Former Liberal Minister Christopher Pyne attracted critics for his political front. But he always had plenty of friends and networks, enabling him often to be a player, if not always a “fixer”.
After his election to the South Australian seat of Sturt at age 25, he went on to hold senior portfolios, notably education and defence, and to stride the parliamentary stage as Leader of the House of Representatives.
In his memoir, The Insider, the former politician provides his take, humorous and candid, on a tumultuous 26 parliamentary years.
In this podcast, Pyne talks about life after politics, and stories from the ‘Canberra bubble’.
“I don’t miss politics at all – because I left happy, and I wanted to go.
“So I’m not one of these politicians that was dragged kicking and screaming. I left when people wanted me to stay, which is a great rarity.”
Pyne is ultra candid about his ambition to be prime minister:
“I think when you’re 15, and you decided you want to be a member of the House of Representatives, you kind of think ‘I’m going to dream big.’ So of course I dreamt to be prime minister”.
Reality, it appears, didn’t hit for quite a while.
“I think that week when Malcolm [Turnbull] was deposed and nobody was suggesting that I should be running for leader, it dawned on me that the generation that was being elected, which was Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, were a generation different to me.”
Spoiler alert: this story details how The War of the Worlds ends.
The latest screen adaption of H. G. Wells’ 1898 modern masterwork The War of the Worlds will hit our screens this week. Continuously in print since its first publication, the book is a literary gift that keeps on giving for producers and screenwriters. They recognise the story’s unerring capacity to find its mark with each generation.
Wells – who also wrote The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) – helped pioneer the science fiction genre when he conceived this astonishing book. With an eyewitness narration that reads grippingly still, it tells of a Martian invasion of Earth.
The new War of the Worlds stars Gabriel Byrne (ZeroZeroZero), Elizabeth McGovern (Downton Abbey) and Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People).
Shock and awe
Set in London, Wells depicts a complacent world; of men “serene in their assurance” of their dominion over the planet. But humans get the shock of another reality when suddenly visited upon by blood-feeding and squid-like creatures possessed of “intellects vast and cool” that are “unsympathetic” to Earthlings whose planet they had long “regarded with envious eyes”.
An advance party arrives inside metal cylinders shot from giant cannons stationed on Mars. From the cylinders come dozens of Martians, each operating a three-legged metal “fighting-machine” that attacks London’s helpless population by means of a “heat ray”. From these “whatever is combustible flashes into flame”, metal liquifies, glass melts and water “explodes into steam”.
Fleeing like rats from a burning ship, panic spreads like a contagion. The narrator describes a breakdown of law and order, and undergoes something of a breakdown himself.
Upper-class women arm themselves as they cross the country, because traditional deference has gone up in smoke. The “social body” of organisation – police, army, government – suffers “swift liquefaction”.
The Martians, however, had become too intelligent for their own good. They had made the Red Planet disease-free but forgotten about germ theory. And so while laying waste to London, they inhale a bug; a simple bacteria “against which their systems were unprepared” and so suffered a “death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be”.
London will rise again. The world has been spared. Humanity gets lucky — this time.
In the new Anglo-French television series, La Guerre Des Mondes, the action takes place in both London and France. Martian devastation is given wider latitude.
Tom Cruise and the red weed in the 2005 film. IMDB
One response is to consider our attraction to sci-fi. It sees the laws of science upended. Technology seems to make anything possible and to minds already accustomed to real technological transformation, sci-fi literature brings the now-thinkable future into the present.
But there’re less obvious elements to think about: themes that were important in 1898 and resonate still.
Invasion and imperialism
Wells’ book touched something existentially British during their Pax Britannica period of relative peace. Across the Channel, Europe seethed with diplomatic intrigue and tensions culminating in the first world war.
The new sci-fi genre connected to an older “invasion literature” genre; a long-standing British apprehension of the Continent, especially its renascent German threat. Wells hints at this when he writes that the arrival of the cylinders (before the Martians emerged from them) “did not [initially] make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done”.
Then there’s the imperialism angle. Was Wells tapping a source of late-Victorian shame at the true source of British wealth and power? Then, a quarter of the world map was coloured British Empire pink. London was the epicentre of modern imperialism — the coordination point for the suffering of millions and the plunder of their lands.
