Getting Their Goats

UP THE road from the Billabong there is a formidable but fading edifice, what was once and long ago the local Masonic Temple. It has since been a rug shop, a wholesale toy warehouse and, most recently, an antique market, though the garishly re-painted doors have been locked more often than not of late. High above the passing traffic and these days unnoticed by all but pigeons, there remain the crossed carpenter’s square and compass, ancient and once revered  symbols of the building’s original owners. It was the long gone local worthies who gathered weekly in that tomb-like meeting hall, the community pillars and solid merchants, the High Street’s men of respect -- the sort whose voices carried just a bit more weight with the local council, where fellow lodge members would have worked and been ready to exchange the secret handshake and sort things out like good Masonic gentlemen.

If you were Catholic and being raised that way, the Masons were figures of both ridicule and loathing. They wore blue aprons and rode billygoats, and there were other giggles too – sleeping in coffins and getting about with one trouser leg rolled up, or so it was said. The loathing was mutual. Catholics were forbidden by papal decree from joining the Masons, who would not have accepted a papist in any case. If it had been just dress-up games and a bit of mumbo jumbo to justify an evening away from the little woman, few would have seen anything too sinister about middle-aged men showing each other a knee.

But there was rather more to the Masons than that. The common wisdom spoke of undue influence and exclusion, of how a Catholic could never get a game for Essendon because the footy club was dominated by goat riders and, even worse, the sons of transplanted Orangemen.  Fancy a job in the public service? Well that would depend on the arm to which you sent your application. At the Board of Works, Masons were said to dominate and promote only their own, while it was known that Catholics did well at the Harbour Trust. Same with the police force, where some squads were Masonic and others Catholic – a divide that helped prompt the Kaye Inquiry and the biggest public airing of institutionalised corruption Victoria has seen, as Gideon Haigh explains in his fascinating history of abortion in Australia. A friend of the Billabong, an old Xavier boy, tells of seeking vocational advice in his HSC year from an elderly Jesuit, who reacted with horror at the lad’s intention to pursue a particular career. “Be very careful,” the old priest warned, “that occupation is infested with Masons.” He laughs about it now, but that advice was delivered as recently as the mid Seventies.

If you have ever wondered why so many prominent Catholics barrack for Collingwood or Richmond, the answer is straightforward. Archbishop Daniel Mannix set out to lift his flock from the boot factories by fostering an education system that took the best and brightest boys and pointed them up Johnson Street, over the Studley Park Bridge and onto the high ground of conspicuous achievement represented by Kew’s shady streets and mansions. Mannix was determined to see his flock colonise the middle class and the legacy of his strategy remains. Scratch any number of current judges, silks, business leaders or medical folk and there you will find it, just a generation or two beneath Melbourne’s social epidermis, that ancestral memory of slums and, inevitably, the unwavering generational fealty to Magpies or Tigers.

Why bring all up this up? The Masons yet exist but are these days, by any real-world reckoning, no more potent nor sinister in their mischief than Rotarians. Their old lodges are shuttered and apt be rebuilt as apartments or shopping centres, the certain fate of that ratty former temple near the Billabong. Well the answer is simple enough, and its purpose as this new year begins is to mine from relatively recent history the sustaining hope of change and reform. Fact is, while the Blue Apron Boys are pretty much gone, there is a new and not-so-secret brotherhood, one even more committed to looking after its own.

Consider the ongoing Dave and Bob show, which is seeing two of the left’s leading lights making asses of each other and themselves. The boasting and abuse, the bitter geriatric crowing of having mounted an enemy’s wife (on a billiard table or otherwise), it would be sad stuff if not leavened by the yeast of so much revealed stupidity. But will it hurt either party in the short term? Will it give commissioning editors or ABC producers or talk-show bookers pause to reflect on the wisdom of having anything to do with either wretch? Don’t be silly! That’s what the modern brotherhood is all about, taking care of mates while ignoring their manifest deficiencies of intellect and character. If you are in that club there is no need for forgiveness because sins and sensational indiscretions are simply overlooked. Need an example? While the rapist Bill Clinton’s  visit to Sydney moved Anne Summers to tears of joy, her response to Tony Abbott has been to warn of a man who would “wheel out his wife and daughters” in support of an allegedly Catholic and conservative anti-feminist agenda.

