Adventures in Correspondentland (42 page)

Making by far the most noise was a group of trade unionists brandishing specially manufactured placards inspired by the Granny Smith theme: ‘Your rights at work: the core issue'. And, helpfully, a local funeral director had even despatched two of his vehicles to spruik his services, which provided the metaphorical image of the day: Howard standing behind a hearse. Politically, he
was a dead man power-walking, and he knew it.

On election night itself, I found myself a few metres away from Howard when he conceded defeat at his once-lucky hotel, the Wentworth in Sydney. Afterwards, as he mingled with crestfallen supporters in the ballroom lobby, with half-drunk champagne flutes already littering the floor, I decided that I should tell him why the election had been life-changing for us both.

A few weeks earlier, in the constituency of Denison in Tasmania, I had proposed to the ‘Aussie knicker lady', and she had given me her first preference. Thinking it might buck him up a bit on a night of such obvious pain, I decided to share this news. This was not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. My new fiancée's parents were not only Liberal Party stalwarts but also near neighbours of the Howards. In her early teenage years, my wife-to-be had even served cocktails at party fund-raisers for John and Janette. Thinking that there might at least be a slither of common conversational ground, and expecting her name to register immediately, I reported that my future mother-in-law would be almost inconsolable, but at least she had a wedding to plan.

‘What?' barked Mr Howard, with a look of startled puzzlement. I tried again, this time in his better ear, explaining that his former neighbour and diehard fan was about to become my mother-in-law. This time, Howard scrunched up his face and shook his head agitatedly from side to side. I tried again, but still with the same results. Wondering quite what had possessed me, I decided it was probably best to keep news of my forthcoming matrimony for another day, when the outgoing prime minister would be in a better frame of mind and unencumbered by so much extraneous noise.

Minutes later, after receiving more consolations, genuflections and ‘We love you, John' shouts from his despairing supporters, he stepped out into the night and into his white Holden, his prime-ministerial aura already fading away.

That night in Brisbane, Rudd delivered a typically flat victory address, which nonetheless delighted hundreds of jubilant Labor supporters dressed in their ‘Kevin 07' T-shirts – all of which offered further proof that the Rudd phenomenon was a personality cult without a personality. As for his political style, it brought to mind what Mark Twain had once said of the music of Richard Wagner: it was much better than it sounded. All those nerdy acronyms, faux larrikinisms and lifeless set-piece speeches, and yet his approval ratings continued to soar.

To the international eye, he came across as highly intelligent, thorough and well briefed but with the personality we associate normally with Nordic prime ministers or EU agriculture commissioners. When we thought of Australian prime ministers, we preferred to imagine them as rougher around the edges, with prodigious drinking capabilities, and a penchant for giving the entire country a day off at times of national celebration. I suppose we expected the prime minister not only to govern Australia but also to personify Australia. Or, put simply, we expected Bob Hawke. However, the prime-ministerial archetype was just as misleading as the national stereotype.

From a purely professional viewpoint, Rudd definitely had his uses. Like John Howard, he raised Australia's global profile, though, noticeably, his prolific ‘Kevin 747' travel produced a backlash at home. He also came to enjoy a very close working relationship with Barack Obama, although that probably had the effect of lowering the president's esteem among Australians rather
than enhancing their own prime minister's. By elevating the role of the G20, he also went some way to giving Australia's famed diplomatic punch some permanent heft, and it came as little surprise when he was invited to become a friend of the chair ahead of the Copenhagen climate-change summit in 2009.

Before jetting off for Denmark, Rudd granted us a 30-minute interview that was rich in acronyms, big ideas, wonk-speak, a global view, blokeish affectations and various Ruddisms – he insisted on calling the BBC ‘the Beeeeeeb', for example, which he delivered in a bizarre, weedy voice. He even offered up a neat reworking of his famed ‘I'm from Queensland' line from the Labor conference in 2007: ‘We are from Australia. We are here to help.' In other words, it was Rudd at his best and worst.

Unknowingly at the time, we had interviewed him at his moment of maximum global interest – in the final days of the
BC
phase of his prime ministership, or ‘Before Copenhagen' – and within a few short months Kevin 747 would be grounded. Failure at Copenhagen meant the geopolitics and domestic politics of climate change altered radically, and Rudd responded by downgrading the ‘greatest moral and economic challenge' of our times.

In doing so uncomplainingly, he failed the Great Australian Ticker Test. After all, Australian prime ministers are not expected to be charismatic, telegenic, inspiring or oratorical – they are memorialised in Canberra with suburbs rather than stone – but they are expected to have the courage of their convictions. Soon, he was being spoken of in the past tense.

If at times of great national drama book titles could be requisitioned and redeployed, like merchant ships on the eve of war,
The Australian Ugliness
offered the neatest summation of
his brutal demise. With the elevation of the country's first female prime minister, the 40th anniversary of Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch
became the literary touchstone, but it was Robin Boyd's opus, then celebrating its golden jubilee, that provided a timely epithet, if not an entirely accurate thesis. Ruminating on the schizophrenic streak in the national character, Boyd described his fellow countrymen and women as ‘cruel but kind'.

When applied to Australian politics, however, his analysis was two words too long. Because he resigned on the morning of the leadership spill to save himself the embarrassment of a lopsided defeat, Kevin Rudd's removal came to be described as a bloodless coup. But it was bloodless in the same way that waterboarding is bloodless – a process that simulates drowning, and thus near death, which leaves the body unblemished but the mind riven with scars. When Kevin Rudd appeared before the cameras a few hours later, to tearfully bullet-point his legacy, its effects were plain to see.

