Hello and welcome back to Fourth Estate, from Gatorgoland Sydney, on Tina Quinn. This week, as part of our ongoing and profile series, we speak with someone who perhaps originated the art of the multi-hyphen career. He trained as a lawyer, but became a journalist, biographer, broadcaster and social commentator. David Maher is a lawyer and journalist for the National Times.
He sat through the four and a half months of testimony, presented before Justice Hope's Royal Commission. All Asia could go on, was guesswork, which they call analysis. The Arvanov Trail will be published later this week, and in it David Maher says there's real cause for alarm at Asio's Cold War mentality, a world of KGB targets, bugging, tailing and phone tapping. Asio boasted that it put its allegations about David Coon to the government without having investigated them or corroborated them in any way.
Too many aborigines have died. Too many have died in custody. Too many are in custody in the first place. David Maher has pieced together a violent pattern of Blackbeth.
The coroner heard evidence of police methods in the West. One dragged an Aboriginal to the van by the hair. A sergeant drinking off duty watched and approved. He told the inquest that aboriginals, when stirred up and looking for a fight, tend to get very greasy and slippery.
Are your members racist, thugs? No. Could people from the outside be forgiven for thinking they are when they read these reports from Western Australia? Well, I can't really assess how people outside Western Australia may be.
But as Archbishop Paul Marchinkus, head of the Vatican Bank remarked, you can't run the church on Hail Mary's. The matter of Vatican cash has been controversial, ever since the crash of Roberto Kargi's Banco and Rosiano. Involvement of Marchinkus and the Vatican Bank in that debacle has so far cost the Vatican about $400 million. Now there are allegations that the Vatican was using some of those funds for its political purposes.
Drag me into his surgery and told me that I was HIV positive by then, of course, I was testing. What was your response to the discovery? Well, I went sort of sharp for four years. Found myself going into another closet.
I think we're now ready to cross to Moscow and David Mardavik, can you hear me? I can indeed. Oh, good. Well David, first let's find out how is this proposal for a new union treaty being interpreted over there?
Well, it's a daring move in order to try and hold some form of the Soviet Union together. Welcome once again to me, you watch. It does make you wonder what the herald thinks is the future of the human race suits and ties, of course, but according to this country is going to sit here with something like 15 or 1600 people permanently imprisoned on Madison, Nuru, because we're trying to find a country uncomfortable enough to send them to. Well, I think they were just disgusting.
They will resolve the issue, but the issue was not resolved by a motive on television. It makes them a little bit more difficult. I am very angry about this, but I've done a bit of work on it too. And I've had a lot of involvement with the Sanam seekers, but you're a motive.
The best way to handle this is very hard. That if all the advocates quieten down a bit, I think this government can resolve it. The higher the level of rhetoric, the less likely there will be a decision. It's not a bullshit.
It's not a bullshit. It's not a bullshit. It's a public issue and that has to be resolved. That makes you feel better, but doesn't get any more than I'm entirely feeling.
Well, it makes you feel better. Welcome to Late Night Live. I'm David Mark. Coming to you from Gadigal Land.
We will be catching up with Geoffrey Watson later. He's the director of the Center for Public Integrity. Our subject is the immediate future of the National Anti-Corruption Commission following the spanking it's head from its inspector, Gail Furnesses. Later, we're off to the UN to discuss the latest report by Francesca Arbeniz, a special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Her report concludes that Israel is in Gaza to stay. But first, Laura Tingle is back with the good oil on Australian politics. Laura, did you like that? The Trumpian intro?
The good oil? Very good, David. Very good. Yeah, probably our last...
David Marviggan, his career in journalism at the Bulletin magazine in the early 70s and in 1976 joined the South of the revered National Times, a newspaper he would go on to edit himself. His entree into television journalism came when he joined the ABCs Four Corners as a reporter in 1985. His coverage to the deaths of Aborigines and Custody in Western Australia saw him awarded both a Walkley and a Human Rights Commission Award. As a biographer, he's been greatly venerated for his works on Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick and of course Australian writer Patrick White, who he will no doubt forever be in Tilling Smith.
His written works are extensive. The high price of heaven was a collection of essays about the enemies of pleasure and freedom with Marion Wilkinson. He wrote Dark Victory, an account of the Tampa, the Children Overboard Affair and the Howard Government's specific solution and the Henson case, which covered the issues raised by Bill Henson's photographs of children. He's also published six bestselling quarterly essays.
As a broadcaster, he became host of Arts Today on ABC Radio National and Media Watch on ABC Television. But this year, he returned to Radio National to replace Bill Adams as host of Late Night Live and he joins us now. David, welcome to Fort The Snagt. Tina, thank you for that march through my career.
Look, you made me sound busy. But the point of it is that this is 50 years and that's I haven't done much more than you've mentioned and it's been over 50 years. It's a long time with not very much product, okay? I'd say the product's been quite voluminous.
There was way too much of me to even fit. I felt like I skated over so much in that little warmer, but there was so much to cover. Well, I'm not going to blow some like or anything. No, pretty good for a middle-class boy from Pimble, right?
I think I've done Pimble proud. I am one of the last fluent speakers of Pimble, by the way. Did you know that? No.
