PROTESTANT LAWYER, CATHOLIC LIBERTINE, INVISIBLE MASONS.

Ian Callinan's The Lawyer and the Libertine is a flawed novel but a significant book. For the first time in Australian literature (I think) it examines the role of two character types in shaping public life, on the one hand the Libertine, the morally elastic opportunist identified with Irish-Australian Catholicism, on the other the Lawyer, the dour man of rigid principle identified with British Protestantism. George Dice, whose career loosely parallels Lionel Murphy's, is the eponymous Libertine. Stephen Mentmore, whose career resembles Garfield Barwick's, is the eponymous Lawyer. Each man's legal philosophy -- "judicial lawmaking" for Dice, "strict legalism" for Mentmore -- reflects his morals.

The novel remains freakishly topical. How often does a barrister write fiction to defend blackletter law only to find himself shortly afterwards appointed to the "judicially active" High Court he has been attacking? It is also provocative. How often does a barrister who has unsuccessfully prosecuted a public figure create a fictional character whose career parallels the accused's? Neither Dice nor Mentmore is a stereotypical saint or villain. This is fiction, not history, in that it rearranges, omits and invents for thematic and dramatic (and no doubt prudential) purposes. It is also a gripping read. Yet when all these qualifications have been made, it is plain (to this reader at least) that Callinan reverses the fashionable estimation -- if not of the historical Barwick and Murphy, then of what each man stood for -- and reveals a deeply held moral preference for "Barwick". Thus the author throws away any chance he might have had of a respectful critical reception. And so, apart from half a page of abuse in the Courier-Mail, the reviews have tended to patronise this astonishing work as "fiction of limited interest".

George Dice, the Murphy type, is the son of a prosperous Irish Catholic shopkeeper and SP bookmaker in depression-blighted Mascot. Stephen Mentmore, the Barwick type, is the son of a fundamentalist Baptist mother and a trade unionist father who bets with the elder Dice. Despising his luckless father, Stephen follows the indomitable mother. The Mentmores are dirt poor and owe Mick Dice money. Mick allows Stephen to pay off the debt by work, for, though wallowing in official corruption, he retains a kindliness that his higher flying son will lack. A third character, Lester, is a passive observer and link between Dice and Mentmore. In later life he works as a journalist for what seems to De the Sydney Morning Herald run by a Catholic -- a surreal touch. Thus he can reveal that the proprietor, without Mentmore's knowledge, forces his appointment to the High Court.

The strengths and weaknesses of Dice and Mentmore emerge in good dramatic scenes. For socially ambitious reasons, Dice attends "St Bartholomew's", a Jesuit college like Riverview (he is also called George in the hope that this will one day help him into the Masons). Mentmore attends "Inner Street High School", like Fort Street High. Once famous for relative sanity, in this novel both schools are sports mad. The two boys meet in a football match. Dice repeatedly stomps, rakes and late tackles his much smaller opponent, but cannot prevent Mentmore from equalising the score on the final whistle. When Dice offers to shake hands after the game, Mentmore, who has absorbed severe physical punishment, refuses. Surprised, the conscienceless Dice remarks: "That's foot-ball, mate. If you want to play it, you've got to expect that." Thus Callinan neatly contrasts Mentmore's ability, doggedness and sense of right, with Dice's ability, flamboyance and pragmatic amorality. As the novel proceeds, the occasions for exposing these differences are the war, women and the functioning of the courts. The opposition between fundamental decency and unscrupulous selfishness underlies every episode.

Only a spoilsport would reveal the plot, for one of Callinan's gifts as a novelist is to achieve surprise. Suffice to say that the novel follows its characters from the 1930s, through the Second World War to the early 1980s when Mentmore resigns as Chief Justice of the High Court and Dice, then Attorney-General, replaces him with a "progressive". Mentmore's war years are well done in the understated manner of Don Charlwood's No Moon Tonight and Ross Campbell's An Urge to Laugh. The character studies are also memorable. But the novel is doomed to be read primarily as a tour through Australia's political-legal history from the Depression to Whitlam. Callinan hopes that the "background to the events in which [the characters] are involved is accurately described". His epigraph quotes Winston Churchill on "history". It cannot therefore be altogether amiss for this idiosyncratic reader to attempt to shed flickers of light on "background" that appears distorted or obscure, or even very well done.

