Titans of bygone Melbourne: revisiting John Elliott and Andrew Peacock

“We acquired Rolling Rock brewery and then we moved onto Molson’s… ,” the small and stooped man was saying into the lectern microphone as we arrived late at the John Elliott memorial service, shuffling among the 300 or so guests arrayed in the stand — sorry, the LEGENDS! stand — at Princes Park.

The grass of the grounds was green, the sky was blue, and the rusting iron of the ground’s oldest stand shone in the sun, as the battered face of Johnny — boxer’s nose, snaggle tooth — stared from a big screen, wobbling slightly. The speaker — Geoffrey Lord, from the Melbourne establishment gathered here: 20 tiers of blue blazers, Real Housewives hair and fake tans — was reciting the history of Elders-CUB-Fosters, etc, the jam manufacturer that Elliott turned into a corporate behemoth. Reciting that history up to a point of course. Up to a point.

“We have to ask,” Lord continued, “what was John’s achievement?” Then a pause. He had an answer, but he left the pause a little too long…

This was last Friday in Melbourne, all restrictions on gatherings lifted. Hours earlier, we’d been at St Paul’s Cathedral for the memorial service of Andrew Peacock, a twofer presumably arranged for the convenience of the Liberal grandees jetting in. Now that was establishment! Scotch bagpipers in and out, flags of all nations (and of Melbourne private schools), priests in full regalia — the works.

Hypnotically boring of course. Jeff Kennett spoke, that trimmed-down, prison-shave dogface leering down at all of us, taking the chance to take a few digs at the current state government — and trying to talk away that intercepted “carphone” conversation between he and Peacock about the (absent) John Howard, in which the two parts of speech were “c—” and verbs.

ScoMo spoke, a man whom Andrew Peacock would have crossed the breadth of the Melbourne CBD to avoid. And Marise Payne, whom he would have steered around in pursuit of the nearest blonde. His ministries, his connection to Papua New Guinea, and his party wars were spoken of, and, of course, the horses, Flemington, the days in the members’ carpark, etc etc.

But how can you capture, at a memorial, the essence of a Man Who Never Wanted To Be King? Groomed for power by Sir Robert Menzies from his days at Scotch College, the great hope of a continued moderate liberalism poleaxed by John Howard, Peacock was a man who always lacked killer instinct and the basic desire for the highest office.

A real memorial would get the high points: the farcical alliance with Queensland’s Gauleiter in the Joh-for-Canberra push, and the glorious moment in the 1970s when he quit the ministry after his glam wife, Susan Renouf, appeared in a risqué ad for bedsheets. Ministerial propriety? No, it was just the Peacocks’ marital war taken into the open. Great days, when Melbourne was a tiny city-state, and a scandal like that could echo for weeks.

Ah, Andrew. He wanted to race horses, dine at Maxim’s South Yarra, and wear Mr John tan sweaters at the Dinner Plain chalet as the roaring fire was mirrored in the brandy balloon. The rest of it was just something other people wanted for him. That photo of him, aged 16, in college military kilt, inspecting the Scotch line with our Sir Robert? You can tell in his eyes, even then, he never wanted it. And joke of all jokes, he bloody got it! He won a narrow national majority in 1990! If we had a national list system, he would have been prime minister! And our history would have been different. Andrew Peacock, at the last, saved!

Hours later, up at Carlton, the consensus on John Elliott was that he didn’t like losing so much. “Oh, yeah, uh, John didn’t really come down into the clubrooms after we lost, he didn’t like losing,” AFL LEGEND! Stephen Kernahan said, in one of those footy speeches that sound like this:

Oh, yeah, we had some torrid tussles at the ground here and everywhere. I particularly remember the ’86 stoush when that stray handball to Gripper went left and we had to come round the centre-half [seven minutes omitted here] and anyway John was a good sport about it and we had some great nights round the pool with Squirrel and AJ and the Gripper and Johnno and he said you’re a c— and I said no you’re a c— and bandcamp this one time at bandcamp …

Then we had Kennett again, with a few more digs about the Andrews government. But I was still thinking about Geoffrey Lord’s long pause, after pondering what Elliott actually did:

He fosterised the world, John did, he turned Australia outwards to the world, which we could do again…

Well, yes, but therein lies the paradox of the corporate raider whose schemes crash spectacularly, leaving nothing at all. Eulogising John Elliott’s life was like eulogising Leonid Brezhnev’s: so much has to be left out that the narrative barely hangs together.

