WHEN MALCOLM TURNBULL’S ancestor John Turnbull arrived at Sydney Cove, he was met with sarcasm. ‘One foot in the grave and the other out of it,’ quipped governor Philip King. ‘What brought you here old man?’1 It was 1802, Turnbull was fifty-four, and the penal colony at the bottom of the world was in its infancy.2 Turnbull, however, would have the last laugh. The Scottish-born tailor’s cutter from London, who had emigrated with his wife, Ann, and four kids under ten, would outlive the third governor of New South Wales by a quarter-century, in the process fathering three more sons and gaining fifty-three grandchildren.
Presbyterian by faith, the Turnbulls had set sail with seven like-minded families, determined to escape British restrictions on religious dissenters—non-conformists were unable to attend Oxford University and could be barred from public office or even denied a christening or lawful marriage. The eight families aboard the Coromandel were known as the Coromandel covenantors and were part of only the second shipment of free settlers to Australia. Sailing into Port Jackson was a glorious moment, but one diarist among the group recorded that on being taken upriver to Parramatta a few days later, they ‘had a large bread bag stole full of wheat and other things of value, rum seized by the soldiers, great trouble in getting our goods in stores and saving them from being stole’.3
After serving a farming apprenticeship in 1803 at Toongabbie, west of Sydney, each settler family took up a grant of 40 hectares at Portland Head, on the Hawkesbury River to the north of Sydney. Turnbull chose well, picking elevated land at Swallows Rock Reach that sloped down to the river flat, so avoiding the worst of the damage when devastating 14-metre floods arrived in 1806—the Hawkesbury flooded often and would not be tamed for more than a century. Besides land, the settlers were promised a year’s food and clothing from the public stores and the labour of two convicts maintained by the government, plus farm tools, a pot, a musket, powder and shot. They lived in slab huts with a bark roof and walls, and an earthen floor.
As Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River describes, the Hawkesbury opened the eyes of settlers to the charm and promise of the new country. Taking over the land of the Dharug Aboriginal tribe bit by bit—between atrocities and hand-wringing, raid and counter-raid—the Hawkesbury farmers grew everything from wheat to corn to hemp, and bred livestock such as sheep, goats and pigs. Within a few years, the fertile Hawkesbury accounted for more than half the agriculture in the colony. Turnbull was selling pork within three months of settling, and he was one of the first to plant a commercial orchard; some claim he was first to sell peaches in Sydney.4 One historian pondered whether the Turnbull grant was on a river bend
not troubled by the Aboriginals, or did John bear their assaults on his cornfields with unusual patience? He was by all accounts a good-humoured man. And industrious too, the Governor had to concede. With the help of his growing sons, the old tailor-turned-farmer proved adept at agriculture; his peaches gained him quite a reputation.5
Amid the natural bounty, Sydney was running wild. Under military rule, both emancipists and exclusives (those who rejected full rights for freed convicts) were at the mercy of the infamous Rum Corps of army officers, subject to kangaroo courts and with no elected representation or free press. The first serious convict uprising took place in 1804 at Rouse Hill, and the following year there was a stand-off between governor King and ex-officer John Macarthur, the fabulously wealthy wool pioneer and land monopolist who was in cahoots with the army. Governor William Bligh, who succeeded King in 1806, became a hero to the local farmers when he banned the use of spirits as payment for produce. It was a brave move, tackling the army head-on: Bligh was arrested for his trouble in the Rum Rebellion of 1808. Turnbull co-signed a Hawkesbury petition in support of the ousted governor, who had suppressed the Rum Corps’ ‘system of monopoly and extortion’.6 He even named his fifth son, born the following year, William Bligh Turnbull—a cheery lad, he was nicknamed ‘Whistling Bligh’. So began a family tradition that has spanned two centuries: Bligh is Malcolm Turnbull’s middle name, and also that of his son Alexander.
The Turnbulls were one of the fifteen families who contributed a then-hefty £10 each to build a church at Ebenezer in 1809, now Australia’s oldest existing church. Descendants of the founding families still gather there—Turnbull was a guest of honour at the church’s bicentenary in June 2009 and led the prayers, bareheaded in the misty drizzle.7 He donated $35 000 for the church’s restoration fund.8
Arriving in 1810 to retake control of the wayward colony for the Crown, Lachlan Macquarie recognised the Hawkesbury settlers as a beacon of progress, founding the five towns of Castlereagh, Pitt Town, Richmond, Wilberforce and Windsor on higher ground to support the growth of the region. Turnbull was granted more land, and in 1817 he took out only the sixth mortgage from the new Bank of NSW, borrowing £25 to build a sandstone home that is still lived in today.9 (Almost two centuries later, the original loan document would be presented to Malcolm Turnbull by Westpac, which grew out of the country’s oldest bank.) In 1824, another 80 hectares were promised to each of Turnbull’s five sons by governor Thomas Brisbane, including a parcel at Sackville North which remains in the hands of their descendants today, marking six generations of Turnbulls on the Hawkesbury.
