Chapter 9
Ratbags and rogues
When Crown Prince Frederik, heir to the throne of Denmark, wedded his Tasmanian wife Mary in 2004, he said he followed in the footsteps of an earlier Dane, Jorgen Jorgenson, with just as much hope and just as much confidence.
But Frederik will need a lot more than hope and confidence if he is to come near to matching the extraordinary adventurer who was ‘one of the most interesting human comets recorded in history’, as the novelist Marcus Clarke said.
A CV of the life of Jorgen Jorgenson might read like this: ‘Anglophile, spy, sailor, author, revolutionist, artist, privateer, vagabond, preacher, explorer, policeman, editor, exile, dramatist, naval officer, debater, convict, whaler, drunk, devoted husband’.
Oh. And King of Iceland.
Jorgenson was a fraud or a genius, according to circumstances. Eminent men like Sir Joseph Banks held him in the highest regard. Others thought him little more than a blowhard. In a tavern he could be a thundering bore or an exhilarating conversationalist, depending on how much you each had to drink. At the casino he could be a bad loser. In the wild he was indefatigable. And in times of danger he was a good man to have at your side.
A compulsive man, Jorgenson constantly sought action and excitement in Britain, on the Continent, in South Africa, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, where finally he lies in an unmarked grave, but not forgotten. It would be very hard to forget Jorgen Jorgenson.
He was born in Copenhagen in 1780. He came out bawling and already bellicose, the son of Denmark’s royal clock-maker whose genes surely suggested that the boy would grow up meticulous, methodical and…quiet.
Quite the opposite. Jorgenson was more the son of the Viking he would have been had he been born 1,000 years earlier. As a child he had been appalled by the horrors of the French Revolution and became an Anglophile, with a determination to visit the British colonies on the other side of the world that were then in their infancy. Inspired by Captain James Cook who was killed in Tahiti the year before his birth, he signed on – as Cook had done – with a British coal ship, the collier Jane, and for the next four years sailed between the Baltic ports and Newcastle-on-Tyne. Then, on a jaunt to London, he was press-ganged into the Royal Navy.
In 1801, then 21 and with an exceptional command of English, spoken and written, he arrived in Sydney and joined Matthew Flinders’ survey expedition on its east coast leg of the circumnavigation of Australia. Jorgenson was second mate on the Lady Nelson and remained in that post until 1804, witnessing the abandonment of plans to establish a settlement in Port Phillip and the transference of the settlers to Risdon Cove on the Derwent River, where they established a colony in Van Diemen’s Land.
Jorgenson went into the bush exploring, armed with a Bible in one pocket and Dr Johnson’s novel Rasselas in the other. He climbed Mount Wellington and harpooned a whale in the Derwent (the first European to do so in both cases).
When he sailed from Hobart Town he might reasonably have felt that he would never again see the Derwent or Mount Wellington.
In 1805 after leaving the Lady Nelson and whaling and sealing throughout the South Seas he returned to England and then went home to Copenhagen. In 1807 he found himself embroiled in a war between England and Denmark. The English, to prevent the French seizing the Danish fleet, attacked Copenhagen and for three nights bombarded the terrified citizens with rocket-propelled incendiaries. Denmark sided with Napoleon, and Jorgenson, who had commanded a ship in the South Seas, was given a privateer, the Admiral Juhl, and took three prizes until he found his ship outgunned and dismasted by the British warship Sappho.
Now a prisoner at large and back in England, Jorgenson mixed with Cabinet members and such illustrious and influential men as the Prime Minister, Lord Castlereagh, and Sir Joseph Banks. In 1808 he and an English merchant came up with a plan to ship goods into Iceland, breaking a Danish embargo on trade with England. He went to Reykjavik, the capital, and quickly convinced himself that the Icelanders needed deliverance from Denmark’s oppressive terms of trade. The country, he thought, ought to be brought under the protection of Britain. He led a bloodless and farcical revolution. Count Trampe, the Governor of Iceland, was surrounded and arrested, and Jorgenson became benign dictator under a new flag, three white cod on a blue background. Jorgenson proclaimed himself the country’s Protector and declared Iceland a republic.
