A Bloody Good Rant Chapter Sampler

THOMAS
KENEALLY
MY PASSIONS, MEMORIES AND DEMONS
A Bloody Good Rant_TXT.indd 3 3/8/21 12:02 pm

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To all surviving Depression babies, including Judy

Contents
Author’s note ix
Commonwealth 1
The ancient crowd: my hero (ancestor) 17
Enigmas: history/myth story 26
Two thousand generations 39
The great Australian unease 49
Enigmas: any mug can write a novel 57
The climate and things around: selling them, buying them 67
The shock of the global 87
Enigmas: third phase, grandparency 114
Mephistopheles and the boys from the CIA 122
Women of Australia 135
Fracking for the market 153
The climate business: flames 161
‘Unnatural males’ and me 167
And who is this Adam Smith bloke? 176
The Yartz, god bless ‘em 193
Enigmas: the greatest scandal 205
vii

viii A BLOODY GOOD RANT
The CIA man I knew, and associated questions 221

Emigmas: death, the cosmic ‘ouch!’ 242
Our monarchical republic 259
The people of the human god 274
Enigmas: the presence/absence 287
The reffos go multicultural 296
Weeping for SIEV X 308
Two sides of Australia: living in Chinese exile/being a Hajji- 319
That old chestnut: what is an Australian? 330
Postscript: a new name, COVID-19 345
Notes 363
Index 375

Author’s note
Hello reader. If there is more rant than reason in this book, then by
all means rid yourself of it. And the thing about being old—I was
eighty-five when writing the last version of this book—is that this is
a rant about questions, far more than about delivering great clarifying
messages from the supposed mountain top of an antique life. There is
no great clarifying light at the end. We draw towards our close with
the same human bewilderment with which we drew our first breath.
To be a questioner and a pilgrim is everyone’s destiny. Politicians have
to make a stab at being certain, but beneath their shining brows lie
doubts they do not begin to utter. COVID and its malign strains have
not reduced our bewilderment.
There is one thing I am more certain about than others, and that is
that the globalised and neoliberal economics has been great for some,
particularly the world run along the lines of market economics, that
it has been materially generous to my generation, to lucky ones born
in the Depression and too young for World War II. But it has not been
so uniformly generous to the more recent comers to the earth, our
grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Nor would recent years have
ix

x A BLOODY GOOD RANT
seemed quite so wonderful if we had worked in the same factories,

producing the same manufactures, our grandparents and great grand-
parents worked in. Our generation were in our prime when neoliberal
economics took over the world, and posited that the market would
look after everything, and that if only unionism and awards could be
swept away, it would look after that 20 per cent of Australians who
had been disadvantaged by the new economics. The golden day never
came and now we have a fifth of all Australians eking out lives in occa-
sional low-paid work and on welfare, and given the neoliberal belief
in underfunding public sector schools, unable to raise their children
into the ranks of the lucky.
Thank whatever gods there be that governments do not apply the
neoliberal brakes as thoroughly as pure market economics would want
them to. But when they treat all human existence as aspects of the
market—including hospitals, universities and other institutions never
intended to be ‘of the market’—then the results are uneven and dismal.
After all, according to the pure religion of economics, all public facil-
ities are an overreach by government. Therefore, privatise the phone
service of Centrelink by giving the contract to the US service provider
Concentrix, and a contract to manage some Centrelink offices to the
Nevada company Stellar. They’ll be so good at looking after—who
is it? Azerbaijanis? No, Australians. And they’ve all worked out so
wonderfully, these arrangements, haven’t they?
But hold your horses, Tom; you’re starting into one of the book’s
arguments already.
I have to say that having lived and worked for a time at US univer
sities, I am appalled by the impact neoliberalism has had on the US.
When I first went there in 1970, I found a secure middle class, an
employed working class, good schools, splendid universities, miracu-
lous infrastructure. In answering to the market gods since that date, it
has become a country of disastrous rifts, of a rust belt which it lacked
the will to revive or transform, a country where a good education costs

