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January
1968 began like any other year. As I slouched under the shower negotiating a moderate hangover, I little realized that this would be The Year of my life. My last year as a bachelor, my first year in the real world of work, the high point of the long post-War boom and – looking back from forty years on – the most remarkable year of an early baby boomer’s time on this earth.
Each generation seems to have just such an era-defining year. For my parents it was 1939, the culmination of a decade-long progression from global depression to world war. Their parents faced an earlier world conflagration topped off by a deadly global influenza epidemic, a grim precursor to possible futures for my grandchildren. My children have already (I hope) experienced their ‘Year’; in 2008, exactly forty years after mine, the world’s most advanced economies teetered on the edge of global depression, again. But, perhaps, they will face even worse times to come or, at least, a year in which much happens, for good and ill.
Above all, 1968 was such a year. Much, indeed, did happen. I was aware of the significance of some of the events I witnessed but much evaded my understanding; I moved as a sleepwalker through an unlit world beyond my ken. This brief memoir is an attempt to recapture some of the atmosphere defining that vague landscape, to remind myself and my contemporaries of what did happen and to reflect on why it happened and why what happened was important for what came next and what is still to come. My children and their friends won’t recognize the young man in these pages but many of my generation will.
* * *
The first month of the year, traditionally an annual holiday period in Australia, started innocuously. I needed to find work, while I completed my university degree at night. Fortunately, the Australian economy was buoyant. The latest in a series of mining booms was driving the country in its accustomed unbalanced manner. Local manufacturing industries prospered behind high tariff barriers, offering secure fulltime employment to men and boys. Growing service sector jobs in retailing, offices and government agencies opened opportunities for women and girls, but generally only until they married. Since before World War I the Australian labour market was regulated by a national system of arbitration that set minimum wages based, famously, on updated judgments as to the income necessary to support a man, his wife and three children. The ‘wage earners’ welfare state’, as it was later termed, implicitly assumed the dominance of what was called ‘the nuclear family’, a patriarchal domestic arrangement in which the husband earned the income, the wife ran the home and the children went to school. Regulations brought in after World War II, aimed at removing women from the paid workforce in order to provide jobs for returning servicemen, were still in force in the late 1960s, underpinned by conventional conservative mores concerning the ‘proper’ roles of men and women. Thus, when a female public servant married, she was required to resign. In the burgeoning glamour growth industry – civil aviation – a rigid gendered division of labour persisted. Women in this industry worked on the ground or were confined to cabin duties as ‘air hostesses’ or “hosties”. The fight by women to fly up at the sharp end of the aeroplane was still to be fought and won. Other inequalities existed. Women, on average, earned about two-thirds the wage of men employed in the same jobs. Superannuation was normally denied to women, it being assumed that the provisions made for their husbands would meet their retirement needs. A similar logic effectively precluded women from buying a house on mortgage; if a married woman’s income was taken into account at all by banks in determining the household’s mortgage credibility, it was radically discounted.
Although the second wave of feminism was stirring, lapping the shores of Australia, emanating from an increasingly radicalized America, this made only a shallow impact on my male psyche at the time – I am ashamed to admit. As will become evident, other political issues were competing for attention. Australia’s most famous contemporary feminist, Germaine Greer, had to leave Australia’s shores for Britain – permanently as it turned out – in order to publish her influential book, The Female Eunuch.
The dominant British cultural hegemony was unassailable and, indeed, unremarkable, so embedded was it in the bowels of this most southerly outpost of empire, possibly excepting the Faukland Islands. In retrospect this seems unaccountable, given the massive boost to Australia’s population occasioned by the waves of European immigration following World War II. But, on reflection, not so mysterious, since Australia’s ‘White Australia policy’ filtered out those refugees and migrants of darker hue. ‘New Australians’, as we were taught to call them, arrived on ships docking in the capital cities, bringing people from Southern and Eastern Europe – from Italy, Greece, the various parts of Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe – but above all from ‘the mother country’, war-damaged, rationing-ridden Britain. ‘Ten pound Poms’ arrived in droves, to be herded into makeshift migrant hostels, wartime tin sheds. Given the extreme housing shortages, many such families lived for years in these ‘temporary’ camps until employment opportunities and the rapid growth of the domestic economy sucked them into the ever-expanding embrace of suburbia. Many male migrants from non English-speaking backgrounds were hoovered out to work on major public infrastructure projects, like the famed Snowy Mountain Scheme, Australia’s answer to the Hoover (no pun intended) dam. Some migrants arrived involuntarily, without comprehending why they were here. Child migrants from the slums of England were removed from families too poor to raise them and sent, like their convict predecessors almost two hundred years before, to the other side of the world. Like the unfortunate tenants of Port Arthur and Norfolk Island, too many of these children experienced harsh and inhuman treatment, this in institutions supposedly working to give them a better start in life; at least the prisons of colonial Australia did not pretend to do anything other than punish their inmates. Almost fifty years afterwards, the survivors of this grim and harrowing experience were still seeking recognition and restitution. Of all this, I was blissfully ignorant.
