Dismissing the myths

A Radical Tory:  Garfield Barwick's Reflections and Recollections
by Sir Garfield Barwick
Federation Press

When Leslie Stephen -- with uncharacteristic optimism -- announced that there was no such thing as a dull autobiography, he spoke as one fortunate enough to have escaped today's more dispiriting samples of the genre.  He would surely not have been so sanguine had he been compelled to endure, for instance, the archetypal "as told to" paperback:  wherein some sports "hero" (not previously noted for authorial activity far above the defacing of locker-room walls) grunts into a cassette-recorder for hours at a stretch.

Thank goodness, then, for a real memoir such as Sir Garfield Barwick's.  Australian lawyers' reminiscences are apt to consist of mere self-justificatory plods through court appearances long forgotten except by themselves ("But easily the greatest of all my forensic triumphs came in the 1934 case of Rex v. Amalgamated Pencil Sharpeners Inc."):  whereas Sir Garfield's, in their unsensational manner, make fascinating and clearly-argued reading.

One of Sir Garfield's priorities has been to rebut David Marr, whose celebrated exercise in pulp-fiction Barwick was hitherto the sole widely-available account of its subject's career.  Marr's more eccentric phantasms, any of which could have been avoided by the creatively-demeaning but incontestably-honourable expedient of checking their verisimilitude with Sir Garfield himself, move their victim to a nicely disingenuous response:

"Men in public life must accept, as I do, the slings and arrows of outrageous journalism but ought not to be subjected to factual error ... the writing of [Marr's] book was undertaken at the suggestion of its publishers as a "quickie" which I understand to be a superficially written book for publication against some publicised event which might enhance its sale ... I quote from his Introduction:  "I began to write Sir Garfield's life with a single purposes:  to pin on the man his responsibility for the crimes [sic] of 11 November 1975";  that is to say, that the book was not written as a record of fact but as a polemic to fulfil a slanderous intention".

HUMBLE ORIGINS

Though nothing will ever convince the Keating mentality that childhood indigence and devotion to conservative values can coexist, Sir Garfield's own upbringing (like that of Menzies) was distinctly humble.  Born in 1903 to a printer and his wife, young Garfield lived in Stanmore, a Sydney suburb which even with today's exorbitant housing prices has not exactly become a monument to yuppiedom.  Of Methodist background, he obtained numerous prizes -- generally of books -- in that church's statewide examinations before winning a bursary to Fort Street Boys' High, alma mater of James McAuley and H.V. Evatt.  From his voracious youthful reading he learnt what might now be the most Politically Incorrect lesson of all:

"lack of money did not prevent the full use of what talents one possessed.  Indeed, the strictures the lack of wealth imposed on me I have come to see as a blessing in disguise.  Consequently I have never bemoaned my origins or my parents' lack of capital or felt jealous of others whose parents have been better placed.  Success has come from my own efforts, and there is an intrinsic satisfaction in that".

To read this is to realise the true casualty of current pedagogical vandalism:  not Gordon Gekko, who is rich enough and cynical enough to buy any sort of education that tickles him, but the bright bookish boy from the working or lower-middle classes.  (Bright bookish girls of whatever social standing can always look to the affirmative action gynocracy).  In Sir Garfield's adolescence such a boy, by means of winning scholarships, would have been launched towards whatever political, judicial, artistic or diplomatic eminence he craved.  He was not obliged to endure the torment of his modern counterpart:  trapped, till at least his early twenties, in secondary and tertiary "schooling" which has as its whole basis the quaint notion that favouring elitism in any field but sport is ethically indistinguishable from shoving Jews into gas ovens.

IN PARLIAMENT

Already Sir Garfield was 51 when urged to contest the seat of Wenrworth, and 55 when elected Liberal MHR for Parramatta.  During the Depression's depths he had admired Jack Lang;  after Lang's downfall he maintained cordial relations with Sir William McKell, J.J. Cahill and Jack Renshaw, while at no stage of his long life does he seem to have been living even on the same planet as Ayn Rand.  (He devotes an entire chapter of this book to recounting his passionate and informed support for conservation, in the days before the troglodytes took control of that field).  But any socialist delusions he might once have entertained soon faded into "the light of common clay".  Partly by the mere fact of having thought out his philosophy -- a philosophy as hostile to America's presidential panem et circenses as to Australia's own class warfare -- he never exemplified the culture of amateurism for which so many late-blooming Liberals have a depressing genius.

To some colleagues, however, he appeared recklessness personified.  When he sought as Attorney-General to systematise Australia's divorce legislation, older hands "expressed their sympathy and told me that it was likely to put an end to my political life ... buoyed by a novice's ignorance, I felt undaunted".  It requires an almost skull-splitting mental effort to imagine a time when Australia's church leaders upheld, rather than unctuously contributed to the wreckage of, Christendom;  yet A Radical Tory reminds us that in 1959 such was indeed the case.  Melbourne's Anglican Archbishop became so vexed at the new Attorney-General's enthusiasm for the Matrimonial Causes Bill that he required Menzies' firm assurance as to Sir Garfield's own religious devotion and marital fidelity.

