The Godfather: Peter Corris on Ian Turner
I must have spent a fair bit of time in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms because I can’t think where else I would have read the Reader’s Digest as often as I did. I had two favourite features – ‘Humour in Uniform’, which contained no doubt pathetically lame jokes, and ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met’.
I number three people as my own unforgettable characters. One, of course, was Fred Hollows, of whom I’ve often written. Another was anthropologist Roger Keesing, to whom I’ve devoted a column. The other was political activist and historian Ian Turner.
Ian Turner arrived as a senior lecturer in history at Monash University in mid-1964, halfway into my first year there as a teaching fellow, as tutors were called. Although not as stuffy as Melbourne University was at that time, Monash was yet to develop the radical tone that characterised it later. Ian Turner was a part of that transformation.
Not yet as heavily bearded and bushy-haired as he later became, he was nevertheless different. He dressed differently from other senior academics. Whereas John Legge, the head of the history department, was natty in sports jackets and bow tie, and Professor AGL Shaw was formal in a suit, Turner dressed in cords, boots, open-necked shirts and army surplus jackets. He rolled his own and was a breath of fresh egalitarian air.
His reputation as a former communist who, despite holding law and honours history degrees, had worked as a cleaner of railway carriages while active in union affairs, had preceded him. Conservative and less vivid members of the department were alarmed by him and I overheard carping from at least one under-achieving colleague whose criticism of Turner was pure jealousy.
A teaching fellowship was a three-year appointment with no possibility of extension. You got a higher degree and an appointment elsewhere or a scholarship (preferably to Oxford or Cambridge, although that tradition was breaking down) or your academic career was over.
I fiddled pointlessly with an MA subject in my first year and went at the start of the next year to a seminar Turner conducted on Aboriginal history – then a subject scarcely recognised. I was inspired by Turner’s passionate advocacy for the study of Indigenous history on the basis of oral and written sources. He readily agreed to supervise my work for an MA on the early history of contact between Aboriginals and Europeans in western Victoria. It was Turner who suggested the shaping of the subject to make it manageable.
He guided me to the then available sources and I plunged into the research, devoting every moment I could spare from teaching to it. I submitted drafts of the chapters to Ian, who read them assiduously and made valuable suggestions and criticisms.
In particular Turner sensitised me to the language to be used in my thesis – to avoid terms like ‘half-caste’ and ‘native’ that were ubiquitous in the primary sources and even in contemporary writing and journalism. His guidance was crucial to the good reception the thesis received and its subsequent publication.
Turner’s annual Ron Barassi Memorial lecture, which earned him the sobriquet of the ‘footy professor’, was always immensely entertaining. I never heard him lecture to students, but Jean, who was taught by him and later became a friend, did and said he was inspiring. ‘He was nervous before a lecture,’ Jean says, ‘but translated this into energy. He could make the shearers’ strikes of the 1890s thrilling.’
I first heard Bob Dylan in Turner’s room when he played what must have been one of the earliest copies of Dylan’s records in Australia to some students and younger members of staff. I’ve mentioned before (in ‘On beards‘) how he took me under his wing to attend a demonstration against Air Vice Marshall Ky, the south-Vietnamese American puppet who visited Australia. Turner instructed me in removing identification and how to behave if things turned nasty.
After leaving Melbourne I rarely saw Turner but I read and admired his 1967 book about the Wobblies, Sydney’s Burning, and wrote to tell him so. Jean and I had dinner with him and his then wife Ann on one of his visits to Sydney and I was astonished to see him taking snuff. He’d had a heart attack some years before and had been advised to stop smoking. Snuff-taking was an oddly old-world action for such a modern man.
Turner died at 56 from a heart attack while on holiday playing beach cricket, to the great distress of Jean and myself. Some years later his daughter Deborah, a friend, who had been reading her father’s papers in the National Library, sent me a copy of the reference Turner had written in support of my application for a PhD scholarship to the ANU. Its generosity amazed me. I owed him more than I ever knew.
