Rather His Own Man Read online

  Nor does the ‘elopement’ stack up. In March 1848 came the violent revolutions – with hundreds killed on the streets of Berlin – and Prince Wilhelm was sent to take refuge in England with his cousin, Queen Victoria. It turned out that Louis and Agnes travelled comfortably to London from Hamburg accompanied by a diplomatic courier. Their marriage was efficiently arranged (difficult for two newly arrived Germans to manage) and a witness at the wedding bore the name of a senior adviser to Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert. They travelled to Australia as first-class passengers, at a cost not normally affordable to a pastry chef. When, some years later, a member of the Anglo-German royal family arrived in Sydney (Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria), the first thing he did was look up Louis and Agnes, as if they were part of the family. He carried a letter of introduction from Prince Wilhelm, who had by then become kaiser not only of Prussia but of a Germany united by the genius of Bismarck. The very religious Jane Dettman, at a time when she was likely to die and hence unlikely to lie, told her son (Harry Bullock, who is still alive) that her mother was a princess, the illegitimate daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I, the King of Germany.

  This was all very discomforting. I really do not fancy having any connection with kaisers, or even the English royal family, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, who changed their surname to Windsor during World War I to pretend they were not related to the enemy. (This produced the only joke the Kaiser is known to have made: ‘Do they still perform at Windsor, the merry wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha?’)

  Before I could credit Jane Dettman’s dying declaration, I would need to know what Prince Wilhelm was up to back in 1823 when he allegedly fathered Agnes. There is evidence that he knew Kroll, and had visited his Wroclaw establishment on a hunting trip to the area. But was it likely – or even possible – that he could have produced at this time an illegitimate child who would be farmed out to the Krolls in return for a king’s ransom – the cost of the Kroll Opera?

  Unfortunately it is altogether possible. A few years after my episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, a book was published which gave more credence to the theory, and suggested that I might have a double dose of royal blood.3 It drew on the well-known fact that Prince Wilhelm was in 1823 conducting a passionate affair with the love of his life, the Polish princess Elizabeth ‘Eliza’ Radziwell. They were writing to each other every day, and many of the letters with their tell-tale details are publicly available to historians – although there are curious gaps in the 1823 correspondence. The two had been in love from 1822, giving each other rings (‘ever true’). Eliza confessed to her friends that her dream was to marry Wilhelm, who ‘took the liberties of a married man’. Their idyll lasted seven years, as Wilhelm fought his father and the Prussian court for his right to marry Eliza. But Hohenzollern politics were cruel and opportunistic: the Radziwells were not royal enough or important enough for Wilhelm to be allowed to marry into them. He lacked the courage to disobey his father, who insisted on a union with Prussian royalty, so in 1829 he married a better-qualified princess, Augusta of Saxe-Weimar. Just before his nuptials, his father published a most curiously worded decree, annulling ‘any union of marriage that Prince Wilhelm may have entered into’ – leading to conjecture that his son had married Eliza secretly. Eliza pined away, dying a few years later of a broken heart. Wilhelm kept a picture of her (in which she looks uncannily like Jane Dettman) on his desk throughout his long life, and asked on his deathbed that it be placed in his hands so that he could expire while looking at her.

  I despise Kaiser Wilhelm, and sincerely hope we are not related. As a young man he was a coward, unable to stand up to his father and the court in order to marry, at least publicly, the woman he really loved. Contrast him with William Weston, who had the courage to do the right thing no matter what society might have said about his love for the ‘lower-born’. As king of Bismarck’s Germany, Wilhelm was militaristic and imperialistic, and his son (Kaiser Wilhelm II) was a war criminal who invaded Belgium and ordered unrestricted submarine warfare. I want nothing to do with these pumped-up Prussians, however many researchers believe in my royal genes!