‘I was fully determined to seize the first opportunity to strike some blow to be spoken of. It was not love of liberty which influenced me on this occasion…I have in the course of my life been under the malignant influence of other passions besides pity,’ he wrote later. The fiasco might have been avoided if Jorgenson had been more determined to resist the random impulses that played such a key role in his life.
The ‘Dog Days Revolution’ as it was called, ended ignominiously when the British, not sure they needed another protectorate, ordered the Royal Navy to Copenhagen, and Jorgenson, shipped back to England as a prisoner, was committed to a Thames River prison hulk. Held among fellow Danish officers, he produced his analysis of the revolution in Iceland, an autobiographical novel and two plays.
After being released, he lived in London on and off for the next 10 years, a period marked by dissolution and much time spent in ale houses rowdily ‘debating’ and carousing with lowlife, or at the card tables. ‘I am always wise everywhere else, and mad in London,’ he said, talking of his reckless gambling. He spent time in sponging-houses (privately run debtors’ prisons). He spied in, and wrote a travel book about, France and Germany. And, inevitably, he ended in Newgate prison for stealing his landlady’s bed linen.
He was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. He suggested directly to Castlereagh that he be allowed to transport himself to a foreign place, and Castlereagh agreed to allow him to do so. He stayed on in England, however, and when recaptured he was sentenced to transportation for life. In 1826, 22 years after he had left, he was taken back to Van Diemen’s Land,
‘Strange fortunes and great activity,’ he said, marked his life in Van Diemen’s Land, and for once Jorgenson was understating the fact. He earned his ticket-of-leave within a year but even while a prisoner Jorgenson was an explorer in wilderness that still defies the most experienced bushwalkers. For the Van Diemen’s Land Company he became an official pathfinder, setting out to find a route from the Shannon River to Circular Head, the company’s base. Plunging into the tangle of forest and mountain scrub around Ironstone Mountain and discovering Lake St Clair, he retreated only when his rations and his torn and ragged clothes were both on the point of giving out.
Two years after he won his ticket-of-leave Jorgenson signed on as a field constable in the Midlands town of Oatland, a hunter-down of Irish and English bushrangers, earning himself the enmity of his former fellow convicts and winning the love of one of them.
Norah Corbett was a dark-eyed laughing Irish lass half his age, transported for petty theft and working as a laundress. Like him she loved to talk and to drink. They were made for each other. They married in 1831 and for the remainder of Jorgenson’s life they quarrelled violently and were fixedly devoted to each other. Drink fuelled both emotions.
Something of the eccentric genius of Jorgenson can be seen in his self-portrait, painted in 1807. The following year he fought against England, the country which transported him to Van Diemen’s Land.
In 1830 Lieutenant-Governor Arthur attempted to save the few hundred surviving Aboriginals from destruction – there were, says Manning Clark, from 3,000 to 7,000 on the island when the white man came in 1804. Twenty-six years later, Arthur organised the infamous man-hunt, ‘the Black Line,’ a human cordon of 3,000 men who went into the bush to herd the natives into the Tasman Peninsula and were able to capture just one man and one boy. Jorgenson, as a field constable took part in the cordon and led his armed men into the wild back-country. A friend to the Aborigines, nevertheless, Jorgenson, typically, had compiled a written vocabulary of their language.
In 1835 he and Norah were pardoned and the pair spent the next five alcohol soaked years scandalising the people of Ross, where Jorgenson was now a constable. They died within months of each other. He was just 60 when he was buried in an unmarked grave in 1841.
The comet had burned out.
The obscene end of Eugene Goossens
He must have felt it when he approached the men at the Mascot airport Customs counter. Heart pounding, stomach churning, the sweat beginning to break out on his scalp and prickle among the thinning, swept back hair: he must have felt the fear.
Ahead of him, behind the counter, he could see four or five men stolidly studying him. Oh, Christ! They didn’t look like a welcoming committee.
Could he dump it here…just a few paces from them?
He should have dumped it! Was that a crime? Or should he just march through, show them a European blend of mild irritability and a lot of urbanity? He was, he reminded himself, respected and admired around the world, a Knight of the Realm: the memory was still fresh and wonderful. The young Queen, Elizabeth II had dubbed him so; he’d knelt before her as she rested the sword on his shoulder at Buckingham Palace just months ago.
Straight ahead, stand tall, be polite but aloof, patrician: let them know that it was Sir Eugene Goossens they were talking to.
