The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia

By Frank Bongiorno

Winner of the ACT Book of the Year Award

It was the era of Hawke and Keating, Kylie and INXS, the America’s Cup and the Bicentenary. It was perhaps the most controversial decade in Australian history, with high-flying entrepreneurs booming and busting, torrid debates over land rights and immigration, the advent of AIDS, a harsh recession and the rise of the New Right.

It was a time when Australians fought for social change – on union picket lines, at rallies for women’s rights and against nuclear weapons, and as part of a new environmental movement.

And then there were the events that left many scratching their heads: Joh for Canberra . . . the Australia Card . . . Cliff Young.

In The Eighties, Frank Bongiorno brings all this and more to life. He sheds new light on ‘both the ordinary and extraordinary things that happened to Australia and Australians during this liveliest of decades’.

Shortlisted for the 2016 Ernest Scott Prize, the 2016 CHASS Australia Prize and the 2016 NSW Premier's History Prize.

‘The definitive account of an inspired, infuriating decade’ —George Megalogenis

‘A very impressive achievement’ —the Monthly

‘Meaty and entertaining’ —the Australian

Frank Bongiorno is professor of history at the Australian National University and author of the award-winning The Sex Lives of Australians. He has written for the Monthly, the Australian and Inside Story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925203592

Frank Bongiorno

Frank Bongiorno is professor of history at the Australian National University and author of the award-winning The Sex Lives of Australians. He has written for the Monthly, the Australian and Inside Story.

Book preview

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

37–39 Langridge Street

Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

[e-mail]

www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright © Frank Bongiorno 2015

Frank Bongiorno asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Bongiorno, Frank, 1969– author.

The eighties : the decade that transformed Australia / Frank Bongiorno.

9781863957762 (hardback)

9781925203592 (ebook)

Nineteen eighties.

Australia—Social life and customs—History.

Australia—Politics and government—History.

Australia—History—1976–1990.

994.06

Cover design by Peter Long

Cover image: Paul Mathews, Fairfax

Endpapers: Fairfax (front) and Alan Pryke, Newspix (back)

Text design by Tristan Main

Contents

Introduction

Stories of the 1980s

Chapter 1

A Good Run

Chapter 2

Keeping Afloat

Chapter 3

‘Vanishing Aussie’?

Chapter 4

Power and Passion

Chapter 5

The Deal-Makers

Chapter 6

Taking Credit

Chapter 7

New Pleasures, New Dangers

Picture Section

Chapter 8

The Identity Card

Chapter 9

The Crash

Afterword

What Did It All Mean?

Acknowledgments and Author’s Note

Endnotes

Credits

Index

For Amy

Introduction

Stories of the 1980s

It was the biggest party Australia had ever seen – at least that’s how its promoters touted it. In January 1988 – the same month Australia would celebrate its Bicentenary – Queensland’s Gold Coast hosted the Ultimate Event. Paying visitors watched tennis and golf played by some of the world’s greats, laughed at the comedy acts and enjoyed the glamour of the fashion parades. Young Whitney Houston belted out a few numbers, and so did that renowned grandson of a Tenterfield saddler, Peter Allen, on a summer visit to the land he still called home. But the ultimate event of the Ultimate Event was the appearance of Frank Sinatra: 40,000 turned out to see the 72-year-old perform some old favourites through a river of his sweat, as the world’s most famous crooner battled the effects of his dinner jacket and bow tie, the stage lights and the subtropical humidity. Singing for an hour with the help of three teleprompters, Sinatra was said to have cleared $1.4 million for his efforts. It was a good night: even the rain which had been so unkind to the party previously, nearly wrecking the Whitney Houston concert, stopped for Ol’ Blue Eyes.¹

The occasion for the Ultimate Event was the opening of Sanctuary Cove, a residential, shopping, hotel and leisure development on the Gold Coast’s Hope Island. It was a very ‘eighties’ kind of place: expensive homes, big marina, golf courses, luxury hotel, boutiques and even its own local brew, served in a German-style beer hall.² Sanctuary Cove was the vision of a bustling, overweight businessman named Mike Gore, who had arrived from Sydney in 1973 with just $400 in his pocket. As visitors contemplated the extraordinary if still incomplete development, there was no doubting his ability to make magical things happen. His friend the advertiser John Singleton thought that, ‘In 200 years Australians will look around and this will be one of the biggest things a single man has completed.’³ Gore was regarded as the leader of the white-shoe brigade, a group of ‘can-do’ Gold Coast businessmen who wielded considerable influence over the conservative state government.

In one of the early advertisements for Sanctuary Cove – headed ‘Are There 900 Civilised Human Beings in Queensland?’ – Gore explained the concept behind his development. Surfers Paradise, with its ‘ugly towers’ and ‘miles of glitzy neon and greasy takeaways’, was ‘Paradise Lost’. His 600 acres, however, were ‘Paradise Regained’:

Shelly’s Farm, Hope Island.

600 acres of salt marsh, leeches and scrub.

She was battered, and she’d been raped, but I could see she was a lady.

I fell in love instantly, and within hours, she was mine.

Later I discovered her sad history. She’d been a fertile farm once.

But 30 years ago, the sand miners had moved in, dumped thousands of tonnes of silt in her natural harbour, destroyed the drainage, and formed the swamp.