I do simultaneous translations for some of the younger members of the ABC staff who just don't understand the language and I can still do it. I think the National Archives are going to interview me and get a vocab down and some of the grammar as well at some point in the next five or ten years. But that's pure public service because if the Pimble language were to die and the dialects were spoken also in Calara and Linfield and further down Sydney's North Shore but not below Chatswood. A great deal of our knowledge would be lost as well.
Just, I don't want to ruin the exclusive for the National Sound Archives but if you could just give us a little sample of the dialect of Pimble. The dialect of Pimble was an exclusionary dialect. It was what you were not allowed to say. You were allowed to use any American expressions, for instance, and there was some attention paid to the objective when I and me were, there was a tension paid but it was scatty to who and whom and also, of course, very, very careful attention paid to not speaking through your nose, which gives me this ridiculous voice.
I've got ridiculous voice. I think highly sought after. Highly laughed after. Do you all, I think your family all speak as well and as eloquently as you?
They can speak Pimble and some of them have worked out of their systems and but yes they will speak Pimble. Growing up in Pimble in the 1950s and 1960s, Australia was known as a somewhat, I mean it was a fairly provincial place in those days but it was also fairly sectarian. It was intensely sectarian and in fact the greatest change in my lifetime in Australia is the death of the sectarian division between Protestants and Catholics. It was bitter and nasty and everywhere carefully observed.
It was also, to quite a large extent, a nasty class division as well and my parents were essentially from Presbyterian families but their kids all went to Anglican schools and so we became Anglican and my mother was an amazingly alert to who were Catholics but yet next door there was a Catholic family and we adored them and down them on the other side of the fence there was a Jewish family and they were very much part of our lives and yet at the same time there was a Communist family under the road by the way. But at the same time... Would I as welcome at the dinner table or? Tina you are inspiring, but I love this.
Over the road was this family, the Rooks and Johnny Rook was our friend and we played with Johnny Rook all the time. I'm talking about the early 1950s now, a very long time ago. We played with Johnny Rook all the time, suddenly we didn't play with Johnny Rook and those things in your childhood you don't kind of question, suddenly we weren't playing with Johnny Rook a long time later in the late 1970s when I was writing a book that you mentioned, A Biography of Garfield Barwick. I discovered why we were no longer playing with Johnny Rook because in the Petrov Royal Commission in the middle of the 1950s it was revealed that Johnny Rook's mother was the typist at the Communist Party headquarters.
Dang. Johnny Rook, no longer to play with. But it was middle class leafy, there was a creek to play in, there was a huge emphasis on good manners and decent behaviour etc etc. And immense emphasis on respectability which made it very hard to me when I realised I was gay.
But in it as well, there was this extraordinary mixture of everything and I very much regret. About 10 years ago I thought I must write a little book about the street I grew up in but so many people have died now it's too late and it could have been really interesting because of the mesh of lives. Well what you were describing there, the different religions and even perhaps political allegiances all sort of housed into this one middle class straight right? Yeah and from a distance people say oh look it was just angler from Chatswood to Wurumur it was all just angler but it wasn't, it was much much more interesting than that.
What were your parents like, did you hear them, when you heard them talk about other people from different backgrounds or different walks of life what did you sort of glimmer from them? My parents were very different, my mother was from a family that sort of you know in and about high society a bit you know not really members of high society but sort of middle class kind of. Sort of on the fringes of all of that and desperate to be on the fringes of all of that not that my mother was my father was completely different. He came from a family of blacksmiths that had a family business and he was, he instilled in us from a very very early age about respect for work, respect for people who are working, respect for the people particularly who worked for us and he was without snobbery and he lived a life with working people, he was their boss but he lived with the working people and he brought into our lives this notion of profound respect for those people.
My mother's family were sort of doctors and various things like that and lived much more isolated lives in terms in class terms so there were those two forces. They came from the same world but they brought to that world different values and one of the things all my career I have tried to acknowledge is contradiction. Contradiction if you cannot acknowledge contradiction in people, in circumstances, in stories you've missed the story, nothing comes without contradiction. Contradiction is life and my family to some extent was contradictory.
Where do you think the awareness of social justice, do you attribute that to either one or the other or obviously that's something that's deep within you and that's very clear in a lot of your life? Rather than mum but social justice, the crucial issue of social justice comes when you realise you're a poof and you realise it at a time when it is a criminal offence to have a fuck. How old were you when you realised? That's such a difficult question.
You can look back, you can look back and say I knew when I was 12 but on the other hand I fought it till I was 25, I married, I hurt a lot of people along the way in trying desperately not to be gay but once I did properly acknowledge it to myself I realised that I was kind of always known but I'd always been terrified that it would hurt my family and that it would lead me to being exiled but it also raised at once issues of social justice because the laws of the time and not just the laws but the ethos of the time was nasty and baseless, you know, baseless but it mattered so much in the 60s and it just was extraordinary, extraordinary how much it mattered and I wasn't brave. You've written about the fact that during your teen years you became somewhat ensconced and Christianity during I guess a period of you were sort of running away from yourself in a sense and you thought it would be the answer. Did it drive you down to self acceptance of your sexuality do you think? Because it was so, it almost not because it encouraged you to embrace who you were of course but because it drove you away from the sort of institutional repression.
