In 1964, aged seventeen, my acne on the wane, finances secured by a scholarship and confidence boosted by my Leaving Certificate results, I entered the Gothic archway to the main quadrangle of the University of Sydney. I was bewitched by the promise of intellectual excitement for the next six years (I had signed up for a course in arts followed by law). The place had a colonial whiff of Oxbridge, in its architecture and its motto, Sidere mens eadem mutato (‘The same spirit under a different sky’). The sandstone lions at its entrance were said to roar at the approach of a virgin (this joke might have seemed funny to a seventeen-year-old male virgin). The place was full of recent ghosts – an orientation revue had scripts by one Clive James, recently departed to Cambridge, and my philosophy tutor arrived very late for his first class, explaining as he wiped away a tear, ‘I’ve been at the airport, farewelling Germaine.’ Whoever she was, I felt sorry to have missed a woman who could have such an impact.
All the excitement in our first weeks centred on a young leather-jacketed English lecturer newly arrived from Manchester, who looked and sounded just like a Beatle and was lecturing on D. H. Lawrence. It was a hot summer and the large lecture theatre was filled with hundreds of partly clothed females in open-mouthed adoration of Howard Jacobson (now a grizzled Booker Prize-winner), who could not believe his beginner’s luck.
English was a joy to read, although the faculty was savagely split between the Leavisites – disciples of the Cambridge don F. R. Leavis, who believed that the text must speak for itself without reference to the author – and everyone else, who favoured putting literature into some kind of context. Leavis had a black mark in my mind because he had refused to give evidence for the defence in the Lady Chatterley trial, but the bearded and intense lecturers he inspired (Jacobson was one) were the more entertaining. Professor Goldberg, the head Leavisite, revitalised the student literary society and I will always be grateful to him for introducing me to The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart, who had been the star witness for Lady Chatterley. I thought the division all a storm in a literary teacup, although it split the faculty down the middle. Of course you should be able to appreciate Saint Joan without bothering about Shaw’s liking for Stalin, or read Mrs Dalloway without knowing that Virginia Woolf wanted to exterminate the mentally handicapped. But context can add meaning and understanding and enjoyment to a text, as I had to point out, at risk of failure, to my examiners in my BA honours exam. They had set a paper requiring the appreciation of two unattributed and anonymous poems – one clearly superior (it was W. B. Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’); the other the verses my father had taught me, which had inspired fighter boys throughout the war (Magee’s ‘High Flight’). I could not imagine them ever reciting the dour Yeats poem as they went into battle, so I felt almost duty-bound to point out to the examiners that the less accomplished verse at least offered some meaning and hope to those experiencing war in the air. My paper, presumably marked by an anti-Leavisite, received a distinction.
The study of literature, once past Beowulf, never seemed a chore. I marvelled at Marvell (even more, many years later, when I studied the Civil War era during which he wrote), while John Donne’s sensual images (and he a priest!) superseded the crudities of Catullus in my erotic imagination. Then the poets of our twentieth century – Auden, of course, and T. S. Eliot, whose ageing Prufrock still comes to mind whenever I walk on a beach (I shall never wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled) or dare to eat a peach (was it, I wonder, a fear of dribbling, or of indigestion?). I was much taken with George Orwell, although my admiration for this hero of the British left has been somewhat dimmed by the recent revelation that he was an informer – on his fellow writers – for MI5. When speaking at the George Orwell Memorial Prize recently, I joked that he was ‘just another Blair’. It did not get many laughs from an audience now largely unaware that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair.
The subject that fascinated me was philosophy, in which Sydney University had a notable pedigree by virtue of the lengthy tenure of John Anderson (from 1927 to 1958), who had given his name to a description – ‘Andersonian’ – which I never fully understood, although its remaining disciples, by the time I arrived, seemed to be pissant libertarians. But much as I enjoyed the study of philosophy, the artificiality of the arguments eventually irritated me. I wanted a discipline that offered concrete and common-sense rules at a level of generality that could be applied to solve real problems with an outcome that was not necessarily good but could at least be said to be fair. In history we studied revolutions, through the spectacles of an American author, Crane Brinton, who likened them to fevers, with early symptoms, high temperatures and long periods of recovery. His metaphors never convinced me, although later they struck me as a useful analogy for litigation, which can become a kind of disease. I immersed myself in the French and Russian Revolutions, and the 1848 eruptions, from which my great-great-grandmother had fled Berlin.
