uQp HEADUNERS -> NtnHTCuvEl" 1! hers pot, piU with a inetre-high black-and-white 'mcKieni hriv-uia^i. inn rhjlii rui\\ • portrait of Frank Sinatra on the wa mp stretcher where he lakes I I f ^^ it'ter-lunch nap ("turns one day .vo. look at Ronald Reagan!"). a Craig McGregor'^ih y window, a tiny desk littered w iih scripts and scribbled notes and a I having a hau- wall of press pix of Clive with glam­ ng) and strives orous women : Joan Collins, Judy Social Portraits iisity of a man Green. Selina Scott... It is all part of , iias wasted half his un.spt>ih Aussie ockerside, which \ plause and a fal six-figuie BBC con- his life and wants to make eveiy has given liim the immense aclva j trace in his pockeL How does he get .second count form now on. tage on British television < [ away with it? being the Outsider "In many ways I've already lived around in sha(j The answer is a complex paradigm ray life, had a lot of fun. 1 really what menswearcircJ [ of how the media works in the lale to get on with nty work, try to do mincmc ij I twentieth century, beciuse Clive something useful in the years that are Hug [ James is obviously better and smarter remaining," he says with unexpected I and funnier than the amiable bufoon somlireness (he tunied .50 in IWO). I he portrays on the box. Indeed there rm really good for the work 1 do and CLIVE JAMES Fare many Clive James. To Cuiieni not a hell of a lot else. I'm not particu (Bioltraph) he is "a polymath with an larl\ ori'jiiijl but I've col a way of SIMON CREAN J antic wit, one of the most scintilla Suddenly his mood l-ing figures in contemporary Britisl. ^ _ laughsoff suggestion- JILL WRAN iiuellectual journal ism". To the gen­ that he is selling himself short, pro eral public he is a TV megastar. To diicing kitsch instead of cullun- / BRUCE DAWE Australians he is one of a group of "Usually I'm ponraycd as a lenih PETER BROCK I expatriates Barry Humphries. sad man who is trying to cover [Gemiainc Circcr, Bruce Beresford, deep inner longing, but as far as PAUL KEATING all males ot James - who come home see it's just not tnje! Hi ' every now and then only to demon- entertainment is woilh di: LEONIE KRAMER I strate how un-Australian they'vebe- it. I'd like to do mou ," ' come. To media waichei's James is a MU.ST ESCAPE!" h. : • ALLAN BORDER i phenomenon.aheavyweiglit literal JOHN CAIN figure who can make TV program with twelve million viewers. To HARRY SEIDLER • Auberon Waugh he is someone who "pietends to Ix? an irreverent figurr BOBBI SYKES but in fact he is a cringing man on ijj i make", .And to Clive Jamj JOHN HOWARD He ELIZABETH EVATT past BOB HAWKE \ ^ ^\ G \ 4N64XQ 3 A067' OT 527 838 A^ Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute University of Queensland Presented to The Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature by THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND PRESS 1990 Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute HEADLINERS Craig McGregor is the author of two novels. Don't Talk to me about Love (1971), which won the Xavier Society prize for literature, and The See- Through Revolver (UQP, 1977), and a collection of short stories, Real Lies (UQP, 1987). He has also written essays and books on political, social and cultviral themes, twice winning the Walkley Award for Journalism with feature stories on Bob Hawke and Jill Wran. He now lives in Sydney and is head of Visual Communication at the Uni­ versity of Technology, Sydney and writes regu­ larly for the Sydney Morning Herald and Good Weekend magazine. Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute By the same author fiction Don't Talk To Me About Love The See-through Revolver Real Lies essays People, Politics & Pop Up Against The Wall, America Soundtrack for the 'Eighties Pop Goes the Culture books Profile of Australia The High Country In The Making To Sydney With Love This Surfing Life The History of Surfing The Great Barrier Reef Bob Dylan: a retrospective Australian Built Life in Australia Time of Testing The Australian People Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute HEADLINERS Social Portraits University of Queensland Press Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute First published 1990 by University of Queensland Press Box 42, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia © Craig McGregor 1990 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset by University of Queensland Press Printed in Australia by The Book Printer, Maryborough Distributed in the USA and Canada by International Specialized Book Services, Inc., 5602 N.E. Hassalo Street, Portland, Oregon 97213-3640 Cataloguing in Publication Data National Library of Australia McGregor, Craig, 1933- Headliners: fourteen social portraits. 