Obituaries
Sydney Morning Herald Peter Coleman remembered as 'distinguished writer and thinker'
Sydney Morning Herald Peter Coleman: Distinguished editor, thinker and politician
The Australian Truly great man of letters: Writer, intellectual and former politician Peter Coleman dies, aged 90
The Spectator A Liberal man of letters: Peter Coleman, 1928-2019
The Spectator Vale Peter Coleman
Quadrant Peter Coleman: A Great Australian
Herald Sun Missing Peter Coleman Already
Condolence Speeches NSW Parliament
For William Peter Coleman AO Former Minister of the Crown
Funeral Speeches
Herald Sun Missing Peter Coleman Already
Condolence Speeches NSW Parliament
For William Peter Coleman AO Former Minister of the Crown
Funeral Speeches
The funeral service for Peter Coleman was held on Monday April 8, 2019 in the South Chapel at the Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park, Military Road, Matraville. The service was conducted by his friend, Father Paul Stenhouse, who also gave the panegyric. The lessons were read by his granddaughter Phoebe Costello and his grandson Simon Coleman.
After the service there were further speeches and eulogies in the Lawson and Gilmore Rooms. The speakers were his three children, Tanya Costello, William Coleman and Ursula Dubosarsky; his granddaughter Madeleine Costello speaking for Sebastian Costello, his grandson, who was overseas and unable to attend; his grandson Bruno Dubosarsky speaking for Maisie Fieschi, his granddaughter, who was overseas and unable to attend; his cousin Jim Davidson; his friend and electoral campaign manager Doug Buckley; his old friend Lee Shrubb; his grandson Dover Dubosarsky speaking for Martin Krygier, who was overseas and unable to attend and is son of his friend Richard Krygier; his friend James Franklin and his grandsons, Simon and Leo Coleman. The Master of Ceremonies was Leo Coleman. (For family tree, scroll down to end of document).
The panegyric and formal speeches are found below, in the order they were delivered.
Father Paul Stenhouse
Panegyric
On behalf of his children Tanya, William and Ursula, their
spouses, and their children, and all the members of his family and extended
family, may I welcome you, dear friends, to this Final Commendation and
Farewell offered for William Peter Coleman – generally known to most of us simply
as ‘Peter’.
He slipped gently into eternal life after quite a few
months of intermittent discomfort and pain, on Sunday evening March 31 – only a
little more than a week ago, in his ninetieth year.
Psalm 38, written it seems more than three thousand years ago, reminds us that according to God’s reckoning,
our life is, truly, as but a breath; and
I think that many of us can vouch for that, as we look back on our lives.
In the months before his death, visiting Peter in Lulworth House,
and before and after that, in St Vincent’s hospital, I marvelled at the
anonymity that seems to envelope all of us, as we approach the end of our lives.
All of us who are old, like Peter, can be compared with Dante
Alighieri’s famous dove, which in the Divine Comedy, flies not just back to the
‘nest’ on outstretched, firm, and sometimes flagging wings, but to the ‘sweet
nest,’ ‘al dolce nido,’ where all desire, hope and fulfilment are to be found,
in love.
The 8th century Hebrew prophet Isaiah, compares human life to a
piece of cloth being woven by a weaver, and compares death to our finding
ourselves cut off from the loom, with the fabric of our lives rolled up.
Something of the richness of colour, and the diversity and detail in
the designs that criss-cross the cloth that was Peter’s life as it emerged from
the loom of his 90 years, will appear in the eulogies that will follow this
service. These eulogies will be given in the Lawson and Gilmore Rooms nearby,
to which you all are invited most cordially and I hope that you’ll have time to
join the family.
In the meantime, I should like to unroll a little of that fabric of
Peter’s life, myself.
We know that he studied philosophy at Sydney University with David
Armstrong and David Stove under the free-wheeling John Anderson; taught for a
year in the Sudan; edited The Observer, The Bulletin, and Quadrant; was a first class writer, reviewer, essayist, NSW
State and Federal Member of Parliament; and was a close friend and admirer and
defender of James McAuley, who as well as being one of Australia’s greatest
poets also was an Andersonian of sorts; and so on. Peter was all these things,
and much, much more.
It’s beyond my powers to do justice to Peter
and his life, even if we had all day to do it. Nevertheless, I’m confident that
there was more drama, more mystery and discovery and excitement and joy and sorrow,
and openness to newness of life and fulness of life in the ninety years of
Peter Coleman, and, for that matter, in all true family-life, and professional-life
well-lived, than any swashbuckling adventurer’s biographers could handle.
Peter was a peerless interviewer. He and Socrates and Aristotle will
have much to discuss. He employed his own version of the Socratic Method. His
questions – all the more searching for their apparent guilelessness – went to
the heart of whatever topic was under discussion. Peter was no exceptor of
persons. He genuinely liked people, and was prepared to give everybody a fair
hearing. Seeking understanding, he would probe any and all speakers or writers until
what they really thought emerged, until truth/reality shone through.
