Australian Notes

Wednesday, 25th February 2009

Have you become a Catholic? I have been pestered with this question over the years, usually by disgusted old atheists demanding to know why I have sold out.

To get the full flavour of John Hewson’s sophisticated and charming observations on my son-in-law Peter Costello (‘no balls’, ‘lazy’, ‘unelectable’) and also incidentally his warm recollections of his old boss John Howard (‘disloyal to every leader he ever worked for’), it helps to read what The Costello Memoirs reports about Hewson when he was leader of the opposition. Page 57 tells a key story. After one testing exchange on Hewson’s plan to bring back the death penalty for rapists, Costello asked his parliamentary colleague Ian McLachlan: ‘Do you think we have an obligation to tell the Australian people our leader is a maniac?’ McLachlan replied: ‘No, the Australian people will figure it out for themselves.’ It is no surprise that in his newspaper article Hewson dismissed the memoirs as ‘indulgent’, ‘a yawn’ and ‘sold at a discount in just a few days’. As co-author with Costello I can only point out that our book has sold 40,000 copies so far. This makes it a runaway bestseller in Australia, where 10,000 sales is considered a very great success. Most political books sell fewer than 5,000 copies. The Costello Memoirs has far outsold the recent biography of John Howard by Peter Van Onselen and Wayne Errington. (That sold 20,000 copies.) I have earned more in royalties from this one book than from several of my other books put together. I would welcome a few more ‘yawns’ on this scale.

Now is not a good time for art exhibitions. The market is almost dead, busted by the global financial crisis. But the other day I opened the exhibition at the new Peter Pinson Gallery of some of Nancy Borlase’s abstract paintings of the 1960s. Nancy was often overlooked during her lifetime — she died at the age of 92 a couple of years ago — but she is now being recognised as one of the most talented artists of her day. Running away from her genteel home in Napier, New Zealand, to pursue a career in art, she first earned a living as Madame Rosa reading tea leaves in the Frascati tea rooms in Christchurch. After the government banned this nefarious trade, she came to Sydney. Moving in bohemian, anarchist and Trotskyite circles, she met her husband Laurie Short, who later led the epic struggle against the ballot-riggers in the Ironworkers union in the 1940s. A few years ago when their daughter Susanna published a biography of her father, the late Clyde Packer and I considered producing a biopic of his life. It was to be an Australian variation of Lech Walesa’s battles in Gdansk, which Andrzej Wajda made into that fine film Man of Iron. Nothing came of our idea, but I now think that there is an even better film to be made by telling the dramatic story of both Australian art and politics from the Great Depression to the global financial crisis, as experienced by Laurie and Nancy together. The Cold War is as forgotten as the Crimean War and the younger generation knows little about its grand guignol, lies, and bad faith. But if there is one book a young Australian could read to capture those years, it is On Burchett written by a Hungarian in Paris, Tibor Meray, and published in Melbourne by Callistemon Publications (PO Box 293, Belgrave 3160). Burchett was an Australian communist journalist, and Meray, also once a communist journalist, was his comrade during the the Korean War. After the Hungarian revolution, Meray defected to the free world. I claim a very marginal role in the book’s production. Some years ago I ransacked the bookshops to buy most of Burchett’s 30 works and send them on to Meray in Paris to help him document Burchett’s life-long mendacity, cunning and perfidy. For more documentary detail, the student must follow the debates on Crikey in recent weeks weeks between supporters of Meray and adherents of the old-time communist religion. The Party may be dead, but the faith lives on. It will no doubt in time re-emerge as a force in the world, perhaps in alliance with Islamicism. Read On Burchett and be prepared.

Bryce Courtenay, Australia’s most popular novelist, is a great loss to showbusiness. At the annual Poets’ Picnic in harbour-side Woollahra on Tuesday, sundry poetasters strutted the boards. Bob Hawke’s wife and biographer, Blanche d’Alpuget, read some George Orwell. I tested the listeners with Walter de la Mare and Geoffrey Lehmann. But Bryce stole the show with Robert Frost’s ‘Once by the Pacific’ — accompanied by his own stunning, ventriloquial sound effects of surf crashing on rocks. I don’t know what Frost would have made of it, but there is a career waiting for Bryce on the stage — like Charles Dickens.