Ignorant also was I of the plight of Australia’s first peoples, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who had lived in their lands stretching back over fifty thousand years, arguably the longest-resident inhabitants of any portion of the Earth. Notwithstanding that fact, the new comers from the North planted the Union Jack and promptly declared the continent, both mapped and yet to be charted, ‘Terra Nullus’, a land uninhabited by humans, consigning two thousand generations of Indigenous people to the status of lower animal. Barely a year before The Year, Indigenous Australians were finally granted citizenship in their own land. But in the centuries leading up to that point and for long after, official policy and unofficial practice encouraged the ‘assimilation’ of their remaining number into the dominant white mans’ world. This history entailed an obscene catalogue of cultural, economic and military horrors. In some places hunted virtually to extinction by police and landowners, in other times and places degraded through labour exploitation, neglect and casual violence, remnant communities strove to retain and rebuild their cultural identities. Most horrific of all were the ‘soft’ policies aimed at eugenically removing aboriginality from the population. This was attempted in various ways, often by well-meaning government, church and welfare organizations. Up to and after The Year, Aboriginal children – especially the lighter skinned – were forcibly removed from their families and communities to be raised in missions or adopted out to white families in the hope that eventually all trace of the past inhabitants of Australia would be expunged. Several generations of Indigenous Australians were treated so. Only in 2008, did the Australian Parliament, in a rare bipartisan display, formally apologise to ‘the stolen generations’ for this inhuman, inexcusable practice, as part of a broader movement for national recognition and reconciliation. Much still remains to be done.
Back in the late 1960s, only one Aboriginal student had graduated from my university. Charlie Perkins later became a leading advocate for Aboriginal rights and a distinguished senior federal government public servant. While at university and, at the time again unknown to me – where was my head – Charlie had lead a brave group of protestors on a freedom bus ride through Outback New South Wales, to confront racism red neck and raw in towns notorious for their treatment of blacks. At the same time, in Queensland, a Neanderthal state government practiced a form of Apartheid only marginally less vicious than in South Africa. In Queensland, Aborigines were confined to their mission stations, unable to leave without written permission of the local police officer, who often also held and doled out the residents’ money at his own discretion. Aboriginal rural workers on the large sheep and cattle stations were paid in kind or, when in cash, at rates much lower than their white workmates. These semi-feudal practices eventually caused a celebrated strike or walk-off by Aboriginal stockmen and their families at Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory, owned by an absentee British aristocrat. Eventually, at the prompting of the federal government, the pastoral company, part of the Vestey Group, was prevailed upon to return a portion of their vast lease to the local Gurinji people, a landmark in the fight for Aboriginal land rights in this country.
Such was my world in 1968.
* * *
But my own attentions at the time were focused on finding a job. Gazing upward, I shielded my eyes from the summer sun. The bright new Royal Exchange Building towered skywards, almost beyond sight. It was located at the Circular Quay end of Pitt Street, named after a long dead British Prime Minister (a well established practice in the Australian colonies, as successive visitors from England and Scotland have ever remarked upon when coming across street and place names transported directly from their homelands). I took the lift to the twenty-third floor and walked out into a beehive of activity, the very heart of the venerable chartered accounting firm, Price Waterhouse. Looking through the windows to the north and east I could see the magnificent vista of Sydney Harbour, laid out before me like a giant jewel, glinting in the unforgiving sun. Never had I seen the Harbour from this height. It is an image that has never faded from my mind.
The office was open, a vast central space surrounded on all four sides by small partitioned offices crushed up against the full-length windows. This, I was later informed, closely reflected the semi-military organization of the firm. The offices were occupied by the thirty or so audit managers, each of who had his (no her) audit teams concentrated at the desks nearby in the large central space. Each team had the equivalent of a sergeant, corporal, private first class and private. Between the manager and sergeant there sometimes stood an assistant manager, a super-sergeant or sergeant-major. This person was close to landing an office with a view but not quite there. As a result, he (no she) lived in a perpetual state of expectation and I soon saw that much of the real work and all the responsibility fell to his lot. Some assistant managers, I later found out, had lived this twilight existence for many years. Those who had never given up hope of progressing generally burnt out, others accepted their fate and survived but not without bitterness. I quickly learnt to avoid them.
