Susan Magarey

With Thanks, Always: For Eric Fry and Bob Gollan

It is a privilege to be invited to take part in this tribute, all the more so as neither Eric not Bob were ever, formally, my teachers; so what I can offer shows just how much they taught us, beyond any classroom, even beyond those wonderful gatherings when we parcelled up an issue of Labour History and took it off to the post.

I first met Eric Fry in the late 1960s. These were the days when the Head of the History Department in what was then called the School of General Studies at the Australian National University (ANU) was a god-professor. This god-professor, Manning Clark, used to preside over the afternoon tea-table – did he keep his very distinctive hat on, or have I made that up? – with Don Baker seated at his right hand, and on his left, an array of different members of staff, varying from day to day. One of them was a slight, dark-haired, quietly-spoken, unassuming man who taught Australian history. This was Eric Fry.

Sitting on Manning's left hand was particularly appropriate for Eric, as he had been a member of the Communist Party of Australia, something I'll come back to. Those of us on hourly-paid tutorships, clustered at the foot of that tea-table in serried ranks, did not have much opportunity to learn about his political allegiances, but we did grow to know him better over the years. In 1968, when the students – inspired by students in Paris – rose in protest against the established authorities, and demanded representation at departmental committee meetings, the History Department was filled with consternation. It was an autocracy, run by the god-professor; it did not have departmental committees, or meetings of almost anything except the tea-table gatherings. To meet the students' demands, there would first have to be a revolution among the staff – and there was, with Eric quietly in the lead. (The god-professor, apparently envisaging himself as a great white whale, took to referring to the 'harpoon-throwers'.)

There are many stories to be told about Eric. One is a tale that he told himself at a party at Don and Val Baker's after we'd drunk a great deal of flagon wine. He told it as though it was a story about someone else. It was an account about a young soldier in the forces during World War II. He had chanced to catch sight of the woman his commanding officer was escorting to a gathering some distance away, down a hill and across a bridge. And he fell instantly in love. So he raced down the hill, across the bridge, picked this young woman up and carried her off – back across the bridge, and back up the hill, and away. It was Sheila, of course. We never heard of any consequences for the young soldier, pinching his commanding officer's girlfriend. But we knew that Eric and Sheila lived happily after.

Other stories are about his immense generosity and care for those he taught. He didn't teach me, but he did rescue me. I had completed and submitted a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. It had duly been sent to examiners. One had reported favourably. But the other could not bring himself to write a report until over a year had passed, and that would have made it too late for me to apply for a PhD scholarship; you had to be 30 thirty in those days. As that year of waiting wore on, Eric constituted himself an emergency examiner, and the thesis was duly passed.

John Merritt and Eric Fry at the 1999 memorial gathering for Daphne Gollan (1918–99) held in the A.D. Hope Building, Australian National University.
Photo: Courtesy Susan Magarey

Eric's generosity was the stuff of legend: it was part of the man's whole approach to people and the world. It ranged from the minute and particular to the broad and general. For instance, this man, who so wanted to write history himself, spent all the time it took to make a list of all the Australian parliamentary enquiries that could be used as source-material for research projects in labour history, which was a major aid for other teachers and researchers. He provided important support for the special issue of Labour History devoted to Women at Work which Ann Curthoys, Peter Spearritt and I edited to mark International Women's Year in 1975. And it was Eric who helped organise, and then led, an Australian contingent to the Commonwealth Labour History Conference at Warwick University in September 1981, where we gave papers and established important links with the like-minded in Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Eric's door was always open, which meant I interrupted someone interviewing him one day, just charging in to ask if I could borrow a book.

By this time I had also met another former member of the Communist Party: Bob Gollan. It was in the late 1960s, and appropriately, some might think, at the Canberra Rex in company with a great many other historians, drinking beer. I knew to look out for him because another post-graduate student had spent a whole evening talking about how important and path-breaking Bob's work was in the history of class struggle in Australia. What did I expect? I'm not sure. But it certainly wasn't the easy-mannered, pleasant and interesting man who was also, to my delighted surprise, happy to talk to a neophyte historian, even one who was a girl. Indeed, as I was to learn, Bob would have been happier talking to any number of neophyte historians than to many of his exalted colleagues in the Coombs Building where the ANU housed its god-professors of research. I vividly recall an afternoon tea very different from those that Manning Clark presided over, in the early 1970s in the Coombs Building. I arrived to encounter Bob reeling out of the door to the terrace in need of fresh air, escaping the stifling company – he told us – of two other famous professors, boasting to each other about how many different languages their books had been translated into.

It was fresh air that Bob brought to us all, sometimes literally. There must be many who recall walking and camping expeditions with him and Anne in the Snowy Mountains, or camping down towards the sea-front on their block at Bermagui.

Anne and Bob Gollan at their house at Bermagui in 1983
Photo: Courtesy Susan Magarey

And there are some who, like me, recall the figurative fresh air accompanying Bob and Anne when I caught up with them in London in 1974. I was coming to the end of 12 months' research, hampered during the last months by the Tory government of Edward Heath putting all of England on a three-day working week, in response to the coal-miners' strike. I think it was Easter, the British Museum and the Public Record Office were closed, so Bob and Anne and I agreed to meet at Westminster to catch a ferry to Kew Gardens. And so delighted was I to be in company with Australians that I forgot where I was: Bob had, gently, to indicate to me that generalising excitedly and critically about the English was not appropriate amid the crowds of English people on the ferry.

