Even as We Speak (39 page)

When I was young in Australia I swung upside down from trees, half-killed myself clown-diving at the baths, and rode my three-speed bike for twenty miles at a time through the
storm-water channels of the Sydney suburbs. I burned energy as fast as I generated it. Then about thirty years went by when I burned no energy at all, with results that most of you can guess at and
some of you know all too well. It is this latter group that I address now: we of a Certain Age, victims of Time’s depredations, the invasion of the body-snatcher. The greatest danger we face,
when we try to get our bodies back, is of overdoing it. The great virtue of a properly run gymnasium like Cannons is that we aren’t allowed to. The staff are on the alert, making sure that no
new member with one foot in the grave will try to pull it out so fast he sprains a thigh. The watchful dedication of these young guardians is eloquent testimony to how the health movement has
calmed down from its initial wild enthusiasm and become part of the landscape instead of just a craze like the hula-hoop or Rubik’s cube.

A craze was what it used to be. It all started with jogging. The so-called health editors of the Sunday newspapers filled pages with copy advising out-of-condition executives
about where, when and how often to jog. One health editor was so impressed at his own easy breathing after a six-mile jog that he went off to do the same course again. Before he was halfway around
he wasn’t breathing at all. The following week there was a new health editor. Like his predecessor he was really an out-of-condition executive himself. Jogging shattered many a calcified
Achilles tendon before the general realization dawned that it had to be done under controlled conditions.

By the time that was grasped, the more trend-conscious out-of-condition executives had given up jogging and moved on to lifting weights. Men barely capable of lifting a double brandy were
pounding themselves into the carpet lifting weights at home. They were the wrong weight. There was nothing wrong with the principle. There was just a lot wrong with the practice. People who had
spent thirty years getting out of shape weren’t going to get back into it in thirty minutes. Luckily the gymnasium movement arrived before they all ended up in traction.

The great majority of Cannons members, of course, are young executive types who have never been very far out of condition in the first place and consequently have little trouble either getting
back into it or else simply maintaining an impeccable physique. I try not to hate them. Some of the women look very cute in leotards and I try not to ogle them, an activity reprehensible at my age,
and no longer tolerated even amongst the young. But I can’t help sneaking a sideways look at the aerobics classes. It must be fun to bounce around like that. Certainly it seems to induce an
intense camaraderie. In the snack bar afterwards you can see the aerobics experts describing their moments of glory to each other like fighter pilots after a dog-fight. The après-sweat
social facilities at Cannons improve after each rebuild of the premises. If I had my life over again I would spend most of it in the gym, staying in my magnificent original trim as I strode
manfully between the Nautilus machines and the punching bags, writing my books at a cafeteria table with nothing to drink except a can of Dexter’s, buffing up my immortality.

Life didn’t work out that way. An old buffer has nothing left to buff up. But he can put the brakes on his decline, and feel hale again if not hearty. Like the other older
senatorial figures who come to the gym I enjoy my solitude, the only hour in the day when nobody wants anything from me. You can see us in the sauna, each alone with his head in his hands, getting
back in touch with the physical life, re-establishing the almost but not quite lost connection between the sound mind and sound body. There’s something Roman about it. A thousand years from
now, when they dig up the railway station, find a gymnasium underneath it, and decide that ours must have been an advanced civilization after all, they won’t be far wrong. I can recommend
without reservation that anyone worried about the deceptive comfort of his or her swivel chair should follow my lead and rekindle that old flame immediately: don’t let even a single decade go
by.

An introduction to
Total Living
by Ron Clarke and others, 1995

Grizzled Aussie expatriates who thought they were safely holed up in this country have been shaken to their foundation garments by the explosion of interest in the subject of
Australian republicanism. There was no dodging the issue. Some said it was the first eruption of a long-simmering volcano. Others thought a squib had gone off. The initial evidence supported the
latter theory. Meeting the Queen during her tour of Australia the Australian Prime Minister’s wife had several times failed to curtsy, while the Prime Minister himself, on at least one
occasion, had physically touched the Monarch.