Author’s note xi
Lamborghinis worth of debt, in which society is riven still. It remains

an extraordinary and creative nation, but its flaws have become per
nicious through the support of the same brand of market economics
our politicians pay lip service to here.
So what I say about all that, I believe very sincerely, but I must
emphasise also that even there I am asking questions. Old punters are
allowed to ask questions, aren’t they? It’s up to them to make them
amusing questions, so the young aren’t bored by them. I hope above
all I have done at least a little of that.
I approach other and profounder human mysteries in this book.
There is the great mystery of why the human soul, whether in the
Arctic or the Tanami Desert, comes up with the same sort of cultural
habits and rituals and versions of the same myths. I try to look at
how the collective unconscious works with novelists and other artists,
and how much of a novel or any other creative work comes from the
unconscious rather than the conscious mind. And thus, I argue, any
mug can write a novel.
I look at the amazing advance in the status of women in my lifetime
and, of course, how far must still be travelled. I look at death, and
the methods I have used possibly to delude myself into believing that
turning in your personhood and your breath forever might not be as
utterly woeful a business as it seems. After all, the great majority of
humanity, all of them without any gifts for it, have achieved that oblit-
eration called death. Nonetheless, when I am called upon to leave the
earth by some little cardio-vascular or other systemic failure, I’m sure
that if you’re in the neighbourhood you will hear my complaints—
unless I am one of those fortunate who go out on a merciful tide of
palliative care.
As an ageing heterosexual I also look at the relation between us, the
children of the 1930s, and ‘unnatural men’, as homosexual males were
called. How murderous males have, since my childhood, punished
these ‘outcast men’. As author of Schindler’s Ark/List I look at the

xii A BLOODY GOOD RANT
long endurance of anti-Semitism, and the other question of an Israeli

state, a militant one established back in the very territory from which
the great dispersal came, after the Roman destruction of the Temple
in the first century. How do these two phenomena, ancestral anti-
Semitism, and the modern, often excessive reactions of the state of
Israel sit together? And as a former student for the priesthood I look
at God and the question of describing or denying IT from our little
suburb on a branch line of the good-as infinite and yet ultimately
doomed system we call the universe.
I have become overwhelmed in old age by a sense of the antiquity
of Aboriginal occupation. The first arrivals of Homo sapiens on our
soil may have been earlier than 80,000 years past. That intense focus,
when applied to our settler history, raises new adjustments for our
imaginations. It also suggests new focus now that the bush blazes and
floods with lethal intensity and after less than two and a half centuries
we ask ourselves whether we even read the continent for what it was.
Then there are questions such as whether our convict stain was
actually a convict bonus? I look at the infatuation of grandparent-
hood, the third phase, after youth and marriage, of the getting of at
least a little wisdom.
Maybe unlike a bottled-in-bond ranter, I am fairly careful in these
pages to offend no one, of course, other than believers in neoliberal
economists and corporatists. But they have so many favours and
bouquets from governments worldwide they do not need mine.

Commonwealth
When I was born in 1935 I grew up, despite the Depression and World
War II, with a primitive sense of being fortunate, a sense imbued by
parents and grandparents, for belonging to the Commonwealth of
Australia. The utopian strain was very strong in Australians of their
and even of my now-old generation. If we weren’t to be a better society,
if we were simply serfs designed to support a system of privilege, what
was the bloody point? It was there in the old federationist poetry of
Bernard O’Dowd that both my grandfathers could recite, and named
Australia:
Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space.

Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?
1

2 A BLOODY GOOD RANT
It is not that I yearn for those supposedly innocent times. Then we

combined an edgy sense of being the world’s hillbillies, a big Appala-
chia at the world’s end, with a sense that we were the last of people, the
winnowing of European (in those days mostly Northern European)
history. We barely knew the scale of the world, though there were men
and women who had experienced its killing breath in a world war
and depression. We still clung to your favourite racial theories of the
nineteenth century (‘Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?’); it would
take Hitler’s murderous overreach to make us renounce them. We
believed in miscegenation, the theory that if an Asian and a European
bred offspring the result debased both strains. The White Australia
policy legislated in our very first session of our very first parliament
in 1901 was still considered an unquestioned good. Also largely
unquestioned was the idea that Australia had been from the beginning
(ab origine) a cultural and religious vacancy. In Patrick White’s great
novel Voss, the Sydney merchant Mr Bonner asks the German explorer
if he will take a map into the interior of Australia: ‘The map?’ asks Voss.
‘I will first make it.’ In fact, Voss is not just in his mind the discoverer
and definer of all that is to be found geographically and pastorally in the
great vacancy, but he also dies there to give it a human, quasi-theological
legend and a meaning it had not had previously. At the stage the book
was published in 1957, an era of dread and torpor in equal measure,
we were largely unaware of the Seven Sisters Dreaming, based on the
passage of the Pleiades across the lower night sky, which for millen-
nia connected people living in Central Australia with the west coast of
the continent but eastwards too. We did not know of this magnificent
legend or of the men stricken by the seven primal sisters whose flight
from their stalkers created the earth and who, in their final desperation
to escape forbidden love, launched themselves into the sky.
The now better-known method of Aboriginal people navigating by
the song of the country that they had learned before they even saw
it all, and of a song being as adequate as an atlas—in fact, more so

Commonwealth 3
since it told you where the water was!—had not been yet revealed to
us by white writers such as Robyn Davidson and Bruce Chatwin or
depicted by the acrylic painters of the Papunya Tula school. So we
were backward, though not stupid, on what Australia should be. We
believed in that term ‘Commonwealth’ adopted at the constitutional
convention of 1891 to describe the, at that stage, future Australia. The
ageing Sir Henry Parkes, former radical, liked it even if it was a term
connected to Cromwell and his king-beheading regime, and the young
scrawny Victorian intellectual and state politician Alfred Deakin argued
eloquently for the name since it was free from party, was distinctive
and was a rich Anglo-Saxon term. At the Adelaide Convention in 1897,
Josiah Symon, a Victorian politician and delegate, suggested its scrub-
bing because of its association with the regicide Cromwell, but his
concern was dismissed informally in committee. Edmund Barton, the
first prime minister, in his notes on the Federation Draft Bill, quoted
John Locke, seventeenth-century philosopher and seer of representa-
tive democracy: ‘By the same Act, therefore, whether anyone unites his
person, which was before free, to any Commonwealth, by the same he
unites his possessions, which were before free; and they become, both
of person and possessions, subject to the governance and dominion of
that Commonwealth.’ In other words, he will be taxed.
Commonwealth was a mantle term under which federationists such
as Deakin could model their constitution and draw on the unwritten
British and written American constitutions. For white people, of course.
Yet within those limits, fairly severe as they are by our standards, in
a recent biography of Deakin by Judith Brett, Deakin is a man of public
conscience and of a liberalism in which change would result from
‘awakened middle-class conscience, not aroused working-class anger’.
In liberal or capital L Liberal philosophy then, and in the first
seventy years of the twentieth century and of federation, the Australian
Commonwealth sought to guarantee the minimum dignity and needs
of its citizens. Not every place at the table of Commonwealth was the

same, but young Australians of my generation believed that society

and parliament existed to deliver those equities—good standards of
education and health, communications, equality of opportunity—
under which all would have an honourable place. And central to that
place of honour was the system that looked after those who could no
longer look after themselves. The Commonwealth belonged, too, to
those who had only their persons to join into it.
When I began writing this book, COVID-19, that world-skewing
micro-organism, had not revealed itself. When it did, the Australian
government, while not stepping back from the philosophy of the
market as the deity of politics, would revert to some old-fashioned,
pump-priming mechanisms, and—however imperfectly—issued at
the most visible level the belief that it was governments’, not the
market’s, first duty to prevent a COVID hecatomb, which to be fair,
it has done. Rudd’s government had after the economic fiasco of
2007–08, all despite the doctrine that public intervention is bad and
that government should stay ‘small’ and avoid ‘red tape’ (protections
for consumers, that is, and brakes on environmental damage). But the
public sector now interfered in capital’s big debacle, saved the system,
left behind Bernie Madoff as the token scapegoat of the collapse, and
let the business world continue with the belief that if everything is
privatised, that is, if bonds based on mortgages upon mortgages upon
mortgages were sold, everyone would get their bonus after all and God
would smile.
So when I began writing this book I believed I was covering
the decline of that view of fraternal and coherent Australia before the
relentless doctrine of market economics, of all men and women
for themselves, and the punishment of the hindmost. The market
is seen—often selectively but in ways that impact on the welfare of
Australian workers and aspirants and disabled and carers, and on the
aged—as the only authentic dictator of policy. Neoliberalism, as this
belief was called, and as I shall continue to call it, reigned.