I spent more than two million dollars on drainage.

I swore to restore the harbour.

I was hooked.

Gore thought of it as ‘the place where we could make a new beginning, without the mistakes of the past’, and claimed that development would ‘complement the natural beauty of the place. Not compete with it or destroy it.’

The sexual imagery of Gore’s promotional material was ripe, but his appeal to conservation was in tune with the times. Sanctuary Cove, however, also had a darker side, promoting itself as ‘unashamedly elitist’.⁴ It was, in effect, a gated residential community.

Gore would not stick around long to bathe in the glory of the Ultimate Event. He sold his share in Sanctuary Cove soon afterwards and later, in 1988, it was taken over by a Japanese company. He then experienced a series of business disasters and an expensive divorce, leaving for Canada with a new and much younger wife in 1992, owing his creditors a cool $25 million.⁵ Like several other entrepreneurs of the 1980s, the chain-smoking, hard-living Gore did not live long after his fall, dying of a heart attack in 1994 at just fifty-three.

Mike Gore’s is just one story of Australia’s eighties, but his career captures a striking number of its familiar elements: the optimism, the energy, the elitism (frequently combined with a pretend egalitarianism), the excess and the crash. Yet today such complexities are overlooked by many of us, who too frequently see the decade only through rose-tinted glasses. On FM radio and in television mini-series, it is the era of big hair and shoulder pads, synthesised pop and ‘greed is good’; of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Ronald Reagan; of British boy and girl bands, Live Aid for Ethiopia and Margaret Thatcher; of yuppies and ‘masters of the universe’ – as Tom Wolfe memorably called his New York stockbrokers in The Bonfire of the Vanities. It is the decade that began in the shadow of the bomb and ended in the joyful dismantling of the Berlin Wall. The world’s most famous political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, began the 1980s in much the same way he had lived for twenty years – as a captive of a racist white regime in South Africa – and ended it a free man, in time to assume his country’s presidency.

Australians participated in these happenings, sharing the excitements, challenges and surprises of the decade, and adding a few of their own. For us, it was the era of Hawke and Keating, of Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee, of let-it-rip capitalism and corporate excess, of assertive nationalism and cultural and sporting success. The decade has been treated as both an alpha and an omega. The journalist Paul Kelly famously claimed that the eighties saw the end of the Australian Settlement, the suite of ideas and policies that had underpinned the nation from the early twentieth century. White Australia, Industry Protection, Wage Arbitration, State Paternalism and Imperial Benevolence: all, said Kelly, were broken by the end of the 1980s – and, he suggests, a jolly good thing, too.⁶ But another journalist, George Megalogenis, saw the eighties less as an end than as a beginning, a prelude to ‘The Australian Moment’, his name for the vindication of twenty-five years of policy reform that came with the economy’s astonishing resilience during the global financial crisis of 2008.⁷

In these accounts, the Hawke government is the ‘gold standard’ for reformist governments of whatever stripe. Giants once strode the land: politicians who did not allow themselves to be diverted by last week’s focus group, this week’s opinion poll or today’s 24-hour news cycle. Yet one of the leading participants in that government, Gareth Evans, recently commented that ‘it did not always feel that way on the inside’.⁸ Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that there is a certain forgetfulness operating when modern politicians, bureaucrats and journalists paint the 1980s as a political golden age. It is an aim of this book to provide an antidote to that amnesia.

The growing ascendancy of eighties youth in our own time might help to account for the decade’s rosy hue. We have had just one Generation X prime minister, Julia Gillard (born 1961), but eighties teenagers and twenty-somethings are already prominent among the nation’s political class. In April 2014, when Mike Baird (born 1968) became the premier of New South Wales, a friend located him very much as a child of the decade: ‘He has shocking taste in music. It’s embarrassingly dated. It’s kind of stuck in a time warp of 1980s music that was bad then and is dreadful still. You know – power ballads, bad pop.’⁹ At the time of writing, six out of eight Australian premiers or chief ministers were, like Baird, born between 1968 and 1973. All probably know quite a few power ballads. Eighties youth are also coming into their own in business, education and culture.

The growing prominence of this generation would perhaps be sufficient justification for an account of the Australia that made them. But to tell the story of Australia’s eighties, it is not enough merely to evoke the experience of the young, the elite or the globally aware; there were other 1980s, too: those of the newly arrived migrant, the displaced manufacturing worker, the Aboriginal battler, the working mother, the nervous pensioner, the struggling – or wealthy – farmer, the disappointed radical, the disgruntled conservative. There was continuity as well as change, collectivism alongside individualism, the old and the durable hanging on alongside the new and disposable. A 1986 federal government inquiry into folklife concluded that white Australians were the heirs to ‘living traditions’ – games, rhymes, sayings, yarns, songs, dances, poems, customs, superstitions, recipes and skills – that ran ‘deep, giving each of us our own sense of cultural identity, yet binding us together as Australians’.¹⁰ This folk culture, with its powerful sense of continuity and roots in the European past, would reveal its enduring strength during the Bicentenary of 1988, despite the glitzy overlay of celebrity song and corporate branding.

