Talking Point: Inspiring vision of a roads scholar

Once a swaggie, late Tasmanian Labor luminary Justin O’Byrne learnt his politics while trekking the nation’s highways and his legacy is a model for future radicals, writes WAYNE CRAWFORD.

Once a swaggie, late Tasmanian Labor luminary Justin O’Byrne, pictured, learnt his politics while trekking the nation’s highways and his legacy is a model for future radicals, writes WAYNE CRAWFORD.

THEY certainly do not make politicians like Justin O’Byrne any more.

The late Tasmanian Labor senator was fair dinkum war hero whose early life reads like a Boy’s Own Adventure – and, more than a quarter of a century after his death, his unwavering commitment to socialism and his acute social conscience remain an example to generations.

Justin Hilary O’Byrne went from the life of a swaggie — walking 1000km to Queensland looking for work during the Depression — to fighter pilot, World War II prisoner of war and one of the tunnellers in the Great Escape; “Father of the Senate” and its President during the latter part of the Whitlam Government and The Dismissal; the longest serving Tasmanian federal MP with 34 years a senator; honoured as an Officer of the Order of Australia and given a state funeral in 1993.

Yet only now has the life of this Tasmanian luminary — larrikin and idealist — been chronicled in a book The Vision Splendid of Justin O’Byrne, by noted Tasmanian historian and author, Emeritus Professor Richard Davis.

After O’Byrne’s death in 1993 Davis was concerned his legacy of commitment to socialism, conservation, the global economy were being abandoned in favour of the more fashionable neoliberalism. Davis determined to write O’Byrne’s biography but the project was delayed for years by his work writing the definitive history of the Tasmanian ALP, A History of the Tasmanian Labor Party 1902-2017.

The biography is the result of Davis’s painstaking research of 34 years of O’Byrne’s senate speeches, voluminous papers in the National Library and material held by the O’Byrne family, recordings of interviews and family discussions.

A friend and great admirer of O’Byrne, Davis writes that he sought to demonstrate in the biography that “his speeches were not the out-of-date mouthings of an old-time politician but a blueprint for the future if we wish this planet to survive”.

Justin was one of 10 children and a member of Launceston‘s still-prominent extended family of O’Byrnes (two of whom, siblings David and Michelle, are state MPs). He left school at 15 to work in a textile factory and came to public attention when he saved a man from drowning and was acknowledged in the local paper for “courage” and “gallantry”.

At 18 during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he went interstate to find work, walking and “riding the rattler” (jumping on freight trains) from Melbourne to south-west Queensland where he worked as a shearer and bullock-driver, dug drains, mended fences, learned bushcraft skills from Aborigines, was a station overseer, bookkeeper, and learned to fly light aircraft — and to play the mouth organ.

In his spare time he read widely on politics and economics — subjects on which he led seminars in prison camp. He once described himself as a “Roads Scholar,” in reference to his years of wandering.

He joined the RAAF in 1940, was a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, was shot down over France in 1941 and spent the rest of the war as a PoW in German prison camps. He was a fellow prisoner with legendary British air ace and double-amputee Douglas Bader (whom he piggy-backed when Bader was without his artificial legs).

O’Byrne was one of the tunnellers in the celebrated break-outs that inspired books and films, The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape, although he did not draw a place in the lotteries which chose the small number of escapees (a blessing, since the vast majority were captured and shot by the Nazis.)

Back in Tasmania after the war, with his honed socialist philosophy, he became a Labor senator for Tasmania in the Chifley government in 1947.

Davis traces a political life during which O’Byrne participated in some of Australia’s and Tasmania’s most historic events and political stoushes. He attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II as part of a parliamentary delegation; was president of the senate during the contentious sacking of the Whitlam government; he strongly opposed uranium mining; took an active part in the protest against the “filthy” Vietnam war and the “harshness” of conscription; opposed the flooding of Lake Pedder; and marched against damming the Franklin.

In 1972 he supported the group of Young Labor malcontents in the turbulent fight for “root and branch overhaul of the Tasmanian ALP” and their quest for “genuine socialism,” conservation, women’s rights, legal abortion, secular education, and “an end to corruption”. The ring leaders were expelled or suspended from the party over their controversial shenanigans, but O’Byrne helped a successful campaign to have the sentences quashed.

Only three years after his election Labor lost office and O’Byrne spent 23 frustrating years in opposition. When Labor did return to power, there was more frustration when the Whitlam years (and O’Byrne’s presidency) ended with the turmoil of The Dismissal.

O’Byrne remained loyal to the ALP despite misgivings that in both parties, career and ambition had replaced idealistic drive as the motivation and that parliament had become a rubber stamp to the executive. He regretted that the idealism he had experienced in the Chifley period had evaporated in the Hawke-Keating years in favour of a new philosophy he saw as indistinguishable from the Liberal Party.

He was never a minister, and his shock election as president in the tied 1974 senate chamber came when a rogue opposition senator (still unknown) voted for him in the secret ballot.

A Liberal senator once described O’Byrne as “the perfect socialist”, a description he happily adopted. Davis describes him as Tasmania’s unofficial ombudsman: “the small individual’s champion against oppressive authority”.

Davis concludes: “His 34 years as a Labor Senator provide a model for consistent radicalism in the most trying political conditions.”

Wayne Crawford is a former associate editor of the Mercury and Walkley Award-winning political journalist.