  That was the inconclusive end of the quest to find out who I was. Frankly, I do not much care whether I am descended from a prince or a showman. Joe Kroll did strike a chord, but so far science has not discovered a genetic predisposition to appreciation of opera. I do have traits associated with emperors – pomposity and an inability to suffer fools gladly (for which reason I have never attempted a political career), but I doubt whether these derive from the Hohenzollerns; they are more likely to come from life as a judge and QC in England. My family think them most pronounced when I come home after a long day laying down the law to grovelling barristers while attended by clerks and ushers – my court servants. They come, in other words, by nurture in a cradle of the class system, and not naturally. As for ethics, those I have are derived from my mother – because she taught me them, not because I inherited them from a dodgy line of our royal relatives.

  Otherwise, my family story is typical enough of the stories of other fifth-generation Australian families who first came to our shores in sailing ships as refugees or as convicts or adventurers. That was two centuries ago, and we can now consider ourselves a ‘race’ – an Australian race in my (not uncontroversial) opinion. We may not think of ourselves as such: we speak of ‘Lebanese Australians’ and ‘Vietnamese Australians’ and describe ourselves on official forms as ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Asian’. But this is a legal mistake: the Race Relations Act does not define ‘race’ eugenically or biologically, but culturally – by virtue of belonging to a distinctive group which has built up common traits and beliefs through its history and interaction over a lengthy period of time.4 So we are all members of the Australian race, a distinctive grouping of people who have emerged from a geographical area with a unique culture, character and mindset.

  It does not matter that the Australian race – or to put our identity less controversially, the Australian people – emerged from a polyglot mixture of nationalities and other races. There’s nothing wrong with being a human minestrone. Our nation began with an ancient and comparatively gentle indigenous people, who occupied the land after migrating from the north many thousands of years before the birth of Christ. Connection with the Western world began with Governor Phillip’s open prison, and in time the best things about Britain were brought to our continent – its government institutions, its common law, a few liberal traditions (most importantly, the Enlightenment preference for rationality over dogma). From the first gold rushes onwards we have been joined by people from Europe, America and Asia, who have brought vivid memories of what they valued most in their culture, their family life and their traditions. In this hard but yielding land they remained, because it was richer than most for primary industry and mineral wealth, and it was truly astonishing in its grave and shimmering beauty and the wonder of its coral coast. Distance from the rest of the world has not been a tyranny, as Geoffrey Blainey conjectured, but a blessing: invasion (other than by rabbits and cane toads) and plague have not troubled us; we have acquired no special ideological fervour or savage class divisions, no desire to ram some ‘ism’ or other down foreigners’ throats. We have benefited from the kindness of distance that enables us to claim not only to be a race, but a race apart.

  The pleasure of studying family history is that it merges with the history of other families and then with the story of how a nation was built from the bottom up, through the struggles of its people rather than the rhetoric of its political leaders. The irony in Australian history, of course, is that we were all boat people once (even the Aboriginals were canoe people) and we came in naval sloops and cutters and great sailing ships, and then in ocean liners after World War II. Yet today Australia is a country that inflicts wanton cruelty on ‘boat people’, and we are afraid to sing the second verse of our national anthem (‘For those who’ve come across the sea / We’ve boundless plains to share’) lest by d
oing so we might encourage asylum seekers. On every return to Australia I hear refugees spoken of as if they are criminals. They are innocent men, women and children, asserting a right under international law to claim asylum on the basis that they would otherwise suffer persecution. We are, of course, entitled to control our borders and process refugees at them, but that does not mean we should have put innocent men, women and children behind barbed wire at Woomera or subjected them to indefinite detention on Manus and Nauru islands.

  2

  My Parents’ War

  It was with surprised delight that I turned over in my hand the tiny shoe of baby Jane Dettman and looked at the sepia photograph of her balanced in it on the steps of Parliament House. What had become of this lovely child, this little princess – perhaps a real princess – after she was nurtured in the bosom of the New South Wales legislature? Well, she grew up to marry a draper named Harry Bullock, who bought land at Botany Bay in the hope of making his fortune running sheep. But his delicate breed contracted foot rot from the clammy foreshore and the project was abandoned. It was an upsetting time, which may explain why he and my great-grandmother were persuaded to become Plymouth Brethren, the worst (or at least most joyless) of all the supernatural sects that offered a happy afterlife to strugglers. This evangelical infection did not spread to other Dettmans – Jane’s brother, Herbert Stanley Dettman, went on to become a noted headmaster of Sydney Grammar and another brother became headmaster of Fort Street in Sydney’s inner west – but the Bullocks were deeply afflicted by piety. Harry and Jane later moved to Katoomba to run a drapery shop, and one of their children was my grandmother. Her name was Bernice, and despite the Brethren, she was high-spirited and irrepressible.