His measured not to say incisive review of Cassandra Pybus’s book The
Devil and James McAuley, well deserved its inclusion in Peter Craven’s The
Best Australian Essays for 1999.
Peter tackled head-on what he called ‘the great and evil passion of
the twentieth century – the totalitarian temptation that produced Auschwitz and
the Gulag,’ in the service of National Socialism and Marxist-Communism.
John Anderson’s metaphysical and aesthetic influence eventually
leached out of the fabric of Peter’s intellectual life, as it did out of James McAuley’s.
What Peter was to call Anderson’s ‘political and intellectual ordeal’
as he worked his way from communism to anti-communism, through what was called
‘the Pink Decade,’ made a deep impression on Peter who, like his friend
McAuley, was inoculated for life against totalitarianism and its fellow
travellers.
Peter was fascinated by what is real. He was the loyalest of friends. He encouraged
the newly established Campion College at Toongabbie – the first Liberal Arts
College in Australia. Over a number of years he attended functions there and graduations.
He was proud to have been included in a distinguished group of Honorary Fellows
of Campion. He would have been delighted had he been able to attend Dyson
Heydon’s Occasional Address delivered at Campion’s Graduation Ceremony in
January this year.
It was this openness of mind, and
delight in challenging debate that, from time to time, led us both, on numerous
occasions over lunch, to explore the thoughts of – among many others – Gabriel Marcel,
the first French Existentialist philosopher – largely unknown in this country,
or at least unmentioned – who died in 1973, and some of the plays of Luigi
Pirandello, 1867-1936, like Marcel, a noted dramatist.
Pirandello won
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. My favourite among his plays is ‘Così è
se vi pare,’ ‘It is if you think it is,’ an examination of the nature of
objective reality.
Gabriel Marcel
comes to mind today because of the mystery that is death: the death of a loving
father and grandfather and distinguished friend. It’s why we‘ve come together
here today.
Sceptics and
cynics say that when believers speak of the Holy Trinity, or the Incarnation,
or the Virgin Birth and then say that they are mysteries, what they
really are saying is that they are unknowable, and they can never be sure, one
way or another, whether they are true.
Nothing could
be further from the truth says Marcel. Mysteries – even
natural mysteries like ‘life’ and ‘death,’ ‘hope’ and ‘love’ and ‘mercy’ – are not
to be picked at, grappled with or stripped down like an old car to find out
what makes or made it work.
Mystery, according
to Marcel, especially supernatural mystery, is something to be in awe of,
ecstatic about, swept off our feet by, completely astonished and enthralled by.
Mystery is not
something unknowable. It is something
too knowable. It’s not something fearful or frightening – it is too beautiful,
too amazing. It's not a lacuna in our knowledge, something to be got over like an
obstacle – it is something too grand for us to grasp in all its reality.
Death is as much
part of life as birth. And had we been asked while we were in our mother’s womb
whether we were prepared to risk being born, we almost certainly would have
preferred to stay inside the comforting environment that is the ante-chamber to
independent life. And that life is the
ante-chamber to eternal Life.
These are some of the thoughts that occupied our minds. And that I look
back on with gratitude.
May I conclude these few reflections,
with the final stanzas from Cardinal Newman’s beautiful poem The Dream of
Gerontius, set to music by Sir Edward Elgar, the outstanding English Catholic
composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Elgar
is famous for his Choral version of The Dream of Gerontius, for his Enigma
Variations and for his Pomp and Circumstance Marches that one often
hears on radio. The speaker is the
Guardian Angel of the dying Gerontius:
Softly and gently, dearly-ransom'd soul,
In my most loving
arms I now enfold thee,
And, o'er the
penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and
I lower thee, and hold thee.
Angels, to whom
the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and
nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest ;
And Masses on the
earth, and prayers in heaven,
Shall aid thee at
the Throne of the most Highest.
Farewell, but not
forever, brother dear,
Be brave and
patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass
thy night of trial here,
And I will come
and wake thee on the morrow.
These concluding verses were written by John Henry Newman at the Oratory,
London, in January 1865.
All our sympathy goes to Tanya, William, and Ursula, and to their spouses Peter
Costello, Anna Taitslin, and Avi Dubosarsky; and to Peter’s cousin Jim
Davidson, and John and Norma Scott; to his grandchildren, and recently born great-grandchild
Lucy.
May Peter’s questing soul find eternal rest. Amen.
Tanya Costello
Remembrances of her father
I repeat Leo’s thanks to you all for coming today and particularly to those who have travelled
I repeat Leo’s thanks to you all for coming today and particularly to those who have travelled
from outside Sydney – from Melbourne, Canberra, Toowoomba.
In the week since
my dad died there have been several wonderful obituaries in magazines, online and
in newspaper that I suspect you will have read. So, I won’t tell the story of
my father’s extraordinary life. Rather, I will tell of four areas in which his
life influenced mine – four tiles to add to the resplendent mosaic of the life
of Peter Coleman.
1.
The first is a love of French.
