A Way Through: The Life of Rick Farley

By Susan Boden and Nicholas Brown

Engaging and informative, this is the biography of a unique man whose determination and sense of justice has left a lasting legacy for many Australians: Rick Farley. From his boyhood in Queensland to his tragic death in 2006, this account demonstrates how Farley became the head of the Cattlemen's Union and National Farmers' Federation, a key figure in the Landcare movement, and a public campaigner for indigenous rights and reconciliation, and how he acquired an insider's view of many key political and social changes in Australia throughout his 30 years in the public eye. Readers interested in environmental, regional, an indigenous issues in Australia will find Farley's determination, skill, and passion inspiring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781742241371

Book preview

A WAY

THROUGH

NICHOLAS BROWN is a senior research fellow in the School of History, Australian National University and the Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia.

SUSAN BODEN is a landscape architect. She holds qualifications in the humanities and landscape architecture.

A WAY

THROUGH

THE LIFE OF

RICK FARLEY

NICHOLAS BROWN and SUSAN BODEN

NEWSOUTH

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Nicholas Brown and Susan Boden 2012

First published 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Brown, Nicholas.

Title: A way through: The life of Rick Farley/Nicholas Brown and Susan Boden.

ISBN: 978 192141 085 7 (pbk.)

Subjects: Farley, Rick (Richard Andrew), 1952–2006.

Human rights workers — Australia — Biography.

Political activists — Australia — Biography.

Other Authors/Contributors: Boden, Susan.

Dewey Number: 323.092

Design Di Quick

Cover image Produced with permission of James Braund (www.jamesbraund.com)

Printer Everbest

All images not otherwise credited are courtesy of the Farley family and Rick Farley's personal papers.

The extract from Peter Corris's Open File (Allen & Unwin, 2008) is reproduced with permission of the author.

The excerpt from Warren Zevon's ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ is reproduced with permission from Hal Leonard Corporation. (Copyright 1978 Zevon Music (BMI), all rights administered by BMG Chrysalis. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.)

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Authors' notes

Map of key locations

1 ‘Never tired, never sad, never guilty’

2 ‘As trendy as it was possible to be’

3 ‘Not like a cattleman’

4 ‘Superhick’

5 ‘Stiletto man’

6 ‘Starting to understand’

7 ‘The best deal possible’

8 ‘The great Rick Farley’

9 ‘The better for having known him’

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

In a strange way he was a cross between Spencer Tracy and James Cagney.

PAT DODSON

Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

SPENCER TRACY

Learn your lines, find your mark, look ‘em in the eye and tell ‘em the truth.

JAMES CAGNEY

Authors' notes

DURING THE 1980s, many of us knew one Rick Farley well. He was the intelligent, reasoned and very constructive voice of the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) and could often be heard on the ABC's Country Hour. Though he had a presence on television, his voice was his great strength – always calm, always clever, always suggesting a way through. Sometimes what he said seemed an unlikely fit with what, as a city-dweller, I expected the NFF's position to be. On the other hand, on one side of my family I had a grandmother who grew up on a sheep station near Moree and had stories of booms and busts, Aboriginal stockmen who could predict the season months out, and shy Aboriginal girls who worked in the big house when times were good. I understood why such a sharp mind would want to work on rural issues. At that point, I was just pleased that he was there and thought of him as a settled presence in Australian current affairs.

My sense of him changed when I met him. Having finished a degree in landscape architecture, I was at home with our baby daughter. To get out of the house, I took a job as Saturday receptionist at the local GP's surgery. Rick wasn't a patient, but that didn't stop him walking in one Saturday, around lunchtime, in 1993. ‘This is a doctor's surgery, isn't it? I want to see a doctor,’ he said. He was short in his dealing with me – but sick people often were. But not all sick people seemed as wounded, and strangely innocent, as he did. He had an agitated energy buzzing around his head. It wasn't so much sparks going out, but surging inwards. He was, on his surface, still. But his interior, as much as I could see it, didn't seem to match.

