Big Blue Sky Read online

  One year, following my fifteenth birthday, I got lucky when this monotonous calendar of activities was spectacularly interrupted and I was allowed to travel by myself to visit the family plantation, Varzin, in Papua New Guinea, with a detour on the way back to stay with a schoolmate whose family had settled in the Eastern Highlands town of Goroka. Now this was a real adventure.

  I flew to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and then changed to a smaller plane to fly to Rabaul. This was my first taste of long-distance air travel, and despite decades of flying since, including ten years on the Canberra−Sydney shuttle as a member of parliament, I’ve never tired of it.

  I exited at the ramshackle collection of huts masquerading as the Port Moresby airport to be hit full in the face by oven-force heat; I was dripping wet in an instant. Then came the overwhelming smells, the strange vegetation and the different-looking people. I could feel my stomach tighten and nerves tingle as my eyes opened to a world beyond the northern suburbs of Sydney, drinking in the wildness of the place into which, as if by magic, I’d been catapulted.

  On the second leg, to Rabaul, we ducked in and around the afternoon storms that are common in the tropics, flying over the empty beaches and reefs that fringe the island of New Britain, and then over great stretches of jungle, with occasional flashes of lightning sparking on the near horizon. I could clearly see the huts of villages scattered across the island, mainly on the lower slopes and along the coast.

  And then we descended into Rabaul, the ancient DC-3 dipping like a lumbering pelican, first passing over a large harbour, ringed by what looked like hills but was actually a giant caldera, dominated at either end by prominent volcanoes. To the east, easily visible, was the low, flat shape of New Ireland. The names—Britain, Ireland—might have been familiar, but it was impossible to imagine a starker contrast between them and their Melanesian counterparts. Here it was hot and brimming with wild growth; the earth could quickly turn malevolent and I was awestruck. If travel is a drug, from that time on I had the taste.

  My uncle picked me up and we drove for half an hour south-east along a winding coast road towards the small town of Kokopo. Occasional villages dotted the route, with small groups of people sitting outside their huts. They wore bright sarongs and gave a nod or a wave as we drove past. There were very few other cars. It was so different to anything I’d ever seen I was jumping out of my skin at the sight of it all: the intense cobalt sky, azure colours wherever you looked, with deep green vegetation hugging the sides of the road, and the Coral Sea, a soapy, aqua pond to our left. By the time we’d turned off onto a smaller dirt road that led up into the low hills where Varzin was situated, Australia had temporarily disappeared off my map.

  My aunt and uncle lived in a spacious bungalow, with views down to the sea and across to New Ireland. With its cane furniture, ceiling fans whirring overhead, extensive verandahs and a guest wing that I had to myself, it was light years away from our brick bungalow in West Pymble. There were no other signs of human settlement, just rows of cocoa and copra trees, and rainforest spilling across the road and surrounding the house on three sides. I was amazed at the strangeness of the place I found myself in, but no one had prepared me for a further inversion of my teenage worldview—the fact that my relatives also had servants who worked on the plantation and in the family home. They were Tolai people from a nearby village. Unbeknown to me, I’d landed at the epicentre of claims by these people for their land. It was now the final years of the colonial occupation of Papua New Guinea by European nations.

  The Gazelle peninsula, where Varzin was located, is among the most fertile parts of New Britain and the Garrett family holdings were the jewel in the crown. This region of New Guinea had first been colonised by Germany in the 1920s. Following World War II, the newly established United Nations determined that the territory should be administered as a trusteeship by Australia. The Tolai made numerous claims for return of the land, with the first, and initially successful, being a claim for ‘native customary rights’ over Varzin. This decision was successfully appealed to the High Court by the plantation owners, including my uncle. But their victory was short lived as around the world colonised states fought for recognition and standing. Within four years of my visit, the Whitlam government had initiated discussions with local leaders with a view to granting independence, which subsequently took place in 1975.

  The hangout of expatriate Australians was the sports club at Kokopo, a ten-minute drive down to the coast from the plantation. They’d gather at five each evening for drinks—and earlier on the weekends, after completing a few rounds of golf or bowls—to gossip and sip gin and tonics. It was very Somerset Maugham; they were not outwardly racist but cocooned from the outside world and blindly resistant to the pressures building around them. Papua New Guineans performed all the manual labour, and most Europeans had a cook and housekeeper whom they paid a pittance. It had been this way as long as anyone cared to remember. One evening after dinner I raised the topic of why this unequal state of affairs should be allowed to continue. But my uncle cheerily brushed my questions aside as the impertinence of youth. Nor did he make any mention of the land claims for Varzin. I left Papua New Guinea thinking it couldn’t and shouldn’t last, and sure enough, in very quick time the colonial era came to a sudden halt. I subsequently studied the region and the Varzin court case for my Higher School Certificate (HSC) geography exam.

  Through the whole trip I was in a state of wide-eyed amazement, and, not surprisingly, vivid memories of the trip stayed with me. There was the earthquake that rumbled across the road just as my aunt and I were changing a flat tyre, tossing the car off the jack; an emergency landing in the jungle on an old World War II airstrip when a wild storm closed in across the ranges; walking into a highlands village with my schoolfriend Nigel Cluer (a future breaststroke champion), the two of us alone among tribal people from Goroka, with pigs and dogs scampering by as I stared, transfixed, at the nose rings and wild hair of the men who greeted us.

