My very first memory is of sitting in the sunshine on the sand of Bondi Beach, overlooked by the tall Norfolk pines that grew there in 1950. I heard a bell, and then saw a great wave of people erupt from the foam-capped breakers and swarm towards the shore. ‘It’s the shark bell,’ my father explained, introducing me to the great Australian fear of death in the water. If you grew up in Sydney, the terror was magnified by the young Rupert Murdoch’s afternoon tabloid, the Daily Mirror, with a series called ‘Famous Shark Deaths’, which would be rerun whenever the paper needed to boost its circulation. I can still recall the gory details – the actress taken (victims are always ‘taken’ not ‘eaten’) in two feet of water and so on. Hence the sense of relief and joy for Australians at their first plunge in the Mediterranean Sea, as they realise it is the only sea they can swim in without fear of people-eaters.

My parents managed to acquire a small flat in a dilapidated building in Bondi, overlooking a park, not far from the beach and close to the job to which my father had returned, as a teller at a branch of the Commonwealth Bank, where he earned a subsistence wage. My mother, in her later stages of pregnancy, became so worried about how they would cope with the cost of a baby that, for the first (and last) time in her life, she bought a lottery ticket. The Plymouth influence on her upbringing had inculcated the belief that all forms of gambling were evil – she would never in later life flutter on a horse race or buy shares (which she regarded as a form of gambling), but the impending cost of diapers drove her to this desperate extreme. She won £10, which would now be worth several hundred pounds, and put it aside to pay for my nappies.

I was delivered by the local GP, who also performed my circumcision. This male genital mutilation was routinely inflicted on baby boys at the time – ‘Dirt might get under the foreskin,’ doctors would say, or ‘You must admit that the Jews know about hygiene.’ The fact that it might diminish sexual pleasure in later life was not, in those prudish times, a worry.

On the subject of sex, I should mention my only memory of abuse. It happened when I was four, undergoing in hospital the unnecessary (but then routine) operation to have my tonsils taken out. It was worrying to be separated for the first time from my parents, although my handsome father would come from work every night and charm the nurses into allowing him to stay after visiting hours. There was no such thing as television, but he would bring with him a hand-held ‘magic lantern’ and project onto the wall the frames of a ‘Tiger Tim’ cartoon for the pleasure of all the children on the ward.

The next day, after I had emerged from the anaesthetic, an unknown doctor came to my bedside. I can recall him vividly – he was small, with black hair and glasses, wearing a brown cardigan. After a perfunctory chat, he put what seemed to be a leather finger-glove on his right index finger. Instinctively I felt terror and then unbearable pain as he violated me. Perhaps it was just another unnecessary medical procedure to which kids were subjected at the time. Perhaps it was not. I will never know. But I still recoil whenever a doctor suggests a prostate examination, and it may explain why I have never been drawn towards being made love to by a man. I was not assaulted again: although I walked past public toilets to and from school, I was an ugly, acne-strewn youth who was never invited in. Not until I went overseas was I solicited, with invitations I always refused – probably from the unconscious fear that gay sex would be like having my tonsils out.

All other memories of Bondi – where we lived until I was six – are unalloyedly happy. I did not realise that my parents were poor – their attention made me feel quite rich. I ran on the sand at Bondi Beach, and was taught to perform that ceremonial wriggle handed down by Australian fathers to their sons: how to hold a beach towel over your privates while extricating yourself from wet swimming trunks (on no account in the 1950s could a penis, however tiny, be displayed on a Sydney beach). I would paddle (holding my father’s hand) in the rock pools, then venture with him into the old bathing sheds to inhale the warm tang of sun-burnished flesh. I would watch superbly muscled young men in posing pouches play handball, then walk up to the local Oval and climb on the big World War I cannon gun. It was removed some years ago, by pacifist killjoys who foolishly feared that it would turn small children into militarists.

It was at that Oval I observed my first sporting hero, the fast bowler Alan Davidson, whose run-up was poetry in motion. Later, at age fourteen, I was thrilled to watch him attack the West Indies batting one late afternoon during the legendary 1961 Test series. There really was ‘a breathless hush’ – not in the close at Eton, but at the Sydney Cricket Ground. I listened to every ball bowled in that series, on the wireless. The first nail-biting Test had ended in a tie and the fourth was drawn after an incredible Australian last-wicket partnership against speed demon Wes Hall. Such were the joys for small citizens of a ‘sporting nation’.

There was no preschool on offer for poorly off parents in those days, which was fortunate because mine occupied their spare time reading to me. My mother disapproved of comics, but found the money, at 2/6d a time, to buy the range of Little Golden Books in which I could follow the illustrations and hear of the adventures of Scuffy the Tugboat and the Five Little Firemen. We progressed to Enid Blyton’s Shadow the Sheepdog and I became very fond of the local strays I would pat in the park, until a mastiff bit me, severely enough to induce a lifelong anxiety about big dogs. Then came larger books – notably the Australian classic Blinky Bill. I cried over his daddy’s cruel death, shot by a man for pleasure, while Blinky the baby koala was hugging a gum tree. Such stories are thought to induce in children the desire to be kind to animals, but since the conceit was to create animals that are human, it may be that my sorrow over the pointless killing of a koala actually sparked an embryonic interest in human rather than animal rights.

Dorothy Wall, author of the Blinky Bill stories, could certainly pack a punch for a four-year-old.

The koala family lived so happily; never thinking of harm, or that anything could happen to disturb their little home, as all they asked for were plenty of fresh gum leaves and the warm sun. They had no idea such things as guns were in the world, or that a human being had a heart so cruel that he would take a pleasure in seeing a poor little body riddled with bullets hanging helplessly from the tree top.

Her precise description of the killing of Mr Bear, of the vigil over his body by his wife and child, then her decision to go ‘far into the bush with Blinky, away from the man with his gun’ was my first alert to the modern refugee experience. After that, I could never be interested in the milksop experiences of Rupert Bear, or even Winnie-the-Pooh.

Robin Hood’s adventures came to me in a picture book from the Disney movie: Errol Flynn, with my father’s moustache, and a photo of a large knight with a large sword, captioned ‘Sir Geoffrey’. My namesake was, I was disconcerted to discover, on the wrong side of history, in the ranks of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Then, inevitably, came The Wind in the Willows, that anthropomorphic classic about character types I would later meet in England (with Jeffrey Archer or Alan Clark playing Mr Toad, and tabloid journalists taking the parts of stoats and weasels). I would beg my father to reread the chapter about ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, with its strangely comforting religiosity which could lull a small child to sleep.

When I learnt to read, I introduced myself to the unending struggle between good and evil through Biggles books, in which good – the British chaps – always triumphed. I worked my way through every volume, entirely unaware of the gay subplot debunked later by comedians or the racism which has caused librarians to remove the series from their shelves. The first pun that made me laugh, before my age reached double figures, was the suggestion that the next offering from Captain W. E. Johns would be titled ‘Biggles Flies Undone’.

By this time I was talking, quite volubly, although until I was almost five my speech lacked coherence. When it did develop, it had an unmistakable English accent. ‘Is his father an English migrant?’ my mother would be asked in the street by people who had overheard us talking and assumed that I was the offspring of a ‘ten-pound Pom’. I may have picked up these unwanted strains from announcers on the national radio (the ABC), who cultivated BBC accents, which were then thought of in Australia as ‘educated’.