I walked home and told my husband, Nicholas Brown, a historian, that I had just met Rick Farley and that ‘I am going to write his biography one day.’ I had a sense of someone carrying an enormous burden beyond the capacity of any individual, however skilled and deft. As with many marriages, mine with Nick saw ‘I’ slide into ‘we’. And so in 2006, we began the process of shaping a book about his life. But the pronoun that should really apply to this biography is ‘he’, for the hard intellectual work in it is Nick's.

This biography would not have been written had Rick Farley lived. Though Australians may wince at the description – and Farley himself may have recoiled at the term, he is, without doubt, a political martyr. He was, even more unusually, a practical intellectual. Dead at 53, he gave, literally, more than his physical capacity allowed. His almost ceaseless travel, largely alone in the last years of his life, from Sydney into regional and remote Australia, took a physical toll to the point of exhaustion and, at times, depression. For almost a decade after he left the NFF in 1995 he was able to right himself and continue his work. But at the end of 2005, his physical health collapsed.

It is sometimes asked in biography whether a person's drive can be described as running towards or running from. Rick Farley was driven by the need for Australians to find a better way to live in our landscape and, in returning access to country to Aboriginal people, to make peace with our often shameful past. He was motivated by a sense of what was morally right and, beyond this, by what was practically possible. He was an intellectual about reconciliation but his thinking was targeted and real. The professional and personal losses in his life caused him more anguish than his surface ever showed. But despite these hurts, he found the energy to undertake intricately complex and exhausting work. And, importantly, work also provided a shy man with the advantage of easier structures for friendships with men than the intimacies of personal relationships with women.

This biography has taken us across physical and political landscapes that were new to Nick and me. Growing up in Canberra, I had some idea about what to expect in interviews with Farley's political colleagues and rare opponents. Nick suggested that, as a landscape architect, I should do the majority of the interviews with Aboriginal people and visits to regional sites. It allowed me to follow Rick's footsteps, stay in the same motels, sit with the same people and kick up the same dust. And it also allowed me see how wise and compassionate he was in his understanding of the whole value of the Australian landscape – economic, cultural, ecological and symbolic. It gave me a taste of how hard he worked and how desperate conditions in regional Australia can be. And it also helped me understand how loved and respected he still is – and how much grief surrounds his loss.

Malcolm Knox sets his current novel The Life in Queensland – Rick's home state. Its central character, the reclusive ex-champion surfer, Dennis Keith, is hounded by a ‘BFO’– Bi-Freaking-Ographer-who stirs up questions he'd rather not face. I know that, at times, Rick's family, friends and colleagues have thought of us this way. I also suspect that part of Rick would have agreed. On the other hand, when he was offered the formidable task of negotiating an agreement at Cape York between Aboriginal people, pastoralists and environmentalists, his response was ‘to give it a crack’. And that is what Nick and I have tried to do. Partly this is to contribute to an understanding of politics in Australia between the 1970s and the 1990s. But mostly, it is to put a life that ended so pitifully into a form that white culture takes to mean that its subject was of lasting value and significance – a biography.

A traditional owner involved in a Native Title Agreement that was to be Rick Farley's last work was sometimes in awe of his serious approach. But, as he put it, ‘I am the better for having known him.’

And we are too. All of us.

Susan Boden

AS A HISTORIAN, I tease away at convenient categories – ‘periods’, ‘ideologies’, ‘turning points’ – and seek to show that ‘context’ will always matter most. And as I, like Susan, listened to Rick Farley over the years, he both disturbed and confirmed this neat professional approach. More fundamentally, however, he both disturbed and confirmed my sense of how – as an early Generation X-er – the cards of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in Australian politics stacked up. I listened carefully when Susan spoke of her meeting with Farley, and the plan it laid. I knew that to try to understand him and his context would put me to a test.

