A Way Through

The Life Of Rick Farley

By Nicholas Brown, Susan Boden

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Nicholas Brown and Susan Boden
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-921410-85-7

Contents

Authors' notes,
Map of key locations,
1 'Never tired, never sad, never guilty',
2 'As trendy as it was possible to be',
3 'Not like a cattleman',
4 'Superhick',
5 'Stiletto man',
6 'Starting to understand',
7 'The best deal possible',
8 'The great Rick Farley',
9 'The better for having known him',
Afterword,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

'Never tired, never sad, never guilty'

'A good kid'

As a boy, Rick Farley ran with freedom. His was a striking gait, remembered as a springing stride developed for middle-distance cross-country competitions. For a man who in later life was associated with conflict, this recollection has an arresting quality. The 'hired gun' of Australian politics from the late 1970s to the 1990s was rarely seen as free. Farley himself later lamented having 'missed out' on being young. Fred Chaney, who came to know Farley well through their work on the National Native Title Tribunal, recalls the way Rick carried himself tensely, as if poised to react, an initial appearance of 'menace' giving way to a less forbidding 'personal gravitas'. Mick Dodson recalls a good friend, but one who 'never let his guard down'. But the boy ran as if weightless. That controlled working style for which Farley would later be renowned makes a sharp contrast to this figure, enjoying the pleasure of the race, of the release, and of the win. In those strides, the child was in a world of his own. The man, however, worked with externalised political skills, with the determination to 'get the best deal possible'. The fit between an inward life, glimpsed in that schoolboy, and the outward roles Farley came to play, was never easy. The tensions of negotiating it account for both the contributions he made to Australian society, and the costs of his work — of his search for a way through the constraints of Australian politics.

Rick was 'always a "good" kid', his younger sister Patti says: 'he never talked back', was polite, worked hard. This was the face that people saw throughout his life. Even amidst the often bitter confrontations he engineered, or endured, at the Cattlemen's Union of Australia, the National Farmers' Federation, or over Native Title, Farley is recalled as reserved but courteous. He was rarely openly angry and was not spontaneously demonstrative at all. As a child he was prone to sulking rather than outburst, and — as his mother concedes — could give 'the impression he didn't care a lot'. But this was a protection, behind which he found strength and power. He took the measure of situations, seeking a role which could hold in balance a maxim he would later invoke: 'a cynic is just a frustrated romantic' — the challenge was to keep a reign on ideals.

The 'negotiator' was there from the start, although Patti sees it more bluntly as manipulation. Rick, she says, 'didn't like people who failed'; 'he never ever in his life did anything he hadn't thought about and realised was the best thing for him'. Even so, there was a rider to this selfishness. He was also good at:

getting people to see something they didn't necessarily want to see, and talking them around into a position that was probably better for everybody ... he was always a bit like that, always looking for the best possible outcome here, and how he could make it happen.

Farley would live by this talent. It took him into work that transformed significant aspects of Australian life. But it was also a need, and a reflex. His sister continues:

Rick didn't like people who demanded [things] of him ... [who exhibited] histrionics, tears, massive amounts of attention — who cost more that it was going to benefit him ... he liked things to be manageable.

That need to manage, when the free grace of the runner was hard to find, meant reconciling the expectations people had of him, the capacities he knew he possessed, and the vulnerabilities he kept protected. Farley's yearning for a better Australia, a country he came to know with a breadth of compassion that would be hard to surpass, grew from patterns laid down early.

'I tend to steer clear of emotion'

Richard Andrew Farley was born at Townsville on 9 December 1952, the first child of 34-year-old Richard Albert Farley ('Dick') and his 27-year-old wife, Joan Audrey, née Cook. He was named after his father, but Joan chose his second name ('just a Scottish thing') to mark her strong Presbyterian inheritance. She did the same for Patti, whose second name was Leith. Joan and Dick's marriage was troubled, and within six years they would be estranged. Some of the tensions between them were hinted at in that coupling of their children's names.

On the Farley side was a line of station workers and managers on the Queensland and northern New South Wales pastoral properties that were established in the second half of the 19th century. The Farleys commanded respect because of the enterprises they served, and because they served them well — as horsemen, stockmen, employers and book-keepers. But that status was fragile. As the poet Rhyll McMaster writes of such family connections, a 'myth of grandeur' was easily evoked in those associations with vast tracts of land, butharder to hold. A sense of magnificence came with fine homesteads and authority, but depended on the trust of remote investors and on marking out the boundaries between the Big House and the sheds, huts and yards beyond. For the Farleys these boundaries could prove tricky. They were marked with pride, but transgressions brought shame and revealed a dark seam running through the family.

