A Letter To My Children

By Christopher Pyne

Why do seemingly intelligent men and women leave their families to spend more than half the year travelling to Canberra, and spending night after night at electorate and campaign events? Surely there are easier ways to earn a living.
A Letter to My Children is Christopher Pyne's honest account of how a belief in the power of public service, inspired by his crusading ophthalmologist father, led him to pursue a career in politics, driven by the ambition of leaving a legacy for the next generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522867992

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Crabb

Introduction

Virtue in action immediately takes such hold of a man that he no sooner admires a deed than he sets out to follow in the steps of the doer.

Plutarch, Life of Pericles

Early in 2014, while I was in Canberra, my eldest daughter, Eleanor, said to my wife, Carolyn, ‘If he wanted to have all these children, then why did Dad go into politics?’

That weekend I couldn’t come home because I had the Liberal Party of Australia’s biennial Federal Council. My children understand that I’m away during weeks that the parliament sits in Canberra—from Sunday night until I fly back on the 6.05 red-eye on Friday morning, arriving home in time to take them to school. They also understand that I travel a lot during non-sitting periods. What really upsets them, though, is when I’m away on the weekends.

Over the years, I have admittedly missed a lot. A mobile phone memory of photographs sent from Carolyn of Book Week parade costumes (Felix as the Green Sheep) and music concerts (Barnaby playing the trumpet, Aurelia on the violin) tells that story. There is one occasion that is always raised by my family, of a Father’s Day when Felix was in Grade 1. Out of the twenty-five children in the class, Felix was the only one whose father hadn’t made it to receive their special handmade plastic tie and look at their child’s work. There is a terrible photograph of poor Felix giving his tie to his teacher, Mrs Calman, instead, both looking equally uncomfortable with her role as stand-in dad. But I have tried to get to the big things—the grand finals, the marathon Saturday night dancing concerts—and Carolyn ensures that they are marked in my schedule as ‘must attend’ occasions.

Eleanor’s question was very powerful. I think my children—like all children—would much rather their parents were home all the time. It’s not unique to politics. Eleanor made me realise, though, that maybe—especially as they’ve grown up—my children have started to query why I ask them to make these sacrifices.

My father was also a very busy man. Remington Pyne was an eye surgeon, and a very good one, and he helped a lot of people in that capacity. Being a doctor wasn’t a job to him, but a vocation. Until his death in 1988, at age fifty-nine, he had dedicated the majority of his short life to the service of others, whether it be through his time as a medical officer after the Korean War or working for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, helping to improve Aboriginal eye health, trying to broaden the understanding of and access to support for dyslexia, or advancing Australian healthcare in co-founding the Australian Craniofacial Unit.

In 1976 he was named South Australian Father of the Year, but I was only eight at the time and didn’t really know why he had been awarded it. It was only after his death that I truly began to appreciate what he had achieved. I believe most young men and women look up to heroes who do great deeds, and they would like to follow in the footsteps of those great men and women by doing great deeds themselves. For me, that hero was my father. It wasn’t just my father’s achievements, but the breadth of his passion and interest, his integrity in always seeing something through, and the way that he went about things that I really admired and that has inspired me in my own journey of public duty.

I was educated by the Catholic Fathers and Brothers at St Ignatius’ College Adelaide, and one thing about the Jesuits is that they, very early in the piece, instil a sense of responsibility to use your talents for others. There’s a saying in the psalms: ‘To whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.’ I had been lucky to be given many opportunities, and I thought I might use them to follow in my father’s footsteps and become an eye surgeon.

My talents, however, as my father helpfully pointed out in his library at our home one afternoon, were definitely not in maths or science, but in areas like advocating and public speaking. I would, as Dad suggested, not make a great doctor, but I could help a lot of people by going into law and becoming a judge, or a good barrister for people who couldn’t afford one.

Instead I chose politics.

