From Robert Mugabe to Alexander Downer: Jeremy Hearder retires after 65 years as a diplomat

Jeremy Hearder has retired once already.

It was late 1996, and soon after a three-year posting in Wellington, New Zealand as Australia’s deputy High Commissioner – and a 37-year career with the Department of External Affairs that began in January 1959 – it was time to stop working.

It didn’t work out.

Jeremy Hearder, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) former diplomat and historian, at the M. E. Bliss Law Library in Canberra.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Within a couple of months he was back at work, buried deep in the extensive history section of the Department of Foreign Affairs, writing a highly regarded biography of one of Australia’s greatest diplomats, Sir James Plimsoll, with whom he had worked in Brussels.

Extraordinarily, once the book was published, Hearder just carried on working in the history section.

For another 28 years.

But on June 28, Hearder, almost 88, will retire again – this time, for good.

The quietly spoken diplomat, who grew up in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs and attended Melbourne Grammar and Melbourne University, concedes it is “probably” time to go as “I’ve had a very good innings”.

When Hearder moved from Melbourne to Canberra, Sir Robert Menzies was still prime minister and it was the middle of the Cold War. He was sent on his first posting in 1962 to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, just as the Vietnam War was starting to heat up.

It was only years later, and only after Hearder joined the foreign service, that he would learn his father Roblin was one of three founders of Australia’s overseas spy agency, ASIS.

A young Jeremy Hearder in 1959 in Melbourne.

Resources were scarce in Laos. There were just four Australians in the embassy and cars were not available to the diplomats, so they had to ride everywhere. Occasionally, the RAAF would fly in frozen food for the Australians on post, but because the fridge at home was so basic, the family’s cook would arrange for the food to be stashed in the freezers of US diplomats.

The only English-language newspaper available in the country was The Times of London, and the BBC World Service was an information lifeline to the outside world.

“It was regarded as a difficult post … You did have, once per posting, a holiday trip to Hong Kong. And I think there were two or three trips a year to Bangkok … they were basically holiday trips. It was just nice to get down there and have a milkshake, for example,” he remembers.

“But it was just a fascinating place to be. Once I happened to be able to join a friend of mine, who was from the BBC working in Laos, and a couple of friends of his, who decided to take a trip on elephants up through the middle of Laos and then up a little hill.”

The BBC journalist was trying to track down a white tiger for a documentary, and while they failed in their mission, Hearder loved the adventure.

Australia’s first High Commissioner to Zimbabwe, Jeremy Hearder, and his wife Kay meeting Robert Mugabe.

After flying solo for the first year, his wife Kay joined him once she finished her medical degree at the University of Sydney.

Laos was the first of nine postings for Hearder, Kay and a brood that would eventually grow to five children. From suburban Canberra, they also spent years posted to Tanzania, Thailand, Belgium, Fiji, the United States, Kenya, Zimbabwe, New Zealand and even Sydney.

In Belgium, a young Alexander Downer – later Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister – was a more junior third secretary on the same diplomatic mission for about a year.

Hearder recalls wondering if the junior Downer might have a “look at my father” attitude – his father Alick had been Menzies’ immigration minister and overseen the dismantling of the White Australia policy – but “he just wanted to do the job”.

Downer for his part, is shocked to hear Hearder is finally retiring at 87.

“A quiet, dutiful and thoughtful colleague who could keep the office calm in a crisis. An oil-on-troubled-waters sort of guy! Also very loyal and thoughtful for the welfare of others,” he recalled.

In Kenya, in 1971, he worked with a young Dennis Richardson, who would go on to become one of Australia’s most storied public servants.

Hearder’s biography of James Plimsoll.

Hearder recalls an intense young man “who liked to talk to people and often used to come into my office and close the door and tell me really what he felt about things”.

Richardson, for his part, says Hearder is an “extraordinarily fine person, he and and his wife Kay are two of the most decent people you’ll ever meet. Very compassionate, with a great capacity to cross cultural boundaries”.

“I remember after one particular issue, which I won’t go into, I went to see him and talked to him about leaving the post to come back to Canberra and perhaps leave the department, but he was just very measured with his advice – and kept me in the service.”

Richardson would later go on to be head of Foreign Affairs, Defence, Ambassador to Washington and ASIO chief.

In 1980, Hearder was sent to open a diplomatic mission to Zimbabwe, and serve as Australia’s first High Commissioner to the newly independent nation.

“This was an extraordinary one because I had 15 minutes with Malcolm Fraser as the prime minister [before leaving], because he’d had a big role through the Commonwealth system to get peace, a Constitution, elections, the whole thing starting to work,” he recalls.

“The main thing that stuck in my mind was, as I was going out the door [from meeting Fraser] he said, ‘If you don’t think we’re giving enough aid, just say so’.”

Not long after, a group of Australian secondary school teachers were on their way to Zimbabwe to help improve education standards in the country. Some would stay for years.

Later, as the new nation grappled with disarmament and the end of a civil war, Hearder asked Canberra for tents as the rainy season approached and guerrilla armies disarmed.

A plane load of tents soon arrived.

The job of High Commissioner brought him into close contact with Robert Mugabe, at that time a revolutionary independence leader and the country’s widely hailed first prime minister. Mugabe in later years would be accused of corruption, human rights abuses, anti-white racism and even genocide.

But back in 1980, when Mugabe initially embraced racial reconciliation, the world welcomed his elevation to leader. Hearder chooses his words carefully when describing Mugabe, mindful of the former dictator’s stained legacy and trying to balance that against his early promise.

“He really liked what Australia had done. He liked Malcolm Fraser; he liked, as a former teacher … the way we produced all these teachers. And I remember we had a party at the residence, we got as many of the teachers as we could and they all came from all over the country and we got Mugabe to come along,” Hearder remembers.

“He was eventually persuaded to [make a speech] and he just … made a wonderful speech.”

Foreign Minister Penny Wong says Hearder’s six decades of distinguished public service have been “remarkable”.

“During that time there have been great changes and challenges in the world, but the role of diplomats like Jeremy has remained paramount. I know he will be missed by the team at DFAT and I thank him for his service,” she says.

Looking back on 65 years of public service, Hearder is understated about all he has achieved and has no regrets.

“No, I was very, very lucky. I had a wife who was prepared to go on doing these things and was interested. The kids had, you know, sometimes it was very hard, you know, being in boarding school. But they all did their bit.”

Working for foreign affairs, he says, “will always remain an extremely demanding, worthwhile and useful, really important part of the government”.

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