Rick's great grandfather, Albert, was born in 1862 at Digby, Victoria, a settlement which developed on the route from Portland Bay to the southwestern pastoral districts. He was the sixth of nine children of London-born Alfred Farley — the captain of a ship wrecked near Warrnambool — and his Limerick-born wife Catherine Cunneen, who (with great enterprise, and occasional prosecution) became licensee of the Digby Hotel. By 1903 Albert had begun the journey north. He became overseer at Cassilis Station, a sheep property in the upper Hunter Valley, New South Wales. At nearby Merriwa in 1912 he married the much younger Ella Munn, whose extended family of selectors and labourers came from near Goulburn and Ulladulla.

Soon after their marriage Albert and Ella moved to Albinia Downs, a sheep station near Springsure, 300 kilometres west of Gladstone, Queensland. This was advancement — Albert was now manager — but also isolation. Cassilis Station adjoined a private village of the same name which served as a coach stop for steady traffic travelling further west. By contrast, Albinia was set in grassy, open woodland — already plagued with weeds — amid sparse settlement and at the end of rough roads. By 1917, when Richard, their third child, was born with a twin sister, Eileen — Bettye — they were back at Cassilis, with Albert now its manager. Again, their stay was brief. No record remains of what pressures or opportunities drove their migrations. By 1919 the family had returned to Queensland, further northwest, where Albert managed Dalgonally Station, near Julia Creek.

A cattle property of nearly 3000 square kilometres on flat, blacksoil plains, Dalgonally had been taken up in the 1860s by Donald McIntyre and acquired by Australian Estates Co. Ltd in the early 1900s. With 23 000 head and well served by an artesian bore, it was the largest cattle station in the Cloncurry district. McIntrye had also held Dalkeith, which adjoined Cassilis, and those old networks had perhaps recommended Albert for the job. Never seen without a tie, even when riding, Albert presided with authority over the rhythms of the station: its musters, its mix of Aboriginal and white labour, its profitability. Dalgonally is evoked with nostalgia by Farley descendants: it was a solid homestead, with broad, vine-covered verandahs, shaded with trees. But there is an undertone to these memories. Sometime after 1930 Ella left. Family lore has it that she ran away with a windmill mechanic. She was never heard from again. Little was said, but the strain of the loss would have been great.

Among Ella's children, Dick seems to have paid a high price. Educated first by governesses, he was bright and took readily to studies at a Charters Towers boarding school until the Great Depression and a sequence of cyclone and fire knocked Dalgonally hard. Thrown back on his skills, he took to labouring. He grew to medium height, had good looks, and was known to be a joker, often generous but prone to drink; his 'benders' could go for days and turn nasty. An undated photograph shows him sunbathing on a beach with friends: with his broad, teasing smile, he was clearly a man it could be fun to be with. But he also carried depression, seen by some in the family as an Irish melancholy that came from the Cunneens.

Already in the militia, he was quick to enlist in the AIF in 1939, giving his address as the house in Townsville where his father now lived with Dick's sisters in the genteel poverty of retired station managers. Dick's military record soon reflected his temperament: penalties for absence without leave during training; detention for poor conduct at Durban, South Africa, en route to the Middle East. On 17 May 1941 he was wounded in action: he had a gunshot wound to the right leg which rumour speculated might have been self-inflicted. Declared unfit, he returned to Australia and was discharged. By June 1942, unemployed, he enlisted again, and was assigned to transport duties at Victoria Barracks, Brisbane. Admonished for repeated drunkenness, speeding and 'conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline', his army career came to an end. He was discharged as a private in April 1946 and started scouting for work as a stationhand.

Joan Cook, who became Dick's wife, came from a very different background. She was also at least a third-generation Australian, but much more a Queenslander. Her father, Alfred — born in Brisbane in 1889 — was a tailor and cutter who travelled down from Rockhampton in 1915 to marry Olive Houghton, a shop assistant, also born in 1889, and raised in Warwick. The Houghtons and the Cooks were skilled tradespeople: cabinet makers, blacksmiths, dressmakers, hairdressers and teachers. First in the Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower and then in Toowong — itself transforming from large middle-class villas into subdivisions for 'labourers and artisans' — Joan grew up in a stable family, marked by the firm stamp of Presbyterian values: hard work, education, good deeds and community service. Alfred was a strict judge of character: as Joan recalls, there were people he determined to be 'straight' — reliable and honest — and people he determined were not. He built the family home in Lodge Street during the Depression, keeping himself busy while work was scarce. It was a modest house, a typical timber Queenslander, perched on the fall of the many valleys that marked each of those older suburbs into their own worlds and hierarchies. The second youngest child and only girl, Joan knew well the dynamics of a male-dominated household. She was petite, determined and bright.