Frank’s ambition at this point was one day to be a bank manager, and the Commonwealth soon recognised his potential and made him the assistant to a senior manager, whom he accompanied on a three-month tour of banks in America and Europe. Every day, scrupuously, my father would send us (my mother had by now, three years after me, produced a truculent baby brother, named Graeme) a postcard from wherever he happened to be. Thus my introduction to the wide world was through the rose-tinted lens of the picture postcard. The Eiffel Tower, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Rockies, the Colosseum, the Swiss Alps – places of legend and majesty I craved to visit when I grew up. Most picturesque of all were the bonnie banks and braes of Scotland, presumed to be teeming with trout, not to mention ladies of the lake and a monster in Loch Ness. I longed in daydreams to visit the land of Clan Robertson and to follow my father’s slipstream to countries that, by the time I did set foot in them, were not quite so pretty.

Dad came back home straight from San Francisco with a precious gift – a genuine raccoon-skin cap, as worn by the celluloid hero Davy Crockett, king of the Wild Frontier. It was a sign of how crazes in America were beginning to rub off on Australia that small children, egged on by Walt Disney, were running around in this hairy headgear in the middle of summer, yelling ‘Remember the Alamo!’ as they fired their cap-pistols. Crockett helped to lose the Alamo, but the Disney film portrayed the disaster as a moral victory by courageous frontiersmen faced with a lesser breed, Zapata-moustachioed Mexicans. Donald Trump would have been taken in by the film at the same time: his memory of the Alamo may explain his obsession with fencing off the Mexican border.

When I turned seven, we moved to Eastwood, a nondescript Sydney suburb. My father bought a small brick-veneer house next to a power station, and it came – joy of joys – with a half-acre of land. A giant lizard was in occupation, which came out of its hole every year to sunbathe, flicking its blue tongue wickedly, and leaving its skin behind as a parting reptilian gift before it retreated for six months of hibernation. There was a small orchard, dropping apples and deliciously ripe peaches, and a field with a cricket pitch and a few feet to spare. I abandoned hope of emulating Alan Davidson, and shortened my run-up to bowl the sort of leg spin with which the young Richie Benaud had begun to take wickets. Beside the pitch ran a creek, the habitat for a million tadpoles and for bandicoot families in soggy burrows. The willow trees by the creek drummed in summer with cicadas. We would pour water down their holes to make them emerge for their brief earthly sojourn and shake them to make them sing. All over Sydney, wanton boys were pulling wings off not flies but cicadas – insects did not merit the regard we had for Blinky Bill’s dad or Bambi’s mum.

Best of all in this new house, beyond the creek was a grassy knoll that led to some tennis courts. This became my true sport, and I neglected my leg spin to work on my backhand. I soon developed a dynamite forehand and a serviceable serve, and started to hit, quite naturally, a hard and accurate double-handed backhand, in the hope of one day representing Australia in the Davis Cup (my first career choice). But this stroke was unacceptable to Australian coaches at the time: double-handed backhands were for girls (they used the ultimate put-down: it was ‘sissy’) and I had to be weaned off it. I have never forgiven them: my tennis career was subsequently blighted by a vulnerable, limp-wristed backhand, which I would run around whenever possible.

Nineteen fifty-three was the most exciting Davis Cup of all time. I listened, breathless, to every point, crouched over the radio by my bed on our glassed-in front veranda. The top Australian player, Frank Sedgman, had turned professional, and our defence of the cup against the might of America was dependent on two nineteen-year-olds, Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall. On day one Rosewall lost to the American top gun Tony Trabert, and Hoad beat Vic Seixas; but the next day Australia’s legendary coach Harry Hopman uncharacteristically miscalculated and pulled Rosewall from the doubles, which Australia lost, and was in consequence 2–1 down. The tension on day three was unbearable: Hoad eventually triumphed over Trabert, winning the fifth set 7–5, and Rosewall won the final match the next day. I have never felt prouder or more patriotic. I’d found a real sporting hero in Hoad: when his autobiography was published, I loitered in a bookshop to watch him sign copies. I was eight and had no money to buy his book, but I finally plucked up courage and asked him to sign a serviette. He looked down at me with his dreamy blue eyes and I was smitten. If only I’d had a mobile phone and could have asked him for a selfie!

Later, when I was sixteen, I watched Hoad play the match of his, and my, life. It was around the time Rod Laver, the reigning amateur champion, turned professional. Lew had lost his touch – he was overweight, out of condition, into drink and cigarettes. So the promoters of Laver’s debut as a pro thought it would be a good idea for Rod to thrash Lew as a warm-up, then battle it out the next day with Ken Rosewall, who was the reigning professional champ. But Lew took himself in hand for three months, stopped drinking, lost weight, trained, and beat Rosewall in four terrific sets at White City. I was there, forever inspired to win against the odds, on court or in court. I did finally get to play with Lew, many years later at a charity gig. I warmed up like a demon, but in the doubles match we played together I muffed my volleys, double-faulted, and even failed to return an underarm serve from the aged Vic Seixas. In tennis, as in love, never partner your hero – you cannot help but let them down.

I am often asked whether anyone inspired me when I was very young. People always expect me to name Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Clarence Darrow. When I’m feeling truthful, I tell them about Lew Hoad.

* * *

In 1952 I became aware – from the radio, although we were prepared for the news by our teachers at school – that King George was dying. He had been taken ill in London while Princess Elizabeth was in Kenya, at a luxury resort called Treetops. A clear but crazy image came into my dreams of a man with a crown, in bed in a tree, below which a pride of lions crouched – kings of the jungle paying their tribute to the King of England. I was a right little royalist, especially after the coronation, when I insisted that my parents buy me coloured picture books so I could be struck by awe at the solid gold coaches with their red plush seating, the bejewelled crowns and orbs and other impedimenta of royalty.

This changed just one year later when the young Queen came to visit her Australian dominion. ‘Every woman’s dream of beauty steps ashore’ announced the Sydney Morning Herald. Every schoolchild was summoned to see her at the Sydney Cricket Ground, on a day of 35°C heat. We were made to wait six hours in this burning cauldron: kids all around me were fainting from sunstroke (there was no cover) or clutching diarrhoea-wracked little stomachs. I was eight but I could recognise torture when I saw it, even if I did not know the term for the deliberate and unjustified infliction of severe pain. The young Elizabeth passed in a closed car which sped around the track, her limp arm poking out of the window.

The day was a cruel farce: I felt cheated, but also slightly amazed. How could Australia go nuts for an English monarch to the extent of offering up to her its children in inhumane homage? I really did think republican thoughts, without being able to put that name to them. I could do that by the time I was twelve, when the whole disgraceful spectacle was repeated, this time merely to welcome the Queen Mother (who at least waved to us from an open jeep). I was critical of Prime Minister Menzies, an extreme Anglophile, who on a later royal visit looked at the Queen adoringly and emoted, ‘I did but see her passing by and yet I’ll love her till I die.’ I did but see her passing by, but so quickly that it made me a lifelong republican.

Kathy Lette and I are sometimes invited to the palace, invitations which, as a rule, we graciously accept. We do our best to entertain Her Maj – I may, after all, be one of her more distant relatives, on the German side. On one occasion my wife wore a suit emblazoned with corgis, which was greeted with a broad royal smile. (As you can see from the dirty look on the face of the flunkey in the photograph, Brenda is not often allowed to be amused.) This was at a celebration for the Commonwealth, and I sat next to her while the orchestra played ‘God Save the Queen’. I noticed that she tapped her feet to the tune. We all sang the words and she seemed to sing along – ‘God Save Our Gracious Me’, I suppose.

Our presence was publicised, and we were berated by some foolish commentators in Australia for betraying our republican principles. They don’t seem to understand either the virtues of politeness or Kathy’s point about accepting invites to Buck House: ‘Of course they are dinosaurs, but who wouldn’t want to see dinosaurs in their natural habitat?’

