The Cassandra of Palm Beach is dead. It’s a wonder he lived so long. Bob Ellis battered his body for decades and last July announced, in his usual mournful prose, that he would be dead within weeks.
That he couldn’t even predict his own his death provoked much affectionate laughter and the relief of his friends, his readers and even his adversaries. We thought it was business as usual for Bob. We hoped for a rerun this year of the merry campaign that cut Bronwyn Bishop down to size over 20 years ago with the slogan “We shall fight her on the beaches.”
But as so often with Ellis, he was proved right in the end.
Cancer took him on Sunday. With him were his wife the writer Anne Brooksbank and their children, Jack, Tom and Jennifer – the family that stuck by this loveable and exasperating man through his triumphs and humiliations.
Ellis was a son of the Seventh Day Adventist church and he preached all his days. The rhetoric of the Bible was his first language but his faith was the Labor party. Its heroes were his heroes. Its history was in his DNA.
As a young man he passed as a political commentator, writing for Nation Review and the National Times. He was a superb eyewitness reporter. He took his readers with him down the corridors and into the bear pits of politics.
Ellis had a knack for being there at the moment that mattered – and if he hadn’t quite arrived, if he was still struggling to finish lunch when the government fell or the minister crossed the floor, his writing made it seem nothing much of moment had happened until he was on the scene.
He made dull politicians interesting. He found virtues in some and vices in others that had never been suspected. He brought scale to petty conflicts. He found history in everything.
Game predictions were his forte. There was about Ellis something of Father Rothschild SJ, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, who would pop up at London cocktail parties to forewarn a young woman that her father would be PM on Tuesday.
I was there outside the Liberal party room in late 2009 when Ellis caused much mirth among the Canberra professionals by declaring that Tony Abbott would emerge any minute as the new leader of the Opposition.
The mockery died after half an hour.
His columns grew into books. One brought him famously undone: defaming young Abbott and the treasurer Peter Costello, plus their wives, in a couple of throwaway lines in his tome Goodbye Jerusalem.
To be in the courtroom with Ellis through the resulting trial was nerve wracking. He could be still for hours on end. But unable to contain his distress he would begin heckling the judge. His honour seemed sweetly forgiving at the time but the bill he made the publishers pay was Olympian.
Ellis’s early success as a film and television writer – Newsfront, Man of Flowers, The Nostradamus Kid, True Believers, etc – ended when the first boom in Australian film ran out of steam and producers tired of dealing with Ellis’s big difficulty: he could not compress.
What he wrote was wonderful but it was always too long. Others had to cut. Ellis was distraught. Clutching the Writers Guild best script award for the miniseries True Believers, Ellis snapped at producer Matt Carroll: “You turned War and Peace into Peyton Place.”
Ellis kept on writing, supplementing his income by turning himself into a speech-writer for ministers and premiers – Labor, of course. Perhaps it was for the best but they never sounded much like him. Ellis disappeared into his clients.
He was grubby, funny, wayward and original. He could be wise. The river of words that flowed through him was a thing of awe even among his detractors. At times his life was in disarray and his career in dire straights, but to the end he was a master of his first love: English.
Ellis was, through all of his careers, essentially a historian – a mythologiser of Australia, of Labor Australia and himself. He is now part of that mythology, read and watched and talked about whenever we try to understand what was going on in this country for the last 40 years.
He won’t rest in peace.
