It was cold again this morning- near freezing- but the air was dense and alive with a physical presence. The street people and I were moderately interested in the two pastel-colored hot air balloons that crossed Lake Burley Griffin and came over the downtown area around eight. The roar of the gas heaters shooting up tongues of fire was a novelty, and I wondered where the people in the wicker baskets below them thought they might be going.
 
Even from their modest altitude, the horizon must stretch out over the loops of the dammed Molonglo River and maybe all the way to Sydney. Canberra is an artificial city, like my hometown of Washington, and exists because it is not Melbourne, and is slightly more than a hundred miles from where the First Fleet landed at Sydney.
 
It was long before the Starbucks in City Centre opened, which had been my fervent hope in venturing out that early.
 
I did a circuit through the still-quiet shopping district and got back at something like work for a while, drafting the paper I cannot start writing in earnest without more understanding. That was the tough part. I had almost put two synchronous thoughts together when there came a tentative knock on the door. It was the Maid, not the Ethiopian one, but one from somewhere else.
 
I assured her she could have the place and I bolted down the corridor. There was no better opportunity to not work on a Saturday, and I retrieved the keys to the rental car from the front desk and decided to go look at the Old Parliament Building.
 
It was one of the two things left on the cultural list to do, and I did not permit my spirits to soar at the thought that I would be on an airplane again in less than a week. There were things to document and accomplish, I thought, and it was an obligation to get out of the way.
 
For many years, Australia’s Parliament was housed in a long, low white building that looks vaguely familiar. Since 1988, it has moved up the Kurrajong Hill, which had its top sawn off and filled with buildings before having the dirt put back on. The re-making of what is now known as Capital Hill cost more than a billion dollars, but it is a grand structure indeed.
 
The old building is nice and human scale. I bounded up the steps, after looking briefly at the Aboriginal encampment on the lawn on the mall side of the building. It reminded me exactly of the little tents that used to be in Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, before the War-on-Whatever started and free speech had to take a back seat to security.
 
The King’s Hall is exactly that. George V, King-Emperor, was there in the person of his son, who opened the place, and in a way, he still was, since a heroic statue of him in full Imperial dress holds sway over the rich wooden floors. It is a little like Robert E. Lee’s statue in the Virginia House of Delegates, only not so large.
 
I was going to breeze through and get back to work, when I realized that I composed 20% of a tour group confronted by a kindly old Aussie volunteer who loved this building. The half-hour to see the House and Senate Chambers took closer to an hour, since he described the place as it had been up until the last session in 1988 in excruciating detail. I didn’t know why until he slyly pointed out a picture of one of the Cabinet note-takers as being none other than a much younger version of Himself in the flesh.
 
I felt a sudden rush of kinship with this old bureaucrat, having taken so many meaningless notes in my own life.
 
For sixty-one years this building was the heart of the nation, even if it started out rocky. Like Washington, it was no fun to live in Canberra.
 
Members used to call Canberra the “Cemetery with lights,” and on opening day, many of the guests had to sleep in tents where the protestors are located now. For a time at the beginning, Prohibition was the rule of the Australian Capital Region, if you can imagine such a think. Designed to accommodate three hundred members and staff, the Prime Minister decided to move his office back into the building for convenience, and the scramble to be where the action was continued over the years.
 
If you were to sneak up from behind and smack me in the back of the head, demanding to know the Prime Minister of Australia, I would naturally say “Robert Gordon Menzies,” as most of us would. It would only be natural. He was PM when World War II began in 1939. In 1941, he lost the confidence of members of Cabinet and his party and was forced to resign. As an Opposition backbencher during the war years, he helped create the Liberal Party and became Leader of the Opposition in 1946. At the 1949 federal election, he defeated Ben Chifley’s Labor Party and returned to the corner office in the old building.

Menzies was about as old school as you can get. He was an extreme monarchist and ‘British to his bootstraps,’ though he built a strong relationship with the Yanks that even survived Vietnam. Menzies was knighted by Queen Elizibeth II in 1963, made Constable of Dover Castle and the Warden of the Cinque Ports in 1965 before stepping down in 1966. He lived another twelve years, and was, for much of the world, the public face of Australia.

His total time as Prime Minister amounts to a total of eighteen years, which remains a record today. Since those years encompassed the ones in which I was still able to learn anything, he will always be the PM.
 
 
But there is so much else. There is a gallery devoted to the bug Russian Spy Scandle, which was eerily like the Whittaker Chambers Pumpkin Papers affair that unmasked Alger Hiss as a Soviet Spy. We fought about that scandal in America for another fifty years, until the actual NSA decrypted messages were finally released.
 
In Australia, it was the Petrov Affair that revealed that the Russians were actively recruiting agents and suborning journalists to print favorable stories about Uncle Joe Stalin. KGB Colonel Vladimir Petrov was sent out to pretend to be a junior diplomat in 1951, the year I was born, and two years into Bob Menzies second turn as the PM.
 
Petrov worked for Stalin’s brutal MVD Security Chief Lavrenty Beria. When Stalin died in 1953, Beria was purged and shot by the emergent KGB. Petrov had the feeling that the same thing was going to happen to him when he returned home. Accordingly, he made contact with the Australian version of MI-5, the Security Intelligence Service (ASIO).
 
They said they could work out a deal, for $5,000 pounds and asylum, if Petrov could bring out some documents that would show what the Russians had been up to. He was more than willing to do so, and did not discuss the matter with his wife, who was on post as another MVD officer.
 
It is the Red Shoe that she lost as she was manhandled onto an airplane by some Russian goons that made her leap into immortality, that and the Menzies decision to ask the aircrew of the Qantas airplane to ask her if she really wanted to go back to Russia.
 
As it turned out, during the stop for refueling at Darwin far to the north, she didn’t. The image of a gigantic Russian guard in a throat-lock by with an even more enormous Northern Territories police constable is too delicious for words.
 
The documents that Petrov brought over were stunning, and named prominent Australians as dupes and fellow-travelers. The Resulting Royal Commission on Espionage that the Menzies Government conducted was enough to shatter the Labor party into two wings, one strongly anti-communist and the other not.
 
It was enough to keep labor out of government for another twenty years.
 
So Petrov, and his wife’s red shoe that she lost struggling with her Russian escorts, were the reason that I can remember Bob Menzies better than most of the other PMs. But life went on, of course, and by the time the time the Parliament moved out in 1988, there were 4,000 people working in the building.
 
It reminded me of home, of the nooks and crannies of the old buildings that house the inner workings of the government. Broomclosets as offices. In the old Parliament, you can touch just about anything in the building. It being Australia, they just expect you to keep your hands to yourself.
 
With that admonition, the docent let us go from the tour, just outside Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s office. It is once been Menzie’s, of course, and a dozen others, but it will be Bob Hawke’s forever now, since that is what it was when the building closed down.
 
I remember liking Bob. He was a quintessential Australian. A gambler, a reformed drunk, and bit of a womanizer, it is said. I took a moment to examine his office, with the phones under glass, and even walked through the door left ajar though the wood paneling to see the Prime Minister’s personal shower.
 
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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