When did the 1980s start and end? Graeme Turner has argued that the 1980s which circulate in popular memory began with Australia’s victory in the America’s Cup in September 1983 and ended with the Bicentenary of 1988. For Turner, it is ‘a newly confident Australian nationalism’ that defines the remembered eighties.¹¹ My own definition of the period is a little more capacious than his. The story begins with the optimism of Bob Hawke’s long-anticipated ascension to the Labor leadership in early 1983, and runs through to its end, the bitter contest that culminated in Paul Keating’s elevation as prime minister in December 1991. The period began and ended in national pessimism. Australia of the early 1980s was still an overwhelmingly white country of just 15 million people, with ‘double-digit’ unemployment, inflation and interest rates, a trifecta that in combination with the drought led some pundits to consider that the country was in the grip of a deep and possibly permanent malaise. Pessimists warned of the possibility of an Argentine fate for Australia, a future of ‘economic stagnation … social intolerance … political decay, and … nostalgic memories of a good life’.¹²

The 1980s ended, as they began, in economic recession, as well as in corporate collapse and political scandal. This was the rather depressing vantage point from which most Australians reflected on the decade they had just lived through. And many, unsurprisingly, did not much like what they saw, being more likely to repudiate the values of individualism and hedonism already synonymous with the decade than recall it with the warm glow of nostalgia that is so much in evidence today. They knew nothing of the era about to open up before them, with the arrival in the mid-1990s of both the World Wide Web and happier economic times. These surprises would divide the merely globalising world of the 1980s from the hyper-globalisation of our own times.

When I told people I was writing a book on this transformative decade, they often felt impelled to share something of their own 1980s with me, even if it was no more than a recollection of a favourite band, a fashion item, or a medal acquired at school to mark the Bicentenary. One told me that her first date with the boy who would later become her husband was on the shores of Sydney Harbour on Australia Day, 1988; another recalled the 1980s as a bit of a haze, a scramble to combine the roles of mother, businessman’s wife and academic. It is experiences such as these that have been largely missing from accounts of the period, which have so far been preoccupied with grand transformations and great men – or at least with men who imagined they were great. The big changes and the great men will have their due in the pages that follow, but my aim has been, above all, to enlarge our sense of both the ordinary and the extraordinary things that happened to Australia and Australians during this liveliest of decades in our recent history.

1

A Good Run

The people were worried about their future, but stubborn in clinging to the notion of the lucky country.

PAUL KELLY, THE HAWKE ASCENDANCY

In the Christian calendar, Ash Wednesday is a time of fasting that signals the beginning of Lent, the six-week period before Easter. In 1983 it fell on 16 February, a day of fierce heat across south-eastern Australia. A devastating drought and deep economic recession gripped the country.

In Sydney, the new leader of the Opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP), Bob Hawke, gave his party’s election campaign policy speech inside a packed and expectant Sydney Opera House. Hawke thought he was addressing the nation’s most pressing emergency: that posed by the recession. But there was a far more urgent and elemental crisis unfolding in the country’s south-east, as people feared not for their jobs but their lives, as bushfire choked or incinerated those in its path, as the advancing flames razed the tinder-dry landscape and visited destruction on homes and possessions – all in apparent mockery of the effort to subject the country to the templates of order, reason and progress.

But Hawke was a man who believed in order, reason and progress. At fifty-three, he had maintained a slim, even athletic physique. His luxuriant, well-tended head of dark wavy hair was already turning grey, as if to signal the growing distance between the boozy, aggressive and randy union leader of the 1970s, and the more mature, self-controlled, statesmanlike figure now bidding for the prime ministership. Journalists – most no doubt aware of Hawke’s philandering ways – still played up his charisma and sex appeal, even as they paid tribute to his discipline in having given up his heavy drinking. The arched, almost triangular eyebrows remained, as did the bad temper and habit of intimidation. His minders, however, had ensured that there would be no repetition of his furious on-screen explosion on the night he became leader, when he was asked by interviewer Richard Carleton if he was embarrassed at the blood on his hands. Indeed, when he delivered his speech at the Opera House, he read it so slowly, and his style was so subdued, that he ran out of time and had to skip much of the text. Peter Bowers in the Sydney Morning Herald noted the emergence of ‘the quiet persuader’.¹ Hawke had already been active in Australian public life for a quarter of a century. He had spent the turbulent 1970s as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), and the early 1980s as a member of parliament and shadow minister. Under this charismatic new leader, Labor was expected to return to office for the first time since 1975.

The man Hawke had tipped out of the leadership just a couple of weeks before, Bill Hayden, sat in the second row of the Opera House auditorium that day. A former Queensland policeman, Hayden had served the party as leader with doggedness, and in the 1980 election managed a swing of 4 per cent. But doubts had grown about his ability to win a federal election. Although Hayden had withstood a challenge to his leadership from Hawke in July 1982, his days appeared numbered after the ALP achieved a swing of a miserly 3.5 per cent at a by-election in the Victorian Liberal-held seat of Flinders late in 1982. Support for his leadership ebbed, and critically, the powerful NSW Labor Right faction had for some time wanted to replace him with Hawke.