My first essay, I decided, would be on an early French revolutionary, perhaps the first socialist, one Gracchus Babeuf. I took myself, as had been my school-day wont, to the State Library, from whose bowels I extracted what appeared to be the only book ever published on Babeuf, and indeed one of only two copies of this rare book which had ever reached Australia. I thought I was safe, and I copied it prodigiously. When I visited my lecturer to receive his congratulations on my erudite essay, I noticed with some horror the other copy of the book on his desk. It turned out that he was finishing his own work on Babeuf, and he read me a lecture on plagiarism. It had the desired effect, and by the end of the second year I had an offer to do an honours course.
But by this time I was anxious to help make history rather than to study it. The reactionary government of Sir Robert Menzies (we called him ‘Ming’ – he reigned imperially from 1949 to 1966) was conscripting my generation to fight a real war in Vietnam, where the ‘yellow peril’ was waiting to descend, as if by gravity, on our whites-only civilisation. National service was conducted as fairly as a lottery: only those whose birthdates were drawn out of a barrel were called up, and then only if they could not make it to university, where you were exempt. An old friend from Epping High, Bernard (aka ‘Judy’) Garland, became the first of my school mates to be blown up in South Vietnam. I remember him as a kind and decent mate, always willing to help, and now he is just an entry on the wall at the War Memorial. There were 580 others, and 3,000 wounded (included my cousin from Dapto, whose kids bear the consequences of Agent Orange). I suspect that Menzies did not give a proverbial toss for the South Vietnamese, whose leaders included the hideous Madame Nhu, who exulted in what she called ‘Buddhist barbecues’. He just wanted to do what he thought America wanted – although, ironically, as it now appears (from Robert McNamara’s memoirs and other sources), America thought that Australia truly wanted the US there. Menzies misled America and he had no insight into Asia and no concern for the kids he put in harm’s way.
It was censorship, as ever, that propelled me onto the student political stage. Nineteen sixty-four was the year of the infamous conviction of the editors of Oz magazine, Richard Walsh and Richard Neville: they were jailed by a moronic magistrate for publishing satire he did not understand, and some weak puns (‘Get folked’, a pun advertising a folk festival, was one the magistrate thought obscene). Even more obscene, to his perverse mind, was a savage cartoon by artist Martin Sharp (who was jailed as well) titled ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’, which satirised drunken and loutish behaviour by privileged hoons in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. This was the same idiocy that had censored Prospero’s adjuration against premarital sex in The Tempest, and now in this crazily conformist country it was putting artists in jail for condemning immoral conduct by their peers. I made my first public political speech, on the front lawn of the main quadrangle, where protest crowds gathered, in order to raise money for the Oz appeal.
Inexorably, I was drawn to student politics, and was elected as president of the Students’ Representative Council, 1966/67. In that office I found myself regularly in the papers denying absurd allegations or hosing down provocations. When the Telegraph reported that ‘Methods of contraception are described in detail in a three-page supplement in the student newspaper Honi Soit’ (only in Australia could this be news, or a sensation, in 1967), I had to explain that ‘students stand four-square behind the publication of information about contraception … they come to university with no real sex education [so much for those Father and Son evenings] and the problem of the unmarried mother is a real one at the university.’ It was – and I dared not mention that I had authorised our welfare services to pay for impecunious students to have illegal abortions.
The SRC supported more than eighty clubs and societies, and those concerned with drama and music actively promoted the new, the classic and the avant-garde – the latter, in the case of works by Pirandello and Alfred Jarry, often occasioning visits by the New South Wales vice squad, whose members sat stoically through Ubu Roi, with its chorus singing loudly the refrain ‘Arseholes to you’. The student revues were brilliant, building up a tradition of acerbic, sledging satire very different from Beyond the Fringe, but just as funny.
