s benefit.
Call it vengeance
For a long, long time I sat, thinking on all this, as the romantic, nostalgic, iconic, bow at the front and bow at the back double-decker putted and churned across the harbour - a trip twice as long and enjoyable then as it is today due to land reclamation along the Island waterfront - racking my grey matter to concoct something appropriate, biting and brilliant. Finally, when the journey was all but over, I had it. I knew word-for-word what to hiss out of the right-hand corner of my mouth.
“My father hates your guts.”
Pig Iron Bob did not react. Not a quiver. Not a sound, not even a sigh, not even a rustle of his dark-blue business suit. He hadn’t heard what I said … probably because I didn’t say it out loud.
As the ferry passengers disembarked at Central pier, I hung back and studied Menzies as he was helped across the ramp by Dame Pattie up the steps and into the back of a black limo. A month or so later, at his home in Melbourne, Sir Robert was struck down, by a massive stroke, resulting in cruel paralysis which sentenced him to a wheelchair in public for the seven years he had left to live. Apparently I was already having a telling effect on people with whom I rubbed shoulders and rode ferries next to in the Pearl of the Orient.
Pop’s ornery carpenters’ union genes would’ve said: “Call it vengeance.”
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/nightlife/pig-iron-bob/11116038
HINDSIGHT
Looking back on that September morning in 1971 with Pig Iron Bob Menzies by my side crossing Victoria Harbour on the ‘Star’ Ferry … I can see it all. Fifty years later I can see everything, including stuff I had never realised was there. It was no accident, that incident. It was pre-ordained. It was all meant to tell me something. Now is an opportune moment to recognise how important it was … fifty years into the future. Now, today, as against then … looking back.
27 January 1971 to 14 February 1972 was, by the Chinese lunar calendar, the Year of the Pig. So there was Pig Iron in its human form next to me in a Pig Year. I was born in another Pig Year, two cycles of twelve years each previously, meaning 1947, meaning I was twenty-four. The twelve-year lunar cycle is made by the twelve animals, chosen by Buddha in the order of their arrival to greet him. The animals are mutiplied by the five vital elements to create the sixty-year greater cycle. These elements, in chronological order, own two consecutive years each per decade: Gold (or Metal), Water, Wood, Fire and Earth. So I am a Fire Pig and 1971 was the Year of the Metal (or Gold) Pig. Pig Iron is a metal. Pig Iron Bob came out of the blue to rub shoulders with me. It was an omen, I now realise in hindsight. I am a believer in Oriental omens, good and bad, the upshot of half a century of being on the receiving end.
Gold / Metal Pig Year plus Fire Pig meets Pig Iron Bob, in hindsight, was an omen of the good type for me in terms of my quest in 1971 to stay in Hong Kong, to make the place my home for the rest of my life. Outcome: I’m still here. Not so good for Bob. He is not. He is neither here, nor there. A month later he had that stroke and took to a wheelchair; sitting down seven years later reading a book he had a fatal heart attack. I wonder if something in the book reminded him of the ‘Star’ Ferry in September 1971 and the young Aussie male in a light-grey business suit, twenty-four years of age, old enough to have recently served in Vietnam, who gave him such an unwelcoming look as he took aim at the spot on the ferry bench right next to me and said: “Good morning.” Might’ve made him think, that look. Might’ve had him, just for a long overdue moment, see himself as others saw him. How’s that, Pop?
How bloody McMahon
A helluva lot of metal goes into building a Centurion tank. Sitting on the ferry with Bob - the man who sent the tanks, the troops, and me, to war - I wasn’t aware that, somewhat ironically, the last of our Centurions was being shipped home via Vung Tau … ‘against the commander’s advice that they should stay until the end to provide the infantry with the mobile firepower they needed against enemy bunkers.’
‘Canberra Times‘, Max Blenkin, 15 April 2020: Just how the risk had increased was demonstrated in the last major Australian action of the conflict, Operation Ivanhoe in September 1971. Soldiers of 3RAR and 4RAR/NZ attacked enemy positions without armour support, resulting in five killed and 30 wounded.
Operation Surfside, April / May 1969. So named because it took place in dense jungle above the coastal
beaches south-east of Nui Dat. The objective was to find and destroy disused Viet Cong bunker systems,
to make it hard work for them to be rebuilt and reoccupied, hence the role of the Centurion tank (above)
from B Squadron, 1st Armoured Regiment, RAAC. I reckon I recognise these two diggers from Charlie Coy.
(the WTFRW) 9RAR, carrying heavy SLRs, per their role as riflemen spotting for the tankies. Another two
riflemen would probably be behind the tank, eyes to the rear. The remainder of the ten-man rifle section
(if it was at full strength, which would be rare) are up the front, behind the camera. Said remainder would
be the two forward scouts and an n.c.o. section leader with their lightweight low-velocity M-16 Armalites
(gimme an AK-47 any day of the war) plus the M-60 gunner and his No. 2 lugging bandoliers of 7.62mm
ammo, plus the section 2IC who would, at enemy contact, take charge of the gun crew, direct the gun to
high ground if there was any, and spread the four riflemen, who would be on the deck, aiming outward in
star formation. It goes without saying that such a choreography, rehearsed ad infinitum during training in
Australia, rarely went to plan in real life.
We were no longer really needed. By ‘we’ I mean ‘us’: the diggers, the grunts, the dinky-die Infantry. The Americans, their focus on the ground being on ‘Vietnamization’, had wholly forgotten we were there. They‘d lost the war, politically if not outright militarily. Therefore so had we. After relieving 9RAR in November 1969, 8RAR were themselves removed but not replaced at the end of their thirteen-month tour of duty. Big Ears Billy chose, to the day, the fifth anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan to announce 8RAR was superfluous to needs in Vietnam. How rude. How McMahon. 1971 carried on with what had been a rotating core of three Australian Infantry battalions cut to two. By March 1972, after months of those two units doing not much more than securing the base of our reduced task force at Nui Dat and facilities at Vung Tau, there would be none. McMahon, note, had been minister for labour and national service at the time he unveiled his Conscription Act. He did so, true to form, minus feel, on Remembrance Day, 1964. One critique of the act reduced it to ‘a political and legal abomination - vague, obtuse and ill-presented.’ How bloody McMahon.
The last impossibility
In 1964 Menzies had fronted up at the Pentagon with a scheme for the Secretary of Defense to muster American power to protect the Commonwealth of Australia, all of it, from invasion by communist China … for as long as possible, preferably indefinitely. There was something opaque called ‘ANZUS’ as a side issue: a deal, a treaty, a mutual defence mechanism. What it amounted to was that at the same time America was saving all of Australia and New Zealand from communist China, the diggers and our Centurion tanks, and the Kiwis and their artillery pieces, plus the SAS of course, would under the treaty metaphorically protect a few undefined acres of the United States of America from that same communist China … for as long as possible, preferably indefinitely. ANZUS was a deal struck between an elephant and two mice, one fat and flat as mice go, the other being New Zealand.