Moreover, Belgium, Germany, France, and also the USA, were engaged in the “scramble for colonies” in Africa and Asia. Under the veneer of sci-fi, Wells describes what it’s like to be a people facing a powerful invader.
A BBC version was set in Edwardian times.
Fear is the contagion
A very different perspective says something about our species and our idealised self-conception. In 1908 the Russian novelist and revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov, drew on WOTW for inspiration. In his novel Red Star protagonist Leonid travels to Mars to learn about communism from Martians who had made their own revolution and now lived in peace. Leonid despairs of the congenitally “unstable and fragile” nature of human relationships and looks to another planet for guidance.
The Earth-bound communist project of the 20th century ended badly, to say the least. But our human vulnerability to invasion, to tyranny, to economic catastrophe, and even to the bacteriological danger from microbes resistant to antibiotics, continues to haunt us.
The latest adaptation is set in our time with smartphones and the internet. Here again our 21st-century complacency is shattered, and our vulnerability laid bare.
Fear is a contagion in WOTW, and its Londoners show little heroism in the face of an alien invader.
Bacteria did in Wells’ Martians and might do for us too – unless drugs to overcome resistance are developed. Through sci-fi, we can explore our fear of the invisible foe.
Global warming might be our other enemy – the red skies of Australia’s last bushfire season fresh in our memory and reminiscent of Well’s novel.
Jeff Wayne created the progressive musical version of The War of the Worlds, featuring Justin Hayward (The Moody Blues), Chris Thompson (Manfred Mann’s Earth Band), Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy), Julie Covington and David Essex.
The narrative provides a hugely enjoyable fantasy. But we need to think about what science fiction might be doing to our relationship with science fact, especially if we consume it as a tranquilliser to displace and sublimate our fears of invisible threats.
If we do, then the incomprehensibility felt by Wells’ Martians may add that little bit more to our discord regarding the sources and solutions to global warming. Humans got lucky in The War of the Worlds. They didn’t need to do anything to survive. We can’t count on luck to save us or our planet.
War of the Worlds double episode will premiere July 9 on SBS and continue weekly from July 16. Episodes will be available on SBS On Demand on the same day as broadcast.
Former US national security adviser John Bolton is the latest ex-government official to rebuke the misconduct, ignorance and self-serving behaviour of the president, Donald Trump, in the form of a tell-all book. The Room Where It Happened details Trump’s idiosyncrasies, offers of favours to authoritarian leaders, lack of basic knowledge, and “obstruction of justice as a way of life”.
Promoting the book in a series of interviews, Bolton told one reporter that he hopes it will be a one-term presidency: “Two terms, I’m more troubled about,” he said.
Yet the battle around the publication is more than another Trumpian political scandal. It centres on the disclosure of US national security information, particularly the concept of “prior restraint” that allows the government to censor speech or expression before it has occurred.
The issues originate in whistleblowing in the 1970s when former officials spoke out against government wrongdoing. Bolton is certainly no whistleblower although the legacy of that era informs an ongoing struggle today around first amendment freedom of speech rights and state secrecy.
Beyond politics
In many respects, the case is emblematic of Trump’s White House. Bolton was in post from April 2018 to September 2019, the longest serving national security adviser under Trump, but now asserts the president “lacks the competence to carry out the job” and is not “fit for office.” When the first excerpts from the book emerged, Trump characteristically lashed out with a tweet full of insults and accusations.
The politics are certainly messy. Bolton, a hawkish Republican, is an opportunistic political operative. With publication of the book, he has angered Trump’s supporters. At the same time his revelations have not won him friends among the president’s numerous opponents.
The crux of the matter is not individual politics but whether Bolton was authorised to publish the memoir. On June 20, Judge Royce C Lamberth of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia denied a last-ditch Justice Department motion to block its release. Noting that excerpts were already printed and the book widely in circulation, he stated that: the “the damage is done. There is no restoring the status quo.”
The author nonetheless remains in trouble. The judge concluded that: “Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States” by potentially exposing secrets. The government could still sue Bolton for not following the prepublication review process that applies to everyone who signs a secrecy agreement.