My own efforts at satire were confined to Oz magazine. There was much to lampoon, but my wordplay was laboured, over-intellectual and unmemorable – it was a joy to meet Kathy, years later, whose puns are effortless and survive in quotation dictionaries (‘Monogamy is what men think dining room tables are made out of’ etc.). My work for Oz did garner one particular accolade, thanks to Garry Shead (now a famous Australian artist), who illustrated my ‘Birdwatchers’ Guide to Vietnam’ (politicians as doves, hawks etc.) by putting genitals on several ornithological caricatures. This could not be allowed in the backward state of Victoria, so the Oz distributors put a large black line over the testicles before they crossed the border.
Honi Soit, the SRC newspaper, provoked a lot of controversy during my term as SRC president. It caused shock and horror in right-wing newspapers by sending a correspondent to Hanoi (which any good newspaper should have done) and in the wider population by raising funds for medical assistance to the Vietcong. It was humane, I suppose, for Australian students to pay to save the lives of jungle fighters, but paradoxical if, thereby nursed back to health, they were to kill more Australian soldiers. I spent some time quoting Voltaire (‘I don’t like what you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it’) in defence of the editors, but eighteenth-century French philosophers did not carry much weight in a country that supported this war against gravity (i.e. against the yellow peril descending inexorably from the north) and dominoes (Asian countries would collapse towards Australia if Vietnam fell over).
I look back with amusement now at my address to students at a ceremony in the Great Hall in 1967, filmed for a Panorama-style documentary on education.9 I wore my mortar board while speaking (a breach of academic protocol) and mispronounced the word ‘orgy’ – no doubt because I was not indulging in any. I did by this stage have a regular girlfriend, who lived near Dobroyd Point, which has the most romantic view from a high cliff over Sydney Harbour. We would contemplate the starry heavens from my father’s Valiant of a late evening, until puerile policemen would sneak their paddy-wagon behind us and switch their lights on to high beam. Once, I parked the car at midnight a little too close to the edge, over which it partly slid and needed tow-truck recovery the next morning.
Another development in my romantic sensibility came from a dawning liking for opera. It is difficult to think of Sydney without its iconic Opera House, but the building did not open until 1973, and the art form was hitherto provided by the curiously named Elizabethan Theatre Trust. It had an amazing scheme (I have not heard of it anywhere else) involving ‘youth nights’. During its seasons, every opera would be performed on a Monday ‘youth night’, which youths (defined as anyone under twenty-six) could attend for the impossibly low cost of 5 shillings. The casts were generally good – the principals were usually Australian returns from Sadler’s Wells or Covent Garden – and when Donald Smith was singing, the high notes were as high as any tenor in the world and even sweeter. Smith was a small, plump man with a hare lip, who preferred to perform at rugby league clubs rather than La Scala, but in costume and make-up his plangent voice transformed him into the most romantic of stage heroes. (I can never forget his appearance as Cavaradossi in the second act of Tosca, igniting the audience with ‘Vittoria’ – the victory over the torturers). I soon discovered an interesting thing about the ‘high C’ which Smith would effortlessly hurl from the stage, whence it would enter at the base of my backbone and run tingling up my spine to explode in my head: it had a mysteriously erotic effect on a female partner. I would wait until just before I knew the note was in the offing and then hold and gently stroke my partner’s hand. It worked every time.