The legal philosophies identified with Barwick and Murphy have been so much discussed in recent years that little remains to be added. Callinan avoids the quagmire of specious logic and adroit manipulation of terms that passes for debate about judges' rights to draw "implications" from the social and moral "themes" of old legislation; or about the "intrinsically political" nature of the judicial function. His contribution is to give jurisprudence a human face and connect ideology with the depths of the moral being. Thus Dice accepts no rule of right and wrong, and conducts himself accordingly. Mentmore, by contrast, believes in duty and self-responsibility and, while failing in many ways, essentially does right. So with the law. Dice accepts bias as an inescapable fact of life and treats objectivity as an illusion to be ignored. Mentmore also acknowledges bias and prejudice as facts of life but regards their existence as a pressing reason to insist on objectivity as the ideal. He explains why to Lester:

   I'll be the last ... of the conservative blackletter men. I know they say
   my type is hypocritical, that we bend the law to make it accord with our
   prejudices just as much as the others, but I don't admit it. It isn't true.
   At least I've always tried not to do that. I've been conscious that it can
   so easily happen but I've struggled not to do it. Once you admit you're
   entitled to do it, you'd never do anything else.

Murphy's dictum that "judges should produce [emphasis added] laws that are rational, just, humane and simple" is resonant. But Callinan's warning about the consequences of abandoning the ideal of neutrality seems to me unanswerable.

The Dice Portrait is intriguing -- if a little flippancy is in order -- because it reverses the stereotype of Roman Catholics in mainstream Australian fiction. Dice not only acts wickedly, he recognises no standard of conduct. And oddly, his hedonism is reinforced by Roman Catholic doctrine and practice. Since Kenneally's early fictions, we have been flooded -- may one whisper "bored"? -- with novels, plays, films, books of poetry and television series in which Catholics, repressed by family, nun, brother and priest, live in guilt and doubt. But George Dice is ruled by no Hard God. Attractive, determined and sensual, he romps about in the Devil's Playground serenely untroubled by conscience. Indeed he is encouraged in wickedness by confession, for Callinan believes that Catholics "do-what-they-like-and-go-to-confession -so-that-they-can-keep-on-doing-what-they-like". He also believes that Catholics enjoy a "certainty of ultimate redemption", which removes their inhibitions against doing evil, and, of course, that they rely on "the end justifying the means". Where is Dr Rumble now that he is needed to give a Radio Reply to this unreconstructed nineteenth-century Protestantism?

Another first for Callinan is that he gazes neutrally on a chastising nun. Little George Dice can't keep his fingers out of little girls' knickers until a Bride of Christ delivers a healthy whacking that, in defiance of James Joyce, leaves George neither victim nor hero. But Sister has scotched the snake, not killed it. Confounding convention, the brutal Dice grows up to be a Catholic womaniser without inhibitions, while Stephen Mentmore, his Protestant shadow, hurts women he genuinely loves by reticence and inertia born of self-doubt.

Closely linked with Callinan's sense of the deleterious effects of Catholic morality is his picture of the tribal-political thing generally known as the "New South Wales Right". Until the 1950s, perhaps until the triumph of Wran's New Labor, the Right was both a way of life and an unwritten "system", working like a "ruling class", but in reverse (remember War and Peace, in which an aristocratic lieutenant far outweighs a career general). The Right had no officers or organisation, no rules of admittance, but it paralleled official political and legal structures and in many respects was more powerful. Being "in" or "out" made and broke careers. It embraced Labor leagues and the right-wing trade unions, rugby league clubs, tabloid journalists, priests with ALP connections, "new money" businesses, and Catholic networks within the police, the law, councils and government departments. Unifying these disparate elements were aggressive Australianism, tribal loyalty to the Irish-Australian Catholic church, detestation of wowsers and silvertails (as distinct from new "big money"), and devotion to Jack Lang ("Big Jake" in this book).

Callinan gets many aspects of this phenomenon right and, where no-one else has succeeded, he can't be blamed if he gets some wrong. John Edwards' Keating: The Inside Story gives a brief glimpse of what the NSW Right was like as a way of life. Graham Richardson's Whatever It Takes and Marianne Wilkinson's The Fixer are informative about Left-Right clashes and scandals. But aficionados will relish the uncanny similarity between the NSW Right during the period covered by Callinan and the Irish-American political-religious tribe at the heart of Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah; while the "favour bank" operated by the "Irish" law men in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is the closest parallel to the network that Callinan's police sergeant taps into.

In The lawyer and the Libertine the local "fixer" is the Mascot sergeant of police, who is "more powerful than the Premier". Naturally he protects Dice's SP bookmaking and the publican's after-hours trade. But astonishingly he can also call in "favours" to fix and unfix disgraceful military appointments for George Dice in wartime. The novel is realistic at least in intimating that those who wielded the greatest influence in behind-the-scenes New South Wales tended to have no official status.