Oh that's that's too neat. I mean it's another contradiction and it's a familiar contradiction that people rush towards the source of the grief and one of the reasons why the clergy still is so gay is that you rush towards it for some kind of forgiveness and acceptance but I've written about this. I went to an Anglican boys camp down the coast from Sydney when I was about I don't know 14 and I fell deeply in love with one of the instructors there. I mean I never said anything, I never did anything but I can now look back and realize that I was besotted and that besottedness was a key to me becoming four about five or six years a really keen Christian and I didn't really snap out of it until I was at university.
Gosh university is a useful place. Lots of revelations. Well I think I once gave a speech on this subject in the Great Hall but universities being wonderful places to discover what you are not. Yes to discover that you really are a dentist or a lawyer or and you're really or you're really going to be an actor but it's also where you find you can't act you're not straight etc etc etc great places for finding what you're not and and I snapped out of Christianity and I can remember the afternoon it happened.
I mean it was the last remnants by this stage but in a philosophy lecture we were asked just without any notice at all to write a little essay and the subject of the essay was how can God be all good and all powerful? That's the end of it you know it's just the end of it. And that was the light bulb moment. Well it was kind of the last click of the door behind me.
There's a great story you tell about being at school at 17. You've written about this and Dr. Day the school doctor was getting a lecture to your your your classmates. He said you can you can tell you can tell a homosexual by the day core of their flats and Tina that has always led me to decorate my own houses or my one house that I've lived in half my life.
On the principle that a stranger coming into the house would never know the two puffs lived here apparently I failed in this but I've strived but no that was that was the school doctor but you've got to understand the nuance of flats as well because straight people lived in houses puffed as lived in flats. Right they were living this alternative sort of artistic existence and well European yes London-ish you know flats yes there's another day that you've written about your wedding day is in 1975 where you also had another light bulb moment. Tina yes so I loved Jenny we lived together for three or four years and we decided we would marry. I knew that this was not a not a good idea.
Respectability how can you call off a marriage how can you call off a wedding ceremony? I'd agree that it would be a very small ceremony. I'd anyway there were very few friends there but one of Jenny's friends was a hippie from the hills behind melden and he brought us as a wedding gift some clear light it was I don't know I have no experience of these things in the last 40 years so I don't know whether it's still it was very very mild acid very very mild acid and we sat there on the lawn of her parents house which was on the sort of edge of the mountains looking down over nambor to the coast and I just realized with complete clarity and calm that this was a terrible mistake and it was wrong it was wrong with me to have been so guthless it was wrong and Jenny and I broke up about six or eight months later but you know I hurt her terribly by my indecision and it was we remained friends very very close friends for the rest of her life but but it was wrong oh god guthlessness is so hurtful to people it's so damaging but it was very much informed by the social laws at the time yeah but that's not an excuse you know it's really not an excuse I had a gay uncle a famously gay uncle he lived in London in a flat you know not just a flat he had an American partner who was incredibly rich and he lived in this immense flat in Bill Gravelier and when my parents went over there and stayed there the partner was absent in America but you know there was a bachelor and there was servants and all of this kind of thing dead new dead new at once what the situation was mum never tweaked you know it took her years to twig that her brother Adrian was a grand London queen and there was this example in the family but I didn't follow it and but anyway I eventually did you mentioned before about you were worried that you'd be exiled from your family and that they wouldn't how did they react my siblings knew and everybody had worked new because by that time I'd gone to the national times and I'd fallen in with a bunch of radical lesbians who kind of saved my life in many ways they had this extraordinary message you won't believe the message day if you're a pouf but you're still just exactly who you are you don't have to be anything else you are that sounds kind of so obvious but in fact it was a revelation to me and they're still my closest friends and they still tear me shreds but so everybody knew and I knew the time had come to tell my parents because they must find out from me and so I went over to dad to the works where you know and I expected it was going to be the last conversation I had and so there we were in his grandfather's office. It was a enormous painting behind him of the metal pore and it was a foundry and I told him and he said at once he said to me you're so much happier now than you've been this is obviously the way you must live.
I just fuck I just completely completely fell in love with him at that point amazing. What a wonderful response. And then he said do you want me to tell your mother and I said no no I'm going up there to talk to her now and I went up and told mum I can't remember what she first said but she very quickly asked me does anybody else at the golf club know and I said mum mum they have got gay sons too. Oh she's didn't think she didn't think so it was a shock for her but she came out she was fine but I did learn years later that having left dad he got on the phone to my brother what the fuck is going on here but his response to me was perfection perfection.
I mean that defies so much of what we would expect from that generation and that background of person of that time. That's remarkable but he was a good man. I guess on Fourth Estate today is David, Marvie, writer, author and broadcaster. David he trained first as a lawyer and then decided to go into journalism which was journalism something that you always sort of had.
No no I was going to be a writer I'd written several plays when I was 15 16 and my parents said and this is absolutely typical and I had to have something to fall back on and therefore I would study law. There was a new course on law and social justice and that was fascinating. In those days you had to become a clerk in a law firm before you could finish your law degree and I got a clerkship in the fanciest law firm in Sydney and I noticed at once that all of the young lawyers were miserable. They were in their mid 30s and they were miserable to a man.