In his heart Sir Eugene Goossens had a gift for music that had made him one of the world’s most renowned classical musicians. In his mind Sir Eugene Goossens held visions of a world-class Sydney symphony orchestra playing in an opera house that would be the envy of the world. And in the bag he was carrying, his briefcase, was…
But now, heart thumping so loudly that they could surely hear it he was at the counter…
‘Anything to declare, sir? Other than this?’ The man nodding at the declaration form he had passed across the desk.
‘No. No, nothing.’
‘What’s in that?’ The man now pointing to his briefcase.
‘Oh, that’s only my musical scores.’
‘Well, let’s have a look at it.’
Goossens was the most powerful figure in Australian music: conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and head of the Conservatorium. As such he was earning more than Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister, and he was well worth it.
Eugene Goossens was a man of great artistic talent wedded to ruthless drive and a grand plan to drag Australia out of its cultural desert: he envisaged a splendid opera house for Sydney, built, he suggested, on the site of the ugly tram sheds at Bennelong Point.
He believed, too, he could take the mediocre Sydney Symphony Orchestra to the front ranks of the world’s finest. He wanted the ordinary men and women of Sydney to enjoy classical music and he gave outdoor concerts that were attended by crowds of 20,000 and more. And he saw that the nation had a latent talent of immense potential: a Sydney stenographer named Joan Sutherland who he cast in the lead role – her operatic debut – in his own opera, Judith.
Above all, Sir Eugene Goossens was a cultivated and intelligent man with the aloofness that comes with being the conductor of great orchestras. Before he was recruited to Sydney in 1947 he had distinguished himself in concert halls throughout the UK, Europe and America. Noel Coward said, ‘My heart loosens when I listen to Goossens.’
Goossens himself once said, ‘The living of a musician is a very dignified one. I’m very grateful.’
But intelligence, urbanity and dignity don’t always come with wisdom, as Sir Eugene no doubt frequently reflected for the six years of his life that remained after 9 March 1956 when he arrived at Sydney’s Mascot airport from London and Customs stopped him.
They were expecting to find what they did: pornographic photographs, films and books in his luggage, although the quantity – around 1,200 items, and the three phallic rubber masks – may have had them tut-tutting with pleasurable surprise. They would have smiled too, at the medal they found among the items: the medal given to him by the Queen on his recent investiture as a knight.
The scandal rocked Sydney and the international arts world. Nevertheless, Sir Eugene might – just – have survived (today it would not be a scandal: an amused par or two in the gossip columns, perhaps) had it not been for Rosaleen Norton.
Sir Eugene, his biographer Carole Rosen says, was searching for ‘the mystical truth that was the fount of artistic inspiration and enlightenment’, but if he was looking for it in the arms of Rosaleen Norton he was looking in a very rum place.
Like Sir Eugene, Rosaleen Norton (see The witch who danced with the devil, page 188) was a conductor, of sorts. Flickering film footage shows her conducting a ‘black magic’ ceremony. The Witch of Kings Cross, as the press called her, is seen waving a knife around and intoning banalities borrowed in part from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘In the name of the horned god…above and below…within and without, around and about, here and there…’
Norton was a third-rate artist, but a first-rate self-publicist. In 1952 her book, The Art of Rosaleen Norton, a collection of grotesque, erotic paintings illustrating poems by her young lover Gavin Greenlees, had attracted the interest of the Postmaster General, who judged the book obscene, but not before Eugene Goossens had bought a copy: he had a secret interest in the occult and the book fired it. He wrote to Rosaleen Norton and she invited him around for tea.
Tea with Rosaleen Norton at her seedy Kings Cross flat was a long way removed from the Twinings and cucumber sandwiches that Goossens was accustomed to serving at his elegant North Shore home. Goossens, however, did not take tea with his wife. Marjorie his third wife, a wealthy and glamorous American, no longer loved him and lived a cosmopolitan and luxurious life in Europe. Goossens, loveless, found Sydney provincial and strait-laced and boring and Norton’s cramped, dingy Kings Cross flat must have excited him; the makeshift altar before which her coven worshipped stirred something deep and dark and prurient inside him.
Goossens, like Gavin Greenlees, fell under Norton’s spell. He, too, became Norton’s lover and for the next two years took part in the humpo-bumpo-mumbo-jumbo of the coven’s ‘sex magic’. (Later he also began a more refined relationship with an 18-year-old admirer, an Adelaide pianist, Pamela Main.)