* * *
The great battle of my student political life was against the university itself, to ensure that it took student concerns into account in major decisions. Australian universities in the ’60s, like those in Britain, were run by powerful administrators responsible to the vice-chancellors: student representation on committees and disciplinary tribunals was unknown and unwanted – indeed, actually feared. ‘Student power’ had erupted on American campuses, the slogan originating in the free-speech movement at Berkeley and spreading like wildfire along with anti-Vietnam protests. The vice-chancellor at Sydney, Sir Stephen Roberts, saw it as a dangerous threat to his authority, and to that of all vice-chancellors. They were ready to nip in the bud any form of US-style protests, sit-ins or occupations. So when the first challenge to their absolute power arrived in early 1967, in the unlikely form of a postgraduate student, Max Humphreys, who organised a protest at the university library against an increase in fines for overdue books, Roberts and his star chamber – called the Proctorial Board – grossly overreacted. They suspended Humphreys, without any form of due process, despite his first-class degree in psychology.
It may seem bizarre that a revolution should begin as the result of a fine for overdue books. Nonetheless, it was a 400 per cent hike, imposed arbitrarily and without any consultation with the student library committee. And what soon became the real issue was the high-handed and obviously unjust behaviour of the proctors. Humphreys had undoubtedly been present at the sit-in, which had disbanded peacefully on the arrival of the Yeoman Bedell – the absurd Oxbridge name given to those we termed ‘the campus cops’ – sixteen armed guards commanded by our main enemy, Assistant Principal. He was the head of the administration and the real power behind the vice-chancellor, and he regarded students as mere inconveniences who should put up or be shut up. When Max the next morning attempted to distribute a hastily written pamphlet protesting against the fine increase, the Assistant Principal had him arrested by the campus cops and dragged to his office, where his pamphlets were confiscated and Max was charged with ‘gross contempt of the university authority and inciting such contempt in others’. I tried to remonstrate with Sir Stephen, a nice enough old man who chain-smoked with trembling hands, but he remained adamant: he had been to a vice-chancellors’ conference where they had all agreed on the need to prevent ‘student power’ from taking hold of Australian universities, and he had a weird sense that history had destined him to be the first to stop this menace in its tracks.
These heavy-handed actions provoked widespread anger and demonstrations by students who would never have thought of protesting about Vietnam. As SRC president, I accompanied Max to his hearing before the Proctorial Board – Sir Stephen and the deans of four university faculties. The hearing was a farce – we arrived to find his accusers, the Assistant Principal and the librarian, taking morning tea with these ‘judges’. They refused me permission to call no fewer than twelve witnesses who had been present at the sit-in and whose testimony would have refuted the charge that Max had incited them. We were ushered out – the Assistant Principal and the librarian being asked to remain in order to ‘advise’ the judges. They returned, half an hour later, with their sentence: Max, for his contumely, would be ‘rusticated’ for a year.
Max’s friends on the far left began to mutter about the need for sit-ins and occupations of university property. They called a lunchtime meeting on the front lawn, and to their – and my – amazement, several thousand students turned up with banners demanding ‘Justice for Humphreys’. I stood there, undecided, while they revved up the angry audience to various forms of violent protest. I realised the opportunity really belonged to the SRC, so I grabbed the microphone and solemnly pledged that it would fight the university to reinstate Max Humphreys, but any violence had to be postponed. I kept speaking – a long diatribe against the Proctorial Board and the need for student representation on it – until 2 p.m., by which time I knew the audience would have to melt away to attend classes. They did so, seemingly content with my promise that the SRC would fight the university and win. But how? We had no access to any form of power.
When I made that promise, I was thinking about the law. I had not been studying it for long, but I had picked up enough knowledge to realise that it could rectify injustice, even at a university. I had already come across the 1610 case of Dr Bonham, a Cambridge don restored to his lectureship by the Chief Justice after his unfair dismissal. And I had by this time commenced my articles of clerkship at the most prestigious (or so it described itself) solicitor’s firm in Sydney. The partner I was working for thought it would be fun to sue his alma mater – so long as I did all the work, and we found a QC prepared to take it on. The silk who accepted the brief with great pleasure was Gordon Samuels, a saturnine Englishman who had cut his teeth debating at the Oxford Union against Kenneth Tynan and was a dab hand at civil procedure, in which he was a part-time lecturer at the law school. His name on our pleading was calculated to strike fear into the vice-chancellor’s heart, and it did.