There were a couple of women but there was mainly men and that further deterred me from being a lawyer and I finished my degree. I finished my articles. I was admitted as a solicitor on a Thursday. I practiced as a solicitor on the Friday and I left for Europe on the Monday.
I practiced for one day in my life as a lawyer and while I was away I had a good think about this and decided that what I wanted to be was a journalist and there were some examples. A great friend of a friend of mine at ANU, a guy called Peter Seculus and Peter had gone to be a journalist and I thought well if he can do it this is fantastic and so I came back. The thing was in those days while having a law degree and being a journalist is absolutely part of the course of these days there were about three journalists in Australia who had law degree so in 1973 when I came back from Europe with Jenny. What have you been quite handy then?
I just got job office left right and centre and started work at the bulletin. Amazing publication to work for. It was a terrific training ground because the deputy editor was a tough woman called Pat Rolfe, Jesus I know her a lot. She took this kind of fancy pants blow hard which are aspects of my life ting that I've completely got rid of.
You'll have noticed that and she made me a reporter and she had to work quite hard at it but I learned and it was an interesting place to work. I travelled a bit for them. I also did arts reporting for them and I was there for about three years. You mentioned arts reporting but did you also do other, did you cover other issues?
I did theatre reviewing for them but among stuff things but yes the first big story I did for them was to fly to North Queensland after the 1974 election. I was elected in 1972. He went to the polls again in 1974 and lost a lot of seats and lost a lot of votes not so many seats but lost a lot of votes in North Queensland. I was sent up to discover to ask why and it was his policies to assist Aboriginal kids particularly Aboriginal kids in school were hated by whites in Queensland and this was my first experience of the undertow in Australia of resentment amongst white voters for assistance given particular assistance given to the Aboriginal community and it was there in 1974.
I saw it again in the voice last year and it is exactly the same range. I think that continued to carry through your career. Yeah this rage about the supposed privileging of Aboriginal Australia. The most recent poll that I've seen when they asked the questions do you think government does enough too much not enough for Aboriginal community.
The too much level is at about 26-28 percent so there is constituency in Australia of about a quarter of the electorate that believes that Aboriginal communities are being indulged by government. Now as I was saying earlier you can as a politician decide what you're going to do with that. You can either contest it or you can exploit it, indulge it and repeat it at the moment is of course indulging it and exploiting it and that was the first big story I ever did as a journalist and I've been writing about that undertow of race ever since. Had you been aware of it do you think before?
Oh yes in general terms. But the wonderful thing about being a journalist is that you've got to take the things that you've been generally aware of and test them and see whether it's true and actually talk to real people about their real feelings and passions and you know consult the documents etc etc etc but this was a moment in 1974 when I realized yep that's right that's right the white antagonism is extraordinary. That's why for instance I was fascinated by the appearance of Pauline Hanson on the scene which is a turning point in Australian federal politics and at that time the proportion of the community that believed Aboriginal is were being indulged was near a 50 percent and she didn't come to Parliament because she didn't like immigrants it was all about her dislike of Aborigines she was she lost pre-selection for the Liberal Party because she had come out in her Queensland electorate saying the problem around here is that Aborigines are not being punished enough for their crimes and in those days that lost you pre-selection for the Liberal Party in these days in many circles in the Liberal Party it is policy that's where we've moved. What do you attribute that to do you think we've become a much unkinder country than we once were?
No because in many ways we are much much much much much much kind of country than we than we than we than we were I think it is about the the the realization in politics that you can do things which were once considered deeply shameful and get away with it that you can put the boot into Indigenous Australians and win votes from it and that you don't care it's about the ruthlessness of politics politics has become I mean it was nothing more ruthless than 1975 but politics has become generally more ruthless and that's what we're dealing with at the moment. You bring up 1975 Good Segue? I was sitting there in my little cubicle at the bulletin we had little cubicles in those days that was luxury. I mean I came to love great be crowded noisy newsrooms but first up I had a cubicle and the editor secretary came around she was Canadian woman she was a really marvelous woman and she said to me David the Governor General is just a prime minister and I said look it doesn't work like that no no she said I said no look it doesn't David the Governor it can't anyway bob him of course he had I think it is the most important event political event in my life by a mile it was illegal it was stupendously unfair it was impatient Whitlam was going to lose the elections there was only six months to the elections it was barach 4 by the newspapers of the country Sidney Morning Herald was barracking for the sort of Charles the first solution to the political problems of Australia in 1970 something above all it showed that conservatives so-called conservatives in this country were willing to bet the house to win they were putting democracy on the line absolutely on the line to win and they won and the electorate alas confirmed the win with a mighty victory for Fraser of the next election and that's why I wrote my first book the biography of Garfield Barbecues the Chief Justice at the time he gave the second his imprimata on a basis which now as time goes by it looks more and more outrageous indeed comically outrageous but they got what they wanted and by the way Prince Charles wrote a personal letter to Kerr commending him for his brave actions let us not forget that King Charles III commended Kerr for chucking out a Labour Prime Minister who had supply and confidence the two measures of legitimate rule but they sacked him and the Prince as he then once commended the second that nothing nothing in my life has so sort of given me my