Edition 1 - All-round CountryFRI 26 MAY 2006, Page 013

A complete original with wit and courage By Greg Sheridan Foreign editor Greg Sheridan recalls one of the funniest and most brilliant men he has met THE only time I had lunch with someone where I was not required to say a single word was withJohn Wheeldon, back in 1984. Wheeldon convinced the then editor-inchief of The Australian, Les Hollings, to hire me, but we had lunch first to talk it over. Wheeldon at that time was associate editor of the paper. As far as I recall he didn't mention the job until the very last words of the conversation, when he told me to ring Les later that afternoon. But it was also one of the most memorable, witty, bonhomous, fluent, sagacious and entertaining lunches I have attended, and my only contribution was to listen. I would rate Wheeldon as perhaps the wittiest man I have met. A lawyer, a politician and then a journalist, Wheeldon was accomplished in all three of his careers without reaching the absolute top. Yet I would have no hesitation in saying that Wheeldon was a great man, a great Australian who deserves to have been much better known, though he had no interest in being known. For someone so much in the public eye as a senator and a minister in the Whitlam government, Wheeldon was remarkably uninterested in the trappings of public notice. It was not that he was modest -- he had a healthy regard for the depth of his own knowledge -- it's rather that he was completely unconcerned with celebrity. He thought celebrity rather a low-class business. Wheeldon was an original. I have never really met anyone quite like him. He was thoroughly Australian and thoroughly cosmopolitan. I often heard him speak French and German to people on the phone. He had a deep, broad knowledge of 20th-century history, literature and culture. His chief concern was politics and the great issues of the 20th century: Nazism, communism, apartheid, the Middle East and much else. He was devoted to the study of the politics of nations that Australians don't always think of first: Austria, El Salvador and Tunisia in particular. For several years I worked beside Wheeldon. He was associate editor in charge of editorials and my job was as the second editorial writer. When I first joined The Australian in 1984 I was astonished at the quality and seriousness of the editorial conferences. They would often last an hour and more than once I wished I had smuggled in a tape recorder. Hollings was a man of enormous common sense and crusading zeal, Wheeldon was a man of almost limitless erudition. They were both keen to thrash through the issues of the day as thoroughly as they could. The conferences were democratic in that anybody who happened to be there was welcome to have their say, but they were also fierce in the clash of opinions, especially Wheeldon's razor-like dialectic. Wheeldon would argue with you furiously, but I never saw him get personally annoyed with anyone. He paid you the compliment of taking your views seriously. There was always a great mental energy about him and often a lot of fun. I wrote a lot about Vietnamese refugees and the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta in the 1980s. Wheeldon conferred on me the nickname of Cabramatta Fats and took to telling people that I spent my time at the Mekong Delta Bar and Grill, Hume Highway, Cabramatta.

Wheeldon's firecracker sense of humour often took the form of welding some characteristic Australian idiom with a wildly mismatched ingredient from the world of international politics. He had a series of verbal ticks and characteristic rhetorical gestures, particularly removing his spectacles, folding them up and gesturing with them, a remarkably mesmerising technique. He also had the habit of commenting in a stage whisper if he thought someone was talking nonsense. Once during an editorial conference a reporter came in, dressed, I thought, in a rather natty check suit. Wheeldon removed his specs and whispered in tones audible to all: ``He has all the air of an unemployed Irish bookmaker's tout, that fellow.'' So why do I say that Wheeldon was a great man? I come to this judgment because of Wheeldon's unshakable moral courage. He was never a man to hold a fashionable, or even the career-advancing, opinion. He thought about every issue on its merits. He was a passionate opponent of totalitarianism, whether of the Left or the Right. In modern post-ideological politics, it is hard to remember how stultifying the left-wing orthodoxies of Labor once were. Wheeldon, for example, was disgusted at the Labor Party's attempts in the mid-'70s to secure money for an election from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein. He was a fierce opponent of the Soviet Union and studied it deeply. Although originally a man of the Left, and never one for modern economic reform, he wouldn't sentimentalise the Left or any of its causes. Typically, he hated apartheid, but he also hated terrorist opposition to it. He spoke the truth about the persecution of Lebanon's Christians and campaigned hard for them. Wheeldon was a man of genius and a complete original. Yet this remarkable mind wrote sturdy but not especially entertaining leaders. He took serious subjects seriously. He felt a kind of duty to avoid the flippant when dealing with the big questions. As a result, Wheeldon's wit didn't translate much into his copy. But in his way he was a gifted teacher. Everyone who knew him was intellectually enriched by the experience. He never gushed, he seldom praised, but on one rare occasion he said to me, in connection with an editorial on missile defence, ``that was a pretty lucid effort''. It was like receiving a distinguished service medal. Wheeldon's brilliance and wit and moral courage will be missed by all who knew him. BIOG: John Wheeldon, John Murray Wheeldon Column: Time and Tide / Obituaries Section: FEATURES Type: Obituary