When Ann Turnbull died in 1819, ‘Old John’ soldiered on alone. There was more tragedy in 1825 when his eldest daughter, Mary Ann, mother of four kids, was murdered with an axe by her second husband, ex-convict James Wright, who was promptly hanged.10 Old John was a tough character. In the late 1820s, when he was well into his seventies, Turnbull ‘was taking a cart of peaches into the markets at Sydney and was “stuck up” by that notorious bushranger of the time, Russel Crawford, on the Parramatta road … The old pioneer held his own and beat the ruffian off until assistance arrived.’11
According to the faded copperplate handwriting in the Turnbull family bible,12 in which births, weddings and deaths were faithfully recorded, John Turnbull died in 1834, aged ninety-one. His tribe then pushed north into the Hunter Valley, buying land off the Crown at Doyles Creek. The Turnbulls had big families and generally lived very long lives. John’s youngest son, William, married at Wilberforce in 1839 and had eleven kids. He helped his father from a young age, plying the Hawkesbury River trade down to Sydney until he moved north in 1868 to farm in the Macleay River district. He died in 1892, aged eighty-three. William’s son James Bligh Turnbull married in 1878 and had fifteen kids. James moved around, from Kempsey to Orange and back, and died in 1930 aged eighty-two. His son Frederick Bligh Turnbull—Malcolm’s grandfather—was born on the NSW north coast in 1893. Gassed on the Western Front towards the end of World War I,13 Captain Turnbull returned home to marry Mary Agnes Brown in Bondi in 1921. The couple, who wound up teaching in the Hunter Valley, had only two children—Flora Jean Turnbull, born in 1922 and Bruce Bligh Turnbull, Malcolm’s father, in 1926. Fred died in 1968 aged seventy-four.
Malcolm Turnbull scoffs at the ludicrous suggestion that his ancestry somehow makes him Scottish. On his mother’s side of the family, Turnbull’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, First Fleeter Owen Cavanough, aboard the Sirius, was at the prow of the boat that rowed Captain Phillip to shore, and was said to have been the first person to set foot at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. The National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, which has compiled many family trees on its website, described Turnbull’s family tree as their ‘most complicated to date’. Amazingly, the centre recently discovered that ancestors on both sides of Turnbull’s family came out on the same ship, the Coromandel. Turnbull’s mother’s ancestors, William and Sarah Stubbs, arrived with John and Ann Turnbull, and lived opposite each other in the Hawkesbury region. Turnbull also has many convict ancestors, back to the First Fleet: the centre found ten, without counting aunts and uncles. None did anything terrible—their crimes were of the ‘stealing a watch and chain or pair of gloves’ variety—and none were political prisoners. According to the centre, Turnbull is not the first PM with convict ancestors: Kevin Rudd had a few (including one on the Second Fleet), John Howard had two and Malcolm Fraser had one.14 Turnbull is both a fifth- and a seventh-generation Aussie, as his mother wrote in one of her book dedications (but not a sixth-generation Australian, as Robert Hughes implied when he dedicated The Fatal Shore to his nephew and godson Alexander).15 As Turnbull said during this year’s Cabinet debate on citizenship, ‘the only people who’ve lived in Australia longer than my family are Aboriginal’.16
What we know of Bruce Turnbull comes mainly from his son, but there is some prior public record. He was born in Tumut, to the west of Canberra, and grew up in Maitland in the lower Hunter Valley, where he attended St Ethel’s Public School before moving with his sister, Flora, to Cessnock High. He showed early talent on horseback, joining the Maitland Riding and Hunt Club in 1938, aged twelve, and placing second in the polo ball race.17 Horseriding would become a lifelong passion.
Bruce had a less-than-promising start to an adult career as an electrician:
When he touched a live electric wire yesterday morning, Bruce Bligh Turnbull, 21, of Church Street, West Maitland, received burns to the back of his right hand and right fingers. An electrician employed by Maitland City Council, Turnbull was working at Turton’s Brickworks … Maitland Ambulance took him to a surgery.18
He soon switched to selling real estate and wound up specialising in buying and selling pubs. He would remain a hotel broker for the rest of his life, eventually making a small fortune out of it.
With the Japanese threatening Australia, Flora joined the Women’s Army Service and was a gunner at the time of her engagement to a Maitland man in 1944.19 Bruce, however, did not fight in World War II. He was still enrolled at a Maitland address for the landmark 1949 election that ushered in the Menzies government, steering Australia decisively away from communism and towards a new era of unprecedented prosperity—and the Cold War. Friends reckoned Bruce leaned towards the conservative side of politics: certainly the new federal electorate of Maitland returned a local Liberal Party candidate in that election, war veteran Allen Fairhall, who would hold the seat for twenty years.
Bruce hauled himself off to Sydney, then a provincial outpost of not quite two million people. Having gravitated to the fashionable eastern suburbs, the handsome twenty-something was swimming in the sparkling harbour at Lady Martins Beach, at the tip of Point Piper, when he caught the eye of a young actress who lived there. Many years later Turnbull asked his mother what had drawn her to Bruce, and she told him he had ‘swum up and down outside her apartment, diving up and down, pretending to be a porpoise’.20
If Bruce Turnbull was no-one in particular in 1953, Coral Lansbury was already a budding radio star. The years 1935–55 were a golden age for radio drama, then far and away the most popular form of entertainment in Australia.21 Coral was precocious: a child actress in productions for the legendary theatrical agency J.C. Williamson, she established herself as a promising writer from an early age; her first radio script was accepted when she was just thirteen.22 A brilliant student, enrolled at North Sydney High, her mother wanted her to leave school at eleven, by which time Coral had already completed her intermediate certificate, but the education department wouldn’t allow it.23 Coral had finished her schooling by the age of fifteen, but never matriculated. At seventeen she’d written her first play—she would write eight more over the next few years.24 Coral kept performing, too, picking up roles in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever and also The Critic. As one regional paper put it in 1947, ‘the vivacious young actress … is rapidly making her name for herself in radio’.25
Enrolling in an arts degree at Sydney University in 1947, she soon met a handsome young Neville Wran, who was studying law but was also a student actor.26 Wran was a heart-throb, and his friendship with Lansbury would have a lifelong impact on her son. As an adult, Wran would often tell Turnbull he knew him en ventre sa mere—when he was in the womb.27
In 1948, the second year of her arts degree, she won the Henry Lawson poetry prize for Krubi of the Illawarra, a verse-play broadcast soon afterwards, starring herself. When Coral was twenty-one, the ABC produced her first radio serial, The Red Mountain, a children’s tale set in the Kimberley for which The Sydney Morning Herald was full of praise.28 By the early 1950s Coral was playing the lead in significant radio productions like Escape Me Never, a love story about a wealthy English girl and a struggling musician which ran for fifty-two episodes of fifteen minutes each.
