A thrilling energy … Robert Hughes, who has died aged 74. Photograph: Timothy Allen/Eyevine
In London, he might be happy to seem the descendant of an Irish policeman, but in Sydney we all knew he had grown up in a fancy house in Cranbrook Road, Rose Bay. We knew his grandfather and great uncles were members of the state legislative council. His much older brother Tom had been a terrifying (to me at least) conservative attorney general.
That is to say, Bob Hughes was not some Irish pub brawler, and although he might be mistaken for Crocodile Dundee in Belgravia, in Sydney there was never a question: he was patrician.
We Australians understand how dangerous it is to be known as privileged, and Bob made every effort to correct our "misunderstanding". If he failed, it was because his background was clear in every public word he uttered. He sounded posh, not only in his speech, but in his refusal to hide his considerable learning. He was unashamedly elitist, and was happy to declare his preference for the company of the cultured to the ill-read.
That is not, for a second, to underestimate his huge roaring Australianness, his eye for bullshit, his colonial pleasure in announcing that the king had got no fucking clothes at all. Nor should anyone doubt the massive affection he felt for his country. When, in the tabloid aftermath of his car accident in 1999, Australia turned on him, it is hard to overestimate the anguish he suffered in private. Whatever he said publicly in retaliation should be understood as the product of a mental pain every bit the equal of that suffered by his mangled body. In that nightmare tangle of events and allegations, he sometimes spoke unwisely and was often reported with hysterical inaccuracy. Whatever the truth of that car accident, we owed him so much more.
For God's sake, this was the author of The Fatal Shore, his epic story of our country's founding. He was the man who had shown us who we were, or what darkness we had to confront in order to grow up. He had grasped the cruelty of our birth and shoved it in our faces. Here, in this vast masterpiece, was the hell we were born into, and he would be our Dante. We could trust not only his research, but also his courage and breadth and depth of learning. And we would be seduced by those sentences that made him – then, in 1987, and now today – one of the greatest writers our country has yet produced.
Bob was a complex man, confident and filled with doubt. He possessed a thrilling sort of energy. He was wilful, ambitious, needful of his friends, then not at all. He was as generous in his support of fellow writers as he was with his cellar (which word evokes a vision of Bob carving one of his bloody legs of lamb with the gusto of a sensualist).
It is to Australia's great shame that we cast out the author of The Fatal Shore. Now we have missed our last chance to tell him that we loved him. Perhaps we don't yet know how much that is.
That is to say, Bob Hughes was not some Irish pub brawler, and although he might be mistaken for Crocodile Dundee in Belgravia, in Sydney there was never a question: he was patrician.
We Australians understand how dangerous it is to be known as privileged, and Bob made every effort to correct our "misunderstanding". If he failed, it was because his background was clear in every public word he uttered. He sounded posh, not only in his speech, but in his refusal to hide his considerable learning. He was unashamedly elitist, and was happy to declare his preference for the company of the cultured to the ill-read.
That is not, for a second, to underestimate his huge roaring Australianness, his eye for bullshit, his colonial pleasure in announcing that the king had got no fucking clothes at all. Nor should anyone doubt the massive affection he felt for his country. When, in the tabloid aftermath of his car accident in 1999, Australia turned on him, it is hard to overestimate the anguish he suffered in private. Whatever he said publicly in retaliation should be understood as the product of a mental pain every bit the equal of that suffered by his mangled body. In that nightmare tangle of events and allegations, he sometimes spoke unwisely and was often reported with hysterical inaccuracy. Whatever the truth of that car accident, we owed him so much more.
For God's sake, this was the author of The Fatal Shore, his epic story of our country's founding. He was the man who had shown us who we were, or what darkness we had to confront in order to grow up. He had grasped the cruelty of our birth and shoved it in our faces. Here, in this vast masterpiece, was the hell we were born into, and he would be our Dante. We could trust not only his research, but also his courage and breadth and depth of learning. And we would be seduced by those sentences that made him – then, in 1987, and now today – one of the greatest writers our country has yet produced.
Bob was a complex man, confident and filled with doubt. He possessed a thrilling sort of energy. He was wilful, ambitious, needful of his friends, then not at all. He was as generous in his support of fellow writers as he was with his cellar (which word evokes a vision of Bob carving one of his bloody legs of lamb with the gusto of a sensualist).
It is to Australia's great shame that we cast out the author of The Fatal Shore. Now we have missed our last chance to tell him that we loved him. Perhaps we don't yet know how much that is.
1 comment:
He will be greatly missed.
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