* * *

The Robertsons were a middle-class family in a middle-class house in a middle-class suburb. Eastwood was not exactly middle class, it was a mix, in those days when your ‘class’ in Sydney was deducible from your household newspapers. We took the Fairfax paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, while our working-class neighbours took the Packer Telegraph. Those with no class at all took Rupert Murdoch’s evening tabloid, the Daily Mirror. My mother wouldn’t have it in the house – she noted that the men in our street who read the Daily Mirror were the ones who beat their wives.

The only other reading material in our home was a series of Reader’s Digest condensed books. I didn’t understand the ‘condensing’ process (it sounded like condensed milk, which was also sickly sweet) but the stories were always meant to impart some high-minded moral. There was one that made a particular impact on me, about a Scottish general practitioner devoted to his country clients, visiting their far-flung farms without demur whenever duty called. One night he saved the life of a wealthy businessman, who insisted he take as a reward a block of shares in an obscure company. The price rose to a dizzying height and the good doctor realised he was rich. One day an urgent telegram came from his benefactor, which he put aside because he was rushing to an emergency. When he opened it the next day, he discovered it said, ‘Sell shares immediately – market about to collapse.’ He realised, as he went back to work a poor man, that he had saved the life of an insider trader who had repaid him in the same crooked coin. The moral was that virtue is its own reward, and this I actually believed and acted upon for many years, until I came to understand that my favourite boyhood story really means that no good deed goes unpunished.

My mother’s favourite maxim, instilled from the cradle, was that money cannot buy happiness. This was consoling when we had none, and was given a particular emphasis on my impressionable young mind by Australia’s first kidnapping, of a boy my own age whose parents had won the lottery. The police mishandled the ransom demand and the boy was killed. ‘That’s what can happen when you win the lottery. Money does not buy you happiness,’ pronounced my mother, insisting she was glad that her one lottery win had yielded only money for my nappies, not the attractions and distractions of great wealth. The evidence for this proposition seemed overwhelming, and I went through most of my life believing it, despite my wife’s elucidation of the proverb: ‘Money does not buy happiness. It just buys yachts and five-star hotels and diamond jewellery – I quite like the sort of misery that money buys.’

My parents were not religious, but they thought I should have the chance to embrace the Anglican God. So off I went, every Sabbath, to Sunday school. I quite enjoyed this for a few years and routinely achieved first-class honours in state-wide Sunday school exams, picking up a working knowledge of the Bible which was later to become useful in defending Gay News at the Old Bailey on the charge of blasphemy. My father took me to a Billy Graham crusade – the biggest excitement in Sydney for years – and I observed the tricks of this over-the-top evangelist as he enticed the depressed and impressionable of Sydney (there were a lot of them) down the aisles to give him money and sign a book which declared they were now ‘saved’. I was very young and very tempted to join them, but I was saved by my father, whom the hokum could not budge. It vaguely occurred to me, however, by the age of nine, that if there was any truth in religion, it logically followed that it should be the most important thing in one’s life. Hence my second career choice: I would become a missionary. The job would entail foreign travel, death insurance (access to heaven) and plentiful opportunity to preach. There would, I gathered, be a certain frisson in converting cannibals – ending up in the cooking pot would be an ever-present possibility, but at least I would have a fast track to paradise through their alimentary canals.

In time, however, I had to choose, not between God and Mammon but between God and tennis. My game had progressed well enough for me to be selected in the district’s Under-16 team, but our matches were on Sunday, which conflicted with church confirmation classes. I was given a dispensation and was ready to be received into the church by the laying on of hands. The hands to be laid upon me were those of Archbishop Gough, the rather ridiculous upper-class Englishman who headed the Anglican Church in Sydney. Just a few weeks before the ceremony he had been quoted on the front page of the Mirror declaiming, ‘The younger generation is wallowing in a mire of sexuality.’ I was not doing much – or indeed any – wallowing, but the good archbishop certainly was – with a number of married parishioners within the range of his archbishopric. He was cited in secret divorce petitions and the scandal was hushed up by the media – even by the Mirror, as proprietors were ‘leant upon’ by an establishment that did not want the ‘established’ church to suffer embarrassment. The public was not allowed to know and the promiscuous primate was packed off to the smallest parish in England.

* * *

I went to Eastwood Public School – a venerable institution, as primary schools go, with the asphalt playground which left its marks on schoolboy shins, and a cricket pitch on which I experienced the thrilling sensation of thwacking a perfectly timed cover drive (though when I played for the school as opening batsman, I made more runs snicking through the slips than thwacking through the covers).

School life was uneventful. History, incredibly, was not taught at all, and English amounted to lessons in grammar rather than in drama or literature – deemed unnecessary and possibly corrupting, the state school syllabus reflecting the philistine values of the Menzies era. We did have a ‘play festival’ once – in 1955 – when I enjoyed the role of the wise and judicious Mr Badger in The Adventures of Toad.

There was the cane, of course, overused in all schools of the period, and routinely prescribed at Eastwood for the most minor infractions. It was administered by a kindly old ex-serviceman whose hand shook so much – probably from delirium tremens – that the beating rarely hurt. Had it done so, I might have been inclined to rebel. But the only trace of any sense of injustice that I can find in my prepubescent schoolbooks (loyally preserved by my mother) was in a composition on the subject of ‘My School’. In it, I inveighed against the hypocrisy of teachers for disciplining children they’d seen ‘scratching themselves’ in the playground, ‘as I often see teachers scratching themselves’. This scored a hit, and I felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw a group of teachers passing around my essay and laughing – rather defensively, I thought. Tight underwear produced in the summer rashes that did bring on an urge to scratch one’s balls and my criticism deterred the use of the cane as punishment for giving in to the itch – my first blow struck for human rights.

Eastwood did not lack culture. There was a cinema, where small boys could roll Jaffas (an orange-coated ball of chocolate) down the aisles and watch endless black-and-white adventures of Hopalong Cassidy, in which the ageing cowboy hero would embark on different ways of slaughtering Indians. I was never much attracted to this genocidaire on horseback – when we played cowboys and Indians, it was only fair that the Indians should sometimes win.

Much more excitement came when I was almost ten and Eastwood suddenly became the cultural capital of Australia. This was the new age of television, launched in 1956 when Bruce Gyngell (later, Mrs Thatcher’s acolyte and founder of TV-AM) appeared on screen saying, ‘Good evening, and welcome to television.’ Channel 7 built its studios at Eastwood, around the corner from our street, and began to record game shows that entranced the nation. I went to some recording sessions – invariably with breakdowns in the primitive technology – and might well have imbibed the adrenalin and some of the techniques I was later to use for my own shows for British and Australian television. I cannot be sure whether those visits to the Channel 7 studios are responsible for my pleasure in performing on television, but I did feel a nostalgic delight when I returned there forty years later, by which time I was a UN judge, to make a cameo appearance in Home and Away. You can take the boy out of Eastwood, but you can’t take Eastwood out of the boy.

As I think back to those formative years between eight and twelve, I have to acknowledge that the greatest influence came from ABC (the BBC equivalent) radio. I was never interested in their kids’ programme, a riff on Jason and the Argonauts, although the legend of armed men springing from the bloody soil of an invaded land has been a useful metaphor in writing about the dangers of military intervention. I remember only one altercation with my parents in those years, and it was over whether I could stay up late to listen to the end of an ABC radio performance of Hamlet. My mother insisted it went on past my bedtime; I pointed out that it was said to be the greatest play ever written, and I wanted to hear how it ended. My father was called and I was physically removed to my bedroom, hurling imprecations about their ignorance. It was a bad call on both sides: they could have granted me this indulgence, and I should have taken their decision with some humility. But it brought home to me the important fact that those in authority – even those you love, with your best interests at heart – are not always right.

