Peter Cosgrove: From a ‘hard so and so’ to master of discretion in You Shouldn’t Have Joined

Former governor-general Sir Peter Cosgrove details his time as both victim and perpetrator of hazing at Duntroon in his follow-up memoir.

Then prime minister Tony Abbott and Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove hold a doorstop after touring the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

Peter Cosgrove’s first volume book of memoirs, My Story, was published in 2006 and sold about 70,000 copies. The book took him to the end of his career in the army and his soft landing in the Qantas boardroom, the first of many plum appointments.

At one point, Cosgrove tells us in his follow-up memoir, You Shouldn’t Have Joined, he was ‘‘a member of 11 board-like entities – way too many’’.

As well as bringing proven leadership and management skills, Cosgrove showed himself to be an energetic corporate booster: Qantas was ‘‘not only an iconic company’’ but an ‘‘enormously vibrant and exciting corporate environment’’, while Deloitte (with whom he accepted a consultancy) was ‘‘a great bunch … aggressive and ambitious’’.

In 2013 then prime minister Tony Abbott chose Cosgrove for the position of Australia’s next governor-general (the author notes wryly that Sportsbet had him at $1.30).

On March 26, 2014, he was sworn in replacing Quentin Bryce.

Cosgrove’s five years as governor-general convinced him, he tells us, that his experiences ‘‘might be of interest to the average reader’’. Yet following the runaway success of My Story was never going to be easy. Given the formidable protocols and conventions surrounding the role of governor-general, how much would he be allowed to write about his vice-regal experiences? As for the rest, was there anything left to say about his life before Yarralumla or had he already mined the best material for My Story?

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with Sir Peter Cosgrove during a swearing-in ceremony at Government House in Canberra. Picture: Gary Ramage

In answer to the hypothetical question ‘‘why did he bother?’’, Cosgrove asserts that his new book ‘‘is not written to correct the record, not to reveal fascinating facts previously unknown, not to convey insights thrilling in their expression and persuasion’’. (At this point some prospective buyers might already be having second thoughts.) Later he observes that several previous governors-general have also written books and that they, too, must have ‘‘regarded the task as a tricky business and definitely not one for a blow-by-blow account’’.

So if we can take the author’s word for what the book is not, what is it? Like its predecessor, You Shouldn’t Have Joined purports to be the tale of an ordinary bloke who achieved high office and accomplished some difficult tasks with distinction.

Cosgrove described My Story (perhaps a little disingenuously) as ‘‘simply the story of a young boy from Paddo who many years later found himself like a kangaroo in the headlights, running hard in order not to get flattened’’.

In You Shouldn’t Have Joined he reprises the theme, writing that ‘‘throughout my public life, I have been and remain a very ordinary person who has been blessed with the best of good fortune … I stand as an example that the jobs I have done aren’t just for those of the most marvellous capacity … [but] that an ordinary person can undertake these tasks effectively’’.

Cosgrove’s skilful leadership of the international peacekeeping force in East Timor turned him from a relatively obscure soldier into a national celebrity. Acknowledging that luck played a significant role in the meteoric rise that saw him promoted to Chief of the Defence Force, Cosgrove wrote in My Story: ‘‘It would have been the height of arrogance and self-delusion to have coveted this honour only three years before.’’

The authorial voice was likeably down-to-earth and self-deprecating (enough, sometimes, to make this reader wonder how Cosgrove ever graduated as an officer, let alone rose to become chief of the army). At Duntroon Cosgrove had a ‘‘bloated punishment record and emaciated academic marks’’; he scraped into the Infantry Corps after having ‘‘clawed my way up from ignominy to mediocrity, eventually finishing a smidgen better than halfway up the class rankings, which, given the depths of my descent, was a pretty fair effort’’.

You Shouldn’t Have Joined begins in a similar vein, with the author repeating a yarn from My Story about having only been accepted by the Selection Board at Duntroon on the casting vote of the chairman. (In the original version Cosgrove remembered being a ‘‘reasonably successful and middle-aged officer’’ when he pulled his own cadet file and discovered the details of his acceptance; in the revised account, he remembers pulling the file when he was Commandant of Duntroon. It’s a small discrepancy but suggestive, perhaps, of an author paying closer attention to rank and protocol.)

