Who is Malcolm Turnbull?
Paddy Manning tracks the rise and rise of Malcolm Turnbull — from Oxford University to Liberal Party pre-selection via his marriage to Lucy Hughes.
Given all his hard slog, juggling his studies and journalism, Malcolm Turnbull would have been entitled to jump for joy when he won the Rhodes scholarship at the end of 1977. He didn’t. Bulletin colleague Suellen O’Grady was sitting on the other side of the desk when he found out: ‘He was pleased, but very quiet about it. I was the one who shouted the news to everyone and then insisted on sprinting down to David Jones to buy a bottle of champagne.’
If there is a passport to the Australian prime ministership, it would have Rhodes scholar stamped on it. From that day on, Turnbull was marked out as one to watch. It was his second attempt, and would see him study for the prestigious Bachelor of Civil Law degree over two years at Oxford University. The Rhodes judging criteria are deliberately hazy. The original will of the scholarship’s founder, mining magnate and imperialist Cecil Rhodes, specified the winners should ‘not be merely bookworms’. Weight should also be given to ‘fondness of and success in manly outdoor sports such as cricket, football and the like’, ‘qualities of manhood’ and ‘instincts to lead’, with ‘performance of public duties as his highest aim’. Plenty of swots were put off by this language over the years. Only in 1976 were the trust deeds amended to remove all manly references and let women win it — nowadays the trust simply emphasises the ‘energy to use one’s talents to the full’. For all that, the Rhodes seems only partly to do with the qualities of the individual: certain schools have an extraordinary track record in winning the scholarship, none more so than Sydney Grammar, which has turned out more than a quarter of the hundred-odd Rhodes scholars so far from NSW. And apart from the old school tie, there’s the calibre of one’s referees: Turnbull’s high-powered backers were Trevor Kennedy, NSW chief justice Sir Laurence Street and — particularly potent — then premier Neville Wran.
“Malcolm Fraser…had apparently told him, on the lawns of Kirribilli House: ‘One day, Malcolm, this could all be yours.’”
Even Rhodes scholars have their strengths and weaknesses, of course. By his own admission, there was nothing academically exceptional about Tony Abbott, and by most accounts there was nothing particularly sporting about Malcolm Turnbull. A few who knew Turnbull scratched their heads at the news. Sure he was brilliant, indisputably a future leader, but was he that sporty? It has always been a bit of a puzzle: Hawke loved cricket, Abbott loved boxing, but Turnbull? Many years later, James Colebatch, who had beaten Turnbull for dux at Grammar, was ‘asked if he could recall the sport Turnbull excelled at to help win his Rhodes Scholarship, [but Colebatch] couldn’t help. ‘Neither of us were terribly interested in sport,’ he says. ‘As for the Rhodes Scholarship, I’ve always wondered about that myself.’ Turnbull admitted: ‘I had a couple of “manly” outdoor sporting activities. One was playing rugby union at Sydney University and I was an active lifesaver at North Bondi surf club, but I was a long, long way from being the most sporty Rhodes Scholar.’
Turnbull later wrote it was the publicity attached to the Rhodes that caught Kerry Packer’s attention, and he was subsequently whisked into an executive trainee scheme and appointed assistant to Packer’s long-time finance director and right-hand man Harry Chester. Still filing for The Bulletin but free of his studies, Turnbull spent most of 1978 working with Chester and Packer, getting to know both well, until he was due to start at Oxford in October. It was a lark. One of the highlights for Turnbull that year was visiting the original Playboy Mansion in Chicago, where he negotiated Australian rights for ACP to the famous soft-porn magazine with Christie Hefner, daughter of founder Hugh. After Turnbull did the deal, he spent a few weeks rafting down the Colorado River with his father, Bruce, before heading over to England.
