Bob Ellis Read online

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Bob Ellis and Anne Brooksbank 2016

  Bob Ellis and Anne Brooksbank assert their rights to be known as the authors of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Ellis, Bob, 1942–2016, author.

  Bob Ellis : in his own words / Bob Ellis.

  9781863958912 (paperback)

  9781925435375 (ebook)

  Ellis, Bob, 1942–2016.

  Ellis, Bob, 1942–2016—Archives.

  Authors, Australian—20th century—Archives.

  Authors, Australian—21st century—Archives.

  Journalists—Australia—Archives.

  A824.3

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Cover photograph by Randy Larcombe

  Back cover photograph by Geoff Bull, Fairfax Media

  Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Anne Brooksbank

  A Son’s Reflection by Jack Ellis

  A Friendship by Les Murray

  1. Childhood

  2. Growing Up

  3. In the Midst of Life

  4. Politics

  5. War

  6. Thoughts and Ideas

  7. Saying Sorry

  8. The Wider World

  9. People

  10. On Time Passing and Endings

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  FOREWORD

  A year or so ago our son Jack said to Bob and me, ‘You know, you have the equivalent of a municipal library on that computer.’

  The computer was only ever part of it. There were a few million more words in many sagging archive boxes that had been in storage when our house burnt down. The words survived, but virtually nothing else. As writers, words grow up around you and fill boxes or filing cabinets or computers, and you don’t realise just how many there are until you need to look back at them. Bob wrote about his own life a lot – especially in the books of diaries, most of which had some kind of focus such as an election – and it is out of this multitude of words available to me that I have set about extracting this one book, In His Own Words, which is to be a kind of autobiography, as well as a selection from some of the best of what he wrote.

  If you make it to the last pages of this book, you can learn more about how we met, in Melbourne, in August 1966, and how I have felt about him all these long years. His letter to me and mine to him were written for the Men and Women of Letters project, and we each read them to an audience at the Sydney Writers’ Festival at the end of May 2015. It was a complete shock when, seven weeks later, we were told that he had days or weeks to live and that chemo, which could only be expected to extend his life by a small amount, was probably not worth the bother. An aggressive cancer that had begun, probably, in his prostate, had already spread fast to his liver. He opted for the chemo and got eight months and used them, as he always did, to craft words – to finish a feature script, write passionate pieces on his blog about the failings of the Liberal government – at the same time reading, always reading, writing letters and going to the pictures. Apart from his Lamy pen, one of his most important possessions was his Pioneers of Cinema card, which allowed him into most cinema sessions for free.

  A lot of people had opinions about Bob, and I would hear these relayed back in different forms, written and spoken, but I found most of them had nothing much to do with the man I had known – and loved deeply – for what would have been fifty years in August 2016. It was said and written, for example, in apparent disgust at his eccentricity, that he always wore a suit. He didn’t own a suit. He wore one to our wedding in 1977, but it was borrowed from one of his oldest and closest friends and collaborators, Stephen Ramsey, who read the manuscript of this book for me and said when he finished it, ‘I think it’s Bob’s best book.’

  It would have frustrated Bob not to be assembling it himself, of course, but this book is still very much his. I selected what he had regarded over the years as some of his best writing, and I have only injected a line or two for context when I felt it was needed. He would have been frustrated, too, at not being at his graveside funeral and wake, nor at the tribute to him at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, when some of his songs were sung by Simon Burke and Andrew Sharpe better than I have ever heard them sung before. In this book he says, ‘The human tendency, I once wrote, is to first discover where the party is, and then contrive a moral reason for being there.’ He was always keen to be at the party, wherever or whatever it was.

  I remembered something Bob wrote – and it’s in this book – about the funeral of his Uncle Claude, when he and others carried the coffin. ‘I thought of these things,’ he wrote, ‘and in my mind I began to talk to him as, under his weight, we approached the open grave. “It’s all right, Claude, it’s all right. Not long now. Another couple of minutes and it’ll be over … A few more feet now, Claude, and you’ll be all right.”’ I have thought of this lately, and I think of it now, and, in its way, it is a kind of comfort.

  I am glad that Black Inc. thought of a book about Bob’s life and then thought, correctly, that he could write it better than anyone else. I will always miss him, but I will continue to be glad of this book.

  Anne Brooksbank

  A SON’S REFLECTION

  My father was a deeply religious man, consumed by ritual. But unlike the talcum-powdered Adventists of his childhood, by the time I met him, he didn’t believe in God. He believed in theatre and film, and the sacred clergy of his religion were the actors and directors he watched night after night, hour after dark-lit hour engaged in the transformation of ideas into magic.

  As children, like the children of any fanatic, we were forced into far-flung theatres and cinemas a number of times a week. Regardless of the lateness of the hour or the night of the week, we were ushered into the darkness of his now-disappearing churches for worship. Throughout each performance, his eyes were not on the stage or screen, but on us. He would spend the show craving recognition in our eyes of the magic he had uncovered.