Sir Stephen and his proctors – all eminent professors in disciplines other than law – had no defence to our claim for Max’s reinstatement and damages, and the last thing they wanted was a trial which would expose their ignorance and unfairness. They offered to settle by restoring Max to his seat in the library after a ‘retrial’ at which he would merely be reprimanded. I drove a harder bargain – we wanted two seats for students on the Proctorial Board and on other key university committees. Sir Stephen gave in – even paying the SRC its legal costs and cancelling the increase in library fees. Both he and the Assistant Principal were ridiculed, not only by the left but in right-wing journals, while the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that the Main Quad be turned into a ‘penitentiary for naughty students’. This was a crucial learning experience: how ‘lawfare’ could win battles for just causes, on behalf of those who had no other kind of power.
The ‘Humphreys Affair’ was my SRC’s finest hour. I am all in favour of student protest, including, as a last resort, occupations and sit-ins – but not if they can be avoided by sensible compromise or, as a second-last resort, legal action. The importance of the action we took was that it created a precedent: it served notice on all Australian university administrations that they must deal with students fairly. I had come to university expecting to find ‘a community of scholars’, but had found instead a community organised largely in the interests of its professors and administrators. Students were to be seen but not heard. A good example was provided by the resignation of Sir Stephen, which we forced by our legal action: the university gazette dedicated an entire issue to reminiscences about him from everyone – except, of course, any student. No one thought to ask me: I was merely the representative of the 16,000 people for whom the university was meant to exist. When Sir Stephen’s replacement arrived – an emollient economist from Manchester University – he made a point of including me and my successor in his counsels. I like to think that this period in student politics did force the university’s ‘community of scholars’ to include scholars in their community.
It was a triumph of sorts, in its time and place. When my student activist daughter teased me – ‘What did you do in the ’60s, Daddy? Were you arrested at anti-Vietnam demos? Were you on the barricades with the students in Paris in ’68?’ – it was deflating to have to reply that I was suing the university and arranging legal defences for protesters. But our legal initiatives in some ways had more lasting effects. When reminiscing with Tariq Ali and other ’60s protesters from the US and Europe, and we go round the table to tell of the outrages that provoked our battles, ‘a steep increase in library fines’ brings forth incredulous laughter. But, ironically, because we used the law rather than broke it, we had success.
Soon enough, our triumph had the practical result of requiring the appointment of two student proctors to join the board for its next big case: ‘Who threw the tomato at the governor?’ The governor was the imposing figure of Sir Roden Cutler, a VC winner no less, who had come to campus to inspect the university regiment. He had lost a leg in the course of winning his Victoria Cross, which did not stop him supporting conscription for Vietnam, where many more legs, and lives, were being lost. That justified, perhaps, a demonstration against his visit, though not the act of someone in the crowd who had hurled a rotten tomato, accurately, at his medal-bejewelled chest. But who? The indefatigable Sergeant Longbottom, charged with policing student demonstrations, came up with the tiny figure of Nadia Wheatley, who had certainly been in the crowd, although in those days there were no CCTV cameras nor any other photographic evidence to convict her.
I was appointed a student proctor to advise the distinguished professors of medicine and science and engineering. They certainly needed advising – I could hardly believe how insouciant these great men were about the rules of evidence, and how anxious they were to convict someone – in this case, young Nadia – to satisfy the media thirst for blood over the splattering of a war hero. I found it necessary to argue that the charge, which would have ended Nadia’s academic career, had to be proved beyond reasonable doubt – I even brought one of my criminal law books to read to them about ‘the golden thread of the criminal law’. Eventually, Nadia was acquitted and went on to write acclaimed children’s books, but the case provided a first insight into judicial psychology – people who want to be appointed as judges think they have a duty to find someone guilty.