Goossens’ biographer explains his involvement with Norton as a search for his Muse. ‘For the majority of participants,’ she wrote, ‘the ritual worship of Pan had provided sexual excitement that was both erotic and illicit. But for Eugene it was something much more, a search for the mystical truth that was the fount of artistic inspiration and enlightenment.’ This explanation would have cut no ice with Bert Travenar.
Travenar, a NSW Vice Squad detective at the time, picked up the story in the ABC program, Rewind, aired in September 2004.
‘Well, two young fellows were hawking some photographs around the newspapers. [Bondage pornography, the photos showed Gavin Greenlees in ceremonial costume and Norton in nothing but liberal make-up, earrings and ropes.] Eventually they went to the Sun and the fellow from the Sun got in touch with the chief of the Vice Squad and he detailed me to…continue with the enquiry.’ (The Vice Squad already had suspicions that Goossens was among a small and elite group of Sydneysiders who were members of a circulating library of pornography.)
Travenar already had in his file letters written by Goossens to Norton: signed letters that confirmed their intense sexual relationship. They had been stolen and given to the police by a Sun crime reporter, Joe Morris, who had infiltrated the coven to get a story on the Witch of Kings Cross but who now discovered that there was a far bigger story waiting to be splashed.
‘Rowiewitch,’ one of Goossens’ letters to Rosaleen began, ‘You came to me early this morning, about 1.45. I realised, by a delicious orificial tingling that you were about to make your presence felt.’
And another, ‘We have many rituals and indulgences to undertake. Even now, my bat-wings envelop and lift you.’
And – fatefully – ‘Anonymity is still best. Destroy this.’
She didn’t of course. She kept his letters stuffed behind her sofa where Joe Morris found them and handed them over to the Vice Squad. The police were ready to pounce, said Travenar, ‘but unfortunately, before I was able to effect an arrest on that occasion, he’d left the country and gone on a concert out of Britain and the Continent.’
For Goossens the highlight of that tour was his knighthood. But the lowlight, as it proved, was the time and money he spent in Soho sex shops – visits that were recorded by private investigators, hired by the Sun, who followed him in London.
‘Joe [Morris] rang me,’ said Travenar, ‘and said, “That friend of ours that’s overseas is coming back on the Qantas flight so-and-so from London.” Then he said he was carrying a briefcase and his information was that the briefcase probably had indecent photographs that he had, in fact, bought.’
Detective Travenar, along with Ron Walton, head of the Vice Squad, and a photographer from the Sun, were waiting with the customs officer when Sir Eugene arrived at Customs. Bag by bag, customs searched his luggage and then Goossens and Travenar went to an upstairs room at police headquarters in the city.
‘I said, “Do you know a woman named Rosaleen Norton?” he said, “Yes. I’ve known her and Gavin for some time.”
‘I said, “There was repeated mention of ‘SM’ rites between you and Norton and Greenlees made in your letters. What is that?”
‘He said, “That is sex magic. It is a symbolic ceremony involving sex stimulation.”
‘I said, “How is that rite conducted?”
‘He said, “We undressed and sat on the floor in a circle. Miss Norton conducted the verbal part of the rite and then I performed the sexual stimulation on her.”’ (This stimulation might best be understood in Rosaleen’s own chant: ‘In and out, above about, below, here and there.’)
Sir Eugene Goossens, a harmless, naïve and foolish gentleman, talking to the Vice Squad without a lawyer, now faced his fall.
Sir Eugene stood down from his positions and the following day was charged with bringing prohibited goods into the country. A much more serious charge of scandalous conduct – something that though done in private outraged public decency – a charge that could have meant him going to jail, was yet to be laid.
On the Customs charge he was fined £100 ($200), but, to Bert Travenar’s chagrin, evident even 40 years later, the Attorney-General decided not to go ahead with the scandalous conduct charge, with all its likelihood of the naming of well-known figures in the pornographic library circle and sensational ‘revelations’ from the publicity-hungry Rosaleen Norton. Implicit in the failure to press the charge was the understanding that Sir Eugene would leave Australia forever.
