Opperman rode out of dark into a new dawn

THE SUBLIME SON OF AUSTRALIA THE Pyrenees, France, June 26, 1928. It’s 3am and a group of cyclists are pedalling their way up a narrow, sinuous road. At times, it is little more than a gravel track. The riders at the front of the bunch are drawn upwards by the dim tail-light of the official car. Another car, travelling behind the men, casts a small and patchy pool of light in which to ride. Some domestiques carried miners’ lamps or electric torches to illuminate the road for their leaders. But most did not want to carry the weight.

The riders’ shadows stretched across the road and into nothingness. Below them the slopes of the lower Pyrenean mountains fell away. Water could be heard flowing down the valley below. The cyclists stared in silence at the gently bobbing shapes in front of them, not daring to look to the side, lest their wheels follow and they plunged into the abyss. Riders already fatigued from a week of intense racing, struggled to stay alert. Most, at some stage of the night, crashed.

Three hours had passed since they left Hendaye on the Atlantic coast on a 387km stage over two of the most feared mountain passes in the Pyrenees. They would reach the base of the first around daybreak.

For now, they climbed into the blackness.

Keen to share the misery with another rider, Opperman tried to start a conversation. “C’est dur,” (“It’s hard”) he ventured to the figure he sensed riding beside him, only to hear a grunt in return. After a few minutes he tried again. Once again came a guttural noise. Determined to coax a response, he tried for a third time in French. “It is very dark and you are too tired to talk.” A reply suddenly gushed forth in English: “Shut up, you Froggie gasbag — I can’t understand a flamin’ word you’re jabbering.” It was (fellow Australian Ernest) Bainbridge. In the dark, the pair had been unwittingly slogging away side by side for hours.

As the hills became steeper, the group began to fracture. A second bunch of riders began to fall back, perhaps by five minutes. Opperman found himself in the slowing pack and decided to bridge the gap. He surged. Riding furiously over the uneven surface he jolted the chain from the cogs. As he struggled to replace it, riders came upon him in the darkness. They cursed him as they pulled heavily on their brakes, locking their wheels in the gravel. Opperman made his repairs and resumed his move into the mountains, alone.

When a rider familiar with the road burst past, Opperman jumped on to his wheel. And together they picked their way through the other riders and rejoined the leaders a few kilometres on.

Around dawn, they rushed through a race control in a small village at the base of mighty Col d’Aubisque, signing their names and collecting some food for the 18km ascent. With the light, Opperman’s mood lifted and he climbed steadily. At the crest he was near the front and dismounted to change his wheel to a higher sprocket. On the loose, shifting surface, with no barriers Opperman made a gingerly descent. “Attention, gardez-vous!” the riders yelled, as they shot past him, seemingly oblivious to the danger. Opperman watched in disbelief and understood why they called it “open grave” pace. The best of them released a foot from the clip and used it to counterbalance the bicycle as they slewed through the apex of the hairpin turns.

Then, the inevitable happened. Opperman crashed. His confidence shot, he was observed inching down the mountain at less than 20km/h, braking heavily every 10m.

By the time he reached the valley floor he had lost all the time he had gained on the way up.

When he reached the middle slopes of the equally fearsome Col du Tourmalet, he glanced over his shoulder and looked down an immense treeless valley. Tiny specks were crawling up the snaking, grey road. When he looked up he could just make out the cars following the leaders. They were perhaps 30 minutes in front, probably more. He put his head down and pushed onwards. He looked to make time where he could. OPPERMAN threw himself vigorously into the election campaign and proved adept at fashioning his vague opinions into a compelling political self-portrait, even if it was a little light on policy detail. His campaign director, Ivo Gibson, helped shape the public image of the candidates into a simple binary. Oppy was a self-made man, in business and sport; (sitting Labor MP John) Dedman was a socialist committed to nationalisation and government control. Oppy was in tune with local people and a keen promoter of sporting events; Dedman was rarely seen in the electorate and he had never been to a local football match.

Nationally, the Liberal Party promised to end wartime rationing and attacked Labor’s plans for centralised economic controls as “socialism by stealth”. Opperman sharpened his anti-communist rhetoric, helping him appear as a champion for hard work, independence and free enterprise. Though he usually spoke in moderate tones, on the hustings he was able to muster some soapbox passion and, by adding just a little Cold War propaganda, gave energy to his campaign.