But it was John Button, a Victorian and Labor leader in the Senate, who delivered the coup de grâce. In recent months Button, a Hayden supporter, had come to think of the Labor leader as having squandered his political opportunities. His performance in the media was poor; Hayden remained ‘an unrepentant bad communicator’.² Button travelled to Brisbane on 6 January 1983 in an effort to persuade Hayden to stand down as leader. Hayden, however, dug in; Hawke, he said, was ‘a shallow man’. Button ‘did not disagree with this view’, and ‘did not think that many people in the Party did either’, but ‘there were a number of important attributes in politics’: ‘integrity’, ‘decency’ and ‘desire for social change’, on the one side; the ability to communicate and to command the confidence of voters on the other. Button’s implication was that while Hawke had both, Hayden was deficient in the latter. But Hayden refused to accept his time was up. He was an ‘existentialist’ who, like Macbeth, went into battle and ‘never asked for mercy … if he lost the next election, he would not ask for mercy either’. Button was unimpressed; what about all of those thousands in the ALP who were not existentialists, and would find cold comfort in such an attitude if Labor lost the next election? ‘I suppose that’s right,’ Hayden replied.³

Having failed in his mission, Button followed up with a decisive letter late in January 1983, reiterating his belief that Hayden could not win the next election. ‘You said to me that you could not stand down for a bastard like Bob Hawke’, Button wrote, but ‘[i]n my experience in the Labor Party the fact that someone is a bastard (of one kind or another) has never been a disqualification for leadership of the party’. The power of Button’s missive lay not only in that it came from a friend and supporter, but also that its author seemed as alive to Hawke’s weaknesses as he was to Hayden’s:

I am personally not one of those who believe that we can necessarily coast into office on the coat-tails of a media performer and winner of popularity polls. On the other hand I believe Hawke’s leadership would give us a better chance of success … even some of Bob’s closest supporters have doubts about his capacities to lead the party successfully, in that they do not share his own estimate of his ability.⁴

Among Labor politicians such as Button, who had witnessed at first hand the unravelling and then dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975, there was now a hard pragmatism that rejected the party’s sentimental attachment to failed leaders, as well as its too-easy acceptance of honourable defeat. Malcolm Fraser, meanwhile, was planning an early election when Button wrote his letter on 28 January. The authority of his Liberal– National Party coalition government was ebbing away in the face of a faltering economy, the embarrassing exposure of tax evasion by many wealthy Australians, and a bitter, occasionally violent struggle in Tasmania over a proposal by the state Liberal government to build a dam in the south-west wilderness.

On 3 February, finally bowing to unrelenting internal party pressure, Hayden resigned as ALP leader during a meeting of the shadow cabinet. At the same time as Labor was dealing with the leadership issue in Brisbane, Fraser was in Canberra seeking from the governor-general a double dissolution of parliament, so that an election could be held on 5 March. Dubious that Labor would be able to manage a smooth leadership transition, Fraser expected that he would be facing Hayden, but the ALP called his bluff by pragmatically switching leaders.⁵ Hayden memorably told the media that he thought ‘a drover’s dog’ could lead the Labor Party to victory at the next election ‘the way the country is’.⁶ But with Bob Hawke’s ascent to the leadership, persistent doubts about the ALP’s ability to defeat Fraser melted away. The electoral and the psychological advantage passed decisively to Labor.

Hawke’s focus was on ending what he called ‘the politics of division, the politics of confrontation’.⁷ A Labor campaign slogan was ‘Bringing Australia Together’; he stressed a politics of consensus. Not everyone among Labor’s elite reacted favourably to Hawke’s plan for an election campaign based on ‘recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation’. The highly popular and successful premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran, thought he had stumbled on ‘a meeting of the fucking Hare Krishnas … Give them something to vote for. These greedy bastards want a quid in their pockets.’⁸ Hawke would not forget Wran’s ‘greedy bastards’; his campaign speech promised both income tax cuts and an end to the wage freeze imposed by the Fraser government.

Hawke evoked a sense of crisis in his speech, and to the extent that he outlined an economic policy, it was a cautious but unmistakable Keynesianism which aimed to reduce unemployment and lift demand through ‘controlled, responsible stimulation of the Australian economy’. A Hawke government would support centralised wage determination as part of its Prices and Incomes Accord with the union movement; this was a formal agreement signed before the election which committed the unions to wage restraint in return for government spending, such as on a new health insurance scheme to be called Medicare. Tariffs were to be maintained until the crisis in manufacturing had been overcome; government would offer industry ‘a necessary breathing space until steady growth is restored’. Hawke ended by invoking the memory of his hero, John Curtin, and the Second World War, the ‘time of Australia’s gravest crisis, when our very existence as a nation was at stake’, and the people had given Labor their support ‘to take Australia through to final victory’. He enjoined his audience to see the recession and the drought as ‘a very different kind of crisis’, but one that posed the same challenge: ‘to bring Australians together in a united effort until victory is won’.⁹

*

Even as thousands of enthusiastic Labor supporters left the Opera House on 16 February, a great tragedy was unfolding further south. Throughout the summer, there had been hundreds of bushfires in south-eastern Australia.¹⁰ On 8 February, when the Melbourne temperature soared beyond forty-three degrees, squally winds gathered about 50,000 tonnes of topsoil into a vast cloud of red and brown that formed in the parched Wimmera Mallee region in the morning, hitting Melbourne just before three o’clock. Day turned into night as the cloud deposited a thousand tonnes of dust on the city, the ferocious winds uprooting trees and unroofing homes.¹¹