The newspapers had been salivating on the disclosures that were yet to come. Two days after Goossens was stopped at Customs the Sunday Telegraph reported: ‘Big Names in Devil Rite Probe. Police have disclosed that “black masses”’ and other devil worship ceremonies have taken place in luxurious homes on the North Shore.
‘A banker, a lawyer and one or two radio artists are said to be among those involved. Police disclosures followed an intensive Sydney-wide check on practising satanic rites. The extent of devil worship in Sydney amazed police. They are expected to make shock disclosures soon.’
The papers were to be denied more shock disclosures and one or two ‘radio artists’ must have breathed huge sighs of relief when the further charge against Goossens was not proceeded with. Bert Travenar was devastated. ‘I’d been dudded,’ said Travenar 40 years on, still bitterly regretting that Sir Eugene hadn’t been humiliated and disgraced in court.
One autumn morning six weeks after his return to Sydney Sir Eugene slipped out of the city and under the name of Mr E. Gray took a KLM flight to Rome. At the last minute he had sent his friends – few of whom stood by him publicly – a form letter claiming that he had been forced to bring the pornography into Australia ‘as a result of persistent menaces involving others’. That was the tack Goossens’ barrister took at his trial.
No-one has ever given this explanation the slightest credence. But was there a sinister link between Rosaleen Norton and the set-up that undid Goossens? Was she the menace Goossens referred to? Did Norton betray Goossens to the Vice Squad because of his failure to help her when she and Gavin Greenlees (her other lover) were on charges of committing ‘unnatural offences’? Did she plant the incriminating photographs in her bed-sit so that they could be found by the reporter Joe Morris?
The veteran Sydney crime reporter, Bill Jenkings in his memoirs, As Crime Goes By, says Rosaleen Norton played a key, behind-the-scenes role in Goossens’ fall. ‘Her role in the scandal was never made public but Rowie the Witch was involved up to the tip of her broomstick.’
Bert Travenar dismissed the claim. ‘That was rubbish when Sir Eugene’s barrister told the court he brought the pornography into the country because of threats…As a matter of fact he [Goossens] told me privately that, 12 months or so before his arrest he’d destroyed his own collection of pornography as soon as he heard that Norton and her boyfriend had been arrested on pornography charges and charges of buggery and what-not…’
In the last, lonely years of his life, said a friend, Sir Eugene was ‘like a man encased in ice’. He looked like a lost soul, his daughter, Renee said. ‘And whereas my father had always carried himself very well, rather grandly, rather like an actor, he now was slumped and had almost the equivalent of scoliosis.’
He found that he was boycotted by the international music world he had once been so much a part of and spent much of his time at his sister Sidonie’s farmhouse in Sussex. We’re all human…to a certain extent, naturally,’ she said, ‘but, that it should become that…Well, it killed him, really. One can say that.’
Officially, however, Sir Eugene Goossens died of a ruptured ulcer in 1960. Pamela Main told Rewind that ‘If things had gone smoothly, which unfortunately they didn’t, I would have married him in 1960. That was his plan. Things didn’t go smoothly. But if he’d lived a few weeks longer, until the beginning of September, we would have been able to get married and would have done.’
It took 20 more years for Sydney to honour the man who was the impetus for the building that is today the city’s symbol. A sculpture of him now meets visitors to the Opera House but the shameful treatment of Sir Eugene still embitters those who knew him. Sir Richard Bonynge, a student at the Conservatorium when Goossens headed it, said, ‘They took a great influence away from Sydney, and then destroyed a human being. It really killed him. He was a great man, a great musician, and Sydney did him a great disservice.’
Renee Goossens lovingly recalled a kind father, a man who, despite his public autocratic and at times despotic image, in private had an off-beat sense of humour. ‘He was a very funny man, funny like silly funny; he would have adored John Cleese.’ But John Cleese and the entire creative crew of Monty Python would have been hard put to raise a smile at the despicable fall of Sir Eugene Goossens.
Was he the boy who cried wolf?
Or was he the wolf who cried boy?
Was he really just an amusing ‘character’ who pretended to be a spy? Or was he a spy who pretended to be just an amusing ‘character’ pretending to be a spy?