When Turnbull arrived at Oxford, he found that his room at Brasenose College was ‘so damp I suspected frogs were breeding under the wallpaper’. Turnbull’s time at Oxford was not especially noteworthy — there are no famous speeches or papers to speak of. Journalist Imre Salusinszky studied at Oxford with Turnbull, and remembered hearing about all the famous people he knew, like Packer, Wran and Malcolm Fraser, who had apparently told him, on the lawns of Kirribilli House: ‘One day, Malcolm, this could all be yours.’ Dropping round for a scotch, Salusinszky found Turnbull’s room much better than his own, and seethed with jealousy as Turnbull quickly made a big name for himself on campus: ‘Over the succeeding months, it galled me to have Malcolm’s witticisms quoted back — like when someone had commented on the size of his backside, and he’d replied that you cannot drive a 10-inch nail with a tack-hammer.’
Turnbull later confessed he was shocked by the acceptance of social hierarchy he encountered as a student there. As Turnbull once recalled: ‘I felt superior to them really. There are a couple of good things about being an Australian in England. For one, you don’t fit into that class structure, so you’re not restricted by it. England never felt like home to me. It was never the centre of my life. The centre was here.’
Indeed, for the first ten months or so, Turnbull ditched the place completely. The Bachelor of Civil Law was actually a one-year degree, and Turnbull was supremely confident he could juggle work and study, so rather than knuckling down beneath the hallowed university’s ‘dreaming spires’, he hotfooted it to London to find Harold Evans at the Sunday Times and see if he could still take up the job offer made years earlier. Evans welcomed him with open arms — and even gave him a five-volume manual on newspaper editing and design, inscribed: ‘To Malcolm, with a warm welcome to the grubby ranks of the hot-metal men.’ The only problem was, there was no paper to put out. Turnbull had arrived just in time for England’s so-called ‘winter of discontent’, the coldest for almost twenty years, when unions including garbos and gravediggers went on strike against wage caps brought in to control inflation. It was Labour’s last gasp, ushering in the Thatcher government in 1979.
At the Thomson-owned Times Newspapers there was no strike, but the company took the opportunity to lock out all staff except journalists and managers in a production dispute over computerisation, including the introduction of word processors. No newspapers were produced for eleven months, even though journalists were still drawing wages, costing the company a fortune and setting the scene for the 1981 takeover by Rupert Murdoch, who was already secretly building his new printing presses at Wapping. At one point, Turnbull was so frustrated he convinced Packer to consider buying the Times, and adopting a Wapping-like union-busting strategy to put the paper out. Packer flew over to meet with Turnbull and Evans, but the Thomsons were not ready to sell. Turnbull considered an offer from the London Observer, but Evans kept insisting the papers would be ‘back on the streets in a couple of weeks’. Turnbull later wrote that Evans’s optimism
continued unabated for ten months and as a consequence instead of having ten holiday months the journalists would spring into action every two weeks or so, write enough copy to fill a paper and then realise that a reopening was still some time off. By the middle of 1979 the situation was becoming very unsatisfactory. My tutors at Brasenose had noticed my lengthy absences in London and threatened to send me down unless I concentrated on my studies. On the other hand I was hardly making a name for myself in Fleet Street, working for a paper that didn’t exist. So with considerable regret I left the Sunday Times, about six weeks before it came back.
For an ambitious young journalist, the experience could only be described as galling. Ten months under the greatest editor of one of the best newspapers in the world, and not a byline to show for it. The unfortunate result is that contemporaries at the Sunday Times remember Turnbull only vaguely, as a kind of interloper under Evans’s wing. Apparently during one drawn-out meeting on the newsfloor, the journalists’ chapel was discussing the merits of legal action proposed by expat Geoffrey Robertson, already a celebrated London barrister who had helped defend the editors of Oz magazine in their long-running obscenity trial, to block the looming Murdoch takeover on competition grounds — he already owned The Sun and News of the World. Who should pipe up from the back of the room but the young Australian reporter, suddenly delivering a lecture on English trade practices law. ‘Shut up, Malcolm!’ someone hissed.
In late 1979, under pressure from his supervisors, Turnbull high-tailed it back to Oxford and, in his own words,‘from then until June 1980 I became a model student, working long hours in the Bodleian Law Library’. It was not before time. The warden of Rhodes House, Sir Edgar Williams, wrote back to the selection trustees in NSW that Turnbull had ‘begun to find his level and to stretch his ability. This has dented his arrogance usefully, but I expect it will bounce back. He has the manner of a likeable rascal but I hope there is more to him than that, Assuredly he does not suffer from shyness.’
