POLITICAL
VISION
POLITICAL
VISION A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH AUSTRALIAN POLITICS
ANDREW CHAPMAN
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Political Vision
Foreword Echo Publishing 12 Northumberland Street, South Melbourne Victoria 3205 Australia echopublishing.com.au First published 2015 Part of the Bonnier Publishing Group www.bonnierpublishing.com Copyright © Andrew Chapman, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cover and internal design by Philip Campbell Design Printed in China National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Chapman, Andrew, photographer. Political vision : a photographic journey through Australian politics / Andrew Chapman ; Don Watson. ISBN: 9781760067366 (hardback) Politicians--Australia--Pictorial works. Political campaigns--Australia--Pictorial works. Politics and government--Pictorial works. Other Creators/Contributors: Watson, Don--writer of added text. 324.0994 Twitter/Instagram: @echo_publishing facebook.com/echopublishingAU
Page 8: Bob Hawke empathises with workers whilst visiting a Toyota factory at Port Melbourne, August 1991 Page 10: John Howard and his family sing ‘Advance Australia Fair’ at the Wentworth Hotel, Sydney, after Howard’s sweeping victory in the 2004 federal elections
Dedicated to Chris, Gill, Sally, Cath, Will and Gerry The little democracy I was born into…
Politics is not the only human activity where envy and pride, love and ambition meet every day as a matter of course. They meet pretty well wherever people go. But only in politics do these base elements of human nature meet daily with self-sacrifice, ideology, dutiful public service, high principle and patriotism; along with bastardry, humbug and betrayal, and the more mundane motives of superannuation, travel allowances and free tickets. Sometimes politics can seem to be little more than blather, an elaborate disguise for nest-feathering, a cynical charade and, for that matter, a tiresome one. It’s a game that attracts all types and sometimes the dullards and cynics are the winners. As consuming passions go, politics can be pretty ordinary. But in a good patch there’s nothing like it: the most fun you can have standing up, folk used to say. Ambition is inescapable and so powerful in the human breast, Machiavelli decided, because Nature has made it possible to desire everything but not to attain everything. Millions of corpses have wired us to fear ambition uncontained. The ambitious are wise to throttle down their inner drive, keep it commensurate with demonstrated abilities and usefulness, balanced by their altruism or anything that might pass for such a thing. Save the ambition for the savage moment of release, and then come forth sphinxlike and tell them you did it for the country, for democracy, for decency, for them. Very often there’s some noble truth in the midst of this dissembling, but that makes the business of politics no less savage. Politics is power: but what makes it different to power in, say, Hollywood films or the Old Testament, is that in politics power is denied. Richard Carleton’s famous question to Bob Hawke on the night he deposed Bill Hayden riled Hawke so terribly because it went to the naked fact of the matter, the fact of power: ‘How does it feel to have blood on your hands?’ Carleton asked. How dare he suggest that power was involved, that blood was the inevitable consequence of ambition? Or take Sarah Ferguson’s question to Joe Hockey on the night of his first Budget: ‘Is it liberating for a politician to decide election promises don’t matter?’ Hockey’s wounded grimace inverted the truth of the relationship; as if Ferguson were the powerful one and the Treasurer a mere servant of the people trying to do his best from a position of great disadvantage. So accustomed are we to this inversion, some of us almost felt sorry for him; and a fellow journalist commissioned to conduct an
audit found insufficient respect had been shown the Treasurer and the interview had the potential to ‘breach the ABC impartiality guidelines’. So we demand respect and impartiality for the powerful, but not the truth from them. Enter the photographers clicking away, poking their lenses ever closer to the pollies’ noses, as if deep secrets might be hidden in their pores. In general the subjects are of no more mystery, goodness or beauty than you or I; but they are politicians and they contain riddles which democratic duty demands that we unravel. Hundreds of reporters and commentators are employed to extract the meaning from the circus, and thus counter the hundreds more who are employed to bend it to particular advantage. Then we ourselves, when making what we can of politics from what we read, hear and see, re-bend it through our own partisan lenses. If new media technology has reduced their once singular importance, political photographers continue to offer a penetrating light. In the still photograph, as opposed to the moving image, there is nothing to distract us from the face, wherein it is alleged the mind’s construction can be seen. We might also see something of the mind in the way a politician walks, or waves his hands about, or tugs at his ear, or twitches under pressure - but you don’t need a video to see them doing it. The very different swaggers of Keating and Abbott are plainest in still photographs. You can see Keating’s ambition in his cuffs and in his shoulders, Abbott’s in his bandy legs. A good still image will always tell us as much as a moving one will, maybe more for being nearer to a distilled essence. Look at Andrew Chapman’s photographs of the men who ran the Coalition of the late 1970s. They speak directly of power. They have desired everything and now think they have attained it. Their fate awaits them. We see them before they are undone. Those who were there will be reminded in an instant, not only of the men but of an era, and of a drama whose last act had yet to be played out. Those who weren’t there, but who want to know what it was like, will find in those photographs a fertile place to start. Look at the photos of the young RJL Hawke and the young Keating and see the perfect self-possession the best politicians always seem to have, and the rest of us can only wonder at. But then look at John Howard, and wonder how someone who so plainly lacks this quality could end up serving as Prime Minister for longer than either of them, longer than anyone else bar Robert