In December 1978 - Menzies having earlier that year kicked the bucket (what transpired is no consequence of him doing that, perhaps) - Washington put up its hand at the U.N. to recognise the PRC as the real ‘China’, and promised to relocate their embassy westward across the Taiwan Strait, from Taipei to Peking. In so doing, Washington belatedly imitated what Canberra and Wellington had done six years before. America recognising communist China in 1978, the year he died, was the last, the most treasonous, impossibility Menzies had in mind whilst lobbying at the Pentagon in 1964 - stirring up an Indo-Pacific pot of steaming hate, racism and determination which included an embargo on the U.S. embassy, also those of Australia and New Zealand, abandoning Taipei - indefinitely and if possible forever.
Robert Gordon Menzies died on 15 May 1978. This poster appeared overnight
all over Sydney and Melbourne, attributed to ‘socialist’ sources. Technically it
was ‘screenprint on paper’, designed by Chips Mackinolty, Earthworks Poster
Collective, Sydney, New South Wales.
For Menzies, 1978 was the last angry shot. His hardened arteries could no longer deliver enough oxygen. His pump gave out. As his life flashed before his eyes, he would’ve watched a replay of the moment in time when it all began to go arse-about for him … when the long, drawn-out conclusion of his political overstay got its start. 9 December 1961. Artless Art. 130 votes. Moreton Bay. That single seat - won, not lost - which knee-jerked Menzies into his recovery mission, designed to rescue himself, not his country. Had he not fallen into the arms of the addiction he prioritised above all else: anti-communism … had he seen the political peril, not of communism, but in chess-moving his young countrymen into harm’s way - not caring to guarantee them one whit of beneficial consequence - maybe Forgiveness would’ve granted Pig Iron Bob a few extra months, instead of him being hustled off of this mortal coil in a handbasket to Hell in May 1978 and missing the main event the Devil had lined up for him: the horror of looking on as Ugly America raised its hand on the floor of the United Nations in recognition of communist China … as an equal. It would’ve, for Menzies, felt like he was watching his own public execution.
Whitlam’s world
The world of Gough Whitlam had, by September 1971, taken on a golden shine. It was time. It was His Time. He did his best to control his excitement, not to get overconfident, not to get big-headed. But it was hard. He could see the future, as clearly as he could see the past. And the future, too, had this golden shine to it. The world, and the future, had been like that for him for ten weeks, even since he’d done what John Foster Dulles, that ignorant American, had refused to do in Geneva in 1954 - look Zhou Enlai in the eye and read what was there, and shake him by the hand; treat Zhou at a minimum like an equal, like a superior in the areas where Zhou’s experience made him so; treat the Chinese Premier like any Chinese would treat their teacher, with gratitude and humility … not like an alien, certainly not like an inferior as Dulles had done. Zhou never forgot it. He told Whitlam all about it, in Peking, when they met.
Zhou had been master of ceremonies in Geneva, and the French prime minister, working to his tight deadline back in Paris, had been his dupe. Dulles had been oblivious to the real negotiations going on in the next room. Casey had been in the dark, too. Wherever America went, even if America went nowhere, that was good enough for Australia’s envoy to Geneva. Ho Chi Minh knew what was afoot, but could do nothing about it. Uncle Ho was overpowered, a distant second among equals. Vietnam, based on 2,000 years of experience, had never trusted China, and now had less cause to do so. It was just one of oh so many false premises upon which the Domino Theory was constructed - a house of straw put up on shifting sands.
In September 1971 Gough Whitlam had another fifteen months of preparation in store before the federal election that would make him Prime Minister. Part of that preparation would be his pre-election speech, and sections of that speech would have been taking shape in his mind as early as September 1971.
… The war of intervention in Vietnam is ending. The great powers are rethinking and remoulding their relationships and their obligations. Australia cannot stand still at such a time. We cannot afford to limp along with men whose attitudes are rooted in the slogans of the 1950s‚ the slogans of fear and hate. If we made such a mistake, we would make Australia a backwater in our region and a back number in history.
… The world will little note, nor long remember, Australia’s part in the Vietnam intervention. Even the people of the United States will not recall nor care how four successive Australian Prime Ministers from Menzies to McMahon sought to keep their forces bogged down on the mainland of Asia, no matter what the cost of American blood and treasure, no matter how it weakened America abroad and even more at home.
… We now enter a new and more hopeful era in our region. Let us not foul it up this time. Australia has been given a second chance. The settlement agreed upon by Washington and Hanoi is the settlement easily obtainable in 1954. The settlement now in reach – the settlement that 30,000 Australian troops were sent to prevent, the settlement which Mr. McMahon described in November 1967 as treachery – was obtainable on a dozen occasions since 1954. Behind it all, behind those 18 years of bombing, butchering and global blundering, was the Dulles policy of containing China.
… Until barely a year ago, to oppose this policy, even to question it, was being described by Mr. McMahon – and even some other people – as treason. If President Nixon had not gone to China nine months after I did, Mr. McMahon would still be denouncing me, just as he was on the very eve of President Nixon’s announcement that he would go to Peking. This is the man, this is the party, which expects you to trust them with the conduct of your nation’s international affairs for another three years.
… A Labor Government will transfer Australia’s China Embassy from Taipei to Peking.
(to be continued … )
PART 1 -
OUT WITH THE 1954 DULLES / MENZIES CHINA PLAYBOOK … AND IN WITH WHITLAM’S
The Australian delegation to China flew into Peking near midnight on 3 July 1971 through “a prolonged and spectacular thunderstorm.”
It was the week before (Gough) Whitlam’s fifty-fifth birthday.
The motley crew of Australian politicians, journalists and academics bewildered their Chinese hosts. Their tendency to communicate in rhyming slang compounded the confusion already caused by the Australian accent, “a thing of terror” to Chinese ears familiar with English spoken by Americans.
(Billy Griffiths, Monash University Press, ‘Inside Story’, 22 October 2014.)
EDWARD GOUGH WHITLAM
Whitlam was at the Port Club one night as Guest of Honour invited by Mick Young, Labor Party representative for the Port District and the Club’s No. 1 Ticket Holder. My father derived genuine pleasure from listening to 5AN when Mick Young - as broad in the shoulder as an ex-shearer ought to be, with hair as curly as the sheep he used to clip - rose to his feet in Canberra. Pop could visualise Mick’s targets shrink like the next woolly victim in line while Mick turned them into second-raters. Pop took real pleasure, too, sitting at the kitchen table, gazing into the future as he talked up Whitlam as pioneer of an unforeseen generation of ‘educated’ federal Labor Party contenders, a generation essential to Labor’s recovery and survival, to take over from tired stalwarts like ‘honest but doomed’ Doc. Evatt and the tragic, eminently forgettable ‘two Wongs don’t make a white’ Arthur Calwell.
Another amongst Pop’s intellectual new breed of Labor rising stars was Don Dunstan. Young Don launched his career in state politics in early 1953 with a speech via loudspeaker from our front verandah at 9 Morris Street, Evandale. (In those days the fully-grown trees that now line the footpath were not there to interfere with the carry of Dunstan’s voice.) I was six years of age. I was captured. I recollect that heady summer evening very clearly. Dunstan was an instant hit. He took out the seat of Norwood, then made a point of taking a chair out at our kitchen table to sit down and thank my father for his advice and physical assistance. The red-brick terracotta-rooftile house in Morris Street remains the same. My parents rented it then bought it during the war years, having married in Wallaroo in 1939. I would stop the hire car outside each time I was in Adelaide and check out the place that had been my home for all my school years. The front verandah with its terrazzo floor my father put down one sweaty weekend is still there, the kitchen is around the back. I very much doubt the table is the same, never have I ventured inside to inspect. Once I did knock on the front door, perhaps a dozen years ago. No reply. Nobody was home but memories.
