STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 593/2

Full transcript of an interview with

MARY HELEN NEWPORT

on 1 June 2001

By Peter Donovan

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library OH 593/2 MARY HELEN NEWPORT

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, MORTLOCK LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIANA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 593/2

Interview of Mary Helen Newport by Peter Donovan, recorded in Canberra on 1st June 2001 as part of The Honoured Women Oral History Project Part II for the Somerville Oral History Collection of the Mortlock Library of South Australiana.

TAPE 1 SIDE A

My full name is Mary Helen Newport. I lived in a suburb called Plympton about four miles out of Adelaide – I can’t think what the kilometers are (laughs) – out of Adelaide on the way to Glenelg, and I am single. My date of birth is 15th January 1927. Place of birth, I was born in Adelaide and grew up there. My parents – my father was a carpenter. He was the second-oldest in a large family. I always thought he had a great potential, but being one of a large family he had to go out to work as soon as he was able, and this enabled his younger brothers and sisters to reach their full potential, like heads of government agencies, Secretary to the Minister of Education, positions like that.

Could you just elaborate on those, just mention their names, uncles and – – –?

Yes. Walter Bernard Newport, because of not meeting all the physical requirements, couldn’t go to war, so he was in charge of the procurement agency. I’ve just forgotten its name now, but it was to do with the Commonwealth Department of Supply and the wartime allocation of materials. Another uncle who became a Jesuit was Secretary to the Minister of Education. His name was Sylvanus Langford Newport. He left that position to become a Jesuit. Another aunt, Gertrude Veronica Newport who became Mrs Shaw, was a school teacher. She was probably quite well-known. But they were the younger ones. The older ones had to go out to work as quickly as they could to help support the family. My mother, she came from a family who used to live at Marino1, and they were quite well-to-do, but they fell on hard times. They lived in a lovely house, apparently, and they even had a carriage, some sort of a carriage, according to the family legend. And they had a ballroom in their house. But they fell on hard times and had to give that up eventually and shifted to Forestville. I never knew if my mother had a specific occupation. I think

1 I understand they owned a chaff mill and cement works – MHN.

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they were just ‘ladies’, quote unquote, and maybe just – I know an aunt became a lady’s companion, which was the thing in those days, probably. So that’s all I can say about my mother. Unfortunately, she became very ill for a long time when my brother and I were children, and she died of cancer when I was twelve. And this placed a great burden on the family, of course, because there was no Medicare in those days, and so we were in straitened circumstances for quite some time. (break in recording) Religion was an important part of our lives. My parents both were great workers for the Church. The church in Plympton – or Mornington, which was another part of the suburb – had only just been started up about the time I was about eight years of age, I suppose, and therefore they were engaged in a lot of pioneering work helping set up that church.

We’re talking Catholic Church, aren’t we?

The Catholic Church, yes, the Roman Catholic Church, yes. And besides that my father was always helping out round the district. Because he was a carpenter, people were always calling upon him to do all sorts of things, and so he was always helping out somewhere or other. And he even taught woodwork classes down at Sacred Heart College. (break in recording) Education. For the first two years of my school life I went to the Plympton public school, and then when the church school was set up in Mornington I finished the rest of my primary education there. I won a scholarship to St Aloysius College, the Convent of Mercy in the city, and, as I mentioned, because we were in straitened circumstances, I had to get through my education as quickly as possible and get out to work. So in two years I did the Intermediate. I enjoyed school life very much. Exams never bothered me, they never have, I always liked them. I looked upon them as a sort of climax to your study to show what you’d learned. I came within the first ten in that Intermediate exam at the age of fourteen in English and in Bookkeeping, and on the strength of that the nuns at the Convent of Mercy offered me another scholarship. However, I’d also put in for a scholarship to go to Chartres Business College, which was considered the best business college at that time, having decided I wanted to pursue a career as a secretary, so I was torn between these two scholarship offers. However, the economic pressure was great, and I felt I

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had to get out to work, so I took the Chartres one. In reflection now, of course, I would love to have gone on and gone to university, but we couldn’t have afforded it anyway. I did quite well at Chartres and was offered a position – I was too young to join the public service, which my uncle, who’d done quite well in it, wanted me to go into. He felt that was a good, permanent, safe job. And so I spent about a year at Elder Smith and Company and then sat for the Public Service Exam and was appointed to the Taxation Department, which I enjoyed very much. It was a large department, and it was a bit like a large family. We had great times. We had a good social club and I enjoyed working there, but after a time you had the pressure to get promotion and there wasn’t much around in Adelaide. And so when the offer came of a transfer to Canberra I seized it and I went to work in Canberra at the age of twenty or twenty-one for about a year. Canberra in those days was fairly primitive. There was no lake, and I had my bicycle sent over – that was the favoured mode of transport then – and we lived in hostels, which were fairly Spartan. I lived at Barton House, which was a little more salubrious than some of the others who lived on the other side, where they had no – it was fibro, I think – and they had no heating and the bathrooms had gaps at the bottom where the cold winds used to whistle in. Anyway, in Barton House it was much better, but of course the food wasn’t great. I went back to Adelaide and was transferred or promoted through various jobs, including the Department of Supply, and then I ended up working for a senator, Senator Hannaford. Through that I became known to people in Canberra. Of course, the senators all knew me, the local federal members of parliament – this was in the Commonwealth parliamentary offices – and visiting people from Canberra got to know me, my reputation or capabilities, and I was offered the job with the Prime Minister, would I like to come and work in the Press Office of the Prime Minister as secretary to Mr Ray Maley, who was the Press Secretary to Sir Robert Menzies – he was Mr, I think he was Mr Menzies then. No, I think he was Sir Robert then. And so, after much agonising, I decided yes, I would take the leap and go to live permanently in Canberra. I’ll just pause there. (break in recording) Now, that can be after the Taxation Office, after I came back from Canberra, that’s right.

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So after you came back from Canberra you went to London, is that right?

No, I had various jobs. I got various promotions and I decided it was time to join the throng that was heading for London to work and see the world over there. So I left with no fixed employment in mind, but just to take whatever came up.

So you had leave from the Commonwealth public service?

Yes. By this time I’d accumulated enough long service leave to be able to do this provided I went on half pay or a bit of without pay. I stretched it as far as I could to about a year and a half. And I went to work in – well, I was deciding, first of all, to go and trip around the Continent. However, I walked through Australia House doors and a man that I had worked for in Australia [tapped me on the shoulder] and said, ‘What about coming to work for us?’ So I said all right, I would. And so I ended up, after a trip around the Continent, working there for about nine months, I suppose. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I could have had a great career there. It was a tough decision to decide to come back, because I was offered all sorts of marvellous jobs. I ended up working for Lord Casey whenever he came through, and he always asked for me. I worked for the High Commissioner and I was nominated for lots of jobs on the Continent, short-term jobs. And I could have worked for Sir Robert Menzies, whom I hadn’t worked for then, whenever he came to London. So there were lots of marvellous jobs going, and London was an exciting place – you never knew who you were going to run into.

So what year was that? Can you remember the year?

1959. Even in the High Commissioner’s office at the High Commission in London, I worked in the section that dealt with MI5 and I can remember being absolutely wide-eyed when we used to have these people come in from MI5 to talk to our people. Because I’d worked for Department of Supply I’d been cleared to Top Secret, so they gave me all these rather sensitive jobs, and I therefore got to see spies and top level operatives, all sorts of interesting people. And they had me, as I say, working for the High Commissioner. One day he said to me, ‘We’re going to have a big interview today. We’re announcing the new Governor-General, and his name is Lord Dunrossil.’ Bear in mind in those days the media wasn’t quite as high-powered as it is today. They were laying cables for TV right through the front doors and there

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was a great deal of activity. I went out into the main foyer. Oh, we’d had a – I should say that we used to have a lot of trouble with the correspondents, the reporters or journalists from the London Times. They always wore bowler hats and they carried a briefcase, and they used to give us quite a hard time, and so you had to be wary of them. Anyway, this man came through the door and I assumed he was a journalist from the London Times. He had the bowler hat and the briefcase, and rather peremptorily I ordered him to go and sit in an anteroom. I said, ‘Look, just take a seat in there. You’ll be attended to shortly.’ And then later I thought, ‘I’d better go back and ask him his name to present him to the High Commissioner.’ He was very correctly sitting there with his furled brolly and sitting on the chair very composed, and I said, ‘Oh, by the way, what’s your name?’ He said, ‘It’s Morrison, but they’re starting to call me Dunrossil.’ I’d put the Governor-General in the antechamber! So I said, ‘Excuse me, sir, just a moment,’ and I ran, I literally ran, to the High Commissioner, said, ‘Guess who’s out there.’ That was my first meeting with the new Governor-General. But we were always seeing VIPs and exciting people and it was a very hard decision not to stay on. I liked working there and they liked having me and they kept pressing me and I kept thinking, ‘Well, if I don’t keep going and go to the United States I might never get the chance again,’ because in those days you travelled everywhere by ship. So I caught the ship. It was a Dutch line. And because I was a Catholic I used to go to Mass of a morning up in first class where there was a small gathering with a chaplain, and I became friendly with a lady in black. And I had visited Vienna – she came from Vienna – and I would prattle on about the glories of the Opera House and so forth. She was a very striking lady, who always sat extremely upright [dressed in black from head to toe]. The chaplain noticed that I had developed an affinity with her and took me aside and said, ‘You don’t know who that is, but that’s the last – that’s the ex-Empress Zita of Austria, who was married to the last of the Hapsburgs. She’s travelling incognito as the Duchess Marie de Bar. Please respect her anonymity.’ I sat at a table with an elderly Dutchman who said, ‘Who’s that lady I keep seeing you with? I bet she’s one of those Bourbon Parmas. That looks a bit like Zita to me.’ I said, ‘Oh, she comes from Vienna.’ I couldn’t break the confidence, of course. But

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he told me all about Otto2, who was now living in Canada, and Zita was going over to join him. Anyway, I ended up working for the Australian Embassy in Washington. Again, because I’d cleared Top Secret, they grabbed me and they wanted me to stay on. But by this time I was being pressed by a chap in South Australia who had wanted to marry me, and I thought, ‘Maybe I should go back and give that a try.’ I should point out he was a Czech, and while I was working in London I used to walk past the Czech tourist bureau. This was the time of the Iron Curtain, when it was really dangerous to go behind the scenes. But being the adventurous sort, I thought, well, wouldn’t it be fun to go and visit this country that I had heard so much about from this fellow, but to keep going and come back through Vienna. However, he got to hear that I was going, sent me a letter to give to his parents who lived in Brno3. When I think about it now it was probably very foolhardly and I could have disappeared forever – – –. I was much younger then, of course, and I didn’t think very much about the risks. I got on the train at the South Vienna station, first of all got on the wrong carriage, they were going to take the carriage off, and spoke enough German to get chatting and was able to rectify that error. I arrived at Brno – oh, I should say that I of course had made advance bookings to stay at a hotel there and to stay at a hotel in Prague. I made sure that I had everything in place, and I had checked with all those top security people as to how I should behave when I got there so that I didn’t get myself into trouble. The top man in charge of security said, ‘Keep your head down, don’t say anything out of place and don’t cause any attention to yourself, and you’ll be all right.’ The train pulls into Brno in the dark of night. It’s not Prague and it’s many years ago, and everything was written in Czech, of course, which I didn’t understand. So here am I alone, getting off on the platform, and the one name that burns in my memory – one word – is V-Y-C-H-O-D. At the time I did not know what that meant, but I think it means ‘exit’. So I thought, ‘Oh, well, look around for a taxi.’ So got to a taxi, knew enough German to ask him to take me to this address. So I speed off into the darkest night of Brno, and, as I say, I probably could have disappeared forever because I must have stood out being a

2 Her son and Pretender to the throne.

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Westerner, speaking English. Knocked on the door, and I asked the taxi driver to wait in case something went wrong, and of course these people thought that I was an agent of the secret police and they were very reticent. I pushed the letter to them, they slammed the door, went inside, read it, recognized the writing of their son and came out. And so I farewelled the taxi driver. So we had a great time. I couldn’t speak Czech, but they sent for someone that they worked with and who could translate. And then, of course, I went to Prague, but that’s a whole story in itself, how we had to whisper over dining room tables because the place was bugged, and I had to be careful not to compromise them because they’d already been sent to prison because their son had skied over the mountains and escaped. It was the height of the Cold War. And we used to sit in a park and talk, where we knew it wasn’t bugged. So that was the background to the Czech fellow. So that was one of the reasons why I didn’t stay on in America. I stayed there for about six months, I suppose. Again, had a wonderful time, made some great American friends, had some very interesting work, being cleared to Top Secret, and then I sailed for home. And I had to think – well, sadly, the situation didn’t work out with the Czech fellow. I won’t go into all the details here. But I decided my life had to take a new course, so that’s when – I went back to my old job but then I was offered this job with Senator Hannaford and then, as I say, I was invited to go and work for the Prime Minister. On the writing side, I should say I’ve always been interested in words, in writing, and I’d won several essay competitions and I’d taken some of those courses, Writing for the Press, et cetera, and I’d always been the top paper, I’d always got good marks, and as I said I was in the top ten at fourteen in English in the Intermediate exam. So I always had this bent towards writing. And so it suited me very well to go and work in the Press Office. Mr Ray Maley looked a bit like the Prime Minister – he was of the same build, the same facial cast, and they got on exceedingly well.