Menzies. Look a bit longer and we might begin to see behind the oversize spectacles and the uncertain smile a desire just as fierce as that which drove his rivals, which fed on theirs and on their vanity. Look longer at the rivals and we might see traces of doubt. Andrew Chapman has been photographing Australian politics for forty years. The record he has left is a marvel of acumen and perseverance. The acumen speaks through the effect of the photos on the viewer: whether his subjects are farmers in their blasted landscapes or politicians in theirs, his photographs testify at once to human ambition and what Susan Sontag called in a famous essay on photography ‘time’s relentless melt’. The perseverance is in what it takes to get a collection like this. For all but a few players, politics is suffused with dreary repetition and inconsequentiality. Like life in the trenches, most of it is spent waiting. There are great dramatic moments and great characters; but some of Andrew Chapman’s most telling photographs are surely the product of waiting through those political droughts described by John Button: ‘when nothing much happens… people are constantly on edge, waiting for the first hint of a political development and terrified of missing it when it comes’. Somewhere in that tense stillness hides the true nature of the political game, and by pointing his lens at it for forty years, Andrew Chapman has left us with a priceless insight into our modern history and ourselves. Don Watson
Prime Minister Tony Abbott visits the Timbermate factory, in the eastern Melbourne suburb of Mitcham, accompanied by local member, Michael Sukkar 1970s
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Contents
Foreword by Don Watson Introduction 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Andrew Chapman Acknowledgements Technical notes
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Political Vision
5 11 13 25 93 159 223 223 223
Introduction To say I was politically naive when I was younger would be an understatement; I suppose to a degree I still am. When I became aware of the political process as young student in the early 1970s, the philosophy of the Liberal/Country Party government that had been running the country for more than a generation seemed out of sync with much of the population that had lived through the turbulent time-changing 1960s. I could understand that previous generations had fought for a better living standard but, all the same, there remained for my generation a feeling of political unrest – there was a bursting at the seams, a yearning for a different life. Many of us believed we were in an unjust war in Vietnam. The conservative government was sending the youth of Australia to fight and kill alongside American troops at the tender age of eighteen, but they weren’t prepared to let those same eighteen-yearolds have the vote. They didn’t understand our culture, our music, our certainty and our lust for freedom from their constraints. Then along came Gough Whitlam and everything changed. We suddenly had hope of a new, bright future: free healthcare, voting for eighteen-year-olds, equal pay for women, welfare reforms, multiculturalism, education, Aboriginal land rights, arts funding and more. Whitlam was a visionary who seemed to do no wrong. Come November 1975 and Whitlam’s progressive politics were overturned as Malcolm Fraser and John Kerr conspired with Australia’s old guard to rob us of our populist democracy and return us to the dark ages. I knew, come the December 1975 election, there was no way that the Australian people would ever stand for that! Of course, I was wrong, and Australia turned its collective back on the great social experiment. Progressive political supporters were left trying to work out what the hell had just happened. We vowed to maintain our rage. I had naively believed that good would prevail and the righteous (and not the right) would inherit the world. And so my bewilderment with politics began. All this heady politics marked many in my generation for life. My response was to start photographing politicians as a way of capturing and deciphering the political process. I would get myself into political events, always anxious that officialdom might kick this long-haired photographer out. 10
Political Vision
It never happened, and in the early days I obtained some excellent access. Too scared to ask permission, or even talk with any politicians or their minders, I became a fly on the wall. I waited, watched and captured what I saw, with no objective in mind other than collecting the images. I’d been studying photography at Prahran College in suburban Melbourne when ACTU leader Bob Hawke came to speak at the student union. I hung around to take photos and ended up at a local pub having a beer with him. I took a few shots, hoping he wouldn’t mind. Of course he didn’t, and I went on to photograph him a number of times, often wondering if he remembered the young opportunist from all those years ago. When I started working on suburban newspapers in the late 1970s, I gained confidence in both photographing and being around powerful people, but outside of newspapers, in my documentary work, I still preferred standing back and watching events unfold. I began to attend more rallies and marches, and by the 1980s was often heading to Liberal Party campaign launches in suburban Melbourne. All this relied on my awareness of political events, and then I would just turn up, hoping to be let in. And, when I got in, suddenly I had access to an array of politicians at the top of the conservative ranks: Malcolm Fraser, Doug Anthony, strategist and