Intense satisfaction came to me from a book I did not actually write. I was enticed to be its editor by Dudley Phillips, who ran the Australian end of the old British firm known as Sir Isaac Pitman & Son. An erudite bookman, a lover of fine music and expensive wine, his specialities were books on typing, shorthand and commerce. Therefore he was just about the last person to be given the option of publishing a worthwhile manuscript on Australian outback history.
One day in the mail he received a tattered manuscript that, at first glance, impressed him. It was an eyewitness story of the era when camels were the main carriers in much of the outback. As the manuscript was interleaved with brown stains from crushed shreds of tobacco, he guessed that it had been floating around to a succession of publishers and been read and rejected, read and rejected.
Phillips enquired if I would give a quick opinion. After a quarter of an hour I knew that the manuscript had a simple, earthy appeal but would need rearranging, culling and fine-tuning. He passed on my opinion to the author. A week later a dishevelled, one-armed man knocked at my door at the university, and stared at me after I opened the door. He did not say who he was but I guessed. The lower part of his face gave the impression that it had been chewed by an animal at a distant time. Whereas some people are embarrassed by a long silence during a conversation he seemed to feel relaxed when silence reigned. I came to know him well – he often called at lunchtime – but I did not think of calling him by his first name.
‘Mr Barker’ had taken up dry country in north-western Australia sometime before the First World War. His sheep run was far inland, close to places where many Aborigines had not yet seen a white person. Realising that camels were the most efficient method of transport in that dry country he became skilled in harnessing them, eventually training a team of fourteen or eighteen to pull his long four-wheeled wagon. As well as carting supplies to his sheep station, his camel team became a general carrier, hauling minerals, wool and settlers’ supplies. When in the 1920s the new motor lorries superseded the camel teamsters, Barker moved on to mining and other activities. In his seventies, retired, he began to write down his experiences. It was the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war seemed possible, and he was spurred to write in detail about camels and how to handle them, for he thought that soon the Western world might be in chaos. Deprived of petrol and motor vehicles, it would be forced to rely again on camels, bullocks and horses.
A charm of his frayed manuscript was the skilled way he captured a fleeting moment. He described his remarkable friend ‘Dobson of Australia’ who occasionally shaved off his beard by lighting it with a smouldering stick. Recounting incidents that had sent Aborigines into fits of laughter, he observed in passing that they ‘laugh far more than white people’. He indelibly captured that day in 1922 when he halted his camel team on the road to Marble Bar so that he could witness an eclipse of the sun – a much-awaited eclipse which, when measured and analysed, was to validate one of Einstein’s theories. The silence fascinated the watchful Barker: ‘A solitary butcher bird in a solitary tree on the side of a rocky hill made the only noise during the eclipse, which lasted about twenty minutes. The bird began its usual evening song but soon realized something was wrong and stopped.’
The task of repairing Barker’s manuscript was longer than expected. I spent at least two dozen evenings in clarifying and rearranging the story and retyping those parts that were barely legible. Sometimes Barker would phone me. I knew he was the caller because he usually rang from a public phone box and, as his only hand was needed to push the pennies down the slot, he had to let the phone dangle by the cord. I could hear it banging against the wall of the phone box before his voice suddenly emerged.
Barker’s book displayed such powers of evoking an era that even I, as a helper, felt pride in its completion. Arthur Black, the main editor at Pitman, did the final polishing of the prose, and I wrote a brief foreword of two pages. Called Camels and the Outback, the book was printed in Edinburgh, and the ensuing delay vexed Barker. Periodically my phone would ring, and finally I would hear the slightly sad voice enquiring whether the ship bringing the books from Edinburgh had arrived. Then one morning in October 1964, I received an invitation to call at Pitman’s office. The cargo of 4000 books had just arrived. Barker too had heard the news, and was sitting on the doorstep before the office opened. I found him rolling a cigarette with the aid of the wicker frame he had invented: thereby the tricky task of shaping and rolling the tobacco could be performed with his only hand.