Among Sir Garfield's lesser-known virtues in office was a complete refusal to stand for Fourth Estate slovenliness.  He learnt this lesson the hard way as External Affairs Minister in 1962, when various off-the-record remarks that he uttered to newspapermen about Indonesia were given the screaming-headline treatment by Melbourne's Herald (as it then was) the following day.  Subsequently he turned for self-defence to his tape-recorder.

"The next time I was interviewed by a journalist there was a microphone on the table.  The visitor called attention to it.  I said, "That's something that will always stand between you and me.  I will never have an interview but that I have my own record of it".  The experience indicated to me that the press have no real sense of responsibility for the welfare of the country.  Their interest is in scoops, exclusive interviews, and tragedies or disasters ..."

His wisdom should commend itself to the Liberals' more blatant present-day no-hopers, always prone to delude themselves about being able to "handle the media".  It appears never to have struck these Pollyannas that the only sure-fire method of "handling the media" in 1995 is to ply its most typical representatives with bowls of Ratsak.

Let us hope, by the way, that Sir Garfield's recollections of the early 1960s silence forever the mythomanes who continue to aver that Australia's leaders never gave a Fourex about Asia before the Beatific Vision of Whitlam's cabinet.  Sir Garfield's own dealings with Tunku Abdul Rahman shed particularly unflattering lights on multicultural nonsense, for which Malaysia's leader felt only scorn.  You would not want the Tunku shooting his mouth off amid an SBS current-affairs panel designed to hymn cultural diversity.  Or rather, you would want him, but SBS wouldn't be crazy enough to have him.  The White Australia Policy represented no discernible moral problem for him at all;  on the contrary, the only thing it seems to have inspired in him was the question "Where can I get one just like it?"  According to Sir Garfield, the Tunku,

"understood Australia maintaining a European population:  "Why should you have my insoluble problem?  The problem of ethnic diversity is insoluble.  I have Malays, Indians and Chinese and it is insoluble"."

Afterwards it became, to put it crudely, a damn sight more insoluble:  with first the shotgun marriage of Singapore and Malaysia, then that union's annulment, and (for the decade's ultimate party piece) the 1969 riots, which last example of heart-warmingly authentic multicultural dialogue left several hundred corpses blocking the streets of Kuala Lumpur,

ON THE HIGH COURT

About his High Court days Sir Garfield says rather little, in the belief that describing his work there will thrill fellow lawyers more than what Daisy Ashford called The Mere People.  "My work as a judge is to be found in the volumes of the Commonwealth Law Reports ... there are few [decisions] of such public interest as to be worth mention here".  He nevertheless maintains a keen enough sense of the ridiculous — sharpened occasionally on what he currently sees as his own shortcomings;  more often, and more promisingly, honed on the antics of Whitlam -- to be highly informative in this part of his narrative also.  Memorable above all is his account of being telephoned by Supergough, eager to announce Murphy's High Court translation:

"He said, and I recall his precise words, "Murphy has agreed to accept the appointment".

"But he is neither competent nor suitable for the position", I said.

"But he managed to have the Family Law Act passed," replied Whitlam".

That type of non sequitur, presumably, is how Australian Prime Ministers get credited with matchless erudition.  Real erudition (as opposed to Whitlamite window-dressing) manifests itself in Sir Garfield's own lucid analyses of the Dismissal crisis, of monarchy's continuing relevance, and of the egalitarian folly behind the Hawke Government's excising of knighthoods from the Order of Australia.  So logical is his marshalling of the various facts involved that even ABC current-affairs reporters should be able to follow him.  As for the really profound metaphysicians in contemporary Australia's dump-the-Queen movement -- Joan Kirner, Jenny Kee, Carmen Lawrence, Kylie Minogue, Yahoo Serious -- they will find Sir Garfield's prose a piece of cake:  albeit cake rich enough to induce in their republican personae severe choking.

A Radical Tory's title derives from Clyde Cameron's verdict on its author.  "He [Cameron] thinks of me," Sir Garfield told PM listeners in 1991, "as the most Tory man he ever met who had strange radical ideas".  In his skill at thinking his way to the roots of political and statutory issues (a skill which necessarily soured him on modern manias for confusing legal practice with social work), Sir Garfield justified the appellation "radical" with greater etymological completeness than Cameron is likely to have realised.

These recollections' proof-reading is not of the finest;  Federation Press's copy-editor has not acquired sufficient French to render tour d'horizon correctly, sufficient grammar to avoid using "loathe" as an adjective, or sufficient knowledge of postwar geopolitics to achieve the correct spelling of Indira Gandhi's and Duncan Sandys' names.  By contrast, the index is well above average.  Altogether, the publishing house which took A Radical Tory, on (after Allen & Unwin permanently antagonised its author through its determination to inflict Marr's screed on us a second time) deserves to be rewarded with sales as lively as is Sir Garfield's own anecdotal style.