The religious-minded had long been used to regarding such phenomena as a warning from God. It is a pity that the belief in such omens had declined, for it might have better prepared people for 16 February. The day before Ash Wednesday in southern Victoria had been cloudy, with light rain and temperatures in the mid-twenties to low thirties. Perhaps these mild conditions, in the midst of the hottest, driest summer in living memory, bred complacency. The following morning, the skies in southern Victoria began clearing at around eight o’clock. Temperatures climbed, humidity dropped, and a strong north wind blew. Melbourne’s temperature again reached forty-three degrees. Combined with the fuel provided by a dry, brittle countryside, the conditions were ideally fitted for fires, and ninety-three were soon burning in Victoria alone.¹² In South Australia, the commuter suburbs in the Adelaide Hills were fast developing into a raging fire zone, and large blazes also broke out in the Clare wine-growing district and the south-east near the Victorian border. Adelaide was soon covered in dust and smoke; radio broadcasts in Britain contained the alarming but fortunately false intelligence that 400 people had died and half the city had been destroyed; Australia House in London was flooded with inquiries from concerned relatives.¹³

Meanwhile, in Victoria, several large fires erupted during the afternoon – near Warrnambool in the Western District; in the Otway Ranges, extending to coastal towns such as Lorne, Anglesea and Aireys Inlet; at Macedon, an area already devastated by a fire on 1 February; and several places in the Dandenong Ranges. Apart from the Warrnambool fire, all were on the fringe between Melbourne and its hinterland, and they were driven south during the afternoon by the prevailing winds. But in the early evening, a strong south-westerly that had been making its way from South Australia during the day finally hit the country near Melbourne, kickstarting the fires’ most deadly phase. All but one death in Victoria occurred after the wind changed direction.¹⁴ Towns that had seemed safe were now suddenly threatened by fast-moving walls of fire and the balls of flame they deposited like grenades.¹⁵

One town that found itself confronted by the danger was Cockatoo: a small community in the Dandenong Ranges about fifty kilometres from Melbourne, a place of fibro and weatherboard homes, many previously holiday houses now owned by battling young families unable to afford a place closer to the city.¹⁶ Residents were surprised by a fire that seemed to appear out of nowhere on the rise above the town. Cockatoo was soon alight, with residents assembling pets, photographs and treasured belongings, bundling them into their cars and seeking refuge on safer ground. The roads quickly became choked with traffic, the chaos heightened by a cacophony of car horns, exploding fireballs and gas bottles, powerful winds and thick smoke. Not all could leave; about 120 children with their mothers and pets spent a terrifying evening inside the local kindergarten, covered with wet towels – towels that repeatedly dried out as a result of the extreme heat – as parents tried to shield them from the frightening scenes outside. The children remained surprisingly calm. With great courage, two men spent the evening sitting on the roof, hosing down the modern circular building of brick, steel and glass as it was surrounded by fire.¹⁷

The power cut out just after nine o’clock, the telephone went dead, and the smoke in the building became thicker every moment. Torches were not needed: the glow of the nearby fire ‘eerily lit the whole interior’.¹⁸ The adults debated whether to move some of the children from the overcrowded kindergarten to a nearby building. A mother of two told a journalist the following day: ‘I knew that any minute we would probably be incinerated and I just hoped that I would die first so I didn’t have to listen to their dreadful screams of pain and fear.’¹⁹ The fire passed without touching the building. But a couple engaged to be married in a few weeks who took refuge in a culvert were found dead the next day, their arms still around each another. At nearby Beaconsfield, twelve firefighters, including one woman, died after being trapped inside a ring of fire.

At Macedon a group of about 250 took refuge in a hotel. Like those in the Cockatoo kindergarten they survived, helped by firefighters who remained outside protecting the building with hoses. But at Kalangadoo in eastern South Australia, a 25-year-old man ran into trouble when his car became bogged during an effort to rescue his neighbours, a woman and her four young children. All perished. Another neighbourly effort at Greenhill in the Adelaide Hills was also in vain, when a burning man emerged from his home: ‘[T]here was nothing I could do. I touched him and his skin came off.’ Thousands of properties were destroyed, from the humblest seaside and mountain cottages to the stately homes that adorned Summit Road in the Adelaide Hills. Kym and Julie Bonython lost their home, valuable art and the country’s largest collection of jazz records.²⁰ The Adelaide radio journalist Murray Nicol remained on air to give an eyewitness account of his own property burning. He won a Walkley Award for journalism, but lost his home.²¹ There were also stories of lucky escapes, such as the school bus full of children in the Adelaide Hills that was mistakenly directed into a fire zone. When some of the children became hysterical, a sixteen-year-old girl told them to ‘sit down, shut up and stop panicking’ so that the bus driver could concentrate on getting them out of the fire. The English-born driver calmly negotiated his way through the smoke and fire; ‘a born-again Christian’, he ‘believed the Lord would bring us through to safety – and he did’.²²