On my first day I stood awkwardly with the other new boys – and one new girl, a gorgeous young Chinese women who had majored in English literature and psychology. Since the rest of us were economics and accounting majors, I realized that Price Waterhouse must really be desperate. A girl! From a non-anglo background! With no obvious business or accounting background!! Perhaps the times were a-changing. Later, after being herded into a room on another floor by a manager whose special job was ‘staff training’, we were told that not all of us were ready to have our training wheels removed to be let loose on unsuspecting clients. Indeed, some of us had little or no accounting knowledge at all; all eyes turned to the girl but then, most were already there. When I asked ‘why’, I was told that there was a shortage of accounting graduates, so a decision had been made – at this point the manager’s eyes turned up to the ceiling where on the floor above the general office the firm’s partners resided – to employ near-graduates (me) and those who had completed degrees in other disciplines (her) as well as those more conventionally fitted for service. Consequently, we all sat for the next three weeks in this classroom rehashing the basics and learning the audit procedures that we were to practice when at last we were parceled out as privates in the audit teams above. If this appears an odd process today when fully qualified graduates find it difficult to get their first jobs in a highly competitive job market, it is worth noting that in 1968 about ten percent only of high school graduates went on to university, only two of which existed in Sydney (Australia’s largest city) at the time.
Thus began my career as a junior audit clerk.
* * *
January also witnessed the birth of Australia’s first set of quintuplets. Born to a solicitor and his wife in a small town in Northern New South Wales, who had a year earlier been blessed with twins, they faced the prospect of raising seven children under eighteen months of age – oh, and a couple of older children as well. Daily news reports kept a nation agog apprised of the latest developments regarding the infants’ weight, feeding and general wellbeing. Sadly, the youngest quin soon died, puzzling the doctors and distressing the nurses. If nothing else, the event put the town of Tenterfield on the map, and in a pre-internet age, even made the news in many other countries. Not until Australia’s Boy from Oz, Peter Allen, sang ‘Tenterfield Saddler’ was the light of international fame again shone, however briefly, on this inland Australian town.
To remind all Australians of the ties of empire, the Queen’s New Years’ Honours List raised eighteen commoners to the exalted rank of Knight Commander or Knight Batchelor. One woman, Mrs. Hilda Mabel Stevenson, became Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to social welfare and charitable causes. The eighteen former included several judges, Queen Councilors, senior medical practitioners and administrators and rather a large a number of retiring politicians from the conservative side of politics. Business leaders were not ignored. The chairman of the first mining company to discover and exploit Nickel in Australia was given the highest honour, fitting in view of the fact that 1968 would long be remembered as the year of the great Nickel boom. The arts were not forgotten either, at least art of the most rarefied and refined kind. Knighthoods were bestowed on a leading guardian of the NSW Art Gallery and the country’s preeminent male ballet dancer and choreographer, Robert Helpmann.
Awards of lesser rank were scattered more broadly, once the major gongs had – as they always had – expressed and solidified the ‘natural’ social order of things. At the bottom end the British Empire Medal went to a porter at Commonwealth Parliament House and to ‘the first full blood Aboriginal’, without any hint of irony in the latter case. Further up the status ladder, an O.B.E. was awarded to a Liberal (read ‘conservative’) Party politician widely known as “silent Billy” in reference to the fact that he had made only six speeches during his two decade Parliamentary career. A welter of minor awards was carefully spread over male and female worthies, graded according to dress and address.
In short, the Queen’s List once again faithfully reflected the essentially derivative position of contemporary Australia in the world and – fractal fashion – reproduced the status order of the mother country in our wide and brown land. This vestige of Empire was swept away in the 1970s by an incoming Labor government to be replaced by an indigenous honours system more in tune with the ethos of the time – part of the reforming program typified by Labor’s campaign hymn, “It’s Time”. Unbelievably, forty years later, a conservative Prime Minster reintroduced the capping stone of the old system and proceeded to urge a new crop of Antipodean Sirs and Dames on her Royal Britannic Majesty, presumably in anticipation of a new flood of donations to party coffers.
The essential genius of the British monarchical system of government, absorbed by the Australian colonies and Federation, lay in the political powerlessness of the Monarch. The people in Parliament were sovereign and the monarch their symbol. Dullness and conformity made up the ideal job description for the latter position. The British royal family has been spectacularly successful in meeting the criteria and filling the position admirably over the past four hundred years. In January 1968 a hint as to why emerged. Research published in the British Medical Journal suggested that a ‘royal malady’, called porphyria, might have blighted the lives of many in the lineage from Mary Queen of Scots onward. Most famously, King George III displayed lengthy bouts of mental illness and strange behaviours, made real to late Twentieth Century play and film goers in Alan Bennett’s ‘The Madness of King George’. The researchers were diplomatic enough to suggest that the condition appeared to have skipped the current monarch and her immediate family.
In the real world, however, Australia was drifting further and further away from Britain and its rapidly declining Empire. This had become obvious earlier in the decade when the mother country cut the apron strings by opting for closer economic ties to Europe, throwing Australian and New Zealand farmers and graziers into panic. This brought back painful memories of 1942 when Churchill had clearly been willing to sacrifice Australia to the Japanese invader in pursuit of ‘defeating Hitler first.’ To underscore its position, Britain’s defence Minister arrived to soften up domestic public opinion concerning its prospective defence withdrawal from Singapore and Malaysia. This development sparked criticism from Australia’s other major ally, the United States, whose governing establishment was uneasy about strategic developments in Asia-Pacific during the developing Cold War – and the hot war in Vietnam, of which more anon.
