Big Blue Sky Read online

  The Great Eastern was owned and run by the Kerrs, a husband-and-wife team whose daughter-in-law, Penny, was a good friend of the family. Located past the northern end of the Monaro, this was sheep and, where farmers had access to water, cherry country. To the west, treeless hills, scarred and devoid of life, dotted the landscape. In between, the plains were grey and droughty, with dry creeks snaking through paddocks, and miles of fencing laid out every which way.

  Young was a rural hub and the hotel, which was in the main street, was patronised by a mix of locals from the town, farm hands, stock and station agents, fruit pickers and other itinerant strays who wandered in at all times of the day and night.

  Between the time I’d agreed to work as a roustabout and my arrival, Old Man Kerr had a heart attack. He survived, thankfully, but was out of action. That left his wife, Margaret, a refined woman in her late fifties, and me, fresh out of school, to run the pub until a permanent replacement could be found. Getting thrown in at the deep end was the best learning experience for the novice that I surely was—only just starting to shave and with long blond hair and well-rounded vowels from a city private school. In other words, I came from a planet far removed from a town like Young.

  During the day the drinkers didn’t so much converse as grunt in shorthand, and it took me a while to decipher what they were saying. It was a kind of mumbled song cycle: weather, weather, sport, gossip, local news, weather. Once you’d picked up the rhythm of the words, and which stage the cycle was at, you could safely chime in.

  But what really mattered, apart from whether the town would experience the blessed relief of rain, was how a glass of beer was poured. I quickly learned that a millimetre too much froth—head, as it is known—in the glass or, alternatively, a millimetre under, was tantamount to treason for the beer drinker. ‘What are you, mate? Some kind of mug?’ Such ineptitude could spell disaster for the publican, as there were several other hotels in the main street and holding on to your regulars was crucial for business. I stayed up late at the end of the first day practising pulling beers from the dregs at the bottom of a keg. As I got the hang of it, Mrs Kerr breathed a bit easier.

  There were some Aboriginal workers among the customers, and this was the first time I’d encountered Aboriginal people. Ironic given that I’d already had contact with Papua New Guineans.

  The tempo during the week was like a shambling funeral march and I counted down the days until the weekend. Friday and Saturday nights were much livelier, especially when thirsty men came in from outlying areas. One recurring problem during my stay was that the weekend crowds were often reluctant to leave once ‘last drinks’ had been called.

  The 1960s counterculture revolution had rolled across the Pacific from San Francisco and into suburban lounge rooms, and was now pushing into the hinterland. In January 1971 I was one of the few visible embodiments of this radical new era in town. Not everybody took kindly to being ushered out at closing time by someone they didn’t know, who looked like a hippie or a surfie or some such subspecies of the modern generation. If a fight broke out at closing time, which wasn’t unusual, I’d try to manoeuvre the brawlers outside, ducking punches and hoping the rest of the bar would follow to watch, then quickly dart back inside and lock the doors.

  The end of my first week came. The law required hotels to be closed on Sundays, so I was looking forward to a day off. Instead, Mrs K asked me to bring a keg around to the rear yard and set it up for Sunday morning.

  At ten o’clock sharp, out of nowhere, a smattering of regulars appeared, with the local police sergeant joining in for a few schooners and a late breakfast of fried sausages and onions. It was a pretty smart arrangement for the publican’s wife and the cop. She kept her serious drinkers happy, and the sergeant had the errant characters herded into one place, where he could keep an eye on them, and do a little socialising at the same time. The town ran pretty well, from what I could judge, and I couldn’t help thinking this arrangement was one of the reasons.

  I slept in a small room on the second floor with a window that looked out over the town to bare brown slopes in the west. In those rare times when I wasn’t working I read like a demon—Hemingway, Keneally, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (‘I have seen the truth . . . in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love . . .’ stayed with me)—and rested my aching limbs. Apart from the hum of trucks doing the night-time run, it was a lot quieter than I was used to. The real noise was the buzzing in my head. I was wound up like a spring, permanently excited. Out of uniform, out of school, out of Sydney and raring to go, getting a little more life experience under my belt.

  …

  Summer wound down and my stint at the Great Eastern finished. I drove to Canberra with Mum to enrol at university and then headed over to Burgmann College, which would be my home for the next three years.

  Some Barker friends had raised an eyebrow over my choice of university. Why quit the pulsing, emerald city, with its great beaches and cosmopolitan pubs, at such a promising time? The question wasn’t so much asked as implied. As my big burst of swotting over the previous year had paid off, I could have gone to Sydney University and rubbed shoulders with the serious lawyers in Phillip Street. Yet here I was, leaving the bright lights to go to a planned metropolis seen as dull and artificial, full of politicians and bureaucrats, dry and hot in summer, very cold in winter. As comedian Barry Humphries once screeched, ‘Canberra, darling, I couldn’t live there. It’s just a bunch of suburbs searching for a city.’

  But I found the nation’s capital ideal. Sure, it had a sterile air. The city centre was a haphazard collection of shops and modest office blocks that people couldn’t get away from fast enough. The houses were little boxes in uniform, scattered across the Canberra plain and spreading out to the hills. No sharp edges or wild colours, no messy experiments in design, everything cantilevered and constructed to the same standard.

