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Night Thoughts on Jerusalem.
Reflections on Bob Ellis's Goodbye Jerusalem. (1997)
I wasn’t going to buy it. I knew it would infuriate me. But then I found
myself with a couple of hours to kill one winter evening in South Yarra, and
there it was in the bookshop. Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Jerusalem. It
had just been re-released after some legal entanglement. "Typical!" I
thought and bought it.
I had first learnt of Bob Ellis in the late Seventies. I knew him, by name
only, as the author of the play The Legend of King O’Malley and
was surprised when a friend assured me that he was regarded as a genius
amongst Sydney's political/intellectual push. "Women want to have his
children." she said.
As a native of Melbourne, what I found hard to believe was that Sydney had
a political/intellectual push. In the Seventies, Melbourne, with its Pram
Factory, David Williamson and Tim Burstall; where Jim Cairns had
burnt call-up papers before the massive Vietnam moratorium crowd, with its Flying Trapeze and Last Laugh comedy venues, was where it was at.
Adelaide came a close second with its Arts Festival and hot-panted Premier.
Even Tasmania had credibility as the bushwalking, folk-singing, eco-narcissist
State. Sydney was regarded as the Australian version of Mayor Daley’s Chicago.
Further inquiries revealed that not only did Sydney have an active, volatile
and incestuous Push but the Push-In-Question was possessed of the extraordinary
conceit that it was the principal if not the only literary and
political in-crowd in Australia. Indeed, the more one probed into the
psychology of Sydney dwellers, the more it appeared that they collectively
thought Sydney was Australia.
Over the next few years, a succession of books, exposes, inquiries and
ABC reports revealed to the rest of Australia the morass that was and had
always been Sydney politics. A strong Irish/Labor Party connection emerged. As
a Victorian, I found this baffling. Hadn’t all the Catholics defected to the
DLP in the Fifties? Did they later all migrate back to the Labor Party? The Sydney Labor party
seemed to have retained its original working class links while Victorian branch
had firmly repositioned itself as a party for the aspiring middle class - Barry
Jones, Dr Moss Cass, Dr Jim
Cairns. There also persisted, in Sydney, strong vertical integration between
local, State and Federal politics while in Victoria and the rest of the
country, there was strict class division on such matters. You would never have
heard a Victorian Chief Justice inquiring about his "little mate" – a
suburban solicitor with scruffy gangland clientele.
Sydney politics seemed very rough compared to the stately Victorian
scene: branch stacking, punch-ups at meetings, corruption, the thuggery of Premier
Askin - a Gordian knot of police, political, criminal and legal interests.
Sydney, in the swinging international agnostic liberated Seventies, seemed
manacled to its convict past.
The divergence of views between Sydney dwelling and non-Sydney dwelling
Australians has always been dramatic.
To New South Welsh eyes, Keating’s
usurpation of Hawke was the rightful accession of the long-serving party
faithful over the politically suspect show-pony. To Victorians and others, it
was Sydney power brokers calling in a debt. The NSW Right had reluctantly
backed Hawke in '83 and now they felt they were owed a Prime Minister.
As this tale of two cities or, more accurately, two Australias – Sydney
and the rest of the country – unfolded, we also learned more of Ellis, who
began to range beyond his Sydney territory. Soon, the chances of meeting
Ellis were not confined to the Port Jackson area. Ellis was to become a
permanent fixture at the National Screenwriters Conference, the Screen
Producers Conference and almost every other conference where he could be seen
either slumped in a corner scribbling like Gibbon or saggily lurching after
women.
His regular column in "Encore" magazine has become compulsory
yet infuriating reading for the film industry. Compulsory for its promise of
gossip, infuriating for its contradictions. Though himself one of the best
screen writers in Australia Ellis continually defends, if not champions, appalling
Australian films. He is clearly intelligent and yet staunchly defended, even
eulogised, Keating during his reign. He is a mature man with a historical
overview and, yet, nurtures an undergraduate loathing for conservatives.
And so... I opened the pages of "Goodbye Jerusalem" with some hope that
this anthemic work might hold some clue into the occult workings of the Sydney
left-wing literary mind. It might even hold a clue to the foremost political
question of the age which is "Why would anyone support the Labor party in
the Nineties?" I was not disappointed. Ellis’s memoir reveals much of the
psychology of the left-wing intellectual: you might even say it leads us into
the very heart of Labor sentimentality.
First of all the book is predominantly about names - the legal tender of
Sydney society. ("It was a great do. X was there with Y and then Z walked
in. Do you know Q? Fabulous person! Did you know that Q and W used to be an
item? That was before he met M of course. It was when they were both working for
R and he was on with J..." ad nauseam) The names in Jerusalem
drop like steady rain that has set in for the day. Everybody knows, went to
school with, taught, has got drunk or has slept with everyone else and Ellis
has done it all with everyone. Ellis affects to behold all these connections
and coincidences with profound wonder, "six degrees of separation!",
as if they were in some way accidental, extraordinary, serendipitous,
violations of the laws of probability - rather than the totally predictable and
thoroughly intended outcomes of networking behaviours
within that subculture.