* * *
Closer to home, leading figures in the ruling federal Parliamentary Liberal Party were jockeying to see who would become Prime Minster, in the wake (unfortunate choice) of the incredible death by drowning of the incumbent, Sir Harold Holt. The Prime Minister had gone scuba diving alone in wild seas off the tip of Mornington Peninsular just south of Melbourne, where I now live. This unlikely and unwise adventure apparently stemmed from a desire on the PM’s part to impress his mistress, who bikini clad, ran around helplessly on the beach in front of the first television news cameras to arrive on the scene. A stunned nation was treated to a real time drama as the camera swung back and forth from the crashing waves to the nymph on the sands.
Holt’s body was never found. In its place conspiracy stories of varying degrees of lunacy were floated (sorry), the most outlandish being that – as a long-time Russian mole – he had swum to a Soviet submarine idling just offshore, to be whisked away to Moscow for debriefing and to receive, covertly, the Order of Lenin. Holt’s state funeral was notable for the personal visit of the US President, Lyndon Johnson, apparently still touched by Holt’s previous cringe-making assertion that Australians were “all the way with LBJ”. I well remember the incredulous look on my father’s face when he found out about the drowning and his comment that in no other country would the national leader be allowed to put himself in danger by disappearing alone into a tumultuous sea. Perhaps because of an implicit recognition of the imbecility of his unfortunate end, Harold Holt quickly disappeared from the public consciousness. For those of us alive at the time, it is difficult to credit that it actually happened. Only in his electorate was his memory preserved in stone, appropriately enough as the ‘Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool’. To this day, locals will say, on a hot day, “we’re off for a dip at Dead Harry’s”. Melbournian local governments seem to have a talent for bad taste when it comes to public monuments, especially when water is concerned. Some decades after Holt’s drowning, the City of Melbourne placed a statue of two of Australia’s most famous explorers – Robert O’Hara Burke and John Wills – on top of a plinth from beneath which a gushing fountain gave forth a torrent of crystal clear water. Burke and Wills died of thirst in the South Australian desert just failing to cross the continent south to north and return in the 1850s. If a host today is tardy in offering liquid refreshment to an Australian guest he or she is likely to be reminded – “you know what happened to Burke and Wills…pause…they died of thirst, didn’t they?”
In the battle to find a new Prime Minister, several senior government ministers offered their services. One aspirant – Billie Sneddon – failed this time but later succeeded in becoming Leader of the Opposition when, in 1972, his party was ousted from office by a resurgent Labor Party. Sneddon did not last long, either in office or on this earth. He subsequently died while apparently involved in an illicit liaison with someone else’s wife. The scandal sheet – a newspaper improbably titled The Truth – led with the headline – “Billie dies on the job”. Another aspirant, also known as Billy – William McMahon – was stymied in his long-held ambition to move into the Prime Minister’s residence (The Lodge) when the leader of the minor member of the government coalition refused to serve under him. The Coalition turned instead to a rugged ex-wartime serviceman (described by the newspapers of the day as ‘a man of action’) who a couple of years later famously voted himself out of office when a party room confidence vote on his leadership was tied. At that moment Billy McMahon finally assumed the Prime Ministership. My two memories of this unmemorable man both concerned President Nixon. The first occasion concerned ‘that dress’. In 1971 Mr. and Mrs. McMahon attended a state dinner in the White House. The world’s media were agog when Mrs. McMahon descended the stairs wearing a white dress with a slit form ankle to thigh on one side (the side favouring the photographers). The picture went around the world, viral before its time. The second image I have is of the Prime Minister being caught by journalists on the steps of old Parliament House, on the day that Nixon recognized Communist China. The Australian Government had not been tipped off by the Americans before the event. McMahon unconvincingly blustered that he had known that this was happening but this only confirmed the gathering view domestically that the US was treating Australia with contempt. Most embarrassingly for the government it had been castigating the Labor Opposition and its Leader Gough Whitlam who had months earlier unilaterally visited China and been feted by Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao. This only served to reinforce the view that it was the government that was out of touch and the Opposition that had its fingers on the pulse of world affairs. A year later the hapless government was gone, replaced by Whitlam and a party that had been out of office for virtually my entire life.