One benefit of life in student politics was to participate as delegates to the National Union of Australian University Students (NUAUS) conferences, held at different campuses around the country, and most often upstairs in a Melbourne pub. After one conference in Tasmania, a friend and I decided to spend a week hiking through the state’s fabled wilderness, along with a female delegate named Gayle. We didn’t have much money, so at the end of each day I would go alone to a country pub to book a room – they usually had two or three beds – and having paid and taken occupation would nip outside to my friends waiting around the corner to invite them in for the night. This seemed to my partly formed forensic mind to be perfectly legitimate – I had purchased the room as overnight occupier and there was no express condition about not inviting guests. It was at a grungy, empty hotel in Launceston that the three of us were arrested, after a complaint from a very grumpy publican. His wife had found Gayle’s sanitary towel in the toilet and deduced that it did not belong to me. We were taken to a police station and fingerprinted before I could expand upon my legal theory about my innocence. It convinced my friends, who urged me to run it when we were brought to court the next day, but it did not convince the police. Having learnt at school that discretion could be the better part of valour, I paid the grim-faced hotelier for three rooms to avoid the danger of a conviction from a Launceston beak. The cops drove us to a local stadium, where we slept on concrete benches, with my companions complaining that we would have been much more comfortable in a warm police cell.
* * *
The other task for the SRC president was to arrange legal representation for students arrested for demonstrating against sending Australian troops to Vietnam. These demos were frequent in 1966/67, as conscripts of our own age who had not managed a university exemption began to be killed in provinces with unpronounceable names, fighting people of a colour that they would not have seen at home. My younger brother Graeme became a conscientious objector (it surprised me that he had a conscience, but his plea was upheld). The government’s lickspittle support for America’s folly (the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, went to Washington and actually said, ‘Australia is all the way with LBJ’) was opposed by Labor (for obscure reasons, the Australian Labour Party is spelled without the ‘u’) and by trade unions, but there were not many dissident voices from the business or legal establishment. One of them came from Sir John Kerr, then a distinguished judge, whose florid features became internationally famous in 1975 when, as Governor General, he sacked the Whitlam government. In 1967, however, he called me up to offer advice about handling the legal case for a hundred students arrested at a big anti-Vietnam demo. His son had been one of them, and he suggested we take his case first as a test for the rest, and he would come to court and glare at the magistrate to make sure he saw through the concocted police evidence. I was grateful for his help and sad, later, that he became a leper in his own land for dismissing – on a mistaken theory as to the legal powers of a British regent – a democratically elected Labor government.
Kerr in 1967 struck me as genuinely progressive, although in later writings I used him as an example of liberal lawyers who had a fatal tendency to go weak at the knees when given access to power. Another example was Ramsey Clark, who when made Attorney General by LBJ proceeded to authorise the prosecution of Dr Spock for encouraging opposition to the draft. Another was Sam Silkin, the Labour Attorney General in Britain who initiated oppressive actions against journalists (my clients) under the Official Secrets Act. I came to detect in the minds of these men a certain craving to be accepted as ‘responsible’ by the establishment they had hitherto been happy to criticise – their proclaimed commitment to ‘civil liberties’ faltering whenever security services told them (often mistakenly) that ‘national security’ required an oppressive prosecution. The Phil Ochs folk ditty ‘Love Me, I’m a Liberal’ neatly skewered the hypocrisy of ‘small-l’ liberals, like – I began to worry – me. So I began to describe myself as a ‘Gladstonian liberal’, unwavering in carrying through domestic reform and taking humanitarian action against atrocities abroad (well, at least atrocities against Christians, in Gladstone’s case). Gladstone did not, however, have to deal with the Cold War, nor with the CIA.
By this time, that agency had me in their sights. In 1968 I received a strange letter from the US embassy: would I care to apply for what they called a ‘Far-East Student Leader scholarship’ – a three-month all-expenses-paid tour of America? I would – I was a student leader, Sydney was in what must have seemed, from the vantage point of Washington, the ‘Far East’, and I had never been out of Australia (other than to New Zealand, which didn’t count). I did not smell a rat, or have any inkling that this seemingly educational trip, run by a pleasant-sounding foundation in Vermont, was in fact a CIA front – part of its long-term plan to win friends and influence people to believe in the American dream, or least to be wary of the communist nightmare. They were secretly funding, for this purpose, Radio Free Europe and Encounter magazine. (The latter’s editor, Melvin Lasky, who later became a friend, defended taking CIA money for the benefit of Europe’s liberal intelligentsia – it prevented them having to earn their money by writing for right-wing propaganda sheets.) I was awarded the ‘scholarship’, apparently because I had been ‘spotted’ by the CIA as a future Prime Minister of Australia. The CIA made many mistakes in the ’60s.