1. Australia — Biography. I. Title 920.094 ISBN 0 7022 2344 1 Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Clive James 1 Simon Crean 18 Jill Wran 38 Bruce Dawe 55 Peter Brock 63 Paul Keating 77 Leonie Kramer 85 Allan Border 94 John Cain 107 Harry Seidler 123 Bobbi Sykes 136 John Howard 148 Elizabeth Evatt 163 Bob Hawke 179 Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute for my father Allister Stephen Charles McGregor Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Bruce Dawe's poetry is reproduced with the premission of Long­ man Cheshire Pty Ltd and is taken from Sometimes Gladness, To­ wards Sunrise, and Beyond the Subdivisions. I would also like to thank AUen and Unwin for permission to reproduce from Harry Seidler's Internment: The Diaries of Harry Seidler, May 1940-October 1941 (1986) and the University of Queensland Press for permis­ sion to use several of Bobbi Sykes's poems from her collection Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions (1988). The second part of the profile on Bob Hawke is taken from my book Time of Testing: The Bob Hawke Victory published by Pengviin Books Australia Ltd, 1983. Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute PREFACE "We are all of us, in our private lives, metaphors for some more general condition. If we don't understand the social significance of the merely personal we wdU never be liberated." I wrote that while trying to write about JiU Wran. Sometimes you don't under­ stand something with real clarity until you write it down; writing is learning. Certainly that's the case with this collection of profiles which I've written over the last few years. The ones which have been published before I have rewritten and modified and, in some cases, restored to their original unedited form. In every profile, however, I have tried to write less about the people themselves than the social context which both constructs them and explains something to us, all of us, about ourselves. I've never been inter­ ested much in personality as such, so it's a bit strange to find my­ self writing about other people. But it's an honourable attempt, this effort to unravel the complex interaction between people and the society which shapes them and which they also shape. The underljdng approach, obviously, is pluralist. And somewhere be­ hind these portraits, I hope, some portrait of contemporary Aus­ tralia and its social structure takes shape as well. The forms are fairly self-evident. I try not to think too much about technique in case it becomes selfconscious or formularised. Nevertheless I've tried, quite deliberately, to use many of the techniques of fiction to enrich and expand the normal nonfiction forms. Behind it aU, I suppose, is a quite ambitious though possi­ bly misplaced attempt to force journalism into some of the arenas of subtlety and complexity which are usually reserved for fiction; Property of University of Queensland Press - do not copy or distribute X Preface I can't see why, theoretically, a genuinely "new" journalism can't annex them to itself. Of course there are problems. Truth (objec­ tive) is a problem. So is the fragility of people's lives. So is the de­ mand to communicate to a mass audience which needs, like ourselves, to be enlightened, not patronised nor treated to a pyro­ technic display. To be beautiful but plain is a lovely thing to strive for. I wouldn't want to claim too much for these pieces: they are journalism-on-the-run. They've depended a lot on people who've been willing to give of their time and answer thousands of ques­ tions. I'd like to thank everyone who agreed to let me wrrite about them; they were often incredibly generous. I could have included a lot more people, many of whom aren't "known" to the media, but it wasn't practical. Two of these profiles, of Bob Hawke and JiU Wran, won the national Walkley Award for Journalism. Most of the writing is of the profile genre but the John Howard feature tries to link, quite explicitly, the person with what was happening in the Australian community at the time.