A keenly anticipated visit may have helped Turnbull maintain his newfound dedication to his studies. His girlfriend Lucy Hughes was due to arrive in November 1979, during the student vacation that would mark the end of the third year of her own law studies at Sydney University. This was not Turnbull’s first serious relationship, but it would prove to be his most significant.
“the continuing fascination with the story is not about Nessie or Watson but Turnbull himself: the black rage he sinks into, his capacity for physical aggression”
Bob Ellis remembers that, pretty much from the moment he got to university, Turnbull was popular with women — maybe too popular for Ellis’s liking, in fact, as he later wrote that they fell out over one woman whose ‘name now is well known but she asked me not to quote it’. Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Dale, in an interview with a colleague, told of how in the mid-1970s he and Turnbull were seeing two women from the same house:
This led to a fascinating exchange in the early hours. Both men, with towels around them, found themselves tiptoeing to the bathroom at the same time. Turnbull, whom Dale knew only as ‘Malcolm the Footballer’ because of his solid frame, announced to Dale he wanted to be Prime Minister by the time he was 40. ‘For which party?’ asked Dale. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ responded Malcolm the Footballer.
An old uni flame remembers Turnbull as ‘very brilliant, confident’, with ‘a large star over his head. Already at that stage he had roles at The Bulletin and Channel Nine which everybody else could only dream about. And he was still studying law!’
One woman, however, dealt Turnbull’s confidence a blow: Fiona Watson, stepdaughter of Labor senator ‘Diamond Jim’ McClelland, one of the many distinguished lawyers interviewed for Turnbull’s Bulletin column. Watson was living in Woollahra, and by most accounts Turnbull had moved in with her. Certainly, he was in love and was, in his own words, ‘very upset’ when she decided to break off the affair. The story of what happened next has been told and retold many times over almost forty years. It has been the subject of two defamation suits, touched on in books and essays, raised in taunts in federal parliament, hinted at in cartoons and musicals, yet the basic facts remain a mystery. All agree Watson found her cat, Nessie, dead outside her home one day in 1977. Veteran journalist Richard Ackland spoke to Watson directly back in 1981, when Turnbull was seeking preselection for the seat of Wentworth, and he alluded to the episode in a wry item for his National Times column, which mentioned in passing that Turnbull ‘could face some hostile questions from the Animal Protection League’. Ackland wrote the last word on the saga for Justinian in 2009: Watson thought Turnbull had strangled Nessie. Neighbours had seen him hanging around. Turnbull had been acting strangely — he even wrote letters to the cat. Ackland still has the letters and posted one online:
Dear Nessie,
Tell you [sic] miss that I love her very much, tell her that when I came to see her on Sunday and she wasn’t there I cuddled you up and it broke my heart that it wasn’t her.
Tell her I know a lot of her current boyfriends will tell her not to see me, they will stroke her back and tell her to forget me.
But, Nessie, we know she never will and you tell her, my little cat, how much we were in love.
All my love
Malcolm
Does the letter suggest a man who would strangle a cat? It could equally suggest the opposite.
Not long afterwards, a business column by SMH journalist Mark Westfield, which referred to Turnbull as a cat strangler, slipped through. Turnbull sued again. Lawyers at Fairfax, which published both The National Times and SMH, were tearing their hair out but had to cough up once again. There was no direct evidence that the cat was strangled, let alone that Turnbull had done it. And Turnbull, of course, has consistently and vehemently denied it — in 2009 he finally went on the record, saying ‘no cat has died at my hands’. He speculated the cat may have been run over. Ackland is clear: that is not what Watson thought. But a cat is not easy to strangle. Trevor Kennedy, a country boy from Albany, WA, who had been forced to kill a few cats in his time, told Turnbull ‘they are buggers — they scratch you all over the place’. Having seen no scratches, he was prepared to testify that Turnbull could not have done it.
Watson no longer talks to journalists about the incident. Jim McClelland did not mince words about Turnbull, however, saying that he was ‘a turd. He’s easy to loathe, he’s a shit, he’d devour anyone for breakfast, he’s on the make, he’s cynical, he’s offensively smug.’