bearings as that event it fired you up clearly oh yeah we have our South American moments in this country and that was one of them so what I'll all yanday uh you know you're not comparing Malcolm Fraser to Augustus Pinochet are you no no no I'm not I'm just you know Fraser was in so many ways a really good man and one of the best ways in which he was good contradictions again was on race South Africa he ended Australia's hideous delians with the apartheid regime he saw the practical end of the white Australia policy by bringing in very large numbers of um refugees from South Vietnam he was in many ways a good man he used and he used and years later I was at I was to interview him at the Byron Bay Lickry festival he'd written a book about foreign policy arguing against Australia's absolute dependence on the United States and I was walking across the grounds at the to the tent where we were going to talk and somebody was up there talking to him and I was bringing up the rear with Tammy Fraser his wife and I said to her sort of half jokingly I don't forgive him for everything and she said to me he does not want to be forgiven isn't that fantastic he does not want to be forgiven do you think he was very much at peace with what he does I've no idea I've no idea because it I mean it was it foreshadowed him forever oh yeah forever forever and so it surely was disgraceful all he had to do was wait a couple of months all he had to do was wait because it was unlikely that the with the government was going to go on the ropes it had it had shown such appalling that of discipline it was on the ropes yeah they just had to wait in patience in patience is a very interesting quality in politics it's not enough recognized the importance of impatience do you think that's what maybe brought on about the the surfing of Kevin around the role of Kevin was you think that was impatience on the part of Julia Guller the factional backers of Julia Guller more to the point it was a disaster I mean Rad was a disaster because you wrote you wrote a link that this you wrote an essay on this very topic yeah Rad was a very very interesting disaster he was a disaster but they had to bear with him through to the next election they had to and they didn't and they wrecked themselves because it was an easy that said I just fear that we've destroyed two prime ministers by doing this yes there were a number of Labor big weeks who were saying who said exactly the same thing it was a no it was a right faction coup and it was impatient David Maras my guest today on Fourth Estate we're talking about his life and career as a generalist broadcaster and biographer as part of our ongoing and profile series so David 1976 you decided to leave the bulletin magazine and you join the staff of the national times how did that come about um Jenny and I had broken up um I was starting a new life this was no I acknowledge that I was gay I was starting a new life oh and the other thing was that I was going to only have a part time job at the national times and I was only going to do some arts journalism for the national times you were the arts editor won't you yes sort of I mean editor was over blowing and I was the arts correspondent and I was going to do my own projects this was the thing I was going to be released to do my own projects which of course I didn't do because I am a journalist and if there isn't a deadline nothing gets done and that doesn't necessarily mean that it gets done by the deadline but nothing gets done anyway that was my move and I went to the national times to write about the arts and I'd been there about six months and the editor called me in I thought he was going to sack me any sit up David um can you just join the staff full time and write about other stuff as well it was a Sir Max Max such this was Max such and I said you bet and so that I still did a bit of arts journalism but I then began writing profiles um and political material and I just loved it um it was terrific people look back on the national times in the 70s as it was sort of the you know the housey and days of Australian journalism was it oh they had so much money you know the national times was established to do something with the profits it never made any money and there was a there were a few hours on Saturday afternoon when one of the printing presses was idle so why not have a national weekly newspaper it had correspondence in North America correspondence in London it had I think two or three correspondence in Canberra it had and this was so wonderful the printing press by the way was a hideous old broken down printing press name and made it very very difficult to actually print photographs and so it had a desk of four or five artists and the artists were in many ways the intellectual center of the paper they were fun they were anarchic um they were extraordinarily bright people like Patrick Cook Jenny Coops one of the one of the um lesbians who I became you know saved my life really uh there were four or five other artists Michael Fitzchames these names don't mean much to people these days but the paper looked beautiful they were beautiful drawings of politicians then a photographer came along I was furious because because it's wonderful photographer called Laurie Graham because her photographs used to take up half a page and sometimes you had to cut you had to cut what you were writing back from four and a half thousand words to three thousand eight hundred words to accommodate her photographs they were you know that's a lost seven hundred words we wrote long we wrote we had time we flew everywhere it and we were protected from the still at that time intense conservatism of the Fairfax operation by Max Such and a couple of other editors in chief and we had a board and a board and so Max Such was the editor Evan Witten was his deputy and tell us about some of the other journalists that you're working with um Brian Tuhey was a fearless fearless correspondent on matters of security and military that's where I met Marion Wilkinson later my co-author when we wrote about the town proferio a wonderful journalist not much known these days called David Hickey who did the best ever scoob in the history of the paper not exactly a scoob but we had the first report on the death and crimes of Sir Robert Askin the premier of New South Wales Robert Hopped who became later on the editor of the paper a European correspondent a little horror and wonderful writer of profiles and a very very shrewd judge of people and it was it was an amazing crew Paul Kelly Paul Kelly was was one of the um Canberra correspondence and he should have got the job as editor but so Max Such went upstairs and became editor-in-chief of the Fairfax publications Evan Witten succeeded him Evan was a brilliant teacher of journalism and his obsession this became the obsessions of the newspaper and