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NLA News - home April 2004 Volume XIV Number 7
‘The Bandar-Log’: A Literary Hot Potato

The Colin Roderick Papers, in the Manuscripts Collection, include a cache of material from the early 1960s that illuminates an intriguing incident in Australia’s political and literary history

Portrait of Dr Colin Roderick. Photograph courtesy of Mrs Margaret Roderick

Portrait of Dr Colin Roderick
Photograph courtesy of Mrs Margaret Roderick

Colin Roderick (1911–2000) was once a major figure in Australian literary affairs. In 1965 he was appointed Professor of English at the University College of Townsville, which he turned into a notable centre of literary studies. For almost two decades before this appointment, he was on the editorial staff of Angus and Robertson, then Australia’s leading commercial publishing house. In this capacity he got to know the leading lights of the contemporary book world including the editor Beatrice Davis and writers such as Miles Franklin, Xavier Herbert and the young Manning Clark.

Another writer with whom Roderick had dealings was Alan Reid, the Daily Telegraph’s Canberra correspondent. Reid, though forced to earn his living as a tabloid journalist, had literary ambitions. He thought that the great Labor schism of the mid-1950s, when Dr H.V. Evatt engaged in deadly warfare with his enemies in the ALP, might well serve as the basis of a gripping yarn. The success in America of political novels such as All the King’s Men and The Last Hurrah led him to believe that he should do something similar in Australia.

However, the Canberra political novel that Reid decided to write was never published. It survives only in the form of page proofs that have been untouched since the early 1960s, bound sets of which are in the Colin Roderick Papers. The reason why they were kept under wraps is an enlightening story.

Initially called ‘The Gathering’, Reid’s would-be novel was part roman ŕ clef and part Machiavellian reflection on the corrosive effects of politics. The cast of characters included a cynical political adviser named Macker Kalley, who bore a striking resemblance to the author. The Laborites whom Reid knew as a Canberra pressman—H.V. Evatt, Eddie Ward, Arthur Calwell—were likewise given a thinly fictionalised veneer. The central character is an Evatt-like politician dubbed Kaye Seborjar who, gifted but unpredictable, is ever fearful of possible leadership challenges from his unhappy deputy, Con Fortune (Calwell). His endless scheming leads him into a series of wordy exchanges with an array of backroom operators including a conspiratorial Catholic activist named Carr Domenico (B.A. Santamaria).

The manuscript was submitted to Angus and Robertson in 1958. While anyone interested in politics would have found its content inherently fascinating, Reid’s novel, even when edited, did have some artistic shortcomings. The characters were wooden and the dialogue was flat, while there was a shortage of drama or action to keep the narrative ticking over. But, as it turned out, the decision not to publish was determined by other considerations.

Collage of Dr Colin Roderick’s notes on Alan Reid’s ‘The Bandar-Log’. Papers of Colin Roderick, MS1578/16/90; Manuscripts Collection. Courtesy of Mrs Margaret Roderick

Collage of Dr Colin Roderick’s notes on Alan Reid’s ‘The Bandar-Log’
Papers of Colin Roderick, MS1578/16/90; Manuscripts Collection
Courtesy of Mrs Margaret Roderick

Roderick’s papers indicate what happened. The heartache began on 12 August 1958 when he sent an internal memo to his Angus and Robertson colleague Beatrice Davis. Roderick was adamant that the company should not proceed with Reid’s novel. The backstabbers and dissemblers who populated it were, he felt, too obviously identifiable with their real world Labor counterparts for comfort. He feared that troublesome litigation might result from the author’s willingness to show ‘just how rotten politics are’.

Page reproduced from Power without Glory:  A Novel in Three Parts by Frank J. Hardy (Melbourne: F. Hardy, 1950)

Page reproduced from: Power
without Glory: A Novel in Three Parts

by Frank J. Hardy
(Melbourne: F. Hardy, 1950)

Roderick’s response to the manuscript led to Angus and Robertson deciding not to publish. There the matter rested until 1960 when a different company, Cleveland Publishing, decided to take up Reid’s unwanted text. Its managing director, J.P. Atkins, was president of the anti-Evatt Democratic Labor Party in New South Wales, and was not put off by the book’s political content.

Atkins, whose forte as a publisher was 1950s-style pulp fiction, set up a shelf company, Newhaven Press, to publish Reid’s book, which was seen as a quality product compared with Atkins’ usual downmarket fare. The printing was contracted out to Halstead Press. This was an unwise move because Halstead Press was a wholly owned subsidiary of Angus and Robertson whose board of directors held the novel to be libellous. Reid’s book was given a new title, pinched from Kipling—‘The Bandar-Log’ (The Monkey People)—but the camouflage, if such it was, was not effective. The alarm was raised a second time when the page proofs were being finalised. News of the attempted rebadging of Reid’s novel spread to Angus and Robertson, which ordered Halstead Press to stop the print run and, moreover, not to hand over the type to Atkins.

The spectre of litigation that had hung over Reid’s book now became a reality. An aggrieved Atkins decided to sue Halstead Press for breach of contract; Halstead Press would have to pay damages if a court found that the book was not libellous. The case of ‘The Bandar-Log’, encased in this narrow legalistic framework, came before Judge Perrignon in Sydney’s District Court on 11 September 1961.