Coral had showbiz in her blood. Her father, Oscar Lansbury, who was Australian-born but moved to England as a kid, was an opera singer. He and Coral’s mother, May, were both in the cast of the touring musical Showboat but were stranded in Australia during the Depression. Coral was born in Melbourne in 1929 but grew up in Neutral Bay in NSW. Oscar wound up doing background effects for ABC radio serials and helped Coral into her first radio gig. Coral’s distant cousin Angela Lansbury made it in Hollywood in the war years and would later achieve huge fame in the hit TV series Murder, She Wrote.
In 1953, aged twenty-four, Coral had married her godfather George Edwards, a friend of her father’s. Edwards was a true radio pioneer, known as the man with a thousand voices, and star of the long-running hit serial Dad and Dave from Snake Gully. Lansbury and Edwards, who was forty years older than Coral and thrice-married, co-starred in The Strange Life of Deacon Brodie, the true story of the man who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Ominously, George was struck down with pneumonia the day after their registrar office wedding and it kept him in hospital for a week. Barely six months later he died of liver disease. George was rich, though he had squandered much of his fortune on booze, horseracing and nightclubbing. He left Lansbury and his two daughters one-third each of his considerable estate, valued at £32 000.29
Coral recovered quickly and had a whirlwind romance with Bruce, whom she described as the handsomest man in Sydney: she fell pregnant within months, and Malcolm Bligh Turnbull was born early on 24 October 1954. By December Sydney’s Truth magazine was reporting the following alongside a beaming picture of Lansbury:
The youthful widow of the well-known Australian radio producer George Edwards, who died in August, 1953, has remarried. The widow, prominent ABC scriptwriter Coral Lansbury, married Bondi lifesaver and sportsman Bruce Turnbull, and now has a baby son, Malcolm. Mrs Turnbull, who is now living with her husband in a luxury house at Roseville, has been ill since the premature birth of her baby. By remarrying, Mrs Turnbull has given up the income from £9000 from her late estate, which was left to her provided she did not remarry. However, in the Equity Court in November, Mrs Turnbull, under the name of Coral Magnolia Edwards, agreed to accept £3100 in lieu of her interest in the estate.30
Official records show Bruce and Coral weren’t married until the following December, at the Campbell Street Presbyterian church in Balmain.31 Coral was an atheist, but for many years Malcolm Turnbull believed he had been baptised as a Presbyterian as an infant, in the Turnbull family tradition. In his forties, when he joined the Catholic Church, he could find no record of the ceremony.
Coral, it seems, brought most of the assets into the relationship with Bruce, although she had been forced to move out of Edwards’ flat at Longworth Avenue, Point Piper, despite the best efforts of Wran, by now a lawyer, who had pleaded her case.32 Bruce’s business struggled at first and the young family moved from one rented home to another, until they settled into a cosy two-bedroom flat in Vaucluse, part of a modest art-deco block of four at 119 New South Head Road, opposite the bowling club, with views across Sydney Harbour.
Lansbury was determined to hold onto her career. Before Malcolm was three the ABC produced her play The Bombora, set in a northern pearling port. Lansbury described the play as an Australian thriller, an alternative to the standard fare of Scotland Yard and the FBI. It was noted in an interview that while The Bombora came into being over a weekend, Coral’s next play would take a good while longer to finish as it would have to compete with her son: ‘As Coral Lansbury, author, she needs six uninterrupted hours to work; as Mrs Bruce Turnbull, wife and mother, “it’s an impossibility”.’33
The demand for writers was voracious, however, with commercial stations running radio dramas non-stop most mornings. Radio plays were no esoteric niche for high-brow tinkerers but a boom industry operating on tight margins and entertaining the masses. Long-running serials for women proliferated straight after World War II—they were known as soap operas because most of them were sponsored by soap manufacturers such as Colgate-Palmolive. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the peak of the frenzy, with six major companies recording drama programs five days a week in Sydney alone, plus three one-hour plays at the weekend.
Actors were racing helter-skelter from one studio to another. Most commercial units recorded five quarter-hour episodes in a four-hour session, morning and afternoon. Three-quarters of an hour for each episode—rehearsal, brief notes and the recording … efficiency was everything provided one had the basic talent. Writers worked long hours and at great speed. The minimum output of a scriptwriter in demand was twelve quarter-hours weekly, or its equivalent.34
The National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra has recorded Coral Lansbury’s contributions to many radio soaps throughout the mid-1950s, like the hugely successful Portia Faces Life, about a brilliant female lawyer engaged in a losing battle to refrain from a professional life in order to make a home for her husband and son; Empty Arms, about a young woman who marries a bigamist and gives up her child for adoption before trying to commit suicide; Fallen Angel, concerning a successful model whose husband dies under tragic circumstances, leaving her with a newly born child; and This Was Sylvia, in which the infinite beauty and insatiable ambition of the title character causes the ruin of three men. As the heroine of the latter says: ‘Women fall into two classes—those whom men make use of and those who make use of men. I’ve always known to which class I belonged.’35 Coral would later describe her early plays as crypto-feminist.
