October 8, 2004
FEATURE
Sir Zelman’s ‘touch
of healing’
PETER KOHN and DAN
GOLDBERG
A TALE OF TWO VICEROYS
SIR
ISAAC ISAACS
August
6, 1855: Isaac Isaacs is
born.
1859-86: Lives with his parents in
north-eastern Victoria where he attends high
school.
1880: Graduates in law from the
University of Melbourne.
1882: Called to the
bar.
1882: Involves himself in the Jewish
community and takes minutes at a meeting of the Melbourne Jewish
Young Men’s Russian Relief Fund.
1892-1901:
Elected MP for Bogong in Victorian
Parliament.
1897-98: Member of Victorian
delegation to the Constitutional
Convention.
1906: Appointed to the High
Court after a period as Australia’s
attorney-general.
1921: Becomes a Privy
Councillor.
1931: On the recommendation of
Prime Minister James Scullin, is appointed governor-general, the
first Australian-born man — and Jew — to hold that
office.
1937: Retires as
governor-general.
1940s: Expresses
opposition to Zionism and the rebuilding of a Jewish state after
World War II.
February 12, 1948: Sir Isaac
Isaacs dies.
SIR ZELMAN
COWEN
October 7,
1919: Zelman Cowen is born.
1932:
Bar mitzvah at Melbourne Hebrew
Congregation.
1935: Dux at Scotch
College.
1940: Awarded a Rhodes scholarship
to Oxford University.
1941-45: Serves in the
navy during World War II in Darwin and Brisbane, where he is a
lieutenant on US General Douglas Macarthur’s
staff.
1951: Returns from Oxford to
Melbourne as a professor of Public Law and dean of Law
School.
1967: Oxford University Press
publishes Isaac Isaacs, a biography by Zelman
Cowen.
1967-69: Vice-chancellor of the
University of New England, NSW.
1969:
Appointed academic member of the board of Hebrew University,
Jerusalem.
1970-77: Vice-chancellor of the
University of Queensland, where he grappled with student unrest over
the Vietnam war.
1976-77: Australian law
reform commissioner.
1976: Appointed Knight
Bachelor.
1977: Appointed chairman of
Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee; honoured with a knighthood
of the Grand Order of Saints Michael and George; sworn in as
governor-general — the second Jew to be appointed to the vice-regal
post; honoured with a knighthood of the Order of
Australia.
1982: Retires as
governor-general.
1982-90: Provost of Oriel
College, Oxford.
1983-88: Chairman of the
British Press Council; involved with Van Leer Institute in
Jerusalem.
1997: Comes out in support of an
Australian republic in a speech at Georgetown University in
Washington DC.
1999: Delivers the second
annual Hawke Lecture at Bob Hawke Ministerial Centre, University of
South Australia, on “An Australian republic: a guide for the
perplexed”, in which he promotes his preferred model for electing an
Australian head of state.
2004: Involved in
a wide spectrum of Jewish communal activities, and continues to work
five days a week, from 9am to 3pm at Treasury
Place. | IT was late April
1977, and Zelman Cowen, vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland,
was sitting in his office in Brisbane when the phone rang.
It was
the Prime Minister’s Office — a call that would trigger an historic chain
of events that he says he never remotely imagined.
Already an
esteemed public figure, Sir Zelman recalls he had no idea that an
invitation to fly to Canberra and meet with Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser
that April day would end with him being offered the keys to Yarralumla —
beginning almost five years as governor-general which he now describes as
“the greatest period of my life”.
Seventeen months earlier, during
an academic visit to Boston, he had followed the political earthquake that
shook Australia when, on November 11, 1975, Governor-General Sir John Kerr
dismissed the ALP government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and appointed
the Liberals’ Malcolm Fraser as caretaker PM. (Fraser later won a
subsequent general election by a landslide.)
A few hours after that
April 1977 phone call, the far-reaching consequences of what had by then
become ingrained in Australian history as “the dismissal”, would
dramatically alter Sir Zelman’s life.
“It was a request from the
prime minister that I should come down to Canberra to dine there,” recalls
Sir Zelman, adding that at best he thought he may be asked to sit on a
royal commission.
He remembers the plane was delayed, so he called
Canberra to ask whether he should postpone his trip. The response, he
remembers, was firm. Prime Minister Fraser was expecting him. When he
eventually arrived in Canberra around 8pm, a government car was waiting to
whisk him to The Lodge.
Greeted by the PM, Sir Zelman was invited
to dine with a few guests. Excruciatingly, there was still no word on why
he had been invited to the capital.
After dinner, Fraser finally
called Sir Zelman into his private study. It was there that he announced
that Sir John Kerr had decided to resign.