Mr Alan Reid (Daily Telegraph, Sydney) at a lunch for US Ambassador to Australia Mr Ed Clark, 5 December 1967. Courtesy of Marietta Troeth, National Press Club

Mr Alan Reid (Daily Telegraph, Sydney) at a lunch for US Ambassador to Australia Mr Ed Clark, 5 December 1967
Pictures Collection
Courtesy of Marietta Troeth, National Press Club

The court proceedings dragged on over the next fortnight. Throughout this period Colin Roderick, the main witness for Angus and Robertson, was careful to update his dossier of information relating to the case. At the start of each day, press reports of the previous day’s proceedings were collected and later pasted into a small scrapbook. This scrapbook is in Roderick’s papers and its existence makes it much easier for latter-day researchers to reconstruct events since there appears to be no extant transcript of the court proceedings.

Colin Roderick was the star of the show when the trial opened. He had to get up in the witness box and explain why Angus and Robertson was so keen to block the publication of Reid’s novel. For this purpose, he came armed with annotated page proofs of ‘The Bandar-Log’ to back up the claim that key passages referred directly to Dr Evatt and other ALP figures. Other material relied on included a graph which traced the parallel course between incidents in the book and the Labor Party’s recent internal history.

A black and white portrait of H.V. Evatt Sitting at a Desk, 1951 by Max Dupain. Courtesy of Jill White, Max Dupain Exhibition N egative Archives

Max Dupain (1911–1992)
[Portrait of H.V. Evatt Sitting
at a Desk, 1951]
gelatin silver photograph;
28.8 x 24.0 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an25060678

Courtesy of Jill White, Max Dupain
Exhibition Negative Archives

Support was also forthcoming from Dr Evatt who, after arranging a private meeting during the trial, told Roderick that he was ‘a good boy’.

The burden of Roderick’s testimony was that Reid’s novel was ‘a thinly disguised documentary on actual political events and pressures’. For almost a week, Tom Hughes, the counsel for the plaintiff, grilled Roderick in an attempt to prove that Angus and Robertson had seized on ‘superficial similarities’ between Reid’s characters and actual politicians, while ignoring dissimilarities. But Roderick stood his ground. Under cross examination he delved into detailed notes that he had made on the characters and synopses of the plot as he continued to insist on the points of similarity. As an example he noted that ‘Seborjar was described as “The Big Man”, which was what some people called Dr Evatt’.

A black & White photograph of John Gorton standing in the foreground of a crowd gathered at Parliament House, Canberra, 11 November 1975. AIS photograph

John Gorton standing in the foreground
of a crowd gathered at Parliament House,
Canberra, 11 November 1975
b&w photograph; 16.5 x 21.6 cm
Australian Information Service photograph
Pictures Collection, nla.pic-an24358492

Roderick’s testimony was supported by counsel for Angus and Robertson who submitted that characters in ‘The Bandar-Log’ were portrayed as ‘corrupt and void of standards of morality and ordinary decency’. They were amoral beasts struggling to survive in a political jungle. A novel with unsavoury characters who could be identified with real people must be libellous.

The decisive moment in the District Court hearings came when another defence witness, a Halstead Press proofreader named Mrs Jean Owers, identified Seborjar as Evatt. It was this testimony that led Judge Perrignon to determine that ‘The Bandar-Log’ was indeed libellous. Mrs Owers, he announced in a reserved decision, could be considered to be ‘the only witness who came anywhere near being the counterpart of the ordinary person in the street’. If such a person believed that Reid’s novel contained an Evatt-like character then the resemblance must indeed be obvious. And so the claim for damages was dismissed.

The stressful intersection of literature and the law in ‘The Bandar-Log’ case was unfortunate but not unique. The affair echoed Frank Hardy’s 1950 trial for alleged criminal libel in Power without Glory. In 1946, the Victorian Supreme Court found Robert Close, the author of Love Me, Sailor, guilty of having written an ‘obscene libel’. During World War II the fabled Ern Malley hoax ended up in court. The 1961 District Court trial perpetuated the repressive mental climate that characterised these earlier trials. Writing, as a result, became even more of a stressful craft in Australia.

Inside cover reproduced from Love Me by Robert S. Close (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1945)

Inside cover reproduced from Love Me
Sailor
by Robert S. Close (Melbourne:
Georgian House, 1945)

The author of ‘The Bandar-Log’ was not a party to the District Court proceedings but the experience was traumatic nonetheless. Alan Reid had written a novel that, in a legal first, had been judged to be defamatory without ever being published and, for a while, he felt that any political novel published in Australia was bound to incur a libel action. It was not until 1969 that Reid emerged as a published author following the appearance of The Power Struggle in which he recounted how John Gorton became Prime Minister. This classic work displayed the same Machiavellian mind-set as ‘The Bandar-Log’ while sloughing off the unconvincing pseudo-fictional facade.

The Power Struggle consolidated Alan Reid’s reputation as the man who knew everyone and everything that mattered in federal politics. The agony he endured as a frustrated novelist did not fit in with this cultivated image of omni-competence. It became unmentionable. Reid’s younger colleagues who flocked into journalism in the late 1960s were blissfully unaware of this unfortunate incident in the earlier life of their hero.

There was one participant though who hoped that ‘The Bandar-Log’ affair would not be forgotten. Colin Roderick was proud of his doughty performance in the dock. He was careful to hold on to the dossier compiled during the trial, including all the press cuttings and bound volumes of Alan Reid’s page proofs. In his latter years he ensured that this invaluable cache of material was among the papers that he donated to the National Library. Scholars and citizens alike should be grateful that he did so, since it enables a fascinating episode in Australia’s political and cultural history to be properly recorded.

STEPHEN HOLT is a Canberra-based historian and biographer

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