When the first copy of the book was presented to him, his face conveyed a feeling of quiet pride. For at least a minute he gazed at the dust jacket with its line of pack-camels standing on a soft green background. He must have been delighted to see his own name, H. M. Barker, printed in large white capital letters. It was by then uncommon for a book to be published in the old-fashioned way, with the author’s initials rather than Christian name on display.
After returning in old age to his native New Zealand he used to send me long letters observing that the winter, even when he had a warm fire to sit beside, felt harsh for a man who had lived so long in the hot outback. In August 1970 he wrote, ‘My 2 oldest friends in W.A. died this year and none are left. Much the same here and the younger generation don’t care a damn.’
Some years after his death, a letter arrived from a nun living in the West Australian pearling port of Broome. Having just read Barker’s book, she explained that he, when living on his isolated sheep station, had fathered a part-Aboriginal son named Adam. The news was a surprise to me, for Barker had said nothing about a family and gave the impression that he was a lifelong bachelor. The nun noted that Adam had turned out to be a good man and now wished to know when his father died and where he was buried. Fortunately in red ink I had recorded, in my copy of Barker’s book, the simple timeline:
Herbert McPherson Barker died at Christchurch, NZ, on 28th March 1973.
In his 86th year.
W. S. Robinson was as immaculate as H. M. Barker was bedraggled. Robinson, usually known as W.S., was a kind of ‘jetsetter’ in the leisurely era when a passenger liner, plying between Liverpool and New York or between the Thames and Australia, was the fastest means of crossing the seas. At the captain’s table or wherever he held court, a telegram – when a ship’s telegram was blinkingly expensive – would occasionally be handed to him by a waiter bearing a silver tray. Robinson was rumoured to have been extremely influential not only in big business but also in international politics; probably he would now be called a ‘fixer’ as well as a middleman and unseen negotiator. I did not fully believe the folklore about the magnitude of his influence until, after his death, I was invited to meet several of his international colleagues and friends.
Few Australians were more influential on the world platform, and yet he was unknown to most newspaper readers in his native land. With his tall figure, his alert face, a full head of white hair which he combed carefully, tailored suits and a grey felt hat tilted at just the right angle, he looked persuasive. Increasingly deaf, he kept in touch partly through a stream of fluent letters sent to people in high places.
Robinson had worked away at his memoirs in spare moments but gave no priority to them. Suddenly it was too late: he died on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland in 1963, when he was aged eighty-six. He had already told a friend or two that he had almost completed his memoirs, and I was brought in primarily to enable him, after death, to keep his word. The trustees of his estate were Sir Maurice Mawby, who was the head of the mining house Conzinc Riotinto, and Sir Eugene Gorman, a legendary barrister. Their wish was for me to write a biography of Robinson, making full use of his unfinished memoirs and his files of letters. They thought that an outside writer would at last make him known to a wider audience.
By chance I had met Robinson at the company’s head office in Collins Street not long before his death. Of course I was impressed – by his stature and intelligence, and the reverential way in which bystanders treated him. He said he had read some of my books; and much later, in one of his letters, I came across a sentence according me, as a historian, about 75 per cent of approval on his scale of values.
It might have been easier – or so I realised later – for me to write his biography than to edit and complete the story already written in his own words. And yet a story in the first person, told in his fluent prose, would be the more arresting. Moreover it was my view that, for Robinson’s own sake, face had to be saved: to friends he had said so often that his memoirs were far advanced. I told Mawby that my preference was to fill gaps in Robinson’s memoirs, and if at all possible to write nothing that he himself would not have written. His widow Gertrude, an Englishwoman of astuteness and charm, agreed.
