The Devil and James McAuley, page 29
… that wild sound
Of trumpets blowing doom and jubilee.
And if it came this instant, where would I flee,
Where hide my terror in the gaping ground,
What crack, what rift, what gulf would shelter me
And close me over never to be found
When the last hopeless wish is, not to be?702
In his broadcast on Trakl, McAuley identified a ‘sombre, nearly despairing, personal religion’ which gave rise to the poet’s ‘deeply pessimistic view of man’s condition’. For Trakl, he observed, ‘mankind had never before sunk so deep as it had now sunk after the resurrection of Christ … The tendency of Trakl’s mind was to see his world, and himself, as involved in that uttermost fall’. McAuley might just as well have been talking about himself.703
Later in 1973 McAuley resolved the problem of how he should respond to the turn of the political wheel. Aware that Peace With Freedom was tainted after its media exposé, he redoubled his efforts to establish the Council for Educational Standards as an independent, apolitical pressure group. He approached various of his friends and associates from Peace With Freedom to be sponsors. David Armstrong did not become a sponsor, although he seems to have maintained some kind of association with the organisation.704 Gerard Henderson was approached, also Margery Nichols, when both were tutors in politics at the University of Tasmania. Nichols had written a critical article on the teaching of social science in secondary schools that McAuley had published in Quadrant.705 As well, McAuley recruited Ronald Conway, a Catholic psychologist with a keen interest in education, and Stan Scott, a colleague of Frank Just who had written an article for Quadrant in 1968. Prominent businessman Sir Ian Dixon, who had been chairman of the Council for Independent Schools, was recruited to help with fund-raising.706 Leonie Kramer accepted the role as president. The first meeting of prospective sponsors was held in Melbourne during 1973. Santamaria was present, but insisted he not be included as a sponsor, saying that his name would be ‘the kiss of death’.707 Also present was Hugo Wolfsohn who argued cogently that the group should not confine itself to pedagogical issues and that it should tackle the wider political realm. Most of the participants did not agree. Wolfsohn and Henderson declined to be involved.708 Sometime later Lauchlan Chipman, who had firm opinions about education, agreed to be a sponsor. In September 1973 the sponsors met and agreed to bring out a newsletter edited by Ray Evans from the office in Geelong.
In October 1973 the first issue of ACES Review announced the formation of the Australian Council of Educational Standards, to address the decline in educational standards as a result of progressive trends ‘expounded remorselessly in the pages of the metropolitan dailies, as well as Teachers’ Colleges and University faculties’. ACES Review offered itself as a forum to keep the public up to date on developments and provide a platform for discussion. For a fee of five dollars, or two dollars for students and pensioners, members would be posted ten issues a year as well as specific monographs, of which the first was Frank Just making a case for examinations.
The first issue offered Leonie Kramer’s onslaught on the ‘woolly thinking’ encouraged by subjects like social science and behavioural science, together with Lauchlan Chipman bemoaning the lowering of standards for tertiary entrance. Homosexuals ‘proselytising’ in Victorian schools were a particular target of the second issue in November 1973, which also featured a graduation address given by McAuley at the Canberra University College. To his audience of Humanities graduates, most of whom were destined to be teachers, McAuley complained of the ‘litter of topics, experiences, self-exploration, exchanges of opinion’ which students were now offered in the place of intellectual subjects. ‘Chatter about the problems they have might have some value as a stimulant, but it is not a substitute for learning’, he concluded.709
By the end of 1973 the question of how the organisation was to fund this activity was pressing. Ian Dixon’s role had been to seek donations from businesses. He had scant success, reporting in October that AMP had agreed to give $5,500 annually and $11,000 for the first year, as long as there was no publicity. Dixon also indicated he had asked Western Mining for $16,000, but there was no evidence they ever agreed to pay.710 In December 1973 Evans was fearful that the funding would not last into the next year, including the membership fees from close to a thousand people. These new members tended to be anxiety-ridden members of the general public, often elderly, whose fear of social change focused on things like spelling or proper usage or the introduction of the metric system. There were, as well, a smattering of teachers from the private school system; few were educational practitioners within the state system. Along with their small subscriptions these new members often sent letters demanding replies and action. Typical was the letter condemning the educational columnist for the Australian, Henry Schoenheimer:
I hope ACES will slap him down. The rubbish he writes is either deliberate misrepresentation or an ignorance which is incredible. I am convinced the real if hidden purpose of the whole rotten system is not to educate children but to turn out propaganda fodder. We shall never get the situation corrected … the press is little better than a conspiracy and the ABC looks like going the same way … In the meantime could you prepare a contribution to the Malvern Community News Sheet.