To which Turnbull responded, icily: ‘I’m very sorry that many years of excessive consumption of alcohol and professional disappointment have reduced what was once a sharp wit into nothing better than gutter abuse. He’s a bitter old man.’
The matter has even been raised in federal parliament, when Turnbull was opposition leader and agriculture minister Tony Burke raised fears for prime minister Kevin Rudd’s cat:
Burke: ‘I have important responsibilities on the issue of animal welfare, and I am aware of potential threats to Jasper the cat, living at The Lodge. I do put the Leader of the Opposition on notice: if anything happens to Jasper the cat, questions will be asked.’
Turnbull: ‘Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I ask you to request the minister to withdraw that imputation. That was a grubby remark. I ask it to be withdrawn.’
Burke eventually withdrew it. Of course, the continuing fascination with the story is not about Nessie or Watson but Turnbull himself: the black rage he sinks into, his capacity for physical aggression and, deep in the background, niggling doubts about his attitudes to women — the same noticed by Alastair Mackerras when Turnbull was a schoolboy. People started referring to ‘Good Malcolm’, who was unbelievably clever and charming, and ‘Bad Malcolm’, a thin-skinned bully with a short fuse who was occasionally frightening.
More concretely, the cat story showed journalists the litigious side of Turnbull, right from the beginning of his career. Ackland’s own view was that, by suing, and continuing to sue, Turnbull turned what might have been passing scuttlebutt into a long-running cause célèbre which he has never been able to escape.
Turnbull wasn’t disappointed in love for long, thanks to a big Bulletin profile he wrote at the beginning of 1978. Tom Hughes QC was a World War II pilot, Liberal attorney-general under John Gorton, then a top NSW silk charging $1000 a day. Hughes was staunchly Catholic, anti-communist and pro–Vietnam War — he once chased away anti-war protesters who invaded the family home at Bellevue Hill with a cricket bat. Hughes was a favourite of Sir Frank Packer, whose Daily Telegraph backed him into politics in a 1963 campaign run by a young John Howard. He was kept on a Packer retainer for decades, but his political career was relatively short-lived. Turnbull’s profile still resonates — at one point he quotes colleague Alan Reid:
There are two sorts of lawyers in parliament. There are the politicians who also happen to be lawyers, men like Whitlam and Menzies, and then there are the lawyers who also happen to be politicians, like Barwick, Hughes and Ellicott. Tom Hughes never acquired that elaborate network of alliances and understanding that are necessary in politics.
It is striking that much the same thing has been said of Turnbull himself.
However strong Turnbull’s interest was in Hughes the lawyer, it was soon overtaken by an interest in his daughter Lucy, then nineteen and studying law at Sydney University, and working through the summer holidays in her father’s chambers in Martin Place.
After almost twenty years’ marriage, in 1972 Tom Hughes had divorced his wife Joanna Fitzgerald, a former journalist and niece of the poet RD Fitzgerald. When Lucy Hughes met Malcolm in 1978, she had moved in with her father in Darlinghurst, while her two younger brothers, Tom and Michael, stayed with Joanna in Paddington. Raised a Catholic like her parents, Lucy had started school at Kincoppal, in Rose Bay, but childhood asthma saw her sent away from home, like Turnbull, to board at Frensham, an exclusive girls college at Mittagong in the Southern Highlands. There, at church one Sunday, she lost her faith in what she described as a ‘weird negative epiphany’, when the Irish priest complained in his sermon that a Catholic girl from a local bank was going out with a Protestant boy from another bank: ‘[I] thought, “My God, this is so unbelievable” … I had shivers all over my body. I walked out of that church and didn’t walk back [into any Catholic church] except for sightseeing until the mid-1990s.’
Lucy’s last two years of schooling were spent at the selective Sydney Girls, then she drifted a little. Lucy’s mother, Joanna, by all accounts a big drinker, was not a shining example, but the weight of expectation played a part in this too. After Tom and Joanna were divorced, Tom had a celebrated romance with actor Kate Fitzpatrick (who rented for a time at one of Turnbull’s homes), before marrying Christine Taylor in 1981.
