Australian Notes

Saturday, 7th January 2012

There have been only a few snotty critics of the Queen’s appointment of the conservative John Howard or the avant-garde and gay David Hockney to the Order of Merit. These appointments are entirely in the gift of the Sovereign and do not depend on the sometimes shifty recommendations of politicians. We have nothing comparable in Australia. One up for the constitutional monarchists!

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To judge from the English press, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s old political colleagues remain divided about The Iron Lady. Norman Tebbit, who served in her government, could not recognise her in the ‘half-hysterical, over-emotional, over-acting’ caricature presented by Meryl Streep. Her old PR adviser, Tim Bell, of Saatchi and Saatchi and other agencies, dismissed the film as ‘rubbish’. Charles Moore, whose authorised biography will not be published until after Margaret Thatcher’s death, believes the film should not have been made in her lifetime. A more conciliatory Matthew Parris, who served with her in the House of Commons, conceded the film caught the way she sometimes camped it up: she could not, he said, order a Welsh rarebit without delivering a portentous pronouncement about it.

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But Nigel Lawson, her Chancellor of the Exchequer, seems to me to have struck the right balance. The film will tell you, he said, little or nothing about what the Thatcher government actually did. But it is an impressive and moving sketch of her character. If you want a good drama with a political flavour, Lawson recommends The Iron Lady. But except for flashes of newsreel footage, it does not deal with her policies on the economy, the unions, Europe or the Cold War. (It is better on the Falklands War.) The point is it does not even try. It assumes we know as much as we need to follow the story, which concentrates on her extraordinary, unforgettable and tragic character. This is what makes the film worth seeing and Meryl Streep’s performance so compelling.

The poet-novelist-dramatist Oliver Goldsmith left his mark on Australian history mainly through his jibe about Tommy Townshend — that is, Lord Sydney, after whom the city of Sydney is named. It appears in Goldsmith’s famous lines mocking his friend ‘good Edmund Burke’ who ‘born for the universe, narrowed his mind/ And to party gave up what was meant for mankind’. To illustrate how party politics deformed Burke, Goldsmith pointed to the unworthy efforts he made to win the parliamentary support of a hack like Townshend: ‘straining his throat/ To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote’. (Don’t even think about the Gillard government!) For more than 200 years, if Lord Sydney was remembered at all, it was for this satiric slight. Historians followed Goldsmith’s lead. None bothered to write a biography, and few examined Sydney’s crucial role in the settlement of Australia or the establishment of Canada.

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Andrew Tink, the former MP, fresh from his prizewinning William Charles Wentworth, decided to fill this gap. It was not easy. Most of Sydney’s personal papers are in the Clements Library in Michigan. The records of his role in dealing with George III’s madness are with the Royal College of Physicians in London. Yet when Tink had finished his manuscript, Australian publishers showed little interest. Nor did English publishers, as UK Foreign Secretary (and respected biographer) William Hague found when he took up Tink’s cause in London. Tink took his case to the lecture circuit. In the end Australian Scholarly Publishing decided to give it a go. Out this week, Lord Sydney: The Life and Times of Tommy Townshend tells the story of an 18th-century British politician who, though overshadowed by his great contemporaries — Pitt, Fox, Burke — played a key role in the foundation of Australia. It was he who selected Arthur Phillip to be the first Governor of New South Wales — a choice which even Lord Sydney’s critics later came to agree was wise, even inspired. (Phillip named the first settlement Sydney as a thank-you.) Equally important was Lord Sydney’s insistence, against much opposition, that the convicts of the settlement have the same legal rights as all Englishmen. This was put to the test almost immediately after landfall in Sydney Cove when one of the convicts sued the captain of his ship for ‘losing’ his luggage — and won in court. It was a portentous victory for the future of the colony. (His descendant Commodore Paul Kable AM has, with June Whittaker, documented the case in their book Damned Rascals?) As secretary of state Lord Sydney also played a decisive role in the settling the borders of Canada and in resettling loyalist refugees from the triumphal United States. Lord Sydney may not have been a Great Man, but he ran the British Empire with a staff of 17! Tink dedicates his book to his wife Kerry whose support during his battles with cancer allowed him to see the story through to publication.

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It’s an odd form of censorship that the journalists impose each year in reporting the Queen’s Christmas speech. If she has something uncontroversial or predictable to say, they report her in full. But if she touches on a spiritual or religious theme, they ignore it entirely. In 2010 her comments on sport were well reported but her launching of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, commissioned by her ninth-great-grandfather, passed unnoticed. In 2011 her views on the importance of the family were reported, but the third of her speech — about how God sent into the world not a philosopher or a general but a Saviour — was apparently considered too boring or too wacky to publish.

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