Shortly before the aneurysm that severely incapacitated him in late December 2005, Farley spoke of ‘looking after country’ as ‘one of the mainstream critical issues for Australia’. His perspective drew on nearly 30 years in which he crossed all the boundaries we like to keep settled in our understanding of political processes – organisational advocacy, community representation, consultancy, parliamentary candidacy and a basic commitment to listen as people spoke of their lives in contemporary non-metropolitan landscapes. At 53, he had formed a clear sense of the challenges that needed to be tackled, and was respected for it. As expressed in one of the hundreds of cards sent to him, wishing him well in recovery, he had ‘handled whingeing farmers, moaning miners and Aboriginal politics’ with consummate skill to that point. The next stage in the work he envisaged would draw deeply on that diverse experience, requiring a more transformational synthesis of those interests, and no dodging of hard questions. ‘Country’, in his formulation, clearly reflected his embrace, especially through his membership of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (1992–97), of the matrix of relationships evoked by the indigenous use of that term. But it also encompassed the transactions all Australians had with their land, from resource use and climate change through to imbalances in demographic distribution, and support services.

Farley, however, did not recover. His death in May 2006 meant that his vision of that transformation fell silent. His work remained to ask questions of a nation which he saw as ‘a bit lost’ as it negotiated the agendas of cultural and economic change he had been long associated with. It also left an image of a figure who – for many – represented the prospect of balancing social justice and environmental sustainability in the midst of uncertainty. ‘Although I never met him,’ a condolence card to Farley's partner, Linda Burney, observed, ‘his actions spoke to me of a brave, intelligent and compassionate man, one who changed my perceptions.’ As Linda Burney herself says, ‘Rick could always see a way through.’

In our study of Rick's life, our objective is to convey both the contexts he worked in and the distinctive qualities of his contribution. Farley himself relished the idiosyncracies of his trajectory: from the counter-culture of the 1970s to prominence with the National Farmers' Federation at the height of its free market crusading of the 1980s, through to the commitment to foster partnerships over some of the deepest divides in Australia – over land, race and the environment. The actor in the experimental, confrontational student theatre of the late 1960s was never far from Farley's later sense of himself as playing a series of parts on the stage of national politics. His actual role, however, was more fundamental and consistent – it was about building relationships. As his colleague at the NFF, Andrew Robb, observed in a tribute to Farley, his achievements in fostering cooperation might now seem ‘conventional wisdom and nothing to be debated’. But, Robb argues, such a view ignores the conflicts – and the transgressions of ‘periods’, ‘ideologies’ and ‘turning points’ – that marked every area of Farley's work.

In drawing together this study, we began with those who worked closely with Farley, and then moved into his personal circles, becoming aware that even with a person as ‘professional’ as Farley, the connections between the two were complex. Given the nature of his work, our list of interviewees is extensive, but we do not claim it as anywhere near exhaustive. And while there is a rich public record of Farley's work from the mid-1970s onwards, there is less in the way of personal papers. A man who lives in relationships, for the deals, on the journey of tactical innovation, in listening, and often on the road – and who dies suddenly, and prematurely – doesn't leave ordered papers. And Rick was, as Phillip Toyne, who worked with him on Landcare and much else, recalls, ‘moody and private and not easy to get to know’. Farley's life, or this version of it, requires the chronology of political history, and is structured accordingly. But beyond that story – with twists (as Farley might have put it) as tortuous as a Ludlum thriller, many of which will have eluded us – there is another kind of journey, about the kind of politics that is too often obscured by a focus on party intrigue and parliamentary jousting, on easy categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. As authors, the coupling of a landscape architect and historian might, on the surface, seem unlikely. Except that land and context were the raw materials to which Farley applied his energy. His originality lies in understanding the breadth and components of ‘sustainability’. Susan and I have sought to understand the politics of building those capacities in places a good deal less privileged, and a good deal more exploratory and creative, than those which often dominate our understanding of the country we share.