I’d been interested in politics since I was very young, and I’d always believed that it was about serving others. My father didn’t think it was such a good idea. He never discouraged me from going into politics, but he never really encouraged me either. He was not a very political person. He had a lot of experience with politics throughout his life, and it often left him frustrated. He also knew a good cross-section of politicians and felt that, while they were trying to do good things and probably often did do good things, they were inevitably disappointed by being thwarted by political circumstances. My mother was, and still is, a dedicated member of the Liberal Party, but she mainly signed up for the fundraisers, and later to support me. Apparently there is an over-representation of people in politics who, like me, have lost a parent at an early age, perhaps because people think that is what their mother or father would have wanted and they are trying to fulfil expectations that can never truly be fulfilled. But neither of my parents really thought that politics was a good life, and, while my father wanted me to come to my own decisions, he believed that your capacity to help people was expanded in a career that you had more control over. After more than two decades in parliament, I am certainly aware that it would be easier, in many respects, to be a successful barrister, or doctor, or journalist, but I still do believe that politics—representing the rights and opinions of the people who we live with—is an effective form of public service. I guess I’m constantly trying to prove my father wrong about that.

I don’t think a lot of people, particularly in Australia, understand why someone goes into politics, with all the attendant issues that accompany it. Our media tend to write about politics like a passage of play in the football rather than focussing on the more substantive issues. We are distracted by the negativity, and forget that politics is a service and that sense of service is what usually drives people into it. Politics is an important job, and it’s important to get right.

My father’s life may also have been easier if he was content as a surgeon, but that was never going to be the case. His was a life of giving, of leading, and of seeing a problem and doing something about it. He was what the Jesuits encourage: ‘men or women for others.’

His story, however, is by no means unique. Ours is a society built on service and on looking after each other, and the wonderful thing about Australia is that you don’t have to be born into a life of privilege to make a contribution. Many Australian heroes—John Simpson, Weary Dunlop, John Monash, Howard Florey, Dawn Fraser—were and are quite ordinary people, who are admired because of their talents, not because they were born into a particular family. They took life by the throat and did something with it. My father’s story is a bit like that; not as extraordinary as John Monash’s or Dawn Fraser’s, but it’s the story of a very bright young person, full of adventure and excitement, who saw everything as an opportunity. He was a boy from the country, a bit of an outsider, and was someone who faced every challenge with the belief that it could be overcome. It’s a very Australian trait, and his is a very Australian tale—a story of success against the odds that I find incredibly inspiring.

My father’s death was undoubtedly the most significant personal event of my life. My first speech in the House of Representatives back in 1993 began with acknowledging the support of my family and my one disappointment—that my father could not be there to see me. I think about him very often and doubt I will ever entirely get over losing him. My father died in the prime of his life, and that’s how I remember him. I’m sure it would be quite different if he had lived longer and become older and sicker and grumpier. Many peoples’ parents live well into their eighties or beyond, and they might see them with dementia or a sense of failure that makes them unhappy. Dying at fifty-nine meant that there was never a possibility of that. I’d rather my father was still alive now, of course, but there’s no doubt that I have a kind of hallowed view of him, borne out by the fact that I never saw him as an old man.

I talk to my children a lot about my father. I want them to know about him and to see that I’m obviously very proud of him. I’m sorry they never got to see him, and that he never got to see them, or any of his twelve grandchildren. He would have loved them; he loved all children. Often, when I am at one of my children’s Christmas concerts, or watching them play football or netball, I think how much my father would have relished to be there. It brings a tear to my eye still.

I decided to write this book as a letter to my children, not just to pass on the memory of my father, although that is certainly important to me. I mainly have directed it to them because I want them to understand that, despite my love for my family, public life does draw you away; you can’t just take and not give. I also want to bestow a message about intergenerational public service so that they will hopefully go on to become ‘men and women for others’ themselves, although wherever they end up I’ll be proud of them.

Using my father as an example for a story about public service seemed easy. I didn’t have to make it up. My father was a great storyteller, although most of his stories tended to be 50 per cent fact and 50 per cent fiction! He would embellish them to make them sound a lot better than they actually were—which is half the fun of being a storyteller—but I always believed them entirely and repeated them as though they were fact, which made people who knew him laugh. I have attempted here to search for the fact in his life and have learnt a lot myself along the way.