* * *
GIRLS FEEL LESS GUILTY ABOUT SEX. The Kinsey Institute published results of its 1967 national study into the premarital sexual activities of American women. The study found that more women than in Dr. Kinsey’s study a generation earlier are ‘doing it’, enjoying it and feeling less guilty. This, the late Dr. Kinsey’s successor put down to the collapse of the virginity barrier. Once breached girls did not recant and return to a life of celibacy until marriage. ‘Almost a virgin’ didn’t cut it. Once crossed and lost, there was no turning back. Several further findings emerged. Sexually experienced women still equated sex and love more often than men. Loss of virginity tended to occur late in high school or early in college, when girls were beginning to cut free from parental surveillance. The pattern of older men seducing younger women was breaking down; ‘first love’ was increasingly conducted between partners of similar ages – bad news, presumably for ageing lotharios. Prostitution was much less in evidence as a spur to lost virginity (presumably the study is referring to boys here). Finally, and pleasingly, girls were much more likely to find their first sexual experience pleasurable.
This study seemed to sum up the tabloid view of the day that ‘the swinging sixties’ had arrived and broken down all barriers to the free expression and enjoyment of ‘sexual liberation’. All this was news to me. I seemed to have grown though the decade with an unerring talent for being attracted to ‘good girls’. If the sexual revolution had arrived, I had been looking the other way. The girls I knew, went to school with and dated all seemed to have one thing in common – a determination to ‘save themselves for marriage’. Most were prominent and enthusiastic participants in Christian fellowship. Some carried biblical pamphlets in their bras to act as a final barrier to temptation. This biographical history made me suspicious of the Kinsey findings. American girls could not be that much easier than their Australian cousins. The tip-off came when I twigged that the sample of 1000 interviews was drawn from American colleges. Since, by the 1960s, Australia was positively irreligious by comparison to American society, I concluded that Kinsey’s sample was badly skewed and offered no hope for me, unless I changed my preference in favour of ‘bad girls’. I didn’t.
* * *
1968 was also the year in which the police in NSW gained the power to compulsorily breath test motorists for excessive alcohol in their blood. As Sydney spread outwards and car ownership grew, so too did the carnage on our roads. (I note that here I have automatically fallen back on the very phrase that the proponents of breath testing invented – ‘carnage on our roads’.) The road toll joined the weather forecast as the most frequently heard social statistic inhaled by ordinary people. It was a grim reminder as to the fragility of life in modern urban/suburban Australia. Somewhat oddly, however, a surprisingly large proportion of road trauma (a much later phrase) occurred in rural and Outback areas. Long, badly made roads linking far-flung towns and farms made for efficient killing fields. The heavy consumption of alcoholic beverages certainly played its part, as the image of the hard-working, hard-drinking male was supported by an extensive network of hotels and several large brewery and distribution networks.
Australians, unlike Americans, generally accepted the limitations on their right to drive without being blind drunk, as they embraced the introduction of compulsory seat belts. But an inherited anti-authoritarian streak, added to a deeply embedded need to equate heavy drinking and masculinity, meant that all attempts to date to erase driving under the influence of alcohol (and drugs) have only succeeded in slowing the incidence of drunk driving and road deaths. Unsurprisingly, at the beginning of 1968 and long after, representatives of the large brewing interests expressed a strong belief that breath testing would have no discernable effect on reducing the road toll. This stance – namely, that any public policy intervention that might harm the financial interests of the provider of unsafe products is ineffectual – has been copied and refined since by the tobacco, gaming and pharmaceutical industries. Nevertheless, as the 1960s neared its end, new social movements were growing up in Western countries around consumer rights and advocacy. Ralph Nader was beginning to educate the world that cars were not safe at any speed. My world was beginning to listen.
* * *
The 1970s had seen mass riots in a number of American cities. Racial tensions had grown throughout the decade as minorities, especially African Americans, mobilized against entrenched discrimination and poverty. The Watts riots or rebellion in Los Angeles over six days in 1965 saw 32 deaths, more than a thousand injured, even more arrests and massive property damage and looting. The causes were many and complex. Miserable housing conditions, job discrimination, police violence and corruption, educational exclusion and a long post War history of neglect by city, state and federal authorities came together to light the fuse. The explosion when it burst forth was devastating. Images of destruction shot around the world, coming not out of some African failed state but from the bowels of one of the world’s great cities, the home of Disneyland, Hollywood and the Dodgers baseball team. Twenty-five years later I happened to be in LA on the eve of the Rodney King riots that ripped apart similar community areas. I had fallen asleep on a bus ride back to my hotel and woke to find myself alone coming to the end of the line. On alighting I (later) realised that I was a couple of streets away from the scene of the vicious police beating that sparked the riots later in that week. Had I, an ostentatiously white male, been standing on the same street corner waiting for my bus a few days later I may have experienced some inconvenience.
In the winter of 1968, authorities and community leaders were nervously looking towards the coming summer, with good cause as it turned out.
