NO LONGER DOWN UNDER No LONGER DOWN UNDER Australians Creating Change MIKE BROWN GROSVENOR BOOKS Suisse Published in Australia in 2002 by Grosvenor Books (Australia) 226 Kooyong Road, Toorak, VIC 3142, AUSTRALIA Website: www.mra.org.au Also available from Grosvenor Books: 24 Greencoat Place, London SWIP IRD. UK P.O. Box 16364, St. Paul, MN 55116, USA 2227,1010 Arbour Lake Rd NW,Calgary, Alberta T3G 478, CANADA 14A Norton Park Ave, Fairfield, Lower Hutt 6009, NEW ZEALAND Copyright ® Michael Brown, 2002 All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher. Cover designed by Adam Brown, Adelaide Typeset in 11/14 Guatemala Printed and bound by GiUingham Printers, Adelaide, South AustraHa National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Brown, Mike, 1945 - No Longer Down Under: Australians Creating Change ISBN 0-9592622-3-7 1. Title Remembering Peter Howard Thefire has notgone out., it's still burning. Dedicated to Adam and Anjali and to their generation who ke^ it burning in so many creative ways. CONTENTS PREFACE 11 Living Justly or Just living 1 A DO ER' WHO DID WHAT OTHERS 23 SAID CAN'T BE DONE my father: architect, building people and communities 2 JEAN & MY GENES 41 my wife and my life Lasting values <fi changing systems 3 A FARMER OUTSTANDING IN HIS FIELD 61 dairy farmer Max Gale The key ofcompassion 4 WAR VETS GO TO TOKYO,WITH KOALAS 75 ex-servicemen and women winning the peace The key offor^veness 5 NO 'YES MINISTER' MAN 91 pubhc servant Allan Griffith The key ofsensitivity 6 LEARNING TO WALK HUMBLY 109 politician Kim Beazley Senior The key oflistening 7 KING OF THE WHARFIES 129 last president of the Waterside Workers,Jim Beggs The ofresponsibility 8 AN HONEST COP 147 ex-police commissioner Ray Whitrod The key ofintegrity 9 BLUEY' AND AN AUSSIE STIRRER 163 mates with a mission, Stan Shepherd and Jim Coulter The key offriendship 10 OUT OF THE FIRE INTO THE MELTING POT 187 refugee families, from Laos and Lebanon The key ofcommunity 11 WRITING WRONGS 209 author Christobel Mattingley The key telling it like it is Old roots <fi new routes 12 SORROW AT SUNDOWN 235 digging up our family's settler roots 13 FREE AT LAST 245 Indigenous pioneers 'Aunty' Marge Tucker, and Walda & Reg Blow 14 SIGNPOSTS ON THE ROAD TO RECONCILIATION 265 where is it heading? EPILOGUE 293 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to British writer Michael Henderson who in 1988 had the nerve to suggest that I write this book and who didn 't let meforget it; To John and Helen Mills, and other MRA colleagues, who also didn't let me forget it and whose greatest encouragement continues to be the commitment, vision and action we share; To the Browns, Herrings, Mattingleys and Stewarts, all of whom loaned me their holiday homes to get away and write in isolation; To linguist-editor Mary-Anne Gale who offered to edit the manuscript, spending weeks cutting out excess verbiage and doing it in a way which gave me confidence ofproducing a better book; To my wife Jean who backed up Mary-Anne's re-structuring and editing, read numerous versions and kept me at it over years; To Lorraine Reilly, Jim Coulter and Audrey Stratton who ploughed through manuscripts, giving reality checks and also telling me to keep at it; To Christobel Mattingley and Jacqueline Cookes for giving their professional editorial and publishing advice; To the various publishers who took the manuscript, made enough encouraging noises to keep me working, then sent it back with apologies six months later; To Gundy Graham for the use of his poem in chapter 11; To my son Adam,for designing the cover; To my sister Barbara Williams and to Helen Mills who picked up more typos and mistakes than the rest of us put together; To the Rev Tim Costellofor being willing to give a recommendation; But most of all,, a thousand thanks to those whose stories are in the book and whose lives have enriched mine. Preface 'Everybody thinks ofchanging humanity and nobody thinks ofchanging himself Leo Tolstoy BETWEEN THE COLLAPSE of the Third Reich and the Japanese surrender, I joined the opening chorus of bawls that became the baby-boom. As William Blake put it: My mother groaned, myfather wept; into the dangerous world I leapt. A perilous and exciting age it was, and has become more so. My awareness of it started in the Sixties - a decade which began with a bang and ended with an ominous rumble. Fired by JFK idealism, 'Peter Paul and Mary' protesting. Civil Rights activism and a determination not to be frozen in by the Cold War, we postwar baby-boomers wakened to our age of political and social consciousness. With youthful