Commonwealth 5
Above all, the new economic dogma as adapted by politicians is seen

as washing away and eroding the concept of a society operating under
a communal conscience, and of a social contract superior in author-
ity to the demands of the so-called market. Indeed, we were told, and
many politicians believe, that a social contract was no longer needed,
since neoliberalism was the ultimate benefactor of humankind. Health,
education, welfare and culture would all flow from the market, and in my
second forty years as a human they therefore all became commodities
and citizens would become consumers of those commodities—‘clients’,
rather than receivers of a share of the high table.
It seems now after twenty years of the twenty-first century that
citizens are in dissent over this version of the world, neoliberal
economics as some call it, ‘trickle-down economics’ and the way it
is practised. Nothing good in this community is not in one way or
another a product, according to the theory. This belief is in the truest
sense totalitarian by a number of tests—it is the one true religion of
government and it dismisses other versions. And it has a powerful
control over parliament and other institutions and the destiny of indi-
viduals. But thanks to the fact that ministers cannot do away with the
beliefs or expectations of the Australian voters, we have not seen it
exhaustively applied in the way corporations and politicians rhap
sodise about it. They fall back on it and extol it and exalt its demands
over all else. In Australia and elsewhere there has been a reaction both
to the political class and their orthodoxies. The governments that have
embraced neoliberal economics most passionately are the ones now
finding it hardest to deal with C OVID-19, to the widespread misery
and terror of their people. Those who have most starved the public
sector, that is, and those who have most derided social cohesion in
favour of economic competition not only have an infection crisis
but a crisis of faith in reasonable authority. These are the United
States and the United Kingdom, who have most put their faith in the
modern orthodoxy.

For much of this century mistrust of parliaments has existed on

a scale unimagined even a quarter of a century past. We have seen
Sydney school children taking to the streets, with parental backing, in
November 2018 to protest about the Coalition’s inaction on climate
change. That is, Australian parents and educators thought the issue
so urgent and so impervious to being dealt with by government that
they permitted their children to speak. And though in the 2019 election
Scott Morrison’s Coalition government was surprisingly returned,
Tony Abbott, former prime minister, holding the safe Liberal seat of
Warringah, was beaten by a woman candidate of sterling character as
well as being a former world’s slalom champion and Olympic medal-
list, Zali Steggall. Her platform exalted the ties between people and their
unpolitical concern over the future of the world and with a concern too
about the totalitarian if selective pursuit of market imperatives.
I am a codger, an ancient having his last good rant. It seems that many
of the concerns I address, however clumsily, in this book have taken
on more strength in the minds of other Australians than I would
have expected. The onset of citizen unease has seemed in some ways
rapid to me. After all, it is at the time of writing a little more than
six years since there arose, in the prime ministership of Tony Abbott,
a treasurer named Joe Hockey, an amiable fellow from North Sydney
who borrowed a line of Menzies and divided society into economic
‘lifters’ and ‘leaners’. He produced in 2014 a style of budget to match
what he saw as the new realities, that is, the prevailing economic
dogma. He explicitly said that the age of entitlement was over.
To Hockey and to other neoliberals, ‘entitlement’ is something
of a dirty word, particularly when one is talking about the bottom-
dwellers of the great trickle-down machine. I have to say that when
I use the word I think of the automatic sense of entitlement of