They gave me a birthday party, that year, in the London flat where they were spending Bob's sabbatical. Anne made a couple of quite splendid pies, and I visited the wine shop in Frith Street where you could buy good Australian wine, and we sat down to lunch: my good mate Liese Baker my new mates Ann Curthoys and John Docker, the Gollans and me. It was great fare, and splendid company. But what made that occasion quite so memorable was Bob's genius as a raconteur, the stories rolling off his tongue as, seemingly, inexhaustible and compelling narrative. A master of the shaggy dog story, he was; many will recall hilarious anecdotes about the Cadillac that Bob and Don bought for £300 when they were newly appointed members of staff at the ANU.

And of course, there was his always incisive, but perceptive and realistic, political analysis. It was on the visit to the People's Republic of China that Anne Gollan organised in 1978 that I, as one of our group of sixteen, benefited most from this. I found visiting China quite overwhelmingly exciting. I had just begun teaching Women's Studies and – cultural blinkers firmly, if unconsciously, in place – I was convinced that the sight of women working on the roads as well as in the factories and the fields meant that we were looking at a society of genuine equality between women and men. After all, our guides assured us that women and men were paid equally, and quoted Chairman Mao saying, 'women hold up half the sky'. It took a while to realise how hopelessly naïve and ill-informed my judgement had been. But doubt began well before the trip was over, a product of the long evenings with Bob and Anne de-briefing after the day's adventures, and pondering on what Bob meant when he said, 'But you wouldn't want a revolution like this in Australia, would you!'

Both gifts – as story-teller and as political analyst – are encapsulated in the story that Jim Hagan recounted at the Gollan Memorial gathering in the Great Hall at University House on 29 October 2007. It was one of Bob's, about the divergence between revolutionaries and reformists, the subject of his 1975 monograph. It concerned a contingent from the British Labour Party visiting the USSR during the years when Nikita Kruschev was president. At the official dinner, the leader of the Britons spent most of his speech trying to persuade the Russians that the British Labour Party was, despite appearances, actively seeking the overthrow of capitalism. When he finished, Kruschev grunted and then replied that this speech had reminded him of an old Russian story about Noah and his ark. You'll remember, of course, that when Noah was to rescue the creatures of the earth, he rescued them as pairs – of horses, elephants, vultures, dogs and so on – for obvious reasons. And for equally obvious reasons, once they were all on the ark, the male of each pair had to be kept separate from the female of each pair; no room for any increase in numbers. This seemed to have worked. When the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, and Noah was finally able to march the animals off the ark again, they appeared obediently in their pairs. But then there appeared a tom cat and a female tabby followed by six kittens. Noah gasped, 'How did you manage that?' 'Oh', said the tom cat, 'it was easy. You thought we were fighting, didn't you!'

The last story that I would like to contribute to this memorial concerns both Eric and Bob. It also reminds us of Eric's membership of the Communist Party. I tell it against myself, for it is, as well, a tale of intellectual enthusiasm overtaking personal perception and consideration. It is a story about an encounter between the old New Left and the new New Left in the 1970s. Sociologist R.W. Connell and historian Terry Irving were preparing a new analysis of class relations in Australian history which was to draw on recently-translated theoretical work of such structuralist Marxist Europeans as Althusser, Dos Santos and Poulantzas. With such theoretical concerns, Connell and Irving were, of course – Oedipally – critical of analyses of class relations in Australian history by previous generations of historians and sociologists, in particular in the work of Robin Gollan and of Jean Martin. I had been charged with organising the weekly seminars. These were traditionally staid and often a bit dreary, so I was trying to ginger them up by inviting speakers from outside the ANU, especially speakers who would engage with the work of people at the ANU. I invited R.W. Connell to come and speak to us about his new analysis, and I asked Bob Gollan if he would chair the seminar and Jean Martin if she would offer comment afterwards. Connell considerately sent a copy of his paper ahead of him, and I gave it to each of them so that they would be prepared. These remarkably in-sensitive arrangements did ensure that the seminar room was packed, though they had effectively bludgeoned Bob and Jean into silence. But then, after Connell had presented his paper, Eric spoke up – quietly, but at some length. And what he had to say was about the excitement of ideas allowing some people to ignore the basic commitment to the struggle for rights and justice for all people, including the intellectual struggle for hearts and minds, and the need to maintain that struggle through periods of oppressive hostility, even danger, during the years of the Cold War. It was gently done, but it was a quite wonderfully eloquent defence, and a political reproof. It was a heroic intervention, in its context. I'm sure that no-one who was there would ever forget the stillness spreading through the room as people recognised what Eric was saying.

Susan Magarey, AM, FASSA, Adjunct Professor in History at the University of Adelaide, is currently writing a history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia.
<susan.magarey@adelaide.edu.au>

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