Several decades later, Lansbury would open up about the difficulties she faced juggling her career with early motherhood, describing her son as a somewhat trying child who loved to argue, and who would burst in from kindergarten at the nearby leafy Vaucluse Public like a ‘bundle of demonic energy’. She said: ‘There were times when I wondered if I would ever survive his childhood.’36 If Malcolm was a handful, he was more so because the young boy struggled with asthma.37 In one letter to Bruce, Coral wrote: ‘Poor little Malco, do you remember once when he was having static asthma, and I gave him the white rabbit with floppy ears, he couldn’t breathe, but he still smiled, and put out his hands for it.’38 But Lansbury would also say that her only regret in life, her greatest sorrow, was that she had only one child: ‘I should have married less and had more children, because I love children so much.’39
As radio plays began to give way to television, Coral shifted her career focus to academia—although she relapsed later to appear on the hit TV show Beauty and the Beast. She achieved terrific grades and completed her degree with double honours in English and History, but was ineligible to graduate from Sydney University because she had never matriculated. For a year she was a research assistant and embarked on a master’s thesis on the growth of Australian trade unionism, which was never finished. Politics was also in her blood: another distant relative, George Lansbury, was a socialist reformer and women’s suffrage campaigner who became leader of the British Labour Party in the early 1930s. Her politics were undoubtedly left-leaning—though she was never a member of the Labor Party. ‘Acting and politics are very close,’ she said once, ‘and we Lansburys always seem to run to the stage or Labor politics.’40
When the young Turnbull family settled into their flat in Vaucluse, Sydney’s eastern suburbs were not quite so outrageously wealthy as they had been before or have become since. By the mid-twentieth century, many of the grandest eastern suburbs estates of the previous century had been carved up, subdivided or reclaimed for public use. After Japanese submarines bombarded Sydney in 1942, many families moved inland and coastal property prices plunged. Three years later, Christina Stead’s For Love Alone described Watsons Bay, at the end of the tram line, as a haven for fishermen and late-night trysts, lovers rolling in the bushes. There was rank privilege, of course, especially in suburbs like Woollahra and Bellevue Hill, but there was diversity too, and much of the housing built in the postwar boom was decidedly ordinary. Even prestigious Point Piper had succumbed to the march of red-brick flats in the 1930s as higher-density development spread out from the inner city. European immigrants flooded in, often grabbing properties at bargain prices. Cosmopolitan Double Bay became a suave hub for Hungarian Jews, and Paddington had its share of Greeks and Italians. Bondi, served by two tram lines, was a complete melting pot—it became known as West Auckland for all the Kiwis who called it home.41
In the 1950s and 1960s, if Sydney’s east was privileged, it was still an exciting place to grow up, as Malcolm Turnbull recalled in late 2004 in his maiden speech to federal parliament, after he had finally won the local seat of Wentworth:
Like many Wentworth residents, I grew up living in flats—mostly rented—and, in the style of the times, with small rooms running off a long, dark corridor. I did not feel deprived of anything—apart, perhaps, from a dog. I was rarely inside. The best things in Wentworth—the waves at Bondi, the ducks at Centennial Park or even the brisk nor’-easter whipping down the harbour on a summer’s day—take no account of your bank balance. Most mornings my father and I went for a swim at North Bondi Surf Club. The surf club showers were no respecters of rank or privilege. Our companions included judges and garbos, teachers and policemen and businessmen of all types—from shmattas [rag traders] in Surry Hills to high finance in Martin Place. There were surgeons whose hands saved lives and there were gentlemen whose calloused hands were used, in a rather emphatic manner, to collect debts for bookies. Wentworth was multicultural before the term was invented.42
Perhaps overplaying it a little, Turnbull hoped to soften his public image as a silvertail by highlighting his humble, even rough-and-tumble, upbringing. But Turnbull had a pretty good start in life—except that his parents’ marriage became increasingly unhappy. The sporty, knockabout salesman, often out of town on pub business, and the ambitious writer, juggling a career and a kid, were a poor match. In 1963 Coral got a position as a research assistant in the UNSW School of History, where she met professor John Salmon. They started an affair; Coral left Bruce and later they were divorced. In 1966, after Salmon had taken up a professorship at Waikato University in his native New Zealand, Coral left Australia to join him, and they married. She would complete her doctorate at Auckland University in 1969 before they moved again, this time to the United States.
Turnbull has spoken often about the profound impact of his parents’ divorce—a stock feature in almost every profile. There are two recurring themes. One is for Turnbull to affectionately and gratefully acknowledge that his father protected him from much of the fallout. His other is to ponder whether his mother’s abandonment spurred him to succeed from an early age, a subconscious desire to win her back or prove she was wrong to leave him. By Turnbull’s account, the split was brutal: Coral simply upped and left the country without warning the young Malcolm, and she did not return to Australia in his childhood. She took the family furniture; she even took the cat. Turnbull told one reporter that after moving into another flat, he and Bruce had to make do without chairs, sitting on boxes until the dentist downstairs decided to redecorate and passed on his old seats.43 Without doubt, this was a rough time in Turnbull’s life. There was a rental shortage and at the end of 1964, Bruce and Malcolm moved again, this time into a red-brick block of flats called Gladswood Gardens at Double Bay. By coincidence, another ten-year-old, Deborah Snow, had just moved out of the same flat, and decades later, as a senior journalist for The Sydney Morning Herald, she described the squashy two-bedder with its tiny balcony, home to her family of five, which rented for 13 guineas a week. The building was full of pensioners and widows. While it wasn’t struggle street, it wasn’t too flash either, and when they worked out they’d lived in the same place, she and Turnbull swapped memories of ‘the lack of other children in the street … the musty gloom of the old air-raid shelter, half-hidden in riotous vegetation at the bottom of the small sandstone cliff behind the building … next to it was the harbour, though our corner of the bay was ringed by older brick blocks, not mansions’.44 There was nothing glamorous about it.
The most candid, in-depth interview Malcolm has given on the topic of his parents’ divorce was for the ABC’s Australian Story program in 2009, long after both parents had passed away and he had been able to look back over their letters and piece together what had happened when he was too young to understand.