'Listening to Rick Farley,' observed a letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald shortly after his death, ‘was always bitter-sweet. His humanity, empathy and optimism were always a source of hope.’ Farley's hope was founded in his professionalism. This was most evident in interventions which marked a new age of policy and commentary in Australia: of genuine disquiet, open questioning, and fresh engagement with practical issues. But his professionalism resisted easy categorisation. Not an expert, never holding elected office, and a seeker of synthesis, his influence was dependent on his capacity (intelligence, stamina and practicality) and character (ambitious, shy and fair). This book is offered as a step towards an understanding of his contribution, bearing in mind the question that was often asked of us towards the end of interviews: where, now, are the ‘impassioned and politically fearless leaders’ who are more committed to being ‘straight’ than to being ‘clever’?

Nicholas Brown

CHAPTER 1

‘Never tired,

never sad,

never guilty’

‘A good kid’

As a boy, Rick Farley ran with freedom. His was a striking gait, remembered as a springing stride developed for middle-distance cross-country competitions. For a man who in later life was associated with conflict, this recollection has an arresting quality. The ‘hired gun’ of Australian politics from the late 1970s to the 1990s was rarely seen as free. Farley himself later lamented having ‘missed out’ on being young. Fred Chaney, who came to know Farley well through their work on the National Native Title Tribunal, recalls the way Rick carried himself tensely, as if poised to react, an initial appearance of ‘menace’ giving way to a less forbidding ‘personal gravitas’. Mick Dodson recalls a good friend, but one who ‘never let his guard down’. But the boy ran as if weightless. That controlled working style for which Farley would later be renowned makes a sharp contrast to this figure, enjoying the pleasure of the race, of the release, and of the win. In those strides, the child was in a world of his own. The man, however, worked with externalised political skills, with the determination to ‘get the best deal possible’. The fit between an inward life, glimpsed in that schoolboy, and the outward roles Farley came to play, was never easy. The tensions of negotiating it account for both the contributions he made to Australian society, and the costs of his work — of his search for a way through the constraints of Australian politics.¹

Rick was ‘always a good kid’, his younger sister Patti says: ‘he never talked back’, was polite, worked hard. This was the face that people saw throughout his life. Even amidst the often bitter confrontations he engineered, or endured, at the Cattlemen's Union of Australia, the National Farmers' Federation, or over Native Title, Farley is recalled as reserved but courteous. He was rarely openly angry and was not spontaneously demonstrative at all. As a child he was prone to sulking rather than outburst, and — as his mother concedes — could give ‘the impression he didn't care a lot’. But this was a protection, behind which he found strength and power. He took the measure of situations, seeking a role which could hold in balance a maxim he would later invoke: ‘a cynic is just a frustrated romantic’ — the challenge was to keep a reign on ideals.²

The ‘negotiator’ was there from the start, although Patti sees it more bluntly as manipulation. Rick, she says, ‘didn't like people who failed’; ‘he never ever in his life did anything he hadn't thought about and realised was the best thing for him’. Even so, there was a rider to this selfishness. He was also good at:

getting people to see something they didn't necessarily want to see, and talking them around into a position that was probably better for everybody…he was always a bit like that, always looking for the best possible outcome here, and how he could make it happen.

Farley would live by this talent. It took him into work that transformed significant aspects of Australian life. But it was also a need, and a reflex. His sister continues:

Rick didn't like people who demanded [things] of him…[who exhibited] histrionics, tears, massive amounts of attention — who cost more that it was going to benefit him…he liked things to be manageable.

That need to manage, when the free grace of the runner was hard to find, meant reconciling the expectations people had of him, the capacities he knew he possessed, and the vulnerabilities he kept protected. Farley's yearning for a better Australia, a country he came to know with a breadth of compassion that would be hard to surpass, grew from patterns laid down early.