  My father was impatient with everything except big ideas. And I think our compulsory attendances at plays and movies was his way of communicating with us. His way of saying things in a more meaningful way than, even he, could put into words. He wanted nothing more from life than for the people around him to ‘get it’. And his pilgrimages back and forth along lightless bush roads to take others to shows he’d already seen was his way of having important conversations with those he loved. Although as children we often resisted, protesting that we had some vital school exam the following morning, we loved him for his unrelenting commitment to what, for him, was more important than almost anything.

  And then there were books. My earliest memories are of the crumbling cockatoo-chewed house in Palm Beach, launching with my little sister, Jenny, off the upper storeys of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined the walls of his bedroom. His system of organising everything else in his life involved urgent searches through strewn objects, but his enormous bookshelves were ordered alphabetically by author.

  His work was constant. He rose between two and four each morning to etch out big words in his tiny longhand. As my mum puts it: ‘He kept the hours of a wombat.’ His slee
p was always broken, accompanied by the thoughtful voices of generations of Radio National presenters, but sleep was the fuel that kept his literary furnace burning. So he travelled everywhere with a pillow in a shopping bag in the hope of stealing a few moments of refuelling peace in a theatre foyer or under a politician’s desk.

  Although he never joined the Labor party, it was for him the manifestation of the central truth of his life: we all have a duty to care for those less fortunate than ourselves. The conversations I remember between him and my mum, and my godfather, John Hepworth, were founded on this shared, self-evident truth. And this backdrop of duty provided the context for my world as a child. I had heard of these creatures called ‘Liberals’, but I don’t remember ever seeing one. The doorways I was ushered through into the crowded houses of friends and collaborators were filled with stacks of loose paper and adorned with a door-side photo of a big-foreheaded man. Below it were the words: This is a Whitlam house.

  He spent his life in search of the exceptional, but one part of him was always engaged in a quiet quest to return to the dull certainty of the people and places of his north-coast childhood. The predictable flatness of a landscape ringed by hills that divided the world into that which was near, and that which was far. His mind needed complexity, but his heart craved simplicity. And this self-sacrificing country decency was the unshifting moral core on which the rest of him was built.

  His devotion to those less fortunate was also what motivated his fanatical, and questionable, insistence on feeding all the wild animals around our house. He would return with bags of fruit or seeds to feed a new generation of Ellis possums or birds, paying particular attention to the newborn or blind among them, noting which type of apple or seed each one preferred. I think he saw himself as a one-man welfare state and, as a result, he could never be away from home for long.

  He was devoted to people and animals, but writing was his reason for being. It was his way of thinking, both his consciousness and his memory. Through his writing he saw himself in conversation with the world, and it was his way of making the world better.

  My father lived his life true to his central belief that all good things, all that was important, all magic begins as an idea in search of the words to bring it to life. I hope, in this book, you find some magic.

  Jack Ellis

  A FRIENDSHIP

  I.M ROBERT ELLIS 1942–2016

  Thrown out of another suburban house

  in the Boarding age, I gloomily stood

  reading the Vacancies pinned up in the Quad

  Wanted: A roommate, alas must be male –

  That had spirit, so we met in North Bondi’s

  Raffles Hotel. Lismore teenager and scrag

  in a twelve-hour argument, Bible Adventist

  vs apprentice Catholic, we hit it off well.

  The Raffles was Dutch, KLM crew layoff,

  The owner, widely feared in Sydney, was one

  Abe Saffron, who kept us incorrupt

  in the year we spent there at movies and pool.

  When his manageress evicted us for grot

  he, returning from Hollywood, cast her out

  in turn, and sent men to invite us back

  but we had moved on to The Midnight Cowboy

  (then yet to be filmed) (it’s how we lived, Murray)

  back from Jedda-land, and a culture called the Push

  which wasn’t a film, I dared to marry –

  he declared this would destroy art in me.

  A month later, the Cuba crisis, he and two friends

  fled to the mountains, and came back not nuked,

  all related years after in a wonderful film

  called The Nostradamus Kid, spurned in Australia.

  Long before, he scripted The Legend

  of King O’Malley, who sold twenty years

  of his soul to Parliament and Nation,

  capital and rail line, then slumped in silence.

  Newsfront followed, whose hero kept his soul:

  masterpieces all three; his career followed on

  through film and prose, as mine through rough metre

  but we were friends for friendship, not rivalry.

  We made an arch biopic for TV

  which many loved by the ABC lost.

  We made a kids’ film I Own the Racecourse.

  He married adorably well, and out-ventured

  a Kiplingite friend on behalf of Bangla Desh

  while I moved quietly home to the bush.

  He was loyal to tin roofs among hosts who were not

  and brought me friends among the filmed and the shot

  but now our barely political yarns

  are finished, even in the Jewish café

  down Bondi, where last summer saw us

  praising our fathers and Bill O’Reilly.