[My father] had every reason to feel very let down by my mother because of the circumstances and the fact that when she left, you know, the little flat we were living in [in] Vaucluse was sold, and we didn’t have anywhere to live. There was a degree of financial hardship associated with all this. Bruce, nonetheless, never spoke ill of her. He always talked her up, and he … rather confused me I think about whether she was actually leaving or just going away on holiday … in his own way, [he] tried to ease me into the knowledge that she was going …
You know, I have letters of his that he wrote to her filled with reproach and bitterness. ‘How could you leave us? How could you leave your son?’ … And she kept them, which is interesting. A lot of people would have destroyed them. She kept them, and I got them when she died. But he wrote her those letters of reproach and then would put down the pen after writing that letter, sealing it up, and then he’d say to me in the next breath as it were, ‘Your mother loves you, she hasn’t really left you. No, she’s just gone to New Zealand to do some studies, she’ll be back. She’s coming back, don’t worry. Everything’s OK.’45
As the marriage broke down, Malcolm was almost the first thing to go. At the beginning of 1963, aged eight, a year before his parents were divorced, he was sent to board at Sydney Grammar’s preparatory school in St Ives, 20 kilometres north of the city. Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise, in that he was not home for the arguments. But Turnbull hated boarding school:
I was desperately lonely, I was not particularly popular, and … I didn’t want to knuckle down to the system … I would stand my ground against older boys and accordingly because they were twice my size get a belting for my pains … I would struggle to find one positive memory of my time at boarding school … really it was a bleak, bleak period for me.
I always begged my parents to take me out of boarding school when I first went there … I ran away on one occasion when I was being taken back to school and sort of jumped out of the car at the traffic lights and ran off and made my own walk home … words cannot describe how much I hated it.46
An old schoolfriend, Andrew Cohen, once recalled that on his first day of boarding at Grammar, Turnbull stood in the doorway of the classroom and declared that he could beat anyone in the class at anything. Cohen tried to put Turnbull in his place: ‘I wrestled him for hours on end. I couldn’t beat him and he wasn’t going to give up, no matter how hard I put a headlock on him.’47 The kid was not soft.
The choice of Sydney Grammar was significant, shaping Turnbull over the next ten formative years. Bruce Turnbull had high hopes for his son, wanting to give him the kind of start he had been denied. Many years later, going back over his father’s papers, Turnbull was shocked at how much of his meagre income went on school fees.
Sydney Grammar has long been the city’s most academically rigorous private school for boys. It is a formidable institution that has now produced three prime ministers—Sir Edmund Barton, Sir William McMahon and Turnbull—plus seven High Court judges and twenty-eight Rhodes scholars. Not affiliated with any church, Sydney Grammar was established in 1854 as a feeder school for the colony’s first university, the University of Sydney. Grammar’s campus is on the eastern edge of the CBD beside Hyde Park, and has been hemmed in over the years by housing and development and the red-light district of Darlinghurst. Boarders lived off the crowded main campus at an old converted Randwick estate, Rathven, and caught the bus into town. In a 2001 survey it was labelled one of Australia’s top ten schools, as ranked by the number of its old boys who were listed in Who’s Who.48 Yet in Turnbull’s early years, Grammar was in a rut under its principal, Samuel Peter Truman Houldsworth, an old-fashioned English master who had taken over in 1965. He was aloof and had a closed-door policy, as Turnbull recalled:
He was very cold and very arrogant. He just had no comprehension of how to deal with Australian boys. I remember when I was in second form, I wanted to start a History Club and I had to make an appointment two weeks in advance to see the headmaster. Well, that’s bizarre, quite bizarre—he just couldn’t have been that busy.49
Worse, according to Turnbull, was the out-of-control bastardisation, particularly at the boarding house which was full of rough country boys. It came to a head in a brutal incident in Form 1:
[T]hey had a very elaborate fagging system at the small boarding house. You cleaned all the prefects’ rooms, made their beds and performed sundry other menial tasks for them. These ‘duties’ were imposed for various crimes committed, and if they didn’t like you, you never stopped committing crimes. I, being very bumptious, told various prefects that I wasn’t going to submit to this sort of rubbish. I was then assaulted by four of these fellows who were big eighteen-year-old men. They belted me up and kicked me. It was really quite a serious bashing. I mean, if it happened to you in the street all the people involved would go to jail.50
Turnbull reported what had happened to Alastair Mackerras, then master of the lower school (forms 1 and 2), who made sure the senior prefects were punished and pulled into line. But Houldsworth was simply unable to maintain authority over the school. Boys were running amok. One day some graffiti appeared on the wall of the science building, in heavy black paint: ‘SPTH IS A CRUNT’. It was ground off the same day, security was brought in, the culprits identified, warnings given … but the very next day a new sign was painted: ‘SPTH IS STILL A CRUNT’.
What happened next was unprecedented: Mackerras confronted Houldsworth, urging him to resign, and went to the school’s board of trustees to say the principal had lost the confidence of staff and students. It was a coup, but after some weeks of turmoil, Mackerras was installed as acting headmaster.
Mackerras had deep family connections with the school and he was the first Grammar old boy to become principal. He was also openly elitist and made no apology for the fact. Over the next twenty years, he would reshape the school with a gradual but determined campaign against the philistinism and anti-intellectualism that he saw as pervasive in ‘ocker’ Australia. Providing a rigorous, liberal education would be the school’s top priority, and bit by bit the intake would become more selective. Music and art, drama and debating were all encouraged, as was a tolerant, civilised attitude among the boys. Rugby, which Mackerras thought brutalising, would no longer be compulsory. Later, nor would being a cadet. Eventually, corporal publishment would go too.
For those favoured boys at Grammar, Mackerras was an inspiration. Compassionate, engaged, stimulating, he had an amazing rapport with the students, all of whom he knew by name. The antithesis of Houldsworth, he had an open-door policy, and many boys confided in him directly.
