The other day, I put out a note on the book The Cruel Sea.  Last night I watched the movie again – for the first time in half a century.  It is a superb adaptation of a great book – about something we must never forget.  It is very moving – often painfully so – and delivered by a cast that included those who would go on to great careers on the stage doing Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov.

But from the very first shot, and the voice over of Jack Hawkins, I was seized by a sense of déjà vu.  This seventy-year-old movie was all about our lost innocence.  Unerringly so.  Back to 1953 and 24 Rosedale Road and Glen Iris State School.  No television.  Up to the Civic in Ashburton for the flicks.  And the newsreel and Hopalong Cassidy.  You could walk to school and play cricket in the middle of the road from a very young age.  Mac and Norma did not even have a car when we moved in.  I can distinctly recall seeing Mac turn the little pale grey Ford Anglia into our street for the first time.

And we had our heroes.  This film shows just how England – I should say Great Britain – won the war.  By spellbinding courage and determination of all the people, all classes of which are so movingly displayed in this wonderfully edited film.  And in other movies like The Dambusters – which Grandfather Les took me to see at Hampton – three times.  (Why not?  Three Australians hit their targets – and one got to say ‘bloody’ on the big screen!)

Then over time, the place of these heroes of a just war we had not sought but could not lose was taken by sports heroes.  War was tainted by the lies and crimes of Vietnam, and later Iraq and Afghanistan.  And no government can commit a worse crime than to send its young men to die in a war entered into on a lie.  (And that comes from someone who was balloted out of the Vietnam draft.  Our government used a lottery to select our young men to be killed in war.)

Then those who had survived the war of those great movies got snaky with those who came back from Vietnam – and I am told that some of those now get snaky with those coming back from the Middle East.  The logic is as appalling as the simple want of human decency.  Our treatment of those who come back from wars not covered in vine leaves is a massive stain on this immature nation’s short history among white people.

My namesake got the VC for the raid on the dams, and I went to Holland to mourn at his grave.  Now our VC winner has been bankrolled by a deluded mogul to show himself as a murderous fraud in the cesspit of a Federal Court libel action.

And for some time now, our major sports have had to live as part of the entertainment industry that depends on television ratings – so that we have to fight to keep sacred the ritual of the AFL Grand Final being played at the time it has always been played at – in the bloody afternoon.  (The shift to evenings during the season put me off.  We Demons went to the MCG after lunch at the Prince Alfred – later saying that our only mistake was to leave the pub, because we usually got bashed up at the footy.)

And now we are choking under the evil of gaming and the dreadful cowardice of our governments and complicity of the screamingly well-paid sports administrators, who amble happily between the nation’s finest and the gutter.

Where, then, does that leave those who were my age when The Cruel Sea came out when they look to find their heroes?  Tina Turner notwithstanding, we need all the heroes we can find.  But, I gather, the first thing we must try to do is to save these children from the curse of their own reclusive virtual unreality.  That is a trap and vice my generation never had to face, and my mind misgives about what may happen next.  People who are clever are so often so dangerous.

But the Grand Final is at hand, and that is as close as you can get to a sacred day in Melbourne.  It is one of those big days – journées – of this city – which happens to be my home.  We have not yet lost our battle for sport, and I am fairly confident that we will overcome the forces of darkness.  What follows is a celebration of our Australian sports that you may have seen before, and which is part of a book I shall shortly submit for publication

Carpe diem!

We that are old had the best of it.

Extract from The Pursuit of Happiness.

For the rest – for those of us who are left to grow old – we have the memory of those afternoons when the autumn leaves were falling and being burnt in the gutters, and this of itself brought out the smell of eucalypt and liniment – and the smell of white paint on freshly cut grass – and the sight of those stocky fifties’ men breaking through the streamers, spitting on their hands, and waiting to play their part in this great celebration of ritual at this peculiar and monstrous temple of theirs that some call the Shrine.  Real Anzacs – Brylcream, basin-cuts, jock-straps, and all – but less tats back then. 

You could just about smell the bloody game – and the Foster’s, and the Four ‘n Twenties, and the Rosella tomato sauce.  (You got the full whack of Rosella on the train into the MCG between South Yarra and Richmond.)  You wore black nicks at home and white away; both had buckles, and the boots had stops and ankle covers (what a thrill for a boy to get his first pair); anyone who suggested that you could change the colours of the jumper was a dangerous lunatic and possibly a communist, or otherwise most dubiously pink.  All men and boys on both sides of the fence were equal for the cherished time allowed to them in that heaving, manly bubble.  The boys would grow to manhood in the shadow of their heroes, a Saturday arvo rite of passage.

It was a time when every second kid at the Glen Iris State School wore an Essendon jumper with number 10 on his back, and when enlightened parents took their kids to the Lightning Premiership so that they could tell their grandchildren that they had seen the great John Coleman.  (He is not now celebrated enough – he kicked twelve goals on debut.)  My folks took me one year – about 1953, I suppose – and Coleman marked about forty yards from me.  Kids don’t forget that kind of thing.  Coleman was up there with Phar Lap.