When my parents married on 5 April 1952, it was a “wet, wonderful spring day which
remained for him the London of his dreams” – they honeymooned in Paris. They had
been to Paris before as soon as they could) with dad’s great friend George Munster who
showed them the (literary) sights there. Dad (like many in the room today) was conflicted
about France - its intellectual life was dominated by fellow-travelling clichés. He could
read and write French very well but Mum told the story of how Dad went one morning
to the nearby grocer for bread and butter returning empty-handed in a huff – the
shopkeeper did not understand what he was asking for. His North Sydney Boys’ High
School French accent let him down - or more likely the hauteur Parisienne of the shopkeeper.
My mother calmly took charge, writing the French words for bread and butter on a piece
of paper and handing it over to the épicier (grocer) who filled the order – pas de problème
(no problem). Many years later dad gave a speech in French at his granddaughter’s wedding
- the large crowd assembled understood him and clapped with enthusiasm.
When I was being enrolled at Hunters Hill High, Dad was very disappointed that
the timetable did not allow me to do three languages - I could only do French and
Latin. But I fell in love with French which has become a companion to my days.
Merci beaucoup papa.
2.
Theatre
The arts featured large in my childhood. All of the arts. It was a
bit unusual in the suburbs. Books everywhere in the house; Australian artwork
on the walls. Dad (and Mum) enthusiastically took us to plays and ballet even
opera. What great fun! We would often
also go to movies as a family – though Tora
Tora Tora about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour would not be every
young child’s dream of a birthday outing! Dad knew the actress Dame Doris
Fitton who founded The Independent Theatre in North Sydney and arranged for me
to attend Saturday afternoon acting classes there for many years – those were
wonderful times for me. Changed my life. For me the theatre has it all.
Dad was a long-term friend and admirer of actor Barry Humphries –
you will have seen a photograph of Dame Edna Everage paying a visit to her
“little friend the Opposition Leader” during the NSW electoral campaign of
1978. Barry is in London and not able to be here but he wrote to my sister Ursula
of his grief on learning of Peter’s death saying: “Peter was a voice of sanity
and humanity in the curdled world of Australian political and cultural
discourse. His was too often a voice in the wilderness, but I hear it still. He
was a great man.”
Dad was also a good friend and admirer of the work of exceptional
filmmaker Bruce Beresford. At Peter’s 90th birthday held at his
bedside in St Vincent’s Hospital - you will have also seen a photo of Bruce
with a frail and failing Peter there - Bruce recounted how they met when a
teenage Bruce paid a visit to the Observer
asking if they were interested in the problems of Australian film makers. They
were and with dad’s helpful guidance, Bruce’s “Why Australian Films Are So Bad”
was published in the Observer, a
manifesto of the well-received Australian New Wave of film of the 1970’s. For more
- go to Dad’s lively short biographies of both these men.
3.
Politics
Dad’s passion for politics – he called it an affliction – was
exceptional. From primary school to the very end Dad was gripped by the affairs
of state and by the cultural wars that underpinned them. In his last days, mention
of the NSW State election drew him in, eyes sparkling with interest.
However, it is a mystery to me really why or how such a private man
of ideas should drop anchor and pin his flag publicly to the Liberal Party -
which he selflessly served for almost 20 years. His solid commitment to freedom
and defending the rights of the individual is some of the answer and I am
hoping that Doug Buckley who will speak shortly can shine more light on this.
Whatever the reason, I am grateful, because it led to my meeting my
dear husband Peter Costello – a fellow sufferer of the affliction. Following
the example of our dear courageous Dad - and perhaps not really understanding
why - I heard the deafening noise at university of the crazy radical left who
exercised unrepresentative power squandering student money and I joined the
fight against them.
4.
Christian faith
Dad described himself at one time as a “fellow traveller of secular
humanism” but I am not sure that this is the full picture.
When visiting mum and dad in exile on Norfolk Island long, long ago
I asked dad what his favourite word was. “Christ” came the prompt reply. Not “Christ, why are you asking me
this, Tanya”, but Christ – the Son of God, the Messiah, the Saviour of the
world.
Dad was always interested in the church and respected the church as
an institution. He was friends with select churchmen. He was moved by bible
stories such as the parable of the Prodigal Son on which he based his perfectly
pitched 2008 address to graduating students when he was awarded a Doctor of
Letters (Honoris Causa) by Sydney University (an institution he cherished). His
outlook on life separated the secular from the sacred, the private from the
public and he had no time for the delusional left Christian voice of the Church
which dominates the public discourse. But his admiration for the ideas and the
poetry of James McAuley, a convert to Catholicism was influential. So too was
his long friendship with Father Paul Stenhouse, Catholic Priest and editor –
Paul took Dad’s funeral service just now – and we are grateful, Paul.
I
finish by reading from one of McAuley’s very last poems, published in Quadrant magazine: It is titled Explicit
Why the horrors must be so
I never could pretend to know:
It isn’t I, dear Lord, who can
Justify your ways to man
Soon I’ll understand it all
Or cease to wonder: so my small
Spark will blaze intensely bright,
Or go out in an endless night.