'I tend to steer clear of emotion'

Richard Andrew Farley was born at Townsville on 9 December 1952, the first child of 34-year-old Richard Albert Farley (‘Dick’) and his 27-year-old wife, Joan Audrey, née Cook. He was named after his father, but Joan chose his second name (‘just a Scottish thing’) to mark her strong Presbyterian inheritance. She did the same for Patti, whose second name was Leith. Joan and Dick's marriage was troubled, and within six years they would be estranged. Some of the tensions between them were hinted at in that coupling of their children's names.³

On the Farley side was a line of station workers and managers on the Queensland and northern New South Wales pastoral properties that were established in the second half of the 19th century. The Farleys commanded respect because of the enterprises they served, and because they served them well — as horsemen, stockmen, employers and book-keepers. But that status was fragile. As the poet Rhyll McMaster writes of such family connections, a ‘myth of grandeur’ was easily evoked in those associations with vast tracts of land, but harder to hold. A sense of magnificence came with fine homesteads and authority, but depended on the trust of remote investors and on marking out the boundaries between the Big House and the sheds, huts and yards beyond. For the Farleys these boundaries could prove tricky. They were marked with pride, but transgressions brought shame and revealed a dark seam running through the family.⁴

Rick's great grandfather, Albert, was born in 1862 at Digby, Victoria, a settlement which developed on the route from Portland Bay to the southwestern pastoral districts. He was the sixth of nine children of London-born Alfred Farley — the captain of a ship wrecked near Warrnambool — and his Limerick-born wife Catherine Cunneen, who (with great enterprise, and occasional prosecution) became licensee of the Digby Hotel. By 1903 Albert had begun the journey north. He became overseer at Cassilis Station, a sheep property in the upper Hunter Valley, New South Wales. At nearby Merriwa in 1912 he married the much younger Ella Munn, whose extended family of selectors and labourers came from near Goulburn and Ulladulla.

Soon after their marriage Albert and Ella moved to Albinia Downs, a sheep station near Springsure, 300 kilometres west of Gladstone, Queensland. This was advancement — Albert was now manager — but also isolation. Cassilis Station adjoined a private village of the same name which served as a coach stop for steady traffic travelling further west. By contrast, Albinia was set in grassy, open woodland — already plagued with weeds — amid sparse settlement and at the end of rough roads. By 1917, when Richard, their third child, was born with a twin sister, Eileen — Bettye — they were back at Cassilis, with Albert now its manager. Again, their stay was brief. No record remains of what pressures or opportunities drove their migrations. By 1919 the family had returned to Queensland, further northwest, where Albert managed Dalgonally Station, near Julia Creek.

A cattle property of nearly 3000 square kilometres on flat, blacksoil plains, Dalgonally had been taken up in the 1860s by Donald McIntyre and acquired by Australian Estates Co. Ltd in the early 1900s. With 23 000 head and well served by an artesian bore, it was the largest cattle station in the Cloncurry district. McIntrye had also held Dalkeith, which adjoined Cassilis, and those old networks had perhaps recommended Albert for the job. Never seen without a tie, even when riding, Albert presided with authority over the rhythms of the station: its musters, its mix of Aboriginal and white labour, its profitability. Dalgonally is evoked with nostalgia by Farley descendants: it was a solid homestead, with broad, vine-covered verandahs, shaded with trees. But there is an undertone to these memories. Sometime after 1930 Ella left. Family lore has it that she ran away with a windmill mechanic. She was never heard from again. Little was said, but the strain of the loss would have been great.⁵

Among Ella's children, Dick seems to have paid a high price. Educated first by governesses, he was bright and took readily to studies at a Charters Towers boarding school until the Great Depression and a sequence of cyclone and fire knocked Dalgonally hard. Thrown back on his skills, he took to labouring. He grew to medium height, had good looks, and was known to be a joker, often generous but prone to drink; his ‘benders’ could go for days and turn nasty. An undated photograph shows him sunbathing on a beach with friends: with his broad, teasing smile, he was clearly a man it could be fun to be with. But he also carried depression, seen by some in the family as an Irish melancholy that came from the Cunneens.