But, as in his sporting life, it was his homely and engaging manner that cut through: “He does not speak to his audience; he talks to them,” observed one journalist. Opperman’s mostly measured public utterances sat oddly with Gibson’s brutish advertising strategy, which portrayed Dedman as a communist sympathiser who was against private home ownership. It smacked of desperation and certainly pushed the limits of decency and “fair play” so often championed by Opperman during the election. Dedman took umbrage and launched legal action against Gibson and the Geelong Advertiser for their misleading and libellous conduct. But the damage had already been done.

Australian voters were disillusioned and tired after almost a decade of war, austerity and hard work. Similarly exhausted, the Labor Party and its leader, Ben Chifley, lacked the stamina to counter their opponents’ forceful campaign. The week before the election Corio was too close to call, but Opperman thought he had done enough to harness himself to a national desire for change. Then, on election day, his quiet confidence left him.

Behind in the count on Saturday evening, the next morning he gathered the family into the car and headed out for a seaside lunch at Barwon Heads. Now convinced of his defeat, he and Mavys began planning their relocation back to Melbourne. Once back home, Bruce Small’s wife, Lillian, telephoned asking after the Member for Corio. In the circumstances, the joke seemed a little cruel. She then went on to tell him that overnight he had edged in front with an unassailable lead. In the final tally, he won the seat by only 234 votes.

As one of 48 new Coalition members, Opperman was part of one of the most emphatic victories in Australian political history. It marked the beginning of the Menzies era.

Dedman was humiliated. At the public declaration of the poll on the streets of Geelong, Opperman made a short speech thanking his staff and the electors for their support. Dedman, meanwhile, paced up and down behind him. When it came time for his reply, he launched a tirade of invective against Opperman and the voters. He vowed to return at the next election to “remove the yoke which the electors have thrust upon themselves”. The crowd laughed and jeered. “Pull your head in,” said one onlooker. A tram conductor, having witnessed some of Dedman’s theatrics from his moving car, leaned out the doorway and shouted: “You can’t take it, Dedman!” The vanquished former member, now literally foaming at the mouth, ran towards the tram shaking his fist, remonstrating with his heckler. The kerb-side quarrel made news across the country and “Doing a Dedman” entered the political handbook under what not to do in the event of an election loss. Unable to find permanent work, Dedman later retreated to run sheep on a small property at Apollo Bay on the Victorian coast.

The Australian Women’s Weekly published a generous story on the Opperman family and their new life in Geelong. It concluded by saying that: “Homespun philosopher, practical idealist, athlete, business man, and now politician, Hubert Opperman said he wants to take political life quietly until he gets the ‘feel’ of things.” It was not to be. The transition to a parliamentarian, Opperman said later, was from “that of a frog to a prince [and] into a world and a whirl you never knew existed”.

When he reached Canberra in February the following year, the mood among the victors was euphoric. Menzies warned an excited party room not to succumb to hubris and to respect their opponents for their political flair. The new Prime Minister then granted Opperman the honour of making the first speech by a member to the House, in reply to the formal opening by the GovernorGeneral. He felt the weight of the occasion.

On February 22, 1950, Mavys sat in the gallery and watched her husband make a nervous beginning to a broad and somewhat deferential speech. On occasion, it soared, capturing the changing mood of the country with a plea for an end to industrial disruption and discord.

“No one actually wins a war,” he said. “Even if a nation emerges from war apparently prosperous its people have suffered a corrosion of spirit wholly foreign to them in times of normal living.”

He championed the Australian worker as a “thinker”, “not easily swayed by his emotions” and “capable of working things out for himself”. The Brisbane Telegraph felt it was “well constructed and delivered with an air of sincerity that impressed everybody”.

A more alarming reaction came from Carnegie resident John O’Regan, who compared Opperman with Adolf Hitler for apparently claiming that the “dissentient view could be allowed only if it was in the best interests of Australia”. Gibson came to Opperman’s defence a few days later, quoting Hansard and suggesting that O’Regan had only read a garbled report of the speech. Oppy: The Life of Sir Hubert Opperman is available from melbournebooks.com.au (RRP $39.95)