I was shown folders in which were stacked maybe 300 sheets of paper, neatly typed by his secretary Kath Scanlan. In odd hours he had written down or dictated events and episodes as he recalled them: the story of a crucial business deal, the account of a Burmese mining venture, a pen portrait – ever so brief – of an English politician close to him, and a sentence or two about remarkable deals he had done in wartime America. The written episodes seemed random. On several phases of his life he was silent. Occasionally without realising it he had described the same adventure twice, though not in the same words. It was, when he died, a work in progress.
Born in Melbourne in 1876, the nephew of Edmund Barton who was Australia’s first prime minister, W. S. Robinson was an orchardist in the Goulburn Valley, a financial journalist on The Age when it reached far more homes than any other Australian paper, and a stockbroker specialising in mining which was the bread and meat of the stock exchanges at that time. When still young he branched into mining itself. Becoming managing director of the world’s biggest lead smelter, of the most promising mine at Broken Hill and of a famous mine in Burma – the same one in which his colleague Herbert Hoover made most of his fortune – Robinson was a somebody in the world’s commodity markets.
Using his recollections and extracts from his letters, I wrote bridging paragraphs from a variety of sources. As I observed in the completed book, I tried ‘as best I could, to conform to his distinctive literary style’. I knew that I was making some headway when I showed to Barton Maughan – one of Robinson’s Broken Hill friends and also an official war historian – a draft chapter written by me and another written by Robinson. I did not tell Maughan which one was mine. He decided, though he was not entirely sure, that my chapter must have been written by Robinson.
I was halfway through the editing when Maurie Mawby suggested to me, out of the blue, that I should go overseas and meet Robinson’s surviving friends. My reaction was cautious. Since the book had to focus on Robinson’s view of the world rather than on the world’s view of Robinson, it might not gain enough from the overseas trip to justify the expense. I explained my reluctance to Mawby but he thought that I should travel. ‘Ask your wife,’ Mawby said. ‘See what she thinks.’ If we decided to go, he assured me that the company would cover all our expenses for six or eight weeks. That night, I arrived home and put the suggestion to Ann. She said yes, instantly and enthusiastically. That first overseas trip, followed soon by others, was to widen my interests far more than I imagined.
We set out two days after Christmas 1964. Contrary to my expectations, even the first day of the journey in this period of slower travel was exciting. Boarding a plane at Essendon early in the morning and changing planes in Sydney, we flew by BOAC to Darwin where we landed after 4 p.m. The first foreign airport we approached was Singapore, and we peered down at a fleet of cargo ships at anchor in the open roadstead, their lights beginning to burn brightly and their reflections wavering in the dark and placid sea. We then crossed to Calcutta, where an aircraft engine was repaired in the darkness, and so to Karachi and Beirut and to Rome where the rain was driving down. With so many stops it was easy to see why it was called the kangaroo route. In the last stages of the journey we were lucky enough to view the snow on Mount Parnassus in Greece and the white cliffs of Dover.
London, though foggy and dank, still conveyed – without any swagger – the feeling that it was virtually the centre of the world. Perhaps half of the old empire was intact, though each year a few more colonies dropped like fruit from a tree. We walked the streets at every opportunity, revelling in the blue plaques fastened to the walls of the houses where Dickens and Thackeray, the Pitts and Churchill, and a host of the mighty had once lived. I carried a list of people to interview but the schedule was easy, leaving most of the day free for the discovering of more blue plaques, Wren churches and leafless parks – by now the winter was intensely cold but exhilarating.
W. S. Robinson had drawn his English friends from several networks, one of which centred on Brendan Bracken. A leading politician, he had risen far. Spending part of his childhood in Victoria where he studied at a country-town convent, Bracken travelled as a late teenager to England on his own, with enough money to pay his fees for a short period at the fine Yorkshire school Sedbergh. Skilled at the spoken and written word, he was adept at making both enemies and friends. In the 1930s he became such a close supporter and associate of Winston Churchill that it was rumoured, wrongly, that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son. When Churchill became prime minister in the perilous days of the war, Bracken rose with him, becoming minister for information, and a very competent and at first gloomy one: he thought that the war would be the end of London as an influential city. Surrounding himself with mystery – at the end of his life he ordered that his correspondence be destroyed – he reaped rewards that mystery sometimes bestows.