Commonwealth 7
certain industries. I am thus accused of seething with class envy, but
the pedigree of the term entitlement is nonetheless an honourable
one. I am influenced by Amartya Sen, whom I briefly met and shared
a stage with at the Kolkata book fair. Amartya Sen is a Nobel prize-
winning economist with game-changing theories about famines past
and present. In a famed book entitled Poverty and Famines (1988),
Sen argued that in famines most of those who die do not perish of
the shortage of food in their landscape, or because of a drought, but
because their ‘entitlements’ to food shrink. Famine is an economic
and political phenomenon which interestingly, he argues, never
occurs in representative democracies, whatever their flaws. Sen
defined entitlement as ‘the sets of alternative commodity bundles
that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights
and opportunities he or she faces’. Basically, the price of food is rising
astronomically on the basis of a sometimes small percentage reduc-
tion in grain, and the price of livestock you sell to buy grain is falling
because every other person in the landscape is flooding the market
with their livestock as well. In a famine, the old, the ultimate cure is
to increase entitlements, and I think every Australian feels her/his
self entitled by their humanity not to starve.
Hockey’s use of the term was selective, and always is in the maths
of neoliberals. For example, a carbon tax on polluters was ruled out of
the budget while unemployed people under thirty years of age could
not access unemployment benefits until they had been without work
for six months. (These restrictions were modelled on American and,
particularly, Republican Party orthodoxy.) The bureaucracy was to
be reduced, and there were cuts to universities, schools, hospitals, the
CSIRO (whose climate scientists came under special scrutiny) and
the ABC, and an end to doctors using the option of bulk billing to
enable patients to have Medicare cover part or all of their medical
costs—a practice that had apparently made Australians ‘leaners’.
Public legal services were cut too.

The embarrassment for Hockey’s plans, though, was that his prime
minister, Tony Abbott, too enthusiastic after a rugby league game at
Penrith, had famously and late the previous year ruled out the cuts the
treasurer wanted to make. It was a budget that according to neoliberal
doctrine was hard on ‘public’ over ‘private’, and more egregiously so
than any other Australian budget in history. Some of the high priests
of neoliberalism found it admirable though many considered it regres-
sive, and David Gonski, the banker who was then chancellor of the
University of New South Wales, saw the educational economies Hockey
proposed—based on treating education as a product, not a birth-
right—as dangerous. Many of those who thought the 2014 Budget
a good beginning on a genuine transfer to trickle-down economics felt
that Hockey merely failed to defend its good and redemptive impulses
effectively.
Many others though found the budget barbarous. Interestingly, the
public most commonly called it ‘unfair’. Some asked glaring questions:
were leaners to be deplored, even if for many years as lifters they had
contributed to tax? Indeed, in trying to sell this division and all that
flowed from it, Joe Hockey was destroyed politically, even though he
produced a second, much cosier budget in 2015. Dismissed as trea-
surer by Malcolm Turnbull when the latter came to power later in
2015, Hockey went to Washington to take up the post of ambassador
to the US.
When Malcolm Turnbull, who had taken over the federal leader-
ship, was removed from power in 2018, I first heard the news while
still in delirium from a long cancer operation. The wonder drugs that
numbed my pain and made me crazy to the extent that I thought
I was lying amid tall gum trees on a bush floor of sticks and leaves,
and I thought that time began to fly backwards with Scott Morri-
son’s appointment, that the seconds would become more and more
cramped and we would suffocate between the narrowing walls of
time. A neat political fantasy that did not survive delirium, but it had