Since colonial times, Australians had grasped for a language and an imagery with which to convey their experience of fire. For one resident, the Ash Wednesday fire at Cockatoo ‘sounded like a battle’ but for another, the fire ‘roared down the hill like a jumbo jet’.²³ The progress of the Belgrave fire up a hill recalled for witnesses an express train. At seaside Anglesea in Victoria, the movement of the fire was for two firefighters ‘like a thousand horses coming down the gully’.²⁴ The SA Labor premier, John Bannon, thought that the forests he had seen looked ‘as if a nuclear holocaust’ had been through them.²⁵ Fraser compared the effects of the fires in coastal Victoria to an invasion of Panzer tanks, while a fire captain at Macedon also favoured a Second World War theme, the ‘spotting’ in that fire – the deposit of fiery material ahead of the main front – being like the film The Dambusters.²⁶ Others recalled more recent conflicts: the fire was like an attack with napalm.²⁷ Almost everyone seemed to agree they had experienced a holocaust.

Seventy-five people died in the Ash Wednesday bushfires – forty-seven in Victoria, twenty-eight in South Australia – and 2300 buildings were lost, as well as 350,000 livestock.²⁸ In the days that followed, bodies were extracted from burned-out houses and cars. Families who had lost contact on the night of the fires looked for one another, occasionally in vain. Thousands of homes were incinerated; whole towns had been largely wiped out; blackened chimneys remained where buildings had once stood. But there was, as usual in such fires, a capriciousness to which properties survived and which were left as piles of smouldering ashes and rubble. Scenes on 17 February recalled waves of wartime refugees: men, women and children with blank faces carried garbage bags containing their few remaining possessions to centres that had been set up to provide them with temporary shelter and meals.²⁹ Others rummaged through the remains of their homes for anything that had survived; a woman at Aireys Inlet searched desperately for her engagement ring.³⁰ The media celebrated the courage of firefighters and the community spirit of people who had stood up to the terrifying walls of flame. But petty jealousies soon emerged, resentment that children who had lost their homes received toys and holidays from donors while others who suffered missed out, and that ‘undeserving’ residents were presented with lovely new properties while those whose homes had survived still had just ‘a normal house’ – and perhaps a burned-out garden to go with it.³¹

The Ash Wednesday bushfires served to remind white Australians of their vulnerability in a land that, even after almost two centuries, they were only beginning to know. But there would be no revolution in how they managed the risk of fire. Bushfire science benefited from an immediate injection of resources and prestige, but things soon returned to normal. Many rebuilt their houses in much the same style on the same block as before. And it was all too easy, once the fires were out, the government inquiries had done their work and the lush regrowth had made its appearance, to return to fatalism. Australians’ belief that they might defy nature, that luck might preserve them from future disaster, had survived the tragedy.³²

*

The party leaders called a short truce in the federal election contest after the fire. Fraser, restored to the role of national leader rather than campaigning politician, toured devastated areas, consulted with the two state premiers, Bannon and John Cain (in Victoria), and promised government assistance. Hawke elected to remain in Melbourne; he did not wish to divert resources from the relief effort to hosting him and his entourage. No one, he said, could doubt his compassion for the victims.

Political commentators quickly went to work explaining how the fires were likely to affect the election campaign. Labor was ahead in the polls on 16 February, but with the Liberals seemingly reducing the gap between the parties. Most thought that Fraser would enjoy the advantage: a national crisis allowed a politician to become a statesman. Incumbency would yield its political rewards; the message of Hawke’s policy speech had been lost in the smoke and dust of Ash Wednesday. But the bushfires had wiped out campaign time, recalling Fraser from the urgent task of fostering doubt about his opponent, and the national mood seemed to favour Hawke more than ever. Wasn’t the central message of his campaign about cooperation in the face of adversity, Australians pulling together in a crisis?

In any case, the momentum remained with Hawke and the Labor Party. On 19 February the WA branch of the Labor Party won ‘a crushing victory’ in the state election, delivering what the Australian described as ‘a savage blow’ to Liberal Party morale across the country.³³ The new premier, Brian Burke, turned thirty-six a few days after his victory. A former journalist who had greatly reduced his weight and drinking in the quest for office, Burke was the son of a federal Labor politician. He combined elements of the old Catholic machine politics with a newer style of Labor pragmatism that had helped leaders such as Neville Wran in New South Wales, John Cain in Victoria and John Bannon in South Australia into power. Wran, a former leading barrister with a rasping voice, a fiery temper and, in private conversation, a foul mouth, was the acknowledged master, having led the ALP in New South Wales to a narrow victory at the 1976 state election. When he followed up with massive victories at elections in 1978 and 1981 – dubbed ‘Wranslides’ – his electoral and policy success seemed to point a way forward for political leaders elsewhere in Australia. Wran gestured towards the social progressivism of the Whitlam era – the government championed the environment and the arts, and in 1984 Wran would himself move a successful private member’s bill decriminalising homosexuality. But it was his reassuring persona, political nous and common touch, combined with a cautious approach to public finance and administration, that were the essential ingredients of his success.³⁴

Labor leaders elsewhere emulated Wran’s cautious pragmatism, although none could quite manage it so well as he did. Still, Cain had achieved a notable breakthrough in Victoria in April 1982; Labor had last won an election in that state thirty years before, when Cain’s father led the party during its first ever term of majority government. Meanwhile, in November 1982 Bannon led Labor in South Australia back into office in contrasting circumstances; the ALP had only been in opposition there for a single term. Bannon had been a Labor staffer during the Whitlam years and had seen at first hand what happened when governments abandoned discipline and cohesion. Like Wran and Cain, he fostered an image of political moderation and, as premier and treasurer, a presidential profile, assisted by a personable style that appealed to Adelaide’s small-town media.