What brought my ear to the wireless at appointed hours on most evenings were the BBC comedies – Take It From Here, Hancock’s Half Hour, Educating Archie and so on. I would note and venerate the names of the writers – Galton and Simpson, Muir and Norden, the latter two featuring in My Word!, a favourite show in which their wordplay was dazzling and their seeming ability to deconstruct well-known quotations amazing. It was my introduction to the art of rehearsed spontaneity, and these men were my gods of insightful comedy. Many years later, when I bumped into Denis Norden shopping in a delicatessen in north London I almost fell at his feet, and when I heard that a friend was to marry Frank Muir’s daughter I envied his marriage to a goddess, although I had never set eyes on her.

Best of all was The Goon Show, with writer and star Spike Milligan. This was a wonderful world for a small boy growing up in an outer-Sydney suburb, although it was wonderful for those growing up anywhere (in palaces, for example, where Prince Charles became a fan). It was radio at its best, enabling the attuned listener to conjure in his imagination a surreal world of exploding puddings and the dolly mixture of the British Empire. There was nothing to rival it on television, at least until Monty Python, years later, made a brilliant attempt. I idolised Spike and dragged my somewhat uncomprehending father to the recordings of some of his ABC shows. Milligan was a regular visitor to Sydney – his mother lived at Woy Woy (a name as far-fetched as any he invented) – and in due course he acquired an Australian stalker as in love with his imagination as I. Her name was Kathy Lette.

Later in life, through Kathy, I met many comedians, some of whom – Stephen Fry, Billy and Pamela Connolly, Rory Bremner, Barry Humphries – became friends. Comics rather than lawyers graced our dinner table with an anarchic ebullience that my own profession is trained to subdue. Delight in humour transcends politics – many comedians are conservative, but hours in their company never exposed political differences. They have a special insight into the absurdities of life for which they should always be valued – a point overlooked by Australia House in the years when it banned Barry because his caricature diplomat, Sir Les Patterson, was ‘bad for Australia’s image abroad’. In fact, it much enhanced that image in a Britain which loved the kind of self-mockery that did not come easily to those from other nations (Canadians or New Zealanders, for example).

School life took a turn for the better when I was selected to spend my last two years of primary education in what was called an ‘opportunity class’. I was never quite sure what it was an opportunity for, other than to be educated by a remarkable young teacher, Lionel Phelps, who taught me to think. Phelps made us read the Sydney Morning Herald every day, and to criticise the doings of grand men with three names – like John Foster Dulles and Robert Gordon Menzies. ‘Ming’ was at the time an international laughing stock for his one attempt at world attention – he had allowed himself to be used by a dishonest British government planning with Israel and France to invade Egypt and recover the Suez Canal. Menzies’s role was to threaten President Nasser to give up the canal, or else. It was a despicable role, and Nasser called his bluff (‘You send this Australian mule to threaten me’). Menzies was ridiculed, particularly by the Eisenhower administration, which deplored this last throw of the colonial dice. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Dulles was justifying CIA interventions (the CIA being led by his brother) in small islands in the Caribbean, while Khrushchev was preparing to khrusch freedom in Hungary. By age eleven, I knew what was happening in the world, but the Cold War barriers seemed so immutable that it was impossible to think of making it a better place.

Mr Phelps encouraged other enthusiasms. He set inventive composition subjects such as writing Goon Show scripts, and urged us to try our hands at poetry. Only one of my efforts survives in my class notebook:

There was a young lady named Helen

Whose breasts were the shape of a melon

But it also appears

She had cauliflower ears,

Which is why she was so meloncholy.

Helen would have been a figure of my eleven-year-old imagination – Eastwood was strictly segregated and the only girls in my orbit were those I met at Sunday school. One I did rather like was Meredith Oakes. We met up many years later when she was a distinguished musicologist in London, having written the libretto for Thomas Adès’s opera The Tempest. Her mother produced a photo of us together in a class at St Philip’s Sunday School in Eastwood, and I hope our learning of the Bible has come in as handy for her as a librettist as it has for me as a defender of blasphemers.

My primary schooling at Eastwood left me, by age twelve in 1958, with some degree of self-confidence but no clear ambition. I was losing interest in a missionary life and the single-handed backhand was not improving. I cannot recall any interest in law, although I have found among my mother’s papers a copy of an Empire Day speech I gave the school when I was eleven. It eschewed the usual grovels to the Queen and noted that ‘the true spirit of the British Empire’ was shown when ‘its people combined to defeat the Kaiser’. (I did not know then that he might be a relative.) I went on to make this point:

There, at this young age, I was unconsciously piping a principle I would later intone in Commonwealth courtrooms around the world. That, of course, would have gone over the heads of my schoolmates and their parents – and probably myself – when piped in my unbroken voice in the Eastwood Odeon in 1957.

* * *

The attraction of being in an opportunity class was that your card was marked for onward transmission to a selective grammar school. But by the time my turn came, the New South Wales education department had changed its policy, and kids in my year were streamed off to a new and very unselective comprehensive that had just opened in Epping, a suburb next door to Eastwood. My parents were inconsolable and offered to pay for me to go to Sydney’s top private school. I refused. I would like to be able to think of myself at age eleven a precocious progressive, firm in my support for state education, but this political principle had nothing to do with my decision. I simply worked out that I could spend an hour longer in bed if I went to Epping Boys High School. I went to this comprehensive school out of youthful laziness, not youthful idealism. So it happened – for better or worse – that the next five years were spent in a rustic atmosphere of fields and gum trees at a school with no history, no old boys, no girls and no reputation to live up or down to.

Epping’s motto was ‘Strive to Achieve’, but with the emphasis very much on ‘Strive’. We were mainly from hard-working families with fathers who had returned from the war and mothers who dutifully described their occupation as ‘domestic duties’. Our faces and races were monochrome: the White Australia policy precluded any other colour (freckles were allowed). We were expected to learn how to become useful members of society, a step up from our parents, whose ambitions were for us to earn more money than they did, perhaps as engineers or solicitors or accountants (actuaries were a popular aspiration, since they were reported by the Sydney Morning Herald to be in the best-paid profession). The notion that a son might become an actor or a poet or a ballet dancer would have been viewed with horror, although a top sportsman would have been very acceptable.

Our school, which had only been operational for two years, was still in the process of being built. In my first year, we were all ordered to bring from our gardens some samples of kikuyu grass, which we proceeded to plant on the sports field (it remains there sixty years later – my proud contribution to my old school). My father became the mainstay of the P&C (Parents and Citizens Association): by this time he had been made registrar of the Commonwealth Bank – a title that gave him some heft with the Education Department, which he badgered to provide us with a teacher of Latin. This was regarded as a luxury for state schools, although every wealthy private school had one, but he thought the ancient language might be useful if his son ever chose a career in law. It wasn’t, as it happens, although five years of its study did help my sex life by enabling me to translate the erotic poetry of Catullus.