Commonwealth 9
happened and the result was credited to or blamed on the extreme

conservatives and anti-climate people. These were the men with not
a Keynesian instinct among them, the ones Abbott had been mates
with and Malcolm Turnbull had tried to cosset and who could not in
the end bear even a leader, the said Malcolm Turnbull, who repressed
his own best instincts until they were no longer perceivable.
If I am right that people are alienated from the political class,
why, despite unease with the new economics and concerns about
global warming, did Australia, albeit by a relatively narrow majority
but not as narrow as was suggested, vote for Scott Morrison? A man
who seemed authentically himself yet who held no policies except
the world as it was, over the Labor leader Bill Shorten, who seemed
to them, rightly or wrongly, too much an apparatchik when he not
so much foretold as prescribed the future. The fact that people
mistrusted apparatchiks meant they felt better with a man of limited
prescriptions intensively embraced than with a progressive with
many, perhaps too many, cures.
But Morrison’s limited prescriptions were about to be challenged
even before COVID-19. In the spring of 2019 eastern Australia and
the west caught fire after a winter in which one of Scott Morrison’s
chief concerns had been preparing the ground for a religious discrimi
nation bill, maintaining the line on fossil fuels and tut-tutting about
parents letting children participate in climate action demonstra-
tions, and maintaining an ‘we’ve-always-had-droughts-haven’t-we?’
line on rivers and the fish kills within them. As the fire became
the chief actor in the Australian landscape, Morrison seemed out
of tune with the scale and meaning of what had happened. He fell
back on the almost irrelevant constitutional formula that fires were
state matters. This monstrous phenomenon was nationwide, yet it
seemed that nothing could tempt Labor out of its electorate timidity
and its conviction, consistent from the end of the Keating era, that it
could nuance an ascendancy by lack of boldness and by being a little

more smiley than the neoconservatives. And then there came the

COVID-19 thunderbolt.
There were warnings in some quarters about leaving the economy
undamaged; the government was within coo-ee of achieving a budget
surplus. What surprised many of us was that Scott Morrison became
a pump-primer, a Keynesian trying to spend his way out of the crisis
by endowing businesses with JobKeeper and the unemployed with
JobSeeker payments. Those who sought JobSeeker were no longer
punishable blots on the economy, but worthy battlers. Was Common-
wealth back? JobSeeker increased unemployment benefits by $750
a fortnight. Only a few weeks before these men had been sticking to
their guns to keep Newstart, the previous unemployment benefit,
pegged, and now they were enlarging it as if they really understood
that most of the money granted would keep the market breathing. To
an extent, they had given up being punishers and become refuellers
of Commonwealth!
Admittedly Scott Morrison left the arts out of the plan. His minis-
ters have always been unsure whether the arts were a leftist indulgence
rather than, as is the case, the industry they are. And he sadly let
academics dangle without JobKeeper. ‘Clients’ of that great private
institution Centrelink had been previously subject to an ill-founded
series of outrageous money repayment demands named Robodebts,
Kafkaesque in their randomness and impersonality. As well as that, as
late as 25 February 2020 the federal government intended to introduce
a trial to drug test five thousand Newstart recipients with the inten-
tion of extending the program to all recipients if possible. And yet . . .
the COVID response!
And by 2021, he was for the sake of fossil fuels breaking the cardinal
rule of market economics: he was proposing that his government
would enter the power market as proprietor of a backup electricity
generation plant based on gas. This was to keep faith with the gas
industry and perhaps to keep faith with the climate sceptics of his

Commonwealth 11
party. But the neoliberal Sin against the Holy Spirit had been violated,
and such crimes might again be committed in the future, perhaps for
the greater benefit of the Australian people.
I thought of old Jim Scullin, the Labor prime minister elected only
weeks before the Wall Street catastrophe of 1929. Scullin would
have loved to have done what Scott Morrison did with his programs
of income supplement, but Scullin presided over an Australia with
substantial federal and state debts, of which the Bank of England
reminded him by sending an emissary, Sir Otto Niemeyer. The Bank
of England had the capacity to make him an economic pariah if he
refused to meet the debts, even though one of the more substantial
debts was one we had incurred to fight World War I. Scullin saved
a bit of money by not occupying The Lodge and by his frugal life,
but he did not have the room to do anything such as FDR did in the
United States or that Morrison did or has the latitude to do now.
Now, under the eye of COVID- 19, Morrison raised JobSeeker
with a coronavirus supplement. To the whole program, the keeper
section and the seeker, he and his treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, devoted
$86 billion according to the ABC News of 21 July 2020. At base, we
knew he was trying to save the economy from a murderous shock, but
also society, which Maggie Thatcher had once said did not exist.
To make a summary, corporatist thinking, the corporations and their
prophets, snake doctors and boosters in the world community, accepted
the priority of the market as an interest that trumped all other inter-
ests, but they had not been solid on looking at making the economy
survive long term. The short-term economy, with its quick-exchange
and convenient fossil fuels, was inconvenienced by a widespread belief
in climate change—by the ‘cult’ of climate change as my former local
member, Tony Abbott, had it. For if fossil fuels and gas generate wealth