advisor Tony Eggleton, Andrew Peacock, the young pretender to the throne, and that bloke standing behind him, what was his name… that’s right, John Howard. My only regret is that I didn’t take more photos. But this was an inevitable consequence of the time. It was not the limitless digital epoch of today. Of course I certainly had my political convictions. But I always aimed to keep my personal politics separate from my photography. I’ll let you decide if I was successful, but fairness was always my object and my intent. By 1983 the political pendulum was swinging back to the left. The long-talked-about Hawke ascendancy was in motion and Bill Hayden was replaced in opposition the very day that Malcolm Fraser called the election. Hawke’s safari suits soon gave way to the legendary coiffure and business suit. In those days it was much easier to get behind the scenes with politicians. I remember turning up to Box Hill Town Hall and going backstage to photograph a soon-to-be-elected Bob Hawke with his minders as he prepared to 11
go on stage – this is something that would never happen in today’s hermetic political climate. Labor turned corporate and took control of the centre of Australian politics, making sure it did not repeat the follies of the Whitlam era. And there it was: suddenly the Liberals were really on the backfoot, and Labor looked like the real deal as Hawke, Keating and co got on with their gradual reforms whilst Peacock, Howard and Downer slugged it out for the Liberal ascendancy. In the meantime, I had been selling the odd photograph to Business Review Weekly. In those days Time Australia was on the same floor of BRW’s La Trobe Street offices in Melbourne, so it wasn’t long before I started supplying images to them as well, and later shooting the odd assignment. They obviously liked what I was doing and by the 1987 federal election I was commissioned to shoot Time’s cover of Hawke on election night at the Hyatt Hotel in Melbourne. I was nervous, as I mingled with the big names of the media, and hoped I was up to the task. I scored the first of what would eventually be many Time covers. By the mid-1990s I had a great working relationship with Time Australia. In 1996 I covered the last week of the campaign across Australia. I travelled in a convoy of buses and aeroplanes to often unknown destinations. A veil of secrecy was descending over the political strategies of the two main parties. I was extremely grateful for my access, and probably not aware at the time quite how rapidly Australian politics was being corralled. For a freelancer with no mainstream media connections and who was not part of the invited press ferried around on the tour buses and RAAF transport planes, trying to find out where any leader was became much harder. The campaign apparatchiks, not wanting to let anyone know where they were going to be, became increasingly paranoid. This was partly to make sure no protestors turned up, but the distrust seemed to extend to the media in general. I would tap into what resources I could, extracting information from friendly photographers, radio stations and newsrooms. Come the final week of the campaign, I would be back on the bus or plane in a carefully executed political exercise, still not knowing where I was going, but confident that as long as I behaved myself, I’d get to see and photograph the leader concerned. These new limitations disempowered independent journalists and pho-
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Political Vision
tographers, allowing larger organisations with more resources to step outside this paradigm and monopolise the political media. The boredom became intolerable as media crews waited all day and night for a thirty-minute glimpse of a leader doing something only vaguely relevant, followed by a strictly limited amount of question time. Then it was back on the bus whilst the leader shot off for a few radio or television and one-on-one interviews with selected newspapers. Those on the media tour for the full four weeks would be all a bit stir crazy by the last week. By the 2004 election, the veil of secrecy had tightened even more. I remember trying to get information about John Howard’s whereabouts from his handlers for an 11am press briefing. I knew it would probably be in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs, nearly an hour away. As I kept ringing, I drove in that direction, desperately hoping I was heading the right way. I was given the location with only fifteen minutes to find my way there. Ingenuity – and many phone calls to a few better-informed media colleagues – was all that kept me ahead of the game. The game has moved on. The public are more media savvy, more engaged with new forms of digital media and less connected to the old values of left and right. But there is a dissonance within conventional politics, in Australia and around the world, as voters search for leaders with clarity and purpose amidst the current surfeit of cynicism and political puppetry. The recent political eras have left me feeling vacant. The backstabbing and broken promises have taken their toll. Maybe I’m a little jaded as I enter my sixth decade, but I still remember a time when politicians spoke from their hearts, when party machines and polls didn’t control the process, and when visionary leaders flourished. Gough Whitlam’s recent memorial service was a reminder of what one man could achieve. No, he wasn’t perfect, but he lived by his convictions and, as his memorial service showed, earned the respect of most Australians. I watched on television as the rows of dignitaries, statesmen and stateswomen were seated, and I wondered what every other leader who had followed him was thinking as they sat there, stacking their record against his.
1970s
Andrew Chapman
1970s
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Vietnam moratorium protest on the steps of the Victorian Parliament building on Spring Street, Melbourne, 1971 14
Political Vision
1970s
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