ARTLESS ART
“I do not think we will be beaten. There are no circumstances which would suggest even a remote possibility of the opposition winning 17 seats.”
So said Prime Minister Robert Menzies on the eve of the 9 December 1961 federal election. On the surface, Menzies had every right to sound confident … even if not he, nor anyone, had any right to sound arrogant. But he always did. Labor had fallen out with its own Catholic power-brokers, who broke away to establish the anti-ALP Democratic Labor Party. The DLP consequently gifted to the Liberal & Country Party coalition their second-preference votes, just one of an unnecessary excess of idiosyncrasies in Australia’s idiosyncratic excessively democratic electoral system that clicked in on polling day. Accordingly, when reading the room, any room, Menzies had lapsed into the habit of not fully focusing, of identifying less than what was there to be read. An economic situation called a credit squeeze was making life tough all over again for the working-class, especially those who had lived through the Depression, then had survived the war years. The banks were okay. Oh yes, the banks that Menzies looked after, they were hunky dory; they simply put their rates up and threatened Bluey and Snow and Ocker and Mrs Ocker with bare-faced foreclosure on their mortgages. What really had Menzies not bothering to read all the room all the time, however, was his opponent. The moon would turn blue before Pig Iron Bob dropped an election to artless Art.
Ordinary through and through, narrow of mind, stubborn and a race relations amateur for an ex-immigration minister in the Chifley Labor government was Arthur Calwell. This bloke, however, was a dead set trier. For all his shortcomings and a profile that was inarguably hands-and-heels working-class and the antithesis of anyone in a morning coat and pinstripe trousers on the opposite side of the House floor, he was no lie-down-roll-over member of parliament. Never would a blink of sophistication visit either eye, not the lazy left one nor the other. Never did a rounded vowel make it past his cracked and colourless lips before being ground flat and ugly by the sandpaper Calwell pronunciation. Never could his single buck tooth render him photogenic. Nevertheless, underneath all that camouflage, the Leader of the Opposition had an ambush set to be sprung.
DOOMSDAY ENOUGH
In spite of his portfolio of negatives conspiring against him, in 1961 just one seat, a single swinging parliamentary seat, was the skin-of-the-teeth margin in the Australian federal election that prevented Calwell from beating Menzies. Just the one solitary parliamentary seat kept Labor from embarrassing the grandee who’d founded the Liberal Party in 1944 to within the last palpitation of his political heart. And this result went down despite the LCP coalition coming up short by broad daylight in the national vote in the House of Representatives. More about gerrymandering later.
The sitting LCP member in Moreton Bay eventually fingernailed what masqueraded as a win by a measly 130 votes. Such a hairsbreadth ‘majority’ provoked a panic-stricken Menzies into panic-stricken retaliation. He set about whipping up a hate campaign. His objective was for it to be emotional enough, fearsome enough, doomsday enough, to twist voters enough to guarantee him victory minus photo finish at the next poll.
His retaliative target: the People’s Republic of China.
The notorious Domino Theory: another Big Lie, rendered so by the aftermath of its first test -
South Vietnam. Ironically … renowned Vietnam War correspondent, author and historian Stanley
Karnow was to observe … the real domino to fall was American public opinion. No less ironically,
considering Australia was co-promoter of the theory and the ultimate target for the March of the
Tumbling Dominoes, the LCP coaltion and Catholic-dominated DLP in Canberra looked on aghast
as public opinion Down Under did likewise. And then, in 1979, China turned the simple-minded
theory wholly inside-out by launching a three-pronged invasion into a by-then forcefully unified
communist Vietnam across the two countries’ common border. China came off second-best in a
fight that went on for two months. The PLA have yet to live that down, and should be wary of a
repeat embarrassment in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait in particular.
“With the black cloud of communist China hanging to the north, we must make sure that our children do not end up pulling rickshaws with hammer and sickle signs on their sides...”
For Menzies, the events of December 1961 have been called a ‘near-death’ experience. Anyone who lives through any such phenomenon invariably decides to make changes to their lifestyle. Menzies had long thought he was immortal. He had been since early 1960 not just Australia’s prime minister but also the country’s minister for external affairs (‘foreign minister’ in most other places), itself a full-time portfolio if done properly. This self-important wearing of two very important hats played into Calwell’s hands. Menzies’ near-fatal stumble, if not fall, indeed cometh after his excess of pride, made all the more dangerous for him by his excess of disregard for his Labor opponent, a mistake he never made again.
FROWN OF THE LUCKY COUNTRY
Menzies took his cue for a fresh pitch to the Australian voting public from some dubious scaremongering in 1954 by his perceived Liberal Party leadership rival and predecessor as external affairs minister, Richard Casey - himself formerly Canberra’s ambassador to Washington. (In 1965, aged 75, he would become Lord Casey, governor-general.) This fellow had sure been there, had sure done that, had pinned to his ceremonial tunic a Great War DSO plus a Military Cross that had been awarded to him for being in the right spots at Gallipoli and the Western Front. Casey had not been taking things easy, working his route up the power steps until at the top of his Xmas card list were names such as Ike, John Foster Dulles (U.S. Secretary of State), Anthony Eden (whom he closely resembled) and Winston Churchill on whose WWII war administration Casey had served from Egypt then Bengal, rare air indeed for an ethnic Australian to be breathing.
In April 1954 Casey brought the frown of the Lucky Country to Geneva for the international conference which would, consequent to the imminent massacre of the French military at Dien Bien Phu, determine what a partitioning of Vietnam might look like. Prior to leaving Melbourne, according to Paul Ham, historian and author of ‘VIETNAM - The Australian War’, published by Harper Collins in 2007, Casey warned a crowded room: “The world is very disturbed … The United States of America is on our side. It is on the side of democracy, decency and right, and the forces of darkness opposed to it are very apparent and very powerful.” Heavy stuff, but mild compared to what he came out with on returning home, having been thoroughly spooked by Zhou Enlai.
A RED HOT BLAST OF EAST WIND
Dulles and Casey looked on, or tried to, as behind closed doors Zhou - who spoke French as fluently as he did English - played like a piccolo the French prime minister, who was facing an election at home and negotiating under the added pressure of a self-imposed schedule as tight and touch-and-go as a noose around his neck and a trapdoor beneath his feet. The international compromise at the 17th parallel went against the demands of Ho Chi Minh whose forces had won the war, and who sought no compromise short of 100% of Vietnam. Imagine the state of panic Casey would’ve brought home if Zhou had been thoroughly on Uncle Ho’s side, instead of just being determined to keep the North Vietnamese under control. Imagine if Zhou had secured for Ho a lower parallel, or even the entire country. Zhou Enlai, it would seem, without the two having communicated via much more than a glance, had delivered a red hot blast of east wind up Casey’s fundamental orifice. So hot was Zhou’s performance at Geneva that Casey lost all sight, all grip, of reality. On landing back in Melbourne, his mood no doubt exacerbated by Dulles’s characteristic and flagrant hatred of all things communist, Casey lost everything else that hitherto had been tremulously holding together inside of him.