Running through this Who’s Who and Who’s Been Up Whom of the Left is
Ellis’s acute, sometimes agonising, uncertainty of his own place within the
subculture. The book is described, with some irony, and perhaps genuine regret, Memoirs of a Labor Outsider a subscript which is hard
to take seriously given that the entire work is a chronicle of his encounters
with heavyweights. And yet here lies a clue to the central dilemma of the
acolyte. No matter how deeply the groupie penetrates the in-crowd, there always
seems to be a more private circle to which they are denied access. Power
elites, like onions, seem to peel down infinitely, always revealing yet another
inner sanctum just beyond the reach of the aspirant. The result is that the
acolyte experiences simultaneously a gratifying sense of belonging and a disappointing sense of
rejection.
Ellis notes (and possibly identifies with) other excluded Labor party figures: Calwell sitting alone with his conscience in the
church; Daly sent to Coventry for defying Evatt. Ostracism and betrayal are
recurrent themes in this book which presents itself, overall, as a tragedy, It is never made clear, however, exactly whose tragedy it is,
Ellis's or the Labor Party's.
In a way, it purports to be the tragedy of Men, particularly Great Men.
Like most left-wingers, Ellis disdains the "Great Man" theory of history and yet
Jerusalem consists mainly of homage to a series of Great Men he
has known, or wishes he had known: men whom he lauds with deep affection if not
outright hero worship. This is mythmaking on a grand scale. Ellis is engaged in
the construction of a pantheon which will show all these men (including, I
assume, himself by association) as great and significant people. Chifley,
Whitlam and Hepworth are dealt with in the fondest possible terms; doted upon
as if they were fathers or grandfathers, indeed the entire book is a epic of,
not so much brotherly, as filial love; a love for venerable,
decent, brilliant, loving, outrageous men - almost a hymn to Men in general but
in particular to father figures, the bigger and more cuddly the better. (Ellis
consistently belittles short men, as if smallness of stature had
been medically proven to be a symptom of meanness in spirit and mind.)
Indeed, Ellis seems to see the history of the class struggle as a battle
between male individuals. He regales us not only with great men but brave men,
working men, loyal men, brilliant men, sad men, dead men, insane men and
especially drinking men. Anecdote after anecdote begins "And so we were in
the pub when K walked in and said…." and after a while you begin to
wonder. "Don’t these men have wives? Families? Do they ever see their
children? Do they ever stay home and just watch television?"
Women, by contrast, are starkly absent, appearing only as adversaries of
mythic proportions - Bronwyn Bishop the Valkyrie, Pauline Hanson the Harpy - or
as carnal diversions: the shared girlfriends, the groupies, the toys. There is
of course, Mrs Ellis, Anne Brooksbank, always in the background; loved and
revered, supporting, strengthening, guiding. But how do we reconcile Ellis’s
admiration of and dependence on his wife with continual references to his
attempts to grope and seduce other women, references made with astonishing
candour, as if the stumbling failure of the attempts somehow excused them?
Larded over this adulation of Men and scant regard for women, is an
adulation of Irishness; a quality which Ellis seems to regard as a genetic quality. At
one point Ellis makes the comment, somewhat ruefully, that while the Irish
settled Australia, the Scots conquered it. Of course, as a Melbourne-bred
descendant of Scottish immigrants, I would, be inclined to agree with that. While the Irish are famed for drinking, singing,
fighting, writing, nostalgia, blowing people up and sorrow, the Scots are
famous for drinking, singing, fighting, engineering, medicine, physics, banking
and dying on the battlefield. Both countries suffered crushing poverty under
the domination of England but, while the Irish starved and drank and sang, the
Scots, cannily built great technical universities, invented electronics and
television and donated to the imperial armies of England whole brigades of
ferocious soldiers who terrified the living crap out of the Zulus and Pathans
who stared wide-eyed through the morning mists to see advancing lines of
tall, red haired men wearing skirts and puffing on what appeared to be flutes
inserted into the rectums of yowling tartan tomcats.
Thus the Scots, while appearing, oddly, to be willing to die for their
English oppressors, ended up, like Figaro, making their masters dependent on
them - for Scottish education, Scottish acumen and Scottish toughness
("Whatever it takes"). Little wonder that these tough, pragmatic,
sometimes Calvinistic wowsers rose to positions of political and financial
power in Australia. Ellis however, sees the ascendancy of Scots in Australia as
cause for regret and we wonder why. Is Ellis is anti-pragmatic? Or is he just
pro-nostalgic. For, unlike the Irish, the Scots are notably unsentimental about their country of origin.