Whatever the truth there can be no doubt that Francis James was a remarkable ratbag: less an enigma, more an egotist, he succeeded in turning his long imprisonment by the Chinese into a spy story that had journalists around the globe in a frenzy. At its climax, when he was released from prison and stumbled, looking aged, weak and drained, into a battery of international film and press cameras and was carried away by stretcher to a Hong Kong hospital, Francis James had probably never been happier.
Although secretive – Rupert Murdoch’s second wife Anna said, ‘No-one will ever know the true Francis James’ – and although he himself once claimed, ‘I am a shy, nervous sort of person,’ he loved the limelight, something that a good spy scrupulously avoids. Above all he lived to tweak the nose of life, and to do it in as public a way as possible.
Bob Ellis, a devotee of Francis James, described him as a man of many parts: fighter pilot, prisoner of war, churchman, double agent, political mischief-maker, teacher and adventurer. ‘He was the boyhood hero Australians never had,’ Ellis said.
Warming to his theme, Ellis said Francis had ‘an infinite capacity to conjure magic out of the universe, poetry out of the past. He should occupy a position like Douglas Bader, Lawrence of Arabia or Lord Mountbatten.’ And, Ellis concluded with rare understatement, ‘He had a strong sense of mystery and gamesmanship that may have tiptoed over into fiction occasionally.’
Francis James was born in Queenstown, Tasmania, in 1918 and went to Canberra Grammar with Gough Whitlam and Sir John Kerr. The school magazine predicted that Whitlam would become Archbishop of Canterbury and Francis James Prime Minister and got it more than half right. James was the son of an Anglican minister who, perhaps significantly, was also a pug, a notable boxer known as the Fighting Parson of Cessnock. Francis James’s passport described him as a theologian. He became editor of the Anglican, a church newspaper such as Australia had never known, and his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, his old newspaper, wrongly described him as a ‘renaissance clergyman’. But he certainly never became the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He would have made a memorable Head of the Church of England, but instead of taking Holy Orders he joined the RAAF at Point Cook in 1936, the youngest cadet pilot in the Air Force’s history. He failed to get his Wings because of his habit of arguing with senior officers (James claimed to have been expelled from five schools because of his frank opinions) but he went on to get his pilot’s licence taking lessons privately, and when war came he joined the Royal Air Force in England.
Twice, flying his Spitfire with the famous Fighter Command, he was shot down over France. The first time he parachuted to safety and escaped back to England. Then, the second time, on Anzac Day 1942, his flaming Spitfire went spiralling into a death dive.
Francis James’s handsome face was hideously burned in the crash. Temporarily blinded, his back broken, he was captured by the Germans. But his pluck and his profound impulse to cause mischief and to put himself in the centre of things, even as he was being dragged from the wreck of the Spitfire, led him, when asked who he was, to gasp: ‘I’m Air Commodore Turtle Dove.’
Greatly impressed, the Germans gave Turtle Dove VIP treatment. The German army’s leading ophthalmologist, General Lurlein, treated his badly burned eyes and plastic surgeons transplanted the skin from his buttocks to his face. (Forty years later, to his grandchildren’s never failing glee, he would tell them that when they were looking at his face what they were really looking at was his bottom.)
He was, nevertheless, a prisoner and tried to escape five times from Stalag Luft III, eventually succeeding when a neutral Swiss Red Cross commission decided he was in such a bad way that he should be repatriated to Cairo and thence to England. The Germans didn’t fight to hold him – they were clearly glad to see the last of Air Commodore Turtle Dove.
At the end of the war he was demobbed and went to Oxford on a special grant. He lasted three terms before he was inevitably sent down. He wouldn’t have had it otherwise. He had taken part in the kidnapping of a fellow student who was held at gunpoint until he paid his bridge and poker debts. A year later he went back: ‘The blighters forgave me.’ Too late. In the meantime Francis James had discovered journalism and Fleet Street.
Generically, journalists have very little dress sense. Not Francis James. He wore a black coat, striped trousers and a homburg for his interviews and so impressed the management of World Review they made him editor. Back in Australia he went to work as the education and religious correspondent and occasional leader writer for the Sydney Morning Herald. On his first day he turned up for work in a 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom I.
‘Magnificent old bus,’ he told Melbourne writer Keith Dunstan, ‘I bought it for 800 quid and sold it – a mistake probably – and bought a 1936 Phantom II. It was faster, easier to drive and I put air-conditioning in it.’ In it he also installed a desk, typewriter and a bar for entertaining, and blinds to shield him from the vulgar gaze. When his subeditor wanted to talk to him he would shower a handful of paper clips onto the car from his office window high above.