Bracken had died about seven years earlier but a few of his friends were still in high places, and I met them. They adored him and his sense of fun, and they also felt admiration for Robinson, cloaking him also with an air of mystery. It was justified because Robinson did not take much part in public life, was not a Briton, and operated from a hidden power base in international base metals.
In London I discovered that Robinson’s opinions had been prized by Churchill. Calling on Lord Chandos, I heard that he himself became a member of the British War Cabinet in 1943 after Robinson privately suggested his name to Churchill. I was shown, in case I might be sceptical, some of the handwritten correspondence that preceded this appointment. At that time Chandos, or Oliver Lyttelton as he then was, did not even hold a seat in the House of Commons. Among others with whom I shared long conversations were Lord Drogheda, the head of the Financial Times, which had been Bracken’s fiefdom; Peter Quennell the charming biographer and poet who was married five times; and Lord Shackleton who was the son of the Antarctic explorer.
On our first Sunday in England we took the train to the seaside resort of Margate. Ann was advanced in the writing of a book on Richard Hengist Horne, the English poet and bohemian who discovered Elizabeth Barrett Browning and then migrated to gold-rush Melbourne – the most noted literary figure to come to Australia so far. Returning to England, Horne died in 1884 at Margate. On the morning we arrived it was hemmed in by dim daylight and a grey running sea: a sight unfamiliar to us for we associated the sea more with the shimmer of bright sunlight. Going by taxi to the cemetery we found Horne’s grave. On the return journey to London we went in a double-decker bus through the farmlands to Canterbury, just in time to inspect the cathedral in the fading light. That day, England seemed very small.
One misty day we went by train to Oxford to meet the venerable financier ‘Foxy’ Falk, who had been a sparring partner and friend of Robinson. O. T. Falk, now in his mid-eighties, was a cousin of Professor Arnold Toynbee, then one of the most quoted of living historians. He confided to us that Toynbee was ‘a dull dog’ whose books should have been more attuned to economic factors.
Falk’s life was linked with that of John Maynard Keynes who, though dead, was at the height of his fame, his economic theories having dominated the Western world since about 1950. Falk and Keynes had both been in the British delegation to the Paris peace talks in 1919, which inspired Keynes to write his celebrated The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book of warnings. Falk, as a sharebroker and commentator and company director, had introduced Keynes, a Cambridge academic, to the intricacies of business, without which Keynes might not have been able to make his influential diagnoses of capitalism. Under Falk’s tutelage Keynes learnt what it was like to speculate and finally lose what, for him, was a huge sum. Falk it was who personally introduced Keynes to the wonders of the Russian ballet, just when it had captivated London on the eve of the First World War. Keynes knew nothing about ballet but on the first night he confidently said of the famous Lydia Lopokova, ‘What a rotten dancer. Her bottom is too stiff.’ Falk introduced Keynes to this elegant dancer with the stiff bottom, and eventually the economist married the dancer, and they lived more or less happily.
In Oxford in his old age, Falk often sat alone at the back of a small, closed antique shop at 36 the High Street, and there we talked. Confiding that he was sensitive to the atmosphere of people and places, he told us with a mystical softening of his voice that the poet Dante had lived for a time in that low-ceilinged room with the broad wooden beams. On this afternoon the room, though a coal fire was burning, seemed so icy that Dante, if he had really spent a winter there, must have longed for sunny Italy.
Soon ‘Foxy’ Falk took much more interest in Ann than in me, and his talk catered for her interests. He told her about his dinners or private conversations with H. G. Wells, T. E. Lawrence, Augustus John the painter, Winston Churchill and Arthur Balfour the philosopher who became prime minister, ‘a great man’. Falk recalled how he first saw the Russian ballerina Pavlova, whose dancing in London excited him, night after night. The notebook I kept paraphrased Falk’s memory of the exciting occasion:
He went one night to the stage door – 10 or 11 men, her admirers, there. She appeared with her bouquets of peonies. ‘I see you like my dancing,’ she said. She gave him half the bouquet, highly scented. She told him to call on her at her hotel.