All four of these Labor premiers, keen to distance themselves from the ‘old’ Labor Party’s suspicion of capitalism, wanted close relations with business. But their background as lawyers, journalists or professional political operatives also meant that business was a world to which they had enjoyed only limited exposure. They could see how business might help Labor governments revitalise their respective states, but Cain and Bannon would eventually reveal themselves to be much less skilled in recognising the dangers of its wicked ways. For his part, Burke fancied himself a wheeler-and-dealer in a way that none of the other Labor premiers ever seriously contemplated. In this, his methods more closely resembled those of Queensland National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen than his Labor counterparts. Burke consciously modelled himself on the infamous Louisiana governor Huey Long, cultivating a populist style based on the ruthless exploitation of government patronage in the interests of his mates and supporters. Burke’s biographer also sees him as nursing a sense of grievance against Western Australia’s ‘old money’, born of a Catholic working-class upbringing and the failure of his father’s political career.³⁵ It led him to look for businessmen who might be willing to help him, and whom he would help in turn. A letter sent to a prospective political donor by a businessman close to Burke revealed the new premier’s methods:

There is absolutely no guarantee that a donation will result in any kind of preferential treatment for the donors should Brian Burke become the Premier, but what I can guarantee is that any point of view that a donor wishes to present to Mr Burke … can be presented through his brother Terry … and it will be given every consideration. If the matter is important enough Terry will arrange an appointment with Brian.³⁶

Here was a glimpse of the old-fashioned Catholic machine politician in all his clannish glory.

One of those Burke persuaded to help him was Laurie Connell, a Liberal Party supporter and owner of the investment bank Rothwells. Connell agreed to donate $25,000 to Labor’s 1983 campaign: small beer for a man whose wealth was growing rapidly through his merchant banking activities. Rothwells had been a venerable Brisbane menswear company with a history stretching back to the 1920s. In the early 1980s its board turned it into a ‘cashbox’ with the aim of converting the firm into a bank; that is, the company was stripped of pretty much everything except its cash. Rothwells qualified for trustee status, which meant it was able to get into the potentially lucrative business of managing trust funds. As such, the company was an attractive proposition to any raider confident they could persuade the Queensland government to offer a measure of patronage so that it could operate successfully as a financial institution. Two rising entrepreneurs who would give the 1980s much of its notoriety in the history of Australian business, Laurie Connell and a young Melbourne high-flyer named Christopher Skase, were in the running to take control, but Connell won. The Queensland National–Liberal Party government granted Rothwells ‘the first money market dealer’s licence issued by the Queensland Treasury in its more than 120 years of existence’. More importantly, Connell’s supporters in the Queensland political establishment helped him give potential clients the impression that his was a sound enterprise, that it had government backing. The premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, launched the new merchant bank at a lavish party in Brisbane that was attended by members of the political, judicial and business establishment. Bjelke-Petersen’s ‘right hand man’, Sir Edward Lyons, attended as chairman of Rothwells board. Happily, he was also chairman of the TAB (Totalisator Administration Board), which decided to channel the substantial cash flow gathered from the state’s punters through Connell’s little bank. Lyons’s good friend the chief commissioner of police, Sir Terence Lewis, was also on hand to enjoy the hospitality; he had only recently intervened to try and make a drink-driving charge go away when Lyons, as ‘full as a fowl’, had been caught by police after a Christmas party.³⁷ Rothwells got its start in the world of Queensland conservative political cronyism, but it would acquire its fame in the no less spectacular Labor cronyism of the golden west, where it would also, eventually, suffer a sad demise.

*

In Canberra, on 4 March – the evening before the federal election – another Labor man anticipated that the turn of the political wheel was likely to bring him success, influence and riches. The 1980s should have been David Combe’s time. During an arduous career as a political operative – most recently as ALP federal secretary – the stocky, woolly-haired Combe had shown exceptional organisational skill and financial acumen in helping bring the party organisation back from the brink. As he did so, he painstakingly built up his political and business networks with an eye on the party’s future – as well as his own. In 1976 he had loyally taken the political hit – or at least much of its impact – following a gross miscalculation by Whitlam to consent to the pursuit of party funding from Iraq.³⁸ After resigning as ALP secretary in 1981, Combe set up as a ‘government relations consultant’ – or lobbyist – and his next goal was to use his old party contacts to make serious money.³⁹ Although in this respect a man completely in tune with the times, Combe was sadly hampered by one disabling legacy from the past: he could not let go of 1975. He remained committed to the theory that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had played a major role in the demise of the Whitlam government, and carried with him an open hostility to the United States on that score. It was an attitude common enough among the ALP left but increasingly played down by the new pragmatists who had taken control of the party. It was an attitude that would cost Combe his career and reputation.⁴⁰