Society’s values have shifted since My Story was published, and the values of the nation’s armed forces have shifted with them. The 2014 report of the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce grew out of the government’s efforts to stamp out a culture of bullying that continued to linger in Australia’s armed forces.

In the earlier book Cosgrove’s reminiscences about his time at Duntroon revolved largely around sport and the author’s hapless search for a girlfriend. The tone in You Shouldn’t Have Joined is more serious. Cosgrove devotes several pages to what he calls the ‘‘infamous’’ practice of ‘‘bastardisation’’ (or ‘‘hazing’’), acknowledging ‘‘while it could be effective in keeping junior cadets focused’’, it could also ‘‘go over the top and be oppressive and damaging to an individual’s self-esteem’’.

Alluding to a ‘‘scandal … concerning bastardisation’’ that occurred in 1969, Cosgrove writes that by the time he came to command soldiers in battle he understood that ‘‘discipline, so essential in the conduct and leadership of troops, must also respect the human dignity of the people you seek to lead’’.

According to Cosgrove, in his time at Duntroon he was both victim and perpetrator. While none of his persecutors ever expressed remorse for their actions, the author owns up to his own youthful mistakes, confessing that he makes a ‘‘quiet but sincere apology’’ whenever he hears ‘‘an oblique reference … to me being a ‘hard so and so’ at Duntroon’’.

In a book that is generally more concerned with anecdote than analysis, this feels like a significant (and courageous) moment of self-reflection.

Cosgrove the author is most compelling when recalling his childhood and his combat experiences in Vietnam. This was true of My Story and it is true of the new book, which has a tendency at other times to read like an instruction manual for aspiring governors-general.

It was easy to warm to the conversational voice and affable personality that shone through the pages of Cosgrove’s first book, but readers are likely to find the second harder going. The writing is stiffer, the humour more self-conscious. Too much of You Shouldn’t Have Joined is given up to arcane details of vice-regal protocol; longwinded lectures on diplomacy and the mechanics of passing government legislation; and a tedious catalogue of royal personages the author has met.

Cosgrove, we soon discover, is not fooling when he warns us in his preface not to expect him to ‘‘reveal fascinating facts previously unknown’’ or to ‘‘convey insights thrilling in their expression and persuasion’’.

Discretion is a prerequisite for any governor-general and Cosgrove proves a master of it. Readers hoping for vice-regal tittle-tattle will not find it here, although they will discover that during his time as G-G Cosgrove signed off on 760 individual acts of Parliament and chaired 137 meetings of the Federal Executive Council, considering 2489 items.

Nor will they find evidence of political perspicacity (although I like his observation that to lead a political party was to ‘‘push a wheelbarrow full of frogs, all contemplating the appropriate time to leap out’’).

These absences are unfortunate, because Cosgrove’s five years as governor-general were a time of extraordinary drama and volatility in Australian politics. Two Liberal prime ministers, Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, were brought down on his watch. He confesses to feeling ‘‘very sad for each of them’’.

But whatever was said or seen or thought during Cosgrove’s conversations with the deposed prime ministers is summarily dismissed with the words, ‘‘Setting aside discussions with individuals who were resigning …’’

In an almost comical refusal to engage with the human drama of the occasion, Cosgrove focuses his authorial attention on the different doors at Government House by which both men came and went.

He expresses admiration for their ‘‘stoicism’’ and reports that ‘‘each left with his head held high’’, observations that are hard to reconcile with the spiteful public vendettas both men pursued in the months and years that followed.

At the start of You Shouldn’t Have Joined, Cosgrove indicates that readers would be ‘‘not be far wrong’’ in seeing his book as ‘‘a form of travelogue with some sermonising interspersed’’, which is an odd way to encourage the purchase of a $50 hardback and one that suggests marketing might not be one of the old warrior’s strengths. At its best the book is more than that but a bit of indiscretion would have made it more enjoyable.

Tom Gilling is a writer and critic.

You Shouldn’t Have Joined: A Memoir

By General Sir Peter Cosgrove

Allen & Unwin, 426pp, $49.99 (HB)