He started to rant and rave. One classic, again as quoted by Paul Ham, was:“With the black cloud of communist China hanging to the north, we must make sure that our children do not end up pulling rickshaws with hammer and sickle signs on their sides ...” China, ‘rickshaws’ and ‘hammer and sickle’ all in the same sentence? This was a long way short of Richard Casey‘s finest moment. A hammer and sickle was in fact the insignia of the PKI, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, the ‘largest non-ruling communist party in the world‘ at the time, its genesis dating back to pre-WWI when it was formed in opposition to the colonialist Dutch administration of the East Indies. Casey went on, as if to overcorrect himself: “International communism might be on Australia’s doorstep within eighteen months.” In other words, by the end of 1955 - in the excited and fatalistic judgement of this ‘external affairs’ expert, this imperialist Australian patrician whose first love was not Australia but the British Commonwealth as a whole - both the USSR and the PRC would conceivably, and jointly, be positioned, ready and able with sufficient hardened military personnel, machines of war, munitions, materiel and support services to invade and capture Australia, having already in just that year and a half gobbled up for the Comintern (Communist International) in quick-fire succession South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, Singapore, Borneo and Indonesia. This was just the sort of glossy ‘Eagle‘ magazine Dan Dare fantasy that Menzies was looking for, to over-emphasise and plant firmly in the mind of his geographically isolated, worldly unwise and vulnerable public - thereby insulating his one-seat majority for at least two years after 9 December 1961 … until he could safely call for a recount via a brought-forward follow-up election.
Having a giggle at Geneva in 1954 - while Zhou Enlai was off negotiating in
French and getting the job done on Vietnam - are (from right) Australia’s
Richard Casey, America’s John Foster Dulles and Belgium’s foreign minister.
Neither Dulles nor his protege Casey had ever had any regard whatsoever
for the Chinese. Dulles infamously refused to shake Zhou’s hand in Geneva,
an affront that broadcast much about Dulles and his weaknesses, and also
gifted Zhou extra motivation to outwit the USA. As for Casey, he viewed the
Chinese, according to a paper published in Melbourne in 1931, as having ‘no
national spirit and no genius for government (but) sees prospects in China
for the Australian trade in wheat since “taste for bread … once on the palate
of a race, is liable to supplant the rather flat and insipid taste of rice.”’ This
observation by Casey was only slightly less absurd than his “our children …
pulling rickshaws with hammer and sickle signs” on his return home after
Geneva in 1954.
The south-eastern Queensland seat of Moreton in 1961, and those 130 LCP votes, precipitated what would turn out to be the strategic yet token assembly and delivery of an Australian Infantry battalion to South Vietnam. Menzies had to get the Army to grow in a hurry - and so be able to, in addition to supporting the USA in Vietnam, help Britain deal with the tense situation in Borneo where Indonesia and Malaya were in conflict over ownership of Sarawak and North Borneo (Sabah). Thus evolved the reintroduction of conscription of select young men to serve in uniform … none of whom, Menzies assured with forked tongue, would be sent off to war. A few years later I would be one of those young men, despite there existing in Canberra an eyes-only ‘red file’ with my father’s name on the cover. In December 1961 the Australian Communist Party was still an unbanned institution; it received 25,429 votes. How ‘select’ was applied to me upon call-up, considering the regulation pre-enlistment security vetting - three background checks, each different, on each and every conscript - Pop never understood. He took it personally.
MORE REBEL THAN RED
Pop was not a communist. Impressed with what he said and the hard yakka he put in for the ALP, the SA branch of the communist party did what it could to recruit him. His decision in the end was not to trust them. They drank too heavily, womanised too openly and were only in the caper to party every night. My mother made sure Pop accepted that the ACP was no place for him. If he didn’t, she said, he would be there on his own. I recall the sparkling clear October night in 1957 when Pop took my brother and me out on the back lawn to watch Sputnik traverse the starlit sky. He was a proud man that night, proud of the fact that somebody - in this case the Soviets, but it could’ve been the Siamese for all he cared - had stuck it up the Yanks. And what did we all get as a consequential reward decades later? The Internet. No, Pop was more rebel than red, and much of him, looking back, rubbed off on me. As a result, through my life I have bucked the prevailing trend, disdained the beaten path, detested any retreat into mediocrity and barracked for Port Adelaide. My father was born in November 1904, in Wallaroo, and thus had watched Harold Oliver, Shine Hosking, Punch Mucklow, Bull Reval, Big Bob McLean and Bobbie Quinn play before I arrived on the scene by accident as a baby boomer when Pop was already 42.
He was a self-taught carpenter, cabinet maker, electrician, brickie and plasterer, and building site foreman. He taught me to drive on the firm sand of Wallaroo’s North Beach in the column-shift EH Holden that materialsed in the Morris Street driveway to announce Pop’s appointment as SA Carpenters’ Union Organiser. During the war he’d worked at Parafield repairing and refitting, rebuilding even, the insides of all-wood all-Australian-made Mosquito fighter-bombers that had malfunctioned and / or crashed during training flights; there were a lot, the plane was a death trap. He could sign-write, too, for kitchen money, and drew Disney characters on sheets of butcher’s paper and pinned them up on the bedroom wall so silently that they came to life as if by Disney magic the moment my eyes opened in the morning. Pop possessed one or two ornery West Country genes via his dad and a lot of artistic Shetland Island genes via his ma. Ever the atheist when he wasn’t being agnostic, he would quote in his mother’s accent this beloved line from Robbie Burns: “Oh wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us.”
Robbie Burns mug shot.
A “monster brought forth to swallow and devour your Liberties and equal Rights”.
JERRY MANDA & PIG IRON BOB
A close second on Pop’s wish list of gifts from on high was to possess a vivid imagination and, most importantly, be able to put it to work. Imagination minus opportunity is a curse, like inheriting a Ferrari whilst serving a life term in prison for whatever. Pop, disillusioned, put down, roughed up and honed by the Depression and the war years, could nevertheless see through his mind‘s eye a world that was perfect - a world in which the Liberal & Country Party did not exist. Even more perfect: a world where the Master Manipulator … some bloke who’d never been caught on camera, whom no-one had seen, who reduced Pop to a snort when I asked him to draw this bloke’s face on butcher’s paper … a crafty cheating ruling-class bastard, the LCP’s ultimate infallible political fixer who hid behind the name of Jerry Manda … was caught, given a fair trial, stood against a wall, and shot through his non-existent heart.
Genesis of the dreaded GerrymanderUniversity of Vermont, Joshua E. Brown, March 22, 2018:
In 1812, the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, approved a narrow and winding voting district for the
state senate that curved from Marblehead around to Salisbury. It looked like a long-necked salamander,
Federalist newspaper editors declared. They labeled the district “The Gerry-Mander” and the Salem-Gazette
warned that it was a “monster brought forth to swallow and devour your Liberties and equal Rights”.