and serve the market in the short term, they risk taking away air and
jobs in the future. Indeed, those high priests of the market who speak
from the grave, authoritative back of their throats on television, were
interested only in their deity, the market, triumphing short term and
thus contemplating a future in which that deity they invoke to justify
inequality will die. Some high priests, some experts!
And the 20 per cent to whom trickle down doesn’t trickle down,
it seemed, were being denied a place at Commonwealth’s table. For
trickle down does not trickle down; it gushes up!
However, with COVID, economic indices and budgetary consider-
ations seemed to be ignored and the question of climate change seemed
to be back on the table, as it was after the fires, and similarly a saner
economics glimmered out there, what our forebears might have called
a Fata Morgana, a mirage above the swamp of the last four or five
decades. An economics based in part on the future and on our survival,
an economics based on a broader palette of products than we had until
now thought of dipping our brushes into, an economics in which we
are clever, not just lucky—all that seemed possible again at least until
some of Morrison’s drearier colleagues emerged with the old neolib-
eral bollocks. Former education minister Dan Tehan not only redefined
what a university is by penalising arts and humanities students by up
to 119 per cent, but spoke of universities as if they were by defini-
tion, origin and history, corporations to attract high-paying foreign
students. That function having been short-circuited by COVID-19,
the university must find other means to operate by slashing staff, by
becoming STEM-based vocational colleges and bilking the humanities
and social sciences. Tehan did not help universities on the Keynesian
model, on which individuals had been helped, and could not see them
as anything but business, which has never been their definition for
a millennium—until he spoke in his dismal righteousness.
Even so, our government convened a national cabinet, including state
Labor leaders, to listen to the experts and come up with an agreed path

Commonwealth 13
to tackle the virus. Suddenly the class wars were over and the division of
Australians into the silent majority and ‘noisy minorities’, whimsically
known as ‘leftist elites’, was over. We all alike had to breathe the phenom-
enally toxic air of fire, and COVID-19 did not play politics.
And on top of that our leaders recognised scientific evidence without
quibbling or contradicting. For Boris Johnson of Great Britain, other
propositions such as herd immunity muddied the reaction and Britain
has paid with thousands of deaths. As for Trump’s leadership, his mad
nostrums and berserk self-contradictions and his mistrust of his own
scientific experts was consistent with his belief that in the post-truth
world a decimating virus could be massaged into something else, such
as a Chinese bacterial weapon. To give Scott Morrison credit, he fell
for none of these temptations. Though ‘post-truth’ was word of the
year in 2019, it almost seemed that nemesis was at work in presenting
a virus that did not yield its literal and vicious truth in any way. Thus
on the daily news we have seen the fate of nations that have second-
guessed or quibbled with the authority of epidemiologists and public
health experts.
Like other smaller social democracies—Holland, Belgium, the

Scandinavian countries, the UK in general—there was no Tea Party
mass in the Australian electorate and few who believed in non-
interventionist government. Nor was there any equivalent of the
Federalist Papers, a collection of essays by Americans James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, for libertarian conservatives such
as Newt Gingrich and states righters such as the Southern rebels of
the 1850s and 1860s to refer to and draw provender from. John Jay,
for example, declared that the federated states would be ‘Distinct
Nations . . . Each of them would have its commerce with foreigners to
regulate by distinct treaties’. In prognostications that would narrow