Already in the militia, he was quick to enlist in the AIF in 1939, giving his address as the house in Townsville where his father now lived with Dick's sisters in the genteel poverty of retired station managers. Dick's military record soon reflected his temperament: penalties for absence without leave during training; detention for poor conduct at Durban, South Africa, en route to the Middle East. On 17 May 1941 he was wounded in action: he had a gunshot wound to the right leg which rumour speculated might have been self-inflicted. Declared unfit, he returned to Australia and was discharged. By June 1942, unemployed, he enlisted again, and was assigned to transport duties at Victoria Barracks, Brisbane. Admonished for repeated drunkenness, speeding and ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline', his army career came to an end. He was discharged as a private in April 1946 and started scouting for work as a stationhand.⁶

Joan Cook, who became Dick's wife, came from a very different background. She was also at least a third-generation Australian, but much more a Queenslander. Her father, Alfred — born in Brisbane in 1889 — was a tailor and cutter who travelled down from Rockhampton in 1915 to marry Olive Houghton, a shop assistant, also born in 1889, and raised in Warwick. The Houghtons and the Cooks were skilled tradespeople: cabinet makers, blacksmiths, dressmakers, hairdressers and teachers. First in the Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower and then in Toowong — itself transforming from large middle-class villas into subdivisions for ‘labourers and artisans’ — Joan grew up in a stable family, marked by the firm stamp of Presbyterian values: hard work, education, good deeds and community service. Alfred was a strict judge of character: as Joan recalls, there were people he determined to be ‘straight’ — reliable and honest — and people he determined were not. He built the family home in Lodge Street during the Depression, keeping himself busy while work was scarce. It was a modest house, a typical timber Queenslander, perched on the fall of the many valleys that marked each of those older suburbs into their own worlds and hierarchies. The second youngest child and only girl, Joan knew well the dynamics of a male-dominated household. She was petite, determined and bright.

After training as a nurse, Joan commenced a round of placements. In 1949 she was at Border Private Hospital at Balinga, near Coolangatta. Moving to the central west, where medical support was in short supply, she nursed one of the Farley daughters — who had returned to those broad plains with her husband — after childbirth at Winton. When Joan met Dick he was working as a station hand at Kitty Vale Station, with no assets except his charm. But they married and went to Townsville, living briefly with Albert, her father-in-law. Rick was born there — Dick was away at the time, working at Proserpine, selling tractors. They soon moved to Airlie Beach, looking for more settled work for Dick and a place of their own. Patti was born in 1954, before the family moved down to Deagon, near Sandgate, north of Brisbane, and Dick found a job with the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland.

To Joan, in retrospect, it was obvious that her husband suffered from depression. At the time there was no name to give to his moods. He was, she simply puts it, ‘always reckless’. Patti recalls hearing the phrase ‘war weary’, and that her father ‘could never settle’. When Joan's father died in 1956, she and her children moved to Lodge Street to live with — and partly care for — her mother. Dick returned to the country, looking for work. The plan was that once he found something permanent, the family would join him. It did not work out that way.⁷

As an adult Rick recalled seeing his father only once after he left the family, and then for barely an evening, when they met for dinner at a Brisbane hotel. With Dick gone, Joan parented alone, and at a time when there was no respectable term for a single mother. With only the most infrequent correspondence between Dick and Joan, silence fell over his name, both in public and — more importantly — at home. ‘Mum would never talk about that stuff,’ Patti states. Patti recalls being teased that she didn't have a father, but she stood her ground on logic: ‘Of course I had a father, you have to have a father.’ And there, for her, the taunt ended. Patti, as her mother puts it, was always a ‘straight shooter’. ‘Maybe it was worse for Rick,’ Patti allows, ‘but I don't know.’ In contrast to Patti, as Joan puts it, Rick was always ‘the loaded gun’: waiting, watching, poised.⁸

Throughout his life Rick rarely spoke of his father, even to those closest to him. At most, he would invoke a succinct image of his childhood. In March 2001 he said:

My father died when I was young and my mother worked to ensure my sister and I attended private schools. She believed that a good school (not only a good education) was essential to our future prospects. Ours was not an affluent household.