  You are gone. And I had dared think

  it was like when my liver went to the brink –

  Low slung and wooden, you pass on your way

  as I prefer all our years to one dressy day.

  Les Murray

  1.

  CHILDHOOD

  SPEECH ON TURNING FORTY, MAY 1982

  Being born as I was on Mother’s Day 1942, a year to the day after the bombing by the Luftwaffe of the House of Commons, made me old enough in 1945 to note the suicide of Hitler and the bombing of Nagasaki on the same day that my sister Kay was born. We had an air-raid shelter in the backyard of our house in Murwillumbah – a town with horse and sulkies still, and paddle-steamers down the Tweed – in which the 1920s, it seemed, had been held over by popular demand.

  My grandparents – born in the 1870s, and married before the invention of the bicycle, deeply religious and convinced for years that the wireless was a trick of Satan – were my first real intimates and communicated to me the pioneering Dad-and-Dave world they grew up in, a world that included Captain Thunderbolt, my grandfather’s cousin. Having known them – and knowing as well that I will meet before I die grandchildren who, in the twenty-second century, will arrive as elderly tourists on Mars – I am aware, perhaps more than many, of how many lives and ways of life one touches in a lifetime. Particularly this lifetime. Particularly mine.

  I am ten years younger than the Harbour Bridge, ten years younger than the ABC, five years younger than Blue Hills, the same age as Casablanca and Oklahoma and Muhammad Ali, and two days older than Paul McCartney. I fear I do not score as well as any of these in venerability or influence or wealth or physical fitness, but I live in hope that at my going hence my name will be better known than it is now, and my mortgage paid, and my children alive, and the world not yet at an end, and parts of it green and promising still, and speech still free in my native land. I might be wrong, and in the long run I know I am. But in the short run I live in hope. Perhaps it’s due to my upbringing.

  The world I grew up in – and seems for me the reality from which everything that’s happened since has foolishly diverged – was one of wirelesses and pet cats and aunties and churches. My father began as a coalminer and rose from the pit to become a commercial traveller, then a banana farmer, and then – when the Depression wrecked him and the many jobless old friends who came to live on his farm and eat his bananas – became a commercial traveller again and graduated from selling Bibles door to door to the more leisurely life of Goldenia and Billy tea and Pick-Me-Up sauce and Mynor fruit juice cordials and Sydney Flour and Aeroplane Jelly and country grocery stores and drinks on the house in country pubs that are no more. As a boy in Maitland, he sat at Les Darcy’s feet on the Sunday mornings when Les came home to tell the kids how he won his bout the night before.

  He travelled thirteen million miles between Sydney and Tweed Heads, and only last month saw South Australia, and became at seventy-nine, he claimed, the oldest man ever to have climbed Ayers Rock. I love him, and do not know him, and share no language we can speak in, save a careful mutual lingering love of the Labor Party, and of Ben Chifley, and a careful mutual protested f
ondness for international cricket. Had he not gone away to World War II, I would have known him better, and hurt him less, in all the thirty years of my growing up. But though he is still alive, it is too late. I’m not sure why.

  To come, as I did, to the big city alone at the age of sixteen from a staid and warm-hearted country town was to undergo as fundamental a change of life, I now believe, as a death in the family or the loss of an eye or a foot. It can be survived, but it brings you to a terrible uncertainty of what you are, and where in the great world you should be going. In the city, I ceased to swim, or play tennis, or listen to the wireless, or ride a bike, or visit friends. Those friends I had in the country town I ceased to know. I feared thereafter everyone with whom, when young, I had a close acquaintance – not out of snobbery but simple fear that the language we spoke was different now, and simple fear (that fear of the city slicker) of becoming bored and not knowing what to say. I therefore lost the richness of acquaintance I so long had easily kept, with Aborigines and orphans and gold prospectors and fishermen and grocers and halfwits and postmen and carpenters, and substituted for it transient encounters and tepid acquaintanceships with media people and public servants and high-school teachers as much in fear of the world and its ways as I. I failed to say thanks to those I owed much, many of them now dead. I shrank in upon myself and the few fanaticisms I had – writing, amateur acting and movie-going – and out of these, with a lot of luck, at long last wove a career.

  Many not so lucky came to the big city and shrivelled away to nothing. It is not just learning with pain to dance to a different drum. It is trying to learn with pain to become a different being. Friendships bloom and wither so fast – and love affairs and alternative careers and hobbies – that you lose all sense of who you are and what you are worth. You become a sales pitch for the person you would like to be instead of an extension of the child you were, and of the interests that grew like leaves on a tree of that child you were, when you gathered mushrooms on green hills and rode bikes with friends to the waterfall or the beach or the foot of the mountain. The city took away from you all sense of that predestiny you needed merely to make decisions, ordinary decisions, like where to go tonight. The city made you afraid.