"Fire at Parliament House"
The High Court building in Canberra is situated directly across the lake from the Carillion, which has a recital each day around midday. So, as one heads out for one’s lunch-hour constitutional, one can leave one’s Walkman behind, for there is usually a musical accompaniment. Anybody who has been to Canberra will know the Carillion. It sits out on an island, looking a bit like an oversized sports trophy, and sounding like Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”. The Carillion is, essentially, a musical instrument in a big box, and, like all musical instruments, it depends on human input to function. Thus, the music played varies widely. Most is not to the taste of the younger generation. Around Christmas time, for example, we are given an assortment of carols. Every so often there is an unexpected surprise: a rendition of Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs”; the theme from “The Addams Family”; “Hernando’s Hideaway”, a much covered song best known from a record by the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band. As might be expected, this kind of thing is enough to put a spring in my step for the rest of the day.
I remember the Carillion from my only previous visit to Canberra, with my parents in the September school holidays of 1975. My father, amateur violinist and lover of all things musical, took us out to sit on the grass one morning to listen to that day’s recital, which included such chestnuts as “Home on the Range” (still a Carillion favourite). Dad would have been happy. I was bored. On that visit we also saw a model of the proposed National Gallery (now visible from my office window in all its 3-D actuality); the geodesic dome-like science building at ANU (where we saw some part of Phar Lap, the horse whose various body parts can be found at many different places across the nation); roads that go around in circles and make it impossible to get to where you want to go; the little models of satellites and other cool stuff at the Tidbinbilla tracking station. I also remember how cold it was in our caravan.
The purpose of our visit was to see mum’s uncle Arthur Hewson, then the sitting Country Party member of Parliament for the Victorian seat of McMillan (he was to be voted out in the elections of December 1975, so we just made it). The timing was extraordinary – anyone with knowledge of Australian politics will have November 1975 firmly etched in their minds, and events were, of course, unfolding well before that fateful day when Saint Gough appeared to the masses on the steps of Parliament House to vent his spleen against Sir John Kerr. So there I was, too young to know anything except what our parents had instilled in us (in order, I guess, to inure us to the propaganda they assumed would be spewing forth from the Commie-filled staff room) – that Whitlam and his band of idiots were leading this country to the edge of ruin (notwithstanding that only three years earlier, as the result of a sudden and unexpected rush of blood to the head, my parents, and many others like them, who had voted conservative all their lives and for several generations beforehand, had actually helped to elect the Whitlam Labor government) – sitting in one of three rows of seats on the floor of the House of Representatives reserved for “special” guests, and then eating lunch in the parliamentary dining room. The best part was the discovery that, to get to his office, we had to briefly exit the building via the roof. (At least to that extent, it was probably a good thing that Canberra sits in a low-rainfall basin.)
(Arthur’s fatal mistake was running on a platform that emphasised that if he were elected one more time he could collect an MP’s pension. But even allowing for that error of judgment, to this day I don’t understand how a Country Party member could have lost his seat during the ensuing conservative landslide (although the seat of McMillan is notorious for veering from left to right, to further right, and back again in relatively short spaces of time, owing to the existence in the electorate of the Latrobe Valley, its transient population and somewhat “curious” mix of residents).)
Out of the experience came my most famous short story, “Fire at Parliament House”, an epic drama in which, amid high tension and shenanigans, a serious disaster is averted by the heroic efforts of a fictitious Country Party backbencher named, imaginatively, “Arthur Hewson”. (The illustrations were by me, as well, demonstrating my all-round creative talent, which I seem to have misplaced at some point during my teens.) This story was read to visitors time and time again over the years by my mother, and to my increasing embarrassment.
Somehow the subject of my “uncle” the politician came up during the later years of High School. (This was, at least, a more credible claim to family lineage than the outright falsehood put around by me at primary school, that my mother was directly descended from William the Conqueror (later revised to Oliver Cromwell, this being to a very slight degree supported by the research of one of Arthur’s brothers, who went to Ireland with the specific intention of confirming that a Hewson had signed the death warrant for Charles the First and came back with a photocopy of a photograph of a reproduction of a document containing a number of barely legible signatures, one of which, at a stretch, may have said “Hewson” – and don’t forget, also, that Bono’s surname is Hewson, which might suggest that a family connection may be the innate, deeply rooted reason for my hating U2).) One of my teachers, a burly, thunderous man called Ray Wilkinson - one of whose most memorable qualities was the ability to raise his eyebrows while almost but not quite smiling, leaving the recipient of this gesture uncomfortably uncertain whether he was expressing amusement at whatever you had just said or treating you with the contempt you suddenly felt you deserved - heard the name, made the aforementioned gesture, and said, “Ah, Old Tiger Hewison [sic]”. Whether he was privy to some actual and possibly salacious information about Arthur (which he was not about to divulge to me) or whether he was just winding me up I will never know, but I was happy to think that Arthur was remembered by somebody other than just blood relatives.
Amongst our 1999 Christmas cards was one from my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Ray (my mother’s brother), letting us know that Arthur had died, and that there were (unsurprisingly for someone whose entire life seems to have been lived in the public sphere; but quite out of the ordinary in a family that for the most part likes to keep itself as far away from the spotlight as possible) 800 people at his funeral. I felt in some small way like a circle had been completed, because 1999 was also the year in which I moved to Canberra. It is still almost absurdly cold here in winter, and the roads are just as confusing as ever. There is a new Parliament House, and a portrait gallery in the old one. Ed Kuepper played at that year’s New Year’s Eve festivities. I hope this means that one day I get to hear “Everything I’ve Got Belongs To You” cascading out from the Carillion.