My sex life needed all the help it could get. Puberty brought the teenage equivalent of the scourge, the acne that was Black Death to social life, and which scarred me until university. Red pustules covered my face: each morning I would take a blackhead extractor to the overnight pimples, covering the bathroom mirror with ejaculations of pus. I was sent repeatedly to a ‘skin specialist’ – an avuncular doctor who prescribed a sulphurous solution which I had to apply every morning and which made my face raw and stained purplish-white, and even less sightly than before. It left the indelible impression on my mind that I was ugly and unfit for female company, so I retreated to my books and rarely accepted invitations to parties. In any event, the girls I met on the train displayed no interest in me whatsoever. In Australia, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, girls never made passes at boys with A passes. Intellectual achievement could not get me a partner to the school dance. It was then that my mother decided I must learn some social graces: she enrolled me in a course at Miss June Winter’s Academy of Dance.

There, in a converted shed near Epping Station, I had the most excruciating experience of my teenage life. It was soon clear that I got no rhythm, and had two left feet. The moment of truth arrived with the ‘Ladies’ Choice’. The boys were lined up against one wall, with the girls about to venture, like heat-seeking missiles, towards their target. My friend Roger and I quaked with apprehension – there was one beautiful and rather forward girl whom we both fancied and she made a move in our direction. To my brief delight she selected me rather than my rival, a generosity I repaid by treading on her toes. She did not make the same mistake again.

I could never get the hang of ballroom dancing, and my embarrassment was only relieved because a fat American named Chubby Checker had made a dance called ‘the twist’ so popular that Miss Winter had to include it in our repertoire. It enabled you to distance yourself from your partner and gyrate within your own space, without contact with your partner’s body, or with her toes. A few years later, at university balls, I would manage to sway and smooch to ‘Hey Jude’ and other Beatles standards, but any other form of dance still eludes me. I am probably the only person in the UK never to have watched Strictly Come Dancing – the very sight of it would, I fear, bring back excruciating memories of Miss Winter.

As for sex, in the ’50s it really was a terrible business for sensitive teenagers. There was no sex education, apart from a ludicrous quasi-evangelical group called the Father and Son Movement, which was invited to the school for one evening each year. Embarrassed fathers were required to sit with their even more embarrassed sons to watch magic-lantern slides of tadpoles swimming towards a cartoon uterus, and endless close-ups of sores on male groins and organs – the consequence, we were assured, of sex with any woman who was not our wife. The wages of sin were death, and we were inculcated with paranoid fears of venereal disease. The Father and Son outfit was also militantly opposed to masturbation – their literature hinted that it might cause eye-sight loss, mental derangement, general ill-health and, worst of all, perpetual prepubescence. Hence a cartoon of a grown boy riding a child’s rocking chair, with the caption ‘Growing up means leaving childish things behind’ – only primary school boys would pay any attention to their willies, which could thereafter curl up as if in hibernation but spring back into action on the wedding night. It was all too silly for words.

Nor was it the only absurdity. Australia was the most censorious society in the free world, keeping out books with the same determination as it kept out black people. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was acquitted at the Old Bailey obscenity trial in 1960, but not even Robert Menzies’s Anglophilia would allow him to permit it into Australia. The story I later heard from his Minister for Air, Fred Osborne, who lived nearby, was that the Cabinet all assumed that Menzies would respect the British decision and allow the book entry. They were taken aback when he stormed into the Cabinet meeting to declare, ‘I’ve read this dreadful book. And I am not going to allow my wife to read it.’ They did not have the courage to disagree so the Dame Pattie Menzies protection test determined in my youth our federal level of sexual tolerance for imported literature.

I wonder now what drove these moral paragons – were they somehow trying to conceal their own depravity by pretending to electors that they were saving us from sin? Nobody ever called them out, and the incidence of rape kept on increasing (although not in the statistics: as a result of their stigmatising of sex, most rape victims were deterred from reporting the assaults against them). Liberation of a kind, at least for men, had come to America in the ’50s with the publication of Playboy – it was, of course, banned from Australia. Film censorship was just as stringent: I recall the loud-mouthed moderator of the Methodist Church describing cinema-going as ‘like travelling through a sewer in a glass-bottom boat’. More evidence, I think, that the dirt was all in the minds of the men who set Australia’s moral standards.

Angry though I still am about those wowsers, I must admit that censorship did me some good. It forced me to hunt out literature the censors were too stupid to have banned. I had read that Rabelais, for example, was pretty … well, ‘Rabelaisian’, and I found a copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel on the innocent shelves of Eastwood Public Library. It had enough scatology to last a lifetime. There was Boccaccio (The Decameron) and Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), with rude sections you had to read into the books to find. And, immortally, Ulysses, which I forced the school to buy me as a prize for coming top in maths. Who could have a more erotic love affair than with Molly Bloom, or with Joyce’s own wife, the blowsy barmaid Nora Barnacle, on whom she was based?

My lifelong aversion to censorship – both in ideological terms when it amounts to denying the right to information or opinion, and for the practical reason that it is usually counterproductive – really began at Epping when I discovered how it was being used to disadvantage all comprehensive school kids in my year. The background to this scandal was that we were all studying, in 1962, aged sixteen, for our Leaving Certificate – the equivalent of A-levels and our passport to the future. English was a compulsory subject and The Tempest was our set text. We were issued with a cheap edition which, on first reading, struck me as a play that was deeply flawed, inhumane and racist. It was the story of Prospero, Duke of Milan, being exiled to an island with his daughter, but taking books that enabled him to learn sufficient magic to confound his enemies and create a brave new world. Except that his seemingly cruel and unjust treatment of his own servant – the indigenous Caliban – undercut the whole message of this apparently humourless text. Then one day on the train, I noticed some private schoolkids of my age with a larger book – a different edition of The Tempest, with more pages. I hastened to buy their edition, which was published by Methuen in London, and discovered a different, rather wonderful and funny play.

It turned out that some idiot in the New South Wales Education Department had determined that state schoolboys were only fit for the bowdlerised edition, in which the absurd Dr Bowdler had removed not only all the comedy and rude jokes (‘This ship is as leaky as an unstanched wench’, ‘Monster, I do smell all horse piss’) but any reference to a main fulcrum of the plot – Caliban’s attempted rape of Prospero’s daughter. State school kids would therefore have no understanding of Prospero’s motivation for punishing Caliban, a handicap for analysing the play that would not afflict our wealthy school rivals.

I wrote an angry denunciation of the Education Department – my first piece of investigative journalism – in the school newspaper, and the very fact that educators could betray education in this way still rankles. But what made this censorship not only stupid but actually absurd was that surgically removing all – and even inferential – references to sex meant that state school kids would never read a word of Prospero’s speech in favour of premarital chastity, as he warns his daughter’s suitor in terms that a seventeenth-century Father and Son Movement would have applauded:

If thou dost break her virgin knot before

All sanctimonious ceremonies may

With full and holy rite be ministered,

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall

To make this contract grow, but barren hate,

Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew

The union of your bed with weeds so loathly

That you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed,

As Hymen’s lamps shall light you.

Hymen’s lamps had to be dimmed and virgin knots left untied for my exams in 1962. And this was just one small example of the hypocrisy that was characteristic of the city in which I was growing up. It was a strange experience, reading newspapers and watching television that presented a political and social world so different from the real one. Cover-ups were commonplace: in the Anglican Church, Archbishop Gough preached against promiscuity while secretly indulging in it himself; meanwhile, Catholic confessors ignored or excused the paedophilia that was rampant in their own priesthood. The state government was irredeemably corrupt, yet not a word was mentioned in the media until a politician was stupid enough to be caught (like the Minister for Prisons, who had been accepting regular bribes to release prisoners early).

