Red Ted) Theodore 1884-1950

361 E.G. (Red Ted) Theodore 1884-1950 by Ross Fitzgerald The Clem Lack Oration: Presented to a meeting of the Society, 24 March 1994 Edward Granville Theodore was dying. Few in Australian public life have commanded the worlds of business and politics with equal authority. Ted Theodore had walked like a giant through the three worlds of business, politics and labour. Writing in 1931, Charles Bernays, the clerk of the Queensland Parliament and chronicler of the first seventy years of Queensland political history, described Theodore as, 'Clever: far-seeing: secretive: popular while in power; said to be a rich man'.' It was a perceptive summation of the paradox of ability, mystery, power and plenitude in a man who within thirty years went from being a mine worker to a mine owner. Later, historian Geoffrey Bolton described 'Red Ted' Theodore as 'the closest that Australia has come to producing the Great Gatsby'.^ A reticent nature, a talent for accumulating wealth and a capacity to deal with powerful labour, business, and political figures combined to crete the impression, as Manning Clark put it, that Ted had 'always been around the fringes of "tainted money" '.^ It had not always been that way. Growing up during the 1890s' depression, there was nothing tainted about home — just piety, politics and poverty. The moderately talented, bookish boy of twelve left school to get jobs to help the family survive. He had felt the injustice of it all the more because his father, Basil, a proud man and essentially bourgeois at heart, had for reasons partly economic, partly adventurous, renounced his upper class Romanian background for ten hectares of unproductive dirt at Aldgate, on the outskirts of Adelaide. As an ideologue and romantic son of the upper class often can, Basil made a virtue out of necessity, praising a life of hard work and little rewards and upholding Australia as a wonderful land of opportunity. Associate Professor Fitzgerald's book 'Red Ted': The Biography of E.G. Theodore was published on I August 1994 by the University of Queensland Press. The documentary 'Red Ted and the Great Depression' was shown on ABC TV on 3 August 1994. 362 The gap between theory and practice was wide. If Ted had an ambition, it was not to become 'disgustingly rich' as Clark would have it, but simply to do better than his father had done. He was not a greedy man, seeking wealth for its own sake. More than money he craved the power and influence which his father did not have; power over his own life in the first place, and power to shape the destiny and purposes of men, machines and the earth itself. But Theodore's sense of autonomy was bought at a price. Within the ranks of the labour movement his organisational and oratorical abilities were widely recognised, but he was considered cool and aloof, 'abnormally sphinx-like'.* According to Bernays, 'He gave one the impression of a man with the cares of the universe on his shoulders instead of the minor cares of a State'.^ It was a perceptive insight. For most of his political career, Theodore's public conflicts were paralleled by tension and conflicts in his married life that caused him to hide further his feelings from those around him. In his last days, he had lived a comfortable, almost monk-like, existence. Gone were the expensive works of art hanging on the walls; his estranged wife Esther had them. Most of his library was stored away; he kept just a few books, including a well-thumbed set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, to comfort him. On Monday 6 February 1950, Ted Theodore lay dying in his penthouse, Princeton, overlooking the harbour at Edgecliff in Sydney. He felt like walking out on the terrace. 'Have you ever seen a more beautiful picture than that of Sydney Harbour on an Autumn morning?' he had asked a friend just a year before.* If death was coming to him, he was, at least, organised to meet it. He had worked out a schedule for dying. 'I have three days to go', he told Myra.^ He would have to apologise to the family for not lasting another three weeks. He had set up a trust for them, but if he died before the end of the month they would have to pay death duties. Keeping things under control was his speciality. 'King Theodore r, one wag had called him because of his command of the legislature in Queensland. He had abolished the Legislative Council; only the King and the Parliament itself could do that. The same writer in Smith's Weekly had prophesied, 'The only thing that will kill Theodore is Theodore himself'.* Well, if hypertension and cardio- 363 vascular disease are self-inflicted, he was right. Journalists never did let up on him. Even when Theodore became a pubhsher and with Frank Packer founded the Australian Women's Weekly, the jokers at Smith's Weekly pubhshed a cartoon of him in a bra and slip, with the caption ' "Red Ted" in Pink Teddies'. Underneath it said, 'Ah well. You'd never have believed, when Ted first went into Parliament for Chillagoe as a full-blooded, two-fisted Labor bloke that he would have come at a Society Womens' Paper!'' Sooner or later, he expected, someone would find the small container or private file, about the size of a shoe-box, with his little treasures in it. Mungana. As far as he was concerned, it was all there.'" The true value of the mines was available for all to see, after he was dead and the old wounds could not be reopened. Theodore was a practical visionary. He had the draftsman's skill for drawing up plans. He kept a sketch of the layout for the proposed Emperor Goldmine in Fiji in his file of treasures. His vision was vivid and of material things. For him, industrial and political labour were ways of getting things done, not debating clubs. The union was a machine for acquiring power which meant generating money, enough money to stage successful industrial action, enough money to educate the workers, and enough money to influence people. Political parties were vote-gathering machines. Getting the votes got you into power, getting into power got you near the money, which in turn got you influence. T.J. Ryan, under whose premiership Theodore had flourished, had never grasped this. The Victorian-born Ryan preferred the prestige of the legal victory; he was never really interested in the Treasury. Theodore, however, knew that the Treasury and Public Works were the keys to gaining influence. In a fight he was described as 'cool and unscrupulous'." He seldom if ever played dirty with a lesser man. Since leaving home at sixteen, Theodore had, despite his sojourns on the Herberton tinfields and the copperfields at Chillagoe, been on the lookout for gold. The ore containing the precious metal has to be crushed and the gold refined. Theodore's life had been one of crushing blows and gradual refinement. He had twice lost political office without expecting to and had survived two Royal Commissions. Yet his accoutrements of power and prestige were often resented by the self-appointed spokesmen of the working class, who sanctified their misery and sentimentalised their ineffectualness as the glorious 'class struggle'. Theodore stood aloof as they revelled in the mateship of common failure, exemplified in the Irish tradition of revelling in oppression. This was a tradition to which he did not subscribe. 364 Theodore had had to deal with the envy of others at home as well. His wife, Esther, was always jealous and often despairing of his progressive male refinement. Eleven years older than Ted she constantly struggled to preserve herself, or at least her looks, which often seemed to her were the same thing. On that wet February Monday in 1950, Myra crossed the room wearing a heavy raincoat and a french beret and did something she hadn't done for years. She gently put her arms around him and laid her cheek against his forehead. With a faint smile, he reached up and took off her beret and twirled it on his finger. 'Red Ted' Theodore, the giant amongst pygmies, lying frail upon his death bed, was twirling a beret? He was still in control, still master of the situation, 'Myra, I have three days left. I am sorry, I tried, but I just can't last until the end of the month'.'^ The nurse, agitated, came out to join Myra on the terrace. 'Do you know what your father just said to me?', she said. 'He said, as you went out of the room, "Do you know who that is? That is my daughter. I didn't know she had so much affection for me" '.'^ Myra's eyes stung as she fought back tears, her heart ached with the pain. She went in and sat with him, holding his hand in silence. Yes, he did love her, he always had. Suddenly years of unhappy detachment, subtly contrived by her mother, were suddenly swept away. Esther always feared losing her Ted, so she clung desperately to him, swamping him in a sea of at times violent emotions that neither she nor he could control. In her jealousy, she had driven a wedge between father and daughter. When the children had come of age, he had left her. Now that was all swept away. Gone were the polite intimacies, Myra was with him at last. Tough, successful and rich though he was, it was this human connection that he had lacked.

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