CHARLES WOOLEY Talking nature and politics with former Labor heavyweight Graham Richardson
Back in the mid-’80s, when Bob Hawke ruled the land, a young New South Wales senator named Graham Richardson was the rising power behind the throne. If you wanted to save the world you first needed to talk to Richo, which was exactly what Tasmania’s environmental campaigner Bob Brown did.
Better than just talk, he helicoptered the hard man of Labor’s bruising back-room politics into the heart of the South-West Tasmanian Wilderness in the hope the seductive eloquence of old Mother Nature would do the persuading.
Brown was playing a long shot. Richo, aka “the Minister for Kneecaps”, was more at home in the tough smoke-filled back rooms of the NSW Labor Party than on a pristine mountaintop in wildest Tasmania. Could natural beauty ever touch his savage heart?
I had been to the top of that mountain and had seen the Promised Land – and it changed my life. I went there in the early ’70s and was instantly converted.
I beheld the extraordinary vista of serried sawtooth mountain ranges piled one against the other fading away into an infinity of blues, mauves and purples. It was a clear day and I could see forever, and that image is as vivid now as it was back at that moment of revelation. What struck me wasn’t just what I could see but what I couldn’t. Standing on a peak in the Western Arthurs I commanded 360 degrees of the world as it must have been before Man.
There was not the scar of a road, not the scratch of a transmission line, neither a building nor a tower, nor the bounce of light from a car windscreen. I was alone. I was the first man or the last one.
I remember the hair rising on the back of my neck and a huge welling of emotion. I had never seen so clearly, never breathed so deeply and sweetly, and had never felt so connected with the world. I remember thinking that if every Australian could see this there would be no argument about its preservation.
A decade later I was a world away in Sydney, in a trendy pub in Paddington, when Richardson told us about his brush with nature.
“We flew west from Hobart into what seemed like an enormous untouched wilderness,” he said. “When the chopper nestled down, Brownie let me walk off by myself. There was a tiny alpine lake, bright blue below me and everywhere valleys, forests and mountain ranges. I’d never seen anything like it. Mate, I’ve got to admit it. I looked at it for a long while and I started to blub. Fair dinkum! Then I got on the sat-phone to the prime minister and I told him: “Hawkie, you’ve got to see this. It’s unbelievable. We’ve got to save it’.”
A lot of water has flowed uninterrupted down the Franklin River since then and it’s been 24 years since Richardson left politics.
Did he miss it, I asked him on 60 Minutes last week? “No, I haven’t missed it from the first day. You turn on the Senate or the House of Representatives Question Time and you look at it and there’s such a play-acting farce you say to yourself, “Thank God I don’t have to go through that drivel anymore!”.
Physically, Richo is a shadow of his former self. For the past 20 years he’s been battling a chondrosarcoma, a rare and usually deadly bone cancer in his pelvis. “I wasn’t sure if this was a vengeful god getting even with me for all the evil deeds that I’ve done over the years,” he joked.
Richo doesn’t believe in God and who would after the radical plumbing procedures he’s been through? The old Labor dealmaker more likely did a deal with the devil in return for his life. The operation is called pelvic exenteration and it is just as eyewatering to consider as it sounds. But a year on he is still with us, stoically accepting life with colostomy and urinary bags, and once a week he trundles up the stairs of Sydney’s Golden Century Chinese restaurant for lunch with his mates.
Lunch with Richo is just like the old days. He over-orders for everyone and eats like a horse. He’s happy. “Oh, I love it,” he says. “I mean, this is me, this is absolutely me.”
He orders another round of drinks and matches the table glass for glass – but with soda water.
The bright side that keeps him going is his son, nine-year-old Darcy, and his dedicated and heroic wife Amanda. Darcy is smart as a whip and is an unnerving miniature replica of Richo. “I want him to be prime minister,” he says. “If I hang around long enough I reckon I could manage it. I could get him there.”
I asked Darcy if he shared his father’s ambition. With the insouciance of happy childhood he lightly dismissed the idea: “Nah. I want to be a creative writer.”
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, perhaps, but the kid is wise beyond his years.