Cambridge Dictionary: ‘gerrymander’ - to change the borders of an area in order to increase the number of
people within that area who will vote for a particular party or person.
Politics for the underdog was Pop‘s passion in life. That and Port Adelaide Football Club. He subscribed to no religion, had no passion for any church, just the opposite. And he was no racist, not by the standards of my childhood. He often told me about the freak athleticism of Jesse Owens in Berlin in 1936, and about the five balls of pure lightning Eddie Gilbert flung in 1931 at Bradman who saw not one en route to his dismissal off the fifth, a bumper hooked in blind, desperate self-defence that went straight up in the air … and he took me one balmy night to Memorial Drive to sit enthralled at the antics under outdoor lights of the Harlem Globetrotters. He looked up only to his fellow rebels, and down on any human demographic that dared to look upon itself as superior, or who interfered uninvited with the lives of others. Particularly deserving of Pop’s invective was Pig Iron Bob Menzies. He hated Menzies’ guts. In vain he dreamed of the opportunity to tell the despotic monarchist bludger all about it. Ne‘er had there been an instant, and never would there be, Pop would mutter, when Menzies dared to see himself as others saw him.
But perhaps he did. Perhaps there were moments when Pig Iron Bob did see himself as others saw him, and it was not a pretty sight. Menzies, born in 1894, was twenty years of age himself when the Great War broke out in Europe. Both his brothers enlisted, but he never did. He never tried to explain why, though he was asked many times. It was as if he had something in his closet that had to stay shut away. It is rumoured that his mother decided sending two out of three sons overseas to war was enough commitment for one ruling-class family. Bob was required, instead, from 1914 to 1918, to go through with his Law studies and content himself with compulsory this and that with the Melbourne University Rifles. Straight after the war he entered pupilage en route to admittance to the Bar as a barrister, specialising in constitutional law. But the twist in all this is that Menzies was a vocal supporter, during the war, during his studies, of conscription - just so long as it didn’t include him. Come the 1950s, as prime minister, he again supported conscription and saw that it was made law. In 1964 he did it yet again - and for the third time in his seventy years conscription was for others, not him. He was absolutely determined that conscription be reintroduced to bolster the Army and impress the Americans, and he imposed his will on his cabinet with all his might. There was a dictator lurking inside Bob Menzies, and in 1964, having been safely re-elected, he let it loose.
Did Australians see Menzies as a fellow Australian? In February 1966 decimal currency was introduced Down Under.
I can recollect working through an entire weekend on triple-time in the accounts department at the Repat converting
war pension cards by hand from pounds, shillings and pence into dollars and cents, whilst a transistor radio gave out
ABC commentary of Bob Cowper grinding his way to 307 in the 5th Test versus England at the MCG. There had been
extended and intense debate in Canberra prior to the simple, logical nomenclature ‘Australian Dollar’ being decided,
under considerable public pressure. Menzies? Knighted by the Queen in 1963 he did his royal damnedest to make our
new national currency into the ‘Royal Dollar’ having at one time had it on the cusp of being christened, with blatant
disregard, the ‘Royal’. Oh no, no Aussie was the Pig Iron B.
Whitlam’s trip to China started as an adventure
and ended with a coup
Stephen FitzGerald
(Excerpts from his opinion piece - published in the Australian Financial Review on 1 July 2021 - in italics below, with each excerpt separated by a personal commentary.)
FitzGerald, 1 July 2021:
It’s not the first time China has been “coming down” to “get” Australia, or “the Chinese” seeking to overrun us. It’s a paranoia that goes back to the 19th century of course, variously dormant or active depending in part on how much political oxygen it’s given.
In 1971 it was fed by a clamorous government invocation of a “downward thrust” (originally former prime minister Robert Menzies’ words) bent on invasion of Australia and now blending the old bogey of race with the new one of communism.
And with the Vietnam hot war on top of the Cold War, the politics were rough and often dirty. The anti-war movement, and Labor’s part in it, excited the government to frenzied attacks on Labor as dupes of Asian communism. In that environment, it was not an attack easily met with rational argument.
Since 1949, the invocation of a communist threat by conservative governments and the tarring of Labor with a communist brush had contributed to keeping Labor out of government. As then-prime minister Billie McMahon candidly boasted in 1971, China was “a political asset to the Liberal Party”. It was a liability for Labor.
We had no diplomatic relations, we voted regularly against Beijing taking the China seat in the United Nations, we recognised and promoted the defeated Chinese nationalists (Kuomintang / KMT) in Taiwan as the government of the whole of China. We had troops fighting in Vietnam, a war constructed by the government as prosecuted by China, and so by this construction we were actually at war with China.
Ramifications
Now for the coincidence that has prompted me to not only research these parallel yet interconnecting stories of not just Whitlam, China and me, also Menzies, Vietnam and me, and all their ramifications, but also format them into a single account and write it. As Gough and his party, including FitzGerald, were en route to Peking, to where there were no direct flights from capitalist airports outside China, certainly not Hong Kong, and would not be for a long time, I had landed at Kai Tak Airport - my fourth landing in the Pearl of the Orient. My first touch-down had been in May 1969 on a short R&R from Vietnam, my second in September that same year on pre-discharge leave for two weeks. My third had been in March 1971 when I took a month‘s holiday care-of the Repatriation Commission (now DVA) in Pulteney Street, separated from M.S. McLeod Tyres by a laneway in which I parked my white Morris 1100 prior to Army service, then my fire-engine red Triumph Spitfire Mark III post discharge. The Repat became my first employer when I qualified for my Leaving Certificate after four years at Norwood High, then did as the certificate suggested. I left.
In January 1964 I’d started work at the murky bottom of the mineshaft, not in the hub of bureaucracy called Registry, in the file room out back of the beige three-storey building (originally two-storey per photo below) that housed the men, women, clerks, comptometrists and paraphernalia of the Repatriation Commission, the good ol’ ‘Repat’ … the irony of which has never escaped me: I would be able to find my own thin file in there ere long. My fourth Hong Kong landing, at the start of July 1971, had been set up, though imperfectly as would soon become evident, during my month-long return holiday earlier that year. The adventure that I’d imagined and assiduously saved up for had been plotted well in advance.
The Repat - Repatriation Commission, 186
Pulteney Street, Adelaide, next to McLeod
Tyres and directly across the road from the
Somerset Hotel.
Prospecting for gold
I landed with a six-month working visa stamped in my passport, issued on the guarantee of an American pyramid scheme shyster by the name of Chuck McKinley, who operated out of Asian House in Wanchai under the cover of an insurance company called Piedmont International. I did not pay the HK$1,000 deposit McKinley was due as part of the deal. I did not take delivery of the initial batch of BCI brand detergent I was supposed to on-sell. I stepped instead on to a different path, one not yet trodden, and went looking for a legitimate and permanent job in an East-meets-West wonderland that had far more possibilities in my imagination than it did in reality.
That job search turned into harder work than I thought possible. Actually, I didn’t think, I simply charged ahead from one contact to the next. As far as I was concerned I was prospecting for gold, digging into every crack in every wall I came across. Eventually I happened upon a flukey situation that I would massage into the perfect career for myself, but only after five hypertonic and hyper-educational months of priceless hyper-networking. By then all that remained in my pocket was a solitary red HK$100 note (as narrated in full in a previous ‘docudrama’ thread titled ‘Up the China Rabbit-hole’).