Truth is, John Elliott was a crook and a cheat. The former quality killed his empire, and the latter killed the Carlton Football Club for a generation. The club took his name off its rusting original stand, which hurt him more than anything. “Put the name back!” he roared at a speech he gave at Percy’s Bar in Lygon St, Carlton, for, of all things, a book launch, in a grand guignol performance to an audience made up half of Blues tragics and half smack-addled poets from the pub’s fading literary push.

Elliott was bankrupt at the time, divorced, sleeping on Percy’s couch upstairs, and could be found pissed as a newt wandering Lygon many hours of the day. He was never more human. The tragedy of the rogue, to be remembered better and truer by his enemies than his friends. “Put his name back,” Kennett roared in his speech, to great approval, at Carlton’s current president — who could not, by protocol, respond that “the John Elliott stand” was de-named because the sign was vandalised four times, and nearly arsonised once, and it was only a matter of time.

What did he achieve, John Elliott? What indeed. Kennett argued that he put iron and ides back into the Liberal Party, regrounded its finances with “the 500 Club”, and that sounds true, though hardly something I’m going to celebrate.

His kids clearly loved him. “We flew to the USSR once when I was a kid,” son Tom Elliott said at the end of the service, “me in economy, he in first, and the hostess said, ‘Your dad’s asleep. Would you like his breakfast?’ So they wheeled down a tureen, and under it was… two meat pies. So I ate Dad’s breakfast.” Homme du peuple. Poor Tom, broadcaster, shiny and neat. He’s been eating his dad’s breakfast his whole life since.

But there is one tribute I will give John Elliott’s shade. When Elders IXL got out of the actual jam-making business in the 1970s, its magnificent, Edwardian, red-brick factory on Toorak Road, South Yarra, was left vacant. In those days it would have been easily demolished — but Elliott, it is said, had seen what San Francisco had done with the repurposing of its red-brick waterfront, and applied the same thing to what came to be “the Jam Factory”.

This kick-started Melbourne’s (very partial) process of recovering such ostensibly unremarkable buildings, and preserving historical fabric (if the Cain government had followed suit, Southbank would have been a world-class warehouse district, not an identikit glass canyon. Sic transit…). So if the prime mover was Johnny, I dips me lid.

After all that, and a gusto rendition of “We Are the Navy Blues”, we all filed down to the under-stand bar for beer and party pies (“Not the members!” my glamorous companion barked. “We don’t get to drink in the bloody members?!”). Blue blazers, white shirts, school ties, flouncy summer hats, and a few scruffy club tragics in Blues sweatshirts and jeans. And I know it’s all bullshit, and this was a concentration of capital and power, but there was still a measure of “all-comers” about it, memory of a time when this was a smaller place, and the fortunes were smaller and luxury was Crown Lager and prawn cocktails.

But there’s no denying where the power was. Last Friday, the last of old Anglo establishment Melbourne was piped out of the holy places for the last time. My Melbourne gone by, I miss it so: cappuccinos at the Classic coffee lounge, pubs breathing beer and dead carpet as you opened the door, a hundred-page Age with 2000 words daily on a businessman’s trial, 12 teams playing each other twice across a winter laced tight as a cleated boot, the great dome of the State Library, echoing with darkness and silence, punk and punks swarming Fitzroy Street in the salty Saturday afternoon air, Barry Humphries spooning up Russian salad from a footpath outside Myer, 10,000 suits and ties passing the Herald boys to Flinders Street station in an evening, and Fintona girls climbing down from green wooden trams in thin dresses on summer mornings, in a small city a long way from the world. Bear it out on the bier and beers, we will not see its like again…