How many Fairfax columnists could survive on the merit of their insight alone? Go on, name one. Not the hack Hartcher or the tired, tapped-out, depleted gusher that is Michelle Grattan. A Dill Horin or Betty Farrelly? Don’t make a Bunyip laugh. On matters environmental, who holds to account the gullible, cheer-leading transcribers of catastropharian cant, a category exemplified by Adam Morton, Ben Cubby and Melissa Fyfe? No one because the brotherhood has its own agendas to advance and that trio ride their goats with unswerving assurance and aplomb.

At the ABC, more of the same. When not on vacation, Jonathan Holmes does his weekly smugging and scandalised tut-tutting, a Monday night caricature of probity and righteousness but hailed by the brotherhood as the genuine article. So why not praise the man, sling him a nice salary and the odd, black tie award for excellence or whatever? He is one of them, appreciated for his eagerness to overlook twitter pal Wendy Carlisle’s transgressions against fact and fairness, indulged when he delivers a token smack to his own. Who amongst those whose agendas he advances would say a bad word about the host who uses his ABC pulpit to urge in the name of fairness that lefty warmists blitz broadcasting authorities with demands that the sceptic Alan Jones be sanctioned for his “unbalanced” agenda?

One could go on indefinitely, especially about the debasement of our tertiary institutions, but with the new year’s quickening it is not the time for grumbling, which the Right in its post-Rudd exile has elevated almost to an artform. Rather, look to history and take heart. Masonic influence waned and faded, in no small part because the rituals and regalia were rendered ludicrous and irrelevant by a changed world’s impatience with old-style sectarian tribalism. Its adherents were to be laughed at – “Where does Mr Smith keep his goat, Mum?” – and it crumbled, just as the temple up the road has done.

The new tribalism, that will go the same way. Dave and Bob can spit their venom about who did what to whose wife and who bags all the money and grants, but such eruptions animate only fellow members of their push’s various factions. To the rest of us, their self-important feuds are the brayings of donkeys in a knacker’s yard. They have gamed the system for years, advancing each other’s careers and turning Fairfax and the ABC into shops less open to dissent than the College of Cardinals.  But their pews are emptying, do no more than consult the latest polls for evidence of that. The billygoats, if you like, are coming home to roost.

Their day is almost done and the best the rest of us can do is see them off in the appropriate style – with laughter at their pretensions, hilarity at their antics. It is the one thing they cannot stand, as Ellis’ hints of bringing legal actions against his needlers attest. Sue for loss of reputation? That would be a tricky brief when the client has long since shredded his own amongst all but those so ideologically blinkered they can no longer recognise a fool.

Make laughter the weapon in 2012. Bring your ridicule to dinner parties and other social functions. Scoff openly, even to the mortification of your hostess, at some minor entry in the register of wit’s parroting of the piffle handed down by his betters. Don’t be rude or aggressive -- don’t “get in their faces”, as Obama puts it. Just laugh good naturedly and openly, and keep right on chuckling until the election is called and the posses of clowns and poseurs are banished from the trough of public influence and funding.

Laugh at Dave and Bob, and the Silly and their ABC. Laugh at those who have traduced the CSIRO and transformed humanities departments into cesspits of dogma. Laugh at the Drum, especially at its proclaimed even-handedness, and at your capital’s cookie-cutter writers festival. Laugh until your sides split at the next Earth Hour. And laugh in particular at broadsheets so contaminated by groupthink they no longer see the bulk of the population as worthy of absorbing the clichés their authors mistake for wisdom.

Increasingly, the brotherhood talks only to itself. Its day is coming. Laugh and rejoice. Goat, or so they say, makes a very tasty curry.