“My head was like a split
atom,” recalls Sir Zelman of the initial impact of Fraser’s words. “I said
to myself ‘He is asking me to be governor-general.’”
“Why me?” he
remembers saying in response, to which Fraser answered: “Because you’re
eminently qualified.”
He told the PM he would need to discuss it
with his wife Anna, who was in Brisbane, but before flying back the next
day, he called in to see his son Simon who was studying at the Australian
National University and remembers trying to conduct a normal conversation
with him while his head was reeling from the PM’s offer.
Once back
in Brisbane, Sir Zelman phoned his wife and said he needed to see her
urgently. When he told her, he says “she saw very quickly the implications
for our family life”.
“She asked me ‘Do you really want it?’ and I
said ‘Yes’... So we telephoned the prime minister and said the answer is
‘Yes.’”
As those hours unfolded, Sir Zelman reflected on the very
first thing that had struck him on being asked to become governor-general:
the Jewish factor — that he, the man who had chronicled the life of
Australia’s first Jewish governor-general, Sir Isaac Isaacs, would now
become the second Jew to hold that auspicious office.
“To think
that I was Sir Isaac’s biographer... it was
incredible.”
LIKE Sir Isaac Isaacs, Sir Zelman was a son of Jewish
immigrants. Like Isaacs, he too was appointed in somewhat controversial
circumstances following the early resignation of Sir John Kerr. (Isaacs’
appointment as the first Australian-born governor-general only came about
after prime minister James Scullin pushed the issue with a reluctant
monarch, King George V, who wanted to maintain the tradition of appointing
a British representative.)
Yet unlike Isaacs, who opposed Zionism,
Sir Zelman has always been a vigorous supporter of Israel and once stated
that if Israel had been destroyed in the Six-Day War, “it would have
destroyed me as a person”.
Reflecting on Isaacs’ views about a
Jewish state, he says: “I suppose he saw himself as the son of immigrants
who had been given so much by this country [Australia] and did not want to
appear ungrateful.”
Sir John Kerr, plagued by the blame that was
levelled at him in the divisive political climate that followed his
sacking of the Whitlam Government, officially announced his resignation on
July 14 and moved out of Yarralumla on December 7.
Sir Zelman was
sworn in as Australia’s 19th governor-general the following day and he and
Lady Cowen moved into Government House.
Unfazed by the still
simmering controversy surrounding the office of governor-general after the
seismic events of 1975, Sir Zelman says he was aware of the potential
difficulties but not deterred by them.
“It didn’t occur to me to
think anything other than that I was overwhelmingly pleased to be asked to
do it.”
He has been famously quoted as saying that the role of a
governor-general is “to interpret the nation to itself”. When a reporter
asked him in 1977 what he hoped to achieve in office, he recalls quoting
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru: “I said that I hope that I
may bring a touch of healing [to the vice-regal’s office].”
History
has recorded that he did exactly that. His tenure until July 1982 is
widely regarded as one in which Sir Zelman restored widespread respect to
the office.
He reflects on the fact that three Jews have held high
office in Australia — World War I commander General Sir John Monash, Sir
Isaac Isaacs and himself — and, asked how he feels to be part of such an
eminent trio, says with disarming humility: “[I feel] OK. It’s pretty good
company.”
He cites representing Australia at the famous, but
ill-fated wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer and at the
funeral of Lord Mountbatten as two of the overseas events that stand out
during his tenure.
But years after retiring as governor-general,
this former incumbent of Australia’s most senior monarchical office was
one of a group which was asked to examine Australian constitutional
reform.
It was during a speech at Georgetown University in
Washington DC in 1997 that Sir Zelman first publicly declared himself a
supporter of an Australian republic.
“There is no doubt, in my
view, that the monarchy has served Australia well, and I am proud to have
served as governor-general... [But] I now believe that the time has come,
in the evolution of Australia’s independent national identity, for us to
have a truly Australian constitutional head of state.”
His views
have not changed. “I have not the slightest doubt [that there will be a
republic]. It isn’t being anti-monarchical. It is evolutionary,” he says,
suggesting that it links what was right for the past with what will be
right for the future.
Sir Zelman, who supports the “minimalist”
model in which an Australian head of state would be elected by a
two-thirds majority of parliament, says he was inspired by Paul Keating’s
1995 speech supporting a republic, specifically by the former prime
minister’s words that “each and every Australian should be able to aspire
to be our head of state”.
Yet it will be a slow process, he thinks
— and he doubts there will be an Australian republic in his
lifetime.
Beyond the lofty issues of the future of the country, he
is an Australian Rules football follower and, as a patron of the St Kilda
Football Club, he is positive about the Saints’ prospects next year,
despite their finals setback this September.