It was a time – 1956? – when a ten-year-old kid at a Grand Final with more than 100,000 there at the MCG would be terrified by being carried off his feet under the parapet at the old scoreboard, and a big, kind man would lean over, and reach down, and just reef the poor little bugger (me) out of the heaving mob. 

It was a time when you got used to being hoarse after the first couple of matches, but when number 31 for the Redlegs (Barassi) obviously sat on the right-hand side of God, or at least was proof positive that God exists.  And even the down sides had champions – like Peter Box at Footscray or Freddie Goldsmith at South (both won Brownlow Medals).

You kicked a paper footy where immortal giants had just been, and you went home knowing that God was in his heaven to listen to Chicken, Butch and the Baron on the Pelaco Inquest and the London Stores show.  And if you had won, you might just shout yourself a Pink Comic (the Sporting Globe) to celebrate.  And on the Monday, you could start getting ready for the next round. 

And then there was TV and then there was World of Sport – and the Sunday roast after the lawns were mowed.  Bliss, pure bliss.  And then there was the VFA of the day, and you would ring up at half time demanding to know when the fights would start.  (And on a bad day, the Channel 7 switchboard lady might query your sobriety.)

And in spring, you would climb those same stairs in the old Southern Stand at the MCG , and gaze on a completely different arena – a vast see of green peopled only by thirteen men in cream.  A different crowd in a different ground – but Boxing Day would bring the grudge match against the convicts (New South Wales) – and when Gordon Rorke bowled the first ball, the bloke who had brought you, a mate of your old man, stood up and informed the whole bloody crowd: ‘That bloody Irish bastard throws the bloody ball.’  (For a lay preacher and a judge’s associate, his language was a bit rough.  I just wanted to hide.)

And could anything ever compete with Lillee and Thompson serving it right up to the Poms at Melbourne’s other shrine?

All these vast public displays of fervid history form part of the character – the fibre if you like – of the City of Melbourne.

And outside of cricket and footy, you had Laver, Landy, Thompson, Rose, Brabham, and Carruthers.  You took it for granted that God’s country would give the world the best – and you felt desperately sorry for all those poor bastards overseas who would never even get to see the great Ronald Dale Barassi.

And what about those dreary days at Kardinia Park with the flat hats; and those days at Arden Street or the Junction Oval, when you bent your heads backwards all day to watch bombs from Glendinning or Super-boot fly over?  Or that day at Coburg – Coburg! – the end of the world was nigh! – when Phil Gibbs asked you on camera about the sacking of Norm Smith – and you were still getting over the Grand Final and the Frog’s response to Gabo’s two goals that had nearly landed in your lap?  And even the Zog – my mum, Norma – was stressed, although more decent than you or Wally Burns had been in the standing area leading up the 1964 Grand Final.

Or that day in the fifties when you went to Windy Hill – that thrice blasted heath – with a mate, whose eye will no longer fall on this note, and his dad.  Close game.  Beckwith, as was his wont, kicked the ball out all day with impunity.  Right on the bell, a Bomber does the same – probably by accident.  Brrrrrring!  A portly little Hitler-bludger scurries in bumptiously and points to the spot in an imperious Baptist kind of way.  Athol Webb, number 15 – decoy full forward – goes back and coolly slots it from the boundary line about 55 yards out.  Demons home by two points.  Dies irae.  Dies bloody irae!  ‘Stow that bloody Demon scarf, Son, keep your eyes to the front, don’t make eye-contact – this could get very bloody ugly’.  I still recall the train trip south.  Fraught.  Tricky.  Tense.

Or that day about thirty years later at Windy Hill with another mate, whose eye will not now fall on this note either, when it was so cold out there that you could only survive death from exposure by drinking more beer, and when you are querying your sanity for even turning up for this Arctic agony, and the Bombers have a player whose name causes an underground Hottentot rumble whenever he goes near the ball, and you know that you are mad, stark raving crackers.  And you go home and turn on Churchill, or music for great things beaten – Jussi Björling and another in the duet Au fond du temple saint – and your mate – your Anglo-Saxon mate, who was a rower – is just bawling his bloody eyes out! 

Or that sacred day of days at the Western Oval.  1987.  Oh, blessed time!  Hawthorn has to beat Geelong and the Dees have to beat the Doggies in the last game for us to be in the finals for the first time in 23 years.  We are losing both, and we are begging the Dogs to end it quickly – like a vet giving a dog the green dream.  Then number 2 (Flower) rose again; Dunstall put the Hawks up, and after an agony we are crying in our beer at Young and Jackson’s.  You take your girls to the Demons’ training, and they ask why are you crying again?  It has been a bloody long time between drinks, Girls, a bloody long time. 

And then we hand out lacings to North and South.  And then nemesis strikes!  We have beaten Hawthorn in a brutally tough Prelim at that human graveyard near Woop Woop.  Then the late Jim Stynes walks over the mark, and one of those inane crypto-fascist clowns commits the greatest war crime of all, and he hands the cherry to the only bastard on the planet who could slot it from there.  Condign revenge for that sausage roll so long ago by Athol Webb, the decoy full forward, out there on the blasted heath occupied by the flying Baptists.