Falk reminisced about the politicians with whom he sat at the peace conference in Paris in 1919, observing the cleverness of Lloyd George of England (‘an unscrupulous rogue’) and the brilliance of Clemenceau of France. He recalled how they began to dominate the learned United States’ president Woodrow Wilson who had argued that Germany should be accorded a less humiliating peace treaty: ‘They left him for dead.’ A historian likes nothing better than listening to people who were actually there, even if they were minor actors and observers.
One evening we went to a two-storey fish and oyster restaurant near St James’s Square, and in its cramped upstairs room we recognised one of two men dining together: he was the stylish actor George Sanders, near the height of his fame. In a loud but not ostentatious voice he was talking to his friend about Profumo the defence minister and Christine Keeler the glamorous one, who, sleeping together, had recently caused a political sensation. For an outsider to overhear such gossip was like standing unnoticed at the centre of the universe. At the airport later, we stood close to Malcolm Muggeridge, the writer and broadcaster, surrounded by cameramen. In the grand scheme of things such glimpses are trifles, but to a traveller they supply surprise and pleasure.
Other meetings with Robinson’s old friends had been arranged in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cannes. We travelled by train, stirred by the countryside, bleak as it was, and all its historical echoes. After a couple of days in Paris and Versailles we flew back to London from which we set out in a Pan Am aircraft to New York. There, staying in a hotel in 44th Street East, we marvelled at the views of the skyscrapers. On our only free Saturday we went in a fast Greyhound bus to Washington, stood by President Kennedy’s new grave in the Arlington National Cemetery, were ushered into the tiny theatre where President Lincoln had been assassinated, and travelled in the bus back to New York, all in one dimly lit day. The human energy, whether the hustling pace of people on the pavements or the conversation of students sitting in the bus, seized us. It was not clear whether all those rushing young Americans knew where they were going but they would certainly arrive there first.
After Ann flew home – our daughter Anna was about to begin her first day at school – I interviewed other friends of Robinson. After brief trips to Montreal and to Corpus Christi in Texas, I flew west to Tucson and finally to San Francisco and Los Angeles. In South Carolina I spent a day and evening with Bernard M. Baruch. Perhaps I was the last outsider to have long conversations with him.
Of few Americans was the honoured phrase ‘elder statesman’ so often used, but a few critics less kindly remarked that Baruch sometimes was photographed sitting on a public bench outside the White House, waiting either to be photographed by the press or summoned by the president. An organising genius, he had been in charge of mobilising the United States’ industrial effort during the First World War, prominent in Woodrow Wilson’s delegation at the peace conference in 1919, and a shaper of the United Nations’ policy on atomic energy after the Second World War.
A New Yorker, Baruch was spending the winter months on his estate in South Carolina, which could be reached by a train from Charleston. Sitting up in an iron bedstead, his back propped against a pile of white pillows, he greeted me with slight puzzlement at first, but soon he treated me almost as a friend, for he desired companionship. Tall for a man of his years – he was ninety-four – his feet nearly protruded from the bed. A rifle was standing upright at the head of the bed, and he intimated – or perhaps I misunderstood him – that it could be useful if there were intruders.
Baruch said that he would soon take a swim or do exercises in his indoor pool where his housekeeper Elizabeth Navarro kept an eye on him. I was about to leave his room when he pointed to several rather garish paintings on the walls. They had been painted, he said, by his friend Winston Churchill whose funeral in England had been only nine days previously. Baruch had watched it on television but, feeling too moved, asked for the set to be turned off. Later I learnt that President Roosevelt had stayed here with Baruch for a wartime month in 1944, trying to recuperate his strength, because negotiations with Stalin were at a difficult point.