SIR Zelman is a
native of Saints country, born in St Kilda on October 7, 1919, one year
after the armistice that ended World War I. He was sent to Hebrew school
at St Kilda synagogue where his parents Bernard and Sara were
members.
He remembers a staunchly Anglo-centric young minister at
St Kilda, Rabbi Jacob Danglow, who had been in his pulpit since 1905, and,
in many aspects, was “more like a bishop”.
Decades later, Sir
Zelman would launch Rabbi John Levi’s biography of Danglow — and on the
cover he would offer the testimonial that Danglow was “a man of undoubted,
overwhelming authority and dignity”.
Attending Hebrew school at St
Kilda shul, he was taught by a young Trevor Rapke, who later became a
Victorian County Court judge.
Sir Zelman recalls a small family
spat over Rabbi Danglow because he declined an invitation to his bar
mitzvah reception on the first day of Succot in 1932. It was, he recalls,
the reason his parents moved to Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, where the
bar mitzvah was held under the stewardship of Rabbi Israel
Brodie.
For years, Melbourne’s first synagogue became the focal
point of his life — and recorded the life cycles of the two Australians
with whom he shares his prominence. It was the synagogue that saw the
marriage of Sir John Monash and years later the funeral of Sir Isaac
Isaacs.
Sir Zelman has vivid memories of the first trickle of
German refugees who arrived in Australia as the Nazis rose to power. Still
in his early teens, he remembers asking his father who Hitler was and
receiving the simple and heartfelt reply that “he is an evil
man”.
As a young boy with Eastern European ancestors growing up in
the Anglo-Australian society of the 1930s, he was struck by the culture
shock the newcomers caused. He remembers them being disparagingly called
“reffos” and can still see “their long overcoats and
briefcases”.
But he says they ignited in him a passion for chamber
music. “They added a new and I think valuable cultural strain to
Australian life.”
After attending Scotch College, where he was dux,
he read arts and law at the University of Melbourne. He was then awarded a
Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, which was postponed by World War II, in
which he served in the navy for four years and was in Darwin during the
Japanese attack of 1942.
He was at the founding meeting of the
Executive Council of Australian Jewry in 1944, taking the minutes. He
married the following year, before commencing his law studies at Oxford.
He lectured there in 1947 and arrived back in Australia in 1951 as a young
professor of public law.
Quoted as admiring “the blazing richness”
of student life at Oxford, his early years were perhaps a good grounding
for what he calls “integration into the mainstream”, which has remained
his lifelong credo.
He was a vocal opponent of the establishment of
a Jewish dayschool in the early postwar years when debate raged over the
battle to build Mount Scopus College. “I thought we were better served by
integration into the mainstream,” he says, adding that he now believes the
success of Australia’s Jewish dayschools proves they have earned their
place — and their legitimacy is “a debate which has passed”.
With
views that were perhaps more in line with the Progressive movement of the
time than with Orthodoxy, it was no surprise Sir Zelman and Lady Cowen
were married at Temple Beth Israel (TBI).
And when his son Simon
was sent to the Sunday school at TBI, it was a significant departure from
his father’s prewar Orthodox affiliations.
TBI is just one of an
enormous cross-section of Jewish community organisations which he and Lady
Cowen are associated with. He is a patron of the Council of Christians and
Jews, the Jewish Museum of Australia and the Friends of the Israel
Philharmonic Orchestra (Victoria).
He is also on the Board of
Governors of the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and the Weizman
Institute of Science, and is honorary chair of the Van Leer Institute in
Jerusalem.
To this day his diary is full of Jewish and general
functions where his presence is both requested and honoured.
It has
been said of Sir Zelman that he is “not particularly religious”, although
he has a deep love and respect for his Jewish roots. Yet of his four
children, Simon and Nicholas have both embraced ultra-Orthodox Judaism —
an ideology far from his own world view. His sons, he says, are “bright
people” and he has “never tried to dissuade them”. Around the dinner
table, he says “it makes for interesting conversations” based on “mutual
respect” and devoid of acrimony.
From 1967-69, Sir Zelman was
vice-chancellor at the University of New England — where his children
enrolled in a government school in Armidale, NSW.
From 1970 until
his appointment as governor-general seven years later, Sir Zelman was
vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland. He was first knighted in
1976.
A father of four and grandfather of 13 (his third son Ben and
daughter-in-law Lahra are expecting twins this week), he still works a
five-day week at his office in Melbourne’s Treasury Place, in the same
building as his successor as governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen, and
Prime Minister John Howard when he is in Melbourne.
By any measure,
Sir Zelman — scholar, academic, jurist and viceroy — has led an incredible
life — a life that, according to him, had a habit of unfolding without
intent. Following his academic achievements, he was offered postings and
positions that were simply impossible to turn down.