Frank Just would dutifully answer these letters, his replies typed in duplicate by the part-time secretary, and meet the persistent request for a speaker or an article for the local community group, as well as providing nearly all the copy for the ACES Review, until he unexpectedly died of a massive heart attack, aged fifty, in May 1974. His role was taken on by Ray Evans, in addition to producing the newsletter for a few months. With Just gone, Evans felt himself exposed to the displeasure of the president, Leonie Kramer, who wanted a more professional-looking organisation. She felt that editorials by Evans, such as the one supporting corporal punishment, made them look reactionary. She was supported in this by Ronald Conway, who felt the wholesale attack on progressive education was ‘tactically bad’ and that many of the articles in the ACES Review were ‘perilously close to the kind of ranting polemic we seek to avoid’.711 Conway resigned as a sponsor early in 1974.712
Although correspondence with ACES Review went to Evans’s Geelong postal address as late as July 1975, sometime during that year he was eased out of the job and the office in Geelong closed. The decision was taken by Santamaria and Kramer, as Evans remembers. The office was moved to Melbourne, initially into NCC headquarters in Hawthorn. Evans believed that his editorial function was taken over by Paul D’Astoli, who worked for Santamaria, although Leonie Kramer was listed as the editor in ACES Review. D’Astoli’s name does not appear in ACES Review but he was listed in the correspondence as attending sponsor’s meetings. Another of the NCC faithful, Neil Dewan, became the business manager.713 Someone kicked in $120,000 as initial capital.714 According to Dewan, the money was used to establish a company, Educational Standards Pty Ltd, and to maintain an office, employ a full-time secretary, and provide travel and accommodation expenses for the sponsors’ meetings in Melbourne. The company also retained an expensive public relations consultant at $16,000 a month to promote the Council for Educational Standards and produce a high-quality newsletter.715 The office was in a building which also housed another NCC operation in Melbourne.716 Evans resigned as a sponsor in December 1975, privately citing the close links with the NCC as his reason. He prepared a report about his concerns for the sponsors; however, at Kramer’s insistence, he deleted any reference to the links with the NCC. As he explained to an incoming sponsor, ‘since I had no documentary evidence I had to acquiesce’. Evans also discussed the situation with David Armstrong, who felt he had acted too precipitously.717
McAuley kept a low profile during these changes, although he was constantly in touch with Kramer and Santamaria. He was on sabbatical leave from the second half of 1974 until June 1975 and was in one of his periods of withdrawal from politics, working on his survey of Australian poetry, A Map of Australian Verse, and a collection of his literary essays, The Grammar of the Real, edited by his friend Grahame Johnston. Both were published in 1975 by Oxford University Press, where Johnston was an influential consulting editor.718 Absorbed in his work he had no comment about the end to the war in South Vietnam in April 1975 and the terrible betrayal captured in the footage of the last desperate evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon. Nor did he have anything to say about the Whitlam government’s immediate recognition of the communist regime in Saigon or the communist takeover of Cambodia and Laos. The fate of South-East Asia, like that of Papua and New Guinea, was no longer of interest to him.
He came back into the political fray with an attack on the Australian Schools Commission in July 1975. Ever since Whitlam established the Schools Commission it had been a source of McAuley’s ire as the embodiment of trendy educational theories which deflected schools away from scholarly aims in favour of deliberate social engineering. He had a particular dislike of the commission’s chairman, Ken McKinnon, whom he accused of having ‘ruined education in New Guinea’.719 Even though education was essentially a state responsibility, which the federal government had a very limited capacity to influence, McAuley fixed on the commission as his major bone of contention with the Labor government.