one of those obsessions was tax avoidance and I'm part on tax avoidance ever since you know I read in the Herald this morning that the cost of superannuation concessions next financial year to this to the economy is 55.5 billion dollars unimaginable all of that money for all people anyway terrible that's a slight simplification David but um but Evan thank you for doing my job for yeah Evan um Evan didn't kind of warm to the job of being um editor much and so next in line was Paul Kelly but Evan had got a team of journalists to do this wonderful story they went down to the western districts of Victoria to the country around Malcolm Fraser's spread Noreen and asked his neighbours what he was like as a neighbour as a local as a grazier and the piece was fabulously funny fabulously damaging the meanness of Malcolm Fraser um you know he didn't he didn't put on grog at his bull sales there's it was a heavenly piece of journalism and Paul edited it he was deputy editor at the time and he was his editor now many of the people interviewed who had naively told the truth were great friends of the Fairfax family and the blowback through the Fairfax family and from Malcolm Fraser was enormous and so instead of Paul getting the job as editor of the paper it came to me it shouldn't have but it came to me and so that's how I ended up for the next couple of years as editor we'll come back to that can you imagine something like that being written today about a politician that sort of that sort of piece it's not such a good idea yeah yeah what's our boy like as a neighbour and of course with with Fraser so much of Fraser's image was as the owner of this immense beautiful spread in the western districts the toffeeist area of of squatterdom no no and it was I think we were five or six journalists went down there for a couple of weeks oh god it was wonderful what when you say those you have largely protected from you know the conservatism with the Fairfax as an effect of the Fairfax organization at large why how do you think they managed that how do you think Max was able to mention because the national times was known as it was the pointy end of journalism it was it was it in fantastic investigative pieces and and took risks look the explanation ultimately is Rupert Murdoch when Rupert Murdoch began to be a national presence and when he created the Australian he was marvellous you know the creation of the Australian as a national daily newspaper was transformative it was so good it was so intelligent and up to date and its political values were kind of quite radical.
It supported Wicklam's election in 72, for instance. And the Sydney Morning Herald had to be transformed to top to bottom because it suddenly looked incredibly fussy in old-fashioned. The detail of the Melbourne Age, it had to be transformed. And the creation of the National Times was a sort of early answer to the wealthy readers who were going to the Australian.
They were taking their eyes and they were wallets to the Australian. So the National Times was a bit of a response to that to show that the Fairfax's could be modern too and innovative and fun. And that was always the thing about the National Times, that its imitators can't understand. It had to be fun.
It had to have jokes. You had to have laughs in there as well. And that laughter is a sign of confidence. Laughter gives the thing of presence.
And we always understood that. I mean, the jokes of Patrick Cook and the writing of Richard Ackland and it was about you had to have this element of fun. And it's such a shame that weekly newspapers today, with all the right political values, all very, very interesting and exploratory journalism, but they absolutely won't have fun. When that Saturday paper, do you think it comes close?
The Saturday paper is an amazing enterprise in a world where the money has bled out of journalism. It's amazing. And the dedication of all concern is terrific. And it has great journalists.
It could have a bit more. That would be a Reddit as night. It is an editor's note. It's been given several times to my dear friends at the Saturday paper.
I tend to give advice freely, Tina. Oh, okay, so you don't challenge for it. Shut up. And it was gritty as well, the National Times.
It was quite gritty. You and another journalist that we haven't mentioned, and some has teamed up for a fantastic piece on a sexual assault that occurred at St Paul's College. Where I've been, and we talk about the different views on it. And the article is constructed around the fact that we had sort of slightly different views.
I saw her on the other day and she's republishing that article somewhere. And I thought, oh, good-oh. Are you getting a cut on that? No cut was offered.
A fall request was made for copyright waiver. I gave it freely. No, I can't believe that somebody would be republishing it. But yes, Anne was a very, very big presence on paper.
You've got to stop giving your services away. I know. Anne was a very big presence on the paper and her arguments was a big impact on me. And she got, she wrote some fantastic stuff at that time.
Fabulous, fabulous stuff. Yeah. It was way out there. 1978.
You wrote an incredibly important piece for the National Times on the arrests made at Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. And you said it was the first piece that you wrote in which readers would be able to discern that you were a gay journalist. Did you set up to reveal that? Or was it something that you decided to do as the outrage, I guess, at what a transpire?
This is so typical of me. I didn't march on the march. So this is the 1978 march, the first Mardi Gras march in Sydney that the police ambushed and arrested a large number of people. And it was a pointless hideous melee.
So I didn't march on the march. But I was given a talk, a fortnight, to interview everybody I could. And I've got at home a document that is almost minute by minute about what happened on that march. And it's been, and I've given it to other people and the views of it, but it allowed me to write this piece.
That I was gay. It was absolutely known on the paper. And I was a little bit scared that I would be considered, that this article would be considered special pleading by the editors. And I can still remember standing there beside Evan Witten as he read the proofs, and he finished reading the proofs and turned to me and he said, that's what journalism is about.
And that was a profound moment for me. That's what journalism is about. And I never boasted after that that I was a puffed, but you know, it slowly emerged. But that was, I was very, very proud of that piece.
But I have to keep telling people I wasn't on the march. I reported the march, but I wasn't on it. I regret. Except, yes, of course, I regret, I regret, because it would have been so much more powerful to be writing an eyewitness account.