* * *
Early in the month rumblings were coming from the Middle East, as they are today, in this case, after-shocks from Israel’s lightning victory in the six-day war of the year before. Colonel Nassar indicated that he might reopen the Suez Canal in line with a UN Security Council resolution. The resolution, passed by all members except the Soviet Union, called on Israel to withdraw from territory seized in return for Egyptian acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. The Soviets contributed to what became a permanent state of war by offering arms to the Arab states. Apart from the obvious disturbance to shipping caused by the Canal’s closure, and admiration for the efficiency of Israel’s armed forces, this event made little impact on Australians, generally, and me in particular. Such events seemed a long way away. Our eyes were directed further East as twenty-year-old Australian conscripts were being flown by Qantas, Australia’s national airline, to an uncertain fate in Vietnam. Surely, what happened in the Middle East couldn’t affect us. As it turned out, the Vietnam War was merely a precursor to an equally unsuccessful and still continuing American venture in the Middle East where the control of oil and the recirculation of revenues by the authoritarian regimes in power have come to define much of the international politics of the 21st Century. However, as all eyes turned to Indo-China in the 1960s, the American impacts of exported inflation, OPEC oil shocks and ratcheting up terrorism were still in the future, unknown unknowns, reminders in retrospect of John Maynard Keynes’ famous comment (in 1937) on our essential blindness when we attempt to see into the future:
By ‘uncertain knowledge’ I do not mean merely to distinguish between what is known for certain and what is only probable… The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of invention, or the position of private wealth owners in the social system in 1970. About all these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know (quoted in Skidelsky, 2009, pp. 86-87).
Substitute the war on terror and the price of oil for Keynes’ first two uncertainties, retain the rest and change 1970 to 2014 and this would describe my profound state of ignorance about my future world in 1968. I simply did not know.
Also slipping under my radar, were developments in Eastern Europe. A meeting in Warsaw of the Warsaw Pact Foreign Ministers broke down in confusion as the Czech delegation had to return to Prague to ward off internal insurrection by the liberal wing of the ruling Communist party. Insurrection would continue to simmer until it came to the boil later in the year, with extreme and unforeseen consequences.
* * *
As the month drew on the new recruits at Price Waterhouse were gradually released from the tutorial room to be seeded across the audit platoons filling the central void of level 23. I noticed ruefully that my group was located well away from the fortunate team that acquired the beautiful Chinese psychologist. Her new colleagues looked like their Lottery syndicate had just snared a high division prize. Grinding my teeth – a low mechanical sound rippled around the floor, causing those about to enter the lifts to pause and anxiously look at each other – I settled down to read the company manual. This took three days, since every audit function was described in minute detail. I have sometimes wondered since whether the ultimate aim was to turn auditing into an automatic procedure to be routinely carried out either by computers or chimpanzees, in the same way that a computer, though not yet a chimp, eventually beat the world chess champion. Fortunately, for the chartered accounting profession, that has not happened – yet.
My first job was to accompany my sergeant – first grade senior – along Pitt Street to the offices of a well known insurance company, an offshoot, as I later discovered of the British insurance group that John Maynard Keynes once chaired. Armed with a green pen and an uncertain grasp of the company manual, I began my short career as a guardian of the integrity of the capitalist system. I had been taught at university that capitalism was a dynamic, efficient innovation machine, responsible for the inevitable progress of humanity from the cave to material affluence. Was I in the wrong building? There didn’t seem to be much energy or efficiency on display in the open plan office that I observed. Innovation seemed to be positively frowned upon. This latter truth was made known to me on the few occasions I tentatively suggested ways I thought the routines I was checking could be achieved more efficiently. My suggestions were not received in the spirit offered. Eventually my senior gently told me that our role was not to suggest improvements but merely to affirm that business as usual was proceeding. Several days of ticking endless lists, allied to unfriendly and uncooperative exchanges with the locals, put me on the right path.
Having helped insure that the Australian insurance sector was in good shape I was shifted on to a number of other audits. The jobs ranged form a small industrial waste removal company with the catchy name, Sludge Disposals, to large oil companies. I know that Shell and Exxon-Mobil (then Esso) are still around but I occasionally wonder what happened to Sludge. My year as an auditor was varied but not, on the whole, captivating. I peaked early. Although I stuck the year out, moving from client to client, I quickly resolved that chartered accounting was not for me. However, I kept this revelation to myself. I needed the money.
* * *
This month also saw the Johnson Administration reluctantly and dramatically beginning to confront the looming inflationary crisis brought on by the twin wars on poverty at home and the Vietnamese abroad. The President announced a raft of measures designed to prop up the US dollar as the world’s international currency in the face of chronic, ballooning balance of payments deficits. They included banning US investment in South Africa, reducing investment in Britain and Australia by a third, forcing US companies to repatriate their overseas profits and restricting US lending overseas. American citizens were exhorted to prove their patriotism by refraining from taking overseas holidays for two years; further curbs on outward tourism were promised. The President’s dog, Yuki, provided loyal support as his master and that of the free world parried questions from the press gallery.