For a while it was not established whether these were deliberate acts of
lèse-majesté
or examples of disarming Australian casualness. But the prominent British art critic,
Brian Sewell, was already certain. The
Evening Standard
ran a full-page article from him recommending that all Australian expatriates in Britain should be deported back to their inherently
treasonable country.

My own name was high on the list, with a full description. I reacted with some alarm. Though Auberon Waugh once made the same suggestion, he had been talking about voluntary repatriation, like
Enoch Powell. Brian Sewell’s tone was less kindly. I had always thought he sounded like a decorative attack dog, a sort of pit bull poodle, but this time he was really barking. Those British
cultural journalists of the second rank who enjoy baiting Australians as a form of licensed racism had previously worn muzzles. Brian Sewell gave you a taste of what it must have been like to be
Jewish in occupied Paris when Brasillach was writing for
Je suis partout
. First the denunciation, then they wake you up during the night.

Sleeping that night with my passport in my pyjamas pocket, I was woken early by a telephone call from the
Evening Standard
. Quelling the urge to answer in a disguised voice and exit
backwards through the bedroom window, I bravely asked them what they wanted. It turned out that Prime Minister Keating, responding in Parliament to a taunt about his behaviour
vis-à-vis
the Monarch, had condemned Britain’s shameless indifference to Australia’s fate during the Second World War. Would I care to comment? I told them to ask Brian
Sewell.

There was no getting out of it that easily. Over the next few days,
Newsnight
,
The World At One
and most of the newspapers were all on the trail. Everyone wanted my expert
opinion on the Australian constitutional issue. Did I
look
like an expert on the Australian constitutional issue? I tried on a false beard, but it made me look like Tom Keneally, who
is
an expert on the Australian constitutional issue. He is in favour of an Australian republic. I’m not, but I’m not sure why. To get out of having to dodge any more questions,
however, let me give the few answers in my possession.

Paul Keating is a man of conspicuous virtues. He has a nice line of invective which could have made him a successful debt collector in another life. When the moment came to pull the lever which
dropped Mr Hawke through the trapdoor to the waiting crocodiles, Mr Keating did not pretend to share their tears. His boldness is proved by the unblushing confidence with which he now proposes to
rebuild a national economy that all Australians, including possibly himself, are well aware he destroyed in the first place. He will probably make a good, long-serving Prime Minister in the not
impossible event that the opposition remains so short of credible leadership that it can’t beat even him.

But he knows nothing about the modern history of Australia or anywhere else. He left school early and has too readily excused himself from making up his educational deficiencies late at night.
Instead of reading English books, he collects French clocks, which can tell him nothing except the time. Compared to most of his predecessors as leader of the Labor Party, he is an ignoramus. Dr H.
V. Evatt might be said to have been privileged, because he went to Sydney University and had a dazzling academic record; and Bob Hawke was even more privileged, because he went to Oxford University
and drank beer; but Ben Chifley, though his school was the footplate of a locomotive, found out about the world by asking. Paul Keating doesn’t ask. He can’t be instructed because he is
always instructing. Tempted out of his field, which is bare-knuckle politics, he finds himself compelled to relay, as a substitute for what he has found out from experience, stuff he has got out of
the air. What is of interest is not his belligerence but how the stuff got into the air.

As Alistair Horne made clear, when the posh papers wheeled him into the argument, the idea that Britain deliberately did less than it could to save Malaya, Singapore and finally Australia, has
no basis in fact. It shouldn’t have needed Mr Horne to point this out. Republican-minded Australian revisionist historians have been able to float the notion only by blinding themselves to
the obvious. The Malaya campaign was a bungle which cost Britain dear, and if there were any plans by Britain to abandon Australia, they were scarcely more sweeping than Australian plans to do the
same. Planning against the worst is a military necessity. When the Australians counted up their resources they had to face the possibility that if the Japanese got ashore the only defensible
perimeter would be the eastern seaboard: ‘the Brisbane line’. This proposal, which was drawn up in some detail, is no reason for the inhabitants of Adelaide and Perth to now demand a
separate country of their own. Luckily the American navy fought a crucial draw with the Japanese navy at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Australian army stymied the Japanese army in New Guinea,
so the prospect of abandoning Australia ceased to loom. But it might have happened, because it might have had to.