That evening, refreshed by sleep, Baruch turned up for cocktails and dinner in a smart blue suit, and after dinner he put a red shawl over his shoulders and another over his legs – he feared cold draughts though the big house was warm. He no longer drank alcohol but was drinking a little that night: a big occasion, for Elizabeth confided that his visitors were few. He spoke generously of many people – W. S. Robinson ‘had elements of real greatness’ – but said with feeling in his voice that John Maynard Keynes was ‘dishonest’ and that General de Gaulle, France’s leader, was ‘not a man of his word’. Though he had not visited Australia he spoke highly of us as a wartime ally and questioned me about Ann and Anna and Canberra’s foreign policy too. So relaxed was he, as the evening raced onwards, that I asked him about the long-term future. He quickly replied that Japan and China (he mentioned them in that order) would be troublemakers and perhaps allies. Russia, then the feared enemy, was less to be feared than a united and reinvigorated Germany.
When I used the fashionable term ‘the Cold War’ he intervened, not in a boastful way, to explain that he had been the first to speak in public that memorable phrase. Surprised, I looked to Harold Epstein for confirmation, and he nodded. An author, Epstein had written the first draft of Baruch’s autobiography – much altered by the man himself – and had flown from New York to join us.
I left to catch the late-night train to Charleston with a sense of elation. Next morning I recorded in a small notebook much of what Baruch had said. He died that year and I was half tempted to write an obituary but decided that our meeting had been private, and memorable for that reason.
A week later the approaching era of space travel was displayed at the Douglas Aircraft Corporation in California. At lunch I sat between Donald Douglas senior and junior, father and son, at a table for eleven, a coloured globe of the world standing as a decoration in the centre. It was the day before the launching at Cape Kennedy of a major venture, and only a month or so before Alexey Leonov the Soviet cosmonaut emerged from his spacecraft and spent twenty minutes floating in space. After the Douglases spoke of space experiments – careful no doubt with their words – they asked me about old-time Australia. As they imagined that it resembled their own country in the frontier era, now vanished, I told them about my friend Campbell Miles, the discoverer of the minerals at Mount Isa, and his simple travels with packhorses and his love for boiled lollies. Laughing at my accent, Donald Douglas junior began to tease me. He had once been taken by Reg Ansett, the airline owner, to Hay in New South Wales for the duck shooting, and was amused that a town called Hay, so simple to pronounce, was called by most Australians as if it rhymed with ‘high’ rather than ‘hay’. Donald Douglas Sr and his wife were not sure whether they could explain why W. S. Robinson had such influence but they singled out one quality: he had thought globally, at a time when a global viewpoint was rare.
Of the memoirs so far written by an Australian businessman, Robinson’s probably reached the most readers. His life was laced with quiet excitement and achievement, and he had rubbed shoulders with or guided the great. In this digital era Bill Gates of Microsoft was to read the book with gain and give it to a friend.
Some readers felt peeved that they were not mentioned in Robinson’s book or, worse, were mentioned too often. Sir Lindesay Clark was not pleased when he read a few pages describing his role in the creation in the early 1930s of Western Mining Corporation. Robinson had given to his unfinished book the title If I Remember Rightly. Lindesay’s private reply was ‘No, you don’t.’ I learnt later that he did not quite see eye to eye with Robinson. Nonetheless Robinson knew enough about the fallibility of human memory to give his book a title that hinted at that frailty.
To be a historian is hazardous. When editing the memoirs of Robinson, I included as part of Chapter 3 a fascinating little essay that he had received privately from his friend Dr Hedley Marston, an Australian scientist of high repute and indeed a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the essay Marston to his credit set out what no mining historian – me included – had previously known: that Charles Rasp in an earlier life had enjoyed a professional career in Hamburg that indirectly helped him to discover the silver-lead at Broken Hill. Marston knew much about the life of Rasp and his wife Agnes, but some parts of their life stories he seems to have made up.