  …

  Back home, the world was moving ahead in other ways, and pop music was tugging at my sleeve, stoking my interest. A distant relative visiting from the UK brought a bunch of records fresh from London. They included Every Mother’s Son’s ‘Come on Down to My Boat’, plus early Monkees’ singles. We constantly played ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, written by 1960s pop rock icons Gerry Goffin and Carole King, with its tart commentary on suburbia as ‘status symbol land’. Good melodies and sharp observations, an unbeatable combination. Later on, when we had a bit of spare pocket money, Andrew and I signed up to the Australian Record Club, which dispatched at least one album every three months by mail. This was the only correspondence I ever received and what riches—Eric Clapton playing searing guitar as a member of John Mayall’s band on The Blues Alone, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s seminal Cosmo’s Factory—we pored over the album covers while repeatedly playing the black vinyl discs on a His Master’s Voice record player, the size of a large shoe box, which had pride of place in the lounge room.

  I’d started going to a church youth group on Sunday evenings where older guys with an acoustic guitar would occasionally show up and sing folk songs, some with a religious bent. For someone with a yearning to know more about why humans acted the way they did and how they interacted with their God—and who was entranced by live music—these gatherings were a new awakening. I’d often join in with the singing on the lookout for opportunities to perform—somewhere, anywhere; I just didn’t know how to make it happen.

  Then halfway through high school, when I was in year nine, Dad announced he’d have to work overseas for six months. Mum started working nights as a waitress to raise the airfare to visit her sister in Canada, my brothers were sent to stay with friends who had a farm in the far west of the state and I subsequently put in a term as a boarder at Barker.

  It wasn’t the easiest of times. I was tall and skinny and maturing slowly, surrounded by burly farm boys, many of whom were alr
eady starting to shave. I was an occasional target for bullies, but managed to keep most of the ape behaviour at bay. If I couldn’t bluff my way out of trouble, I could usually talk my way out, as most of my fellow boarders weren’t that bright.

  Because of my recurrent asthma, I’d had a nose operation to improve my breathing. It was sore for months afterwards and, on the one occasion I volunteered to fight a younger but tougher boy whose bullying I’d objected to, I finished the worse for wear. One direct punch to my still-tender nose forced me to a teary and humiliating surrender. Even so, I resolved that, if I could help it, this would be the last time I’d come off second-best. I came to deplore violence of any kind, and still do, but I vowed to better prepare myself for a world that had little in common with Sunday-night youth group. This was a harder place where you had to be able to take care of yourself and others, if need be.

  We slept in a large dormitory and once ‘lights out’ was called I pulled up the blankets and, with a pillow over my head, stuck my ear directly on the speaker of my tiny transistor radio. I was mesmerised by the frenetic sounds of the British music revolution, with a smattering of Aussie bands in the mix: the Kinks, the Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Easybeats and Masters Apprentices blasting out their early best.

  This music, and humming hymns and old remembered melodies, helped sustain me, for boarding was a solitary experience. Most boys already had well-established friendships and those I was close to went home on Friday afternoons. At least I had my one good friend, Nigel, with whom I’d jaunted through the jungles of New Guinea. But if he wasn’t around, I spent the weekends after school sport and chapel walking by myself through the school grounds, just mulling over tunes and thinking. My trip to Papua New Guinea had stirred up all kinds of thoughts: about politics and society, how the world worked, and what part I might have in the future.

  My boarding experience soon came to an end and I couldn’t wait to get back home, away from the predictable food and conversations that I’d endured for months, relieved only by the occasional postcard or letter from overseas cataloguing my parents’ travels. By now ensconced in a bigger house in Eton Road, Lindfield, we were still on the western side of the railway line but had more room to accommodate three big teenage boys. It was here that adolescence—in my case late and relatively uneventful—unfolded.

  As in West Pymble, visitors were frequent, and I enjoyed listening to and then joining in the often heated discussions about the topics of the day. Later on, the war in Vietnam featured extensively. These debates would continue around the dinner table at night and we were given a fair hearing. My parents held opposing political views. My father, while not gung-ho, was a Liberal Party supporter. Mum, on the other hand, had grown up in Bowral, and experienced the blanket conformism that went with conservative communities. As it happened, Gough Whitlam was friendly with her elder brother and had visited the family home in his student days. Whitlam was now leader of the Labor Opposition and, like a number of her friends, she was drawn to the modern vision he seemed to embody.

  Even at Barker it was impossible to ignore the scent of big changes and I became more interested in politics through 1969, my second-last year at school. I’d been to a big anti-Vietnam War demonstration in the city with a few like-minded classmates. Conspicuous in our uniforms, awkwardly holding our straw boaters behind our backs, we were heckled mercilessly by the crowd when we arrived. But then a few voices rose up to argue that these pimply youths shouldn’t be held responsible for their parents’ decisions and that everyone’s support was needed—even that of these young refugees from the conservative classes—if the war was to be quit in time. We carried on listening to the speeches in uncomfortable silence.