You’ve just chatted about female things, you’ve been in a female role. Were there many females in the Press Office?

3 Approximately two hundred kilometres from Prague.

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Oh, no. There was just the Press Secretary and myself. Life, then, in the media, was fairly low-key. There was no television, really. It was just coming in, actually. It came in in 1956, I think. (break in recording) When Ray Maley found out I had a penchant and a bit of a flair for writing he let me do lots of things. I didn’t mind. My salary was pretty minimal – in fact, it was so minimal in those days that the Government had to subsidise our salary to pay the boarding house. We all lived in a hostel – had a lot of fun, it was a marvellous life. You got to know all these young people your own age. We all didn’t have very much money and we made a lot of our own fun by singing round the piano, forming little choral groups, and the fellows who were affluent enough to own a car used to pile us all in at the weekend and we’d go swimming down at Kambah in the Murrumbidgee. And we had a terrific lot of fun. But, as I say, salaries were very, very low, and it took me ages to save up the fare to go home on the train at Christmas to go back to Adelaide. Now, to get back to Mr Maley – – –.

Where did you work? Where was your office?

In Parliament House on the personal staff of the Prime Minister. And perhaps I should say a little about the Prime Minister, who was Sir Robert Menzies. He treated you like family. He and Dame Pattie regarded you as family, because he only had a very small personal staff. There was Ray Maley, myself on the press side, and on the other side was his private secretary, who was a person from the Prime Minister’s Department, fairly high-level – and then there was Hazel Craig, who was his personal secretary, a highly efficient woman, exceedingly efficient, and she had about three on the staff under her, and that was the whole of the Prime Minister’s staff. Now, when you travelled on the VIP ’plane he treated you like one of the family. You sat at the little table with him, and he loved making martinis. Now, I’m not a great drinker, one glass is about as much as I can manage at a sitting. However, he used to insist that you had one of his martinis. They were fairly deadly (laughs) because he made them fairly strong, and he had a great ceremonial way of doing it. And when he pressed upon you a second one I used to have to look around for the nearest pot plant. But Dame Pattie was always worried that we weren’t getting enough vitamins at the hostel, so she used to bring in fruit and vegetables from The Lodge to supplement what we were getting.

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The very first time I travelled with the Menzies down to Melbourne, where they always stayed in the Hotel Windsor, I slunk to the back of the room as befitted my lowly status, I thought. The head waiter came up and said, ‘Madam, the Prime Minister presents his compliments. He wishes you to join him at table.’ So I came down and the Prime Minister stood up and pulled out my chair and said, ‘My dear, you’ve been neglected. Sit down and have a dozen oysters.’ That was just an idea of how kindly they treated you. And, of course, therefore the staff looked upon him with great affection. I regarded him always as a man of great principle, always gentlemanly and always courteous, even in the exchanges in Parliament House. Somehow, even though they used acrimonious words, they weren’t cutting like the politicians use now. They didn’t descend to vulgarity. He and Eddie Ward used to score off each other, and I can always remember Eddie Ward, for instance, when the new Speaker who came from South Australia, who decided to reinstate the ceremonial aspect of the Speaker’s office and wear his wig and gown and demand all the ceremonial niceties – that is, the members were supposed to bow as they entered and left the chamber – Eddie Ward said, ‘Mr Speaker, how low do we have to bow?’ And the Speaker said, ‘I have yet to determine how low the Member for East Sydney can get.’ But he and Menzies, of course, loved sparring off each other, but it was always on a level that you could enjoy without squirming and feeling that it had hit the depths.

So what was your particular role? What were your tasks?

Well, to start with, I did anything and everything the Press Secretary wanted. I helped organize – I must say as time went on I got given more and more responsibility when he saw I had an aptitude for it. And he used to say, ‘We need a so-and-so done or a such-and-such,’ that is, a foreword for a book in the Prime Minister’s name, or a message for the hundredth anniversary of something. The Prime Minister used to always clear it but I would write it. And then I did more and more of these kinds of things besides doing transcripts of the Prime Minister’s speeches. And I can remember in those days we used to put things like ‘laughter’ in brackets. So I looked after the newspapers, did the newspaper clippings, all the kinds of things that you would expect, all the jobs in a media office that you needed to be done that the Press Secretary didn’t do. So more and more he concentrated on

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the top level things, the political things, and I did the routine things. I organised press conferences – used to have those in the party room against the background of all the books in the bookcase, which looked impressive – and did research.

END OF TAPE 1 SIDE A: TAPE 1 SIDE B

My big chance to develop a journalistic career came when I was working for Mr Maley. He had developed a bad heart. There was a ball in King’s Hall in Parliament house in honour of Princess Marina. It was a gala occasion. Ray Maley had been Press Secretary for the Queen and organized the media side of the Royal Visit – I think that was in 1963, and he had been made a member of the Victorian Order as a thank you. He was just being photographed in King’s Hall. Before the photographer could click the camera he fell down dead. As I said, there was this great affinity between he and Sir Robert and Sir Robert was quite visibly affected and he didn’t really want to go on with the ball, but he had to because Princess Marina was the guest of honour, but he was terribly upset. The journalist who worked in public relations down in the other end of the building, Jack O’Sullivan, was supposed to take his place. He became so overcome at being made Acting Press Secretary that he had a haemorrhage of his ulcer and got carted off to hospital in an ambulance. That left me. Of course, in those days, they wouldn’t – women didn’t get to high levels very easily. [It] wouldn’t have been the thing for me to be promoted, and of course I didn’t have sufficient background anyway. But, for the time being, I did what I knew and what I had learnt of the job. And one of these things was to send the Prime Minister a cable every day when he travelled overseas. That fell to me, and I did that every day, agonised over it – it took me, I’m sure, three times as long as anybody else, because I was conscious of the great responsibility and wanted to be sure I was accurate because the Prime Minister would act on what I said, and so I used to sweat over those cables. However, Sir Robert was sufficiently impressed when he got back to say, ‘Give the girl a rise, she’s worth it.’ It took two years for the Department to try and decide what to call me and what to pay me and what to equate my salary level with. In the meantime, I went on doing more and more things – – –. We had tried out a series of fellows to take on the job, and I had to train them. I literally taught them the ropes. Several were not suitable. Finally, Tony Eggleton was appointed, and he was just the right choice for the job. And I

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just show you here a tribute that was paid to Tony and I recently in a newspaper article, who said that we were a class act together, and no-one exceeded us for – (rustle of paper) that’s the bit, there.

Yes. Oh, perhaps if we can borrow that we can get a photocopy and include it with the tape. So I’ll just say it’s a little piece in the Canberra Times, Saturday, October 24, 1998. Perhaps I’ll read it, just to get my voice on the tape.

Right.

‘It was not always so, admittedly. There were fewer honestly-called “press secretaries” around thirty years ago, but they included some class acts. No team has surpassed for professionalism in the Prime Minister’s antechamber the team of Tony Eggleton, who had started out with Sir Robert Menzies, and Mary Newport.’ Why were you so good together? Why did you work so well together?

Well, I think we got on personally quite well, and again Tony gave me more and more responsibility and he said he regarded my years there as my cadetship in journalism. He could see I had a flair for doing things. The trouble was that I became so proficient at these cables that every time they travelled they wanted me to be left behind to keep them up to date, and I rarely got a trip overseas. I felt rather sad about that. So, to console myself, I did a degree in that time, somehow, at the ANU. It went on for many years, I did it bits and pieces, but I thought I – that consoled me for always being left behind to do the cable. And when Sir Robert Menzies retired and was succeeded by Harold Holt – and even when Sir Robert was there – Tony Eggleton used to say to me, ‘They always said at breakfast time, “Where’s Mary’s cable? Where’s Mary’s cable?” and they acted upon it.’ Harold Holt, for instance, used to walk off the ’plane from overseas, walk straight into Question Time with my cable in his hand and read in the Parliament my statement on a particular issue. Mind you, I’d made sure that I’d rung the relevant minister and got that authorised by him, so that – I always took a lot of pains to be sure that everything I said in it was accurate insofar as I could. So I then became very well- known in the embassies overseas, because bear in mind those were the days before computers, before a whole lot of technology, and the cable from Foreign Affairs was their only means of – well, their quickest means of being informed. They didn’t have to wait for the newspapers and things. So my cable used to get routed between some of the nearby embassies when Sir Robert was travelling or Mr Holt or subsequent Prime Ministers. So it was quite a responsibility.

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So this time you’ve been in Canberra a few years. Had you had any special mentors here? How did you fit into the public service? You were in the Prime Minister’s Department, but presumably you were under Public Service Board and things like that.

Yes, you were regarded as – – –.

Who did you go to for advice and things like that?

Well, I hadn’t, of course, worked in the Prime Minister’s Department, although I was attached to it formally, because working on the Prime Minister’s staff and being a permanent public servant I was still in the public service. So I suppose I got to know all the upper level people in the Prime Minister’s office. There was Sir Peter Lawler, who was very helpful. You had key people in certain areas, and if you developed a rapport with them – well, you made it your business. In this job you had to develop a rapport with as many people as you could to get your job done properly. And I had a lot of friends up in the press gallery, which was directly above our office, and they helped us and we helped them. There were some quite famous names like Alan Reid, who had a very good relationship with Sir Robert Menzies and subsequent Prime Ministers. He would tell them all sorts of background. Journalists always know the scandal, they always know what’s going on, even though they can’t print it. And in return for that, the Prime Minister used to trust them. He used to background brief them about a whole lot of things, knowing that he could fully trust them not to leak it before the appropriate date. And so there were quite a few up in the press gallery that I had a lot of rapport with and became very good friends and am still friends with to this day. I should, perhaps, at this stage make a mention about our accommodation. The poor journalists up in the press gallery, which was directly above us, had the most appalling accommodation. It was terribly makeshift, it was I think iron out on the outer edges. It was put up as a very temporary measure, and they were all jumbled up like rabbits in a warren. They had the most appalling conditions, and when we look back now we just wonder how they ever worked up there. Down in our office, my little office next to Tony’s was a former men’s toilet. We had no air conditioning, had one little tiny window that opened onto a courtyard to let the air in, and we had a carpet that had a few holes in it. But somehow you put up with that. Menzies had been in office twenty-odd years and things, of course, rolled on. There

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was never a review or anything. And eventually, when Labor did come to power, they absolutely refurbished the whole place, which was well-deserved. But like those conditions I mentioned at the boarding house, you put up with an awful lot because those were the times. You just cheerily went along and did the best you could in the circumstances.

Did you ever visit the Menzies at home?

At The Lodge? Yes, yes.

I’m thinking more or less back in Melbourne.

No, they didn’t have a home in those days. When they travelled to Melbourne they –

In between parliamentary sessions.

– yes, they lived at the Hotel Windsor. That’s how I happened to – I often stayed at the Windsor. It was quite close to the Treasury offices. And that reminds me of an unfortunate incident in which I goofed up. It was quite early in the piece and it was a Saturday. I had the afternoon free and thought I’d be a goody-twoshoes and catch up on work and go to Treasury offices. I sailed out the front of the Windsor and the chauffeur, Peter Pearson, who drove the Bentley, which was parked on the kerb, said to me – he was lounging there – he said, ‘Hop in the Bentley. I’ll drive you down.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not far to walk.’ He said, ‘Oh, come on, I’ve got nothing to do.’ Unfortunately, while we were away, Sir Robert had been asked by 3LO to do a radio interview. He comes out, no chauffeur, no Bentley. I’ve got it down at the offices. I wasn’t all that long, but when I’d got back the interview was all over and he’d had to go in a Holden taxi down to 3LO. Well, I thought I’d die. It was one of those occasions where you wished the earth would open up and, you miserable thing, that you could be swallowed up. And Hazel, quite rightfully, gave me what-ho. And I just felt so miserable, I didn’t know – I couldn’t think of one redeeming thing other than bleating, ‘Well, I was just thought I’d catch up on work.’ And, strangely enough, when I’d taken a taxi earlier for something, the taxi driver, who had a pretty clapped-out vehicle, said to me, ‘You know, I’d give an awful lot to have the Prime Minister ride in my taxi.’ And I’d airily said, ‘Well, there’s no chance of that because he’s got his own Bentley, his own chauffeur.’ Little did I know. However,

15

Sir Robert himself was very magnanimous, he could see the whole situation, and he just shrugged it off. But I really did feel very badly about that. But that was his home in Melbourne.

How did you get on with his succession? Were you – you had to be a close observer – indeed, the succession of each of the Prime Ministers, I suppose.

Yes, well, when it came to Harold Holt I thought, ‘Goodness me. Should I be pursuing a career in the Department or the Service generally, or stay with the Prime Minister?’ However, Harold Holt made the decision, virtually, by saying, ‘Look, I have no media staff. Stay with me – – –.’ You know, they were all nervous of the media. So he said, ‘Stay with me,’ and I stayed on. I should say that Sir Robert always said he was glad to be going at the time when TV was coming in because he didn’t like it. Anything technological he found difficult. For instance, I used to play pennant tennis in those days in Canberra, and on a Saturday when he’d be quietly working in Parliament House he would get me to come in to turn on the tape recorder for him. That’s how anti-technology he was. And I showed him how he only had to press that button to make it stop. And so the TV he just didn’t like very much at all. Of course, at press conferences he was the past master. He was very skilful. He was always ready with the quip and the quick remark, and I can remember one day this journalist near me was not listening to what was going on, he was just waiting for an opening to get his question in, which he did. Unfortunately, he repeated exactly what a chap just before him had said, so Sir Robert Menzies said, ‘Weren’t you listening? Next question, please.’ But, to get back to Harold Holt, he was quite a different person altogether, and Tony Eggleton always makes the remark when he’s interviewed about his reaction to the change that Holt signified, ‘Well, I always knew it was going to be different, because when Holt sent for me on Australia Day 1966 he received me in his underwear, so I knew it was going to be a different era.’ Harold Holt was a very likeable man, [I] got on very well with him. Very charming and genial. Was Mr Nice Guy, really, and of course I think people tended to take advantage of his good nature. He was, shall we say, a member of the jet set is about the best analogy I can draw. He had these three daughters-in-law who we were always getting photographed in their bikinis, and he was a great SCUBA diver and we were always

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getting him photographed in his SCUBA diving outfit. Of course, sadly, he came to an end in that on that fateful day. Just jumping ahead to describe that day, it was December the 17th, 1967. He’d been in office two years, and it was the time of Christmas parties. It was in the morning, I was getting ready to go to a Christmas luncheon. I was under the shower, my hair all shampooed up. The ’phone went, ‘It’s Eggleton here. There’s a car coming for you in five minutes. The Prime Minister’s disappeared.’ I said, ‘Disappeared?’ He said, ‘Yes, went swimming and haven’t seen him since. We fear the worst.’ I spluttered, ‘But I’ve got shampoo in my – – –.’ He said, ‘Five minutes.’ So I had to hastily wrap a scarf around my head, go into the office. Tony said, ‘You’ll have four hours alone with the world’s press, because I have to pick up Zara, we’re flying down on the DC3, which is of course pretty slow, we have to then get a car and drive down the Mornington Peninsula to Cheviot Beach, so you’ve four hours you’ll be on your own.’ So I sat up with my head wrapped in a scarf for quite a long time talking to the world’s press who just crowded in. And I was in touch with the Navy divers and others down on the beach and kept giving the bulletins as to progress that was being made or their surmises as to the outcome. And, as the time wore on, the Navy divers said to me, ‘If we don’t find him before nightfall we’ll never find him, because the sea lice will have eaten his bones clean.’ I can always remember that statement. Of course, there were all sorts of bulletins going about that he might have got eaten by a shark, and then we had all sorts of people coming in – because this had never happened before in Australia’s history – as to what the succession would be, what the processes were, and who had to be informed. It was quite an exciting time. I forgot to eat or drink, and at about half past eight that night Herschell Hurst from the Melbourne Sun Pictorial said to me, ‘Have you eaten?’ I said, ‘No.’ And we always laugh about this – he went home and got me a sandwich because there were no shops around and I couldn’t leave my post.

Where was your post at this stage?

That was in Parliament House in the Press Office. And then when Tony finally arrived at Cheviot Beach he kept feeding me back information, because we had all the facilities in Parliament House for quickly disseminating it to the wide world. And then darkness came, and then the cabals started to form. I could hear the

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politicians coming up the stairs and on the ’phones, and determining who would get to succeed Holt. Now, the obvious one, of course, would have been McEwen, but he refused to serve under McMahon, and so the forces that went to work decided that Gorton was the man. But on this night the lobbying had started, as the night fell.

So why were they all in Canberra at that stage, here we are in December?

Well, there were key people, there were a lot of key people who flew in. When they heard this news they flew in. And I always remember Senator Scott, I can hear him on the ’phone saying, ‘Oh, Gorton’s the chap we’ve got to get up.’ And so it was in the interests of certain other key people to come to Canberra. The secretary of the – or the Director of the Liberal Party, Mr Willoughby, came in, I remember, at about six o’clock, and he wept and he said, ‘He’s gone. They’ll never find him now.’ He was very sad. There were a lot of people felt a lot of affection for Holt. But a lot of those events that night are quite etched in my mind, because it was very dramatic and of course the journalists went wild over it. And you had to keep on trying to give them a new angle on the news. The subsequent funeral was quite an affair, because LBJ4 flew out, of course, and he wept. We had Prince Charles5, and we had the heads of twelve of the Asian nations. But it was also a cloak for a lot of those heads of government to be able to get together in the time of the Cold War and talk without having the world’s attention focused on them. They did an awful lot of that just after the funeral. It was a great occasion for them to get together to do that.

So that meant a lot of extra work for yourself?

Well, it was probably spread out a bit, because McEwen was the interim Press Secretary. I still continued in my job, but his office –

You mean Prime Minister?

– I’m sorry, Prime Minister, what am I saying? Yes, he was the interregnum Prime Minister for three weeks, so his office naturally assumed some of that load. Harold Wilson, for instance, and of course the President of the United States and quite a number of other heads of government were there. So it was a great opportunity for

4 Lyndon Baines Johnson, the then President of the United States of America. 5 Heir to the throne of the United Kingdom.

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them. I remember sitting up in the front row of St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne at the funeral and watching them all. It was a very impressive occasion. Harold Holt did achieve a number of things that he’s not often given credit for. His government eased the [White Australia policy, with] certain constraints. He became – tried to get Australia to become more oriented towards Asia. He saw our future lay in that area, and he put great emphasis on developing better relations with Asia. (break in recording) Harold Holt always said he became Prime Minister without stepping over any dead bodies, because Menzies, of course, had anointed him – – –. He was the one that was saddled with that VIP ’planes affair – you may recall the Opposition said that the privileges were being abused, too much money was being spent on them.

It was Peter Howson was involved in that.

Yes, we had to ring him up in Uganda and get him to come back – – –. Our official line was that no, there were no records beyond very short-term ones. But Gorton, in the Senate, [contradicted this and] said yes, there were, and he tabled all the documents. That was quite a sensation of the Holt era.

How did you find Holt during this period, because, you know, some people say the job got too much for him towards the end?

Yes. Well, there – – –.

We had the Vietnam War at this stage, too, which was becoming more and more controversial.

Yes. I should have said that Menzies said that one of the worst days of his life was the day he decided to send troops to Vietnam, to commit ours to the Vietnam War. He thought that was the worst day of his life, and of course Holt was faced with a fait accompli, and that’s how he came to work very closely with LBJ, because he felt that we had these common interests. And also at the time it was thought that we needed America’s help for our own defence if things got worse and the situation escalated and it came down to our area. Harold Holt was a man that only needed four hours’ sleep a night. Unfortunately, he would sit up in bed in the dark so as not to disturb Zara and write, and we would have to try and decipher his handwriting the next day, which wasn’t very easy. (break in recording)

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Just before moving on with the politics, back into your private life a little bit, did you still call Adelaide home? Did you still have family there?

Oh yes, indeed. And you really couldn’t afford to get home, as I say, more than about once a year. However, because I travelled a lot with the Prime Minister I got over on brief visits on the VIP ’plane. And I can always remember some very close friends asked me to be godmother to their child, and they delayed the baptism until I could coincide with a visit. I can always remember on this Sunday the Prime Minister – it was Gorton at the time – was doing something down at Morphett Vale or McLaren Vale, which gave me sufficient time to go in, be godmother and come back and be sitting up there. They let me have the ride on that occasion, when they found out that I’d been asked to be godmother. So yes, I got back occasionally. And of course they used to see me on TV, because I developed a very good relationship with the press gallery and I was always running around with a very heavy tape recorder – they were very heavy in those days – and a microphone. When the Prime Minister came back from overseas I had to organise a press conference down in Sydney at the airport, and they always had me on the TV with the microphone. I had an alpaca coat. That alpaca coat used to figure quite a lot on the TV screen. And, of course, I was always popping up in articles. You had to be careful you didn’t give throwaway lines, because it might end up in print, and that did happen on a few occasions. The media would try and interpret that as some reflection of what the Government was planning.

In your private life, you obviously never married.

No.

You must have had to make a pretty firm decision at some particular stage.

Well, unfortunately it was – you know, you thought you had lots of relationships, but unfortunately they got tired of being always told, ‘Well, look, I’m sorry, I can’t see you. I’ve got to cancel that dinner date, I’ve got to fly to Perth with the Prime Minister.’ For ten years you had this kind of life, and you tried to develop a private life but it was very difficult because, in the media, and especially when there were so few of us in the office, you just more or less lived your job morning, noon and night. You tuned into radio bulletins all the time, you had to be up to date with events, and you might go to work in the morning and find yourself in Sydney for lunch, because

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the Prime Minister would decide – saddle up the VIP ’plane and off you’d go. You were always flying around somewhere, going with him to something, because you had to help with the media all the time. I did get a big official trip overseas, and I was always promised more, but I always got left behind to do those cables. It became an institution. On one occasion, when Harold Holt was Prime Minister, he went to [visit] the forces in Vietnam. It was a Saturday morning, I’d done the – – –. (tape ends)

END OF TAPE 1 SIDE B: TAPE 2 SIDE A

Yes, it was a Saturday morning, and I’d prepared the cable to go to the Prime Minister who was at the front line in Vietnam. When I’d got to Foreign Affairs, in the cable section they said, ‘Oh, our cable operator has gone sick. Do you think you can sit down and tap this cable out straight to Vietnam, because we’ve got that all set up. All it needs is someone to tap it out.’ So there was I, tapping out my cable straight to the front line in Vietnam. (break in recording) That was taking part in history. (break in recording)

Did you get to know Holt? Did you get to see his personal life much? Did you get to go to his home at any time, or was it always a very, very official thing?

No, you see, you lived in such close proximity to these people that you really, really got to know them on a personal basis, and that particularly included Gorton, because Gorton would not have anybody else travel with him other than the five of us. That is, there was he and Mrs Gorton, Ainsley Gotto, Tony Eggleton, myself and a typist. He wouldn’t have anybody else. Occasionally he might have Sir Lenox Hewitt, who was the Head of the Prime Minister’s Department then, but he’d let his hair down. We’d be at Kirribilli House, and he’d tell us what he thought of his fellow parliamentarians, what he thought of the media, what he thought of anybody else. He’d just let it all hang out. Of course, you felt you were in a privileged position and you couldn’t gossip about this because you just felt that it was on a very highly confidential basis. He was a very quirky Prime Minister. He took a dislike to Sir John Bunting, and Sir John Bunting was too firmly established in the firmament of the public service to banish entirely, so there was created another department called the Department of the Cabinet. It used to be the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, so Gorton hived off the Cabinet bit and more or less sent Sir John Bunting

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to Siberia just to look after Cabinet matters. He installed Sir Lenox Hewitt in his office. He was the Head of Prime Minister’s Department, but he was installed in the Prime Minister’s Office. Now, Sir Lenox was a very different operator to Sir John Bunting. He’d been known as ‘Dr No’ in the Department of Treasury because he used to come to work there very early, I believe, and when everybody checked in for work they would find little slips in their in tray that he’d written. He would never change a decision unless people presented solid new facts. He had a very methodical kind of brain. Well, he travelled with us quite a lot, I got to know him very well. I can remember one night we were working, half past twelve in the morning, down at some hotel in Melbourne before something or other, and I was absolutely exhausted. I had to say to him, ‘Look, I am so tired I can’t keep awake. Could we please postpone this till tomorrow?’ Those kind of people were very driven. And yes, Gorton was very quirky. He used to make policy on the run. He and Lenny Hewitt in Adelaide once made some sort of economic decision that later had to be rubber stamped by Cabinet. He would make very quick decisions and change plans. For instance, we’d been down to a meeting in Melbourne. We were coming back on the VIP ’plane [late at night]. They weren’t as streamlined then as they are now. It was very bad weather, storms, lightning, thunder. We were to go to Kirribilli House to stay. The Prime Minister said, ‘No, I want to go back to Canberra,’ and the captain of the ’plane said, ‘Sir, it’s exceedingly bad weather, it’s very dangerous.’ He said, ‘We are going to Canberra.’ The captain said, ‘There’s a heavy fog hanging over it.’ Gorton insisted: ‘We are going to Canberra.’ So we rocked around the sky, we divebombed through the clouds about ten times and couldn’t land. By this time, everybody’s ashen-faced. In the ’plane there were the usual five of us. So Gorton turned to me and said, ‘Righto, you’re the only one here that’s got any influence up there,’ [– pointing heavenwards – ] ‘you’d better start working on it.’ So I had said to Tony, ‘I think we’re all going to be headlines tomorrow: “Prime Minister’s ’plane crashes”.’ Somehow the captain finally got us down. It took a long time and we were all shaken. And when we landed safely I turned to the Prime Minister and said, ‘Prime Minister, I’ll take the credit for this.’ He – it’s well known now that he was a bastard, in the sense that he was the child of a – illegitimate, of a, shall we say, extra-marital relationship. He always said that

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he didn’t find out till he was twenty-four, and then he felt a great sense of relief because he didn’t like the woman he thought was his mother. His father had had a relationship with this Irish woman, and I think she was from a lower socio-economic level, and this was why Gorton always identified with the underdog, why he found it easy to put in place certain policies that favoured the people on the lower socio- economic level. He was instrumental a lot, I think, on the state aid side. And one day Alan Trengove, from one of the Melbourne newspapers, came in with the manuscript of a book on Gorton’s life. We nearly collapsed because there it all was – this was the first we knew of it. It all came out about Gorton’s background, and of course Gorton was in with the Melbourne Establishment, and here he was Prime Minister. And it was, in those days – it’s not like it is now, it’s hard to believe – but it was a fairly rigid time about social mores. The society took a dim view of such kinds of things, and we were very, very nervous. But he wanted it to come out. And I always remember how we nervously wondered what kind of reception this would get – – –. Mrs Gorton I liked very much. She’d married Gorton in a whirlwind romance, they’d met at university in England. She was American, and she, I remember one day, showed me her hands. She said, ‘See these hands? I was going to be a concert pianist, but my husband had an orchard in Mildura so I went back to help him pack oranges and that was the end of my hopes of a career as a concert pianist.’ She was very devoted to Gorton, but very hurt by all the rumours that used to fly around about his dalliances, shall we say? Gorton had crashed in his ’plane with his face on the controls and that had rearranged a good-looking face into something that was craggy and interesting, but which he felt very self-conscious about. And he did have quite a few dalliances, and there were always the rumours going about he and Ainsley, but I often felt that it never got to the ultimate, that she kept him on the end of the string. She was twenty-one and he was fifty-six. And she exerted enormous influence over him. If she was capricious, he could become terribly grumpy, and in fact I did travel with them up to Singapore for the CHOGM6 conference, and he just was so upset by something that Ainsley had said or done that he walked out of a

6 Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting.

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meeting or didn’t continue with something. It used to affect him to that extent. He was quite obsessed with her. And he also [had an interest in] Geraldine Willesee. That was a set-up. Every year the press gallery had a men’s only gathering, Christmas gathering, at which they let it all hang out, you could say or do whatever you wanted to do and it would never get reported. The Prime Minister was invited and he could do the same – whatever he said or did was not supposed to be reported. However, on this occasion they knew his weakness for nineteen year-olds, they set him up with Geraldine Willesee – she was the only woman in that whole gathering, and he had had a few too many to drink and Geraldine turned her charms on him, and so he took her back with him. Oh, he got a message during the proceedings that the American President had sent him a message about the Tet bombing in the Vietnam War, and he was to go to the American Embassy to be fully briefed on it. By this time he’d had a few to drink and Geraldine Willesee was turning her charms on him so he took her with him to the American Embassy. Tony Eggleton was with him. He was quick to see the inherent dangers of the situation, so he insisted that Geraldine sit in the back seat and he sit in the front seat. But Gorton wanted to have her in the front seat. So they went off to the American Embassy. It was a terrible fiasco. The American Ambassador – I don’t know what he thought, but there was Gorton, worse the wear for drink, with Geraldine Willesee who had no need to be there, there was no earthly reason why she should be there, a junior, nineteen year-old cub reporter. Ainsley was there and Gorton treated the Ambassador, I’m afraid, rather cavalierly. I wasn’t there, but I heard. And he insisted on dancing with Geraldine Willesee. Much to Ainsley’s chagrin she was ignored, and I expect one day Geraldine Willesee will write her memoirs about the night. It was quite late in the morning when he left the American Embassy. The journalists, of course, by this time were going to write some of the story anyway, and they tried to get the log books at the gates of The Lodge to find out what time they’d checked back in, but I think the chauffeur might have put down a different time to the time that they arrived back. That was a great scandal. That was the true story behind that – it didn’t all get out, of course. But that was most unfortunate.

One gets the impression Tony Eggleton was a bit of a minder – – –.

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Yes, oh yes.

Did you have to take on some of those sorts of roles yourself also?

Only in a very broad sense, because that’s one reason, I suppose, why the Press Secretary has to be a man, because you’re in such close proximity in situations where you were virtually almost living with them – not quite, but you’re in such close proximity it would be a bit difficult for a female, although things have changed so much these days with attitudes and things. But he always had to stick like glue with the Prime Minister, especially Gorton, because he was so mercurial. We never knew what was going to happen next. A headline in the newspaper said when Gorton came in it was a case of fasten seatbelts. Every morning, we never knew what the day was going to bring. And those were the days of Maxwell Newton who used to write scandal sheets. He was always writing scandal about Gorton. And we used to think he used to rat our files – we used to have to lock up the filing cabinets. Those were also the days of lax security – anybody could wander in and out of the office. Maxwell Newton used to write the most scandalous stories, and that was also the time of St John, in the Parliament, who used to throw up his hands about the doings of Gorton, because he was always getting into some scrape or another or making a wild statement that we used to have to retrieve. He appealed to the ordinary person. He used to dress very casually with his shirt undone right down to his belt and, as I said, he identified with the underdog. This is – – –.

I was just going to say his relationship to Ainsley Gotto, that became rather notorious. Did that impact on you? Did that –

Well, again – – –.

– sort of put you a bit further removed from the Prime Minister? You seem to have a close relationship to a Menzies or a Holt.

No, it didn’t really, because we had this sphere of operation in the media, and that was pretty broad, and that did, I suppose, to a certain extent, amount to a minder role because you’re always seeking to protect him. It’s part of your role if you are in a job like that – you are always trying to put the best gloss to the public of what’s going on in the government and interpret the government’s attitude to the media, clarify things for them. So you did have quite a close business relationship with him,

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whereas Ainsley’s was a very personal one. She would decide who was going to see the Prime Minister and who wasn’t, and she would call him ‘John’ which greatly annoyed a lot of officials because those were still the days of protocol and proper manners and things. And Mr Willoughby, that man whom I mentioned wept when Holt died, said to her, ‘Miss Gotto, my name is Mr Willoughby, not Bob.’ He used to object. She called everybody by their Christian name. She was twenty-one. She was very attractive, she’d been a little actress. When people would ask me for advice – I used to always be getting asked for advice by mothers – ‘What should I do to see if I can get my daughter into a career like Ainsley’s?’ I used to say to them, ‘Give her a course in dramatic art. It gives them poise.’ And she had poise, and she had the confidence to speak out. Paradoxically, she had an affair with the personal secretary to Gough Whitlam, Race Matthews. They were a great twosome, and she used to stay on with him in Melbourne sometimes when we came back. By then her relationship with Gorton – this was near the end of the era – had mellowed. But getting back to Mrs Gorton, she used to get very upset by all this, and she in fact took pen to paper at one stage when it got so bad. She was quite an intellectual herself. She participated in the Australian-Indonesian Dictionary Project at the university – she had a particular interest in Indonesia. And she used to – because she liked words and writing – she used to enjoy my cables and used to give me compliments. Getting back to Gorton again, personally, one other interesting little incident was when Gorton was on an official visit to Japan. He was in Osaka and Fairbairn decided to mount a palace revolution – he decided they’d had enough of Gorton and it was time to have another leader. So I had to get on the ’phone and ring and say to Gorton, ‘You’d better come home straight away. There’s a palace revolution. Someone’s trying to depose you as Prime Minister.’ The Liberal Party towards the end decided it was time to have another leader. And, as you know, Gorton voted himself out [at a Party meeting]. [section of transcript deleted]

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[But they were tumultuous times. There was the notorious occasion when Alan Ramsey, then employed by The Australian, leaned out of the Press Gallery7 in the House of Representatives while the Parliament was in session and yelled, ‘You liar!’ to Gorton. There was pandemonium. Tony and I were listening downstairs in our office. I ran up the stairs to meet Alan fleeing down them, shouting, ‘Get out of my way! They’re going to arrest me. I’m going to run around to the Senate.’ Tony said, ‘You’d better go after him and we’ll get him to apologise and save his bacon,’ which we did. Tony drafted the apology, he apologised to the Parliament and so was reinstated. This is the background to the incident. Those were the days of Sir Frank Packer – father of Kerry Packer – owner of the Daily Telegraph, who was very powerful indeed. Most newspaper proprietors were. Sir Robert Menzies and all the other Prime Ministers took a lot of notice of them, of Packer in particular, especially as he had Alan Reid working for him. Packer was among those who had decided it was time for Gorton to go. He encouraged his journalists to manipulate the situation then obtaining between Fraser, who was Minister for the Army, and Gorton. The war in Vietnam was at a critical stage. Gorton, ever the maverick, favoured taking advice from, and confiding in, the Chief of the General Staff, Daly, thereby bypassing his own Minister, Fraser. With justification, Fraser was affronted. The journalists kept feeding Fraser information, reminding him that all of this constituted a slight to his status as Minister. Finally, Fraser had had enough and roared off to Government House to tender his resignation. Alan Ramsey had been accorded a special background briefing by Gorton but, obviously, when Gorton got up in the Parliament to make a statement, what he had to say contradicted the version he’d given Ramsey. But we were always having incidents like this. We constantly stood ready for the unexpected to happen.]

What was your relation to the Press? In effect, you were a press person, and yet you’re not one of the Rat Pack up in the Gallery.

7 The term ‘Press Gallery’ has two meanings. It refers (1) to the journalists and media personnel working in permanent premises at Parliament House, Canberra and (2) in a precise sense to the balcony (gallery) exclusively reserved for the media to sit in and physically observe the parliament in session - MHN.

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No, but they respected you. I was more or less the first woman on a ministerial staff that was given a rise above the basic level, and I always put myself out to help them. I really worked hard to oblige them by digging out things. And I had a very good relationship with the Labor Party. We were like lawyers. You may in public have to be adversaries, but in private you were good friends, and I really helped them. We interacted. John Menadue was on the staff then, he was Private Secretary, I think, to Whitlam. You see, it was a smaller place, the old Parliament House, very friendly place. You couldn’t move around without bumping into people, and [the Labor Party] were just around the corner from us. And so I helped them, they helped me. And I can always remember the day when Arthur Calwell was deposed and Whitlam was elected as Opposition Leader. I knew this was very important, so I went round the corner and stood there till the caucus came out and I had the answer, because Holt was flying somewhere and I had to get a message to him. I knew that the minute he got out of the ’plane the press would be onto him, what did he think about Whitlam as the Leader of the Opposition. So Whitlam came out and he said, ‘Huh, I know what you’re doing. You’re going to tell your boss, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, Mr Whitlam.’ So I ran around, got in touch with Fairbairn8 and said, ‘Look, quick, get on the communication system and tell the Prime Minister that there’s a new Leader of the Opposition, Mr Whitlam.’ But it was all on a very friendly level, very small compass. Of course, it was paradise for the journalists, because no politician could come in or out of the place without running into the press. They knew exactly where to get them, whereas in the new Parliament House they can come in and out unobserved.

So how close were you to all these cabals? Because my memory of these years is, particularly after Holt, the Liberal Government was just slowly just crumbling. Holt was a shadow of Menzies, for instance, and then Gorton was – he was the best person we could have, and then McMahon. Defeat at the polls was almost inevitable. So there had to be a lot of machinations going on there. You must have been privy to lots of them.

Well, you did, you saw a lot, because we had a lot of people [giving us information]. You see, we were the sounding board. In those days, the Press Secretary was more than just that. He was a fairly high level – very high level minder. And he was –

8 The RAAF base.

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Tony was always the person of great discretion. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he always knew the right thing to do and he respected confidences, and people would drop in. The press would drop in and they’d pour their soul out to you. You knew all the scandal, all sorts of scandal that was going on that could never get published. For instance, just one example, the Prime Minister had an eye for the wife of the High Commissioner for Ghana. Very attractive woman called Maria, used to wear gold turbans. And he –

This was Gorton.

– it’s Gorton. It came out in public later. He said to her at something, ‘How about some black [fluff]?’ Anyway, I think she was a very attractive woman and she might have flirted with him. Well, he flirted with her – – –. But anyway, we all knew it, the journalists knew it, but they couldn’t print it because it was just libellous. Unfortunately, the High Commissioner for Ghana one day had had enough and he issued a statement, which was very foolish – if we’d been his advisers we’d have said how silly this was, because once you put a concrete piece of – you go into a bit of hard copy, you thereby give the gossip credence and you give a basis to any future journalistic action. And so they had a field day, because Henry Sekyi, S-E-K- Y-I – I think his name was Sayshi [phonetic spelling] – came out and denied all these rumours and made all sorts of statements, but of course that in effect confirmed that there was a dalliance going on. So the newspapers had a field day. Well, we knew all about this because the journalists had come in and told us, and there were lots and lots of things that happened like that. But they would sometimes come in and ask our advice as to how they should play it – should they go out and do this. And of course Tony would advise them and he’d also tell the Prime Minister what was going on – we used to keep him informed about gossip and rumours. Well, that was a very good conduit for us to be able to keep him up to date with current affairs. So then we’d have people ring up because Tony was close to the Prime Minister and knew things that were going on, there was certain backgrounding that he could give. So we had a ringside seat on the movers and shakers, the powerbrokers, and we often had the Head of the Liberal Party drop in. Well, of course, Tony was privy to more than I was, but because we all lived in such close proximity an awful lot of this came into your sphere of operation. So you

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saw a lot and heard a lot, and you knew the proclivities (laughs) of a lot of people. And you knew some of the things that were likely to happen. When McMahon became Prime Minister I thought it’s time I had some private life. McMahon said, ‘No, stay with me, I haven’t got any press staff.’ So I decided, ‘Oh, well, I’ll stay on for another couple of years.’ Billy McMahon was a very insecure person inside, really. He was a hypochondriac. Having in mind what I’ve mentioned about Sir John Bunting, about Ainsley’s relationship to Gorton, Billy McMahon was often coming up to me, putting his arm around me and whispering in my ear, usually, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t go on.’ Me saying, ‘Yes, you can. Look, you’ve done this ten times before. Of course you can do it.’ Sir John Bunting watching, thinking Lord knows what. But there was nothing in it, it was just a pure reflex action. He was a touchy-feely kind of person. In fact, Sir Robert Menzies used to say to him, ‘Don’t touch me.’ – – –. But for some reason he fixated on me and he’d ring me up even at midnight, after he’d done interviews and programs, and talk for an hour about how he’d gone, had he said the right thing, had he done this, and you’d be endlessly going over and over and over things. And he’d ring you up on a Sunday – there was some TV show on a Sunday that he used to get interviewed on – and for quite large slabs of time I’d be talking to Billy about a post-mortem on this particular interview. We’d be going over and over and over it. And consequently I used to become very exhausted. (tape ends)

END OF TAPE 2 SIDE A: TAPE 2 SIDE B

He was known as ‘Tiberius of the telephone’. He used to do this to his top officials, and they used to say you’d never know when you were going to get a telephone in the back. But Billy had a penchant for going off at a tangent. He would be giving a speech, we’d have the autocue going – a laboriously big thing like a baby organ with big print coming out the front – a sentence would appear, it would spark off something and he would go off in another direction. The guy pedalling the autocue used to go berserk – did he stop? Should he go on? Because then McMahon would leap onto something. The poor fellow working this nearly went mad. And there used to be cartoons in the newspapers about it. There was a cartoonist called Pickering who did a marvellous cartoon of Whitlam on the autocue behind the curtains, somehow deposing the fellow operating it and [gleefully] bungling it all so

30

that he’d faze McMahon. That autocue used to travel with us on the ’plane. It weighed a couple of tons, I think. And one of the persons who used to come around with us on the fateful election tour before Billy McMahon went out was John Howard, who was a very young thirty year-old then, a Liberal Party official – – –. He remembers – I know John quite well from those times. But Billy would get sometimes his facts wrong – – –. At the time Australia’s population was about thirteen or fifteen million – he said it was something like seventeen or nineteen. And of course he said to me, ‘Now, I didn’t say that, did I?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Prime Minister, you did, you made a mistake.’ Didn’t like it – – –. He was quirky, too. For instance, you’re travelling on the VIP ’plane and he’d come on board, say, down at Flight Facilities down in Sydney, and he’d suddenly decide he wanted to look at The Bulletin to see what they were saying about him. He’d send off one of the staffers to go and buy The Bulletin, and of course the poor chap had to go from Flight Facilities right back through the terminal – took him a fair time – Billy would get very impatient and say to the captain, ‘Righto, Captain, take off,’ and leave the poor chap behind. He’d often do things like that. And he’d send us out to the airport ahead of him. I remember in Melbourne he’d suddenly decided he wanted us, saying, ‘What are you doing out at the airport? You’d better come back in.’ We were there waiting on the VIP ’plane for him to come out. And he could be quite quirky to work for, too.

And he is the reason you gave it away?

Well, with all these midnight calls and all this extra load he put on me, my health really started to pack up. And of course by that time I was trying to fit in some university studies, which was practically impossible. I used to have to miss tutorials and things. I decided enough was enough, and I’d get into the Department. And so I kept asking Sir John Bunting for a transfer and he wouldn’t hear of it, told me I had to stay there till after the election.

When you say ‘the Department’ – Prime Minister’s?

Prime Minister’s Department, yes, as distinct from the Private Office in the Parliament House. That was in another building entirely.

Did you have standing within the Department in terms of seniority?

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Well, I only had my basic classification, so I didn’t really get any promotions other than being elevated to Assistant Press Secretary. Therefore I could see myself slipping way behind in the promotion stakes. But my main reason for wanting to go was to take off this enormous pressure. Billy absolutely worked you into the ground. He was very demanding.

Was it just you, or was it everyone around him?

Oh, I think others as well. By this time Tony Eggleton had left, he’d gone to the Commonwealth Secretariat in London and I’d been breaking in yet another new Press Secretary, and therefore that was an extra load on me. And I really, really went right down. My health really suffered. And so I did a memo to the Chief of the Staff over there [in the Department] asking: there was a job going, could I be considered for the advertised vacancy? But of course he went and blabbed to a friend, obviously, in the press, and there were the headlines that said, ‘If Mary goes, can Billy be far behind?’ So that put an end to that – I just had to stay there till the end. But I was at a very low ebb health-wise by the time that ended. He became quite frantic in the end, he was calling in all sorts of speech writers and people, thinking there was some magic formula that would keep him in office, but really I think people and the Party had decided it was time, anyway, for him to go. They’d kind of run out of steam. It was really time for a change, time to have the Labor Party come in. And the Labor Party offered me a job, because they’d been in the wilderness for twenty-three years. I said, ‘Look, much as I’d like to help you, I have been here for ten years, with very little private life, I’m exhausted after Billy, I just want to go into a routine, bureaucratic job,’ I said, ‘a nine-to-five, no overtime.’ I’d been riding on overtime all these years, and I just wanted to do that. They replaced Tony and I with about four people each, and I mean all these things should have happened to us. But when things go on year in, year out, a sort of an inertia develops, that the status quo continues to apply. But we should have had bigger offices, our staff did increase – I got a typist to help me, we squeezed her into the little space we had – but now they’ve got a whole big department, I understand. The [Prime Minister’s media office is] a huge department [compared to us]. We operated everything on a shoestring. But I went to work in the Department then, and it was – – –.

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In what role?

Well, they put – – –.

Because you’re a press officer.

Yes. Well, there’s always a certain friction between the Prime Minister’s Office and the Department, because I always was as polite as I could be, but there was many a time when you had to say, ‘Look, the Prime Minister wants within an hour a briefing on “X”. He wants economic policy on “X”.’ And they would have to drop everything and do it and run over with it. Well, of course, they didn’t like that, and you were the person that they could take it out on. Quite a few of them were very understanding about it, but some of the lower levels, they resented having to be told ‘Drop everything and do this.’ As I say, you tried to be as polite as you could, but – – –. So when you went back into the Department, they said, ‘Ha, now you’re here, ha!’ And so you got all sorts of jobs. One of the jobs I had was recording in a huge, huge handwritten record – it was an enormous book, it was kept on a shelf in one of the safes – and it started with Alfred Deakin, with Edmund Barton and all those, all handwritten, who’d occupied the offices of Prime Minister and Ministers. And it was my job to handwrite in that who was the Minister for so-and-so, who was the Prime Minister, et cetera. To get it down I had to take it off the shelf, put it on my shoulder and let it fall on the desk. And I had to record every time there was a change, even an acting change in the ministerial office, if someone acted. And I can always remember Clyde Cameron, being pretty amazed that Clyde Cameron, straight after they got into office, took six weeks off and went overseas and had this great orientation, shall we say, to enable him to undertake his ministerial duties. They had a great time when they got in office. And so that was one of my first jobs. But then I had to get promotion quickly, and I had to then decide what I was best suited for. And I’m afraid politicisation started to set in. Whitlam distrusted the advisers and the bureaucrats from the other era. He felt they had been so associated with the Liberal Party for all those years, they couldn’t adjust their thinking to Labor’s goals and orientations, and so he brought in hordes of advisers and replaced a lot of the bureaucrats with his own appointments, and this gradually filtered down to the staff, so that when they saw my CV, that I had been Press Officer to five Liberal Prime Ministers, they put a big question mark over me as to whether I could

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be trusted at the higher level. So it was fairly hard going, getting a promotion. However, I gradually did. I worked in a variety of jobs. I helped Royal Commissions, I helped Commissions of Inquiry into things. And just to pick out a few highlights, I went to work in the Department of Supply and Transport, I think it was called then. They had a very big problem. They had a lot of strikes, they had ten thousand employees. They were the people that supplied the chauffeurs for the government limousines, and they couldn’t understand why there was an enormous amount of sick leave and discontent, so they set me out to find out. Well, I had a great time. I addressed meetings on the workshop floor of vast numbers of workers, and said, ‘Well, I’m here to find out what you’re really unhappy about.’ Well, they told me everything, from the poor chap that had to use acid to get the paint off the cars, and they would only let him have two pairs of gloves a year and the acid used to eat into them and he therefore either had to buy his own as [he needed] more than two pairs a year – – –. They came to me with all sorts of problems. And they had a problem with one of the managers. I found out the poor chap had incipient Alzheimer’s so that was why his decisions were perhaps inconsistent. And I used to write pages and pages of these reports, and I could see what a lot of the problems were. A lot of the managers needed better training. They would suddenly change the shifts overnight of some of these men. Now, these people were used to a very circumscribed life. They got a set salary, a set wage, they did a routine sort of job in the workshops, they would go to the pub every Friday and they had a very circumscribed life. You changed their shift, you changed their whole life. They got very annoyed about it. But [the managers made changes] peremptorily. Instead of consulting with them and giving them [advance] notice, they just put a notice up on the noticeboard [making a sudden change] – – –. (break in recording) Among the various jobs that I did after I left the Prime Minister’s Press Office was helping to set up the Australian Federal Police, and I enjoyed this very much. The Government had appointed an Englishman, Sir Colin Woods, to head the new Australian Federal Police, which was an amalgam of the old Commonwealth Police and the ACT Police, I think it was. And he became a great friend – he and his wife used to have me to stay in London – and he did an excellent job with the Force. And the work was quite exciting, too. I was the Ministerial Liaison Officer, and I saw a

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lot of what went on with some of the top level investigations, like the Mr Big, the Mr Asia and all those. And I had a lot of admiration for the police, for what they had to do. We also absorbed the Narcotics Bureau as well. I remember one day I was sent down to Sydney to find out why the lady who was in charge of recording all the seizures of the drugs was getting ill, and I soon realised that this [airless] vault where we kept all these seizures just reeked of cannabis, heroin, LSD and everything else. And I reeked of it when I came out, and so I could well understand why she became ill. Anyway, the Government decided that they needed to institute an inquiry into the Painters and Dockers. It was mainly politically-motivated, because there was a lot of graft and corruption on the waterfront, and they felt that a Royal Commission was the way to go, that it wouldn’t take very long, that they would soon be able to wrap it up in a few months. And so I was asked if I would be the Executive Secretary to it, because they had trouble finding some of the bureaucrats to take it on because it was fairly dangerous. The Painters and Dockers were associated with twenty-eight unsolved murders, and they were very powerful, and their motto was ‘We catch and kill our own’. So a lot of men’s wives wouldn’t let them take the job on. As always, with a spirit of adventure, I said yes. So I was told on the Friday that I had to report for duty on the Monday in Melbourne. It had just been announced, and I was to be responsible for setting it up, Frank Costigan was to be the Royal Commissioner, he was to be assisted by Douglas Meagher, a prominent lawyer, and I had to find them offices, I had to make all the arrangements, and usually three weeks was about the time that you took to do these – you were given to do these things, to find staff, premises, courtroom. On Monday morning Frank Costigan said to me, ‘I want you to arrange for a raid on Puttynose Nicholls’ premises tomorrow morning.’ I had just hit town. He said, ‘We want to catch them by surprise. If we don’t raid them now and get the documents they will burn them and dispose of them. They’re assuming that we’re going to have this lead time to set up, but I want to catch them.’ So I had to liaise with the Federal Police, we had to get the subpoenas out, we had to get a big van to accommodate the documents, and then we had to decide where to hide them. We had had difficulty when I had tried to get accommodation for us because everyone associated the Painters and Dockers with the Bookies’ Heist, the two million dollars heist of some years before, when the Painters and Dockers had been

35

responsible for blowing up the building, and nobody wanted to have their building blown up. So nobody was very co-operative when it came to renting buildings. The police didn’t want us on their premises, either, didn’t want their place blown up. Eventually I managed to find a good hiding place which I probably can’t reveal to this day, but we had to prepare all this legal framework to enable us, at half past seven the following morning, to go out to Puttynose Nicholls’ place and seize all the documents, which we did. Caught him by surprise, grabbed all the documents, filled the great big police van with them, had Puttynose in court later that day. I had to race around and had to persuade some Commission to let us have their little courtroom. I couldn’t get other premises. Had Puttynose Nicholls in court, who said, ‘Mr Costigan, my privacy has been invaded.’ Frank Costigan said, ‘Mr Nicholls, before this Commission is much older, your privacy is going to be even further invaded.’ So Frank Costigan said to me, ‘We are going to Sydney tomorrow morning, we’re going to do the same thing in Sydney before they can get rid of the documents.’ So we had to do all the necessary to have the big raid in Sydney.

So where did the Puttynose Nicholls raid take place?

In Melbourne. We had to go to Sydney to raid them in Sydney the next day. So barely had time to breathe. We’re on the ’plane, down in Sydney, arranged the big raid, got the subpoenas, grabbed all the documents before they could dispose of them. Frank decided we’d go to Brisbane the next day, but of course by the time we got to Brisbane some little lawyer chap came puffing up and said, ‘I know what you’re up to now. Give us a chance to have legal representation.’ But of course the things weren’t as important up in Brisbane as they were in Sydney and Melbourne. We’d got all the key documents that we’d wanted. And of course then we went to Adelaide. I don’t think we went to Perth, I can’t quite remember now. So then we came back to Melbourne, and we had to then set up the whole thing. And it was a very interesting experience, because we’d managed to catch a lot of very interesting documents that incriminated all sorts of people. Frank Costigan was a man who worked late into the night. Doug Meagher was a man who started work at six o’clock in the morning. They dovetailed in beautifully, and they were top-notchers, it was a delight to work for them, for people who knew what they wanted to do,

36

where they were going, how to go about it and were very skilful people at what they did.

Did you ever feel under threat?

Sort of. ASIO9 counselled me and said, ‘They won’t kill you, but they’ll put sand in your petrol tank, probably, and go in for heavy breathing on the ’phone.’ Again, as I say, looking at the situation now I’d probably be too nervous to take it on. And, being a female, there was the added element that they were always trying to chat you up. They tried to do that in Sydney, they used to come up and nudge you and say, ‘How are you, sunshine, how about it?’ Whatever. You were always open to that sort of thing. And coming back from Brisbane, when I went to retrieve my case from baggage handling, it was all cut open in the bottom. Obviously someone had slit the side right up and put their hand in and thought – as if I’d be silly enough to carry important documents and put them in the luggage hold. I carried them with me, of course. But you had things happen like that. Doug Meagher set the whole place up like a military operation. He had maps and charts on the wall, and he had been in the Army so he adopted that kind of strategic thinking. And he wanted all sorts of things – this was the big operations room, and they were the first to really get computers working to help them on the money trail. They had a very interesting method of operating. And of course we got to know all those crims, they all had names like out of Damon Runyon’s Guys and dolls, and there was Freddie the Frog. They told us about how Freddie the Frog got done in on the wharf. That there was a line-up, they’re all getting paid, the dockers, and this chap came up with a gun and put it to Freddie’s head and said, ‘That’s for you, Freddie, for doing –’ what he’d done to some other member of the Painters and Dockers. And apparently all his brains, et cetera, went over the chaps in the front of the queue. Police came in, said, ‘Righto, how did you get all that, and what happened?’ And the chap said, ‘Didn’t see anything, the sun got in my eyes. No, no, couldn’t see, I couldn’t see who it was.’ And so they couldn’t get anything out of them because their motto was ‘We catch and kill our own’, and they would get ‘wasted’, to use their parlance [if they revealed

9 Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation.

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anything]. And then whoever did that was avenged. At least Freddie’s death was avenged by another member of the Painters and Dockers who flung open the doors in the Melbourne pub one night, and his name was Texan Longley, and he said, ‘Right, that’s for Freddie,’ and did some chap in there, but they grabbed him, and they put Texan Longley in jail. And he was only released quite a short time ago, therefore he is a more venerable gentleman now. And they said, ‘But you were responsible for sixteen murders,’ and he said, ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ He was able to rationalise the whole thing and he works for charity now – – –. But there were lots of interesting incidents. The detectives were walking along Webb Dock one day, and one of them said, ‘What happened to Ferret Nelson?’ And they said, ‘Mmh’m, careful where you’re walking,’ and they checked when the cement went down and it was the time that the Ferret disappeared. And there were other chaps that went to the bottom of the harbour with cement shoes. And they had connections with undertakers who had crematoria, they had connections with butchers, so I’ll leave that to your imagination as to what happened to other people. So what they used to do was this ghosting on the wharves. A ship would come in, the ship owners would say to the Painters and Dockers, ‘Look, we need it cleaned, we need this, this and this, and it should take only about ten of your people.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the Painters and Dockers, ‘twenty – twenty chaps.’ ‘What? Twenty?’ And so they would have ten fictitious names, they would get paid for ten ghosts. But ship owners wouldn’t get any work done if they didn’t pay up, that’s what used to go on. And of course drugs would get smuggled in in nooks and crannies, or thrown over just before they docked and there’d be a chap in a boat there to pick them up. The Painters and Dockers were into all sorts of rackets.

So how long did that involve you?

Well, that only lasted a few months, because it got very dangerous, and also when it got so exciting – it went on and on, much longer, and it looked as if [it would be] going for years, so some of the high level chaps who were many rungs above me could see it was an interesting job, I was still alive, it was quite exciting, and so they elbowed their way in to replace me. They were a much higher level than me. And it was really getting a bit dangerous, I suppose, for a woman because they can compromise a woman in more ways than they can a man.

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So I then went back into the bureaucracy – – –. I went back to the Federal Police. And it was only a small bureaucratic area in the police – – –. After a time I – – –. Sir Colin Woods had left, we had a new Commissioner, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s probably time to get another promotion.’ So I eventually worked my way up to the top of what they called the Third Division, then. And I thought, ‘Well, my aim would be just to get one rung into the executive arena, the SES10. But of course every time they looked at my CV – the Labor Party was in, still – it was very difficult. There was this terrific prejudice against you. And so I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a time server. I’ve got to this level and I can’t see [much future].’ Once you got into the SES you were very much associated with the Minister, you were at a very high level, policy level, and I don’t think they could trust me for that. I’d been recommended as being SES material and done a few preliminary training/managerial courses. So I thought, ‘Well, there’s not much future here for me.’ I just needed to look around. I saw an advertisement in the national press for a national media officer to set up the very first media office for the forty-three Catholic bishops of Australia. Collectively they were known as the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The Conference is the organisational unit for bishops. And so I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll have a fling at that – – –.’ (tape ends)

END OF TAPE 2 SIDE B: TAPE 3 SIDE A

Peter Donovan, speaking with Miss Mary Newport for the Honoured Women’s program. I’m speaking to her at her home on the 1st of June 2001. This is tape three of three, sides five and six of six. (break in recording) So if you could – a little bit more on why you left the public service because it’s a – you said you didn’t want to be a ‘time server’, but you would have had superannuation and a whole heap of things –

Yes.

– reasons for staying. And what year was it that you left?

1988. When I got promoted to the Veterans’ Affairs Department, Derek Volk, the Head, I’m sure felt that I was just going to serve my time there until retirement, but I’m not that kind of person. I come from a family that’s always been very active.

10 Senior Executive Service.

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My father died at ninety-eight, and he died in the middle of painting the house and running a business. He ran his own business in the end. And he was lobbying the district councils to do this, that and the other, and he had his marbles right to the end and he was very active – walked quickly, and was very sharp. His brain was sharp and active right till the very end, until he dropped in his tracks – – –. I liked work. As I said to you earlier, I’ve enjoyed whatever I’ve done, and I’ve always chosen a job on the basis of whether I would find it was a growth thing for me, and that I could contribute, it was something I liked doing, enjoyed doing, rather than necessarily pursue promotion. The only reason for pursuing the promotion was that I could see dead ends and I wanted to keep moving. So when I found myself in this situation, when I could see that I wasn’t going to – I was going to be just marking time, I thought, ‘No, I’ll see where else I can use my talents’, such as they were. So that was why I put in for the job. Well, I had a few interviews, they sent a high level management consultant to interview me, and they appointed me, they chose me from all the applicants. So there was I faced with carving out [a whole new sphere of operation] – I’d done, performed many pioneering roles before. I haven’t listed them, but I was the person that they used to send on projects to plough new territory. I think I told you I was sent on that fact-finding tour with those ten thousand workmen. All those kind of jobs, they used to give them to me, so I’m used to pioneering things. So I had to set this office up and deal with bishops, who were not businessmen – they had other priorities. They had heavenly priorities, as distinct from business ones.

Where was the office?

In Canberra. They’d set up a completely new Secretariat, and they’d appointed a woman for the first time to an executive role. So I had quite a number of obstacles to overcome, and I had to convince them to think in more worldly terms, because if they wanted to make their way in the media they had to come to grips with how to present themselves and to speak up. And many of them shrank back. It was very hard to get them to go on the media. Very difficult. One of the few that I had any success with – and he eventually got his own press secretary – was George Pell,

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down in Melbourne11. He was Auxiliary Bishop, and I used to say to him, ‘Come on, Bishop, you would be just right to comment on this, make a statement on this.’ He said, ‘Look, I’m only a low-life, I’m Auxiliary Bishop. They don’t count.’ So I couldn’t use him as much as I would have liked. But I like to think one of my big achievements was the launch of the Catechism. There was quite a lot of division about whether we should have a launch. In fact, the feeling was not to have a big one. I said, ‘This is ridiculous’ on one of the few occasions I got to address the whole lot of the bishops in Conference – they used to have a plenary meeting twice a year – and there was great controversy over this. So they got me out the front to address them, and I didn’t mince words. I said, ‘You can get on the national media for free, nationwide. You can have all this time. You can have great exposure. This is a major event in the life of the Church.’ I did a lot of hard talking, and I eventually won the day. But the Cardinal wouldn’t do it. I had to get someone who was good on TV. My favourite then next was the man in Perth, Archbishop Hickey, a lovely man. Got a great admiration for him. He’s got a degree in the Social Sciences, and he’s got a great intellect, but as well he’s a great Christian. He tries to do the loving thing, the Christian thing. And also he was amenable to suggestion. A lot of the bishops found it very difficult to be told what to do when it came to the media. (break in recording)

So just in general, what were your roles as part of the Conference there? In effect, an extension of what you were doing for the Prime Minister’s office?

Oh, more so because I had to set up the Media Office. They had no idea what they wanted. So I had to be the architect of that and decide how the Church could most effectively get its views out to the media, make its voice heard, how you could operate within the Church. There were two aspects to it, there was the getting the word out to the general public, the world at large, the community, and then within the Church, helping to facilitate communication within the Church. But I had to do it at a national level and, as you would be aware, there’s always friction between the states and the federal system, and this applied in the secular world as well as in the Church world. So I had to be very careful of the local bishops’ own rights, I was

11 Appointed in 2001 as Archbishop of Sydney.

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never allowed to go directly into the diocese, I had to go through the bishop, so that slowed things down a bit. Each bishop, I should point out, is sovereign in his own diocese, and although we had a Bishops’ Conference it was only virtually a gentlemen’s club. They came together, discussed matters of national importance and took decisions, but it was all on a voluntary basis. They themselves decided what they did in their own diocese, but it facilitated the organization of the Church to have this central body. For instance, they took a decision on the Holy Days of Obligation, that Australia would not have as Holy Days of Obligation the present ones, with the exception of the Assumption and Christmas Day. That’s at odds with even many other churches on the other side of the world, but they took that as a national decision. But there were many other things that the bishop was sovereign in, and so you had this constraint on how you operated. I couldn’t just go to a parish and liaise with them; I had to keep going through the bishop. And of course many of them said, ‘Well, look, I don’t see why I should be involved in arguing the point with someone on television – it’s a bit deameaning for a bishop.’ But I said, ‘You’ve got to stand up and make the Church’s views known on this particular issue. Even if it means having a verbal duel with somebody, it can be done in the right kind of way.’ It was very difficult to persuade them to do that. And many of them had stage fright. I had to put quite a few of them through a training course to give them enough confidence to be able to do this.

So in effect you were involved with the electronic media, because the Church traditionally has had a print media …..

Oh, well, yes. All kinds of media, yes. Getting them on TV. For instance, one example involved Senator Michael Tate from Tasmania – he’s since become a priest, actually – he was a Labor Minister. He attacked the Church over bishops allegedly living in palatial mansions, and I had to set out then to disprove this and point out that in many circumstances the bishop lived in quite basic circumstances. [For one example,] I chose Bishop Robinson from Sydney, who lived in a disused old shop that had been boarded up with bits of board every which way, it was on a busy highway, it had no cooking facilities, [he had to have his meals elsewhere,] and I managed to get that on the front page of one of the newspapers, with the headline, ‘Don’t mansion it.’ We effectively won that battle, even if it didn’t win us the

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friendship of this Labor Minister – – –.. But I had to get some of them to go on the media to do that – – –. But, to get back to the Catechism launch, having persuaded them to do this, I had to make sure that I had a big crowd there [at the National Press Club], and I had such an enormous crowd that they couldn’t all fit in. They had to put a TV in an upstairs room and put the overflow up there, and we had them queuing up down the street to get in. And Archbishop Hickey did us proud. He was humble enough to let me take him through his paces beforehand, like we used to do with the Prime Ministers, go over all the possible questions he was likely to be asked, and help him, let him frame the answers and then help refine those. And, sure enough, he got most of those questions. He did beautifully. I managed to get a lot of key people there, like John Howard, who wasn’t Prime Minister then, but he marched in a little bit late, which was great for effect, to the reserve seats in front of everybody. They’re all seated, in marches John Howard and Senator Parer and quite a number of other MPs, and they all came up afterwards and spoke to the Archbishop. It went off very well. We had people call in and say they were proud to be a Catholic that day, because it was well done. I liaised with the Vatican quite closely. I was instrumental in persuading the ABC12 to take the Pope’s direct broadcast of his Midnight Mass in Rome, which came through at about ten o’clock – we were ten hours ahead of them – on Christmas morning. Now, the ABC weren’t all that favourably disposed to the Catholic Church because, as you know, there’s this friction about taking a stand on homosexuals. And anyway, I managed to persuade the chief operator in charge of this area in the ABC to take the broadcast live. But that meant they had to pay for the link. An American group called the Knights of Columbus paid for the uplink out of the Vatican to come over via satellite, and it came to the Indian Ocean, got bounced off there, went to Ceduna, came by landline through to Sydney. They had trouble marrying the sound because the sound came in a different way, and we had endless problems with that. And I had to short-circuit the problems, I had to find a way of getting that fixed, because unless I did the ABC were losing patience, they weren’t going to take it. So I scoured around to find out if there was an Australian

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prelate in the Vatican. There was. I rang him up and said, ‘As one Aussie to another, help! I need this help, will you help me?’ He said, ‘Sure.’ So I said, ‘I want you to go to the RAI, the Italian TV company, and straighten this problem out for us. This is the problem. This is the suggested solution. You speak Italian – can you do this for us?’ He did, we straightened it out, we got the broadcast on and it’s been on as a routine now ever since. The ABC only had to pay the downlink, and that was about four thousand dollars an hour, I think, but that was only half the cost of a normal landline broadcast, satellite broadcast, and they were able to fill in that time on Christmas Morning, which is often difficult to fill in. So from then they have taken the Pope’s direct broadcast straight from the Vatican and put it on in its entirety on Christmas Morning. So I had a lot to do with the Vatican. I had to give them reports, they liked a report every year about what was going on in the Church. I got to know Archbishop Foley in charge of communications there quite well. He was a great big American who’d gone to work in the Vatican. He came out to Australia with the Pope and I looked after him while he was out here. We had a great rapport, and when I visited the Vatican – had an audience with the Pope in his little private chapel – Archbishop Foley took me out to an Italian lunch and I got to see behind the scenes in the Vatican. I got shown around and shown through their offices and met the key personnel. I made it my business to interview the TV people, the radio people, they interviewed me and sent me out on the airwaves through all the African countries, et cetera. They’ve got a very high-powered system there, they’re really up to date with all the latest in technology to get the Word out. I was very impressed, actually. So then I took the news service from them every day and I used to disseminate that from the office in Canberra. We had lots of high level dealings with all sorts of people in the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasting [and the Federation of Commercial Television] and used to do submissions on censorship and things like that. In other words, you tried to help the media when it came to their area of ethics and morals.

And you continued till about 1995, I believe?

12 Australian Broadcasting Commission or Corporation, depending on year.

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Well, I stayed there for what I call ‘seven Biblical years’. I felt by this time, you know, time was marching on. I was probably keeping younger people out of a job, and I could see that computers and all that associated with it was burgeoning. It needed a whole rethink of the way you handled communications, and I felt that you needed someone that had a five year span ahead of them, and so I thought after seven years that I’d established it for the bishops, I’d done all the spadework, I’d represented them at overseas conferences, I’d been to the Philippines, I’d been to Prague, they had a great big worldwide conference of people in the Church media, and we’d had the World Council of Churches in Canberra. I’d laid the groundwork, and I’d finally managed to persuade them how important the media was, and I’d managed to get some of them put through media training courses, and I thought it was time now to have a new direction and a new focus. I either stayed on for five more years, or it was time to move out and let someone else take that on. So I thought perhaps it was best to go, given that I was getting on a bit and that I felt it probably needed someone very much younger.

So the first day you walked in –

There was nothing, nothing. [I always say I started from the paper clips.]

– literally it was a bare room. What was it like the last day you walked out? How many staff were there?

I had an assistant by then, yes. And by then we had a you-beaut fax system. You pressed all the buttons and it went to numerous locations, a hundred locations. We’d just – there were two things I insisted upon when I took up the job: a fax machine and a computer. In 1988 they were relatively in their infancy – it’s hard to believe, but that was so. Computers were just coming in, and it took me quite a while to get the computer – – –. They did have a fax machine, and I wanted every bishop to have a fax machine and they wouldn’t. Catholic Insurances13 was prepared to donate every bishop a fax machine, but many of them wouldn’t have it. They were nervous of the media – remember I said to you Menzies was nervous of technology? – and they thought it would be too intrusive in their lives, many of them. And so I used to go around at the Conferences quietly singing a little ditty – ‘A fax for every bishop,

13 CIC.

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every bishop with a fax’ – in the right spots, and it took me a bit of a time, but I finally got them to all have a fax machine so I could quickly be in touch with them. There was no quick means of communication otherwise. And so I eventually got those things. And then, of course, I had to get the latest technology to enable quick communication. We gradually progressed and got the latest, and I used to go to training courses to keep up, and used to attend industry demonstrations of the latest in technology, because I felt we were national, we had to cover a big area, it wasn’t just a little diocese. But now it’s a big business, it’s all changed and they’re all into it and it’s all become part of life now. It’s hard to believe how much – how quickly things have changed in ten years. That includes social relations as well as technology, and it’s progressing exponentially, as well.

Just an observation over the whole of your time with the Bishops’ Conference, how did you see (pause) differences between, say, the conservatives and the progressives? In South Australia, of course, we have sort of non-gender language, you know, for the Mass, and things like that.

Yes. Well, that was gradually coming in when I was there, and the nuns, they were very vocal. Oh, dear! They were very vocal, shall we say, and they made their presence felt with the bishops. Of course, many of the bishops were older men who’d grown up in an era when they took for granted certain kinds of behaviour, certain means of operating, and it was very difficult for some of them. They had to rethink their position. I tried – you have to be very tactful, always, in the media. I tried many ways to bring them up to speed in the twentieth century. For instance, I persuaded Geraldine Doogue, Paul Kelly, the Editor of The Australian, Stephen O’Doherty, who’s now a Member of Parliament, but he was prominent in the media down in Sydney, and – who else was the other one? – to be a panel for the whole of the bishops at one of their plenary meetings to tell them like it was. I took my soundings and made sure that they would accept this, so we sat each one of these up there, and they each had a certain time to speak, and they told the bishops where they were going wrong, what they should be doing, and pointed out the opportunities that they were missing. And I could see the hackles rising on some of them. It was a risk – it was a risk for me, but it had to be done. However, being the good Christians they were, several came up to me afterwards and said, ‘I realise now what I have to do.’ One was Archbishop Carroll from Canberra. He said, ‘I shrink from the media.

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I don’t like going on it, I don’t want to go on it, but I realise now I have this moral obligation to do so.’ So we had to put him through a training course, we got him to go to do a number of interviews and things, but he hasn’t really sustained it. Some people just don’t like being on the media. But others undertook the courses and some of them did quite well. Now, the man I worked for in the Secretariat, the General Secretary of the whole of the Conference, who has since become the Bishop first of Armidale then of Parramatta, and who was a front runner for Sydney – everyone thought he might get the Sydney job that Pell’s now occupying – he shaped up very well. He took on a lot of interviews and he’s got so used to dealing with the media now that you often hear him quoted. He’s Bishop Manning. And he speaks out on social issues and things, and I still ring him occasionally and say, ‘I see that you said this, that and the other.’ But there are still some, of course, who feel that they should be operating on a higher level, that this is all too worldly, but I said, ‘It’s the real world. If you want to get – that’s where the people are, and that’s where you’ll communicate with them. If they’re not coming to the Church that’s the only means you have of reaching them.’ And they realise that now, and so they’ve expanded their media activities greatly. I had a lot of hurdles to overcome, a lot. And it wasn’t easy. And being a woman, of course, there was this certain prejudice. But we slowly made progress and I admired many of them. They were sincerely trying to live up to their Christian ideals. But of course they were men of a generation that had difficulty coming to grips with the modern world. I felt I was so much in their focus that I had to dress like the ads they saw of those businesswomen. I spent a lot of money on clothes. Every morning, before we started the Conference session, they would read all the newspapers, and there would be these ads of these businesswomen, and I felt I had to look like them because they identified me with those businesswomen, so I spent a lot of money on clothes to look the part. It gave you a certain influence, as it were. So, being the men they were, many of them used to comment. In fact, one of them used to tell me if he didn’t like something I wore, and when I appeared on the TV for the launch of the Catechism, he wrote to me from Wilcannia-Forbes and said, ‘Don’t wear that outfit again, wear those nice bright clothes.’ So it was all of a piece. You had to personally embody what they expected of a businesswoman, and you had to be competent in your area, but then you had to also overcome the past’s prejudices.

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As you know, in the business world, for a long time there was a lot of prejudice against women getting promotions, even in ordinary, everyday business. Well, that was multiplied (laughs) in the Church. But I enjoyed it, it was a great challenge, I met a lot of interesting people, I got to travel overseas and represent them, and I hope I achieved a few things for them.

Just starting to head towards the end for the moment there, Mary. The reason for your interview was you’re a recipient of the Medal of the Order of Australia.

Oh, right.

Obviously for your work in the public service.

As well – yes.

You got this other Award for your work for the Church. Tell us a little bit about that.

Right.

Just put that in context. What is it, and why? What does the citation read? Just explain it to me.

You want me to do that first, the being a Dame?

Yes. A Dame of what?

Well, I’m a Dame – to give it its full title – of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Now, it’s an Order that’s under the auspices of the Vatican, it’s not quite the same as being made a Knight or Dame directly by the Pope, but it has to be approved by the Vatican. As you can see, that is signed by Cardinal Furno – – –.

When you pointed there it was to a document on the wall.

That’s right, certificate, yes. Now, you are approached to become a member of the Order on the basis of your personal life as a Catholic, your achievements, perhaps, in the realm of the Church and, as well, your achievements personally in the community. And your particulars and your CV are submitted to Rome for scrutiny and approval.

END OF TAPE 3 SIDE A: TAPE 3 SIDE B

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It’s an Order that goes back to the Middle Ages, the time of the Crusades. The garb – which I’ll show you later – for women is a long, black cloak with a big, red Cross of the Crusaders on one side. Women wear mantillas at their – it’s not ordination.

Investiture.

[section of transcript deleted]

– [Investiture, yes. Men have a white cloak. But you have this Cross of the Crusaders because it was started by Godfrey de Bouillon and, as you know, the Crusaders sought to liberate the Holy Land from the infidels. When they were defeated there were various offices that needed to be attended to. The Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, known as the Knights of Malta, used to look after the sick, I believe, and the Order of Lazarus looked after the lepers. So there were these various functions the former Crusaders performed in Jerusalem looking after the sick, the hospitals and the lepers. Now, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre is especially charged with looking after the Holy Sepulchre itself, maintaining that in Jerusalem and maintaining the little Christian community around it. So that is our special focus.]

Where were you invested with the Order?

In Sydney by the Cardinal, by Cardinal Clancy. Last year, actually. And we have Chapter meetings in Sydney. There are moves afoot to have a Chapter set up in Canberra. It’s quite an impressive occasion, being invested, with trumpets, choir and great ceremony, and your cloak placed upon you. The gentlemen, the Knights, are given golden spurs and a sword. Women were only recently accepted into it in the 1800s. [From 1100 to 1871] it was men only.

So was this award for your work with the Bishops’ Conference, or your longer career?

No, it’s just – no, it’s general, your life, really. You have to go over your life as a Catholic, a Christian, and set out what you have done and the kind of person you have been and you’re considered on that basis.

Okay. What else is there in your life that contributed to this award?

To that award, particularly? Oh, well, I suppose it’s all the work I’ve ever done for the Church. I’ve been – – –.

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Elaborate on that.

Oh, I’ve been very active in that. Well, I said I came from a family of Catholics who were always involved with helping the Church in some way. I sang in the Cathedral choir in Adelaide, I was active in what’s known as the Legion of Mary, I set up a newsletter for them. I helped out in the St Vincent de Paul. When I came to Canberra I was closely involved in the Church here, I sang in the Cathedral choir for a while in St Christopher’s and helped, as I say, with St Vincent de Paul for a while. I worked in London – when I was there I joined the Westminster Cathedral choir, and I was approached by a journalist to join an organization that helped the transition of converts into the Catholic Church. This is very interesting, because they had a lot of high level converts, and these people had perhaps been formerly Church of England and they’d met with stiff opposition from their families and perhaps their local community in becoming a Catholic. And so we had these functions and befriended them, and helped ease the transition. One of such persons who sticks in my mind is the Abbot of Prinknash. The whole community on Caldey Island thought they were affiliated with Rome, and they found out one day when some little local parish priest had an accident near there and they got to speak to him that they weren’t, and they had to take a decision for the whole cloister of monks as to whether they went to Rome or not, and they all said yes except, I think, two. One wrote a book called Abbot extraordinary, anyway, as to why he didn’t. But this Abbot of Prinknash, the minute he heard I was from Australia, he said he’d nearly been killed out here because he’d come out to visit New Norcia Abbey in Western Australia – they were Benedictine monks – and he was involved in a ’plane crash, but he was able to walk away from it. So he said he has rather graphic memories of Australia. But you met a lot of very interesting people, notable people, who came over and that was one thing I was engaged in there in London. Then, of course, I had worked for the bishops – – –. Oh, I ran the Newman Graduate Association for fourteen years. I started off as being its Secretary and then became its President, and we used to make it fairly ecumenical. We used to have a dinner meeting about every six weeks, and we’d have – we sought to infuse civic and professional life with Christian values. And to that end we had Members of Parliament addressing us and a lot of top level people,

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and among the members ourselves we had quite illustrious persons who were Fellows of the Royal Society, et cetera. And there was Kevin Kelly, who used to be Ambassador to various countries and who’d started the Campion Society at Melbourne University and is often mentioned in memoirs about political events in the Church in Melbourne. And so it was a very interesting organization, and we liked to feel that we helped in some small way influence people’s thinking about ethics and morals in business and professional life here. That was one of the reasons I was given the Order of Australia. It was a composite, I suppose. I also co-founded the Australia-Japan Society in Canberra. The very first meeting was held here at my house. That’s gone on to bigger and bigger things now. But that was very successful. And I was always involved in the musical line. I was, for four years, Secretary of the Choral Society here and I helped Marymead14, I helped them with lobbying. And – what else did I do? Oh, yes, I was with Lifeline, I was on the Board of Management of Lifeline for a couple of years and I did their PR work for them. That was in its infancy here. That was very interesting. They made you do six weeks on the ’phones, which was rather harrowing. It was for those kind of things that I was given the Order of Australia, and of course it harked back to the days of when I was working for those Prime Ministers, because back in those days I was all lined up to get the MBE, and always when you’re working in the media you have to take risks, you have to be friendly with all sorts of people, and to make your role work – you don’t compromise your basic principles, but you do have to be agreeable and pleasant to everybody. And of course those were the days when things were very formal and there were certain fairly strict views about mixing with the media. A lot of the public servants were terrified of it, and I was photographed having been at a restaurant, and making a few favourable comments about it, simply because I felt I might be compromised otherwise, and anyway I was told that unfortunately ruled me right out, so it would have been nice to have been recognized for all that responsibility. I had had a very great deal of responsibility then. It was entirely me all by myself that sent those cables. I mean, I had enough common sense to check with Ministers and everybody, and made sure that every word I put in them I could verify and stand by it, but besides that we were such a small office that I did

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have a lot of responsibility, and I ended up doing, as the time went on, a lot more work writing speeches and briefing the Press. It got to the stage when the Prime Minister was away if some of the Members of Parliament had their constituents in to impress them by taking them to lunch, or they wanted to make a little award, they’d call in on me and ask me to make the award on behalf of the Prime Minister. They knew that I was only an underling, but it impressed the local constituent from some far outback place. And so, anyway, I didn’t get the MBE in the end for that reason, but somehow I think they felt that all that should be incorporated in the later Order of Australia.

So what have you done since? What do you do this week and next week?

Oh, well, when I left the bishops I was still very keyed up about things and I did some freelance work, and there’s always the great plan to sit down and write the book, but what’s deterred me is the law of libel, because there are many things you could say to give it colour and interest that would be very revealing, and perhaps libellous. I have lots of acquaintances who’ve had their books stopped by lawyers who got to hear what’s in them. I could name half a dozen people. Alan Reid was one, for instance. One of his books never saw the light of day, he had an injunction brought against him. The other thing is you don’t like to hurt people and you feel that some of the things that you could say would possibly hurt the relatives of these people living if you’re very frank and truthful in what you say. So I wrote some articles for the Catholic papers and they would ring me up, some of the editors that I knew then asked me to cover this big WUCWO15 Conference – that’s the big conference of Catholic women from all around the world that met in Canberra – and I covered that. It got into great contention because it had on the agenda ‘Women priests’, and the local Nuncio moved against that, so it caused a bit of a sensation. There was the Constitutional Conference where Archbishop Pell spoke, and I did a couple of pieces for that, and I joined the Editors’ Society and I was their training officer for three years, and I was invited to join the Committee of the Friends of the National Library, which was great, I thoroughly enjoyed that, and I

14 ??? 15 The World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations.

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set up a newsletter for them – – –. I’ve eased off on the editing work now, because it has pretty severe deadlines and you get very tired of working at ninety miles an hour as time goes on. But I’m still on the committee of the Editors. And I’m serving on a couple of other committees. So I suppose you always – I just feel that everybody should do a little bit of community work. If everybody did a bit it does help out. And of course you’re approached from time to time to give your views on some aspect of the past that people who are writing books want you to verify. Everybody seems to be writing this year, this Federation year, books on various political figures. Someone’s doing a – was talking to me the other day, they’re doing a biography of Harold Holt, and so someone’s always trying to check out your memory on something or other.

Now, you said you were shot in China?

Oh, yes. Terry Metherell used to work for one of the Ministers in Parliament House. He subsequently became a Minister in one of the governments down in Sydney. He got up a party to go to China in 197816, and he was able, because he called it a ‘Parliamentary Delegation’, to get us into places that nobody else got into. That was the year, more or less, that China got opened up, and it was the year that the entombed warriors – well, no, that’s not quite true, because Nixon helped open up China, that was back in McMahon’s day. But that was the year that the entombed warriors were discovered, and there hadn’t been all that many people visiting China, so a Westerner was a bit of a novelty. We were taken to Mao Tse Tung’s hideouts in Yenan, and shown his desk and his footwarmers and all of the memorabilia, personal memorabilia, we had a fascinating time, really. In Beijing the populace used to wait for us to come back in the evening to look at us, because they hadn’t seen Westerners before. We had a redhead and a blonde, who were great novelties, and so they all would stop with their bicycles and watch us march into the Hotel Beijing. The big thing was we were going to visit the entombed warriors in situ down in Sian, so we were taken on a tour of the place. We saw where Chiang Kai Shek was, he’d left his false teeth in a glass there, I believe, and they showed us that. And we were taken onto the site where the entombed warriors were discovered. They hadn’t

16 Diana Laidlaw, currently a Minister in the South Australian Government, was a member of our group.

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all been excavated, and the corrugated iron that formed the cover for the site was made by Lysaghts from Australia, which was interesting. They’d set up a little makeshift tiny room nearby, where they had a few of the warriors and some of the artefacts there to demonstrate to visitors, give them an idea of what they were like close up. I, as you know, had been studying at the university and I’d done several years on China and Japan, I’d majored in it, and I was agog. Here was I seeing artefacts from the Emperor Chin’s tomb. I couldn’t believe it, two thousand years old. His crossbow and arrows, these entombed warriors, each of which had a different face, was modelled on his retinue. And I was goggle-eyed, gazing up at them. I was at the back, I didn’t hear the yell to jump out of the way. What had happened was the little local guide that we’d picked up had put an arrow in the crossbow, and instead of letting the slack slowly go off had taken her hand off quickly. The arrow sped through the air and guess who it caught? The others screamed and got out of the way, but I was so busy goggling at the artefacts, I turned around to collect it in my leg and it started to bleed. Well, I didn’t know what germs they had two thousand years ago, and the cadre who was in charge of us came over. There was only one car for miles around. He said, ‘We’ll have to take you to the People’s Liberation Army Hospital,’ which is across the paddy fields, et cetera. And so I yelled out, ‘I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding!’ (laughs) And the first thought that crossed my mind was, ‘Well, I never thought I’d end my days in China. I’ve probably got terrible bacteria now.’ Anyway, on every tour there’s always somebody who is difficult. We had this woman who wouldn’t eat the food the Chinese served us, she demanded English bacon and eggs for breakfast, for instance. As I left with the cadre in the car to be raced to the hospital, she yelled out, ‘Remember the curse of the Pharaohs’! We got to the PLA Hospital, where they’d (a) never seen a Westerner before – out in the sticks now – never seen a Westerner before and certainly never one shot by a two thousand year-old crossbow. They cleared all the peasants out of the waiting room, held a medical conference, didn’t know what to do with me. They had absolutely minimal drugs and things. They produced a very long, crooked hypodermic needle and said they would have to give me an anti-tetanus injection, had I ever had one? No. The guide from Peking stayed with me and they started to inject this and I had a big reaction because I was allergic to it. She kept saying, ‘Do you feel strange? Do

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you feel unusual?’ I thought, ‘Here we go again, I’m going to snuff it here.’ I looked at the equipment, the washbasins were all brown and cracked. The medical equipment was so dilapidated and so old I doubted its hygiene or its antecedents, and I wondered if the barefoot doctors knew what they were doing. I tentatively enquired, as one was attending to me, where he’d been trained, and I’m not quite sure if it was an orthodox medical degree that he got or not. However, I had no option. And, while I was in there – they had to take hours to do this because I was having such a reaction – the busload of my fellow travellers had pulled up out the front. The local people, who were riding their bicycles, were so amazed to see a blonde and a redhead in this heap of Westerners they crashed into each other and got out and had a fistfight, much to the amusement of the passengers on the bus, who decided I was going to live, so they took off. So anyway, I was there quite a long time and they had to drive me back into the city in their one and only car, and after that I had to every day report in to a PLA depot somewhere on our travels to have my wound dressed and my progress checked. And it was amazing watching the expression on the faces of the medical staff. Their jaw fell and they went through the motions of pulling a bow and arrow – they couldn’t believe it, that this is what had happened to me. I’d been shot by their late, lamented Emperor Chin, who’d given his name to China, C-H-I-N. So they said to me, ‘It is important for the welfare of the local guide that when you return to Australia you send a written report that you are recovered,’ so I duly did that. Someone said I should have souvenired the arrow, but you don’t think of those things. All you’re thinking about is whether you’re going to survive the whole incident.

You’ve had some marvellous experiences. What’s the – can you recall what’s the nadir17, perhaps?

Oh, of my life’s experiences? All I can think is that one major event in my life is getting my university degree. I always wanted to get it, but the family fortunes were such that, as you know, you had to pay to go through and they couldn’t sustain that. I just loved every minute of my years at the ANU, even though they had to be protracted because of my work commitments. I just loved going to that university,

17 Misheard as ‘major’ – MHN.

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and I enjoyed the exams and I did quite well in them, and I just felt that was a big milestone in my life, getting that university degree. Back in those days it was much harder than it is now. I think things have relaxed a bit now, but they’ve made Colleges of Advanced Education, given them university status, et cetera. I did one year of Law at the – one unit of Law at the University of Canberra, and it was a different approach from what I’d been used to at the ANU.

How did you get into university? You’ve said you’d only ever gone to Intermediate.

Oh, I had to matriculate, I had to go to night school and matriculate. No, they wouldn’t accept me on that basis, no. So I had to take a year to matriculate, so I did that. I did German and did my stint, got my matriculation and was accepted, yes. Oh, things were fairly tough in those days, yes, you had to have certain standards.

You know, that certificate over there suggests you’re quite a committed Catholic. How did you – did you find yourself constrained at all in the public service, being a Catholic?

What, do you mean taking certain courses of action, or – – –?

Traditionally, you know, Catholics – – –.

Oh yes, there was quite a bit of that, yes. Yes, you felt that the fact that you were a Catholic did militate against your chances. That was an added – together with the fact that you’d worked for the five Liberal Prime Ministers, both before and after – the fact that you were a Catholic didn’t necessarily help your chances. People had this prejudice against Catholics quite often, for no good reason. It’s much different now, the world’s much more ecumenical now. One of the things I did when I was in the Newman Association as President was to become very ecumenical. We formed a relationship with all the major groups around, we visited their temples, their churches, and went to the Synagogue, and we had evenings with all of these people, the various Orthodox churches and so forth. It’s a different world now but, yes, certainly I would say there was prejudice there and you were – perhaps there was bias against you for that reason. Because a lot of the mandarins in the public service were ex-Geelong Grammar and, you know, the Establishment, and as you know in Adelaide there was a very strong Establishment there who were quite anti-Catholic.

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Were there many – can we just broaden them out from Catholics – you know, sincere Christian, say, Parliamentarians?

Yes, oh yes.

They weren’t sort of crucified in the dogfight of – – –?

I’m not quite sure how they came to terms with this, but there were some, and at the particular moment of course there’s a group in there that runs the Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast every year, and they aim to infuse Christian ideals into the Parliament, but they tend to be scoffed at a bit by the media because the media, I’m afraid, is very atheistic. I used to find, when I used to put press releases out for the bishops, I had to start from scratch to explain what the Eucharist was, very basic things that normally in past times you would take for granted, because they had no Sunday School training. Once upon a time everybody went to Sunday School in some church or other, but not any more. And they’re completely ignorant of how – of any other than the most basic ideas about religion and of course they get it wrong. They get this sensationalist view of things, they get the absolutist view, and it unfortunately gets the headlines and the Church quite often gets a bad press. Many’s the time they stood me up there and got me to explain things like sanctifying grace and what the Sacraments were, and the Church’s view on this, that and the other. At least they accorded me respect, they gave you respect, but they treated you as a bit of a quaint person, bit of an oddity in this day and age. But they did at least respect your views. You struck the odd Christian journalist who knew what you were talking about, but of course he was a bit constrained by what his editor wanted to publish or not publish, and how much space they gave religion. They always liked dramatic, sensational stories, scandal. It was very hard to get things in. But thank Heavens, a lot of that prejudice now has broken down. It’s, as you say, in the Church itself we have now got divisions between the progressives and the traditionalists. A lot of that needs a good deal of communication. I feel that sides are taken sometimes without fully understanding the other’s position. There’s a great richness there that isn’t fully mined or tapped. I mean, the Church can embody things like meditation and a whole raft of things that never get an airing, really, and it’s got so much to say that’s very sensible on how to run your life. It all makes very logical common sense to me, how we’re obliged to take care of our bodies as well as

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our souls and have right thinking. I mean, forgiving your enemies is a very therapeutic thing. You’re not harbouring – wasting energy on anger and retribution and so forth, it just makes enormous common sense to me, how to live your life sensibly.

Well, I’ll call a halt there, Mary, and just say thank you. We’ve gone three hours, we’ll perhaps have another go. But thank you very much – that was terrific.

Oh, I hope it was useful, Peter, because I seem to have jumped around a lot and there were many things I’ve left out. I should sit down and type some of them and send them to you if you want me to.

Oh, that’ll be terrific. Thank you.

END OF TAPE: END OF INTERVIEW

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