Years later, R. Maja Sainisch, using the skills of a first-class detective and her knowledge of Germany and its language, began to piece together the real story. She found that Rasp had a strong desire to conceal his past. Serving as an officer in the Saxon army, at the height of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he fled to Australia where he adopted the name of Rasp and shrewdly concealed his past. It is hoped that the long-awaited book about the real Rasps will soon appear.
My involvement in Robinson’s memoirs was a result of Maurie Mawby’s interest in history. In fact he was interested in almost everything: he was a one-and-only. His mind was quick, his speech rapid, and he rained knowledge on his hearers. Coming from a humble, Cornish-flavoured background in Broken Hill, Mawby had studied mostly at night school until he became just about the most widely qualified man in the mining industry. He also knew much about native plants, not surprising because Broken Hill was the first stronghold of the ‘green’ movement in modern Australia; and the company for which he worked for most of his life, the Zinc Corporation, actually tackled the sand-besieged area around the mines in the late 1930s. The original vegetation – removed by axemen, droughts, wind erosion and a plague of rabbits – was restored in Robinson’s era by the systematic planting of native trees and shrubs. One of the most effective environmental crusades, it was conducted when the green movement nationally was not yet born.
Promoted to the head office in Melbourne, Mawby from 1962 was chairman of Conzinc Riotinto of Australia. He was already well known as a developer of mineral deposits. The massive bauxite deposits on the shores near Weipa in north Queensland, the iron ore at Mount Tom Price in the Pilbara, and the copper of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville were being shaped by him. Not often in the history of world mining has one person been a driving force behind three such disparate and major discoveries.
When he died in August 1977, I was asked to deliver the address at his funeral in Melbourne. On the day before, his wife Lena showed me his coat of arms. I doubt whether he displayed it often – he was ambivalent whether he should accept a knighthood. There stood a wooden Cornish headframe or poppet head, such as supported the winding gear above a mine’s shaft. As a field naturalist during his free weekends in old-time Broken Hill he wanted that pursuit recorded too, and so his coat of arms displayed the Sturt desert pea and that exceptional bird with its sprawling ungainly nest, the mallee fowl.
As I spoke, I saw the faces of people, row after row of them, who had come to honour Mawby from mining fields all across Australia. ‘He loved this country,’ my speech concluded. ‘I need hardly say it in this gathering.’
Essington Lewis was rugged and masterly: few Australians have been more influential. A country boy from South Australia, he became head of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company and its rising steel industry; and during the Second World War he was also given extensive powers by Canberra and placed in charge of a workforce of hundreds of thousands of men and women busily making munitions and military aircraft.
He died in 1961, while riding a horse in rugged country, and a few months later his son Bob suggested that I write a biography. To do the research, I needed the help of BHP which in effect owned the Lewis papers, many of which were confidential and of national importance. The difficulty was that BHP, even after it became Australia’s largest company, tended to be averse to publicity and especially to criticism. My argument was that a fair and readable biography of Lewis would actually help the public image of the company, ‘irrespective of any skeletons it might rattle’. Eventually it was agreed that I could access the Lewis papers. In effect I had the right to write what I wished but BHP and the family had the right to refuse permission for the manuscript to be published.
I liked working on the book. To visit Newcastle and its steelworks, and its underground coalmines nearby and to visit distant Whyalla and its shipyards was exhilarating. To talk with Lewis’s surviving circle of friends was to come closer to him. But a vital insight simply came from a piece of cardboard I found in his office desk. It said in capital letters I AM WORK. I ended the book on that note. Later it became the title of John O’Donoghue’s splendid play.