arrogance we sought to grab history by the throat and change it. Or so it seemed to me, as I finished high school, had a brief spell in university and then plunged out into an unsuspecting world. I was convinced that Australia, my country of birth, had some greater purpose than booze, bets and bikinis. While many of my friends were gorging themselves on pulp fiction, I was ploughing through serious political stuff, trying to understand revolution in Latin America, South-East Asia and 14 No Longer Down Under Africa. The vision and rhetoric of an English writer, Peter Howard, hooked me. Howard, early in the Sixties, voiced a challenge for American university students: that they could be part of a process of 'modernising man' (no correct gender language then). We had become technological giants but remained moral and spiritual pygmies, proclaimed Howard; we could span the stars and probe the oceans, but we were still run by the same basic fears, hates and lusts as the cave man. Our survival depended on a revolution to 'modernise' the character and behaviour of the human race to match our technological achievements. By the time I got to America in 1965, the fire that burned in Peter Howard's guts had consumed him - he collapsed and died mid-stream of an exhausting speaking tour through North and South America. But the young crowd he inspired burned on. And within weeks of my arrival I was in the middle of a conference they had organised on Mackinac Island in the Michigan Great Lakes, and was swept up in the 'Sing-Out' movement they were creating - musical revues expressing some of Howard's themes. It was gung-ho all the way, glowing with enthusiasm for the tmiversal era of brotherhood we could see coming to birth. Thousands of young people became involved, belting out such positive themes as 'Freedom isn't free' and 'Up with people' on stages from iimer-city Harlem to the Hollywood Bowl. In old Greyhound buses we criss-crossed America, a dozen times or more, setting up our Mghting towers and loud speakers in college football stadiums, army bases, conference rooms in downtown hotels... even a 'showboat' barge at Cape Cod. Then for two years in Los Angeles, with a bunch of inexperienced enthusiasts, I pumped out a newsprint tabloid we unabashedly called Tomorrow's American News, hawking it along Hollywood Boulevard until we were chased away by Preface IS motor-cycle cops. In our minds it was unstoppable, the inevitable progress of history... By the end of the decade, five years later, it was my turn to be burnt out. I still talked the language of hope, but it clanged hollow on the hard floor of reality. And not only I. The blood-drenched debacle of Vietnam brought down the JFK-style idealism as dramatically as Kennedy himself was felled. The sweat and sacrifice of the Vietnam vets went unsung, except in the bitter praise of protest songs. Martin Luther King Jnr., too, was cut down in a hail of bullets. The tide of civil rights which achieved so much stirred up a dangerous rip tide of uncivil wrongs. America's inner cities went up in flames. Hopeful dreams which began the decade became hallucinations, as drugs seeped into the life-blood of the Sixties generation. I retreated back to Australia... to the drylands around the River Murray where dark-green fruit orchards cling like parasites to red shifting sands, fed by the life-blood of Australia's longest river. Here on our family fruit orchard, I tried to regain some semblance of stability by picking over apricot trees through the withering heat of the day, and by picking over my values and beliefs in the cool of night. A different perspective began to form - revealing itself on one of those vibrant Outback nights when the stars vie for space in a moonless sky. Even while focussing on some dark infinity, a feeble flicker beyond the starry clusters made itself known, travelling eons of light years from a sun which - who knows - might have been blown into oblivion long before homo sapiens iitsx. staggered across the crust of our planet. What did it all mean? Was I just a random part of it all, a bunch of molecules shaped by DNA and the environment I had been born into, scratching my way forward among (what was then) five billion other people? Was the Christian faith and definition of existence that I had been raised with just a load of 16 No Longer Down Under sentimental hogwash; and the great causes I had given myself for just scrubbed-up gimmickry? Or was there some vast design which I might yet dimly perceive - some destiny to be discerned and pursued, some meaning to unravel and enrich? I was desperate to know.