  None of this mattered to me. I loved the natural character of the city, with generous areas of parkland and open space surrounded by wooded hills and ranges.

  I loved the placement of the lake (named after American architect Walter Burley Griffin, who, along with his wife Marion, had designed Canberra) smack in the middle of town, bisected by the two main avenues that linked the northern and southern sides of the city.

  I loved the low-key sense of national purpose that seemed to radiate from the creamy white, low-slung Parliament House, the serious air around the big modernist National Library and other stern-looking government buildings on the southern side of the lake.

  Most importantly, I was now free to spread my wings without causing my parents too much grief, yet still close enough to charge back to Sydney, only three hours with the foot flat to the floor on the deadly Hume.

  In my earlier enquiries about ANU I’d discovered that it drew students from across the nation, as well as from overseas. The Colombo Plan scholarships scheme supported by Australia meant the keenest from Africa, South-East Asia, PNG and the Pacific came there to study. This was the clincher. Living with students from varied backgrounds sounded interesting, a stark contrast to the samey middle-class tribe I’d been a member of all my life.

  I’d applied for Burgmann College for the same reason, plus it was brand-new and had the added bonus of being a co-ed college. Like most people, I didn’t know a soul before I arrived, and so friendships were quickly made—including with another Sydney private-school refugee, Mark Dodshon, instantly nicknamed Doddo by his new friends—and have lasted to this day.

  The college was located on the southern perimeter of the university, close to the lake, and was still under construction when the first intake of students arrived. L-shaped with elongated two-storey wings and surrounded by trees, it was hip 1970s in style, with lots of glass and open areas leading to the grounds outside. I lived in Barassi, which became the partying wing. Named after legendary Australian Rules player and coach Ron Barassi, it had views across the lake and westwards to th
e Brindabella Mountains. The panorama through my college room window became my inspiration. Sometimes it seemed to change each hour, a reminder of the pulsing flux of weather bearing on water and land, with the mountains constantly changing colour throughout the day.

  The university and its colleges were experiencing big social changes. Students, unlike the drinkers in Young, were fully embracing the freedoms that the 1960s had ushered in. There was something in the air that reached its zenith with the mass movements against the Vietnam War, the campaign for racial equality in the US, the quest for women’s liberation and a host of other social causes. Many students rejected what they saw as the suffocating mores of their parents, reinforced by seventeen years of conservative rule in which authority wasn’t widely questioned and social stirring was frowned on.

  This high-water mark of change was backed by a dazzling soundtrack of protest music across genres: folk, pop, rock and the avant-garde. It was a time for new relationships and new experiences. Society was definitely in transition and there was a feeling that anything was possible. I jumped right in.

  The only curb on my lust for life (apart from a nod to self-preservation) was my need to work. I was determined to pay my own way given the straitened circumstances at home, and so during my time at ANU I held down a variety of part-time jobs, including as the inaugural Burgmann College barman. The college had decided to have its own bar in order to foster college spirit. After my stint at the Great Eastern, I was the logical choice as no one else had much experience, and so most evenings during the week saw me mixing drinks and playing confidant to my fellow students.

  Where I could fit it in, I took on other occasional work. I’d managed to get a truck driver’s licence just after leaving school, hoping to get work in a Sydney factory, and this useful document helped a lot. I trundled second-hand furniture around for St Vincent de Paul, sold Sharpe Brothers soft drinks door to door, worked in a carpet warehouse and on the weekends did time as a labourer at a woodchip factory, of all things, on the outskirts of the city.

  This last gig required an early start and Sundays were hard going. Once the factory floor was swept and the boss had disappeared, I’d sneak off and grab a quick nap in the massive pile of woodchips that were dumped next to the factory building. The stack made for warm and surprisingly soft bedding. I wasn’t the only casual who’d discovered this hideaway and it wasn’t uncommon to bump into other students half buried in the pile, happily snoring off the night before. One morning I collapsed on top of someone who would become a close friend and colleague many years later in government: Warren Snowdon, the Member for Lingiari in Central Australia.

  …

  Burgmann College’s motto was ‘The Place to Be’, and it wasn’t far off the mark. As the newest college on campus it attracted its share of lively people. Nominally Anglican, it had been established by a collection of Canberra churches, and was lucky to have as its first master Dr David Griffin, who was open-minded enough to preside over a unique social experiment. Unlike similar colleges of its ilk, there was no student hierarchy or senior common room. The facilities were not segregated between men and women. There were no rules other than to be socially responsible; it was a modern version of the great second commandment, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’. As a result, Burgmann wasn’t cliquey, and it was relatively free of the cant and pompous chiacking, inherited from English university colleges, that often passed for culture at these institutions. We were the first intake, tradition-free, with a blank canvas on which to paint, and so we made it up as we went. As in nature so in life, diversity produces healthy communities; and the colour of beige—in my eyes, where I’d come from—was thankfully absent from this lively college next to the lake.