My typescript on Lewis’s life was completed – or almost – in April 1966, just before I went to China. BHP retyped it, handing copies to its higher officials and to a few members of the Lewis family. Helpful remarks and reminders came back. Bob Lewis said in his gentle but forthright way, ‘There is too much talk about the man; and too little are he and his active life allowed to speak for themselves.’ It was fair comment. Some readers said the story was too wordy, while others said the prose was too lean and tight. Inside the family circle one pointed out that it did not make enough of Lewis’s sense of fun, though she did admit later that the sense of fun was ‘rarely seen’ by outsiders. Another relative complained that Lewis, contrary to my story, didn’t smoke cigarettes, but the oldest son Jim explained that his father smoked them for years before he turned to cigars. Another reader sensibly pointed out that when he was at Whyalla and drove a buggy with two horses, named Iron and Steel, they were ponies, not horses. All authors owe a lot to a few people who, at the right time, take a microscope to the detail.
The story, however, remained unpublished and seemed likely to remain so. In January 1968 Sir Ian McLennan entered the fray. He liked the biography – maybe some of the points that offended earlier readers had now been resolved – but disagreed on a few major issues. One complaint was that I had described Lewis’s disillusioned attitude to democracy during the world Depression. The other points were so minor that they were easily resolved on the basis of fact. On Lewis’s reluctance to dress formally he reminded me that Lewis would, if need be, wear a dinner jacket but rarely if ever ‘white tie and tails’. On Lewis’s dislike of publicity he reminded me that in later years Lewis relented a little and allowed his own photograph, even a recent one, to be sent to the press. This did not mean that a press photographer could come and ‘capture’ Lewis as the photographer’s eyes saw fit: Lewis himself controlled the capturing.
One complaint by McLennan was entirely valid. I had failed to point out that BHP had become a much larger firm after Lewis left. It had become a major producer of oil and gas in Bass Strait and of iron ore in the Pilbara, and those achievements had been largely carried through by McLennan and his generation. Sir Ian’s complaint, holding some truth, was worded delicately: ‘I think that perhaps the biography gives the impression that the building up of BHP was more of a single-handed effort by Mr Lewis than, in fact, it was.’ It was a mirror of this old-fashioned company and its respect for privacy that Lewis was still formally called Mr Lewis.
One or two sentences still kept me and BHP apart, and another four years passed before the book finally appeared under the title of The Steel Master. It was still being read almost half a century later.
I must have written a dozen books before one of them was formally launched. To my surprise The Steel Master was launched at BHP’s head office at 500 Bourke Street in Melbourne on a December afternoon in 1971. Sir Ian, as the chairman, made the main speech. Neither of us mentioned the long-running disagreement about sentences that now seem of little consequence. At the end of the launch we parted amicably. When he was very old we sometimes lunched together.
For the space of about a quarter of a century I wrote no more about the history of big institutions or those who led them. From early 1968, when I finished The Rise of Broken Hill, until the early 1990s when I began work on a short history of the Golden Mile, I was writing other kinds of history.
The prestige of mining was high when I worked in western Tasmania on my first book. A host of well-known Australians, including many prime ministers, had links with mining fields. Mineral discoverers were folk heroes; the major gold nuggets were prized as if they were works of art; and many of the older women in the countryside still wore tiny nuggets as jewels when they dressed in style. By the 1980s, however, the mines were chastised by critics as destroyers of nature. Many were denounced as foreign-owned – it was forgotten that nearly all the rich goldmines at Kalgoorlie during the 1890s boom were owned by Britons. Above all, several minerals – including lead and asbestos – were now singled out as enemies of health, and uranium was labelled the potential enemy of all humankind. Perhaps only a minority of Australians had turned against mining so far but they were soon multiplied by the articulate, surging green movement and its success in politics.
Belatedly, about 1990, I realised that ‘green’ as a political word carried contradictory meanings. In Perth, making a speech, I found myself coining two phrases to distinguish viewpoints that lay far apart. Most Australian people were Light Green; but many of the new political leaders were Dark Green and feared that environmental crises were endangering the world. I still see the distinction between light and dark as vital if there is to be constructive political debate.