I was an eyewitness to the next day. I turned up at the magistrate's court where everybody was being hauled into before the magistrate. And I wrote about an eyewitness account of that. But do you, there's been lots of discussions over the last few years about whether the police should have a float at the city, might be a gay and lesbian Mardi Gras.
And it's debated, heavily given their history. I mean, it started, it started off as a protest march. And of course, the brutality that ensued. Do you think they should be marching in the moment?
Is it not a triumph for gay and lesbian people that the police in uniform, that had once bashed them and failed to investigate them properly and dealt in the most appalling way with them, march with us? Isn't that a triumph? In my view, a triumph, extraordinary change. And you would want to obliterate that because you don't think they've done well enough?
For fuck's sake, take a victory when it's offered. You know, people, there are lots of people who can't, they just can't cope with winning. And I, in particular, I'm thinking of those old die-hard Catholic DLP operatives like my old friend and combatant Jared Henderson. You know, everything Jared fought for is a young man, the survival of capitalism, the survival of the Catholic Church, the survival of the Liberal Party.
He won, they won. But they just don't know what to do. What's the one? You know, I think that's when you have a drink and retire and put your feet up.
You've had a mighty victory. You don't have to keep looking for more battles when you have a victory. Now, I'm sure, I know in fact, there are lots of young gay men and women who think my attitude is just hopelessly old-fashioned and conservative and uncombatant and things. But Jesus, it's a victory.
There are the coppers in uniform marching along, many more women than men you'll notice. But they're there. They're marching. They're celebrating and you'd want to stop them.
During this time, you also decided to become a biographer. Well, that was that was Barwick. That was Barwick. Yeah, because Barwick was getting away with it, with with 975.
So John Kerr, the Governor General, couldn't go to a cocktail party without a Mount of Descartes. The rage against him was continuous and great. But Barwick, who had given this whole thing, his imprimato, his life was untouched. You know, and people were just sort of, oh, well, that was just Barwick.
And I became fascinated by this now. And I spent three years writing his biography. And there were many things I came to admire about him, but he was a bastard. He was a bastard.
But I discovered in writing that biography that, again, you've got to pay attention to the contradictions and you've got to get it right. You've got to get the person right. People are much more complex than... I'm more complex and I have never been somebody I don't believe who was going out to destroy people.
I've gone out to explain them. I'm an explainer. I'm not a combatant. And so my first biography was to explain how a brilliant young lawyer from a Labour background could end up giving a tick to what Kerr did in 1975.
That was the question of the book. Then, later on, I got a bit literary. Yes, with Patrick White. Interesting, because Barwick obviously, he didn't, it was a pretty critical biography.
And he didn't much like that you were writing it. He was placed at first until he discovered what my views on the 1975 world. I'm not been hiding them from him, but I wrote something in the National Times that made my position pretty clear to him. And at that point, he said he was not going to help me in any fur because he did go into a game, he said documents, and he also tried to get all of his friends not to talk to me.
So it was difficult. So the Patrick White experience was very different than when you decided to write... Patrick is Harold as one of the great Australian writers of the 20th century. He's the only Australian writer to ever receive the Nobel Prize for literature.
The author of a dozen novels, many plays, short stories. Had you known him personally before? You decided to write? Okay.
So it was only that you met him, you approached him, that you wanted to write this biography. Is that right? Why? Well, look, the writing of books comes to you as a bolt out of the blue.
And I was reading a biography of a strange and interesting guy who had been a publisher in Sydney in the 1930s and ended up as a Nazi and interned in the Blue Mountains. Anyway, very interesting figure. And in it, there was a mention that Patrick White's parents had financed his first publishing venture in the 1930s on the understanding that he would publish their son, Patrick's poetry. I thought to myself, that contradicts Patrick White's talk about his whole style and I'm giving parents.
But this is really... God, I'd love to write a traditional biography of him. I'm going to write it. It was like that.
And that was the next eight years of my life, really. I mean, I was doing some part-time work through it as well. But there was another thing as well. My parents had met him and Mum loved him, Dad hated him.
I was reading his books as they were published. So I read writers in the chariot when I was about 14, 15, absolutely loved it. Again, Dad hated it. Oh, Dad, yes, famously threw one of his books across the bedroom saying that it was an idiot.
Well, he's quite polarizing. Yeah, he was. And as a person. But I loved his work and I was fascinated by his life.
And in the end, the book is actually dedicated to my father. He said, he shouldn't be a dedicated to your mother. I said, no. It's sort of, in a sense, it's by way of explanation to you, Dad.
Because it was also the exploration, of course, of gay lives. And he was openly gay as well. Wasn't he Patrick White? Yes, he was that interesting rather...
Never talked about it, never denied it. And Monalia Laskaris was always his partner, not his friend or special friend or those kinds of things. I think he generally used the word partner. So I'm not going to discuss it, but it's obvious.
And that was sort of a dignified conservative way of dealing with these things that I would march in my mind. He'd just, sweetie a hand man up Oxford Street, David, yeah. So I was completely fascinated by his life. And it turned out to be richer than I had imagined.
And one of the reasons it was richer than I had imagined is that his friends had nearly all disobeyed his instructions to destroy his letters. Right, because he said he'd wanted them burnt, right? Yeah. And everywhere I went, there were a dozen letters here and two dozen letters there.