Ah, yes – what was the word for it all?  Innocence, the lost innocence of a found boyhood, a little mirror of life held up before our shining schoolboy faces.

And then at last came the final series in 2021.  A mate from school, Ross, and a mate from the Bar, Chris, had shared with me various parts of the agony since 1964.  We had seen Melbourne lose more games than some people have had hot dinners.  Chris was Christopher Dane, QC – the rower who had bawled over Jussi Björling.  He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  This was going to be his last Grand Final – if we made it.  The pandemic meant that the finals, including the Grand Final, were not played at the MCG.  Chris could have made it there – but not to Perth for the Grand Final.  Ross and I would have attended all finals here, but we could not bring ourselves to watch the games live on TV – if someone else emailed a score, we could discuss it by that medium, and return to our Trappist cells to suffer alone and in silence.  We knew Dane watched it live.  The three of us watched the Grand Final live on TV and kept in touch through the ether.  Chris Dane died not long afterwards.

Well, Mate, they did it for you – and you made it to see them do it.  This one is for you, Chris, and all our unshed tears. 

Your testament might be in the email you sent Ross and me during the second semi-final – ‘You may be safe to turn the TV on now – they’re ten goals up in the last bloody quarter.’

And since I wrote this, the guy who as a young boy was there at Essendon with his dad and me in the 50s has also left us.  You were a bloody good footballer, yourself, Alan.

There is one more thing to say about sport.  Most of it involves teams – people coming together to achieve a shared goal.  It requires teamwork – people playing not so much for themselves as the team.  That is precisely what we see so little of in public life now – in politics or business.  The best teams are those whose members enjoy playing in the team the members of which share confidence in each other.  And the result helps fill the void of ritual left after the departure of God.  Money is poisonous in so much of sport, but its role in our community gets larger over time.   That is certainly the case in my life.

Australians romance about the role of sport in their lives.  For me, sport can resemble litigation – the contest contains the drama.  But sport is more than drama.  It is a catharsis, and we get the thrill of the contest, the succour of a secular liturgy, a feeling of release, and, above all, that sense of community and belonging.  Communion.  And when we look back  on the decline in religion, the lapse in education, and the rape of technology, we need all the relief we can get.  And we must do all we can to rid it of the curse of gaming.  Obscene wealth is one thing.  Orchestrated and murderous predation is another.  We are guilty of a national failure from which many are dying.

PS

It might be said that Donald Sinden launched his great career by getting second billing in The Cruel Sea (although even I recall the name Mogambo).  When young, he had Cary Grant good looks.  You can catch an interview with him about this movie at an advanced age.  He had what was called negative buoyancy .  That was interesting – the whole movie involving the ship was shot at sea.  They even had people who had sailed in it serving as extras in the engine room. 

Sinden was wonderful in Shakespeare.  He was a natural.  He was happily married, but that did not preclude him from befriending Bosie.  Those English people from the West End have that boulevard savoir faire.  And they bat so deep.  It’s just as well the buggers never managed that in cricket.

It is not surprising that most comment on the war in Gaza is very emotional.  For many reasons, many if not most people will find it hard to be objective because of something in their upbringing or faith.  They will have a bias – or, if you prefer, a prejudice.  But, and this isn’t surprising either, very few of them will admit it.  That is not part of their upbringing or faith.

What is surprising is how often each side gets criticised for not talking about the weakness of the case of their side.  You see it all the time.  We saw it in response to what I thought was a very sensible address by Louise Adler.  She got criticised for not saying more for Isreal or more against Hamas.  And you very rarely see the diagnostician take their own medicine.

Imagine this at the footy with Storm v Eels or Carlton v Collinwood.  ‘OK, Comrade, you can say what you like about my lot, as long as you acknowledge that your lot are bludgers, urgers, hit-men, and downright fairies.’  And get ready for a very big dental bill.

It is one thing to say that the ABC, or anyone in journalism, should be ‘balanced’.   The position of the passing commentator is different.  And even the ABC would have a problem giving equal time to a serial liar and fantasist who trades on division in the community – like Donald Trump.

Even the law of defamation allows that we are likely to hold views strongly and express them on a partisan basis.  You do not lose your defence of fair comment because you show some prejudice.  In th name of Heaven, how many of us are free of prejudice?  This part of our law of defamation does not require you to jump the hurdle of reasonableness.

As matters stand, so much correspondence in the press about Gaza comes down to what eight-year-olds did behind the shelter shed at Glen Iris State School in 1953: ‘You started it’.  Or – ‘You were worse than me.’

That is neither surprising nor uplifting.

At first on advice, but then on instinct and experience, I have kept my head down on the war in Palestine.  If you don’t, you are liable to get your head shot off, by either side.  Louise Adler had a note in The Age on Saturday which was met with the usual response from the usual suspects.  One passage prompts two reflections.  ‘…. peace cannot be premised on the subjugation of a people.  Violence only returns.’

The first is obvious; the second is elemental and instinctive. 