Somehow I managed not to be deported when I fronted up at Immigration to apply for a new working visa to replace the one whose restrictions I had not complied with. My fourth landing in Hong Kong thus was my last as a non-resident. My local ID card, first issued in October 1971, has since before the 1997 Handover to China classified me as ‘Permanent’.
To secure a convenience
FitzGerald 1 July 2021 (cont’d):
(July 1971 was not) the best moment to be launching a bid to engage (with Peking) some might have ‘thought, and many in Whitlam’s party said it was mad, and likely to lose them the next election, within Labor’s grasp for the first time in 23 years. He was the first Labor leader with the courage to take up this challenge. It not only flew in the face of Australia’s foreign policy, and Washington’s, it was at great risk to his own and his party’s fortunes. But his decision was calculated, and consistent with ALP policy since 1955 to recognise Beijing. Whitlam himself had first called for recognition in his maiden speech to Parliament in 1954. He saw this as rational, logical and in the nation’s interests. He believed we must accept that China is a permanent and significant part of the international landscape, whatever its government or what we think of it, and like Churchill he believed “the reason for having diplomatic relations is not to confer a compliment, but to secure a convenience”.
The wheat silos at Wallaroo. I can remember, as a child, watching the first one being built.
Wheat. Richard Casey had foreseen a market for it in China as far back as 1931, but taste
had less to do with it than cost and availability. Australia’s wheat export to China could be
turned off or on at Peking’s whim. When Whitlam went to China in July 1971 it was off and
the Wheat Board was in a flap. When Whitlam left China a week later it was on.
“Would you mind travelling economy class?”
… Whitlam, and ALP Federal Secretary Mick Young, had seen an opportunity. Quarantined from the politics of enmity and fear, Australia had quietly been selling wheat to China since 1960, worth over $100 million a year. But the Australian Wheat Board had returned empty-handed from China in late 1970, and this was public news. For the first time since 1949, the government was in difficulty on China.
If the trigger was trade, the opportunity was diplomatic engagement, and in the ALP’s cable to Premier Zhou Enlai, it sought discussion of diplomatic relations, not just trade.
Whitlam had also been reading the signs. Some other countries, notably Canada, were moving to recognition of Beijing, there were indications the US might be about to shift, and China itself had signalled a willingness to engage, inviting the US table tennis team to Beijing, the start of what became known as ping-pong diplomacy.
I was neither politician nor Party official, and had no expectation that I would be part of this adventure. But the day after the invitation arrived from China, Whitlam tracked me down in the Curtin pub, where I’d gone to meet Mick Young … . He asked me to join as China adviser, then added, with his familiar irony: “Would you mind travelling economy class?” Would I what! I spent the six weeks before departure and the two weeks on the road trying to meet the demands of (Whitlam’s) prodigious thirst for knowledge.
Stephen FitzGerald
Confronting the beast
(Edited excerpt from the docudrama ‘Up the China Rabbit-hole’, narrated by Lockhart Road, published on BigFooty, 9 April 2019) :
Desperation is the mother of downsized ambitions. I’d been interviewed, had cold-called and applied in writing for all sorts of vocations: clerical, administrative, assistant-to, manual, a police cadet (eyesight failed me on the spot), TV newsreader, nightclub bouncer (two years infantry sounded good, but no), sub-editor for United Press International, reporter for an English-language newspaper - Hong Kong published four such dailies, the most prominent being the ‘South China Morning Post’ - then went back to ‘go’, virtually, via the Australian Commission and (another) Commonwealth Public Service-issue office desk, in admittedly a different hemisphere, that had fallen temporarily vacant.
This time, armed with a written introduction from somebody - it could have been Keith Hooper of Far East Advertising, previously with ‘The Advertiser’ - when I called on the Commission, 9th Floor, Union House, I’d been taken eastward down Chater Road to lunch at the Hong Kong Cricket Club (a year later I’d be myself a formally-introduced member, saddled with a HK$500 joining fee which today stretches to six figures) by senior administrator, Bruce Denham. He read to me the riot act - not in the least unreasonable in view of the DUI cropper of my predecessor and the fact that I was boarding in a house of ill repute: Chungking Mansions on Nathan Road, Tsimshatsui (TST).
Looking west down Peking Road circa 1971 towards Chungking
Mansions, facing camera from the other side of Nathan Road, on
which British Leyland double-deckers travel to (south) and from
the Tsimshatsui waterfront and, next to the ‘Star’ Ferry pier, the
Kowloon-Canton Railway terminus of which only the clock tower
still stands.
Home to me was one big concrete box, a high-rise network of neon signage, a beacon, a kaleidescope, a place to be, a place to be from. Chungking Mansions was a multinational vertical Greenwich Village. The air I breathed was a living thing, marinated with a bittersweet cocktail of curry, kimchee, durian and Chinese medicinal herbs and cooking spices, the sound and sight effects of hustling Indian custom tailors, crammed-to-the-ceiling mini electronics marts, pop, rock and jazz music stalls, Cantonese opera stalls, girly magazine stalls and whatever other sorts of stalls, and that was just the lobby. A piquant muskiness of marijuana circulated, resupplied from skinny elevators when their doors opened, having travelled through floor after floor after floor of original sin. In spite of this smudge on my reference, Bruce Denham took me on as ‘local’ labour, nothing special, and had me paid HK$2,300 per month. What hooked me up to the gig was my instant availability, plus inbuilt employer’s insurance of sorts in that I was still on Canberra’s books as being absent on a year’s ‘special leave’ minus pay, could be checked up on, even intimidated. When I’d flown up to Hong Kong for my fourth landing, you see, I had not, in fact, burnt all my bridges behind me.
My six weeks under Bruce’s wing and Doubting Thomas eye brought with them a memory that has endured. There was the morning I was on my way to work, sitting next to the rail of the ‘Star’ Ferry as it filled up at the Tsimshatsui pier on Kowloon side with a boatload of commuters and tourists - including American servicemen on R&R as the war … though rapidly scaling down as far as Washington was concerned, maintaining artillery and air power but handing the fighting on the ground and even disastrous sortees into Laos over to the locals in what they called ‘Vietnamisation’ … was still in progress. My row wasn’t occupied, apart from me, until suddenly it was. A human shape featuring familiar white hair and thick bent black caterpillar eyebrows loomed from starboard, and lumbered with the help of a walking stick across the deck towards me.
You guessed it.
It was Bob Menzies … assisted by his better half, Dame Pattie.
The ‘Star’ Ferry’s green and white Northern Star circa 1971 steaming south
across Victoria Harbour to Central pier and the CBD, Hong Kong Island.
Nobody worse to elevate
They deposited themselves right next to me. Menzies nodded, said “Good morning,” as he’d seen that I’d recognised him; Pattie said something similar, quite sweetly. I said nought. Here was the very ex-prime minister who’d reintroduced the draft, who’d drawn my birth date out of a barrel and sent me off to war. (In fact, I’d indirectly volunteered for service in Vietnam by transferring myself from 7RAR, which in April 1968 was on its way home after its first active service tour, to 9RAR which would be going to war that November, but I won’t dwell on that.) Here was the bastard, the very one, who’d slid open the first of my adult sliding doors, to have me, after twists and turns, detours and forks in the road, being sat there at the port rail on the ‘Star’ Ferry right up next to him … close enough to slip a sharpened bayonet under his ribs, give it a twist, and get away with it.