After training as a nurse, Joan commenced a round of placements. In 1949 she was at Border Private Hospital at Balinga, near Coolangatta. Moving to the central west, where medical support was in short supply, she nursed one of the Farley daughters — who had returned to those broad plains with her husband — after childbirth at Winton. When Joan met Dick he was working as a station hand at Kitty Vale Station, with no assets except his charm. But they married and went to Townsville, living briefly with Albert, her father-in-law. Rick was born there — Dick was away at the time, working at Proserpine, selling tractors. They soon moved to Airlie Beach, looking for more settled work for Dick and a place of their own. Patti was born in 1954, before the family moved down to Deagon, near Sandgate, north of Brisbane, and Dick found a job with the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland.

To Joan, in retrospect, it was obvious that her husband suffered from depression. At the time there was no name to give to his moods. He was, she simply puts it, 'always reckless'. Patti recalls hearing the phrase 'war weary', and that her father 'could never settle'. When Joan's father died in 1956, she and her children moved to Lodge Street to live with — and partly care for — her mother. Dick returned to the country, looking for work. The plan was that once he found something permanent, the family would join him. It did not work out that way.

As an adult Rick recalled seeing his father only once after he left the family, and then for barely an evening, when they met for dinner at a Brisbane hotel. With Dick gone, Joan parented alone, and at a time when there was no respectable term for a single mother. With only the most infrequent correspondence between Dick and Joan, silence fell over his name, both in public and — more importantly — at home. 'Mum would never talk about that stuff,' Patti states. Patti recalls being teased that she didn't have a father, but she stood her ground on logic: 'Of course I had a father, you have to have a father.' And there, for her, the taunt ended. Patti, as her mother puts it, was always a 'straight shooter'. 'Maybe it was worse for Rick,' Patti allows, 'but I don't know.' In contrast to Patti, as Joan puts it, Rick was always 'the loaded gun': waiting, watching, poised.

Throughout his life Rick rarely spoke of his father, even to those closest to him. At most, he would invoke a succinct image of his childhood. In March 2001 he said:

My father died when I was young and my mother worked to ensure my sister and I attended private schools. She believed that a good school (not only a good education) was essential to our future prospects. Ours was not an affluent household.

In another speech, in October that year, he added, 'My parents divorced and my father died when I was young.' In a passing remark in 1996 he stated, 'My father died when I was ten.' But even at the time when he was offering these summations he knew that in one crucial respect they were not true. On 14 May 1970, after a prolonged bout of drinking, Dick Farley shot and killed himself in a washhouse at the back of a house at Kajabbi, a small settlement 90 kilometres northwest of Cloncurry, where he was working intermittently as a labourer. He had — according to the police report — been 'on a drinking bout for the past three months'. With no money, Dick was buried by the RSL. Even Bettye's husband told her not to attend her twin's funeral: it was a waste, it was a hurt, and it was better to 'move on'.

Dick was just shy of 53 when he died, and not far from Dalgonally. One day short of 26 years later, and also at 53, his son would die of a cerebral aneurysm. To be struck by the figure of Rick's absent father is not to diminish the importance of Joan. Rick would always insist on his indebtedness to his mother for her strength and what she made possible. He said that to grow up in a house of strong women was to appreciate early the art of compromise. But no one can entirely 'move on', and Farley's career must be seen, in part, through the lens of a search for that lost father: a figure to mediate between the world of leadership and the world of nurture and altruism. In that absence, Rick acquired early the style that served him well in the conflicts he managed in his public life, but perhaps less so in private: 'I always steer clear of emotion.'

Over time Rick assembled the details of his father's life and death, but not by actively pursuing them. A close friend recalls him making passing reference to Dick as 'the sort of bloke you imagined looking most comfortable on the back of a horse' — perhaps an image recalled from that one evening: Dick 'spruced up', awkwardly meeting his family, sitting down to dinner, then disappearing. At Lodge Street Joan would sometimes briefly reflect on connections to the land up north before changing the subject. Later, working for the Cattlemen's Union, Rick was often crossing his father's tracks, out around Cloncurry, largely unknowingly. The Farley name, politician Bob Katter junior recalls, would have won Rick respect in some quarters, even if no one spoke openly about the connection. When the extended family later sought to make contact with Rick, they found him wrestling with an 'amazed curiosity' about what he was told, and trying to clear emotional boundaries long protected. 'Only now that I am famous do they want to track me down,' Rick remarked on first hearing that Farley relatives wanted to meet him. So deep were the defences, the habit of managing, that it was inconceivable that he would ever initiate such an inquiry. But once the overture was made, and he was encouraged to trust it, he accepted kinship. It amused him to call out to his cousin, Joan Scott, the daughter of Dick's younger sister and wife of Queensland National Party politician Bruce Scott, at airports: 'Hello cuz!'

(Continues...)Excerpted from A Way Through by Nicholas Brown, Susan Boden. Copyright © 2012 Nicholas Brown and Susan Boden. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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