Welcome now to bread and wine:
Creature comfort, heavenly sigh.
Winter will grow dark and cold
Before the wattle turns to gold.
William Coleman
In
December Peter celebrated - amid family and friends - his 90th birthday. His life
evidently encompassed three generations. And, born 1928, the Australia he grew
up in was, on the face of it, very different from today’s: it might
described Max Dupain’s Australia, in reference to his brilliant photographic
record. It was an Australia that was hedonistic, and the same time puritanical; boisterous and yet inhibited; raucous but tongue-tied.
An
Australia that was, in the comment of the time of Anthony Burgess, ‘inarticulate’. Such an inarticulacy that
might explain a key feature of the Australia Max Dupain photographed – for all
its obvious good naturedness; something was missing; or, to be more accurate,
missing from notice: the fruit
and sweets of human expression. In a word, ‘culture’.
I would
venture that Peter’s life was a retort to that omission or silence.
Throughout
his life, Peter’s deepest affinity was for the great articulator of human
experience: poetry. The man’s soul was poetical. Thus his disposition to quote
poetry as the occasion suggested –sometimes difficult occasions; his biographical
labour on his great poet friend Jim McAuley; his regular attendance at the poets' picnic; his trove of rare ‘collectors items’ of Australian 20th c
poetry; and perhaps his attraction to a political philosophy of freedom.
And yet
Peter was not a poet.
Nor was
he a novelist, despite drafting a novel in his young adulthood.
Neither
a dramatist, despite his excursions into the theatre.
Neither dramatist, novelist, nor poet; Peter’s creative talent lay in prose.
An
early emblem of this talent was his book, Blasphemy, Censorship, Sedition. Written
to rebut the philistine manifestations of the ‘official’ Australia of Max
Dupain’s day, it is also a classic of prose style. Oh to write like that!
With
this talent realised, Peter would be a critic, judge, editor, and herald of the
new aspiration to expression in post-war Australia.
His aspiration
to foster, and revel in, a new articulacy he fully shared with his sparkling
circle of friends, a circle which stayed with him until the end of his life,
and he with him. And, more generally, with the interwar generation, born
between 1915-1945, which was so brilliantly fluent, in poetry, film, the
novel, art, history, philosophy; and has accounted for the bulk of Australia’s cultural
achievement over the past century.
An early
example was his role as herald in organising singlehandedly a conference on
‘The counter-revolution in Australian Historiography’; that was addressed by Manning Clark, A. W Martin, Bede Nairn, Robin
Gollan, Ken Inglis, Malcolm Ellis, Donald Horne. … Imagine being in that
seminar room …
Not
long after came his editorship of the better known Australian Civilization. Note
the assertiveness of the title. Not
‘Australian Barbarism’ , not ‘Australian Banality’ but ‘Australian Civilization’. And the yet
the word was not deployed in the title as a complacent pronouncement; but as an
Ideal; an ambition; resolve to be dissatisfied with the thinness, mediocrity, crappiness of so
much of Australian life.
It may
be said Peter's life was devoted to waging perpetual war against the Great
Australian Crappiness.
This
offensive continued into the last years of his life his biographies of poets, film
makers, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom; always seeking to throw light on
talent; always seeking new talent; always hopeful of finding it.
Today
the ideal of Australian Civilization seems in a state of recess; and the Great
Australian Crappiness resurgent. New puritanisms seem to replace old; new
silences supplant the former one; new prejudices take up where previous ones
left off; Indeed, some old prejudices are simply revived.
What
would Peter say?
I will
try to answer that question with a reflection on his character. Peter was an optimist;
not out of some self-conscious philosophy; he was one of nature’s optimists.
Seven
decades before Bridge Climb commenced its service, on the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a
day in September 1939, two figures were descried by a vigilant observer
ascending the arch of the Bridge . Concerned by possibility of sabotage, police
were alerted, who found 12 year old Norman Coleman, the elder brother – the
loved elder brother – of the second figure, ten year old Peter Coleman. We must
allow the gumption, guts, have-a-go-ness
and the sense of possibility of the two boys.
I think
that would be Peter’s message in trying times:
Climb
that bridge.
Ursula Dubosarsky
After Dad’s death last week, my son-in-law
in Paris, Simon, wrote to me that he thought that Dad was “one of the true free people” he had ever known, and I think that is a just observation.
These last
seven years were in some ways desolate for Dad without our mother, but he had
us, his children, his exemplary children-in-law, Peter, Anna and Avi, and of
course his devoted grandchildren. He also had the precious comfort of Verna’s
family; of his brother Norm’s family, and that of his cousin Jim Davidson.
He had his local community, his neighbours, the library, the
businesses, restaurants and cafes of Queen Street and Ocean Street Woollahra,
where he was a familiar daily figure in his panama hat, and always so well
looked after by everyone. And he had an intense sweeping, curiosity that
sustained him in optimism, and he was a writer. Driven by an apparently
unquenchable energy, he went everywhere, he saw everything, he observed,
thought, and he wrote.