Sparta, Athens, Rome and England learned the first.  So has every other aspiring emperor.  It is now the turn of Russia.  The most obvious example occurred after the most brutal war in history.  The attempt to subjugate the German people by the Treaty of Versailles led ineluctably to a war that was even more gruesome.  It was only left to Keynes to say why and for Hitler to say how.

Humanity has been reluctant to leave revenge to the law, much less to God.  The problem is canvassed in the Oresteia and Hamlet and so much more.  It is just a fact of life that violence begets violence.

Any community, of people or nations, depends on people showing tolerance and restraint.  Violence tests our subscription to that rule. 

As it seems to me, there is an unstated premise to so much of what is said on both sides in this current conflict.  That is that it is in order for me to treat you as being somehow different because you come from a different tribe or subscribe to a different faith.  That premise contradicts the Enlightenment view of civilisation which says that each of us has our own worth or dignity merely because we are human.  It also banishes tolerance and restraint.

I do not believe in original sin – or any religion – but if I did, the above would for me be its source.  Because of what my ancestors did, or what others did to my ancestors, I should be treated differently.  The same goes for you.  That state of mind inevitably breeds conflict.  And even it is based on an inarticulate premise – that I have the right to judge others and act toward them based on that judgment.

And I see no relief from any of this.  It look so be part of our doom as human beings.  One that does not afflict gorillas.

We saw that King John scuttled off to the Vatican to get Magna Carta annulled – and to pawn his whole realm.  That is an annihilation of sovereignty, rather than a mere incursion.  You can still detect something like a purr of recognition in an English audience to Shakespeare’s play when King John tells the papal legate ‘from the mouth of England’ that no ‘Italian priest’ shall collect revenue ‘in our dominions’.  He goes on to refer to our ‘great supremacy’ – a word we will come back to.

The issue blew up fatally under Henry II when Beckett sought to shield his priests from the ordinary law of the land.  Here was another challenge to the authority of the English crown – a dint in its story that would enrage Henry VIII – and would be unthinkable today.

If we then move forward to the sixteenth century, we are at the end of that phase of history called the Middle Ages.  The advisers consulted by the crown are now meeting in what we call a parliament.  Its growth is fragmented, and, as ever, unplanned, but it is beginning to resemble the parliament we know today.  By the reign of Elizabeth, it can cause real trouble to the crown.  The jostle for power has begun.

The time of feudalism is about spent.  Under that system, the standing of people in the community would be determined by a convoluted system of ranking of a kind that people would later see in the civil service of India or Prussia.   Too much of it was fixed from birth.  We are moving to what is called the modern phase of history, where your standing was determined by your efforts and what you could negotiate. 

In other words, we are seeing what Sir Henry Maine called the movement from ‘status to contract’.  That statement may be large – large enough to be one of those that I suspect made Maitland nervous – but it is a very useful prism when we come to look at what we like to call ‘progress’.  Indeed, one reason the common law judges were slow to give legal effect to an agreement between parties may have been that they thought they would be giving people the power to make their own law.  The French Code says in terms that ‘Contracts legally made have the force of law between those who have made them.’

There is another movement that we can observe.  Kant said that enlightenment was our emergence from our self-incurred immaturity.  ‘Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’ – the problem, Kant said, was not a lack of understanding, but a lack of resolution and courage to use it without help from someone else.  That is a riveting insight – that bears directly on our professional conduct today and the failures of our courts. 

It also underlies what we know as the Protestant revolt or Reformation.  As nations matured, their peoples did not just seek to reduce the place of the supernatural, or magic, in their lives – they wanted to reduce the role of the middle man, the priest.  They were coming to the view that the church might be causing more trouble than it was worth.  In medieval Europe, there were three groups – those who fought, those who worked, and those who prayed.  Well, that does sound very medieval – and one group was ready to take a hit.

The protest of Luther was about faith and the church.  The English revolt had next to nothing to do with either.  Putting Harry’s errant carnality to one side, the issue was not merely political, but constitutional.  The Tudors emerged from the splintering of the nation that came with the Wars of the Roses.  The paramount duty of the crown was to secure the succession.  Because of a conflict of interests, the pope could not accommodate the English king.  So, the English broke away.

They did so not by royal proclamation, but by a series of acts of parliament.  By doing that, the crown tacitly acknowledged that ultimately sovereignty in England rested in the crown in parliament – or at least, that is what the parliament and its champions could argue. 

Here was a real accretion of power.  Among other things, the title of the crown, and the government of the church, all derived from the parliament.  The church became in substance a department of state.  The crown was at the head of both, and by and large the Anglican church has behaved itself since, and not caused trouble to the crown or the nation.

There was an Act of Supremacy.  It followed an act that had a recital of complacent self-satisfaction that Jefferson would later mimic – ‘Where, by diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire….’  It’s like Magna Carta.  ‘Nothing much going on here, Officer – just a spot of cleaning up some odds and ends with those clerical wallahs.’

Here, then, was a declaration of independence.  Fine – but what did it have to do with the law? 

Well, the English had to defend it against a Spanish invasion.  The soldiers of the Vatican would certainly have burnt Elizabeth at the stake as a heretic; would-be assassins had already been offered Paradise.  After that speech at Tilbury from their queen, England was about to flower as a nation.

