Father warned Australia would be a ‘prison’: Tragically, he was right

When British diplomat and academic Francis Campbell accepted the job as vice-chancellor of Australia’s Notre Dame University in early 2020, his Irish father told him not to go.

“It’s a prison,” he said, remembering the fate of his Irish ancestors who never returned. Campbell assured his father that he would be back to visit two or three times a year, in keeping with the travelling life he experienced as an ambassador. But no sooner had he arrived, than Australia’s borders closed.

“If somebody had presented this scenario to you, even a year before, you could not have comprehended it,” he says, admitting he may not have come if he’d had an inkling of his impending confinement.

Notre Dame University vice-chancellor Francis Campbell at the Bambini Trust cafe.Credit: Kate Geraghty

During 2020, and especially at Easter and Christmas, Campbell would phone his father to explain that he could not get back to Ireland. “There’s a thing called COVID. And he would say, ‘nonsense, nonsense. I told you they’d trap you there’,” Campbell recalls.

While Campbell has the fondest memories of his good-humoured father, the story is tinged with sadness. Earlier this year his father died, leaving him and his brother in London to watch the funeral on YouTube.

The national border closure separated him from family, but the timing of state border closures was more serendipitous. He ended up dividing his time equally between Notre Dame’s campuses in Sydney and Fremantle.

We are having what turns out to be a long and humorous lunch, in a quiet nook at Bambini Trust and Wine Room opposite Sydney’s Hyde Park. And as our discussion unfolds, he reveals just how much he embodies the tension that comes with being Anglo-Irish.

Campbell is the committed Catholic, with an endearing Irish lilt and a humble disposition who has worked at the heart of British power, and faithfully represented a queen who heads a Protestant church. “The civic nature of the British identity allowed me to be Irish, it allowed me to be Catholic, and it allowed me to be British,” he says. “It didn’t pull me in one direction in a way that Northern Ireland did and often does.”

In diplomatic fashion, he found a way to resolve an internal tension – as both a citizen of the Irish republic and a British representative of the Queen. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which ended violence in Northern Ireland, allowed one to be Irish, British or both. “So I describe myself as both and I think it is a reflection in a sense of my life.”

Gin-cured Mount Cook salmon with cucumber pickle and horseradish.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Entree arrives and, with his good humour and ability to put you at ease, it’s obvious why he made such an effective diplomat.

The food is a mix of gin-cured salmon and spiced calamari, appropriate says Campbell, because it is from Western Australia. Near his home in Fremantle, he has noticed that many of the fishing boats are named after Italian villages.

Campbell’s journey to Australia followed a diplomatic career that took him to 10 Downing Street, as an adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and to Rome as Britain’s ambassador to the Holy See, or the Vatican, with stops along the way at the European Union and United Nations in New York.

As a schoolboy in the 1970s and ’80s, he saw the British military erect watchtowers. As an adult, he advised the government that demolished them. “It was surreal,” he says. “I remember watching those towers being put up from a school window. They were being erected in the mid-1980s, and roughly a decade later you’re listening to a debate in Downing Street about bringing them down.”

Six spices calamari with rocket and tarragon mayonnaise.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Now 51 and single, Campbell grew up with three older brothers on a farm near Newry in Northern Ireland, during the years of sectarian violence known as The Troubles. His mother, who died when he was at university, had always told him that London was “not like this”. It was something he would learn during working holidays in London, staying with a cousin who had a crisp English accent.

London would ultimately become a beloved home, but his initial instinct was to stay in Ireland and become a Catholic priest. “I was no good at farming,” he says, smiling. “Staying on at school was the only thing I could do.”

Unemployment was high and university enrolments low but, amid the deprivation, he loved his Catholic school so much that, at the age of 16, he wanted to “rush headlong into the seminary”. Ironically, it was a priest who advised the young Francis to slow down, stay in school, and train his eyes on university. He ended up at one of the best in Britain – Queen’s in Belfast.

He studied politics and international relations and went on to study at Trinity College in Dublin; the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, in Belgium; the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland; and the University of Pennsylvania. He was the first in his family to get a tertiary education.