He also had
his colleagues, whom he valued and he had his fans, old and new, whose open
admiration always surprised him. And he had his friends. Dad loved his friends,
despite occasional ups and downs, deeply and abidingly, some for over seventy years,
and we are very moved to see those friends, and children of those friends, here
today.
The final
year of Dad’s life was so hard, and yet his extraordinary forward motion and
searching critical engagement with the world continued almost to the very end.
His was in some ways a heroic life and it was certainly a heroic death. I want
to thank especially Father Paul Stenhouse for his steadfast, indefatigable
friendship, which made a huge difference to the final months and indeed hours
of his life. And also sincere thanks to the many different members of staff
connected with St Vincents hospital and the Genesis and Kinghorn cancer
centres, and to Dr Andrew Hardy and Jane Lear-Walker at Lulworth House, all of
whose impact and care cannot be overestimated.
All his life,
Dad loved and respected and supported and socialized with artists. He loved
painters, cartoonists, photographers, performers, actors, stage directors,
publishers, producers and film directors. And of course, as a writer himself he
loved writers and seriously supported other writers, all kinds of writers,
again all his life. His support to me as a writer and his imaginative influence
on me, was boundless. But as I think we all know, most especially Dad loved
poets. So I’m going to finish with a short poem by Amy Witting, a poet and
novelist he admired enormously and whom he published whenever he could and who
was also known to many of you here. You’ll see why I have chosen the
poem. It’s called “Last light”.
Ten minutes after sunset. Still a faint flush
behind the darkening trees. The tall parched bush
which all day long has drunk the sun and stored
the gold of it stands shining with its hoard
like a stilled hive — all other light receding
lovely, alone in its slow fading.
Ten minutes after sunset. The pine has drunk
darkness out of the air and towers black
against a sky of steel. At its far height
a spread of wings — a parrot taking flight
meets a last hidden gleam which from its breast
strikes a long shaft of amethyst.
This last light
the eye holds
beyond the night.
Sebastian Costello
Reflections on Grandpa, read by Madeleine Costello
For a writer, Peter
Coleman’s own story is remarkable. It’s a story of public
service, publications and respect from the highest calibre of people. It’s also
a story, that I’ve only really come to appreciate recently.
A few years ago I had a rare
opportunity to enjoy Grandpa’s company, just the two of us. We
sat under the Sydney sun on the balcony at Woollahra and shared a cup of tea.
“Don’t be like John Laws," he said. "That bully pulpit routine”. That was his advice for
his eldest grandson as I began my media career. Grandpa didn’t like bullies.
He was also fearless. While he’d rally against ideas he didn’t agree with, he
was constantly challenging himself with new concepts, hobbies and projects. As
far as I can remember, he was the first member of our family to master email. (For
the benefit of my father, Peter Costello, email is a messaging system used on
computers).To him nothing was
impossible, after a little thinking time.
Much
will be said about Grandpa’s legacy on the page. But the words that I will
treasure the most are the messages of encouragement that he would send after he
had read some of my written work. They were brief notes, often written in capital
letters, but his encouragement meant the world to me.
When I consider the
admiration I have for my Grandfather, I wish I had more time with him. But
his work will live on forever and a spirit such as his wasn’t meant to be
shared with family only. Grandpa thank-you for enriching all of our lives.
Rest
in Peace.
Words from Maisie Fieschi
Read by Bruno Dubosarsky
In my strongest memories of
Grandpa, there’s always bright sunshine. Grandpa is in his early seventies, tanned
and wearing his light cream suit and hat, smiling gently and walking with great purpose and sprightliness.
I am deeply lucky to have so
many memories with Grandpa, who I admire more than I can say. I am so grateful
for the myriad of ways he influenced and encouraged me, from teaching me essay
writing, to his ardent support of my further education and my study of French,
to his vast public writings on and defending of artistic and intellectual
freedoms.
It seems only natural that
we would end up on that sunny September 2015 day in Paris at my marriage to
Simon, with Grandpa in his full regalia as our witness and with Grandma in our
hearts and her wedding ring becoming my own.
Just two and a half months
ago, Grandpa became Great-grandpa to our little girl, Lucy. I wish so much they
could have met, but we will forever tell her about the great works of this “grand homme”, and how much we loved him
and he loved us.
Jim Davidson
I come here as the remaining Tiernan of Peter’s
generation - though neither of us, since our mothers were sisters – and wives
- bore that family name. For a large part of my life – until Peter Costello
came along – I represented a Melbourne outrigger – in return having only porpoise glimpses of Peter and
the family when I came up to Sydney.