  One Saturday in early 1915, young Bernice – barely seventeen – and a girlfriend from another Brethren family left, at their parents’ direction, for a special Plymouth gospel meeting at Beecroft. In fact, they headed to Central Station, where the country troop trains were decanting the boys from the bush who had volunteered for military service on the Somme. They were milling around the platform, talking loudly, and it was a simple trick for the girls to choose a target and bump against him. Bernice picked her man and moved towards him. ‘Did you speak to me?’ she asked. ‘No,’ replied the somewhat startled youth, a twenty-year-old teacher from Tumut, Harry Beattie. Bernice grinned. ‘Well, you can now.’

  And so he did, for the rest of the day, as they wandered the cliffs at Watsons Bay before his troop ship sailed for England on the morrow. The vivacious girl made such an impression on this rather staid and studious youth that over the next four years, until his return, he wrote her a letter every week, in unusually perfect copperplate handwriting. Bernice kept his missives away from her parents, stashing them under her bed. But she reckoned without the annual Katoomba ritual of removing the mattress to shake out the bed bugs – out they came, along with the letters. Jane was furious, as was Uncle Everard – the hard-line family enforcer of Brethren values – although there was nothing remotely indecent in the letters’ contents. Harry Bullock’s anger subsided, however, when he considered the remarkable copperplate hand of the young teacher. Writing like this would impress his clients in the drapery business.

  So Harry Beattie and Bernice Bullock came to marry, on the strength of his perfectly sloping calligraphy and her need to escape the smother-love of the Brethren. Uncle Everard had more objections – wasn’t Beattie a Catholic? Harry had lapsed after being sent to St Patrick’s College in Goulburn. He was not sexually abused, but each night he observed from his bedroom window the line of priests visiting the maidservants’ quarters to dishonour their vows of chastity. He decided, at the age of twelve, to have nothing further to do with these hypocrites.

  Bernice’s instinct at the railway station was right – bright young Harry Beattie was quite a catch. He was one of fourteen children from a Tumut grazing property, Windowie, run by the Beatties and the Butlers from Scotland, who had come out during the gold rush. He and his brother Bob showed scholarly qualities and were trained by the Education Department to serve at the one-teacher schools that dotted the countryside. They heeded the country’s call and volunteered for the war: Harry with his educated voice and quick wit was selected for Australia’s first air squadron – the Australian Flying Corps – but to his regret poor eyesight precluded him from becoming a pilot. Instead he became flight sergeant to the squadron – his copperplate records of their missions and debriefings may now be seen at the Australian War Memorial. He was awarded a Mention in Dispatches for dragging a pilot out of a burning Sopwith aircraft, and was kept on for some months post-war to assist C. W. Bean in writing the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918.

  Harry had a good war, unlike Bob, who was killed with nineteen other Australians by a German tunnel bomb at Bapaume, a town on the Somme.1 On British ceremonial occasions to which I am sometimes summoned by an embossed card that says ‘Dress: Medals’, I clip onto my jacket the small golden wings that Harry bequeathed me – his medal as a founder member of the Australian Air Force.

  After marrying Bernice, Harry was appointed schoolmaster at Rouse Hill, where the first four of his seven children were born, my mother being the third. Then the family moved to a one-teacher school at Marshall Mount near Dapto, in the Illawarra. The family occupied a large white house opposite the school – all seven children would be dispatched each morning to call their father ‘Sir’ rather than ‘Dad’ once they entered the school gate.

  They lived happily, despite the depressing diagnosis dished out to the second-born, Margaret, who seemed inattentive and short-sighted from around the age of six. Her worried father bought her glasses, but they didn’t help. Peg, as she was known, had an inoperable tumour on the brain, from which, doctors said, she would die.