Menzies hadn’t been PM since January 1966 when he passed the poisoned chalice to Harold Holt. Holt was gone by the end of 1967, and now John Gorton was past tense to boot, usurped by Big Ears Billy McMahon and Sonia, his ubiquitous handbag with legs attached that swept upwards to her armpits and were the only agenda item Nixon would recall from the McMahons’ regulation visit in 1971 to Washington, DC. The LCP coalition was embroiled in an internal duel: McMahon versus the rest - the inevitable legacy, for them, of Menzies’ asphyxiating twenty-one-year grip on absolute power, as Liberal Party founder and leader since 1944, and as prime minister since 1949. If McMahon had his over-ambitious way he would’ve imposed himself as PM the instant Holt was declared a missing person. Paul Hasluck, essentially Menzies’ war minister when it came to Indo-China, had not a nice syllable for McMahon … ‘contemptible creature’ being two words too many in his assassination of the character McMahon didn’t have. To think that Big Ears Billy, prior to being grudgingly made acting PM by his party in early 1971, there being nobody worse to elevate, had been foreign minister: Australia’s caricature of an envoy to a world that knew nothing worth knowing about Australia and which, having experienced him, was glad of it.
For the McMahons’ White House attendance in 1971 the dress Sonia chose to almost wear was indeed split all the way
up to her armpits, a two-inch gap at the hips there to render her anatomy a straightforward street map for Nixon to
read. The strategy to this, knowing McMahon’s reptilian predilections, may have been to use his wife as a distraction,
to render Nixon speechless enough to be incapable of discussing America’s withdrawal from, and defeat in, Vietnam.
Part of Menzies’ own and LCP coalition strategy was to not only get American combat troops into Vietnam in 1965,
but to keep them there indefinitely for Australia’s benefit.
Call it vengeance
For a long, long time I sat, thinking on all this, as the romantic, nostalgic, iconic, bow at the front and bow at the back double-decker putted and churned across the harbour - a trip twice as long and enjoyable then as it is today due to land reclamation along the Island waterfront - racking my grey matter to concoct something appropriate, biting and brilliant. Finally, when the journey was all but over, I had it. I knew word-for-word what to hiss out of the right-hand corner of my mouth.
“My father hates your guts.”
Pig Iron Bob did not react. Not a quiver. Not a sound, not even a sigh, not even a rustle of his dark-blue business suit. He hadn’t heard what I said … probably because I didn’t say it out loud.
As the ferry passengers disembarked at Central pier, I hung back and studied Menzies as he was helped across the ramp by Dame Pattie up the steps and into the back of a black limo. A month or so later, at his home in Melbourne, Sir Robert was struck down, by a massive stroke, resulting in cruel paralysis which sentenced him to a wheelchair in public for the seven years he had left to live. Apparently I was already having a telling effect on people with whom I rubbed shoulders and rode ferries next to in the Pearl of the Orient.
Pop’s ornery carpenters’ union genes would’ve said: “Call it vengeance.”
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/nightlife/pig-iron-bob/11116038
HINDSIGHT
Looking back on that September morning in 1971 with Pig Iron Bob Menzies by my side crossing Victoria Harbour on the ‘Star’ Ferry … I can see it all. Fifty years later I can see everything, including stuff I had never realised was there. It was no accident, that incident. It was pre-ordained. It was all meant to tell me something. Now is an opportune moment to recognise how important it was … fifty years into the future. Now, today, as against then … looking back.
27 January 1971 to 14 February 1972 was, by the Chinese lunar calendar, the Year of the Pig. So there was Pig Iron in its human form next to me in a Pig Year. I was born in another Pig Year, two cycles of twelve years each previously, meaning 1947, meaning I was twenty-four. The twelve-year lunar cycle is made by the twelve animals, chosen by Buddha in the order of their arrival to greet him. The animals are mutiplied by the five vital elements to create the sixty-year greater cycle. These elements, in chronological order, own two consecutive years each per decade: Gold (or Metal), Water, Wood, Fire and Earth. So I am a Fire Pig and 1971 was the Year of the Metal (or Gold) Pig. Pig Iron is a metal. Pig Iron Bob came out of the blue to rub shoulders with me. It was an omen, I now realise in hindsight. I am a believer in Oriental omens, good and bad, the upshot of half a century of being on the receiving end.
Gold / Metal Pig Year plus Fire Pig meets Pig Iron Bob, in hindsight, was an omen of the good type for me in terms of my quest in 1971 to stay in Hong Kong, to make the place my home for the rest of my life. Outcome: I’m still here. Not so good for Bob. He is not. He is neither here, nor there. A month later he had that stroke and took to a wheelchair; sitting down seven years later reading a book he had a fatal heart attack. I wonder if something in the book reminded him of the ‘Star’ Ferry in September 1971 and the young Aussie male in a light-grey business suit, twenty-four years of age, old enough to have recently served in Vietnam, who gave him such an unwelcoming look as he took aim at the spot on the ferry bench right next to me and said: “Good morning.” Might’ve made him think, that look. Might’ve had him, just for a long overdue moment, see himself as others saw him. How’s that, Pop?
How bloody McMahon
A helluva lot of metal goes into building a Centurion tank. Sitting on the ferry with Bob - the man who sent the tanks, the troops, and me, to war - I wasn’t aware that, somewhat ironically, the last of our Centurions was being shipped home via Vung Tau … ‘against the commander’s advice that they should stay until the end to provide the infantry with the mobile firepower they needed against enemy bunkers.’
‘Canberra Times‘, Max Blenkin, 15 April 2020: Just how the risk had increased was demonstrated in the last major Australian action of the conflict, Operation Ivanhoe in September 1971. Soldiers of 3RAR and 4RAR/NZ attacked enemy positions without armour support, resulting in five killed and 30 wounded.
Operation Surfside, April / May 1969. So named because it took place in dense jungle above the coastal
beaches south-east of Nui Dat. The objective was to find and destroy disused Viet Cong bunker systems,
to make it hard work for them to be rebuilt and reoccupied, hence the role of the Centurion tank (above)
from B Squadron, 1st Armoured Regiment, RAAC. I reckon I recognise these two diggers from Charlie Coy.
(the WTFRW) 9RAR, carrying heavy SLRs, per their role as riflemen spotting for the tankies. Another two
riflemen would probably be behind the tank, eyes to the rear. The remainder of the ten-man rifle section
(if it was at full strength, which would be rare) are up the front, behind the camera. Said remainder would
be the two forward scouts and an n.c.o. section leader with their lightweight low-velocity M-16 Armalites
(gimme an AK-47 any day of the war) plus the M-60 gunner and his No. 2 lugging bandoliers of 7.62mm
ammo, plus the section 2IC who would, at enemy contact, take charge of the gun crew, direct the gun to
high ground if there was any, and spread the four riflemen, who would be on the deck, aiming outward in
star formation. It goes without saying that such a choreography, rehearsed ad infinitum during training in
Australia, rarely went to plan in real life.