He was by this time also affecting a black hat with an enormous brim and a scarlet-lined cloak that he would swish elegantly whenever he felt the urge. The hat, he used to say, was necessary to protect his eyesight. ‘My skin had to be shaded from the sun and my eyes were photophobic; couldn’t stand direct light. The Ministry of Pensions in England decreed that I should wear a large-brimmed hat.
‘The Department of Repatriation here sent an agent to me, told me I had to wear a wide-brimmed hat. Nobody could provide it and they had to go to Akubra and have a couple especially made. One day a Repat. bloke drove up with two large boxes, two splendid hats, one grey, one black. Not a bad effort.’
The cloak, he admitted, was purely for effect. It gave him entrée anywhere.
He was at the Herald for three years before, in 1952, the Archbishop of Brisbane and the bishops of Armidale and Newcastle, took him to dinner and told him the church newspaper, The Church Standard was ailing. It needed fresh blood.
Francis and an old Oxford friend bought the paper, re-christened it the Anglican, and took its circulation, in six months, from 1,700 to 90,000. The paper he and his wife Joyce produced was not quite what the bishops ordered. But it was compulsory reading for its mostly non-believer readers. The Anglican broke hard news stories about the big political issues of the day.
‘We were able to tell in the Anglican that we were gong into Vietnam and so were the Americans,’ he told Keith Dunstan. ‘When the first battalion was going – and which battalion it was. All hell broke loose.
‘Oh, Christ! The Prime Minister rang up the Archbishop. “Espionage! How does James get this information?”’
There was a simple explanation, he said, but the question that had puzzled Prime Minister Menzies was to puzzle the Russian and Chinese Governments not long after – and lead to Francis James’s imprisonment. Where did he get his information? Was he a spy?
The solution to the puzzle, James said, was simple.
‘You see’ my background is really a service one.
‘Inevitably I knew a lot of people who were contemporaries of mine. Half my family are Regular Duntroon [then the Army officer training camp]. My uncle Jimmy retired 2IC Duntroon. My dear friend General Pierre Rousselet, who lost a leg at Dien Bien Phu, was in Hanoi.’
His contacts also included members of the Communist party. So when, in 1966, Commonwealth security searched his house in the guise of looking for heroin, and he discovered his phone was being tapped, Francis decided to have some fun.
‘President Lyndon B. Johnson was in town so I arranged a phone call [to his Communist friend]. I gave the impression to the listeners that a bomb was to be thrown and we could meet at the corner of Pitt and Market Streets and I would hand over the ‘egg-timer’ – code for the fuse and percussion device.
‘So bloody funny. At precisely three minutes to eleven all traffic was brought to a stop and a half a dozen very large gentlemen in mufti closed in on us. They took us down to Central where they opened the box. A staff sergeant came up incredulous: ‘Super! It is an egg-timer!’
Three years later, in 1969, the joke backfired badly.
At a time when tensions between the two Communist super powers, the USSR and China were at their height and each country was in readiness for war, Francis James wrote a series of articles for the prestigious and authoritative London Sunday Times. In them he claimed to have made a trip to the border between the two countries and visited the top-secret Chinese nuclear centre at Lop-Nor. He claimed to have interviewed scientists at the site who told him that China had the capacity to build hundreds of atomic bombs and its nuclear capacity was well ahead of the predictions in the West.
(He also described a wildly romantic and highly unlikely ride he had made with the Kazakh cavalry. More disturbingly the photographs that accompanied the Sunday Times articles looked very like those James had taken 14 years before in Manchuria on a junket with a delegation of Anglican bishops.)
The articles caused a furore in both countries. The Chinese, who had never allowed an outsider to visit Lop-Nor furiously denied the allegations, and the Russians reacted by arresting James at Moscow airport. He was taken to the KGB office at the airport. ‘Now Mr James, do you deny you are a journalist, and not a theologian?’ the KGB man demanded, waving a copy of the Sunday Times.
Francis James was more than a match for the Russians as he had been for the Germans and by the time he left he had a visa for Canton stamped on his passport. He got to China in October and according to westerners who saw him began to act in an extraordinary fashion. He seemed to be saying – ‘Hey everybody! Over here, look at me! I’m a spy.’