The New South Wales police force was thoroughly corrupt as well, with senior officers, praised by the media for putting down anti-Vietnam demonstrations, doing a nice line in protection rackets with abortionists or setting up serious crimes with their friends, the serious criminals. These were subjects that would never be mentioned in the newspapers because of defamation laws inherited from England, which awarded large sums in damages to anyone whose reputation was lowered by published criticism. I later spent much time trying to reform these laws, in England and the Commonwealth – there is no doubt the catalyst was my schoolboy disgust at how they had whitewashed the news during my youth in Sydney, a city of dirty secrets.

There was no obvious outlet for political views in school, other than through debating in competitions with other schools. This was quite a big deal, as teams of three would vie for this cup or that shield. I was third speaker (or ‘whip’) for the school team, which meant engaging in off-the-cuff criticism of the other side. We were doing very well in the main competition until we met the top grammar school – an engagement in which we were beaten by a bad adjudicator. We had to propose the motion ‘Melbourne needs 50,000 Negroes’. This had recently been suggested by a visiting American sociologist who was vilified by the press for this implied criticism of White Australia.

I had not thought much about the White Australia policy until we began our one-hour preparation – all we could think of at first was to argue that Melbourne was so boring it needed some jazzing up. But as the minutes ticked on, and we talked about our monochrome existence – no coloured faces in the school, not even a Chinese restaurant in Eastwood – we began to understand and agree with the viewpoint of the alien sociologist. The racist assumptions in 1901 of Australian’s founding fathers – kick the Pacific Islanders out of Queensland, forbid the entry of slanty-eyed Chinese, treat Aboriginals as subhuman (in 1962 they could not even be counted in the census) – had consigned us to a dull incomprehension of what amounted to humanity. We convinced ourselves, if not the adjudicator, and I like to think of the moment as some sort of turning point in our thinking about the racist mindset of the nation in which we had, by happenstance, been born. It also aroused the interesting thought that radical, non-conformist ideas might be right – or turn out to be on the right side of history.

As for the politics of the school playground, Epping was a small, struggling school and I could not find anyone who would bother to help set up a student council. The headmaster, H. E. (Hector) McGregor, was as good as they came in state schools: a grave and serious man with a prominent hearing aid, he had published a book on English grammar that we all had loyally to study. I could never thereafter split an infinitive, and it had a permanent influence on corrections to girlfriends and my children: ‘Don’t say “quite unique” – something is either unique or it is not’; ‘“Disinterested” means impartial, not uninterested’. Kathy dubbed me Conan the Grammarian.

Like most ambitious teenagers, I was dogged by the question – from teachers and relatives and everyone I met – of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had by now abandoned interest in becoming a missionary or tennis player, but the school was good at careers advice, subjecting pupils to numerous ‘aptitude tests’– and it turned out that my perfect occupation would be that of an orchestra conductor. I liked the idea, but I could not read music. I had lost interest in maths, which ruled out accountancy or the preferred profession of an actuary, and despite my attraction to the Reader’s Digest doctor, I wasn’t sure about trying my unsteady hand at surgery. I began to wonder whether my facility at debating meant that lawyer might be an attainable career choice, although I had never met one.

At age fourteen I did a speed-reading course and obtained a list of the world’s best books. I borrowed them from libraries and began to enjoy the pleasure of literature uncondensed. The most impactful was Great Expectations, the story of the convict Magwitch, who returns from Botany Bay to confront, in a memorable scene, his unwitting beneficiary at Pip’s flat in the Temple (by a coincidence that could be called Dickensian, the very flat allocated to me after I became a Master of the Middle Temple forty years later). The character in the book who most intrigued was the lawyer, Mr Jaggers, the deus ex machina of the plot. Most readers find him slightly sinister and he is not one of Dicken’s popular or inspiring characters (if you want a hero, try Sidney Carton). But I was gripped, from the moment he appears at the Three Jolly Bargemen pub to explain the presumption of innocence to bar-room readers of a tabloid who have presumed the guilt of a client suspected of murder. He remains in the book a figure of self-controlled power and professional purpose, dedicated unemotionally to saving the lives of wretches at the Old Bailey who manage to pay his fees. For all the guilty secrets he keeps as a counsellor, it is his good deed that is the wellspring of the plot. Mr Jaggers was the first lawyer I met, through the imagination (grounded in his early life as a court reporter) of Charles Dickens. He was someone I thought, at age fourteen, that I might like someday to be like.

It was censorship that finally determined my career. In my final year at school I got hold of a book that influenced me profoundly: The Trial of Lady Chatterley. The Menzies government, not content with banning Lawrence’s novel, had banned this account of the trial, published as a Penguin Special, as well, on the grounds that a transcript of the celebrated court case might ‘deprave and corrupt’ Dame Pattie Menzies and the wives of Australia’s ruling classes. This idiocy provoked a courageous Sydney bookseller to arrange for friends in England to transcribe by hand every word of the book – legal arguments, witness cross-examination, judge’s summing up and all – onto thirty-two tightly spaced ‘air letters’, the fastest means of communication in those days. The pages entered Australia as personal mail and so eluded the censors. The Trial of Lady Chatterley was then reconstituted and printed in a samizdat edition, and a copy fell into my schoolboy hands. What I found exciting was not the surplus of four-letter words, nor the erudite debate over D. H. Lawrence’s place in literature, but the conduct of the trial by the book’s defenders, Gerald Gardiner QC (soon to be Labour Lord Chancellor) and Jeremy Hutchinson QC. Their court tactics replaced those of Lew Hoad in my pantheon, and by the end of my final year my ambition had settled. I was now a prefect, with a particularly cheeky first-year class to oversee (and no power to cane them, as they usually deserved). ‘What you going to be when you grow up, sir?’ they asked me in assembly line.

‘I am going to be a barrister, at the Old Bailey in England,’ I replied, to my own surprise as much as theirs.

They burst into disbelieving laughter. ‘Some hope, sir,’ said one. ‘How many pimples you got on your face, sir?’ said another.

I smiled: thanks to censorship, I had found my vocation, just as (many years later) I found Gerald Gardiner to help with Spycatcher, joined my learned friend Jeremy Hutchinson for censorship trials heard in the Old Bailey, and accepted the invitation of Penguin Books to write a foreword to a new edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley.6

Meantime, some cultural interests were developing: I could neither sing nor play an instrument, and had no knowledge of music other than the Top 40, which I would listen to with Auntie Peg – ‘Volare’ and ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?’ One day I walked into the school assembly hall when a rehearsal of Trial by Jury was in process, and was smitten by the wittiness of the words and the rum-te-tum of the music. I became an instant Gilbert & Sullivan fan. Records (long-playing discs, in those days) were too expensive, but providentially an EMI cut-price operation, the World Record Club, offered some G&S operas that had been recorded in East Germany (to avoid D’Oyly Carte copyright) by good British casts. I soon knew all the words, and moved on to the sexier Offenbach, in clever translations rendered by the Sadler’s Wells opera company. I was excited when the company brought their version of Orpheus in the Underworld to Sydney’s Tivoli Theatre and I persuaded our Latin teacher that she had to attend – she was quite shocked that in Offenbach’s version the reason for Orpheus turning round to Eurydice (and thus losing her to hell) was not the magnetic pull of his love but her thrust of a candle up his posterior.

Love of operetta led to love of opera – a matter of logic, I think, rather than any genetic inheritance from Joe Kroll. For my twentieth birthday, my mother took me to see La Traviata so I could thrill to the trill of Joan Sutherland, who was accompanied by a striking and actually quite slim Italian tenor named Luciano Pavarotti, in the days before he became, in every sense, great.

