Harold Holt is out there somewhere with Elvis, Shergar, Lord Lucan and Reggie Perrin. Having a beer no doubt, while laughing at the poor deluded world. Although as he would now be 99, Harold is unlikely to be a heavy drinker.
His clothes were found on the beach at Portsea in Victoria in 1967. And Harold wasn’t in them. He was last seen wading into the surf and heading for Tasmania. This would be a strange enough course of events in normal circumstances. But as Harold was the Prime Minister of Australia at the time, his disappearance is even stranger. This was the time of the Vietnam War and the swinging sixties. Australia was a different place back then, uncertain about where it fitted into the new world order. The old connections of Empire were fading as war in Asia made the Aussies look towards their back yard.
Holt was the first leader here to reach out to the Chinese. So much so, that some people began to think that he was an agent of Chairman Mao. This led to many conspiracy theories such as Chinese submarines taking him away, or the CIA doing what the CIA does best.
But as Sigmund Freud (or was it Grouch Marx?) said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. And the sad truth is that Harold probably just drowned and was gobbled up by the multitude of murderous aquatic life that patrols the seas around Australia.
You can imagine my surprise therefore when I stopped outside the “Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool”. The guy drowned, so they called a swimming pool after him. It is as incongruous as the “JFK Memorial Rifle Range”.
Henry Bolte is another interesting character. He was Victoria’s longest serving premier, having held that post from 1955 to 1972. By all accounts, Henry liked a drink or two, despite being the man who introduced breathalyser tests in this part of the world. Long after he had retired to his sheep farm in Ballaret, he was driving home one night when he smashed into his neighbour’s car. Henry was pretty badly injured and woke up later in hospital to find that the nasty doctors had taken a blood sample which they were planning to pass on to the Police.
Somehow (and I’m conscious here of the risk of libel, even if the man has been dead for nearly twenty years) Henry’s blood sample was switched with one from a non drinking unknown party and came back clean. He was found to be pregnant however! Actually I made that last part up, but something did tickle the suspicions of the local constabulary and before long, Victoria’s most famous citizen was up in front of the judiciary to explain why he had tampered with samples. He ran a sort of Bart Simpson defence, along the lines of “It wasn’t me, even though I’m the only one who could benefit from the crime.”
Needless to say Henry got off, which I’m sure is totally unconnected to the fact that he would have appointed all the judges in the case while serving as Premier. But his reputation in the eyes of the locals was forever stained. He is the most famous drink driver among Australia’s political elite, which is saying something when you look at the likes of Bob Hawke. So how is he commemorated? They called a bridge after him! What better way to remember a drunk than to name a piece of roadway in his honour.
This leads me to think that Australians have a dark sense of humour when it comes to remembering their politicians. They certainly don’t hold them in high regard, encouraged no doubt by the behaviour of politicians towards each other. Question time in the Australian parliament is like feeding time at the zoo, except the animals there don’t call each other ‘drongos’ and slag off each other’s wives.
So it comes as no surprise that when they die, the country tries to find the most inappropriate object to remember them by. But I think it also points to the difficulty Australians have with naming places. In Europe, names developed organically from the places ancient herdsmen forded rivers or the shade of a particular glen on the day Stone Age man first walked there. That’s why in Ireland we have places that literally translate as “The Valley of the yellow furze in the moonlight of a bright October night”. In Australia, the white man arrived to find that the locals had named everywhere already. Showing the same care and attention for the traditions of the indigenous population that they showed them in normal life, they promptly discounted all these names and set about calling every nook and cranny after their beloved homestead back in blighty.
But Australia is such a vast country that they soon ran out of “Little Ramsbottoms” and “Surrey Hills”. So they took to being literal. So that’s why you end up with the Blue Mountains (which look green to me but don’t say that to an Aussie), Mount Beauty, The Snowy Mountains and the Big River. The early inland explorers were clearly not men of imagination either. You can imagine Burke and Wills coming over a mountain and seeing a vast desert in front of them.
“What will we call it, Robert?” said Wills.
“Well it’s in the middle of the country, so why don’t we call it ‘The Central Desert’”
And so they went on, naming things after dead white men or the first thing that came into their heads. It’s a big country so many of the original indigenous names have survived. Wagga Wagga (so good they named it twice) comes to mind as do many tongue twisters that I can’t even pronounce never mind type. But if something new is built and they can’t find an inappropriate dead politician to name it after, the locals seem to struggle. Last year, they opened the newest bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne. They ran a public competition to come up with a name and the winner, from thousands of entrants was “The Yarra Bridge”.
Henry and Harold, wherever they are, would be proud of that lack of imagination.
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