The prepublication review system was created following a wave of whistleblowing that exposed government abuse in the 1970s. The most famous example was Daniel Ellsberg’s revelation of the Pentagon Papers, a top secret military report on US involvement in the Vietnam War. Other whistleblowers including Frank Snepp, Philip Agee, and Victor Marchetti wrote books detailing their experiences working for the Central Intelligence Agency. Not all of them revealed secrets but the fact they were speaking publicly raised concerns.
In response, the US government created a process requiring all current and former national security officials to submit material intended for a public audience before it could be published. This vetting process was intended to protect classified information.
The system has been riddled with problems from the beginning, including lengthy review processes and arbitrary decision-making around what can and cannot be published. The issues have afflicted both works that criticise and support US foreign relations. In 2019 the Knight First Amendment Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the system as dysfunctional and placing too much power in the hands of reviewers.
Frank Snepp: forfeited royalties for his book. Amazon
Authors who refuse to submit work for prepublication review are liable to be prosecuted. After publishing a 1977 book without approval, Snepp was ordered by the Supreme Court to forfeit all royalties to his former employer, the CIA. The court ruled that the book had caused “irreparable harm” to national security.
Bolton’s legal team claims he did not violate the secrecy agreement because he had satisfied all issues raised by the National Security Council’s senior director for prepublication review.
But the nature of the secrecy system and the review process is nebulous and allows the executive branch significant room for manoeuvre. While Trump’s assertion that “every conversation with me… [is] highly classified” is a stretch, the suggestion that “Bolton broke the law” and “must pay a very big price for this, as others have before him” is consistent with the broad authority afforded to presidents on national security matters.
The White House recently opened a second prepublication review process of Bolton’s book. The outcome of this latest review, which will be overseen by Judge Lambert, will determine his fate. If the courts follow historical precedent and rule in favour of the government, like Snepp before him, Bolton stands to forfeit his reported $2 million advance, and could face criminal liability that includes the possibility of a jail sentence.
Speech rights
While the author remains in legal peril, Bolton’s revelations continue to receive widespread attention. That the press can report national security secrets is rooted in another seminal whistleblowing case, Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other outlets. The Supreme Court ruled that prior restraint of the press was unconstitutional.
The First Amendment of the US constitution protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press from government interference. But when it comes to discussing national security information, the press enjoys greater protection than government employees.
In hyper-partisan times, it can be hard to look beyond the immediate political stakes. Yet the issues raised by this episode predate Bolton and Trump and are likely to persist long after them.
One grey morning in October 1970, in a crowded, tizzy-pink courtroom on the corner of Melbourne’s Russell and La Trobe Streets, crown prosecutor Leonard Flanagan began denouncing a novel in terms that were strident and ringing.
“When taken as a whole, it is lewd,” he declared. “As to a large part of it, it is absolutely disgusting both in the sexual and other sense; and the content of the book as a whole offends against the ordinary standards of the average person in the community today – the ordinary, average person’s standard of decency.”
Scribe
The object of Flanagan’s ire that day was the Penguin Books Australia edition of Portnoy’s Complaint. Frank, funny, and profane, Philip Roth’s novel — about a young man torn between the duties of his Jewish heritage and the autonomy of his sexual desires — had been a sensation the world over when it was published in February 1969.
Greeted with sweeping critical acclaim, it was advertised as “the funniest novel ever written about sex” and called “the autobiography of America” in the Village Voice. In the United States, it sold more than 400,000 copies in hardcover in a single year — more, even, than Mario Puzo’s The Godfather — and in the United Kingdom it was published to equal fervour and acclaim.
But in Australia, Portnoy’s Complaint had been banned.
Politicians, bureaucrats, police, and judges had for years worked to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under a system of censorship that pre-dated federation, works that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned. Bookstores were raided. Publishers were policed and fined. Writers had been charged, fined and even jailed.
Seminal novels and political tracts from overseas had been kept out of the country. Where objectionable works emerged from Australian writers, they were rooted out like weeds. Under the censorship system, Boccacio’s Decameron had been banned. Nabokov’s Lolita had been banned. Joyce’s Ulysses had been banned. Even James Bond had been banned.
There had been opposition to this censorship for years, though it had become especially notable in the past decade. Criticism of the bans on J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Norman Lindsay’s Redheap had prompted an almost complete revision of the banned list in 1958.