Orchestral concerts never enthused me, perhaps because attendance was compulsory for school concerts at the Town Hall, but also because they did not have words. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra had previously had one of the world’s best conductors, Englishman Sir Eugene Goossens, to whom Australian music owes two crucial discoveries: Joan Sutherland (working in a typing pool) and the need for Sydney to build an opera house. He was, alas, another victim of censorship – disgraced and deported after the vice squad (egged on by the Daily Mirror) arrested him at the airport for importing indecent photographs secreted beneath the score of Salome. When he claimed that his butler must have done it, by packing some Continental porn before he left Europe, he was confounded by the fact that the face on some of the photographs was that of Rosaleen Norton, a habituée of Sydney’s red light district, Kings Cross, who had introduced him to what they called ‘sex magic’. It was the perfect tabloid story – the grand maestro brought low by the ‘witch of the Cross’. Although her magic was no more than the practice of fellatio, this struck puritanical Sydney as demonic. The finest pervert ever to raise his baton to conduct the Sydney Symphony was thrown out of the country.

Theatre offered much more thoughtful entertainment. By good fortune, a close friend had a younger brother who had won the part of the Artful Dodger in the stage version of Oliver! His mother took us to see it, and to other shows, including a memorable Saint Joan played by the remarkable actress Zoe Caldwell, who hooked me on drama for ever. My own debut came in the school production of Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly, in which I played the manager of a bank robbed by the outlaws. I had to appear without trousers (the gang had arrived while I was in the bath), so my mother made sure the shirt I had hastily to put on was long enough not merely to cover my manhood, but almost to cover my kneecaps.

School, like everything else in Australia, broke up for long Christmas holidays. I spent these at Harrington, a little fishing village on the north coast to which my grandparents had retired. It took six hours, with the state of the roads at the time, to make the journey, with a break for lunch. At a café on one trip I had the quintessential Australian experience of peeling back the cheese topping on my veal steak to watch half a dozen flies emerge and slowly flutter away. It is the kind of memory that lingers. Others were happier, especially of the oysters my father could expertly extract from the breakwater rocks, the prawns we would pick up in nets at night and the fish I learnt to catch and would bring back to my grandmother to cook for dinner. I came to know the breaks in the seaweed surrounding the sandbanks where flathead would lazily bask, the rocks from which I could cast at sunset in hope of bream, and, best of all, the beach where I could wade into the waves and pick up some of the sand whiting feeding beneath them. There were big rods stacked underneath my grandparents’ home, with hoods and sinkers that I learnt to tie on to nylon lines, and the pleasure almost made up for the daily sensory torture of sitting on the unsewered toilet.

Catching fish was exciting – the choice of bait (I could thread a mean worm), the feel of the bite, the jerk to hook the fish, the careful reel-in to ensure it did not escape, and so on. But as every good fisherperson knows, the true pleasure of the sport can be experienced without catching fish. It comes from the feeling – as you watch hypnotic patterns in the water while fingering your taut line – that you are doing something, even though you are not doing anything except wave watching and waiting for the bite that never comes. It was a common dream of my grandparents’ generation of Australians to ‘head north’ before they reached three score years and ten, retiring to fish in the sunshine, and I shared it at the time.

Holidays at Harrington did put me in touch with old people, and really poor people. My grandparents were happy enough in a home they had bought and then part-rented. I would play bridge and cribbage with them and listen to the cricket – the wonderful commentaries of John Arlott and Michael Charlton and others who not only knew what they were talking about but how to talk, unlike the current crop of ex-players, who drive me mad with their fatuities. As for the town poor – the aged and the disabled, who would struggle to the post office for a pension that barely allowed them to live – I felt some stirring of political feeling. In a land of plenty, with a mining boom beginning, the care of the old and unfortunate – I called them ‘down-underdogs’ – should have been a priority for all politicians and political commentators. It wasn’t and it isn’t – I am still annoyed at how little politicians and the media (especially the ‘commentariat’ I read in Murdoch-owned papers in Australia and Britain) care about the poor. The Calvinism that has shaped the Protestant religion holds that although you cannot earn your way to heaven, concern for the poor is a sign of your election as a saint; lack of concern is an indication that death will mean a one-way ticket to Lucifer-land. For Christians, the great thing about dying – if there is a God, that is – will be to watch all the politicians and journalists going the other way.

We did not study politics at school – I did English and history honours, together with economics, French, Latin and maths. Nevertheless, at age thirteen I developed a short-lived political theory, which I would propound to my friend the school librarian. The trouble, I explained, with Australian democracy, where voting was compulsory, is that so many dumb people get to vote (my evidence for this was the ‘donkey vote’, by which many compelled electors simply voted down the card, on which candidates were listed alphabetically, so that parties would strategically select candidates with names beginning with A or B). My solution was simple: we should not deny the vote to the unintelligent, but we should give an extra vote to all those with an above-average IQ. ‘I don’t think that’s likely to find favour, Geoff,’ said the librarian, over-kindly.

I might have suggested that we simply make voting voluntary – Australia is the only democracy in the Commonwealth where it’s a crime not to vote. But voluntary voting has its problems – in the Brexit referendum, 37 per cent voted to leave, 35 per cent voted to stay, and 28 per cent didn’t bother to vote at all (many of them because they believed the opinion polls, which said the remain side was assured of victory). Compulsory voting might have saved the British from the Brexit disaster, in which the impressionable, the over-patriotic and the racist, stirred on by opportunistic politicians, propagandist tabloids and Russian bloggers, produced a result against which most of the intelligent members of society – teachers, professionals, university students, businesspeople – had voted. There should be some guard against short-term populism, but I have to doubt, like the librarian, whether my youthful idea of an IQ test at the polling booth would be the answer.

My favourite day of the week was Saturday. At the time, people worked on Saturday mornings. I would catch the train from Eastwood with my father, raid his office fridge, then take myself to visit the City of Sydney Library. This was my mecca: it had a vast range of books, all covered by cloth glued with a substance which gave off an aroma that had the effect of a drug. In some strange way, I think it turned me on as I sniffed the covers before setting off for the heady delights of the city. First stop was a film theatre which had a weekly programme of Movietone news reels, interspersed with The Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin. The black-and-white coverage of a world before television news was narrated histrionically, by a voice rising to repeated crescendos as it spoke of war, communists, car rallies7 and (inevitably) the royal family. I vividly remember the white flowers on the coffin of Ethel Rosenberg, executed with her husband, Julius, for spying. Her children were my age and I wondered – I still do – how Americans could bring themselves to kill a mother. Executions were always good news for Movietone: they were covered with grisly fascination. But comedy invariably followed, or Australian news that would end with a joke or a homely salutation: the rest of the world was there to be gawked at, but should not be allowed to intrude on our love for cricket and football, the royal family, car rallies and Mr Menzies.

Out in the sunshine, I would press my small face against the windows of shops selling model aeroplanes – how I longed for the money to buy one – and then cross the road to the main bookshop. In this shop, at age thirteen, I committed my first – and only – crime of dishonesty. There was no one looking on the first-floor display of Latin textbooks, and a racy translation of Catullus, at the cost of 1/6d, was just sitting there. I had the money, for a change, but became overwhelmed by curiosity – how would it feel to break the law? It felt guilty, of course, and the buzz of excitement as I liberated the book fizzled out as soon as I left the shop without being apprehended. The guilt did not come because of the deterrent effect of the criminal law, or from remorse, or the eighth commandment, but because I had done something of which my mother would have disapproved. That has always been my ethical standard, as I suspect it is for so many others of my generation. In my case, it even stops me from fibbing on my tax return.