But the mechanics of power interest Callinan less than the mindset that allowed an Irish Roman Catholic like the sergeant to go to confession every week and yet engage in a lifetime of official corruption. For Callinan this mindset is an "unreachable country". It was formed, he believes, by

   exposure to old style Irish self-righteousness, alcohol and betting, the
   ancient Irish chip on the shoulder, the conviction that any means justify
   the end, the certainty of ultimate redemption, the age old impassioned
   grievances against England and the non-labour establishment, the long-past
   but faithfully preserved ancestral memories of bitter hardships, and the
   opportunity in Australia to take and criticize at the same time.

Eloquent as is this analysis, it is also significantly incomplete. For it fails to note the distinction between legal and moral, between "breaking the law" and "committing a sin", by which the sergeant would have rationalised his conduct. No doubt the extension of this principle led to a great deal of crime, and to sin as well. But it is not unlike Barwick's famous dictum about tax: "The liability to pay income tax is wholly derived from the law ... The obligation to pay is a legal one. Some politicians try to treat it as a moral obligation. But it is not" (A Radical Tory). Amen! says the sergeant as, in good conscience, he breaks another law.

The old chestnut of how far "historical fiction" is entitled to go in departing from "the facts" must have troubled Callinan. There was once a rule of thumb that an historical novel might invent, add, subtract and interpret, but not directly contradict established fact. Since Hochhuth, however, dramatists and novelists have claimed the right to be understood as serious critics of the past, and, when caught out in error, to plead that they have written fiction. Heaven forfend that Callinan be lumped in with Hochhuth, but his method does raise doubts. Translating Archbishop Mannix from Melbourne to Sydney was legitimate, but painting Mannix as uncouth and giving the Catholic church in NSW an opposite role to that which it actually played was not. Of course Mannix made his support for the Anti-Communist Labor Party known. But he did it in his own dry way. At a function where a Catholic politician who remained in the ALP at the time of the Split gave a rousing anti-Communist address, and where another who had left the ALP was present, Mannix merely observed: "I like what Mr Galbally has said. I am proud of what Mr Scully has done." That was Mannix. Callinan's picture of him addressing senior politicians as "my son", and uttering crude threats to win support for "Mr Tantanis" (Santamaria) takes fictional licence too far.

Even more astonishing is Callinan's making the Catholic church in Sydney an enforcer for Santamaria. The reality was that the Catholic church and the ALP in New South Wales both broke with the Movement, leaving Santamaria in Victoria exposed to destruction by the Left. The Sydney diocese then interdicted the Movement, forbidding it the use of church facilities and even preventing clergy from associating with its members socially. Far from backing Santamaria, powerful figures on the Right, like Callinan's sergeant, searched out and purged suspected sympathisers. Equating the NSW Right and the Movement because they were both Catholic is like equating Murphy and Barwick because they were both lawyers.

Turning now to Masonry, which is curiously absent from this novel. At one point, Dice asks the sergeant about his low rank: "With your connections you could be police commissioner. Why just a senior sergeant?" What an odd question at a time (1944) when the sergeant and Dice would have been acutely aware that the Commissioner of Police in New South Wales was always a Freemason. And the oddity prompts a serious, if digressive, query. Is it not strange that a novel plainly intended to convey the political-social reality of New South Wales, and bent on scrutinising the public role of Irish Catholics, should treat Freemasons as virtually non-existent? Why Punch without Judy?

I intend no disrespect to Australians who embrace Masonic ritual and brotherhood, and who number so many of the nation's most intelligent and purposeful citizens, when I point out how surprising it is that Masonry has been largely written out of Australian literature. Moreover I happily accept the assurances, given on the rare occasions when Masonry is mentioned in a political context, that "neither politics nor religion are ever mentioned in a Masonic Lodge". And yet, through whatever derivative groupings, Masonry has undeniably exercised an important, arguably a beneficial, influence on Australian life. Why, then, is its name usually unspoken, even in non-fiction histories to which its activities are germane?