Turnbull remembers that in around third form he and a friend went to see Mackerras ‘to complain about a creepy master at the boarding house’.51 Mackerras must have taken the boys seriously: the master subsequently left.
Mackerras was said to have ruled the school by love. It seems faintly inappropriate now, but over the summer holidays, Mackerras (and for the short time they were together, his wife) and some of the other masters would take groups of boys away to his family retreat at Kiama on the NSW south coast for beach strolls and barbecues, and later to a nearby farm inland at Berry. Some years he would take as many as eight boys a week, for six weeks straight, so that he got to know as many as possible. Turnbull was one of those, and he remembered that the trips were ‘much prized … a treat, for which parents just contributed basic food expenses’.52
In an early demonstration of his ability to find a powerful patron, Turnbull latched onto Mackerras. As he recalled later: ‘He’s a very, very charismatic fellow from the point of view of boys … he’s very affectionate, just has a way with them. He’s also firm but fair. All these things characterise him. A very lenient man but with a stern sort of attitude about him.’53
It is natural to speculate that Turnbull the boarder had found in Mackerras a substitute father figure, and it is hard not to sympathise with the young boy from a broken family, corresponding with his mum by way of a tape recorder, seeing his dad only at school holidays—and then often helping out in the hotel trade, doing stocktake in pubs and counting glasses for pocket money.54 Bruce Turnbull may have been devoted to his son, but he was hard, too. Many years later, in his cups one night, Malcolm told a colleague of the time Bruce went away for the weekend and left him locked inside their flat, alone. Other long-time friends describe Turnbull as ‘basically an orphan’.
Malcolm became a Mackerras favourite. Quoted in a seminal 1991 profile, the headmaster paid Turnbull the ultimate compliment, saying he reminded him of himself, in that he would rather shun sport and the company of his peers to discuss history, philosophy and religion (and Mackerras’s Catholicism would leave a lasting impression on Turnbull).55 In fact, he’d earlier described Turnbull as ‘born middle-aged’—something Mackerras’s own mother had said about him.56 But he also called Turnbull an unpopular loner intolerant of his immature peers, and thought he had issues with women, probably because his mother had left him: ‘I always thought when he was young he was distinctly anti-woman. He was anti his mother for one.’57 Copies of the school’s biannual Sydneian magazine show that Turnbull really hit his straps in his senior years. Reading over them, it is striking how well documented the boys’ accomplishments are—every creditable essay, dash for the tryline or performance on stage is recorded for posterity. As a result, there is a minor trove of ‘Turnbilia’ to pick over.
There is an impressive accumulation of prizes, especially for debating, at which Turnbull excelled year in, year out, including winning the interschool Lawrence Campbell Oratory Competition. Many years later, Turnbull’s old schoolfriend and fellow Grammar debater David Gonski told the bigwigs assembled at a book launch how he would always be first speaker, carefully laying the groundwork and sticking to the plan, and Turnbull would come in last and say whatever he felt like. They would always win, and always on the back of Turnbull’s contribution.58 Turnbull left some of his opponents traumatised: one woman wrote to journalist Annabel Crabb in 2009, recalling the time at the age of thirteen when she was taking part in an interschool debate at Grammar, and Turnbull rose up and declared: ‘As my opposite first speaker has obviously not reached the age of discretion I move that she be removed from this debate.’ At which a pimply boy hooked an umbrella around her neck and dragged her offstage, to loud guffaws from the audience.59 In his memoir, The Church frontman Steve Kilbey remembered representing the ACT in the national debating championships, and coming up against Turnbull, a legend in high-school debating circles, representing NSW:
He was already like some young lawyer. It was as though the ’60s had never happened for Malcolm—no long hair, no swearing and no hint of a fashionable item of clothing. He meant business. He had a sneering, arrogant, know-it-all manner that was dynamite on the debating scene. Even as he sat there watching me speak I could feel him shaking his head and writing a thousand notes to himself on how he could rip apart our case. He was the Muhammad Ali of high-school debating. The total heavyweight champ.60
NSW won, of course. Kilbey put Turnbull up at his Canberra home, and next morning found him talking to his mother in the kitchen: ‘They discussed the politics of the day, and of course Malcolm was a know-it-all and a mum-charmer at the same time. When he’d gone my mother declared that one day he’d be the prime minister of Australia.’
For all his brains, Turnbull was not a bookworm. He loved the naval cadets, and rose to be a leading seaman. Grammar’s cadets took to the harbour in old 8-metre Montague whalers, camping out for days at a time at Snapper Island. His fondness for sailing can be seen later in Turnbull’s life, when he writes of jumping into the family’s old Couta boat to watch a whale frolicking in Sydney Harbour.61 One former master, Adrian Cooper, who taught Turnbull maths and lived with him at the boarding house at Randwick, ran an outdoors club that Turnbull joined, going on bushwalks and cross-country skiing. He recalls:
We were in a hut in the Snowy Mountains in Koscziusko National Park, and Malcolm preferred to stay in a tent just outside the hut. There were meals inside, of course, but for the sleeping he preferred to stay outside. One morning we found he’d had a nightmare in that tent and he couldn’t find the exit, and he ripped through the side, which was a bit of an embarrassment. Poor guy!62
Turnbull also played in the lower Rugby divisions—never officially part of the First XV, according to the records, but occasionally coming off the bench for the second team. His former coach Laurie Fahy rejects the myth that Turnbull did not like sport: he remembers him playing at breakaway or flanker, enthusiastically and hard, both at school and later at university. There were few scraps, although Fahy remembers the time Turnbull came steaming off the field to protest: ‘Laurie, Andy Tyler just belted me in the scrum!’ Fahy asked whether Turnbull had been ‘boring in’—a dangerous grapple. A sheepish Turnbull had to admit, ‘yes’, and walked off.63
Turnbull was not very popular, but he was not a complete loner either, and some friendships stuck into adulthood. There was Cohen, and Ted Marr, especially close, who would both study law at Sydney University with Turnbull—and Marr would join him at Oxford.