And the day came when I said to him, Patrick, you know that people have disenade you and that they have kept your letters, don't you? He said, no, no, no, no. And I said, can I see them? And he said, have you written something?
And I had, of course. And it was a permission note from Patrick. Now, it was very, very badly drafted because I didn't say copy. I just did read.
But he signed it on the spot. And then that opened to me this world of beautiful writing and beautiful, kind of autobiographical writing and book in many ways, this is letter stitched together. And he was so pleased at the end of it all. He made me what a bastard.
Our deal was that I would that he had no veto over the book that I would send. I would send the manuscript to the publishers after it had gone to the publishers. I would give him a copy just to check if for any inaccuracies. And I got this phone call from him.
He said, we're going to have to sit down with this. And I thought, fuck. But then he made a clear that he thought the book was OK. But he made me sit opposite him on his dining room table.
He had a copy in front of him. I had a copy in front of me for nine half days while he read it in front of me. And he would laugh at things. And I would hope it was a joke of mine.
No, it was something he'd written in a letter in 1952 that delighted him. He was so delighted that those letters had survived. And I've now been able to direct to the National Library in Canberra over a thousand of his letters. It's just, they were just so beautiful and funny and outrageous.
It was a great time. Why do you think he instructed them to be burned and to be destroyed? Yet he obviously took such joy. It allowed him to be completely unrestrained in the world because he would be there fault if it got out.
There was also a kind of subarastocratic notion that you did that kind of thing. But yeah. Was there anything that you thought he tried to keep from you? Well, I've never discovered anything in the years since when so many more letters have appeared, more documents have come up with.
I've actually got a stack of Patrick White documents at home that I'm trying to transcribe at the moment. They've just emerged. They're from the 1930s. His handwriting.
I cannot tell you how he's handwriting this. From a distance, it looks beautiful. Up close. No.
It's so hard. Look, it's just so, so much beautiful material of a great creative mind whose work is now not fashionable. And that is the thing about writers. When they die, nearly all of them, they work guys with them.
I mean, who is reading Christina Stead these days? And the Man Who Loved Children is the greatest novel that's been written by an Australian. It's a phenomenal piece of art. But she's not read.
You die and your work dies with you, particularly now that Australian literature is being taught in fewer and fewer and fewer universities. Can you believe that? I've only discovered the works of people like Shelley Hazard and Elizabeth Harrower as an adult because it was never, you know, we've discovered them. You've discovered them.
Do you like them? Oh, very much so. Transylvinas, I think, is a master face. Absolutely master face.
Yeah. Yeah. What have you read of Patrick's? Well, you're putting me on the spot there.
He's letters. He's letters. Thank you. Read the part one fear.
Okay. All right. That's my reading recommendation. That's the gateway.
Okay. All right. He's last great novel. I'm going to do that, actually.
Yeah. So I'm not sure. So I'm going to read less. He was a complicated person.
What was the most contradictions? What was the biggest contradiction? Do you think that he was fiercely judgmental and deeply loving and not necessarily the same people, of course, but that he had within him the capacity for profound empathy and love. But he could also be brutally dismissive.
He was capable of wounding people terribly. He was also capable of minding, supporting, encouraging, loving people as well. And there were those, they were two very marked sides of the one man. So in addition to Garfield, Barwick and Patrick White, you've gone on to write a link about many other men who've served quite a prominent role in Australian life, you know, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, Bill Shorten, George Bell.
I know you've been put to you before. What about the women? Look, I think we'll end the interview now. It's been going on for a very long time, hasn't it?
Look, I, this is a terrible judgment of me. I have written dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of profiles of people. I was not aware that I was writing about men all the time until, until about 20 years ago. My publisher said, we must bring out a book of your profiles, David.
I said, I thought that would be a great idea. And then I looked at them. And I realized the extent to which they've written about men. Nearly all my life, my bosses have been women, women are my closest friends.
I don't understand women. I don't think. Gillard became a politician who fascinated me and I started to, you know, try to get an idea of where she came from. And I've written about her, of course, and her fascinating cultural and religious background.
I thought she was a good Prime Minister, by the way. But nearly all my attention has always been on men. And there's no getting around the fact that men puzzle me and intrigue me, particularly in power, in a way that women don't. And I don't really understand that.
I don't really understand that. I blame women, by the way, for it. Why is that? What have we done?
Because of the, you know, opus off, David, you don't know what you're talking about. The dismissiveness. I really can't explain it, but isn't it bizarre? I reckon this is, we're going to see something.
I'm quite, I reckon it's still coming. So, journalist, biographer and broadcaster David Masveking with me there for the All the States profile series. That was part one of our discussion. In part two, David speaks with me about getting fired from the editorship of the National Times, learning the National Television Journalism over two stints with the ABC's Four Corners, his co-authoring of Dark Victory with Marion Wilkinson, which schicksmoor the temper and children overboard affair under the Howard government, and how he accidentally came to replace Philip Adams as host of Late Night Live.
And of course, there'll be many more anecdotes along the way. You'll find part two at the Fourth Estate Podcast with the rest of our episodes. Don't forget to leave us a review, a rating and subscribe that way. You'll never miss an episode and you'll help other people find us as well.
I'm Tina Quinn, join me again for part two of our profile on David Masve.