A Comrade in yearning . . .

IN LOOKING backwards, Aust-ralia’s First Ambassador to China, Stephen FItzGerald, appears to sacrifice balance to partisan proselytizing . . .

I aM NOT sure what Stephen FitzGerald is attempting in Comrade Ambassador, his long distance trawl through the now all-too-
familiar record of Australia-China relations.
It’s a curious patchwork of purple prose,
political posturing, domestic memoir, and Tory baiting.  In essence, he has written history
as entertainment, with minimal relevance to
contemporary politics.
We begin in the dog days of the ALP, before the 1972 election.
FitzGerald’s hero emerges early.
Gough Whitlam contrives an invitation for an ALP delegation to visit Premier Zhou En-Lai in Beijing. Gough’s game plan is to normalise Australia-China relations, working towards an exchange of ambassadors.  
The visit “proceeds with the speed of a slow symphonic poem”. We glimpse Whitlam sipping chilled Pouilly-Fuisse in a Hong Kong garden, conferring with China’s octogenarian Communist party members, until finally he meets Premier Zhou.
The result? Whitlam is ebullient, “not so much triumphant as vindicated”.
Never mind about Nixon’s 1972 visit to
China, or Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy. Whitlam’s visit has “set in train a transformation in public opinion”, claims FitzGerald
It’s all uphill from there.
In rapid order, Australia’s Embassy in Beijing opens in 1973 and FitzGerald becomes Comrade Ambassador. Although, when his credentials arrive from London they spell his name wrong, with a small “g”. FitzGerald says he had no idea whether the Queen “likes it, or even notices”.  On such small things do nations turn.
To his credit, FitzGerald touches lightly on Vietnam, and offers some biting and revealing views on his fellow politicos ­— China’s Foreign Minister, Ji Pengfei, is “a sleepy nocturnal animal”, Jim Cairns is “unfocussed and passive”.
Toiling in China, FitzGgerald clearly enjoys its diplomatic power plays and the Ambassadorial lifestyle. We learn inter alia that his wife, Gay, sometimes works in a people’s commune, staking out tomato vines, and a Polish diplomat gives his daughters two noisy cats that yowl a lot.  Splendid.
After Whitlam’s 1975 dismissal, FitzGerald serves under Malcolm Fraser, whom he finds “closer to Whitlam than I’d imagined”. That must have been surprising to the Liberal Party after the dismissal.
There’s an earthquake in China and the FitzGeralds return to Canberra in 1977, to “sell our Duffy house and buy a 1920s heritage house in Reid”.
At this point we are well attuned to the FitzGeralds’ domesticity. But do we really need to know that, subsequently, they sell their
Paddington house, buy another, and restore it with “the help of an Irish heritage architect whose main work is restoring pubs”?
Now comes the high point in all good melodrama – enter the villain!
First up is historian Geoffrey Blainey, who startles Australia with a speech attacking Asian immigration. He suggests we face a “slow Asian takeover of Australia” (shades of the current Government concerns — and preventive legislation —about Asians gazumping Australian real estate!).
Next on the list is Pauline Hanson, who’s accused of racial
hatred, etc. etc. Nothing new to learn here.
FitzGerald’s arch villain is John Howard, who is “sneaky” and “not only ended the constructive bipartisanship in foreign policy . . . more damaging, he legitimised an Asia-sceptic position in Australian political and public life”.
According to FitzGerald: “Howard’s closing down of the debate about national identity has encouraged a new kind of Australianism, or rather an old one in a contemporary form.
Nationalistic, military-minded, more mono-
cultural in the way it views and projects the Australian identity, dogmatic in the worth of its own judgments on foreign countries and peoples.”
He goes on: “You can still see two Australias.
“There’s a cramped and frightened one, a conservative one that doesn’t want to change and would turn the clock back to about 1971, or even 1947, if it could.
“And there’s the one you can see in what’s been happening in these few years, and it has elements that could give it the excitement and creativity that’s distinguished some of the great societies in history, like Tang Dynasty China or the Italian States of the Renaissance”.
Here FitzGerald ignores the fact that old  China and the Italian Renaissance states, while undeniably creative, were largely ruled by either despots or homicidal oligarchies.
By any measure, Australia today is neither cramped, backward-looking, military-minded, mono-cultural nor dogmatic.  Frightened, maybe – and given the Middle East situation, justifiably so.
Regrettably, all of FitzGerald’s political pontificating  sits rather awkwardly against the current backdrop of our triumphal multi-cultural society, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, our calibrated acceptance of refugees, our untiring efforts to accommodate  Islam, the Turnbull Government’s embrace of innovation, and Australia’s punching above its weight in world affairs.
Despite the hand-wringing of the politically disadvantaged, Australia’s open society is the envy of the world, and is likely to remain so. In looking backwards, FitzGerald appears to sacrifice balance to partisan proselytizing.
If history teaches us anything, it is that the past should contain lessons to inform the
future.
FitzGerald’s problem is that he can suggest no practical lessons from his colourful past which might be usefully applied to Australian politics in the 21st century.
Instead, like many self-serving political warriors of Old Labor, he yearns for the good old days of Whitlam, Hawke and the class wars – in the same way that film critics now write about the Golden Years of Hollywood.  The world seemed simpler then.
FitzGerald apologises: “I can’t write as optimistically now about our future as I did in the mid-1990s”. Too bad, because Comrade Ambassador is well remembered and clearly written.
But more than a generation after Comrade Ambassador, the world has moved on. As the Chinese remark, we live in interesting times, and as Malcolm Turnbull has pointed out, now is an exciting time to be an Australian.
In his final paragraph, FitzGerald seems to endorse this view. But he strikes a warning note:
“As Australia comes closer to Asia in the next decades, and more under the influence of powers with a different kind of history, it will also need to take great care of these ideals and values and be uncompromising in their defence, at home, and from any encroachment from abroad.
“Which means we have to understand Asians at least as well as they understand us.
“I can be optimistic about the Australian people because they’ve shown themselves able to understand and to change. But the politicians…?”
To paraphrase Gough Whitlam — Well may we say, ‘God save the politicians’.

n Comrade Ambassador, by Stephen FitzGerald [Melbourne University Press, 2015].