His antagonism was in no way mollified by his being among the first to be awarded honours under Whitlam’s non-monarchal system. If anything he regarded his award of Member of the Order of Australia as a calculated insult. Patrick White, a vocal Labor supporter, had been given the highest award.720 It triggered a furious outburst reported in the Tasmanian University News. In response to an innocuous question about ‘the creative process’, he lashed out at creative writing in schools, saying it encouraged children to take ego trips across the page ‘throwing around cliches about abortion, pollution and conservation’. Creative writing was yet another educational travesty created by ‘educational apparatchiks and ideologues’ who had all but destroyed the traditional humanities subjects. As far as he was concerned, nothing was more important than getting these deviations out of the schools ‘in the interests of society and civilisation’. His colleague David Mallick, a lecturer in education who had a room two doors down the corridor from McAuley, saw himself as a target of this ill-mannered outburst. He responded by saying that McAuley’s sentimental vision of himself locked in battle with educationalists who were out to destroy civilisation did him no justice as an intellectual or as a poet. McAuley countered that he could identify the enemy of civilisation and give it a name: ‘It is the Australian Schools Commission and the forces which at every level it triumphantly claims as its allies.’721
In the July issue of Quadrant he amplified his remarks about the Schools Commission, denouncing its first report as being determined by a political ideology of egalitarianism, what he called ‘the new Jacobinism’ which did not aim at an equality of opportunity and rights, rather a process of disadvantaging the intellectually able in order to make the educational outcomes more equal.722 In the August issue of ACES Review, which was entirely devoted to the report, McAuley’s verbal artillery was unrestrained, castigating the report as ‘A Blueprint for Ockers’.723 Much the same sentiments were aired in his speech to the NSW Liberal Party Convention, in August 1975: ‘If the Schools Commission has its way’, he said, ‘a new barbarism lies ahead’.724 Again he reiterated the critique in Quadrant editorials, responding scornfully to McKinnon’s claim that he was defending hereditary privilege. As students at a selective high school in the thirties, he and his friends had not been required ‘to explore our identity as a person, or ask what form marriage might take in the 1970s, or to clear Sydney of smog’, he wrote, and they had been all the better for it.725
In each of his public utterances McAuley was sounding more and more like those angry and bemused letter-writers who wanted to ‘slap down’ the proponents of innovation and change. His vehemence showed that he had taken no heed of David Mallick’s gentle admonition at the conclusion of their protracted exchange: ‘People with different views are not the enemy, Professor McAuley. They are people with different views.’726
One decision of the Whitlam government that he did not regard with horror, although his feelings were equivocal, was the appointment of the chief justice of the NSW Supreme Court, Sir John Kerr, to the position of governor-general in February 1974. McAuley discussed the appointment with a mutual friend and they both wondered why it was that Kerr had never become prime minister, as so many had expected: ‘We agreed one reason why this didn’t happen was that John lacked ruthlessness. He could never eat people for breakfast or wield a bloody knife’, McAuley wrote in retrospect. What he most likely said at the time was that Kerr had no backbone. In another conversation, with an ex-student in London, he remarked that Whitlam was being too clever in making the appointment, believing Kerr would be pliable. To the contrary, Kerr was an extremely ambitious man who would seek to use the power given to him, he said. Knowing both men, McAuley felt that Whitlam didn’t understand Kerr at all.727
There had been no perceptible thawing in the relationship between McAuley and Kerr since 1961. In 1975 when the governor-general made an unofficial visit to Tasmania to see Keith Isles, who had retired as vice-chancellor, Isles engineered a meeting between them. A true reconciliation happened early in 1976, when Kerr visited Tasmania with his new wife. As Anne Robson, Lady Kerr had been a good friend of them both when she worked at ASOPA. She was keen to rekindle the friendship, especially since it was apparent that McAuley did not have long to live.728