As my eighty year old Scottish neighbour used to say. "Scotland is the
best country in the world to starve in."
The roots of Ellis’s love of Irishness appears to lie in a respect for
things humble and honest, a respect for men who work by hard physical labour.
But how do we reconcile this sentiment with the admiration of power that
elsewhere infuses the writing? Whence the name-dropping? Such confusions riddle
the work. Ellis supports tariffs, yet despises the (Scottish) politicians - McEwan and Menzies - who created them. He affects affection for the uneducated,
and yet his satiric writings snobbishly lampoon John Hewson for having gained
his PhD from Saskatoon. Ellis is simultaneously scared by Keating and at
the same time admiring of him, like a new boy in awe of the Head Prefect.
Of course the confusion is not Ellis’s alone. The schizoid nature of the
Labor mentality is captured brilliantly in Gerry Connolly’s impersonation of
Keating: "You establishment… scum" (Only a Labor Prime Minister could
regard himself as a not being part of the Establishment.)
In the end, Ellis seems to love the Labor Party for its people, not its
policies. As with Keating himself, Ellis’s commitment to the Labor cause seems
to arise not so much from empathy with the underdog as a white-hot hatred of
pedigreed dogs. Ellis's loathing of John Howard goes beyond all reason, seeking
to portray him at best as an Australian Rick Moranis ("Honey I Shrunk the
Deficit") and at worst as an arch fiend. At the same time he reveres the
consummately aloof patrician leader, Whitlam.
But, putting Ellis’s confused and bathetic sentiments aside, Goodbye
Jerusalem is also a revelation of the mentality of the Labor party
machine. In particular it is an insight into that machine’s astounding failure to
understand Australian attitudes at any given time over the last fifty years,
illuminating starkly the gulf between the views of the True Believers and
ordinary Australians.
To begin with, the Party always seems to have been fighting the last
war. We see Chifley, after World War II, campaigning on a "never
again" platform (referring to the Great Depression) just when the country
is about to embark on a period of unprecedented prosperity. How did it take the
Labor Party 30 years after WWII to grasp that there wasn’t going to be another
Depression and refocus their policies accordingly, by which time the prosperity
was, ironically, starting to wane? The result was Whitlam shovelling cash into
education, the arts, and "quality of life" programs, just as the good
times were coming to an end.
How could Keating’s minders have NOT anticipated that the rapid succession
of reforms under his Prime Ministership - anti-discrimination,
anti-vilification, unfair-dismissal and pro-Asianisation - would start to make
the public jittery and that the High Court Mabo decision – which seemed to
imply that the aboriginal people still legally owned a lot of Australia and white
Australians might have to give it back - would create widespread insecurity. How could they not see that focussing on aborigines as a
downtrodden class, at a time when the recession was creating a new class of
downtrodden whites, would make Pauline Hanson's preposterous proposition - that
aboriginals were better off than poor whites - somehow credible. Timing.
Timing.
How could Keating’s minders have not seen that he was pushing the
Republic barrow so fast that the wheels were bound to come off. Hawke would
have presented the Republic issue as a matter for all Australians and made them
feel that they had chosen it. Keating basically said, "It’s coming folks,
so you better get used to it."
Though he purports to be an outsider, Ellis analyses these towering
failures of common sense and sensitivity like an insider,
attributing the electoral backlash against Keating to the foibles of
electioneering; to television debates in which he suggests ludicrously that
the studio lighting favoured Howard; to a forged letter scandal which no one even
remembers; finally to the sour-grapes suggestion that Keating wasn’t really trying
anyway. All excuses to avoid the overwhelming reality that the public hated
Labor’s policies.
What is most striking in this portrayal of Labor thinking is what is NOT
mentioned. Reading this book, no one would imagine that we were in the Age of
Communications. There is not the slightest mention of the impact on society of
computers, cable and satellite TV, global news organisations, the Internet,
street kids, heroin, the loss of the entire TFC industry to Asia,
immigration, the mushrooming litigation/public inquiry/prosecution industry,
the gigantic gamble of sharemarket-based superannuation or the aging of the
Australian population.
Rather, what is revealed is a world of intellectuals and politicians
still clinging to age-old divisions, grudges, memories and a Fenian resentment
of the wrongs suffered by long-dead fathers. Goodbye Jerusalem is
indeed a wake indeed but not for any vision of the future. It is wake for the past: a
lament for the Hibernian Dreamtime written by a writer who is in love with the
idea of writers in love - not with women but with other men; a writer who is
pining for his own Lake Isle of Innisfree and a Celtic twilight where life is
poetry, drink and free love or, at the very least, a time when men could go
down the pub and get away from their wives.
Ian McFadyen 1997