The Hughes family was — is — Sydney royalty, spanning four generations in public office. Lucy’s great-grandfather Sir Thomas Hughes was a member of the state’s Upper House (like his brother) and the first lord mayor of Sydney. His son Geoffrey Hughes was a World War I airman who won the Military Cross after a dogfight over France with the Red Baron, served again as group captain in the next world war, then failed in an attempt to enter federal politics opposing Ben Chifley’s bank-nationalisation plans, but who had a distinguished career in the law and business, including as chairman of Tooheys. Geoffrey’s youngest son, Robert Hughes — whom Turnbull interviewed in New York — was Lucy’s uncle, and by any measure one of the twentieth century’s most influential Australians. He took the art world by storm as a critic for Time, and cemented his reputation in 1980 as author of the modern-art classic Shock of the New.
Lucy had a lot to live up to, which helps explain the rebelliousness. It was only after returning from a trip to Europe that she decided to follow the family tradition and do law, which led to the work placement with her father — and, when a Bulletin journo conducted his interview in Tom Hughes’ chambers, an introduction to Turnbull. Lucy’s first impression of Turnbull was a telling one: ‘Malcolm was very dashing and extremely attractive, you know’, with a ‘kind of strong energy’ about him. ‘I guess that was a remarkable thing. He wasn’t a passive, sit-back … let-it-flow kind of person.’ Turnbull was definitely the serious type. On his first dinner-date with Lucy, they were accompanied by Bob and Helena Carr.
For all the chemistry, the relationship was a slow burn, not immediately expected to lead to anything in particular: Turnbull was about to leave for England for two years. But to Lucy’s surprise, the relationship just grew stronger.
[W]hen he went to Oxford, we saw each other a lot, but my own I guess expectation was not that we would have a long-term relationship necessarily. But … our relationship actually developed through distance, which was fantastic … [We] corresponded with aerogramme, which I think are an extinct item of stationery now, and wrote to each other every week. Sometimes Malcolm would chastise me because I didn’t write often enough, which was a well-deserved chastisement. And we spoke on the telephone, not nearly as much as people do now and, of course, there was no email, there was no fax, but we kept in touch.
When Lucy arrived in England towards the end of 1979, Turnbull realised he could not bear to see her return to Australia again. She agreed to stay, and they lived together first in a North Oxford flat and then in a tiny, rose-covered cottage at the nearby village of Cumnor. They were married there four months later. Geoffrey Robertson stood in place of Tom Hughes, to give Lucy away. Turnbull knew Robertson well, having profiled him for The Bulletin — he was also following in his footsteps: Sydney University, Rhodes scholar, civil law at Brasenose. Turnbull said of the wedding that he and Lucy
decided we would be married in the Cumnor church and approached the vicar, Neil Durand. The vicar remonstrated with us, pointing out that Lucy as a Catholic and I as a Presbyterian were not part of his flock. ‘Your petty sectarian approach is unconstitutional, Vicar’, I responded. ‘The Church of England is the religion of the state. You are a servant of the Crown, not materially different from an ambassador or an admiral. It is your constitutional duty to prevent fornication in your parish and marrying us is a good start.’
Vintage Turnbull. Without conceding the point, the amused vicar relented — ‘If the Church of England can include bishops who doubt the divinity of Christ, it should be broad enough to take in you two.’ Malcolm and Lucy were married on 22 March 1980, aged twenty-five and twenty-one respectively. No family had been invited, but Malcolm recalled that his father, Bruce, turned up anyway:
We just wanted to do it with like a dozen mates, and that was the plan. And then … maybe it was two days before the wedding, there was a knock on the door and there was my dad with the suitcase … He said ‘I’ve only got one son, I’m not going to miss his wedding’ and that was it, and it was so sweet that he came.