McAuley’s cancer had reappeared toward the end of 1975, necessitating major surgery in late October. It was during his weeks in hospital, he later recalled, that he watched the events surrounding the blocking of supply by the Senate. Every time he turned on the television it was ‘nightmarishly the same news … the same politicians saying the same things and nothing happening’. He longed for Kerr to dismiss the government so there could be an election. He undoubtedly discussed the possible options with Santamaria, who flew to Hobart to visit the hospital on 23 October. Santamaria had been in regular contact with the Liberal leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, and he was doubtless keen to get McAuley’s opinion, as someone who had known Kerr for so long.729 They certainly discussed whether or not Brian Harradine, now expelled from the ALP, should run as a Tasmanian independent, in the event of a double dissolution.730 Lying in his hospital bed contemplating the possibility that Kerr could take the unprecedented action of dismissing a prime minister, he considered another aspect of the man he had known since they were together at Fort Street High School: ‘He would enjoy the opportunity for a grand dramatic moment; he would appreciate the opportunity, as so few Governor-Generals are given, to enter the history books.’731 Perhaps McAuley was recalling Kerr’s account of being in Westminster the moment VE Day was declared and his elation at having been a participant in ‘history being made’.732
Without warning, on 11 November 1975, the governor-general did take decisive action to sack the prime minister. McAuley was delighted to find that he had been wrong about Kerr’s lack of fortitude and that his old comrade could wield a bloody knife, after all. As soon as he was well enough he penned an appreciative editorial in Quadrant.
In the frenzied environment of conspiratorial rumour which flourished after the dismissal of Whitlam, stories began to surface in Hobart, and even in the national press, about covert consultations between McAuley and Kerr leading up to the fateful decision. McAuley’s intimacy with Santamaria did not pass without notice. Speculation grew about the nature of the wartime collaboration of McAuley and Kerr: some kind of espionage unit, it was said, connected through the shadowy Alf Conlon to the establishment of ASIO. Both were revealed to have been in the pay of the CIA: McAuley at Quadrant and Kerr as president of the Law Association of Asia, also an ‘unwitting’ beneficiary of CIA funding. Inevitably these factors coalesced into a narrative which had Kerr being advised by McAuley prior to his move against Whitlam, or, in another version, McAuley acting as go-between for Fraser and Kerr. Most definitive was the story in which the governor-general was seen by the English Department secretary in the corridor two or three days before the dismissal.733
John Kerr’s movements in the days leading up to the dismissal have been systematically studied by journalists and historians. On the evening of Thursday 6 November he and Lady Kerr flew from Canberra to Melbourne with their arts adviser to buy paintings for the official residence. The governor-general’s official diary does not record Kerr’s engagements on the following day but it is assumed he was buying pictures in Melbourne. On Saturday 8 November he was at Watsonia barracks. Kerr and his wife flew to Sydney on Sunday 9 to look at Sidney Nolan paintings. It has been established that he consulted Chief Justice Garfield Barwick in Sydney on Monday 10 November. It is therefore possible that Kerr could have flown unnoticed to Tasmania to visit James McAuley on Friday 7 November. But even if McAuley had been discharged from hospital by then, he was hardly likely to have been sufficiently recovered to be at work; in fact he did not ever fully return to his duties at the university.
In the improbable event that Kerr had come to Tasmania, and that he was seen in the corridors of the hospital and not the university, what would have been his purpose? Kerr had always been a secretive man. He later told McAuley he had consulted no one about his decision. While that claim has been disproven, it is most unlikely that he would have sought counsel from someone he no longer had any reason to trust, from whom he had been estranged for nearly fifteen years and who was recovering from a serious cancer operation. Certainly, McAuley was cultivating Malcolm Fraser, but the governor general surely did not need a tenuous go-between in Tasmania when he dealt regularly with the leader of the opposition in Canberra.734 It did not make sense. Both McAuley and Kerr have dismissed the idea as ludicrous. Gough Whitlam himself looked scrupulously at the connection between these two men he had known from his undergraduate days at Sydney University. Even he could find no conspiracy.735