In the next century, the English would finally come to terms with their king.  But now they had dealt with God and his church.  After they had fixed things with their king, they could turn their full attention to the aristocracy. 

In 1789, the French blew up all three at once, and they have still not recovered from the explosion.  The Russian experience hardly bears mention – and we are about to face another problem with them as a result.  People of the cloth have wrought misery on their flocks in places like Greece, Italy, Spain and Russia.  The Americans erected solid barriers under their constitution, and they are now being torn apart by illiterate devotees of a faith perverted by mammon, and people who prefer fiction to fact.

The Anglican vicar, then, comes down to us now as quite a relief.

If you were born in Australia in 1945, as I was, you were likely to have put in front of you, when you could read, books about the war.  When mum’s parents joined the Herald-Sun Book Club, it was full of titles like The Dambusters, Boldness Be My Friend, and Two Eggs on My Plate.  Perhaps the best known was The Cruel Sea – especially after the launch of the film with a cast led by Jack Hawkins. 

The author was a natural and most graceful writer.  During the war, he had served in and commanded the kind of ships dealt with in the book – the smaller naval vessels that accompanied convoys on the Western Approaches by attacking German U-boats with depth-charges.  The Germans could by attacking Britain’s supply lines have forced it to sur for peace.  Gradually, the British navy got on top, but, like Waterloo, it was a damned close-run thing.  Monsarrat’s knowledge of all this comes through on every page, but he is just as much at home in discussing the private lives of the sailors.  The result is a wonderful and moving classic of the genre.

The novel covers the whole duration of the war.  It centres on two ships, a corvette, HMS Compass Rose, and a frigate, HMS Saltash, and two officers, Ericson and Lockhart.  We go through the commissioning of both ships and the training of their crews before they go into action.  Ericson is the senior officer and a professional seaman.  Lockhart is a journalist and Ferraby, the other sub-lieutenant, is a bank clerk. 

Their characters are very different – and so is their performance.  At the start, they have to put up with a dreadful first lieutenant, who is Australian, and it is a mercy when they lose him.  (To return to Oz and, as we later hear, bullshit about his experiences.)  Lockhart becomes Number One on each ship, and is in many ways the central character.  He and Ericson are very close, while still observing the discipline of rank.  They are joined by Morell, who is a barrister, married to a very attractive actress.  Ericson is the very model of the captain of a warship in wartime.  He is fully supported by his wife – but not by her mother.  He has a son at risk in the merchant navy.  When Saltash comes in, we meet new officers.

All the time, we are learning of the traditions and customs of the Royal Navy.  That is an institution that has been vital to the nation and its people since well before Trafalgar.  (We learn that Lockhart idolises Nelson and can quote him at will – something he must have picked up before he signed up.)  So we learn all this as they go – and we go.  It is utterly engrossing, because the writer is so obviously at home with his theme and his craft.  The whole book is imbued with a sense of dedication to all those who served, especially those who did not make it back.

There are scenes that stay in our minds – in my case for about sixty years.  After a very hard convoy, Compass Rose returns to Liverpool which is still smoking after nights of heavy bombing.  Two ratings in uniform turn the corner to see if the house of the sister of one of them is still standing.  On a later run, Ericson has to decide whether he should run over his own countrymen in order to pursue a U-boat.  No man or woman should ever be put in that position – but you could say that about almost anything that happens in this dreadful war which calls to mind life and death in the trenches at the Somme.

 Some men crack, and some wives play up – the two may be related.  Lockhart falls madly in love with the belle of the Wrens, and she reciprocates it – presumably to the sadness of many sailors  There is a Don Quixote sequence of the grotesque horrors of the war, and the sequence dealing with life and death after Compass Rose is torpedoed contains writing that is as strong as that left to us by the great Russian novelists.

The cast of characters is delicious.  When the officers are introduced in the ward-room of Saltash, one causes a pause when he (Holt) announces that he went to Eton.  The Australian – ‘Guns’ – who is, thank heaven, nothing like the first one, decides to take the Etonian on and asks him if he was taught about Australia.  ‘Well, yes.  Convicts and rabbits.’  Holt has the hots for the Wren whom Lockhart will fall for.  Things may be a little different below decks.  Stoker Evans has been putting it about to excess.  It all catches up with him when his ship is torpedoed.

But he could guess what could happen now.  The wives would combine against the other women, and rout them; they would then combine again, this time against him, in the dock for seduction, in prison for debt, in jail for bigamy: he could imagine no future that was not black and complicated, and no way out of it, of any sort….It seemed to him, in a moment of insight, that he had had a good run – too good a run to continue indefinitely – and that the moment had come for him to pay for it.  If he did not pay for it now – in the darkness, in the cold oily water in private – then he would have to meet a much harsher reckoning when he got home.

That is how this writer links what happens at sea in the war to what goes on at home.  It is wonderful writing – as much like a play or opera as a novel.

Here is how the author sums up near the end.