Most interesting of all are Turnbull’s early writings and performances on stage. In 1968, the thirteen-year-old was moved to write a letter to the editor, one of only a handful published in the Sydneian:
Sir,
I have been concerned in recent months at the general feeling that ‘football is all that matters and when it’s over rowing is next best’. Perhaps this cannot be blamed entirely on the boys, for the real root of this problem lies in the depths of time. Colours, blazers and other gaudy paraphernalia are awarded to the muscle-bound types who can play in the First XV, row in the VIII, or do other such duties, but what glory is showered upon the debaters and chess players and other such bastions of true culture? There may be hundreds of supporters at a football match but the First Debating Team is lucky to get over ten! Surely the awarding of colours for debating and similar activities would reveal a gleam of patronage and support and respect for these people.
Yours, etc.
M. B. Turnbull—Form 264
That year, the self-appointed bastion of culture also had two stories published: one a sympathetic sketch of a Jewish pawnbroker, bereft at the death of his wife and sons in World War II; the other an overly clever Sherlock Holmes episode, ‘The Fiery Furnace’. Turnbull picked up awards for poetry recitation, prose reading and unprepared oratory, plus recognition for his debating. The following year, Turnbull was the lone Grammar boarder to make the cast of school theatre group The Globe Players’ King Lear production. A pompous reviewer—another schoolboy—observed wearily ‘that the quality of performance was uneven cannot be denied, but so is the quality of the play itself uneven’. He applied the faint praise liberally:
Malcolm Turnbull had the unenviable task of sustaining the most difficult role of Edgar. In this part, the Scylla and Charybdis of dullness and melodrama have to be avoided with the greatest care; it is only in the concluding scenes that the part is reasonably plain sailing and in these scenes Turnbull was at his best, by far: for here he was more relaxed and natural. He did not wholly avoid, however, the danger of overdoing the melodrama in the early scenes in which he appeared. In the ‘Poor Tom’ episode … Turnbull was extremely vigorous in his representation of the naked madman; his crouchings and wild outbursts were, on the whole, well done and the danger of being comical was, for the most part, avoided.65
Young Turnbull’s acting would improve, as he had a powerful incentive: girls. The magazine records that boarders were infiltrating The Globe Players, ‘notably since productions have been in conjunction with Girls’ Schools’.66 Sure enough, Turnbull played a ‘very convincing’ Iago in Othello the following year, and a shot of the assembled cast in costume shows the very attractive Abbotsleigh girls up front, with the boys behind them. A serious-looking Turnbull, dark and handsome but shorter than the senior boys who dominated the cast, peeps out from the back row.
In Othello, there were already signs of the devastating advocate Turnbull would become:
With a voice of rich quality, M. B. Turnbull spoke the poetry with clarity, although his soliloquies needed to be less mellifluous and more varied. In voice and commanding presence, he showed he possesses the resources to have given a believable performance as Iago, had he acted with less artifice and more spontaneity. On the one occasion when he dropped to a quieter, more natural tone … he showed how genuinely chilling his performance might have been.67
Turnbull’s career as an actor would culminate in a triumphant final-year performance as Prospero, protagonist of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. Turnbull read himself deeply into the part and his performance reportedly showed ‘the wisdom of years’.68
Given Turnbull would later become an ardent republican, it is curious to read among the School House notes a tongue-in-cheek report of a teenage attempt to stir up British patriotism:
The Sydneian Award for the best might-have-been of 1970 goes to Malcolm Turnbull for his abortive attempt to revive the true spirit of Empire … [H]is planned Association for Empire Loyalists … had a simple programme which one would have thought would have appealed to all loyal members of the School—namely the recovery of India for the Crown—but so far has the sun of Empire set that the Association never even got off the ground.69
By now in Form 4, Turnbull was firing. It did not stop him writing in to The Sydney Morning Herald’s letters editor, complaining about multiple-choice exams, particularly in humanities, which discouraged imagination and forced examinees to conform to the opinions of the examiners:
SIR—In this computer age one becomes accustomed to seeing traditional standards fall away before the sacred cows of progress, efficiency and speed … Much as I recognise the need for speedy marking of examinations, I fail to see why students should be deprived of the right to justfy their opinions for the sake of speed and economy. I would rather see exam results a month late than have a student’s right to disagree without penalty lost.