The Turnbull–Hughes wedding party went down to the Bear and Ragged Staff for lunch. Though the wedding was small, back home the Women’s Weekly ran a big picture of the smiling couple at the ceremony, formally dressed, signing on the dotted line. Six months later, they were back in Sydney for good, and Tom and Joanna Hughes had a belated reception in their Paddington home, which also made the Weekly’s gossip pages. This was the first chance for all sides of the family to meet. Coral, by now divorced from John Salmon, flew in for the occasion. Turnbull recalled that his mother had something to share with Lucy, telling her:
‘My dear, I hope you will never change your name to Turnbull’, and Lucy said ‘Well, I don’t intend to, Coral, no, I’m Lucy Hughes’ and my mother said ‘Well, that’s good my dear, because you know what happens: if you change your name once, you’ll have to change it every single time you get married’. Whereupon, the rather conservative aunts of the Hughes family nearly fainted.
Turnbull already moved in heavyweight circles, but marrying Lucy launched him into the eastern suburbs social set, and the social pages. One gossip writer found him looking terribly uncomfortable as MC at the launch of a new collection of couture clothing by Lucy and her friend ex-model Melissa Doucoure at the Sheraton–Wentworth Hotel. While bossing the waiters around and generally fussing, Turnbull confessed, ‘I think I am more nervous about this whole thing than Melissa or Lucy.’ Turnbull regarded himself as a ‘scruff ’ — Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen once joked he was the only man he knew who could make a $1500 suit look terrible.
“Turnbull’s mother, Coral Lansbury, had placed bets with fellow professor Leonie Kramer on whose son would be the first to make prime minister.”
With the prestigious degree from Oxford under his belt when he returned to Australia, Turnbull quickly found work in the law. His first job was as a solicitor, working under Aleco Vrisakis at Blake Dawson Waldron, but Turnbull quickly decided that being a junior solicitor at a big firm was not for him, and went to the bar, encouraged by his father-in-law. Bruce Turnbull’s connections also helped: Bruce was good friends with John Sackar, then an up-and-coming junior barrister. The two men were part of a close-knit running group that often jogged together in Centennial Park, along with Bruce Gyngell, barrister Henric Nicholas, and prestige estate agent Bill Bridges. Sackar recommended Malcolm for a room in his chambers on the sixth floor of the Selborne Wentworth building on Phillip Street, one of the best in Sydney. Impressions on the sixth floor were mixed. Sackar, now a Supreme Court judge, says Turnbull was the first barrister any of them had met who did all his own typing, no secretaries or palaver — ‘We all thought it was pretty extraordinary.’
On the other hand, according to the first substantial profile of the young lawyer, in 1984, he put a number of his fellow barristers off-side, and the general feeling was that Turnbull was unsettled at the bar, distracted, with broader horizons. Turnbull admitted: ‘The media business has always been my real love; I’m temperamentally more a journalist than a lawyer.’ The piece recorded that Turnbull’s mother, Coral Lansbury, had placed bets with fellow professor Leonie Kramer on whose son would be the first to make prime minister.
Like any barrister starting out, Turnbull took whatever work he could get. With his notoriety as a journalist and his connections with Packer, and under the guiding hand of Tom Hughes, Turnbull was kept busy. He read under Sackar and Peter Hely, the then leading junior barrister in Sydney, and both did what they could to funnel work through from an extensive list of media clients. But Turnbull took a pretty jaundiced view of many of his colleagues and soon got bored and fidgety. Keeping a weather eye on the NSW Labor government’s looming reforms to the legal profession, which would open the bar to more competition from solicitors, Turnbull was preoccupied with his next move. In the end, Turnbull spent only about a year at the bar as a fully fledged practitioner, leading some commentators to question his oft-touted credentials as a ‘brilliant barrister’.
It was hardly a surprise when Turnbull decided to run for pre-selection in 1981. What did surprise many of his friends was that he chose to run for the Liberal Party. Bob Ellis blamed Lucy Hughes, writing that Turnbull had ‘married the enemy’: ‘I was with them on a night when he suggested he might stand for Labor and she talked him out of it … It was not, I suspect, the last time they had that conversation.’
Paddy Manning is a journalist who has worked for The Australian, Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, Crikey and the ABC and was founding editor of Ethical Investor magazine. He is author of two books: Boganaire: The Rise and Fall of Nathan Tinkler (2014) and What the Frack? Everything You Need to Know About Coal Seam Gas (2013).
This article is an edited extract from Born To Rule: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull, published by Melbourne University Press. Buy the book here.