  It was also a federal election year and our home became an unofficial campaign base for the Labor Party. While Dad went off to play golf on the day of the election, Mum and I got up early and marched up and down the leafy streets of Lindfield and Roseville, in one of the nation’s safest Liberal seats, pushing how-to-vote cards into letterboxes. I was convinced a change of government was necessary, although most people we ran across didn’t seem to share my conviction.

  Meanwhile, in an effort to get serious about my studies, with the final exams only twelve months away, I’d taken to sitting up the front at school. In the economics class the following Monday, the teacher—somewhat surprisingly—asked the students, ‘If you could have voted in Saturday’s election, who would have voted Labor?’

  Without hesitation, I thrust up my hand, only to hear an outbreak of titters and laughs behind me. I swung around to find I was alone. One out of thirty; enough said.

  When the headmaster decided on an experiment in democracy by instituting the first student representative body in Barker’s history, my political instincts gelled. I stood for office for the first time, and as there were very few (if any) nominees, was elected president of the senior student council.

  I took the role seriously. A common room had been provided for final-year students where we could meet and engage in intellectual discussion and debate. Instead, we mainly played table tennis and hung around. Despite the general level of apathy among my peers, and a lot more realpolitik as it turned out, I drafted a manifesto proposing regular meetings of the student council so we could make suggestions to the headmaster on how the school could be run better. I then sent our proposals up the food chain, but I never heard back. Democracy, to paraphrase Sir Elton, lay bleeding in my hands.

  …

  My final two years at school passed in a blur of study and some tentative socialising. The North Shore girls I liked—alabaster beauties with sweet dispositions—already had steady boyfriends, or were pretty choosy. Dancing classes were held at Turramurra on Friday nights and a huddle of boys would congregate in one corner, trying to summon the courage to ask a girl they really liked to dance. This was no big deal for me as I enjoyed the company of the opposite sex, but at the same time I couldn’t get on the girlfriend/boyfriend wavelength—I was only just out of short pants. When a friend’s sister I was drawn to actually kissed me one night, it put me into meltdown. Although nothing came of it, I lived off the memory until I left school.

  There was one girl I’d met at a youth fellowship folk night whom I liked a lot. Rayna, a beautiful, gentle girl, was special. But she lived many suburbs away on a different train line altogether and it took five hours on public transport to get to her place, spend half an hour in polite conversation with her mum, head out on a movie date or go into the city, escort her home and then get myself back to Lindfield. The logistics of getting together saw the relationship falter and then stop; in short, the rail system defeated us.

  With everyone around me making plans and scoping out possible careers, I had decided to try to get into law. My parents had floated it as a possible profession and it seemed like one of the few things I might have had an aptitude for—namely, arguing. But as is the case today, you needed good marks to get in so I stepped up my efforts.

  In fact, I’d already applied to the Australian National University, which was trialling a new entrance scheme for students who showed real promise, offering early entrance without requiring a top-level mark. It sounded like an attractive initiative, especially for someone in the B class. As it turned out, my application wasn’t accepted, but it did put the germ of an idea in my head. Here was a way of getting off a well-trodden path that everyone seemed to take for granted.

  I’d made some good friends at Barker and no enemies that I was aware of. I’d enjoyed my time in the choir and various music productions. I’d taken my Sunday school beliefs with me and led the Crusaders Christian group for a time, and I’d learned a bit along the way: about the heart and soul through English literature, and the land and the way it’s used through geography. But the narrow habits and material aspirations of the North Shore were looking increasingly monochrome to me, the landscape predictable and flat. I wasn’t angry or sad, and I certainly didn’t resent my parents for sending me to a school l
ike that nor the privilege that surrounded me. I just couldn’t wait to leave.

  It was nearly forty years before I returned to my old school to give an address to students studying music. By now I was Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts in a federal Labor government and we’d been in power for less than a year. I was greeted with muted restraint—I didn’t expect anything more.

  3

  THE PLACE TO BE

  THE ROUTINE WAS tougher than I was used to. Out of bed early, summer’s on the run, the dry air still warming to its mid-afternoon peak.

  Help kick off the morning fry-up, breakfast for the few guests—mainly commercial travellers who’d stayed overnight.

  Get the pub ready for the day. Rolling kegs with TOOHEYS and RESCHS stamped on their metal girdles up from the cellar on a wooden ramp—and, God, they were heavy—and into the bars: the public bar at the front, and the ladies’ lounge at the rear. The familiar smell of stale beer was in everything, wafting through the rooms and across the verandahs like cheap perfume at a hens’ night.

  Then hunker down and work in the front bar till late. Ease out the drunks, empty the till, clean up, and start all over again.

  It was the beginning of 1971 and I’d come down to work at the Great Eastern Hotel in Young, in southern New South Wales, before commencing study in Canberra.

  With better exam results than expected, I’d qualified for Arts/Law. The Australian National University, where I’d had a go at early entry, far away from the cloistered vibes of the North Shore, was my first choice.