But those glimpses accreted, had continuity. Peter was
a presence in my life right from the time he gave me my first piggyback until I
saw him last December, at the gathering for his ninetieth birthday. And he was determined to be a
presence – partly from his own generous nature, and partly as a way of
returning the kindness my mother had shown him as a small boy. (Indeed,
somewhat to my exasperation, she would sometimes slip into calling me by his
name.) She would tell stories, of Peter’s first publication as an
eight-year-old, The Lucky Star, its inked pages sold from a billy cart
at the front gate. You won’t find that listed in any Coleman bibliography.
For me, Peter was always out there in front - by half
a generation. When I was a boy he would send me postcards from overseas, books
from Sydney when I was a teenager, and later in life published a story I had
written. He was always encouraging…
I’m not sure though that he would have entirely
approved when I became editor of Meanjin, the traditional left-wing
counterpart to Quadrant: as I joked at the time, somebody has to be
Kaiser Bill to George V - for they too were first cousins. Our personal relations were much, much better!
There was a moment, in the mid-1960s, just before Viet
Nam, when a progressive initiative was taken by the centre right. Issues such
as relaxing White Australia, preserving
historic buildings, decriminalising homosexuality, and censorship questions
were at the core of it, and Peter played his part. As is well known, he wrote
his first book on censorship. Later he would revise his stand, but in the early
sixties he appreciated that there was far too much of it. As a minister of the
day put it, censorship was only a minority concern, ordinary people weren’t
bothered by that sort of thing... Peter recognised the absurdity of this
attitude, for he was concerned with – as the bold title of an impressive
symposium he edited was styled – Australian Civilization.
Alas, Peter has gone from us now. We all feel the
loss. For me, in addition to the continuity which all relatives provide – for
good, or ill – he brought to our
relationship three things of inestimable value: friendship, encouragement, and
urbanity. Peter Coleman epitomised Australian civilisation.
Doug Buckley
Politics and Poetry
Poetry was always close to the heart of Peter
Coleman. Anglican poet T S Eliot wrote about what he called his "Hound of Heaven",
a creature that dogged him but revealed itself only when Eliot's Christian
faith wavered, reviving him by reminding him of the existence and character of God. What his hound was to Eliot, poetry was
to Peter Coleman, this we know.
Kindness was also there in the Coleman heart.
When we had a small falling-out in the 1970s, Peter hand-wrote several hundred
kind, peace-making words on one of those old blue aerogrammes, not conceding
the point, but revealing very much of himself, and hustled it off to me in
London. And when he spoke publicly about
some of my writing he did so, not as the gimlet-eyed editor that I knew he was,
but as a kind friend.
Some of us have been asking why does a man
like Peter Coleman step into public and political life? I don't have easy
answers but there is at least this: I was there at the beginning.
Many
months before the 1968 New South Wales elections, I asked the Liberal Party if
I could be useful somewhere and they gave me Peter's number. He had been
preselected for the new and decidedly dodgy electorate of Fuller. Soon I was his
Campaign Director. It was an ambitious, innovative campaign that included a segment
on the ABC's Four Corners, a one-off newspaper called Fuller News, and was exhausting for both of us and for Verna. Very
much against the odds, together we won,
and won well, and would win together
again.
But why did the most intelligent man I have
ever known, effectively abandon strong careers in the Law, in academia or at the top of Australian publishing? Head
home from his cool, spacious, book-lined barrister's chambers in Phillip Street,
to rattle a couple of hundred rusting Gladesville front-door fly-screens, through
many a Sydney summer?
Politics has of course always come with the
lure of power and of position, but none of us sees such figuring much in Peter
Coleman's thought-world. And though a safe seat would have offered time for
writing, Peter would surely have kept on writing wherever he was.
So consider this: from the age of ten,
Peter lived in Harbourside Kirribilli with his father Stanley Coleman. It was a
kind of debating-chamber for a bunch of journos and ad-men, free-thinkers, Trotskyites
and more. Peter claims that he never understood the talk, yet something he would
certainly have come to see: politics is about ideas, contestable ideas.
But not ideas in vacuo. This was pre- and early
World War II when politicians were making life and death decisions. Exhibit A: giant
Atlantic ocean-liner Queen Mary tied
up right there off Kurraba Point, grey-painted now and sinister, chocka with
Australian troops heading for possible death in the Middle East.
John Anderson, a philosophy professor during
Peter's time at Sydney University was influential as well as controversial, a
man of ideas but also a man who took consequential action. More importantly, Peter
was a friend of the Tassie-based academic Jim McAuley, even writing McAuley
biography. McAuley was a strong example of a serious thinker who took political
action, in his case anti-communist action at a time when it was needed. This
was of course the distinguished Catholic poet, James McAuley. McAuley's poetry,
and his example of political action, would have figured prominently, I submit,
in all of Peter's decisions and actions. Poetry speaks more than we know.
But equally, in all that I have known of
Peter, I see his father Stanley's advice: "Bite off more than you can
chew, then chew like buggery."
Lee Shrubb
I think I
first met Peter in 1948, at the start of my second year at Sydney Uni, by which
time I’d discovered where the exciting intellectual capital of Sydney was:
inside the Philos room in the quad. Much of the clever talk though, was
on the Library steps in Macquarie Street, and even more in Repin’s coffee
places - 6 pence a cup with free replacement. And golly I was allowed to sit
(admiringly) among them! Such a pleasure to have their light shine
upon me.
