Peter Ryan: Extraordinary Australian with a spark of mischief

John Tidey brings us into the company of an extraordinary Australian in Ryan’s Luck: A Life of Peter Ryan MM.

Ryan in 2001. He was ‘dapper, witty, bohemian, trouble and brave’.

Ryan’s Luck: A Life of Peter Ryan MM
By John Tidey. Arcadia, 136pp, $29.95 (PB)

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The marks that Peter Ryan made in his long life (92 years) were due not so much to luck, as to an upbringing in then-semi-rural Glen Iris in east Melbourne where, as he said, “you learned that it was possible to rise through prudence, being economical and working hard”.

But there was also a contrasting side to Ryan from the disciplined battler. There was a touch of daring about him, a spark. His eyes were bright with mischief even near the end. Such a combination has produced from time to time, an especially Australian genius, this striking version chronicled impeccably by John Tidey.

Ryan made his initial mark in the mountains behind Lae in Papua New Guinea, where in 1942 the Japanese occupiers placed a price on his head – two cases of canned meat plus five Australian pounds. Dead or alive.

He had left school, Malvern Grammar, aged 16, and joined up at 18. When the Japanese imperial forces landed in PNG, he had been determined that this would be where he would take up the fight.

His father Ted, who had died when Peter was only 13, had fought there in World War I. His brother Barry was later to become a PNG patrol officer, or a kiap in Tok Pisin, the creole language that Peter had learnt from Ted, and loved to use through the rest of his life.

Ryan spent months on perilous missions tracking Japanese air, ship and troop movements from behind enemy lines. He told later of the initial “thrill of the adventure … You stride down the jungle trail full of confidence, a pioneer…” – but extreme challenges and fear inevitably followed soon enough.

Kari, a PNG police lance corporal, was deployed to assist him. Ryan described him as “cool under fire and a deadly shot. He and his kind were at the apex of a great pyramid of support”. Ryan was to return time and again after the war to visit Kari and Singin Pasom, a local official who became an MP, and their extended families, and others in that “great pyramid”.

Braving Japanese patrols, crocodile-infested rivers and malaria, he reached the Australian base at Bulolo after an epic mountain trek only to be berated by an army quartermaster for losing his pay book. When he was evacuated back to Australia he weighed 41kg.

He had vowed “if I ever get out of this, I’ll never travel anywhere again”. And he didn’t. Only back to PNG, including to open a primary school that he had helped fund, which was named to his delight the Peter Ryan Memorial School.

His thrilling war account Fear Drive My Feet (The Book of Job, 18:11: “Terrors shall make him afraid on every side, and shall drive him to his feet”) is for many the classic Australian World War II memoir (Text Classics). Like all his books and many columns, he wrote it by hand in his neat cursive script.

Ryan next was co-opted by Alf Conlon into the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs that became the brilliant core policy bureau for then military commander Thomas Blamey and for the restoration of civil government in occupied territories. Other members included prominent Australians John Legge, James Plimsoll, Ida Lesson, Harry Gibbs and John Kerr. Two DORCA staffers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, concocted the Ern Malley poetry hoax in 1943. Ryan ended the war with a Military Medal and as a lieutenant.

 

He enlisted at Melbourne University, graduating BA (Hons) in history after becoming president of the Labour Club and standing unsuccessfully for the ultra-safe Liberal seat of Toorak at the Victorian election of 1947, when News Weekly attacked his leftism. At university, he became friends with Manning Clark. Later, as director of Melbourne University Press (MUP) for 26 years, Ryan published five of Clark’s six-volume History of Australia – before launching in 1993, two years after Clark’s death, an extraordinary attack on the work.

He married Davey – Gladys Davidson – whom he had met at a tram stop in Glen Iris. They had a daughter Sally and a son Andrew. Their marriage lasted 68 years until Ryan died aged 92, in 2015.

He became a pioneering public relations director with ICI at its thrillingly modernist HQ, the Melbourne “Spy” columnist for Nation magazine. At MUP, he played a core role in publishing the ambitious Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Encyclopaedia of PNG, and at 65, he became Secretary to the Victorian Supreme Court’s Board of Examiners for lawyers, and began writing regular columns for Quadrant.

Ryan was dapper, witty, bohemian, trouble and brave. Tidey brings us into the company of an extraordinary Australian.

 Rowan Callick was Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian. With Ryan, he shared a passion for PNG Pidgin.