Consider the case of Gavin Souter's Company of Heralds (1981), that excellent history of the Sydney Morning Herald's first 150 years. Despite Granny's reputation as the mouthpiece for the Lodges, Souter makes no mention of Masonry, not even to dispel what he might think an error. The only hint, if it is a hint, of Masonic influence is the revelation that Colin Bingham was an "unlikely starter" to become the first Australian editor of the Herald -- this in 1961 -- because he "had been baptized and brought up as a Roman Catholic, although he abandoned Catholicism as a young man". The reality in Sydney around 1950 might be best conveyed by picturing a senior Catholic civil servant reading the morning paper. Glancing at "Column Hate" and the news, he is electrified by an editorial that would strike most readers as stupefyingly bland: "It is imperative that holders of office under the Crown display the highest standards of integrity and competence and that established appointment procedures be always scrupulously observed." Decoded, this fog of polysyllabic generalities conveys, to the initiated, that someone called, say, Murphy, has been appointed, say, Deputy Controller of Forests, when a Smith was in contention. In short, some invisible line demarcating Catholic and Masonic territories in the civil service has been crossed; and initiates are in no doubt that the Herald has fired a shot, albeit blank, to register Masonic displeasure.

When a major Masonic stronghold was breached, proxy warfare on a grand scale erupted. Souter is silent about the campaign launched when a Catholic was appointed Commissioner of Police in 1953, although the Herald was still hounding the unhappy man on his deathbed several years later.

Souter's history is outstandingly clear and frank. But his foreword insists that it would be wrong to imply that "nothing has been left out". And at points where Masonic interests could have been the motive for Herald campaigns but nothing has been said, he seems to hint at a gap. Thus he deals very openly -- up to a point -- with the extraordinary episode in which the antisocialist Herald joined in Evatt's attack on the Santamaria Movement, helped write Evatt's and Calwell's policy speeches, and used Herald journalists to staff a campaign headquarters -- known as the "Labor Ward" -- for Arthur Calwell. But only one faint clue is given as to why this was done. Having explained how the editor; Pringle, came to be informed about the Movement and was thus able to print an authoritative expose the day after Evatt's attack, Souter writes teasingly: "Evatt had in fact been to see Henderson [Managing Director of Fairfax] before releasing the statement, but Henderson did not mention this to Pringle until long after the event." This seems to be a gnomic hint that the Masonic management of the Herald had decided to join the coalition of non-communist forces then backing Evatt against Santamaria.

It is fair to say that the Lodges regarded themselves as the guardians of a secular society; and the Herald, despite Protestant origins, always trumpeted its "liberal principles". By contrast the Santamaria Movement could be interpreted (not by this writer) as a Catholic attempt to intrude into public life, with the possible outcome being theocratic control over social and political policy. Furthermore the Movement's influence had shifted the balance of power to the extent that Masonic prerogatives, such as the Commissionership of Police in NSW, were being lost. It is understandable, therefore, that in 1953-54 Masonry should reverse its policy of limited co-operation with Santamaria and, through the Herald, attempt to destroy the Movement while assisting other non-communist groups. The remarkable thing is that Souter does not mention Masonry in connection with the Herald campaign, not even as a possibility, not even to deny it. When Santamaria died recently, Bob Hogg alone among the memorialists (Australian, 4th March) gave weight to the role of Masonry in first supporting, then demolishing his work.

To return to Callinan. It is of course unfair to use The Lawyer and the Libertine as a platform for a general complaint about Australian literature. But it is not irrelevant. Deplorable as were so many aspects of the NSW Right, and admirable as is Callinan's depiction of them, perspective is needed. The Irish-Catholic networks within police, councils, government departments and politics were created in the first instance to break through existing Protestant brick walls and Masonic glass ceilings. "No Catholic need apply" once stood outside many factory gates; while businesses and governments, silently, did not advance Catholics beyond certain levels. Is it really too rancorous, therefore, to suggest that "the background" to The Lawyer and the Libertine would have been even more "accurate" if the Masonic-establishment network, which gave the Catholic Right so much of its point, had been touched on? Surely Mentmore -- a successful barrister and a sound type -- would have been invited to join a Lodge; membership of exclusive clubs would have followed, then briefs and business opportunities offered by denizens "pickled in port and privilege". Surely a Masonic rather than a Catholic newspaper proprietor should have pushed for Mentmore's elevation to the High Court?

The Lawyer and the Libertine is a welcome addition to the lamentably few novels that explore the moral philosophies implicit in Australian public life. Its strength lies in the dramatic contrast it draws between Dice and Mentmore, and thus in the damning commentary it provides on the intellectual and cultural trends that have mis-shaped Australia's recent history. Revulsion from the sight of selfish opportunism triumphing over reason, decency and solid achievement is a perennial theme, but it was never more timely than it is today.

Donut Gallagher is an Adjunct Professor at James Cook University. He edited The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh for Penguin. Nicholas Hasluck discussed other aspects of The Lawyer and the Libertine (Central Queensland University Press) in the July-August Quadrant.