It was very exciting. I could not wait to Pan-Am across the Pacific, landing in Fiji at night and watching as friendly brown faces approached from the tarmac. I had left White Australia. I remained in Suva for a few days, staying with an Indian family, who explained their fears about the discrimination against them, imposed by indigenous chiefs (an issue which was to bring me back to Fiji as a QC many years later). Then it was off to Hawaii to join my group of Asian student leaders.
There were thirteen of us, assembled under the wing of a benign Scout-leader type called Phil. Some were not very political, and I suspected they had been chosen because of a familial relationship with corrupt rulers. I remember the sad face and sage advice of Hien from South Vietnam, who after the fall of Saigon was probably sent for ‘re-education’, and Shig, a jolly Japanese youth who was later to make a fortune in steel. My best friends were Kiwi, an obsessively nationalist Singaporean, who rose high in Singapore Airlines before falling out with Lee Kuan Yew, his former idol, and Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, a grave Indonesian given to frequent laughter which showed the gaps in his teeth. He became a particular friend, and in years to come I watched with admiration his political career in Golkar (the ruling party) as he fought to combat the corruption that had become endemic in his country.
Then it was onwards to California, to begin our three-month indoctrination into the values of the ‘greatest country in the world’. Our first stop was at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California, set in the mountains and, unlike Berkeley and UCLA, not known for student activism. The CIA doubtless reckoned it was a safe place, not realising that the reason for its lack of protests was not so much the conservatism of its students but the fact that most were spaced out on drugs. The very first night of our arrival featured a lecture on the subject by none other than Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor who had become the guru of dropping out. He spoke about the ‘philosophy of ultimate pleasure’ and how psychedelic drug-taking resulted in the ‘suspension of conditioning’ so that the individual could enjoy ‘real thought, real decisions, real love and real life’. He struck me as a salesman, of no great intellectual rigour (too many fried brain cells?), but what was extraordinary was the street erudition of his audience. Their questions – sometimes of a technicality that even he could not answer – showed that drug culture had permeated this centre of learning, with no obvious ill-effects. By early 1969, ‘Timothy Leary Dearie’ (as he had been saluted by ‘Let the Sun Shine In’ in Hair) was becoming passé. I introduced myself after the lecture and begged an interview for my student paper. He agreed: no doubt this Johnny Appleseed of hallucinatory drugs saw Australia as fertile territory for propagating mind expansion. I bothered him the next lunchtime with questions that he thought naïve (they probably were) while he ate a steak that had been specially prepared for him by his acolytes, ‘peppered’ with some undoubtedly illegal substance. Later he had to flee America after escaping prison, and took refuge in Algeria for some time. On his death, his ashes were put in a satellite and released, appropriately enough, in space.
Leary was the first famous American I had met – the CIA would have been appalled. It did not control our movements, however, and Phil, who was very relaxed, did not attempt to direct them. Thus it came about that in Atlanta, Sarwono and I spent some time with Black Panthers, listening to their grievances, which were real enough, and allowing them to introduce us to hash. We inhaled as deeply as we could, for some time, but abjectly failed in our first attempt to ‘turn on’. In the end everyone collapsed with laughter, not because of the drug but because of our hilariously inept attempts to get high.
