HEADY DAYS
All my sins are remembered

Part 1:

When one writes about politics one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other.  I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement. I am now 69.

My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s. It was in those embryonic years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. It was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes.

But such experience in my adolescent years did not prevent me from being interested in the political world. I just finished watching a two-part doco on Whitlam,1 Australia’s Prime Minister just after I arrived in Australia from Canada when I was in my late 20s.

Gough Whitlam (1916- ) is now 97. He didn’t rise to the top to become Prime Minister; he had to fight to get there.1 He did that fighting all the way back to the same year my mother joined the Baha’i Faith: 1953.  I was only 9, then, and living in Ontario Canada. 

Whitlam’s only free ride into the political arena came on the winds of social change that woke up conservative Australia and helped deliver the Australia Labor Party (ALP) victory in 1972. By then I was 28, living in the dog-biscuit dry land of northern South Australia, and teaching high school.

Part 2:

Tough Irish Catholic working class stock dominated Labor in the 1950s and 1960s; these were Whitlam’s opponents as he tried to rise in the ALP. Whitlam’s opponents included the conservatives, the Liberal Party members. Whitlam was different; he had a Protestant background; in the ‘50s and ‘60s he was young and fresh. He was also educated, witty, intellectual, brimming with ideas and committed to serving all Australians. Because of all this, he was resented and distrusted by his own party, the ALP.

Whitlam entered Parliament in 1953, and joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1959. I joined the Baha’i Faith that year, a non-partisan religion; I knew nothing of Whitlam.  He became Labor Leader in 1967 after a catastrophic ALP defeat. I was teaching Inuit at the time in the Canadian Arctic.  He didn’t win his first election as Leader in 1969 but he came close.
By 1972, his persona and policies were hitting a chord with rebellious baby-boomers who were railing against sexism and racism, and demanding peace not war, especially in Vietnam. Women and migrants also liked their suburban neighbours Gough and Margaret. At the campaign launch, TV stars, rock singers and comedians pushed the “It’s Time” jingle into every Australian lounge room and Whitlam gave Labor its first Prime Minister in 23 years. By then I was on my way to Gawler in the Barossa Valley to teach in a high school outside Adelaide in South Australia, much less that dry-biscuit, and popular as a vine-growing region.
Whitlam exercised his power at breakneck speed in 1973, appointing his own government advisor on women’s affairs, a world first; introducing a Racial Discrimination Act and investing in motorways, childcare centres, housing for low-income families and other infrastructure.  Whitlam was all the rage while I got ready to move to Tasmania to teach in what is now the University of Tasmania.

Whitlam spoke of breaking the reliance on Britain and America, and of Australia becoming more independent. He bought Jackson Pollock’s $1.348 million Blue Poles for the new National Gallery of Australia and loved the ensuing controversy. The ALP was in the news a lot of the time. I was far too busy with my 60-hour a week job, with the last and rocky-year of my marriage, and with my responsibilities in the local Baha’i community where I served as the secretary. My emotions and my mental-set were full to overflowing. The partisan-political world was like a parallel universe which existed far-out on the periphery of my new Australian life.

Part 3:

In one year in, 1973-74, as I left South Australia and arrived in Tasmania, and after an initial rise in ALP popularity, cracks appeared. The actions of an Arab coalition started a worldwide economic meltdown. Whitlam had assumed Australia’s economy was bulletproof, but inflation and unemployment rose steeply. Ignoring advice, he pushed through one of his most prominent – and expensive – reforms: free university education for all. The state of the economy deteriorated further.

The conservatives controlled the Senate and tried to block government legislation, but Whitlam called their bluff by calling an election. The ALP, on 11 April 1974, won with a similar majority to its win in 1972.  He enacted a free healthcare service, the forerunner of Medicare, and I settled-in to what became the beginnings of my second marriage, and another 60 hour a week job teaching a new list of subjects to students preparing to teach in primary and high schools.

Part 4:

Whitlam’s renewed optimism didn’t last. The party axed his trusted deputy Lance Barnard and a scandal erupted around the relationship between his replacement, Jim Cairns, and Cairns’ exotic chief of staff Junee Morose.  The decision to sign up the offshore loan shark Troth Hemline to help buy back Australia’s mineral wealth was like signing a death warrant for Whitlam’s administration. In 1975 the Opposition voted in a strong leader in Malcolm Fraser. Blocking supply this time sparked dramatic events unprecedented in Australian history: the Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked Whitlam.