Malcolm Turnbull
Point Piper.70
It was his first byline. Turnbull won the history prize that year. He may have been inspired by a visit from former NSW Labor premier Jack Lang, who addressed Turnbull’s history class on the problems of the Depression. Turnbull harboured a deep admiration for the divisive warhorse, and the visit may have spurred his interest in politics. Alongside a surprisingly powerful poem, the fifteen-yearold’s contributions to the Sydneian that year give us a window into his political awakening, and reveal an innate reformer. A two-page essay titled ‘Old Men at Twenty-one’ lamented how long it had been since Labor had been in government:
The long term of the Liberals has resulted in their becoming part of the establishment, and this has attracted to their ranks men averse to change of any sort—men whose interests lie solely in the system as it is, hardly the material needed for a progressive government, which is what Australia, a progressive nation, needs above all else.71
Giving an example of the Liberals’ policy torpor, Turnbull almost channelled Lang, making a nationalist argument that while low taxes and tariffs had been necessary to encourage foreign investment twenty years ago, ‘today it results in almost all of our minerals being owned and exploited by overseas investors’. Pointing approvingly to Venezuela, which had ensured oil deposits would be given back to the people after forty years, Turnbull concluded: ‘Twenty years have seen many changes in Australia and the world but few in the Liberal Party.’72 Whatever he would become later, Turnbull was said to be a staunch lefty at high school.73
In Form 5, sixteen-year-old Turnbull was made one of the school’s many sub-prefects and also joined the editorial committee of The Sydneian, headed that year by Gonski. The group of boys promptly put the prefect system itself under the microscope, devoting twelve pages to the topic ‘Order of the Garter or Glorified Janitor?’ A key issue was whether the head prefect should be elected by the boys, or at least chosen from a shortlist after consultation. There was a frank interview with Mackerras, who tried to dampen any expectations of a democracy when asked how he chose prefects:
It’s a rather good thing to have a reformed stirrer among the prefects. He can get around in the underworld and report what’s going on. I don’t want you to think I use the prefects as a sort of spy system. Of course, it’s true that they do report boys who do stupid things.74
Mackerras duly chose Malcolm Turnbull as the head prefect in 1972, his final year at Sydney Grammar, and also made him joint school captain. One former teacher recalls that, before the appointment, a deputation of older 1971-leavers went to see Mackerras to plead ‘anyone but Turnbull’—he was too domineering. The job certainly seems to have brought out the worst in Turnbull. The bullied became the bully. Midnight Oil drummer Rob Hirst, a year below Turnbull at Grammar, later wrote about Turnbull’s time as head prefect. He described a menacing presence at the lectern, haranguing the boys at school assembly:
The figure booms. The figure thunders. The figure is as deadpan as an Easter Island statue … Who’s not been wearing their (ridiculous Fabulon-soaked and flat-ironed) hat in public? Who’s been leaping (heroically) from the ferry to the wharf before she’s properly docked? Who’s responsible for the latest obscene graffiti, carved like scrimshaw into the heavy oak benches of the Old Music Room? And who were those clowns who yelled out ‘Sieg Heil’ during last week’s assembly?75
The clown was Tim Barrett, later a respected Sydney barrister, who was duly severely chastised by Mackerras.76 Another contemporary at Grammar, journalist David Leser, told Hirst: ‘If defining yourself as a teenager was all about working out where you stood in relation to authority, Malcolm Turnbull stood firmly and squarely in the camp of the enemy.’ But Turnbull had the ear and affection of the ‘delightful’ Mackerras and strode the musty corridors of Grammar as if it were his own personal fiefdom. Hirst writes that Turnbull managed to alienate almost everyone around him, students and teachers alike. A fighter and a winner, he nevertheless had a dearth of people skills: a ‘plummy brew of eloquence, imperiousness and un-humble pie, plus a kind of sighing, saturnine resignation that his job necessarily involves being constantly surrounded by cretins’.77
Turnbull’s own final missive as head prefect, at the end of 1972, seems to bear some of this out, evincing frustration at the weary task of telling boys to pick up their rubbish or get their hair cut, and pleading for more cooperation and evolution, not revolution, given ‘nothing radical will ever happen at College Street’.
As one who has done his share of ‘system-bucking’, and then become part of that system, I can confidently say that much of the conservatism of the ‘establishment’ is the direct result of non-cooperation on the part of the boys … I am arguing a somewhat Fabian line when I say that the best way to change things is not through confronting the system head on—because in a confrontation it must win—but by working with and within the system to promote change.78
Along the way, Turnbull’s marks got better and better. At one point, the boy who used to send his reports to his mother was terribly worried because he was only ranking towards the middle of the top class.79 By the time he finished his Higher School Certificate, Turnbull had achieved top grades in English, ancient and modern history, and economics, and he easily gained a Commonwealth scholarship to Sydney University. On the day he was due to receive his final results, he borrowed Bruce’s car to drive down to Edgecliff Post Office, but it skidded off the road and into a fence. He left it there and hitched a lift to get the results, and only then rang his dad: ‘[I] said I’ve got good news and bad news. He said “OK, being an optimist, what’s the good news?” … Well, I’ve done really well in the HSC … “What’s the bad news?” … Well, I’ve pranged your car.’80
Turnbull was not dux, as some journalists (and Hirst) have reported. That honour went to James Colebatch, a good mate of his at school and later head of neurology at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital and a professor at the University of NSW. Colebatch said the error had first appeared in The Bulletin and was repeated by news media across the country.81
However much Turnbull hated his early years at boarding school, he retained a deep affection for Sydney Grammar, telling the author of a 1986 book about the Mackerras family that he was ‘very grateful to the school and very positive about it, so of course, I hope to send my son there’.82 Which he did. Turnbull remains a supporter of the school, and in 1987 he established the means-tested Bruce Turnbull Scholarship for boys who cannot afford the fees of more than $30 000 a year.
In almost every picture from his school years, Turnbull looks incredibly serious, often with a heavy scowl. Malcolm came out of Grammar a winner, with a powerful ambition and also a gathering awareness of the winds of change blowing through politics. An ofttold story from circa 1970 leaves a lasting impression. Bob Carr, future Labor premier of NSW and foreign minister, but then a young reporter for ABC Radio, was covering an anti–Vietnam War rally down at The Domain one Saturday morning. As the usual speakers like Tom Uren revved up the crowd from the stage, a somewhat bored Carr noticed a figure
up on the platform with the speakers, just standing there hanging onto one of the scaffolds, as if he was part of the proceedings, a brown-haired schoolboy. He stuck in my mind because he looked remarkably like a good friend and colleague of mine at the ABC, Paul Murphy. Think of a young Paul Murphy with a sort of Beatles mop of brown hair, with a big head … The other peculiar thing was, he had no part in the proceedings. He hadn’t been called up to speak on behalf of school youth. He was just someone who turned up and got it into his head that if he was going to be there, he would stand on the scaffold stage! Just hang there looking over the crowd—he wasn’t going to be part of the crowd.83
A few years later Carr would meet that schoolboy—Malcolm Turnbull.