federal prerogatives and bear bitter fruit in the Civil War, Alexander
Hamilton wrote: ‘To look for the continuation of harmony between
a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same
neighbourhood would be to disregard the uniform course of human
events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.’
The arguments about federalism in Australia were partly the same
as in America and also drastically different, as Western Australia
discovered when it attempted to secede in the 1930s.
I think it would be a very interesting study to have a look at the
impact of nineteenth-century American history on the Australian
Constitution, for those who drafted it must have been interested in
the US Civil War a mere thirty years past and so chose to describe
those former colonies that entered the Commonwealth as bound in
an ‘indissoluble’ union. The adjective stuck, even though it was the
British Privy Council that made the final decision, not the High Court,
in those days when we were largely sovereign except not quite. The
sorting out of boundaries of jurisdiction between federal and state has
been done in recent times by the Australian High Court and emergen-
cies tended to aggregate more power to the federal sphere, although
state boundary closures during COVID reminded everyone we do
have states with authority over their own borders.
Despite many eloquent spokespeople for the modern economic
orthodoxy, the Australian people as a mass still saw government at
the beginning of the twenty-first century as a mediator of the fair go
and a party to a social compact. On Sunday mornings in California
while I spent time there to teach in the Graduate Writing Program
at University of California Irvine, we went hiking with friends in
a great canyon on the edge of the city named Modjeska Canyon in
the Santa Ana Mountains. There were still coyotes and occasionally
mountain lions sighted there, and at the canyon start a wonderful
breakfast diner to which middle-aged motorcycle riders from the city
came. You didn’t have to be long in that café to know that one of the

Commonwealth 15
great political controversies for these gentlemen was a proposed new

Californian legislation making the wearing of motorcycle helmets
compulsory. These respectable, bourgeois riders were in an uproar
about it and to an Australian it almost seemed that they were claiming
the right to fractured skulls and brain haemorrhages. But that wasn’t
it: it was that they did not think it fell within the power of any govern-
ment to pass regulations on behaviour. They would rather risk death
than concede obedience to the regulation. What was a communally
accepted behaviour in Australia was an issue of inappropriate govern-
ment intervention in America. The citizen’s life was entirely his own
to regulate.
I remember once telling an American that the state health depart-
ment had been able to put an end to tuberculosis in Australia with
compulsory chest X-rays, and got a shock to see how surprised he was
that the government should attempt to make an X-ray compulsory.
There is an instinctive suspicion in many Americans, something they
must’ve picked up from signals given them by adults, from the state-
ments of uncles and aunts, fathers and mothers, against compulsory
anything other than conscription for war.
Thus, no wonder in COVID, even without the doubts spread by
Trump and in spite of all the competing myths about the infection,
there are millions who will not obey government. We Australians
bring no philosophy to our attitude to government. We have combated
COVID with considerable goodwill. And it is obvious that even if
this COVID-induced phase will not bring permanent change, even
if Deakin’s ‘Common Weal’ might die in the hearts and intentions of
politicians, it has never died in the hearts and hopes of the people!
By the twenty-first century many conservative economists and
federal politicians, not least Joe Hockey, who tried in 2014 to wean
Australians off the national welfare proposition, would not make
such a concession to the interests of the public. Yet he found that old
Chifleyan—and, to be honest, Menziean—values still existed in the

expectations of the people, even if they did not in himself and many
of his colleagues.
And with the onset of the coronavirus, they seem to come back in
the new national cabinet as well.

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THOMAS

MY PASSIONS, MEMORIES AND DEMONS

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First published in 2021

Copyright © Thomas Keneally 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

Allen & Unwin

A catalogue record for this

ISBN 978 1 74331 157 8

Set in 12/17 pt Minion LT by Midland Typesetters, Australia

The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

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The CIA man I knew, and associated questions 221

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seemed quite so wonderful if we had worked in the same factories,

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Lamborghinis worth of debt, in which society is riven still. It remains

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long endurance of anti-­Semitism, and the other question of an Israeli

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Last sea-­thing dredged by sailor Time from Space.

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It is not that I yearn for those supposedly innocent times. Then we

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same, but young Australians of my generation believed that society

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Above all, the new economic dogma as adapted by politicians is seen

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For much of this century mistrust of parliaments has existed on

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happened and the result was credited to or blamed on the extreme

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more smiley than the neoconservatives. And then there came the

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Like other smaller social democracies—Holland, Belgium, the

A Bloody Good Rant_TXT.indd 13 3/8/21 12:02 pm

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great political controversies for these gentlemen was a proposed new

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long endurance of anti-Semitism, and the other question of an Israeli

Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space.