Combe was not yet forty when he fatefully accepted an invitation to dine with a young Russian diplomat named Valery Ivanov on election eve. One business on whose behalf Combe had been working was the Commercial Bureau, which had a unique status as the only Australian trading house accredited in the Soviet Union. The company was run by a mysterious businessman named Laurie Matheson; he seemed very rich, which impressed Combe, had a background in naval intelligence, and in due course it would become all too clear that he was also an informer for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), if not something more sinister. Matheson’s main business problem was that his former managing director had left to establish a rival organisation that was providing Commercial Bureau with unwelcome competition. In particular, he was having difficulty in New South Wales, and needed to gain a hearing with the Labor government there. Perhaps Combe might help him? Combe, as a member of the Australia–USSR Friendship Society, was about to travel with his wife to the Soviet Union. Combe undertook to work on Matheson’s behalf while in Moscow.⁴¹

The First Secretary in Canberra’s Soviet Embassy responsible for liaison with the Friendship Society was Ivanov, who was only thirty-three years old when he arrived in Australia in 1981. His youth was one factor that aroused ASIO’s suspicion that he might be an intelligence officer; a Soviet diplomat of his seniority would normally be at least in their late thirties. The interest in him grew and, with it, interest in his connection to David Combe. It would later come to light that Ivanov had organised Combe’s invitation to Moscow. By the time Combe arrived back in Canberra from Moscow late in 1982, ASIO was convinced that Ivanov was a member of the KGB.⁴²

After his return, Combe provided Matheson with a report, based on his consultations with officials in Moscow, on how he could develop his company’s trade with the Soviet Union. Combe pointed out that political tensions between Australia and the Soviet Union were a barrier to trade and recommended that Commercial Bureau might try to ease these tensions by participating in the Australia–USSR Friendship Society. He also suggested an upgrade of relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Australian Labor Party, to be engineered by none other than David Combe, government relations consultant. Combe billed Matheson for $2500; ASIO soon had copies of both the report and the bill.⁴³

As ASIO built its case against Ivanov, it considered approaching Combe to warn him of his predicament; perhaps he could be persuaded to report on his new friend, thereby helping ASIO make its case? That approach was never made, and to this extent, the self-serving claims later made by the ASIO director-general, Harvey Barnett, that he had saved ‘Combe from himself’, or from the clutches of the KGB, should not be taken too seriously.⁴⁴ In the context of the expulsion of KGB spies from other Western countries during this period, as well as local criticism from both right and left concerning ASIO’s capacity, the organisation needed to catch a spy of its own.

On the evening of 4 March, Combe arrived at the home of Ivanov, his wife, Vera, and their seven-year-old daughter, Irina. Combe had already had plenty to drink; by his own account, he ‘probably would not have run the gamut of a random breath testing unit’ on the way to the house. By the time he left – after many hours of food, conversation, vodka, beer, red wine, white wine and liqueur – he was ‘pretty well gone’. Whether Combe on that evening had revealed himself as a threat to national security would later be debated passionately. That he was a menace to traffic safety is beyond question.

The conversation during the evening was often rambling and, in Combe’s case, increasingly slurred. He did most of the talking and had great hopes for the future – the country’s and his own – under the Labor government that now seemed an inevitability. ‘I was going to put in my list of requests on … about Thursday or Friday,’ he told Ivanov. ‘I thought I’d ask to be Chairman of Qantas for first choice, and then Ambassador to Moscow, something like that you know.’ ‘Being Ambassador to Moscow, David, you’ll keep your hand on the pulse,’ replied the homesick diplomat wistfully. After a couple of years of money-making as a lobbyist, Combe explained, ‘then I’ll say, right, I’m entitled to something, I want my job for the boys, Ambassadorship, Moscow will suit me very much.’ Ivanov was confused; who were ‘the boys’? Combe gave an impromptu lesson in Australian English, explaining that he meant patronage. Combe told Ivanov that he – Combe – was one of ‘the boys’, and payday had now arrived:

I’m putting myself in a situation where, I’ll level with you because you’re a friend, Valeriy, I’m going to make the next two years, they’re going to be the two most economically fruitful years of my life. I’ve worked a long while for the Labor movement… . I’ve got nothing for it; in financial terms the next two years with a Federal Government and four State Governments, I’m in enormous demand, I mean I’m in a situation where I can say to Esso, you know, IBM, and all these companies, well, you know, I’ll listen to your proposition and I’ll make a decision in due course whether I’m going to work for you … in the next few weeks they’re the decisions I have to make. Whom do I work for and on what

Reviews for The Eighties

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As other reviewers have suggested, this one falls into the easily mocked gap between journalism and historiography. In short: it's entertaining (though that might rely on the fact that I'm old enough to remember some of the decade under discussion), broad (politics, economics, culture, and environment all get a look in), and the parts don't add up to much. This is obviously intentional; Bongiorno avoids telling any kind of over-arching story, but he writes small scale stories so well that I'm sure he could have done so. Instead, he structures the book thematically, which allows for some nice juxtapositions (the America's Cup and the floating of the currency)--but doesn't allow for any sense that time was passing. The '80s end up looking rather static. He also avoids too much discussion of how he sees the decade compared to other historians, but when he does mention their disagreements, he's clear and concise. Perhaps he can public a long essay interpreting the decade; for now, he's done a very nice job of describing it.