In another speech, in October that year, he added, ‘My parents divorced and my father died when I was young.’ In a passing remark in 1996 he stated, ‘My father died when I was ten.’ But even at the time when he was offering these summations he knew that in one crucial respect they were not true. On 14 May 1970, after a prolonged bout of drinking, Dick Farley shot and killed himself in a washhouse at the back of a house at Kajabbi, a small settlement 90 kilometres northwest of Cloncurry, where he was working intermittently as a labourer. He had — according to the police report — been ‘on a drinking bout for the past three months’. With no money, Dick was buried by the RSL. Even Bettye's husband told her not to attend her twin's funeral: it was a waste, it was a hurt, and it was better to ‘move on’.⁹

Dick was just shy of 53 when he died, and not far from Dalgonally. One day short of 26 years later, and also at 53, his son would die of a cerebral aneurysm. To be struck by the figure of Rick's absent father is not to diminish the importance of Joan. Rick would always insist on his indebtedness to his mother for her strength and what she made possible. He said that to grow up in a house of strong women was to appreciate early the art of compromise. But no one can entirely ‘move on’, and Farley's career must be seen, in part, through the lens of a search for that lost father: a figure to mediate between the world of leadership and the world of nurture and altruism. In that absence, Rick acquired early the style that served him well in the conflicts he managed in his public life, but perhaps less so in private: ‘I always steer clear of emotion.’¹⁰

Over time Rick assembled the details of his father's life and death, but not by actively pursuing them. A close friend recalls him making passing reference to Dick as ‘the sort of bloke you imagined looking most comfortable on the back of a horse’ — perhaps an image recalled from that one evening: Dick ‘spruced up’, awkwardly meeting his family, sitting down to dinner, then disappearing. At Lodge Street Joan would sometimes briefly reflect on connections to the land up north before changing the subject. Later, working for the Cattlemen's Union, Rick was often crossing his father's tracks, out around Cloncurry, largely unknowingly. The Farley name, politician Bob Katter junior recalls, would have won Rick respect in some quarters, even if no one spoke openly about the connection. When the extended family later sought to make contact with Rick, they found him wrestling with an ‘amazed curiosity’ about what he was told, and trying to clear emotional boundaries long protected. ‘Only now that I am famous do they want to track me down,’ Rick remarked on first hearing that Farley relatives wanted to meet him. So deep were the defences, the habit of managing, that it was inconceivable that he would ever initiate such an inquiry. But once the overture was made, and he was encouraged to trust it, he accepted kinship. It amused him to call out to his cousin, Joan Scott, the daughter of Dick's younger sister and wife of Queensland National Party politician Bruce Scott, at airports: 'Hello cuz!'¹¹

'Quizzical, opinionated and articulate'

Bringing up her children alone was not easy for Joan. She had some money from a family bequest, but still needed to take night shifts as a nurse, and maintain daily order — walking Rick to school, taking Patti to child care on the tram, returning home to sleep, then collecting Patti and being at home for Rick at the end of the day — as well as feed them, read to them, put them to bed and then leave for work. There were close and supportive relations with her brothers and their wives, and her mother provided some continuity, but needed assistance herself and rarely ventured out. Eventually, as Joan's children were settled in schools, she retrained in children's health, overcoming restrictions on the employment of married women to secure more regular, stable work. But the road was often hard and isolated: it built up her resources, and her sensitivity to what people might think.¹²

Rick was also sickly, labouring from around seven to eleven with allergies, tonsil infections and chronic asthma, sometimes with severe attacks. Every month he went to specialists, and more often to a local doctor who lived over the fence and administered antibiotics through a nebuliser. At least twice he took himself to the surgery alone and placed himself on the machine — a show of independence that impressed his mother but also reflected self-reliance. A break in one long episode of ill-health provided an opportunity for an outing for the children, and a posed photograph at a local resort, complete with koala. With his arm around Patti, Rick played the big brother, but tiredness showed in his eyes. That vulnerability contributed to the image of ‘the good kid’, whose resilience needed to be watched. For Rick, as Patti perceives, ‘You've got to have something special about you, you've got to be special in some way because if you're not…you can't just be ordinary.’¹³

