Reflections of Bob Ellis and the Labor Party.

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