Knowing Peter North
Since I last wrote about Peter North I finished Growing for Broke and went on a quest to fill in the blanks and take this imprint Peter made on me and do something with it. I bought every copy of Growing I could and gave it to thoughtful people I knew. I contacted the printer Digital Press Australia to order more copies but the manuscript was gone and the publisher had folded. Fortunately Jane O’Sullivan of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) (who had sold me the first copy of book) suggested I get in touch with Michael Bayliss, also of SPA, who in turn was able to put me in touch with Peter’s partner and love of nearly thirty years Bea Toews. Bea filled in a lot of the blanks and put me in touch with Peter’s nephew Michael Herbig who filled in the rest.
Despite knowing almost nothing about Peter personally when I finished Growing for Broke, everything I later found out, every single thing, fit. The author was exactly as you would expect from having read Growing. Growing gives the reader not just an insight into Peter’s politics but into him. His character and his mind had a structure and a robust logic and coherence to it so Growing is a continuation of that.
Michael Herbig likened Peter to Roger Federer, fiercely competitive and driven but completely graceful, courteous and sportsmanlike.
Peter supported the Greens political party and no doubt their stances on corporate donations and Adani featured in his thinking. But Peter was not your average greens voter. He was not anti-establishment per se, he was just antipathetic to this current corrupt, avaricious and unimaginative establishment. Peter’s father was working as an Engineer in England in the 1940s so Peter’s family must have been relatively prosperous. Peter was an excellent athlete and passionate spectator of many sports including the then completely patrician pastimes of golf and sailing. He made friends easily and often for life. He was successful professionally. He was not anti-establishment because he found himself at the bottom, he lived a great life of passions, friends, love and success. He looked at Australia and thought it could be so much better.
While reading Growing I thought several times that Peter might be either an accountant or an engineer because he wrote with so much clarity and structure and lucidity. He could not have been a politician, a lawyer or a political science academic because the novelty of his insights could only have come from outside the machine. In fact he studied both accounting and engineering and was successful in both.
Perhaps Peter’s disdain for the Australian political system was borne of his extensive academic and professional experience in systems analysis. Peter looked at the corrosive impact of money in politics and the corrupt, dysfunctional system that purported to be based on the lofty ideas of liberal democracy. Did he come to it like an engineer might approach a bridge that did not look like the blueprint?
One of the best things about Peter and Growing was his ability to be scathing but never nasty or bitter. Peter brought so much force and attention to a polemic exercise without it consuming and poisoning his character. He was by all accounts very glass half full in his personal relationships. Maybe for him the Australian political economy was just like a gearbox that needed an overhaul. It is one of the highlights of Growing, so much scorn but no malice.
Peter just did not have an angry or bitter bone. He was very laid back and his lifetime of scorn for Australia Inc was coupled with deep, deep friendships, loves and passions. His coffin was draped not with a copy of Orwell but with the flag of his beloved St Kilda.
Perhaps no matter how long and how forensic a polemic he built, no malice could ever take root. Certainly he was not drawn to drama at all. It is not my place to disclose the poignant last conversation of his life, but what passed between them speaks to a person who was deeply down to earth and at peace with life. Peter was nonchalant, but never disconnected.
He had deep and beautiful connections with many people yet somehow was always cool and calm. I knew he was like that before I heard that because in Growing Australia’s shortcomings are catalogued at length but Peter never once revelled in anybody’s shortcomings. He spent a lifetime cataloguing and no doubt despairing at the shortcomings and misdeeds of Australia’s elite but in Growing he just notes them calmly.
Reading Growing you may well think Peter had a staff of librarians cataloguing his vast array of clippings. He no doubt kept some records but apparently he just had an amazing memory. He could sometimes bring up the date and contents of a meeting he had been to many years after the fact. This dovetailed perfectly with the deep lifelong friendships he had. He could go without seeing someone for a decade and pick up right at the conversation where he left.
I was not at all surprised to hear that Peter had migrated to Australia - albeit when he was very young - that he had left Perth for Melbourne at the end of high school, and that he and his true love Bea were born wanderers who lived all over the world. You have to come back to a place to really get it, to understand it. Growing is written with the investment one can only ever have in one place. Peter certainly got a long way off the beaten track, to Saudi Arabia, Papua New Guinea, the Seychelles, Nicaragua and Thailand. Interestingly he always said that while he knew that Australia was in some ways less corrupt than many of the countries he had lived in, it was the exposure of Australia’s shortcomings that so lit him up and energised him. You have to come back to Australia to love it in that way. It is not that returnees love it more or less than those who stay here, it is that there is a particular timbre and hue to the love the returnees feel for Australia. I can’t really put it in words but I felt it in Peter’s.
He was a prolific writer and wrote eleven books other than Growing in both fiction and non-fiction. He was a prolific writer of letters to the editor under the pen name Wilfred Pink. He was also a voracious reader and some of his favourite books and authors were A short history of everything by Bill Bryson, The right stuff by Tom Wolfe, Jared Diamond’s books, Into thin air by John Krakauer, Richard Dawkins’ books, Confessions of an economic hitman by John Perkins and The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street by John Talbott. Apparently Peter was particularly impressed by the manifesto at the end of 86 lies (no prizes for guessing what book I’m now reading). Some of his favourite musicians were Khachaturian (and in particular the orchestral adaptation of his ballet Spartacus); Glenn Miller and Louis Armstrong.
One of the main reasons I got in touch with Bea and Michael was because I wanted to know why this genius of a man had not entered politics despite clearly being ardently passionate about it and a prolific commentator. Peter never went into politics because he was not drawn to the drama of it and struggled to ever distill and summarise something into the quick grab so common in politics. As Michael put it, he was more 4 Corners than the quick grab (and probably only if the entire 4 Corners episode focused on a single discrete topic). This did not surprise me at all, Growing is nothing if not comprehensive in its analysis.
Peter respected activists. He was encouraged and inspired to write Growing because of a group of 350.org activists who took time off work, travelled from Melbourne to Newcastle and laid themselves down over rail lines to stop coal shipments. One of the most beautiful things I heard about Peter was that although he had never had much time for rock and roll in his final year he took an interest in Peter Garrett. Peter Garett was as passionate about the country as Peter North was but took the final plunge and entered the machine. Peter North was just as driven and committed to Australia but no doubt saw his place as a commentator as the most optimal position for that cog in the wheel. Peter North and Peter Garret are tributaries of the same vital, passionate river of love of home. Peter Garret eating so many s*** sandwiches to take the fight for the environment out of the echo chambers and to Cabinet and Parliament. Peter North on his deathbed toiling and toiling on Growing for Broke until the very end.
Peter North lived what was by all accounts a beautiful life. He lived his passions, he was brilliant, he was charming, he was a lodestar of insight, companionship and camaraderie for many, many people. He was good news in their lives. All the genius and insight he brought to politics would have no doubt lead him to novel, brilliant insights about everything from footy to Thai cooking and more. What a gift he must have been in all his friends and relatives lives.
I so wish I had known him. Fortunately Growing for broke is a time capsule that lets others know him just a bit. I was reminded of my own uncle’s observation that he had met some amazing people in books. Growing is a sad indictment of the Australian political and business landscape but the silver lining is that you get to meet Peter North.
When he was given his terminal diagnosis Peter discussed with Bea what he should do and decided he had to update Growing. He not only printed a second updated edition, he was editing another version on his last day alive. Growing for Broke is Peter North and they are both such gifts.
So what do I do with the giant imprint made in me by a complete stranger I never met? I cannot feel sad about a life as well lived as Peter’s. But I can certainly malign a political system that does not draw people like him into its core. I can also try to fix it.