We were no longer really needed. By ‘we’ I mean ‘us’: the diggers, the grunts, the dinky-die Infantry. The Americans, their focus on the ground being on ‘Vietnamization’, had wholly forgotten we were there. They‘d lost the war, politically if not outright militarily. Therefore so had we. After relieving 9RAR in November 1969, 8RAR were themselves removed but not replaced at the end of their thirteen-month tour of duty. Big Ears Billy chose, to the day, the fifth anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan to announce 8RAR was superfluous to needs in Vietnam. How rude. How McMahon. 1971 carried on with what had been a rotating core of three Australian Infantry battalions cut to two. By March 1972, after months of those two units doing not much more than securing the base of our reduced task force at Nui Dat and facilities at Vung Tau, there would be none. McMahon, note, had been minister for labour and national service at the time he unveiled his Conscription Act. He did so, true to form, minus feel, on Remembrance Day, 1964. One critique of the act reduced it to ‘a political and legal abomination - vague, obtuse and ill-presented.’ How bloody McMahon.
The last impossibility
In 1964 Menzies had fronted up at the Pentagon with a scheme for the Secretary of Defense to muster American power to protect the Commonwealth of Australia, all of it, from invasion by communist China … for as long as possible, preferably indefinitely. There was something opaque called ‘ANZUS’ as a side issue: a deal, a treaty, a mutual defence mechanism. What it amounted to was that at the same time America was saving all of Australia and New Zealand from communist China, the diggers and our Centurion tanks, and the Kiwis and their artillery pieces, plus the SAS of course, would under the treaty metaphorically protect a few undefined acres of the United States of America from that same communist China … for as long as possible, preferably indefinitely. ANZUS was a deal struck between an elephant and two mice, one fat and flat as mice go, the other being New Zealand.
In December 1978 - Menzies having earlier that year kicked the bucket (what transpired is no consequence of him doing that, perhaps) - Washington put up its hand at the U.N. to recognise the PRC as the real ‘China’, and promised to relocate their embassy westward across the Taiwan Strait, from Taipei to Peking. In so doing, Washington belatedly imitated what Canberra and Wellington had done six years before. America recognising communist China in 1978, the year he died, was the last, the most treasonous, impossibility Menzies had in mind whilst lobbying at the Pentagon in 1964 - stirring up an Indo-Pacific pot of steaming hate, racism and determination which included an embargo on the U.S. embassy, also those of Australia and New Zealand, abandoning Taipei - indefinitely and if possible forever.
Robert Gordon Menzies died on 15 May 1978. This poster appeared overnight
all over Sydney and Melbourne, attributed to ‘socialist’ sources. Technically it
was ‘screenprint on paper’, designed by Chips Mackinolty, Earthworks Poster
Collective, Sydney, New South Wales.
For Menzies, 1978 was the last angry shot. His hardened arteries could no longer deliver enough oxygen. His pump gave out. As his life flashed before his eyes, he would’ve watched a replay of the moment in time when it all began to go arse-about for him … when the long, drawn-out conclusion of his political overstay got its start. 9 December 1961. Artless Art. 130 votes. Moreton Bay. That single seat - won, not lost - which knee-jerked Menzies into his recovery mission, designed to rescue himself, not his country. Had he not fallen into the arms of the addiction he prioritised above all else: anti-communism … had he seen the political peril, not of communism, but in chess-moving his young countrymen into harm’s way - not caring to guarantee them one whit of beneficial consequence - maybe Forgiveness would’ve granted Pig Iron Bob a few extra months, instead of him being hustled off of this mortal coil in a handbasket to Hell in May 1978 and missing the main event the Devil had lined up for him: the horror of looking on as Ugly America raised its hand on the floor of the United Nations in recognition of communist China … as an equal. It would’ve, for Menzies, felt like he was watching his own public execution.
Whitlam’s world
The world of Gough Whitlam had, by September 1971, taken on a golden shine. It was time. It was His Time. He did his best to control his excitement, not to get overconfident, not to get big-headed. But it was hard. He could see the future, as clearly as he could see the past. And the future, too, had this golden shine to it. The world, and the future, had been like that for him for ten weeks, even since he’d done what John Foster Dulles, that ignorant American, had refused to do in Geneva in 1954 - look Zhou Enlai in the eye and read what was there, and shake him by the hand; treat Zhou at a minimum like an equal, like a superior in the areas where Zhou’s experience made him so; treat the Chinese Premier like any Chinese would treat their teacher, with gratitude and humility … not like an alien, certainly not like an inferior as Dulles had done. Zhou never forgot it. He told Whitlam all about it, in Peking, when they met.
Zhou had been master of ceremonies in Geneva, and the French prime minister, working to his tight deadline back in Paris, had been his dupe. Dulles had been oblivious to the real negotiations going on in the next room. Casey had been in the dark, too. Wherever America went, even if America went nowhere, that was good enough for Australia’s envoy to Geneva. Ho Chi Minh knew what was afoot, but could do nothing about it. Uncle Ho was overpowered, a distant second among equals. Vietnam, based on 2,000 years of experience, had never trusted China, and now had less cause to do so. It was just one of oh so many false premises upon which the Domino Theory was constructed - a house of straw put up on shifting sands.
In September 1971 Gough Whitlam had another fifteen months of preparation in store before the federal election that would make him Prime Minister. Part of that preparation would be his pre-election speech, and sections of that speech would have been taking shape in his mind as early as September 1971.
… The war of intervention in Vietnam is ending. The great powers are rethinking and remoulding their relationships and their obligations. Australia cannot stand still at such a time. We cannot afford to limp along with men whose attitudes are rooted in the slogans of the 1950s‚ the slogans of fear and hate. If we made such a mistake, we would make Australia a backwater in our region and a back number in history.
… The world will little note, nor long remember, Australia’s part in the Vietnam intervention. Even the people of the United States will not recall nor care how four successive Australian Prime Ministers from Menzies to McMahon sought to keep their forces bogged down on the mainland of Asia, no matter what the cost of American blood and treasure, no matter how it weakened America abroad and even more at home.
… We now enter a new and more hopeful era in our region. Let us not foul it up this time. Australia has been given a second chance. The settlement agreed upon by Washington and Hanoi is the settlement easily obtainable in 1954. The settlement now in reach – the settlement that 30,000 Australian troops were sent to prevent, the settlement which Mr. McMahon described in November 1967 as treachery – was obtainable on a dozen occasions since 1954. Behind it all, behind those 18 years of bombing, butchering and global blundering, was the Dulles policy of containing China.
… Until barely a year ago, to oppose this policy, even to question it, was being described by Mr. McMahon – and even some other people – as treason. If President Nixon had not gone to China nine months after I did, Mr. McMahon would still be denouncing me, just as he was on the very eve of President Nixon’s announcement that he would go to Peking. This is the man, this is the party, which expects you to trust them with the conduct of your nation’s international affairs for another three years.
… A Labor Government will transfer Australia’s China Embassy from Taipei to Peking.
(to be continued … )
Last edited:
