As a young fellow I was still working on questions of my place in the world, as well as broader questions about society’s formation, structures and driving forces.
My rugby scene was composed mostly of young men with a rural and private school background, and some budding professionals and businessmen. I never met another teacher in that rugby competition, nor did I meet a clerk, tradesman, shearer, labourer or any everyday working man through rugby. This crowd wasn’t a representative cross-section of country town society.
A few rugby supporters seemed to me to rather enjoy feeling separate from the general population, and I became interested in the way this country community organised itself. Life there wasn’t the same, in quite striking ways, as the life I’d experienced in the city.
In New England I’d become aware of widespread recognition of several families whose contribution to the area was acknowledged as important and worthy. These families had been early settlers, squatters really, who had moved into the district as it was opening up to white settlement from the 1840s onward. Well-known families included the Whites, of the Saumarez and Booloominbah properties near Armidale, and the Gidley Kings, who settled the vast Goonoo Goonoo Station near Tamworth. Such families had, over a number of generations, come to be identified as the ‘squattocracy’. That term wasn’t always applied positively, as it had connotations of the aristocracy and was associated with pretensions better left behind in England—although I saw no indications that the Whites or the Gidley Kings deserved any negative judgements.
The means by which the squattocracy had obtained land intrigued me. I wondered, had these families come to any kind of accord with the Aboriginal people they had displaced? These Anglo-Irish families had settled on the most productive land in the region, so I assumed it had been the country of a significant number of Aboriginal people. But in 1960, I never heard anyone question the legitimacy of the white occupation of the land.
My O’Brien forebears had themselves been among the early settlers in New England. Driven from Ireland by economic necessity, upon arrival in the late 1870s my grandparents had travelled straight from the ship at Circular Quay to the Tenterfield area and settled on an acreage some fifteen miles to the east of the town, in the Black Swamp area, towards the direction of Drake. Gradually they had converted pristine scrub and forest into pasture land. In order to establish an income, my O’Brien grandfather had, with a horse, dray, pick and shovel, taken contracts to build and maintain roads in the area. How, though, they had acquired title to their farm I had never enquired and had never been told as far as I could remember. I’d simply assumed it had been purchased, but the reality was probably that their settlement and ownership had been legitimised through the Land Acts of the 1860s: if a white person settled and worked the land, and added improvements, they might obtain the title.
As their family grew, my grandparents became concerned about the lack of educational opportunities for the children. A decision was made to sell the farm and move to Sydney, where they established their dairy—a trade they well understood from Ireland—in Edgecliff and Double Bay, and their children started school in Paddington.
Vague memories remain of a holiday I spent in Tenterfield when I was of primary school age, visiting and staying in the homesteads of grazing properties held by old Irish family friends of my dad: the Moran, Petrie and Connolly families in particular. I also remembered visiting one day the site of the timber cottage built by my grandad on country to the east of Tenterfield town; there was nothing of it left except the rough, grassy outline of the original foundations.
From that history I had an understanding of and sympathy for the dignity and worth some bestowed on these New England pioneering families. Starting from nothing, and by huge physical endeavours and merciless persistence, they had built a life for their families, a community with their neighbours and an infrastructure for their society. So there was something valuable to accept about them and much to admire. However, I disagreed when some in the rugby crowd went further than simply accepting the worth of such families and acted as though they were superior to others.
In my second year with the club, a need arose to appoint a new First Grade captain. One candidate stood out. Roy was marvellous; he had played in the Drummoyne First Grade team in the Sydney competition and been selected for the national Barbarian team playing against the visiting British Lions—the Barbarians were just outside selection for the Australian test team, so Roy was good. He understood rugby; he was a great tactician and strategist, and a fiery but absolutely fair and unrelentingly strong player. A leader on the field, he was always encouraging his team to do their best and lifting them when needed. Roy was the obvious next captain.
But rumours and criticism began to spread among the local rugby crowd. ‘He lacks polish.’ ‘How would he perform when speech making if called on to represent the club?’ ‘He’s too rough a diamond.’
Roy, an insurance salesman, was well liked by all his clients, even if his speech was a little unpolished. But he wasn’t appointed to the captaincy. The whispering campaign, well managed, denied him what should rightfully have been his. Roy took it all with grace. Appointed in his place was a private school–educated businessman, a reasonable club-standard player, with far less rugby knowledge and skill than Roy, little charisma and few leadership qualities.
Such attitudes challenged me. What was going on with these ‘born to rule’ folk? I certainly didn’t believe that superiority could be obtained by birthright or any unearned privilege. I was disconcerted and quite troubled by the attitudes I was now witnessing, and the rights seemingly reserved for only some of those with whom I was interacting.
One of my college lecturers had discussed the social origins of teachers. He rather upset my sectional peers when he claimed that young male entrants to the teaching profession came, typically, from the ‘upper working class’, while typical female entrants came from the ‘lower-to-middle middle class’. He suggested male school leavers entered teaching as a means to progress up the class scale, while females used teaching to ensure they didn’t slip down the social scale.
Inwardly I considered my origins and those of my college peers. I guess most of us took a surreptitious look around. There were no professional families represented by me or any fellow student. As the lecturer suggested, all of us were from ‘lower social classes’, as far as that concept had any meaning in Australia. When I glanced at my peers, I saw fine young people eager and keen to become excellent teachers—all supportive, kind, pleasant if not charming, and bright of wit. I didn’t care to what class, if any, they belonged. They were wonderful just for whom they were. If there were ‘right people’, they were certainly pretty right. Besides, I told myself, my entry to teaching was for the pursuit of knowledge, not climbing up a class ladder.
Apart from a few years on the family farm in New England, my father had been a minor public service manager. He had left his Darlinghurst school when he was fifteen and, having joined a government department as his first paid job, stayed with that department for his entire working life. He had grown up in a home near his family’s dairy farm in Sydney’s Double Bay, with their herd pastured on an area now known as the Lough Playing Fields, off Manning Road. The O’Brien family’s original stone-built dairy remained in place, on a corner site of the Fields, disguised as a service station. My dad’s boyhood home was up the hill some way from the dairy property, one of the group of four large cottages that together made up The Grove, a housing enclave off Queen Street, Woollahra. One of his tasks as a teenager had been to mow, roll with a heavy hand-roller and apply lines to the grass tennis court attached to his home.
That O’Brien home was the first house I entered in my life. My grandparents still lived in it when I was born, and on her way home from the maternity hospital my mother stopped by and took me in to ‘show me off ’. I have no memory of either O’Brien grandparent, unfortunately, but from family stories I know they were decent folk with little formal education, earning their living from hands-on dairy work as small-business proprietors.
My mother came from a village and farming background in Ireland. She had only six years of schooling—a curtailment to her education forced on her by circumstances. As a girl it had become far too risky for her to continue her daily walk along the country backroads to the Castlepollard or Ballymacarney school. At the time of her sixth and final year, the British, who ruled the country, had unleashed on a fractious Ireland, desperate for independence, a paramilitary force about 6000 strong, known as the Black and Tans. Their main task, it seems, was to subdue the Irish population through terror. Irish girls and young women were considered fair game by the British thugs.
When I applied for an Irish passport to enable me to travel freely in Europe, I had to supply my mother’s birth certificate in order to prove my lineage. I was shocked to note my grandfather had signed with an X. He had been the head herdsman for the Earls of Longford, the aristocratic title of the Pakenham family, and responsible for all the stock on the estate of the Pakenham family seat at Tullynally Castle near Castlepollard in County Westmeath. My grandfather was, so the story went, a noted judge of horses and cattle, and for these abilities he was held in great respect throughout the county. One entitlement in his work was to a house on the estate, so my mother grew up in a quite substantial two-storey home. She and all three of her siblings were literate, as was my grandmother. The reasons for my grandfather’s lack of literacy are hard to fathom now.
My heritage is mixed but, clearly, there was no professional background on either side. If class was an issue, to which level or class did I belong from my jumbled family tree? I remembered my mother insisting that Australia was a classless society: one of its clear attractions for her. If she had been comparing it with the Ireland she had left in 1923, as an eighteen-year-old, she’d been correct.
My family and my schooling, particularly with the lovely nuns of my primary school, had influenced me greatly, of course, but I was trying to think through my interpretation of society independently and had developed a strong egalitarian model. It seemed to me that individual success and social standing were achieved through personal effort and endeavour. No one I had seen had won rewards or been recognised simply because of the perceived superiority of their birth or class. Superiority had to be earned.
I admired the accomplishments of individuals. Sometimes, though, I saw that a helping hand could produce quicker and more immediate rewards. So, I’d developed a philosophy of self-help with care for others thrown in. Early conversion to the acceptance that all are equal, not only in the sight of God—as taught to me by the nuns—but also manifestly to each other made me more egalitarian. I argued for the greatest good for the greatest number rather than a focus on self or of letting the devil take the hindmost.
By the time I arrived in Weabonga, I felt no need to play out someone else’s class-based fantasy. All were equal, so I accepted everyone as I found them and as they treated me, and tried to treat others with respect and friendship whenever possible.
In the New England rugby scene, I met folk who challenged my ideals. A collection of men from rural ‘leading families’, aligned with businessmen from the region’s towns, appeared to control power and its use in the region.
I was not surprised to observe such a group. During the years of my upper high schooling I’d noted men from my Kensington church combining with like-minded others from surrounding parishes to counteract the influence of communism in the Labor Party and the labour unions. They were part of ‘the Movement’, a semi-secret society founded and led by Bob Santamaria, a lay Catholic, with support from Archbishop Daniel Mannix, the rather fiery Irish prelate of Melbourne. ‘The Movement’ had become a significant force, advocating an exaggerated traditional form of Catholicism and a heightened conservativism in politics.
My older brother spent several nights a week working with the organisation and, despite its requirement of secrecy, had divulged some aspects of it to me. I didn’t find them appealing. Even as a teenager I believed that if such objectives were worthy, they should be reached by more legitimate means—such as openly joining the Labor Party and taking an active part in its pre-selections, while publicly rebutting ideas and policies one might oppose. I perceived ‘the Movement’, with its hint of martyrdom, as a rather unsophisticated, ‘church-in-peril’ response to an exaggerated threat. And I pooh-poohed one of Santamaria’s more curious suggestions: to settle all Australian families on small rural selections, in order to promote their ability to become partially self-supporting, as in a seventeenth-century Italian state. Now, when I saw how successful such a model was in helping to raise the bonny Weabonga children, I had to admit a little grudging respect. That didn’t make the idea feasible, though, throughout most of late twentieth-century Australia.
A few years later, while in the National Service with university men, I had been approached by associates of the Eureka Youth League. I had no doubt they were trying to recruit me. Openly associated with the Australian Communist Party, Eureka claimed to be working for social justice and the rights of all, particularly the young. Such goals appealed to me, and some of their events might have been fun. For a brief moment I considered a loose association, but then I realised that Eureka was too similar to ‘the Movement’ for me. Both demanded strict adherence to their modes of thinking, believing and acting. I sought a more individualistic answer to many of life’s questions, finding my way to a truer, more personal interpretation of society.
Even though I rejected ‘the Movement’ and Eureka, I viewed each as working for their version of the greater good. Here in New England, though, I observed a group organising for what I perceived to be the pursuit of narrow sectional or even just selfish interests. But, to my surprise, these New Englanders were quite successful in capturing social and political power.
I asked my local acquaintances and friends to explain how such people, ‘born to rule’, apparently uninterested in and even dismissive of those they considered inferior—most people, it seemed—came to wield such influence, especially when many of the positions they held were electable. ‘Easy,’ was the response. ‘The squattocracy and nabobs have control of decisions that affect people’s lives. They employ people, either through their rural holdings, through the town-based businesses into which they’ve invested, or through their influence on the shire councils. Many people owe them a living. Casting a vote the right way is an attempt by an elector to curry their favour.’
No one suggested there was any corruption in place. Votes weren’t being bought but, nevertheless, debts could be brought in, if only by implication, and the application of hints and indirect pressure.
The ‘nabob’ operations were well illustrated by their very active, well-organised and well-funded campaign to have New England recognised as a separate state. Prominent in this advocacy to secede were a few names from the squattocracy, with many others from the leading businessmen. The editor of the Tamworth-based newspaper, the Northern Daily Leader, gave them access to a powerful means of communicating their push for statehood.
In my assessment, any such new state would need subsidisation forever from the mother state, New South Wales, and be an eternal drag on the economies of both that state and the nation. In trying to build support, the New England state advocated that the Newcastle and Hunter Valley areas be included in the new state. But the Hunter people had no interest whatsoever in leaving New South Wales or in joining a New England. It was clear to most that a push for a New England state based on the inclusion of the Hunter was absolutely doomed to failure from the outset. But such a failure wasn’t apparent to the nabobs who led the push.
Questions about the underlying motivation for this new state movement kept arising in my mind. Clearly it wasn’t in the best interests of Australians generally, nor even of those living in the region. From what and from where, I wondered, came this dream and the intense efforts being expended on its unlikely achievement? That personal needs for aggrandisement and individual desires for power were at play, as much as anything, appealed to me as a likely explanation. Could it have been a case of a big fish in a much smaller pond? Personal desires were outgunning public good, I concluded.
I did wonder how it was that the regional leadership, which claimed to be working in the best interests of country people, seemed to have so little concern for the lives led by those I knew, such as the good folk of Weabonga. Many other public and social goals might have better qualified for support from the power, knowledge and vitality of the ‘right people’ than a new state. If the nabobs were looking for causes to champion, I thought they may have been helped by paying a visit to our isolated little village and hearing a few suggestions.
At our one-teacher bush school we might have discussed the lack of electricity, and the schoolroom being unsupplied with illumination, a radio, musical instruments or a moving-picture projector. We might have discussed the lack of running water and sewerage. We might have discussed the limited reading material and the absolute dearth of reference books when city schools had libraries. We might have discussed the lack of music, arts and crafts materials when town and city schools had speciality rooms, materials and teachers. We might have discussed the fact that these country children had no visit from medical or dental services in my two years when students at all town and city schools did at least annually. We might have discussed the lack of counsellors and careers advisers. We might have discussed the typical teaching appointment of inexperienced, barely competent young men, like me, to these little, isolated schools. We might have discussed why it was that rural children weren’t receiving equal educational opportunities to children in towns and cities.
Provision of decent education for country children everywhere was—I thought—worth fighting for.
But the nabobs might have responded by charging me with the promotion of my own narrow sectional interest: while there were many small bush schools in New England, their supporters represented relatively few voters. To counteract any such accusation, I would have introduced the new staters to Ethel and Perc, who, in their own forthright way, would have mentioned road and communication needs, the upgrading of hospitals, the provision of decent health care in smaller rural communities, and the connection, at last, of electricity and adequate sewerage throughout New England. To me, my elderly friends had a more insightful grasp of local priorities than any of the new staters.
I had little doubt whose interests the nabobs were truly promoting. They made me somewhat cynical about the use of political power in rural Australia. It’s always sensible, I believed, to dig deep into the motives of anyone making appeals for the support of country people.
I remained happy to be part of the hoi polloi. My view of all men being equal was strengthened. I was certain the idea of social class, if it existed, mattered not at all to me, and I should just let it waltz by.
With the people I saw most frequently, the residents of Weabonga, my expectations of society were met. I understood them. They provided a necessary balance, showing the inherent worth and decency of ordinary people. All the men were extremely hardworking, whether graziers or labourers. All the women, whether from homestead or village cottage, were devoted to their families and spent long, long hours in caring for them. No distinctions were made that I ever saw. Everyone worked diligently at achieving the goals they set themselves, and often a friendly, helping hand was offered about. Weabonga people had reached out to alleviate my distress and give me support. I appreciated and was happy to take part in the genuine society they created together.
More importantly, the children in our little bush school—through their fondness for each other, in their ongoing, unconditional support for their schoolmates, and by their own efforts—modelled a fine society.
I was fortunate that much of my country life was fulfilling and my social life fun, so the squattocracy and nabobs didn’t count for much to me. My crowd of local friends worked hard but also found time to enjoy themselves. Most were progressing sensibly toward important, solid goals, not wasting time and effort on pies in the sky. Most were planning on marriage—and I was beginning to think of doing the same.
Marriage planning had been brought to my attention in a curious way.
Within a month or two of meeting, Patricia and I had established a semi-regular pattern of going on outings. At first, any conviction that our outings were actually dates eluded me. I hadn’t formed any serious intention, although I enjoyed her company immensely and felt a growing interest. Her charming qualities impressed me.
When my twenty-first birthday came along, my family planned a simple celebration at home, to which they invited all my mates and other friends. My mother took care of the catering, along with Peg, her long-time friend.
Peg was a wonderful woman. Of Northern Irish background, she was a social powerhouse with a compelling singing voice well suited to heart-pulling Irish melodies. Her rendition of the ‘Spinning Wheel’, for example, was spine tingling, comparable in quality to any version I’d heard. Peg’s husband, Barney, was her equal in joie de vivre. In the early 1920s he’d been an active member of the legitimate Irish Republican Army and, when it came his turn at a party, he could sing so strongly the rebel song ‘The Old Fenian Gun’ he might have moved mountains. Peg and Barney had been present throughout my life, and I enjoyed sharing my birthday with them.
Patricia had been invited, but not necessarily as a girlfriend. It was early days.
During the evening Patricia assisted by fetching and carrying food and drink from the kitchen. On one trip she overheard a comment Peg addressed to my mother: ‘Mairy, thut guurl is go-un’ to get yur Paytuh.’
Patricia said nothing to me on the night, but later revealed this episode to me on one of my Sydney trips. I apologised for any embarrassment and asked if she’d responded.
‘Yes,’ she told me, ‘I said in turn, “But I may not want to catch your Peter.”’
Admittedly, at the time of my birthday I wasn’t yet ready to be caught, so I saw Patricia’s response as reasonable. At twenty-one I hadn’t begun to think seriously about marriage; while I had considered it, I’d acknowledged to myself I was too immature to take on such a responsibility. While at Weabonga, though, I’d started contemplating a married future, and I felt a little anxious that my chances with Patricia might have been knocked for six by Peg’s indiscretion.
As my time at Weabonga and Patricia’s in Melbourne extended, we depended more and more on our letters and phone calls to maintain and grow our friendship, which became increasingly meaningful and important for me. But conducting this long-distance romance wasn’t easy. I was worried that Patricia had established herself so well in Melbourne—her ‘rat pack’ sounded very supportive—that she might not want to leave.
I was reassured that she made sure to come up to Sydney so we could spend time together when I had opportunities to visit from Weabonga. All the hours we spent talking on the phone and being together during holiday periods became charged for us both. The more I saw Patricia, the more I appreciated her. I recognised I had fallen in love and I loved the feeling. There was nothing better for me than being in love.
I believed my being teacher-in-charge at Weabonga was accelerating my emotional and intellectual growth. I began to think in a different way about our friendship, and the possibility of getting married came to figure in all my thoughts of the future. I now came to believe I was ready for commitment. But was this reasonable, I wondered? Was I, just through isolation and loneliness, imposing inappropriate feelings on the friendship? Was I overly dependent and taking advantage of the young woman’s kindness? I didn’t wish to place Patricia in a position where she might feel compromised and hemmed in by me and my needs. But, I reminded myself, I wasn’t dependent on Patricia: several of the young women in my crowd in town had made it obvious they were willing to entertain ideas of a closer relationship with me. This went some way to convincing me that I wasn’t imposing a personal need on my friendship with Patricia.
The other thing was that Patricia’s ability to strike out in an independent manner, her confidence in her decisions, and her assertive behaviour when speaking up for herself had always impressed and delighted me. As I thought it through, I came around to believing she was quite capable of telling me any necessary home truths.
Encouraged, I made my feelings clearer in every letter and phone call. We moved closer to an important decision.