Among stories of my father I have included stories from my own life. This is not a political biography; life is made up of many moments and this is a somewhat random collection of them. While the stories might seem unconnected, I have paired those I feel show how certain qualities have manifested in me through my father’s example. I believe these qualities are important for any role that one might take on, especially in public service or leadership. Leadership cannot be described in isolation, it is the sum of many virtues, and it doesn’t just come in the form of bestowed titles or official positions. The fact that my father and I took very different paths in life, yet encountered so many intersections, I hope demonstrates that I have inherited more from him than just my crinkly hair.

My good friend and long-time political mentor Amanda Vanstone said to me once, ‘Christopher, you’ve really got to stop talking about your father so much. You are almost fifty now, it’s time you moved on.’

I was a bit taken aback; Amanda often has that effect on me. Maybe she’s right. Nevertheless, I think it’s important that Remington Pyne’s contribution should not be lost or forgotten. I believe that it’s important to know where you’ve come from when deciding where you want to go in the future. I also think that you should build on good work that has gone before. My father established strong foundations of public service, and I’m lucky to have the chance to build on those. Hopefully my children will learn from that example and build on those again. In so doing, a tradition of public service is born that adds value to the society in which we live and to the country that we seek to serve.

Part I

Death

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith

Timothy 4:7 (King James Bible)

While at university I was going out with a girl called Rachel David, and we were quite serious. I had known Rachel since our school days, when we’d debated against each other, although I wouldn’t say that we’d had fun doing so. We were both painfully shy when there wasn’t a proposition to be argued and so wouldn’t talk once the adjudicator had wrapped up, but we were both aware of who the other one was. We then found ourselves enrolled at the same university—Rachel in medicine, me in law. Her father, David David, and my father also worked together and were close friends, so eventually we were kind of thrown together.

Rachel and I were out having dinner on a Saturday night, and at about nine o’clock I suddenly decided we should go home which, for a Saturday night, was a bit unusual.

‘Why would I want to do that?’ asked Rachel, fittingly put out.

‘Well,’ I hesitated. (We had had quite a stormy relationship so I was attempting to proceed cautiously, although I wasn’t exactly sure why I had suggested it myself.) ‘Well, you haven’t seen my parents in a while. It’d be nice if we spent some time with them.’

‘But I see them all the time!’

‘I just think we should go home,’ I replied matter-of-factly and Rachel reluctantly agreed.

I drove us home in my mustard yellow Golf (an awful coloured car but one I was very pleased with, having recently purchased it with the profits from the cleaning business I had started with a couple of university mates).

We arrived home at about half past nine to find my father’s friend Freddy Boyd-Turner lying in the middle of the street outside our house on Undelcarra Road in Burnside—the house that my parents had built and in which we had lived since 1970. The first memory I have is of arriving at that house for the first time, eighteen years before—all five of us children in the back of my father’s beloved old pre-seatbelt black Mercedes. It was a red brick, two-storey home with the greatest Port Jackson fig tree in the eastern suburbs. The title of our property ran through the middle of the tree so it could never be removed without the two neighbours agreeing.

At the time of that evening out with Rachel, my eldest brother, Remington, was living on a yacht moored near the Birkenhead Bridge—he had always gone in a slightly different direction to the rest of the family, and had moved out of home many years before. My other siblings had also left home. Nicholas was living in Perth, working at Woodside Petroleum as an analyst. Alexander, as soon as he finished university, had headed off overseas for eight years to live out his love of anthropology in places like the Ardèche and Lapland. He had arrived home with a French fiancée, Veronique, about a year earlier and they had been married in 1988. Samantha was the next oldest above me, and the only daughter, so of course our father loved her dearly. She had been living in Sydney, working as a nurse. She had recently come back to stay with us because my father hadn’t been very well, but she was out that night as well.

Aside from that, it had just been my parents and me at home for a few years, but I didn’t mind too much. From about the age of fourteen until maybe eighteen or nineteen you don’t want anything to do with your parents and they’re a tremendous embarrassment to you. I was beginning to come out of that stage, thinking that maybe my parents were interesting after all and that I should probably start spending a bit more time with them.

I parked the car and went to see Freddy.

