The Whitlam Mob by MacCallum Mungo;

Author:MacCallum, Mungo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

DON DUNSTAN

Gough Whitlam’s short time in office was beset by enemies on all sides, but few were as damaging as the conservative premiers. From start to finish his government was at war with the eastern-staters. There was Robert Askin in New South Wales, and Joh Bjelke-Petersen was well into his hillbilly dictatorship in the deep north. In Victoria Rupert Hamer had succeeded the terminally recalcitrant Sir Henry Bolte, but the latter’s long, broad, ultra-conservative shadow still enveloped the state. In the beginning there was some aid and comfort to be had from the minor states, but in 1974 Labor’s John Tonkin lost office in Western Australia and shortly afterwards Eric Reece succumbed in Tasmania.

Only South Australia remained in the fold, but in some ways that compensated for all the rest, because the premier of that generally benighted state was the extraordinary, the unique Donald Allan Dunstan, a like-minded progressive and moderniser who in some ways played the role of John the Baptist to Whitlam’s Messiah. The two men were rational optimists with a shared belief in the essential intelligence and goodness of humanity, natural enlargers in contrast to the punishers and straiteners who preceded and succeeded them. One of the many things they had in common was a somewhat quirky sense of humour.

One of Don Dunstan’s favourite stories concerned a pianist of Chinese ancestry performing the works of Franz Liszt before a very upper-class English audience.

After the concert, he was sought out by a gushing admirer. ‘Oh, Mr Chang,’ she enthused, ‘I do think it’s wonderful that someone of your race should have such a feeling for our music.’ To which the pianist replied, ‘Really, Lady Fortescue, I had no idea you were Hungarian.’

Much of Dunstan is there: the familiarity with the arts, the loathing of racial stereotyping, the delight in pricking pomposity. Much, but by no means all. But it was this aspect of Dunstan that most people latched on to: the naughty boy from Fiji who wore pink shorts into parliament simply to cock a snook at the establishment.

They saw, and either loved or hated, according to their politics, Dunstan the iconoclast, the destroyer of images. All too often they missed Dunstan the statesman, the architect of what was, for Australia, a genuinely new kind of society. People talk about the ’60s as the decade of liberalisation, but in Australia most of the ’60s didn’t happen till the ’70s. What was widely seen as the pivotal cultural event – the hippy musical Hair – was performed in Sydney in 1969. The rise of women’s lib as a political force took another couple of years, and the gay movement was later still. Although Aborigines had been recognised by the referendum of 1967, the push for land rights was in its infancy. Censorship was rife: police routinely attended the opening of exhibitions and performances viewed as suspect. Multiculturalism was not even a word, let alone a social reality.

And yet in a few short years, Dunstan, as premier of a minor and traditionally extremely stuffy state, turned things upside down.

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