….no quiet end could obscure the triumph and pride inherent in this victory, with its huge cost – 30,000 seamen killed, 3000 ships sent to the bottom in this one ocean – and its huge toll of 780 U-boats sunk, to even the balance.

It would live in history, because of its length and unremitting ferocity: it would live in men’s minds for what it did to themselves and to their friends, and to the ships they often loved.  Above all, it would live in naval tradition and become a legend, because of its crucial service to an island at war, its price in sailors’ lives, and its golden prize – the uncut life-line to the sustaining outer world.

In truth, this book shows how England (Great Britain, I should say)  won the war – through the grim determination of its fighters and the true grit of its people at home.  This memorial is for me as good a read as any book in this two hundred book collection.

Following the events described in previous posts, I sent the letter below to the Victorian Attorney-General with a copy to the Supreme Court.  Curiously, the day after, VMIA through its lawyers offered to indemnify me in accordance with the policy.

Dear Attorney-General,

VMIA and VCAT

I am writing to you by email in order to bring to the attention of the first Law Officer of this state issues relating to the administration of justice in this state.

They relate to the events referred to in the note that follows under this letter below.  That material has been posted on my website, and it is included in the attached book The War Against Humanity which I will shortly submit for publication.

I have set out my complaints about the breakdown – that is what it is – of two government agencies.  ‘One dying government agency colludes with another to maim the system.’

That is bad enough.  Two things make it worse.

First, for a good part of thirty years in my service to Her Majesty, I devoted a lot of time and energy on two tribunals – including about eighteen on the AAT or VCAT presiding over the Taxation Division – doing all that was necessary to avoid the abyss into which VCAT has now fallen.  I cannot recall a case where a matter referred to me was not dealt with in under six weeks.  (And that was also the case with a major and sensitive public inquiry into gaming.)  Now after six months, I am still waiting for VCAT to say if and when something might happen, and for VMIA or its panel law firm to say it is ready to discuss the dispute.  I am not even clear what the dispute is.

Secondly, for the reasons given, these failings affect the Supreme Court.  The legislature makes a law that makes a member of the judiciary the person responsible for the management of the Tribunal.  That is to say, parliament passes an act that makes the judiciary responsible for an organ of the executive.  Then the executive – the government – makes it impossible for the Tribunal to operate as it should by denying it the funds and resources it needs in order to operate responsibly.  The first was a mistake.  The second is a calamity.

It is obvious that these issues go to the heart of the administration of justice in this state.  Very many Victorians are suffering badly from a persistent failure of governments of both sides to honour the first precept of Magna Carta.  They have denied justice by delaying it.

Because the issue involves the Supreme Court, I will send their Honours a copy of this letter.

May I ask for the considered response of my government to my grievances? 

I would be glad to discuss them face to face.

Yours truly

Geoffrey Gibson,

6/46 Fehon St,

Yarraville, 3013

O427156583

5 September, 2024

Addendum to letter

Two failed government entities

VCAT is a Victorian tribunal that reviews administrative decisions  of Victorian government agencies.  I presided over its Taxation Division for 18 years.  VMIA is a government insurance body.  Its decisions are subject to review by VCAT.  I set out blow a post I put out about my dealings  with them.

A failure of government, not just governance

This bleak tale is about the death of government.

I am 78, in indifferent health – lung cancer in remission, and incurable emphysema.  If it matters, I am a retired lawyer on a part pension who presided over statutory tribunals on a sessional basis for thirty of my fifty years in the law – and got sacked from both.

Recently, I made my final move, to Yarraville, to be close to my daughter and a base hospital.  Then I discovered an issue in rising damp in my swish recently built apartments, and that the whole block was riddled with the problem – to the extent that the government insurer, VMIA, just cannot keep up.

The builder is broke and should be behind bars.  The rectification will cost more than $90,000 – eight times what I paid for my first house. 

I lodged a claim with the government insurer.  Or I thought I did.  The VMIA robots had other ideas.

Dear Geoffrey Gibson

This email is to inform you that your claim 00043068 is currently in the status of DRAFT and has not been submitted. The Draft 00043068 will be automatically closed if you do not submit it within five days of this email….

That missive landed on 25 December.  Happy Christmas, Citizen Geoffrey. 

Then VMIA rejected my claim on grounds that my lawyers say are unsustainable, for reasons given in VCAT precedents. 

I issued proceedings there very reluctantly, because delay is a byword – not just months, but years.  They are even more financially crippled than VMIA, whose name is now notorious among the many thousands of victims of shysters.

So I said that we should meet to discuss settlement, and set out my legal advice.  Six months later, I still await a response – from a government agency that I fund that is supposed to be a ‘model litigant’.  I am getting the usual runaround from lawyers.  There are many claims on VMIA on this bombsite, but it appoints lawyers randomly – one hand does not know what the other does.  Now, my local MP, after strenuous endeavour, says that the Minister cannot intervene.

That being so, I may have to take out a reverse mortgage, and possibly bequeath a Bleak House law suit to my daughter.

So much for thirty years’ service to my government.

I have three complaints.  Government has failed to enforce its building regulations, or adequately to fund and staff VMIA.  Above all, it has let VCAT become a waste-land.  These failures have nothing to do with party politics.