Nineteen sixty-three was a febrile and frenetic year. I attempted special honours courses in my Leaving Certificate while captaining tennis, squash and debating teams, sneak-reading The Trial of Lady Chatterley, gleaning some sex education from news reports of Stephen Ward’s ordeal at the Old Bailey and listening to early Beatles melodies. There was also the distraction of those two essential requirements of being Australian: sport and ‘mateship’. Everyone had to have ‘mates’ – mine were half a dozen of the brighter kids, those who shared a degree of cynicism about power (whether of teachers or of government). My first experience of what mateship meant had come at the end of the previous year, after we had performed a play I had written to entertain the boys in the departing year. They enjoyed it, and when we were summoned to the headmaster’s office the next day we assumed it was to receive his thanks. Instead, fingering his cane, he told us it was an obscene and criminal libel on various teachers, himself included. ‘Who wrote it?’

There was a long and (for me) quite painful silence – would they ‘dob me in’? Eventually, one stepped forward and said, ‘We all did, sir.’ And the others slowly nodded. This, I realised, was what mateship meant.

But something was wrong – I didn’t want the cane but I did want the writing credit. Ego got the better of discretion and I owned up. It turned into a Monty Python-esque moment as we all vied for punishment:

‘We all wrote it, sir.’

‘No, I wrote it!’

‘No, we all did.’

‘No, sir, I wrote almost all of it…’

The confused headmaster shelved the cane but ordered me – his prime suspect – to apologise to all the teachers.

The experience – I was quite astonished at the overreaction to satire – taught me that discretion might be the better part of valour when it came to credit for our final schoolboy stunt – a plan to disrupt the headmaster’s final address to our year. This was a solemn speech that would be larded with Polonius-like precepts about how we should behave in the big wide world. My idea was to interrupt it with a broadcast from a ‘Rebel Radio’, mixing seditious reflections on our education with readings from a new satirical magazine called Oz (a Sydney equivalent of Private Eye). Several of my mates were budding engineers and they worked out how to rig the assembly hall sound system so that at the flick of a switch, the headmaster’s microphone would be cut off and the rebel broadcast would be heard through the loudspeakers. A courageous classmate was prevailed upon to record the subversive content (I did not want to be expelled after voice recognition of my ‘Pommy’ accent). The switch was flicked just after the head began his speech. He stood in frozen fury. ‘It must be Robertson,’ he spluttered.

‘No, it’s not!’ I shouted as I jumped from my seat in the hall, unwilling this time to take the credit. My engineering mates had wired the hall so cleverly that none of the teachers could work out how to stop the broadcast, and the headmaster eventually gave up. It proved, I suppose, that we were now old enough to outwit the authorities. I doubt whether they went on like this at Eton, but perhaps that was their loss.

There was no time to gloat: we had to hunker down for the Leaving Certificate – an external examination, the result of which would be the key to winning a scholarship to Sydney University. Your future depended on how much memory you could cram into three hours of speed writing, and how well your teachers had tipped the questions. I cannot now remember what causes I attributed to World War I, or my answer on the economics of autarkies, although I do recall mentioning the rape of Miranda and analysing the scansion of Prospero’s injunction to chastity.

A few nights before the results, we went to the theatre, to laugh manically at a young comedian from Melbourne, whose Edna Everage (long before she was made a dame) resembled all our grandmothers. To open the show, Barry Humphries came on stage with a long flaxen wig and a surfboard, singing:

I was down by Manly Pier

With a tube of ice-cold beer,

And a bucket full of prawns upon me knee.

When I swallowed the last prawn,

I gave a Technicolor yawn,

And chundered in the Old Pacific Sea.

Fifty years later, I was able to recite it back to Barry, our neighbour in north London, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

The interesting thing, looking back, is that we state school kids had absolutely no idea how good – or how bad – we were academically. We came from a new, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants comprehensive, without a notion of how we would fare against kids from the massively funded private schools based on British models, who had bigger and better textbooks. Our teachers seemed good enough, but perhaps they could have been better. My favourite, a charming but anarchic history master, had once told me to wag school and spend my days in the State Library. I took his advice, but did not know how it would pan out for my history honours effort.

Our results sent us into a state of shock – my friends and I had attained first class in almost all our honours subjects. And, mirabile dictu, I had come second in the state in history. I was so overwhelmed at this achievement that it was several hours before I began to wonder why I had not come first. Later, I put this down to the fact that the other kid’s father was a history professor who had set the honours paper. Ironically, we became rivals again in 1975, when our first books were published by the same London publisher. Mine was about the mistreatment of Irish Republicans by the British, and it did not sell well except in Ireland. His book was a hagiography of General Pinochet: many thousands of copies were bought by Chilean embassies around the world. Once again, I had come second.

* * *

We were not really disadvantaged by attending a comprehensive school – we weren’t bullied or buggered or forced to join cadets. But we were not led to believe we were any good. The lack of confidence came out in university tutorials – old school ties, for no rational reason, induce self-confidence and self-assertiveness. That should not be the case: public education should compete much more effectively in the parental marketplace. Not only is it free, it has the great advantage of secularity. In a world where dogma has become the greatest threat to rationality, I still think that this is the most important form of education. Something only comprehensive schooling can produce is diversity – the value of children and teenagers mixing with a wide variety of fellow human beings from different social classes, different ethnic and religious groups, and different levels of advantage and performance.

I am inclined to think, however, that schools make little difference to the adult we learn to be at our mother’s knee. Years later I defended A. S. Neill’s famous school Summerhill from David Blunkett and his education inspectorate, who were trying to close it down. One of Neill’s basic beliefs was that children come to embrace education – but only when they want to. Hence they must not be forced to attend class. Of course, Blunkett’s government inspectorate had decided to close the school because its pupils were not being forced to attend class. The case (which became a TV movie) challenged the bureaucrats who could not tolerate difference and could not abide parents who genuinely believed their children would thrive under different conditions.8 I called evidence from former Summerhillians – an astrophysicist, a philosopher and a Hollywood actress – whose free schooling had done no harm. That, I think, is the best thing that can be said about a school, and it could probably be said about Epping Boys High School in my day.

These days when I talk to teachers, I advocate courses in human rights, which should be introduced (perhaps in the space allocated to religious studies) in all secondary schools. I recite the story of the headmistress who sent all her new teachers this letter:

Dear teacher,

I’m a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness, gas chambers built by learnt engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burnt by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is to help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated morons. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

It’s surely time to put that insight back into and onto the school curriculum. Human rights are not history, because they aren’t past; they’re not law, because they’re still in flux; they’re not philosophy, although they do provide ethics for our time. Nor are they religion, because they pay no heed to the supernatural; and they’re not politics, because they’re not populist. They are, however, drawn from all these disciplines, and more, in their efforts to define and enforce human values. Values which a democratic society can’t be neutral about. For students in our state schools, and teachers as well, they serve to show that privilege is an anachronism, dogma a distraction; freedom is a birthright and discrimination a wrong that should never be suffered. To the advantages of comprehensive education with its secularity, diversity and locality, let us now add humanity.

Notes

6 C. H. Rolph (ed.), The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v Penguin Books Ltd (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

7 Car rallies were absurdly popular in ’50s Australia, especially the ‘Redex Trial’, in which familiar-brand vehicles were driven around the country. It was a big deal to be taken, age seven, to gawk at cars you could see on the streets, lined up before the start of the 1953 Redex Trial. I had completely forgotten my excitement until Peter Carey’s novel about it, A Long Way From Home (London: Faber, 2017), stirred my memory.

8 See Summerhill (CBBC, January 2008).