Around them, Brisbane was growing rapidly. The ‘sleepy, sub-tropical town, with its feathery palm trees and miles of sprawling weatherboard’ described by David Malouf, was becoming a more recognisably modern capital. For a child it was still (according to Kevin Hart) ‘a restless sunburnt city’:

Those long tar streets that rise into

the sun and cool verandahed houses, quivering

as I climbed to school with barefoot boys plodding

flatly along…

But shopping malls and apartment blocks reflected a gospel of development, and better roads stretched out to the beaches, including the rapidly expanding Surfers Paradise, or north to Caloundra, where the Farleys would take summer holidays once Joan had settled employment. The rich sensuality of Brisbane childhoods is often evoked — intense, rolling thunderstorms, ‘nights when air was only thick wet heat’ — and Farley retained a deep attachment to being ‘a Brisbane boy’ and a Queenslander. Through the 1950s the insularity of the northern state was also moderating on several fronts. One was a surge of commitment to education, with secondary enrolments rising by nearly 400 per cent between 1951 and 1961. If it was ‘still the age of inkwells and metal nibs’ — as Hart recalls — ‘the great age of Copy Book, the glorious age of parsing’, it was nevertheless also a time when Queensland resolved to lift the standard of its schools. For Joan, and for her son, this promise of a change through education was vital.¹⁴

Rick's education started at Toowong State School, where he is remembered as being just another ‘knock-about kid’. Joan knew her son was bright, and was reassured when he took immediately to school. At the end of his first day, his teacher remarked that he was one of the few who didn't cry when left: ‘While he was waiting for me,’ Joan was told, ‘he went up and put his hand on the [teacher's] desk and said, When do we do some work around this place?’ Joan's aspirations for both a ‘good school and a good education’ reflected her hope that an all-male environment would compensate for the absence of a father. Accordingly, in 1965 Rick entered Brisbane Boys' College (BBC) — Patti would attend its sister school, Clayfield College, both run under the auspices of the Presbyterian-Methodist Schools Association. Until, and even after, Rick secured a Commonwealth Secondary Scholarship in 1967, Joan worked hard to make BBC possible. He ‘embraced’ the school, she remembers: ‘There is no other word for it.’ That emotional attachment in itself was conspicuous in Rick's demeanour, and was further reassurance for his mother. ¹⁵

At BBC, Farley moved with clever, hard-working boys. In an entrance IQ test he was assessed as ‘A— to A’; by the beginning of 1966 this was raised to ‘A to A+ + ’. He went straight into inter-form debating, and this remained at the core of his extra-curricular activities. English, French, Scripture, History, Geography, Mathematics, Physics and Art were his subjects that first year, and he topped the form — also winning a prize for ‘religious knowledge’. ‘In his first year he was very fortunate,’ Joan remembers:

He had a Form Master who took an interest in him, and because Rick up until then had not been able to play a lot of sports, he got Rick to be the scorer of the cricket team…

This was the first of the many acts of mentorship in Farley's life, offering a measure of inclusion, if not breaking through his natural reserve.

The summation of his progress at the end of his second year reflected other aspects of his character:

Although Richard's results are very good, I feel he relies too much on natural ability instead of consistent hard work. He must learn not to get discouraged when he is beaten, but to try harder.

Each aspect of this assessment was true. Then, and throughout his life, Rick knew well what he was good at; he trusted in his insight and withheld energy from matters he judged less important. And always, he took anything less than success personally. The ‘loaded gun’ chose his targets with care. Perhaps not coincidentally, in that second year the earnest, sometimes sickly child found — as Joan adds, ‘to his amazement’