The Australians showed more resentment for the Americans who came to their rescue than for the British who had been so ineffective in defending the Empire. The idea that Australians
should
have borne ill-will towards Britain was hatched subsequently by revisionist historians with an interest in republicanism. It is a legitimate interest, especially in view of
Britain’s undoubted indifference to the sensitivities of Australia and New Zealand at the time of its belated entry into the Common Market. But to play fast and loose with the truth in order
to further a political interest is not legitimate, and nothing is more likely to make Australia go on seeming provincial than this propensity on the part of its artists and intellectuals to tinker
with ideology. You can understand it from the Murdoch press. Its proprietor favours Australia’s cutting itself off from Britain because he has cut himself off from both countries, in pursuit
of some dreary post-capitalist Utopia in which the hunger to acquire is exalted as a spiritual value, and the amount of debt magically testifies to financial acumen. But there is no good reason why
some of Australia’s most creative people should share his bleak vision.

And yet they do. In Australia the conspiracy theory of history wins in a walk and the cock-up theory comes nowhere. At the Dardanelles, three times as many British troops were uselessly thrown
into the same boiler as the Australians, but the fact doesn’t get a mention in the Australian-made film
Gallipoli
because its writer, David Williamson, favours a republic. Williamson
is a gifted man who must know the truth. But he has an end in view. The conspiracy theory that Britain cynically exploited Antipodean cannon-fodder in both wars is seen to further this end.

I wonder if it will. Ordinary Australian people, less bound by the requirements to write a neat article or a clear-cut screenplay, are more likely to favour the cock-up theory, especially if
they are old enough actually to remember what the war in the Pacific was like. Indeed, some of them might be inclined to extend that theory to a full-blown view of the world’s contingencies,
one of them being that if the British had done everything right in Malaya, they might still have lost.

It is racism of a particularly insidious kind to imagine that the Japanese were able to advance only because we retreated. General Percival, commanding for Britain, was certainly no genius, but
even if he had been Montgomery and Slim rolled into one he would have had trouble with General Yamashita, a strategic prodigy in command of an army which comported itself brilliantly all the way
down to platoon level. After the fall of Singapore, a jealous Tojo banished Yamashita to Mongolia, but with the war almost lost he was brought back to stop the rot on Luzon, where the Americans, by
then wielding limitless resources, found to their horror that his troops had to be cooked out of their holes, and came out shooting even when they were burning.

Mr Keating’s assumption that a modernized, Asia-minded Australia needs to be a republic might be greeted with some puzzlement by present-day Japan, whose economic clout dominates the
region and whose Emperor, at his coronation, spent a night in the embrace of the Sun Goddess. Mr Keating’s real problem, however, is with my mother. Though fiercely proud to be Australian,
she has made a point of seeing with her own eyes all the officially visiting members of the Royal Family since the present Queen Mother, then the Duchess of York. When the present Queen first
visited Sydney in 1954, my mother came in by train to wave. She was there again for the Queen’s visit this year. The two women are very like each other, sharing the same past, if not the same
income. My mother did not, and does not now, regard my father’s death as a pointless sacrifice on behalf of British interests. She believes that he was defending civilization. Though Mr
Menzies took care to keep her war widow’s pension small so as to encourage thrift, she voted for the Liberal Party as often as for Labor, and always according to her assessment of which party
had the firmer grip on reality. She has personally elected every Australian prime minister for the last sixty years and if Mr Keating thinks he can do without her vote, it might be his turn on the
trapdoor.