And there I met
them: Peter Coleman, Peter Shrubb, Eugene Kamenka, George Munster, more of them, but long ago now. All described in Peter’s Memoirs of a Slow Learner - not slow, of course - and from there
friendships, hostilities, and love flourished. Over the years that followed
most of us travelled – to England, America, in Peter’s case to Sudan – then we
met again, now married with little kids back here, with our loved ones, more
settled and with newer friends and a certain degree of establishment in the
world.
If we were living
close enough, dinner parties were all the go. Verna made wonderful soups, Ann
McCallum was troop-cook, the Harries arrived, I cooked up a storm. And there
were many others. Talked ranged from art and theatre to politics and history,
literature and foreign affairs, always cultured, with lots of passionate but affectionate arguments
with a degree of sobriety but let’s not go into details.
There was a time
when Peter was a drama producer and I remember his first Oz production of Look Back in Anger with none other than
our mutual dear friend Phil Marchant playing the trumpet in it
backstage. Later still, in front of the world, Peter, the expert on the world’s
best wife, Verna, was the Best Man in Phil Marchant’s wedding, to Leila the
other perfect wife, and since it takes one to know one, there are a few others
in the room today.
Our families
holidayed together at Hawks Nest in the 70s, though my recollection is that
Peter was more anxious about finding out his new ministerial portfolio than enjoying
the beach.
Peter retained
his love for theatre and film, and years later I remember Peter and Verna
stepping out of the Independent Theatre and running into Peter Shrubb and Lee, who
had watched the same production. Peter Coleman was much the more enthusiastic
about Australia’s first performance of “The Caretaker”? Amiable argument ensued.
And now, whose
children later became best friends? Yep, Peter's and Verna’s with Peter's and
Lee’s. A pleasure to behold.
Martin Krygier
read by Dover Dubosarsky
It’s an honour to be invited
by Peter’s children to speak at the funeral service of a man of such
accomplishment, broad connections and influence, and deep and loving family
relationships. I immediately and gratefully understood that it was a gracious
way of paying tribute to a remarkable relationship and accomplishment, that
between Peter and my father and their Quadrant. So I was at once moved to be
asked, and – notwithstanding my later parting of ways from the magazine –
unhesitating in response.
William remarked in his
letter to me that ‘I think you will agree that your father was Peter's best
friend. It might be said that Peter loved Richard. As did Verna. And as they
both did Roma.’ I knew that to be true and mutually so. Today is not the day to
speak of the sources of Peter’s love for Richard, which are anyway expressed in
the dedication of The Liberal Conspiracy
to my parents, and with grace, eloquence, and profound insight in his panegyric
at my father’s funeral in 1986.
I will speak, however, of the other side, the
deeply reciprocal character of that loving friendship. Accessible from the
National Library is the oral history interview of my father. When Peter’s name
comes first comes up the interviewer says of Peter: ‘very able man.’ Richard
responds, ‘Oh lovely man. although, you know, we argued on many things but
essentially a man who is very fair and writes beautifully. Oh yes.’ Later he
returns to the theme: “Peter Coleman is a man of tremendous intelligence and a
workaholic. He loves Quadrant. It is for him his greatest love. Peter has said
“This is my life's work.”
Richard goes on to expand the reflection:
“Because you could feel this. … there is never, never a job too difficult to do
when it comes to Quadrant and I'm quite sure that if he ever retires from
politics he will still try to keep on editing Quadrant. He's so from that point
of view very, very happy also because he and I have established a very good
working relationship: means I make suggestions quite often but if they're not
pursued they're dead. I don't ask him a second time and there's never a
quarrel.”
Their relationship was not
superficial mateship. Indeed superficially it would not be easy to predict. On
the surface Richard was different from Peter: born Jewish but without religion,
born Polish but never to return to his country, with an understanding and
disgust for totalitarianism that came from direct experience, rather than the
much more rare route of empathy and learning. But they shared many of the
deepest things: devotion to a cause that truly mattered, total seriousness and
indomitable courage in pursuit of it, often in unwelcoming circumstances, and a
love of the written word. They were more than friends. Richard loved and
admired Jim McAuley and Peter, as he did few other people. The three of them
conspired to make Quadrant under their watch a magazine of the first order,
intellectually alive, eclectic but with fundamental, often controversial,
commitments and typically a pleasure to read.
When I did leave the
magazine long after my father was gone, my mother remonstrated sadly that
Quadrant was my father’s third child. It gave me pain and pause, because I knew
it was true. Quadrant was just as much Peter’s fourth child. I was relieved at
the time that my departure did nothing to break personal relations with him,
and so asked him, naturally, to read and comment on a memoir I wrote of my
father, as he asked me, equally naturally, if I would like to accompany him to
an evening at the Polish Consulate in which he was interested, and he knew I
would be. We also sent each other items to read that we thought the other would
like.