“That’s the way
the cookie crumbled,” is how he describes the generous cards fate has
dealt him in life.
Despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he
is generally comfortable spending two hours strolling through the
milestones of his life with all the cerebral alertness and methodical
precision of the astute jurist that he is.
At critical junctures he
stops, wanders over to his bookshelves and selects a speech or a book to
double-check his facts, to highlight the point, to illustrate the historic
nature of the circumstance.
Now in the twilight years of his life
he is writing his memoirs, a task that will surely fill reams of pages.
Indeed, as he reflects on a lifetime of ideas captured in a collection of
almost 1000 speeches, all carefully filed and stored on shelves in his
office, it is words — hundreds and thousands of inspiring,
carefully-crafted, intelligent, thought-provoking and
philosophically-challenging words and ideas — which he says are “the most
important aspect of what I have done with my life”. |
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FEATURES
• LITERARY
HOAXES AND THE HOLOCAUST
November 19, 2004
• AN
OPEN LETTER TO BARRY COHEN
November 12, 2004
• USING
HUMOUR TO COMBAT ANTISEMITISM
November 5, 2004
• LIFE
AS A SETTLER LIVING IN GAZA
November 5, 2004
• THE
AGE OF TERROR
October 29,
2004
• LABOR
PAINS
October 22,
2004
• LIGHTS
UNTO OUR TIMES
October 15,
2004
• SIR
ZELMAN’S ‘TOUCH OF HEALING’
October 8, 2004
• THE
GREAT DEBATE
October 8,
2004
• A
DAY ON THE HUSTINGS
October 8,
2004
• FOUR
YEARS OF THE INTIFADA
October 8,
2004
• THE
ALL-AUSTRALIAN RABBI
September
24, 2004
• YES,
PRIME MINISTER
September 17,
2004
• GREEN,
BLUE & WHITE
September 10,
2004
• THE
BATTLE FOR MELBOURNE PORTS
September 3, 2004
• ISRAEL,
SPORT & POLITICAL BOYCOTTS
August 27, 2004
• THE
PHILOSOPHER, THE JEWISH STATE, ITS DEMOCRACY AND THE
FUTURE
August 20,
2004
• MAKING
A FEDERAL CASE
August 13,
2004
• DYNASTIES
OF DENIAL
August 6,
2004
• ECHOES
OF THE RAINBOW WARRIOR?
July 30,
2004
• THE
REBBE’S MAN DOWNUNDER
July 23,
2004
• BETWEEN
THREE WORLDS
July 16,
2004
• THE
DAILY LIFE OF ANNE FRANK
July 9,
2004
• ONE
SMALL STEP
July 2,
2004
• GLOBE
TROTTER
June 25,
2004
• HEALING
THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA
June 18,
2004
• CRY
ME A RIVER
June 11,
2004
• KIWI
CRISIS?
June 4,
2004
• TERRORISM’S
TOLL
May 28,
2004
• OFFENSIVE
May 21, 2004
• ART,
TRUTH AND THE ‘JEWISH LOBBY’
May
14, 2004
• A
FAIR GO FOR RABBI FELDMAN
May
14, 2004
• ‘NO
GHETTO HAS WALLS TIGHT ENOUGH TO STOP IDEAS
PENETRATING’
May 7,
2004
• ISRAEL’S
UNSUNG HEROES
April 30,
2004
• MARCHING
FOR LIFE
April 23,
2004
• KADDISH
AT TEREZÍN
April 16,
2004
• KIBBUTZ
OUT WEST
April 9,
2004
• ISRAEL’S
ADVOCATE
April 2,
2004
• SCHINDLER’S
SURVIVORS
March 26,
2004
• TWO
TICKING SOUNDS
March 19,
2004
• ON
THE FRONT-LINE AT THE HAGUE
March 12, 2004
• THE
LIGHT AMID THE DARKNESS
March 5,
2004
• REFLECTIONS
OF AN EXOTIC STRANGER
February
27, 2004
• THE
MAN BEHIND THE FENCE
February
20, 2004
• THE
TROJAN HORSE OF THE 21ST CENTURY
February 13, 2004
• HATRED
AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
February 6, 2004
• TROUBLE
IN PARADISE
February 6,
2004
• HOLOCAUST
DENIAL: THE STATE OF PLAY
January 23, 2004
• THE
SECRET LIFE OF ADASS ISRAEL
January 16, 2004
• NEW
EUROPE, OLD PREJUDICE
January 9,
2004
• DRUGS
IN THE PLAYGROUND
August 15,
2003
• INDIAN
WEDDING JEWISH-STYLE
July 11,
2003
• THE
THIRD WAY
July 4, 2003
|
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