  She survived, attended a school for the blind and lived happily – she was always happy – until she was seventy-eight. She often stayed with us – my mother was closest to her in age and took most responsibility for her. She knitted us socks, jumpers and tea cosies. The subdued click-clack of her knitting needles orchestrated our house, and every Easter we would queue up to enter the Hordern Pavilion at the Royal Easter Show and radiate pleasure at all the prizes Auntie Peg had won in the Blind Knitting section. She was an object lesson in overcoming the challenge of a disability, and I wore her blue-ribbon jumpers with a certain pride. Today she would be hailed as a champion, a role model and an example of why knitting should be a Paralympic sport, but in her time she was seen as a poor blind girl who was good at crocheting. Her prizes – never of money – were acts of condescension by people who did not realise that the disabled have real talent and are capable of superhuman efforts to show it.

  My mother’s name, Bernice Joy Beattie, was shortened to Joy to avoid confusion with her mother, Bernice, although in the family her blonde hair earned her the sobriquet ‘Snow’. She was serious enough for Brethren relatives to want to convert her. As a school girl she travelled every day to Wollongong High from Marshall Mount, an arduous journey that began with hitching a lift in the early-morning milk ute, which drove her three miles to Yallah station to catch the train to Wollongong, where she would lug her heavy Globite case up the hill to school. Her regular companion was classmate Charmian Clift, who grew up to marry the novelist and war correspondent George Johnston, partied with Leonard Cohen in Greece, and became famous enough as a writer to have a Kiama park named after her. Young Joy did not fully approve of young Charmian, a beauty and exhibitionist who was put on the cover of the (very) soft porn Pix magazine (to Joy’s horror), having won the New South Wales Beach Girl Quest of 1941, and subsequently escaped to Sydney to a job as an usherette in Kings Cross. Nonetheless, the girls left their signatures in each other’s autograph books (a sign of teenage camaraderie in the century before Facebook) and while still at high school played together, as Hermia and Helena, in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its director was a precociously talented older boy, Francis James.<
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  I would give much to be taken back in a time machine to Wollongong High in 1937, to be in the audience of that school production. As it happened, I was vouchsafed the next best thing. Francis James had an amazing career: as a fighter pilot, publisher (he ran the Anglican Press, which printed Oz magazine) and spy – the charge for which he was jailed in China. He survived three years of solitary confinement there by indelibly memorising every detail of what had happened each day in his youth. I met him in London in the 1980s, when he was living in the stately Kensington house of businessman Gordon Barton and his partner, Mary Ellen (where he would announce himself as ‘James the butler’). His memory was still amazingly fresh of how Joy Beattie (a ‘lovely, intense, small blonde’) scrapped on-stage with Charmian Clift (‘a big, busty and bruising brunette’).

  Joy gained her intermediate certificate, but there was no money for further education. The country was still feeling the effects of the Depression and many people in Wollongong were unemployed. She took a low-paid job at a dental clinic for the poor, staying with a friend in town during the week and returning to the family home at weekends with bags of lollies for Peg. The work brought her into contact with despairing victims of the floundering economy and the uncaring first Menzies government – unemployed men struggled to feed their families and could not afford 2/6d for a set of dentures. It aroused in my mother a concern for the poor that never left her.2

  When the war came, Joy decided to volunteer for the air force – an obvious choice given her father’s membership of the original Australian Flying Corps. So off she went, with 140 other recruits, to train for the WAAAF – the Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force (the third ‘A’ for ‘Auxiliary’ to emphasise, I suppose, the perceived inferiority of women). They would not be flying, of course – the war did not break down the sexism of the time quite so far – but these women would do more than pack parachutes. They would be permitted to help in the administration of the war effort, so they had to complete an intensive three-month training course. It was held at the Ranelagh Hotel in a town called Robertson (in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales). To Joy’s surprise she topped the course, and was quickly made a corporal and sent north to Townsville, the key administrative centre for pilots, ground-force soldiers, ships and aeroplanes en route to fight the Japanese in New Guinea and the islands of the South Pacific.