The VCAT collapse is dreadful.  Denying justice is the ultimate failure.  There is a simple enough remedy.  Appoint a dozen or so barristers of ten years standing on a sessional basis with instructions to resolve all disputes within six weeks of filing.  It takes some effort and experience, but I managed it for thirty years – and with very tricky cases.  (My little case could take a morning – if someone says what the point is.)

The whole point of the profession is to get people through the wounding roundabout as soon as practicable.  Justice delayed is justice denied.

It gets worse.  VCAT is not a judicial body.  This tribunal is part of the executive – and it has therefore been shredded like most of our civil service.  Its members lack the constitutional protection that judges have.

But it has a Supreme Court judge as its President.  And its statute says that the President and Vice Presidents are ‘to direct the business of the Tribunal’ and ‘are responsible for the management of the administrative affairs of the Tribunal.’  

A judge is therefore running part of the civil service.  So much for the separation of powers.  The irony is that after killing off responsible government under the Westminster System, government has chosen to make a judge responsible for directing civil servants.

Judges may be driven to act, or precluded from acting, by ‘government policy.’  That is anathema.  I should know.  When permanent members, whose job was threatened, usurped my role as head the Taxation Division, after its first eighteen years, the then President, to the horror of Treasury, said that ‘government policy’ stopped him from intervening.  No judge should ever be put in that position.  The whole process was fraught.  Good advisers stopped me from suing – but it still smoulders, woundingly.

VCAT is a festering failure.  The scandal now is public.  A superior justice is obliged to preside over a sustained denial of justice.

I set out these misgivings in a book, The Making of a Lawyer, 2008.  I said that judges who have to play a part in politics will do it badly and will debase their currency.  The result?  Rien.

We Victorians are paying a dreadful price for the attrition of the civil service by both parties over two generations.  VMIA and VCAT just stand mute like Easter Island statues.  One dying government agency colludes with another to maim the system.  The government of the State of Victoria looks to be broken – juristically,  financially, and morally.

Welcome to the Kingdom of Nothingness.

In March, I put out a note on Macbeth.  In listening to it again the other night, I jotted the following four notes in my Commonplace Book.

Its structure reminds me of Tosca or La Bohème.  It crests in a way that the text cannot recover.  At about 3.4.  (I see I had made a similar remark before.)

Banquo and Brutus have something in common.  They are too decent to succeed in the politics of blood.

The fascination lies in the comparative graphs of the psychopathy of Macbeth and his wife.  Her dissolution may be more ‘tragic’ – a fraught term – than the Richard III-like descent of Macbeth.  In the argot of our time, she could talk the talk, but not walk the walk.  Macbeth will go down like Don Giovanni.

As in other tragedies of this playwright, the poetry is so riveting that it is more like an opera than a straight play in the theatre.

In light of the behaviour of Bendigo Bank about scamming, I decided to switch to the Commonwealth Bank – in which I also hold shares.  (You may recall that I had previously written off NAB.)  This led to further, and in some sense, worse unhappiness.  

 I had been a customer of the Commonwealth Bank through the CDIA account of my self-managed superfund for more than 10 years.  Commsec, which is owned by the bank, operates the shareholdings, and the CDIA account handles the cash. The Commonwealth Bank therefore knows all there is to know about my super – including the pension I receive from it.  It was about to begin to receive  my C’th pension.

When I first went to the Williamstown branch, I took my home Certificate of Title.  There is no mortgage .  I was told they did not need to see my title.  I then and there opened two personal accounts that showed up on my screen with the CDIA account.

I expected  two credit cards.  I got two debit cards.  One bounced publicly at the Yarraville restaurant I patronise – no need to blush there, as I was dealing with literate adults.

So, I then spent another hour at Williamstown completing forms with staff and explaining the above.  We settled on a limit of $5000.  The accounts held by the bank showed it held shares for my fund worth forty times that amount – which is less than what I receive each month by my two pensions.

Could the bank seriously say it needed  more documentation to allow credit of $5000?

You bet – just wait for the robots to swing into action.  They wanted more documents about the fund they had held from its inception. This of course came in a DO NOT REPLY email – or by referral to my inbox at Netbank – so aping MyGov.  In illiterate gibberish. 

So, back to Willy for another session of an hour or so – trying to explain this madness.  I took in the fund’s most recent tax return.  Later that day I rang the bank in response to another DO NOT REPLY  – and I got referred to my Inbox.

Please upload the following to document to support your credit card application: 1. most latest Self Manage Super Fund Member Statement (please note the document provided was too old)

And so it goes.  Senseless gibberish.  Next will come another DNR suggesting I call them – and endure the endless delay and deceitful palaver – to find out the demands of ‘Cards Verification’ – whose word is command.  Why not just say what is required – and in a way that the customer can respond to? 

Perhaps, the bank might even call the customer!  Just imagine buying a Toyota and getting a DNR from the dealer asking you to ring a crowded switch to ascertain the next mandate from Tokyo.  That deal would be off the table with the speed of light.  And you would be relieved to be relieved from dealing with such people.