In 1997, aged 27, he joined the British Foreign Office, and two years later he was seconded to the office of Labour prime minister Tony Blair.

Francis Campbell says nothing quite prepares you for meeting the Queen. Credit: Kate Geraghty

His job demanded impartiality. He had to keep his personal opinions to himself, including his opposition to the Iraq War. But he was also a Catholic and his Pope had come out strongly against the war.

“I haven’t changed my position on the war in Iraq. I was against it then and I’m against it now,” he says.

Still, Campbell admires Blair and other politicians he saw up close, wrestling with major decisions that involve life and death.

“Even though I disagreed on the basis of what I knew, I didn’t know everything. I have to look at the totality of the person,” he says.

Line-caught snapper fillet with mussels, diamond clams, pippies and Yarra Valley salmon roe.Credit: Kate Geraghty

When the second course arrives – pea and saffron risotto with spanner crab and Kinkawooka mussels for him; line-caught snapper fillet with mussels, clams, pippies and salmon roe for me – the European flavour invites recollections of Campbell’s posting in Rome.

Pea and saffron risotto with spanner crab and Kinkawooka mussels. Credit: Kate Geraghty

In 2005, he became the first Catholic appointed British ambassador to the Vatican since the Reformation. The one-time altar boy found himself at the centre of an institution that still represented enormous cultural power, especially in Africa and Asia, if no longer in Europe and Australia. The BBC even made a four-part documentary about him. When an Irish cameraman asked if he were Irish or British, he told him he could not exaggerate one at the expense of the other. The comment gave him grief from his Irish friends.

Having considered a life in the church, Campbell knew that when he met the Pope – then Benedict XVI – he was meeting someone who had once been a simple Catholic priest. He felt surprisingly relaxed in his company. The Catholic church was so familiar and after all, “the Pope had not always been Pope”, he recalls.

It was an entirely different experience when he hosted visits by two powerful women who had loomed over his life. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher came to visit a number of times. As a schoolboy, he witnessed her intense militarisation of Northern Ireland.

“She was the prime minister of my childhood,” he says. “Having Mrs Thatcher in the back of the car was something you couldn’t quite fathom.”

He has also twice met the woman he had literally known as a ubiquitous face on the coin – Queen Elizabeth II. Campbell was officially her envoy to the Pope and he was nervous about meeting the boss. But she was “very astute, very witty and gracious”.

“It is more surreal to meet the Queen,” he says. “It’s not like meeting a Pope. Nothing quite prepares you for that and even the corgi dogs. It’s like, is this happening?”

The Irishman warmed to her as a popular Queen, not as head of a monarchical system. “With the Queen, in relation to the Irish conflict, there has been a healing, there has been a rapprochement, there has been a sensitivity that sometimes politicians don’t have. And that is also coming from someone whose own family was affected by terrorism,” he says.

Being born in Northern Ireland, he is entitled to both British and Irish citizenship. “As an Irish citizen, would I vote to have a monarch as an Irish citizen in Ireland? The answer would be no,” he says.

“[But] if I was offered the choice in Britain to move from a monarchical system to a republican system, I would probably say no.

The billCredit: Nine

“If I ever became an Australian citizen, I wouldn’t know how to answer that question.”

Ever the diplomat.

He was less diplomatic in 2014, however, after he took leave from the Foreign Office to become professor and vice-chancellor at St Mary’s University in London, the job that ultimately led to his position at Notre Dame. In a tweet, he spoke out against the government for its silence on ethnic cleansing of Christians in Mosul in Iraq.

“The French foreign ministry was taking the lead, but my own government was silent. I was thinking: what do you need to actually step forward here and condemn?”

The impact of COVID-19 on higher education may end up rivalling some of his most challenging diplomatic assignments, which have included a stint in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Notre Dame’s future does not hinge on international students, but the higher education sector generally depends heavily on selling itself in the global student marketplace. “Most universities would say that the domestic student financing and domestic student tuition is not enough to do all the things a university is expected to do,” he says.

There are echoes of his childhood in his new job. His mission is to extend Catholic higher education to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, giving them the same hand up that he enjoyed – and the same chance at a life so rich in experience.

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