Unfortunately, I cannot be
present today, because I am in Washington D.C. as a ‘Democracy Fellow’ in the
National Endowment for Democracy. When I see and admire what the Endowment does
to support democracy around the world, I feel that while I have left the
current Quadrant family (or perhaps they left me), I will never be able (or
willing) to shake the family of values that Peter’s and Richard’s lives exemplified
with such purpose and distinction (and also quite a bit of fun), and that I had
the luck to imbibe from the example of them both.
James Franklin
Peter himself
was often asked to speak at funerals, and there was a good reason for that. He
had a clarity of thought that could summarise what someone’s life had amounted
to. At the same time he had a sympathetic emotional attunement that could
appreciate what it was like to have someone else’s concerns.
He had a
difficult family start, which left him with some permanent burden. It was compensated for in later years by
Verna and his children. On the other hand, the kind of things he did in his
career lacked tenure, and the reversals of fortune usual in politics and journalism
affected him. He wrote successful books, but not ones to bring in big money. It
was a precarious life with no chance to rest on laurels even when there were
plenty of laurels.
I mention that
because he made the most of his experience, to understand others. His unselfish
appreciation of people and interest in their stories and ideas is what made him
such a success as editor, biographer, oral historian. I recall him saying about
another editor, who he thought was a good editor, that he didn’t entirely
approve of his just accepting articles whole. Peter thought the editor’s job
was to help the writer explain him- or herself as well as possible. Generosity and
gratitude were typical of him.
He was chronically
restless. He used that to advantage too, in moving across such a range of
intellectual and literary areas. Hence the true description “Man of letters”.
(Here’s his own comment on that phrase: obsessive scribblers, he says, “try to
disguise their affliction under some other label – man of letters, philosopher,
academic, humanist, freethinker, writer. None really fits the case …”)
As that comment
shows, he had a strong sense of the farcical aspects of intellectual and
political life. He says, “When I was
elected Leader of the Opposition late in 1977, there was no shortage
of advice. Clyde Packer rang from California to urge me to buy a
greyhound. Rupert Henderson, the legendary director of John Fairfax & Sons,
warned me to expect nothing from Fairfax (‘They are weak!’) and to
take no notice of journalists.”
Thus his Memoirs – I think along with The Liberal Conspiracy his most
impressive book – is memorable for the recurring phrase, “now a Japanese
restaurant”; used as in “I slept at a
Kent Street dosshouse and soup kitchen (now a Japanese restaurant), filling
many notebooks with ‘observations and reflections’, to be grist to the mill of
my novels when the time came …”
Also distinctive
of his work was his sound judgement – his ability to grasp the right end of the
stick in so many different areas, and have something unique to say. That was true
early, when he learned faster than most of his generation which way was up in
the Cold War. It was true very late in life too, when he became involved in
indigenous affairs, an area he agreed was mostly a wasteland of rubbishy ideas,
when he supported the campaigns of Bess and Jacinta Price.
That was true
about the big questions of life too. Most general-purpose intellectuals take an
“above my pay grade” attitude to questions of religion and the meaning of life.
He agonised over them, like his friend James McAuley. As he says, “once you
have contracted the habit of looking behind the screen of life, once you are touched
by the compulsion to examine conflicting values and ideas of the world, there
is no turning back.”
His final word
on the question (I think) was in a 2009 speech. He says “my Mum was a
Christian. She believed in the church—for marriage, baptism, confirmation,
Sunday school and so on. Dad was an atheist, hedonist and a bit of a bohemian. In
my youth I thought Dad had the better of the argument. But in time I came to
believe that my mother was right after all.” But he didn’t feel able to sign up
to any sect or creed.
Finally, he says,
“it is not true that we never learn: Something
is gathered in—something worth preserving and passing on.”
Yes indeed. In fifty
years’ time, when the young people of today write their memoirs, tearily evoking
old Sydney with its long-gone Japanese restaurants, their minds and culture
will have been formed, whether they remember or not, by someone who really
understood, made his own and passed on the best that was worth preserving.
Simon and Leo Coleman
My grandfather as we all know, was an intellectual who was deeply engaged with the ideas and events of the world. This never left him. When I visited him in hospital only a few months ago I saw he was a bit agitated. So, obviously concerned, I asked him what was wrong. He explained that the New Caledonian independence referendum was on that night, and he could not get the TV to show him the results. That was Peter to a T, interested in the battle of ideas around him, until the end.
None of us will ever forget grandfather's boundless energy and determination. When we we visited his house for lunch last year, he asked us if we wanted to go to the shops to get some dessert. No we said, there’s no need, don't bother. He kept on asking, and at age of 89, then decided it was best for he himself to drive to the shops to get us dessert. Now that changed our minds, and we all ended up driving to get dessert. He seemed quite pleased after that.
As you can see he was an affectionate grandfather who deeply cared about his family. Now we could go and and on, but we will end on this.
We will miss you grandpa.
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