  Burgmann later became well known as the breeding ground of a prime minister (Kevin Rudd) and cabinet ministers of different stripes (yours truly and Nick Minchin, Minister for Finance in the Howard government), along with senior diplomats—John Dauth, who served as ambassador to the United Nations; Judy Pead, ambassador to Sweden; and Hugh Borrowman, ambassador to Vietnam—and lawyers and public servants, many of whom spent their formative years there.

  In 1971 it was buzzing. A kaleidoscope of youth had gathered from home and abroad: kids from the bush, overseas students, the reckless and the studious, the drinkers and the pot smokers, the well-off and the poorer students on scholarships.

  Like many colleges we produced our own annual revue. It was light-hearted stuff, all about lampooning the social and political foibles of the day: playing Beethoven’s Fifth on wine bottles, pretending to be members of the Russian Ballet dancing to a bushranger ditty. There was plenty of talent on offer: pianists, guitarists, thespians and comedians poured out of the woodwork.

  One typical performance by a raconteur of great skill, John Terry, who later went on to work for legal aid in NSW, saw him simply read out the names of suburbs and their postcodes from the Canberra phone book in an exaggerated ABC newsreader’s accent, which made everyone collapse in hysterics. (Well, it seemed funny at the time.)

  On another occasion a group of students dashed off to a Canberra hotel to kidnap the famous English comedy duo, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, who agreed to the heist and came back to have dinner at the college, tossing off a truncated but hilarious routine on departure.

  I don’t have many regrets from this period, but not putting in more effort while at university is one. An occasional student at best, I struggled to concentrate. The law seemed stodgy and dense, and there was so much going on that I missed most of my classes, leading to a predictable end-of-year ritual: borrowing notes from studious mates and cramming like a speed freak in the final weeks. Sometimes on the morning of exams I’d wait for ten minutes after everyone else had gone in and were already furiously scribbling their answers, just to generate some adrenalin. Not the best way to pass, but the only method of motivation—blind panic—that worked for me.

  Politics classes were more interesting, especially the lectures by Professor L.F. Crisp, who was an authority on Labor prime minister Ben Chifley. I occasionally joined the honours students who congregated in his study after class to hear him reminisce. He actually knew a prime minister. We sat on the fraying carpet in his office, mouths agape. Some of those students were already playing politics, and the student union meetings echoed loud with red-hot rhetoric on the rights and wrongs of the world, who was to blame and what needed to be done about it.

  We were basking in the afterglow of the ‘summer of love’, and the slogans and lyrics rolled off the tongue easily: ‘Make love not war’, ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with’. And I fell in love quickly, and on more than one occasion. This earth-shaking part of growing up had mostly eluded me until then, but was suddenly centre stage. It was heady mind and body contact, a supercharging of the senses. Some relationships didn’t last that long, but emotions were always on the boil and break-ups, and making up, commonplace. In fact, the freedoms we were experiencing were a kind of mirage, because most people were really looking for the perfect mate. Eventually the ship of young fools righted itself, and the search for an authentic relationship began in earnest, as it has since the first of never.

  Still the campus pulsed with an energy that, when directed, was potent. One of the big issues of the day, Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, was dividing the nation. The conflict was long-running, having started in 1965. Young men were chosen by lottery to do ‘national service’ and serve in the army. But as the war grew increasingly unpopular, some young men who were picked simply refused to cooperate. I was due to be considered in the next selection process and, if my birth date was drawn, I would have to decide then if I’d chance my luck or go on the run. The second issue attracting attention was the system of apartheid that had divided South Africa into a two-tier society, with black South Africans on the bottom. The student leaders and much of the student body were of one mind. Both issues had to be remedied immediately, whatever it took.
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  In the case of the campaign against apartheid, ANU students were well placed to make an impact. The national parliament was just across the lake, as were various embassies and consulates that had a presence in Canberra. The South African embassy became a target for student activists who planned a succession of actions, including a permanent posse standing outside the embassy with signs reading: TOOT AGAINST APARTHEID. This meant the sound of car horns blasted across the parliamentary precinct all day and, courtesy of those students who had cars, all night as well.

  The tour of Australia by the South African Springbok rugby team was an opportunity to intensify the campaign. Games were interrupted by spectators who took to the field, smoke bombs were set off, the police presence was significant and civil disobedience was legion. We marched in large numbers from the university into the centre of town to protest the arrival of the Springboks in July 1971. Looking back down University Avenue at a crowd that took up all the available space, ten people wide and stretching for half a kilometre or more, brought home the latent power that people have when they gather en masse for a cause, if they are willing to use it. In the ensuing tussles with police a number of students were arrested (and later released) as the game staggered on. In the stands surrounding the pitch chaos reigned. Even though it was another ten years before the South Africans were banned from playing international rugby so long as apartheid was in place, the seeds of change were well planted during this time.

  Burgmann College became an occasional refuge for those students on the front line. One evening a short, stocky student rushed into the college, soaking wet. Dave Bradbury, later to forge a career as a documentary filmmaker, was a student radical who had narrowly escaped the clutches of the police—leaving his wristwatch behind. The arresting officers were determined to track Bradbury down under the guise of returning his watch.