Afterwards, any audit of Australian politics took on the feel and stench of a triage, a sifting of the wounded and slain. The bush capital had become a killing field. In the space of just 40 months, Australia had got through four Liberal leaders and three from Labor. In New South Wales, the spiritual home of the Australian political ugliness, there had been four different Labor premiers in the past five years, with just one election. Of Louisiana, it is frequently said that a politician can survive anything apart from being found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. All it took in Australia, as Rudd so viciously learnt, was to wake up on four consecutive Monday mornings with a lacklustre poll.

For a country jadedly stereotyped as chauvinistic, the supreme irony was that much of the watching world interpreted
Julia Gillard's rise as a sign of political progress. Those who read the international headlines – ‘Strewth, There's a Sheila Running Oz' was how my former paper, the
Daily Mail
, described her rise – would have been unaware of the macho, factional chieftains lurking in the background, or that the backrooms of Australian politics were choked not so much with smoke as with testosterone. Australia still awaited its true political gender test: the day when its chieftains were women.

Julia Gillard had risen to power in a year cluttered with literary anniversaries. As well as being the 40th anniversary of
The Female Eunuch
and the 50th of
The Australian Ugliness
, it was also 60 years since A. A. Phillips first noticed that listeners of an ABC program called
Incognito
tended to pick the outsider when asked to adjudicate between the performance of a foreigner and a home-grown musician. Nowadays, few vestiges remained of the cultural cringe, and the country could proudly reflect on its global cultural creep, with figures of Australian loveliness such as Cate Blanchett in the fore. Instead, it had been replaced by Australia's political cringe.

Damning proof came from the 2010 election, the most insular, visionless and low-calibre campaign I have ever covered in any mature democracy on any continent. Mired in the marginal constituencies of the suburban fringe, it rarely broadened its gaze. Struck by this parochialism, the visiting British academic Niall Ferguson likened the campaign to Strathclyde local politics, but, if anything, that seemed unkind to Strathclyde. The boat-people question once again became the campaign's emblematic issue, and an outsider arriving midway through would have been forgiven for thinking that an armada of asylum seekers had besieged Australia.

The 2010 election made a mockery of the Australia I had
spent the last three years describing: smart, sophisticated, warm, generous-spirited and, above all, consequential. It was not that Australians had voted for irrelevance and mediocrity. By choosing Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott over Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, the two major parties had made the decision for them. It brought us back to the point of departure for so much of the discussion on post-war Australia: Donald Horne's scorching polemic. Australia was
his
Lucky Country anew: blessed by an abundance of resources and cursed by second-rate politicians. I know I run the risk of speaking with an imperial voice, but for the first time during my tenure in Australia I really felt I was slumming it.

Up until then, my good fortune had been to report Australia during something of a golden age in terms of its punch and relevance. Howard and Rudd were truly front-rank figures. After the global financial crisis, the world was agog at Australia's success in avoiding recession, the ‘Wonder from Down Under'. There were few better countries from which to watch China's inexorable rise, and to sample the mixture of dread and desire that it unleashed in the West.

Both these sentiments were to be found in Australia's new defence strategy, which called for a military build-up to rebuff a belligerent China that would be financed, of course, by selling China still more resources. The ongoing drought, the Big Dry, coinciding with a resurgence of climate-change scepticism, made Australia as good a place as any to cover the global environmental debate, if only to make some sense of those two countervailing ideas.

On the cultural front, Cate Blanchett took Broadway by storm in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, a production I first saw in Sydney on the night that she had to retire after being hit by a flying prop. Geoffrey Rush scored a Tony in New York for
Exit the King
, an absurdist comedy that, again, I was lucky to see at the tiny Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills.

We got to celebrate the rise of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, a rare voice to break through from Aboriginal Australia, and the coloratura of Joan Sutherland, the Australian anti-diva. The rise of Tony Abbott even allowed us to bring the phrase ‘budgie smugglers' to a global audience, along with footage of his skimpy scarlet Speedos. Alas, three of the stories that had the most impact back home – and the most hits on our websites, that modern-day yardstick of journalistic pulling power – were the sorry tale of a Queensland woman first mounted and then smothered to death by her pet camel; a shark attack on a swimming kangaroo; and a yarn from Alice Springs where a driver was pulled over in his Holden Commodore for leaving his five-year-old child unrestrained and using the seatbelt to secure his slab of unopened beer.

Dreadfully, the biggest story during my time in Australia was also the one I least wanted to cover: Black Saturday, 7 February 2009. When news of the first fatalities came through – the death toll by early evening was 14 – I thought there must be some terrible mistake: that they must be heat-related deaths rather than fire-related deaths, old-age pensioners wilting in the high temperatures. Were not Australian bushfires measured in the number of hectares of forestry destroyed or, occasionally, properties?

But soon after, we saw for ourselves the burnt-out cars that lined the road leading from Kinglake; trudged through the still-smouldering houses that littered the Victorian bush; listened to
the harrowing testimony of survivors who told us how relatives, neighbours and pets had failed to outrun the flames; saw the bunches of flowers laid in makeshift memorial against the blackened landscape; and even felt for ourselves the heat of the flames.

Having covered such terrible disasters elsewhere, I did not expect to witness death in such large numbers in Australia, and in many ways Black Saturday continues to lie outside my comprehension. Unable to bear much more bereavement and ruin – the death toll that day rose from 14 to 178 – I took it as yet another sign that it was time to continue my retreat from frontline news.