‘I detest publicity. I’m a simple student. I’m a very shy, quiet sort of person,’ he had told Anna Murdoch. ‘It happens that by sheer chance I’ve done things because I wanted to do them which people appear to find unusual. Well that’s not my problem. Huh! I’m a very private person. Very private.’
But in China, a country whose dogma then, in the days of The Gang of Four, was strict conformity and utter predictably, he was very public, very eccentric and entirely unpredictable. They imprisoned him.
There he stayed for more than three years, while the Chinese tried to get him to admit he was a spy for the Russians. Or was he working for the CIA, MI5 or the Deuxieme Bureau in Paris? (The Chinese hadn’t heard of ASIO, he said later.) Constantly interrogated and sometimes held in solitary confinement, he was told that if he signed a confession he would be freed. Years later he said he had signed ‘five or six absurd fairytale confessions which would make good copy in a popular newspaper,’ but the Chinese, not versed in the ways of the tabloids, clearly thought it was a case of crying wolf.
He admitted he could not understand the Chinese mind: ‘It was all so incalculable,’ he said of the attitude and motives of his captors. They, in turn, must have been totally perplexed by him. He held no bitterness towards them – ‘The Chinese are mere tyros compared with Gerheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, at the techniques of interrogation, you see.’
Francis James, for all his Walter Mitty side, was a courageous man. But imprisonment was a tremendous strain. In March 1972 he was on the brink of freedom. His captors took him to the border with Hong Kong where one of his four children, Stephen, was waiting to take him to freedom. He would be able to join Stephen, the Chinese told him, if he would sign a confession. James refused.
He went back to jail while the espionage experts and ‘China-watchers’ on newspapers internationally pondered afresh the question: was this extraordinary man a spy – a new kind of espionage agent, highly extrovert and totally outrageous – and had he seen China’s secret nuclear centre? Only Francis James really knew, and he was somewhere in China being held, likely as not, in solitary confinement.
Ten months later, on 15 January 1973, his old Canberra Grammar schoolmate, the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, announced that the Chinese government had found Francis James guilty of espionage but had decided to deport him. It was, the Chinese said, a friendly gesture following the establishment of diplomatic relations with Australia in the month before.
The next day newspapers around the world carried front-page stories and photographs of Francis James crossing the border. Swaying on his feet, leaning heavily on the Australian High Commissioner’s arm, the once debonair James was dressed in black trousers, an ill-fitting blue Chinese coat and an incongruous red cap. His hair cropped and tousled, needing a shave, he looked, wrote one reporter, like an irritable Stanley Laurel of silent film days.
He was as indomitable as ever but clearly ill – a 54-year-old man who looked 10 years older.
Then he collapsed and was put on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to Hong Kong’s Matilda Hospital. From the hospital bed, over a brandy and soda, he phoned his wife Joyce in Sydney, and then his Hong Kong tailor. He wanted to apologise for not having paid the man’s last bill, now almost four years old.
‘I have been unavoidably detained, old boy,’ he said, ‘for reasons beyond my control.’
Francis James had enjoyed life on the edge for most of his 54 years. At one time, when he was sending money to North Vietnam during the Vietnam war, he was branded a traitor to his country. He had been publicly denounced for his attitudes on China and Vietnam by three successive Australian prime ministers. And along the way he’d had an amusing skirmish with the law when, as religious editor of the very pagan Oz Magazine, he stood trial with its editors, Richard Walsh, Richard Neville and Martin Sharpe, on charges of issuing an obscene publication. They were given jail terms, overturned on appeal. He, as the magazine’s printer, was fined £50.
He went home to Sydney and lived there for the rest of his life, another 20 years, writing as a freelance journalist and enjoying a kind of celebrity status (most people didn’t know what to make of him). But he never told, and no-one ever really got to the bottom of, his China story. That was the way he wanted it, he claimed. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he said agitatedly to Anna Murdoch. ‘My life is secret. Neither you nor anybody else will ever succeed in writing an article about the real James. I’m too shy to allow it to appear. Far too shy.’
Well, that was plainly not so. And to another journalist he said, ‘I have done my best to eschew publicity…I am not really a stirrer.’
He was wrong there, too.