I arrived back in Australia the month Azaria Chamberlain went missing. Previous to that, I was out of the country in the second half of the 70s, living in New York City. I was 14 and not terribly political. In short, I totally missed the high drama of 1975. The place where my family lived for short while was deepest darkest St. Ives; I went to St. Ives High School when the 1980 election took place, not long after. Malcolm Fraser's incumbent Coalition government defeated the ALP led by Bill Hayden.
The next day there was a schoolyard post-mortem of sorts and not knowing what was what, I was able to see most of the kids leaned towards the Liberals except one lanky thin kid with Buddy Holly glasses whose parents voted Labor, who was hounded across the schoolyard by muscular bullies. It was memorable; and when I think of why I dislike Tories in this country, I think of those bullying kids. But St. Ives High School was simply like that: Conservative politics, racism and bullying were just ingrained social graces where for all I knew there was widespread domestic violence, prescription drug abuse and alcoholism.
To a kid who grew up in New York City, the deep Sydney Northshore looked like a cultural wasteland. It was a beautiful tree-lined place with the ugliest of attitudes. And Malcolm Fraser was their man. That left an impression.
All of this is to say, I really didn't feel political until I was 14 and living in Sydney, and I totally missed out on the Dismissal thing so I'm effectively with the people who were too young to remember the Dismissal. So my dislike of Malcolm Fraser was more of a general rejection of the kind of backward - more like redneck - St. Ives self-image of Australia. If they liked it up in St. Ives, surely it was deeply thoroughly flawed, vulgar and detestable. In some ways, this still holds true.
St. Ives was a place where meanness was a virtue in the way that a Jeff Thompson bouncer was mean, but good. Giggles and beer. If the bouncer hit Gordon Greenidge in the head, it was cool because well, that's how you played hard and doubly pleasurable because Greenidge was a black man. More giggles and beer. Their kids thought this was normal.
There was a graffiti on railway bridge on the lower Northshore, where it read 'Fraser', with the 's' substituted with a swastika. It was already there in 1981 when our family move down to Chatswood - an altogether more progressive area with a rather cosmopolitan school - and I recall the graffiti still being there when I was a operation personnel at the ABC in 1989. By then it was utterly anachronistic, and it wasn't long before we would see Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser make peace.
In between, Fraser lost to Hawke in '83 and shed a tear on the way out. Australia grew up a little bit out of being a parochial post-colonial backwater, although that might have felt that way simply because I was in Chatswood and not St. Ives. I've been assured St. Ives most certainly didn't change.
And that was mostly it.
All of which is to say, for a person whose political consciousness leans to the progressive, I've never been all that angry at Malcolm Fraser the person. In his years after politics, he would often step up to say the decent thing. The Liberal Party on the other hand continued to drift to the right and mostly towards the unintelligent and unintelligible.
Alan Ramsay pretty much nails it.
Whatever you thought of his politics and his seminal role in the vice regal dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government almost 40 years ago, John Malcolm Fraser was, above all else, a genuine liberal in the best sense of the word. Thus he goes to his grave appalled, surely, by the oafs, boofheads and lesser ninnies that not only control the Liberal Party and conservative politics in this country these days, but take their disgrace to the summit of running Australia too.
How could it have come to this, J.M. Fraser must have wondered, constantly, in more recent years, as political behaviour, state and federal, from top to bottom, in our parliaments and out, and right across the three major parties in our democracy, became uglier, greedier, less inclusive, less civil, less caring, more irresponsible, more ill-mannered, more shrill, more ratbag, and wholly more venal, indeed blighted in any and every way you care to look at what is happening to national political life in this country?Malcolm Fraser might have well wondered why and how his party became the party of illiberal, intolerant, racist, cultural imbeciles who deny scientific facts and have no eye for the future or the environment. He would have been correct to do so. If I had the opportunity to meet the man and a time machine to do some time travel, I would have shown him the schoolyard of St. Ives 1980 - the Australia in which presided over where the dastardly future was being incubated. The seeds of the eldritch horrors of an Abbott-Government Australia were all there to be seen.
The man, after leaving office was much more influential as an opinion leader. The multi-cultural Australia he espoused and gave life to with the inception of SBS stood in stark contrast to the racially tinged, accented-with-xenophobia, bigot-friendly drift to the right that the Liberal Party executed under John Howard. After the 1993 election loss the Liberal Party embarked on a lot of soul-searching and decided upon a course of lurching to the right, most precipitously. If Fraser had been damned in 1975 of the potential for Australia to turn into some kind of Latin American military junta, then Howard tacitly pushed Australia towards the lukewarm 1984-parody in which we now reside with much praise from the big end of town. After all, there's nothing like a party you pay for, doing your bidding. All kinds of prejudices found a legitimising home in the Liberal Party of the late 90s and early 2000s. Bullies, conks, monarchists, climate change denialists, male chauvinists, xenophobes, homophobes, and the plain old rude congregated under the big tent of stupidity erected by John Howard.
For, it has to be said, those bullying xenophobic, homophobic, sexist, anti-intellectual, culturally backward bullying kids amassed on that St. Ives schoolyard are now the paid up members of the Liberal Party of Australia. Racist and proud of it, mean and proud of it, clinging to the glories of a White Australia. Stop the boats. Stop the witch. Stop the mining tax. Repeal the Carbon Tax! Stop the science funding, stop the education, stop making sense. They never grew up they just confirmed and hardened in their entirely idiotic world view. Malcolm Fraser might not have understood it, but I would have been able to show him from whence came all that crassness, avarice, and intolerance.
And so with his sad passing, well may we say God Save Malcolm Fraser for nothing will ... oh, no, let's not; let's just forget about the punchline for once.
Instead we say, vale Malcolm Fraser.
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