Outcry over the bans on Mary McCarthy’s The Group and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been loud and pronounced, and three intrepid Sydney activists had exposed the federal government to ridicule when they published a domestic edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley, an edited transcript of the failed court proceedings against Penguin Books UK for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Britain in 1960.
Penguin Books Australia had been prompted to join the fight against censorship by the three idealistic and ambitious men at its helm: managing director John Michie, finance director Peter Froelich, and editor John Hooker.
In five years, the three men had overhauled the publisher, improving its distribution machinery and logistics and reinvigorating its publishing list. They believed Penguin could shape Australian life and culture by publishing interesting and vibrant books by Australian authors.
They wanted Penguin’s books to engage with the political and cultural shifts that the country was undergoing, to expose old canards, question the orthodox, and pose alternatives.
Censorship was no small topic in all this. Those at Penguin saw censorship as an inhibition on these ambitions. “We’d had issues with it before, in minor ways,” Peter Froelich recalled, “and we’d have drinks we’d say, ‘It’s wrong! How can we fix it? What can we do? How do we bring it to people’s attention, so that it can be changed?’”
The answer emerged when they heard of the ban placed on Portnoy’s Complaint. Justifiably famous, a bestseller the world over, of well-discussed literary merit, it stood out immediately as a work with which to challenge the censorship system, just as its British parent company had a decade earlier.
Why not obtain the rights to an Australian edition, print it in secret, and publish it in one fell swoop? As Hooker — who had the idea — put it to Michie, “Jack, we ought to really publish Portnoy’s Complaint and give them one in the eye”.
The risks were considerable. There was sure to be a backlash from police and politicians. Criminal charges against Penguin and its three leaders were almost certain. Financial losses thanks to seized stock and fines would be considerable. The legal fees incurred in fighting charges would be enormous. Booksellers who stocked the book would also be put on trial. But Penguin was determined.
John Michie was resolute. “John offered to smash the whole thing down,” Hooker said, later. When he was told what was about to happen, federal minister for customs Don Chipp swore that Michie would pay: “I’ll see you in jail for this.” But Michie was not to be dissuaded.
‘People who took exception to it at the time are mostly dead,’ Roth said, some 40 years and 30 books after Portnoy’s Complaint was published.
A stampede
In July 1970, Penguin arranged to have three copies of Portnoy smuggled into Australia. In considerable secrecy, they used them to print 75,000 copies in Sydney and shipped them to wholesalers and bookstores around the country. It was an operation carried out with a precision that Hooker later likened to the German invasion of Poland.
The book was unveiled on August 31 1970. Michie held a press conference in his Mont Albert home, saying Portnoy’s Complaint was a masterpiece and should be available to read in Australia. Neither he nor Penguin were afraid of the prosecutions: “We are prepared to take the matter to the High Court.”
The next morning, as the trucks bearing copies began to arrive, bookstores everywhere were rushed. At one Melbourne bookstore, the assistant manager was knocked down and trampled by a crowd eager to buy the book and support Penguin. “It was a stampede,” he said later. A bookstore manager in Sydney was amazed when the 500 copies his store took sold out in two-and-a-half hours.
All too soon, it was sold out. And with politicians making loud promises of retribution, the police descended.
Bookstores were raided. Unsold copies were seized. Court summons were delivered to Penguin, to Michie, and to booksellers the whole country over. A long list of court trials over the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint and its sale were in the offing.
A stellar line-up
So the trial that opened on the grey morning of October 19 1970, in the Melbourne Magistrates Court, was only the first in what promised to be a long battle.
Neither Michie nor his colleagues were daunted. They had prepared a defence based around literary merit and the good that might come from reading the book. They had retained expert lawyers and marshalled the cream of Australia’s literary and academic elite to come to their aid.
Patrick White would appear as a witness for the defence. So too would academic John McLaren, The Age newspaper editor Graham Perkin, the critic A.A. Phillips, the historian Manning Clark, the poet Vincent Buckley, and many more. They were unconcerned by Flanagan’s furious denunciations, by his shudders of disgust, and by his caustic indictments of Penguin and its leaders.
They were confident in their cause. As one telegram to Michie said:
ALL BEST WISHES FOR A RESOUNDING VICTORY FOR LITERATURE AND LIBERTY.
This is an edited extract from Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins, published by Scribe.
At the BookShelf 
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