I had so far spoken with about eight people at the bank.  None had the wherewithal or authority to complete a simple banking transaction – and a least some felt uneasy about that.  You can bet that the rich don’t get this brush-off.  There is this vice like determination to sustain a regime that does not allow dignity to operatives within – or respect or common decency for customers without.  It is a dreadful part of the war against humanity.

According to the press, the CEO of this bank gets paid north of $7M a year.  That is more than ten times what Australians pay the Chief Justice of the High Court.  And for that, the customers, if not the shareholders(including me in each), get a ship that is breaking up and sinking before our eyes.

It is as if the CBA is playing snakes and ladders with our psyche – or sanity.  Those who devise this cruel mode of contact must be bent on removing any humanity from the dealings between the bank and its customers.  Hence the grinding closure of branches and ATMs.  It did not take me long to conclude the CBA was more brutal than the Bendigo Bank.  And it shows on the premises of the branch.  The atmosphere is like that of Centrelink – a war zone – with the same message about not answering back in anger.  And do those who earn – if that’s the word – say forty times what those on the shop floor earn still have the gall to talk about a ‘social licence’?

This bleak tale is about the death of government.

I am 78, in indifferent health – lung cancer in remission, and incurable emphysema.  If it matters, I am a retired lawyer on a part pension who presided over statutory tribunals on a sessional basis for thirty of my fifty years in the law – and got sacked from both.

Recently, I made my final move, to Yarraville, to be close to my daughter and a base hospital.  Then I discovered an issue in rising damp in my swish recently built apartments, and that the whole block was riddled with the problem – to the extent that the government insurer, VMIA, just cannot keep up.

The builder is broke and should be behind bars.  The rectification will cost more than $90,000 – eight times what I paid for my first house. 

I lodged a claim with the government insurer.  Or I thought I did.  The VMIA robots had other ideas.

Dear Geoffrey Gibson

This email is to inform you that your claim 00043068 is currently in the status of DRAFT and has not been submitted. The Draft 00043068 will be automatically closed if you do not submit it within five days of this email….

That missive landed on 25 December.  Happy Christmas, Citizen Geoffrey. 

Then VMIA rejected my claim on grounds that my lawyers say are unsustainable, for reasons given in VCAT precedents. 

I issued proceedings there very reluctantly, because delay is a byword – not just months, but years.  They are even more financially crippled than VMIA, whose name is now notorious among the many thousands of victims of shysters.

So I said that we should meet to discuss settlement, and set out my legal advice.  Six months later, I still await a response – from a government agency that I fund that is supposed to be a ‘model litigant’.  I am getting the usual runaround from lawyers.  There are many claims on VMIA on this bombsite, but it appoints lawyers randomly – one hand does not know what the other does.  Now, my local MP, after strenuous endeavour, says that the Minister cannot intervene.

That being so, I may have to take out a reverse mortgage, and possibly bequeath a Bleak House law suit to my daughter.

So much for thirty years’ service to my government.

I have three complaints.  Government has failed to enforce its building regulations, or adequately to fund and staff VMIA.  Above all, it has let VCAT become a waste-land.  These failures have nothing to do with party politics.

The VCAT collapse is dreadful.  Denying justice is the ultimate failure.  There is a simple enough remedy.  Appoint a dozen or so barristers of ten years standing on a sessional basis with instructions to resolve all disputes within six weeks of filing.  It takes some effort and experience, but I managed it for thirty years – and with very tricky cases.  (My little case could take a morning – if someone says what the point is.)

The whole point of the profession is to get people through the wounding roundabout as soon as practicable.  Justice delayed is justice denied.

It gets worse.  VCAT is not a judicial body.  This tribunal is part of the executive – and it has therefore been shredded like most of our civil service.  Its members lack the constitutional protection that judges have.

But it has a Supreme Court judge as its President.  And its statute says that the President and Vice Presidents are ‘to direct the business of the Tribunal’ and ‘are responsible for the management of the administrative affairs of the Tribunal.’  

A judge is therefore running part of the civil service.  So much for the separation of powers.  The irony is that after killing off responsible government under the Westminster System, government has chosen to make a judge responsible for directing civil servants.

Judges may be driven to act, or precluded from acting, by ‘government policy.’  That is anathema.  I should know.  When permanent members, whose job was threatened, usurped my role as head the Taxation Division, after its first eighteen years, the then President, to the horror of Treasury, said that ‘government policy’ stopped him from intervening.  No judge should ever be put in that position.  The whole process was fraught.  Good advisers stopped me from suing – but it still smoulders, woundingly.

VCAT is a festering failure.  The scandal now is public.  A superior justice is obliged to preside over a sustained denial of justice.

I set out these misgivings in a book, The Making of a Lawyer, 2008.  I said that judges who have to play a part in politics will do it badly and will debase their currency.  The result?  Rien.

We Victorians are paying a dreadful price for the attrition of the civil service by both parties over two generations.  VMIA and VCAT just stand mute like Easter Island statues.  One dying government agency colludes with another to maim the system.  The government of the State of Victoria looks to be broken – juristically,  financially, and morally.