Sober analysis in the quality press pointed to the forces at work. The structural imbalance in America’s international economic position was creating intolerable strains in the international monetary order conceived by a bullying America and accepted grudgingly by Britain and the other nations at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944 and launched soon after the War but not fully in gear until the early 1960s. Currency devaluations by the European nations late in the decade helped hold the line but the drain on US gold stocks to which the dollar was tied was on terminal descent. The Europeans, understandably, wanted the US to get its house in order, to cut inflation and reduce the flow of dollars abroad. The worry for the Europeans was that, collectively, they held two US dollars for every US dollar backed by gold in Fort Knox. A sudden loss of confidence could cause a run on the dollar as foreigners rushed for the exit, all trying to redeem their greenbacks for gold at the same time. The result would be akin to all patrons trying to get out the same door of a burning theatre. Hindsight tells us that the United States was unsuccessful. By 1971 President Nixon had abandoned gold convertibility and two years later the Bretton Woods Agreement passed quietly into history, beginning the long march to today’s chaotic world of imperfectly floating currencies. All that remains of Harry Dexter White’s dream of US post-War economic dominance – that triumphed over Keynes’ theoretically more sensible model – is the inertial presence of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency by default. Over the past thirty years the United States has gone from being the world’s largest creditor nation to its largest debtor, with an increasingly nervous China-on-the-rise holding most of its IOUs. How strange and unbelievable that would have seemed to us back in 1968.
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During this month, Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant on a South African dentist Philip Blaiberg. The operation was successful but the patient died – after eighteen months. Thereafter, organ transplants became a thriving business in the West. Hearts, livers, lungs, kidneys in turn became transferable and Nobel Prizes tracked the careers of the brilliant researchers and clinicians (and lucky recipients) who pioneered and improved survival rates. Dr. Blaiberg was white and his donor ‘coloured’, that racial category under Apartheid reserved for those deemed neither black nor white. One can only hope that this medical accident caused many a racist politician and bureaucrat sleepless nights in Pretoria and Johannesburg. Dr. Blaiberg apparently evinced no concern, racial or otherwise.
The prevalence of organ transplants has – as so often happens with break-through technological innovations – led to some unintended and undesirable outcomes. Along with the pleasing prolongation of life and quality of life of recipients has grown the lucrative illegal trade in human organs. Inevitably sourced by fair means and foul from desperate people in the world’s poorest countries, this morally disgusting practice underlines the extent of global inequality and the inability of governments to solve the root causes of poverty and corruption. Only extreme libertarians offer any defence of this state of affairs, pointing to the inalienable right of individuals the world over to destroy their lives if they so choose. The rest of us know that something is wildly wrong if a person anywhere must ‘choose’ between sacrificing her life or see her children starve. Sophie’s choice is no choice at all but the harbinger of evil forces unchallenged.
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As the month wore on rains finally came to the state of New South Wales. Bushfires raging in the Blue Mountains just to the west of Sydney were extinguished and large areas of the state suffering drought drank greedily of the blessed downpour. Bushfire and drought were emblematic of modern Australia and had shaped the land and living organisms for millennia. Australia’s Indigenous peoples had long learnt the ways of nature and to a degree the means of controlling them. Recent settlers, most of who lived in a few large cities, had no such fount of knowledge to draw on. Adding floods to fire and drought completed the trifecta. Like the biblical plague of locusts – we also had those – these natural disasters were accepted as part of our lot, though not without complaint or an expectation that governments, if not God, would help us through. They formed the central motif of Australia’s most famous poem revolving around a crusty outback drifter who first bewailed the presence of drought and then the floods that ended it. Either way, “we’ll all be rooned” (Said Hanrahan). Back then we city folk wryly indulged the endless complaints of our rural cousins. How could we know that within our lifetime, climate change would emerge as a global threat, bringing with it the prospect of more extreme weather events and coastal inundation. The latter prospect looms large in an island nation – at primary school we had been taught that Australia was the world’s smallest continent and largest island – where ninety per cent of the population live within a few miles of the coast.