‘What on earth has happened to you, Freddy?’ I asked, looking down at him.

‘Well, I just missed my footing and fell over the gutter.’

‘But what are you doing here, lying in the middle of our road?’

He said, ‘Your dad’s died.’ Just like that. Freddy was a doctor, so he was practical but clearly short on bedside manner. He thought it would be better if he just told me.

It felt like he had run me through with a spear or shot me with a .303 at close range. I didn’t quite know how to react.

Rachel followed me down the wide brick path to the house, and we found my mother sitting with my father on their bed, stroking his hair. She was holding a card with the ambulance number, which she explained she’d taken from his hand. She had been in the sitting room, watching television, and had come into the bedroom to find him stretched across the bed with the card in his hand, reaching to grab the phone to call the ambulance. He’d obviously had a heart attack but it must have been very quick, and the first person my mother had called was Freddy Boyd-Turner—one of their best friends and also their doctor. He had come straight over. I was the next person to arrive. My mother still hadn’t spoken to anyone else.

I realise now that by some strange chance it must have happened when I said to Rachel that I had to go home. I must have had a sixth sense about it. I must have somehow recognised that my life was about to change.

Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, I’d never really believed that my father was going to die.

He had been to the United States in 1982 as president of the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists, and while overseas he was out of puff just from climbing up stairs. When he got back he thought he might have a check-up and they discovered he had some blocked arteries. Poor hearts seem to run in the family—heart disease had claimed two of Dad’s uncles before they were sixty, and my grandmother and great-grandmother had also suffered from weak hearts.

My father had a triple bypass in January 1983. It was very early for that kind of surgery and afterwards he was very weak. These days people go back to work within two months of bypass procedures, but at that time you couldn’t really even open a soda water bottle for weeks. Nevertheless, after a while Dad seemed to be fully recovered and was back working, busy as ever.

Then, in February 1988—two months before he died and five years after the triple bypass—he had suffered a major heart attack. He was in hospital for a couple of weeks but they had told us there was nothing they could do.

While in hospital, my father had given me a little black and red book—a Thomas More reader, with a reading by St Thomas More for every day of the year. He knew I was fascinated by stories of the lives of the saints and, St Thomas More being the patron saint of lawyers, he felt it was appropriate it be given to me. It’s written in Old English, which is difficult to read, but I endeavoured to read it to my father every day, even though (or maybe because) he was mostly asleep. I remember one day he stirred as I was muddling through it and opened one eye to look at me.

‘That isn’t really helping,’ he said.

‘I thought I was being helpful.’

‘No, not really,’ he replied, and fell back to sleep.

When Dad came home from hospital he worked from there for about three weeks, but he was really just winding up his surgery, giving his patients away and tying up loose ends; he’d been relinquishing his work commitments slowly since his first health scare in 1982. Looking back, he was probably quite peaceful in accepting that this was going to be the end, but he was sad, very sad. That month I spent a lot of time with him and there was a lot of talk about him passing away, but I still didn’t fully comprehend it all. They hadn’t operated on him, he just came home and I must admit that, even with the talk, I assumed that meant that he was going to recover. I was young and hedonistic—going to university and parties, that sort of thing—and I thought, Dad’s home, he’s resting, he’s going to recuperate and go back to work again, just like the last time.

My mum did, however, tell me one day during that period, ‘Your father wishes that you would stop always kissing him goodbye like it’s for the last time. Maybe you should stop doing that.’

I didn’t know that I was doing it, but perhaps in the back of my mind I was aware that there wasn’t much time left. If so, I never focussed on it, not until it was too late.

He was fifty-nine and I was twenty on the day he died—9 April 1988.

I sat with him and my mother on the bed for a bit, as she wept and rocked back and forth, saying interchangeably that she wished she’d been with him, but that at least he was at home and not in a hospital. Eventually I had to get out, and I went upstairs to my room. I remember stopping before I even got there, standing in the long upstairs corridor and looking out one of the windows at the big gum tree in the front yard, which should have been cut down long ago, but my father had always stubbornly refused to do it. I stared at the tree and the night sky—unchanged from