Publishers Note:  Not again!  I am sure I said ‘Cults’.  

Colts  The political kind

There was the Colt from Kooyong, Andrew Peacock, who made his mark and then made his mark, and then, like all good pretenders vanished without a trace, to Washington, (and Shirley MacLaine) to reflect upon what could have been.  As Paul Keating immortalised, “a soufflé cannot rise twice”.  If there’s a Colt in the contemporary scene, he’s actually a gelding.

Peacock was famous for so may other reasons, his three points in the 1990 federal election, emphasis to the first two, and then the third point, the abyss of ‘What was the third point?’  As far as Colts go he was one in a long line of great Australian politicians who had the looks, the intensity, the bravura of the film star, yet was well and truly shackled to the reality of political life; in all it’s dullness.  All the major politicians had their moments, either spectacularly pant-less outside an American motel foyer, or cultivating comfort zones between Canberra, Sorrento and Toorak as other indiscreet non-moments.  The best of all, the man who challenged Gough but never took the guernsey, the one and only Billy Snedden, the man who ‘died on the job’ for Australia.

Andrew, the Colt from Kooyong, had his compensations.  There was his wife, his ex wife and then another and another and another mans wife, Susan-Lassiter-Peacock-Sangster-Renouf.  What was her real name?  Was she gauche, NO!! Just enterprising, opportunistically advertising ‘Sheridan Bed Sheets’, while her husband was a minister.

Prior to Andrew stood a real man, and another woman who would endure as the star of the Maxwell House commercials.  In Australia there’s no such thing as the hallowed sanctity of office, here it’s the hollowed inevitability of falling short of the mark.  And what better footnote to history’s page than wee Willie McMahon, and that celestial White House staircase.  More Baz than Luhrman and  for a moment, the world stood still as legs, longer than the piers of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, more slender than the arch, and more langerous than the eddying backwash of the ferries, the legs of Sonya McMahon, displayed through a slit in her dress that seemd to go all the way up to her armpit. (Pictured here with their heads cut off)  How we laughed at Willie, deducing he lacked one, yet he managed, by the wiliest of political stratagems to score such a stunning sheila.

Of all the PM’s I like Harold Holt the most.  Celebrated pork-swords man, as noble a figure as his namesake at Hastings (who took the arrow in his eye), and whilst not flailing the femmes with his sword, cut a swathe through the lumbering ranks of a rusted on, DLP depleted Labour Party.  His end came in the tradition of Mary Shelley and the pre-raphaelites.  A spectacular and mysterious demise scripted from Le Carre with a little bit of  “ Blue Hills” thrown in.  (He drowned in the surf of Bass Strait)

As a colt, John Gorton comes a close second to Harold Holt.  Gorton’s secretary was described by a disgruntled minister in regards to policy, “It wiggles, It’s shapely, and it’s name is Ainsley Gotto”.

Sadly, it is difficult to see a contemporary political Colt.  I think we all miss them.
Quentin Cockburn QC

Publisher’s note: Sir Bertram Postule was asked to pen a likeness of Mr and Mrs McMahon.  He suffered an attack of the vapours on seeing the image above.  We trust he will recover quickly