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Problems were emerging in Australia’s near neighbour, Indonesia. The 1965 military coup that had installed General Suharto in power was showing no signs of either improving the general living standards of the nation’s poor majority or stemming the tide of corruption. Indeed, corruption was now endemic in the army and a scenario familiar to observers of Latin America was playing itself out. A crony elite was growing stronger around the military caste, the regime supported by covert US diplomacy and military aid as part of its self-proclaimed war on communist expansion. Australia’s government faithfully parroted the US line, subscribing to what was called ‘the domino theory’. In this world, once one country succumbed to a successful communist revolution, it would set off a series of follow-on revolutions in nearby countries. The policy of Cold War containment meant that wherever the threat of communist insurrection arose, the US and its allies would be there to nip it in the bud, before the pestilence spread. The fact that the regimes that replaced popular uprisings in Iran, the Congo, Greece, Indonesia, Vietnam and, later Chile, were inevitably vicious, anti-democratic dictatorships seemed to worry the Western democracies less than the prospect of national liberation from neo-colonial bondage. Even at the time we saw the flaws in the domino theory. Most of the revolutions were vehemently nationalist in character, most notably in Vietnam and Indonesia. Independence from the French and Dutch drove national liberation struggles. The new emerging third world countries were as keen to maintain their distance form the contending super powers, the United States, Soviet Union and, increasingly, China, as they were to throw out their colonial masters. What was also clear to many of us was the immense human cost of the military coups. In the case of Indonesia, Suharto unleashed a reign of terror leading to the death and disappearance of about half a million people. The earlier invasion of West Papua and subsequently of East Timor meant that the Suharto and Sukarno regimes had, between them, committed half a Rwanda and two Kuwaits, all with active and covert Western encouragement. The Qantas manager on the Ground in Indonesia at the time was a close family friend. His later accounts of the bloody takeover by Suharto were horrifying. In his case, armed soldiers confronted him in his office demanding a list of all communists working for the airline. When he refused, the local shop steward of the non-communist trade union was brought in and directed to go around the building pointing out Qantas members of the other, communist, union. These employees of an organization owned by the Australian government were hauled off and “disappeared”. The Australian Government did nothing
With the final overthrow of Suharto in 1998, Indonesia has gamely struggled towards a democratic future but weighed down with the baggage of his ‘New Order’, the country has a long way to go. As I write, corruption still pervades the state and society, now having to face up to the scourge of Islamist militancy in the world’s largest Muslim nation.
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Almost the last memorable event in January concerned the decision by the UK government to ban arms sales to South Africa, deep in the grip of Apartheid. South African Prime Minister Vorster ‘slammed’ Britain for its temerity, in the time-honoured manner of authoritarian leaders of one-party states. At this time, apart from a few anti-Apartheid demonstrations on university campuses, Australians largely ignored the issue and, in this sense, was far behind the rumblings against the South African regime erupting in other advanced western nations. For most Australians of my generation, South Africa had always been treated as ‘one of us’, a white dominion of the British Empire, to be bracketed with Canada and New Zealand. The prevailing misconception was of a country like us with a majority white settler population and a remnant Indigenous minority. That white Australians could think this way said much about our insularity and embedded biases. It took many years and much effort to shake the majority from their ignorance and apathy. Eventually, the cutting of sporting ties between the two countries – especially cricket and rugby – brought Australia into line with international attempts to shame South Africa into reform. But in January 1968, those battles were still to be fought.
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The jungles and villages of Vietnam were coming to dominate discussions in the media and on campus. The conservative coalition government was rallying behind the United States – Britain and France were noticeably absent, having been brushed aside by the two superpowers in the neo-imperialist stakes – pursuing what a later conservative Prime Minister would call a ‘deputy sheriff’s role’ in the region. The left wing of the Australian Labor Party maintained its traditional hostility to American foreign policy, grieving for the Vietnamese people in their fight for freedom, while also maintaining its equally traditional racist stance against Asian immigration. Communists within the Party and those outside it had at least the excuse that they were following Moscow’s directives. Arthur Calwell, the just retired long-time Labor leader, returned from an overseas trip to announce that he smelled a conspiracy within the Party to turn Labor’s foreign policy into a pale imitation of the government’s. He promises to ‘bring our boys home’ from Vietnam by stumping the country to expose Labor’s treachery. Needless to say, the boys stayed in Vietnam for another four years. Calwell has, however, gone down in Australian political history as the party leader to lose the largest number of national elections and for being the only political leader in the country to attract – and survive – an attempted assassination. Just as remarkably, he publicly forgave his would-be killer and expressed the hope that the poor man would receive appropriate medical help. During the Second World War Calwell served as Immigration Minister. His most memorable comment expressing his Party’s entrenched anti Asian immigration credentials, was that “two Wongs do not make a white”. Recently the Australian Labor Party has returned to its hallowed past, channeling Calwell’s spirit in its relentless treatment of Asian refugees and asylum seekers who are fleeing poverty and mayhem in their homelands, taking to leaky boats in desperate, often doomed, attempts to reach the Australian mainland. On arrival the lucky ones were accommodated in camps behind barbed wire and guard towers, located in remote corners of the continent or offshore islands legally excised from Australia’s migration zone or belonging to other countries in the region. The unlucky ones drown. The then political Opposition was highly critical of these measures, castigating the government for not being tough enough, and promising that when elected they will – ominously – ‘stop the boats’. On achieving office they set about making good on their word – introducing a farcical faux-military policy of refusing to tell the public about any boat movements, while covertly and illegally forcing the boats back to where they might have come from.
ON THE 30 JANUARY, the uneasy calm in South Vietnam was shattered by a concerted onslaught launched by the Viet Cong and regular units of the North Vietnamese Army. What followed dominated the news over the next few months and super-charged protests in the West that were to indelibly mark the entire year. And so, February rolled around