We were soon whisked to Washington, where CIA connections brought us an audience with the House Minority Leader, Gerald Ford. We were unimpressed: he had a face out of a gangster movie and seemed a bit slow – he did not know where or what ‘Far-East Asia’ was. But three nights in New York were well spent: I went to a performance of Hair (which had just been banned in Sydney by the reactionary state government) and I discovered the Met. Il trovatore was playing, an opera which, as someone remarked, needs only the five best singers in the world. The Met could afford them – Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Luciano Pavarotti, Sherrill Milnes and not forgetting Ezio Pinza, for me the most thrilling of all because he had been the dubbed voice singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ in the movie of South Pacific. The Met, with its amazing Chagall stained glass, was my New York mecca ever after. On my last night I had a ticket for another opera, with Renata Tebaldi and the reigning tenor, Franco Corelli. Alas, he had to cancel to fly to his father’s sick-bed in Italy, to be replaced at the last minute by an unknown, Plácido Domingo. I heard him there first!
The CIA tour took us around the country – from the bears of Yellowstone to the Colorado canyons to the wooden bridges of New Hampshire. We marvelled at the beauty of America, and occasionally at the ugliness of some of its people – when we came across Ku Klux Klanners in the South and visited the Texas A&M (Agricultural and Mechanical) University, alma mater to George W. Bush, with its massive collection of guns donated by old ‘Aggies’ – an example of how deeply entrenched the Davy Crockett instinct is in American culture.
The planned highlight of our visit was the one-month ‘homestay’ with a typical American family in a typical American town. The place the CIA had carefully chosen, to impress on us the virtues and superiority of the American way of life, was Sarasota on the Mexican Gulf shore of Florida. This was indeed a pretty nice place – lots of spacious houses with motor launches on its numerous quays. It had a famous circus museum (it had been winter home to the Ringling Brothers), a nice little opera company, innumerable tennis courts (and later the celebrated Bollettieri Tennis Academy, where my son was to train) and plenty of fast-food delights to dazzle we Far-East Asians, who had yet to be colonised by McDonald’s.
My ‘typical American family’ was that of Milt and Judy Rubenfeld, proprietors of the local light shop. It comprised Paul, a quirky seventeen-year-old, whose bedroom I shared for the month; Abby, his very serious teenage sister; and a somewhat fractious younger brother. The latter, in this typical American family, later did time for armed robbery in the local penitentiary. Abby became a distinguished attorney with a lesbian partner with whom she produced children in Texas. But I like to think of Paul, my bedroom mate, as the most typical of all.
Paul Rubenfeld became an actor, aka Paul Reubens. He appeared in some Cheech & Chong movies and then developed his own almost immortal character, Pee-Wee Herman, to the delight of children around America, and indeed throughout the world. But Pee-Wee’s biggest adventure came when he returned to Sarasota to see his parents, dropped into one of its gay cinemas and was arrested by an undercover cop for – well – scratching himself. His career immediately came to a total and cataclysmic end. He was treated as if he had betrayed a generation of American children. Some time after Paul’s fall, I reconnected with Judy. Hugh Grant had just been caught, at the height of his Hollywood fame, picking up a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. ‘Times have moved on – it hasn’t ended Hugh’s career,’ I said. ‘Maybe they can now forgive Paul.’ She cackled with laughter and shook her head. ‘Geoff, you still don’t understand America!’
Did the CIA get its money’s worth out of my three-month ‘indoctrination’? Not if you believe the Washington Times, in which I was listed in 2000 (by John Bolton, no less, Bush’s ambassador to the UN and now Trump’s national security adviser) as one of his country’s enemies because of my arguments that the US should be bound by international law. But however forcefully I may criticise its foreign policy, the ugliness of its gun culture or its responsibility for some of the world’s inequality, poverty and conflict, I have never faltered in my general support for America’s leadership of the free world – a result, I suspect, not of my youthful CIA sponsorship but of my knowledge about the alternatives. As for Paul, he is a delightful man who has entertained my actor son and may soon make a comeback. I hope he does, although it will be too late for me to retitle this book How the CIA Made Me Sleep with Pee-Wee Herman.
Notes
9 Four Corners, ‘Great Economic Lecture’ (ABC TV, April 1967).