Talk to Salvation Army Eastern Territory Historical Society, Bexley North, Thursday, March 13, 2014
I suppose before I head off down memory lane I should start by giving my testimony - testifying to my present state of grace (or lack of it). I’m no longer a practicing Salvationist, in fact I have to confess to being a backslider. I’d be lucky to get to one meeting a year, though I did go to the Commissioning a few Sunday mornings back.
But my beliefs and values remain heavily influenced by my Army upbringing, and I think this influence isn’t hard to detect in my work at the Herald. The social values you find reflected in my columns are, I hope, Christian moral values. I suppose in some ways what I am is a Christian fellow-traveller. I have a lot of Christian friends. The evangelicalism of the Sydney Anglican diocese means there are a lot more active Christians in positions of power around this town than a Sally may imagine (though the governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, is a devout Baptist). I feel at home in the company of Christians, I feel I know where they’re coming from, and I can trust them. I have high expectations of honesty and decency from people who profess to be Christians, and I rarely feel let down. It never ceases to amaze me that people who have no experience of professing Christians have no expectation of them being any more truthful or trustworthy than anyone else - that is, not very. ‘I tell the odd lie to get myself out of trouble, doesn’t everybody?’ Well, not anyone brought up by my parents.
One noteworthy Anglican layman who’s had a big influence on my thinking in recent years is Michael Schluter, founder of Britain’s Relationships Foundation. Schluter believes his emphasis on the importance of the ‘relational dimension’ of every aspect of our lives - our working lives, our business lives, even government policy - to be deeply scriptural, as I tried to demonstrate in a column I wrote last Easter Monday. In recent years Easter Monday has become the time when this backslider/fellow traveller offers a little sermon to his readers. What I do know is that the effect of their actions on people’s relationships is often the last thing on the minds of our business people, economists and politicians, even those pollies prone to making speeches about The Family.
Another Christian who’s had a big influence on my thinking is an American preacher called Ched Myers, an exponent of ‘sabbath economics’. I wrote about sabbath economics the Easter Monday before last. I can boil it down to this: when you look at all the things Jesus is quoted as having said in defence of the poor, and all the things he said in criticism of the rich - when you go right through the New Testament adding up all the quotes - maybe, just maybe, he meant what he said. Maybe those who follow Jesus are required to be just as manically pro-poor and tough on the rich as he was. Maybe, as Myers alleges, the ever-more comfortable Christian church has spent most of the past 2000 years ‘reading down’ all Jesus’ anti-rich statements for fear of giving offence to too many well-off people in the congregation.
One of our songs says ‘the rich and poor as well, it doesn’t matter who’, but if you take Jesus at his word, he seems to be saying it does matter who, that there are different standards for the rich and the poor. In its early days, of course, this wouldn’t have been a problem for the Army. It worked among the poor, was largely composed of the poor, and was quite clearly pro-poor. But one of the consequences of righteous living - when you don’t waste money on drinking and smoking, don’t spend your life in pubs, don’t mistreat your wife and kids - is that you don’t stay poor. You give your kids a decent education and eventually your descendants become middle-class and respectable, even disapproving of all those poor people who don’t work as hard as they should and don’t spend their money wisely.
But I’d better get on with the reflections of an OK. The first thing to say is that I’m proud to have been an OK, proud of my parents and the lives they lived, and happy for the world to know where I come from. I think the advantages of being an OK far outweighed the disadvantages. In fact, I can’t think of any significant disadvantages. It’s true we had to move every two years, and that this meant I ended up going to five primary schools and three high schools but, apart from it meaning I retain few if any friends from my school days, I don’t think my continual changing of schools - including a shift from the NSW school system to the Queensland system and back again - did me any harm. And I don’t know of any OK who does believe they were disadvantaged by all the moving. The attitude of modern parents that changing their kids’ school would a terribly damaging thing to do leaves me nonplussed. Admittedly, the Army always moved us before the start of the new school year, never in the middle of the year, so that would have helped reduce disruption. It did, however, mean I had to spend most of every second Christmas holidays packing, and I didn’t much enjoy that. Of course, OKs don’t know anything other than the peripatetic life and so take all the moves in their stride, whereas moving homes and schools would come as a shock to a lot of normal kids.
In my job at the Herald I did spend about 15 months in Canberra before I was married, but I’ve never wanted to move from Sydney, never hankered after a foreign posting as so many journos do. Once married, we stayed in our ‘ideal first home’ at Redfern for seven years, before moving to our present home in Glebe, where we’ve lived for almost 30 years, even though we could have afforded to trade up to a better one, as so many people do. Sometimes I wonder if my desire to stay anchored in the same place - and know a lot of the people in my suburb - is a reaction against all the moving I did as a boy. On the other hand, my father stayed ‘working’ for the Army for 45 years before he retired, and I’ve stayed working for the Herald for 40 years and counting, never really wanting to change papers. That bit I guess I get from my father.
If I can’t think of any great disadvantage of being an OK, what were the advantages? Well, obviously, my Christian upbringing and, though you could argue every soldiers’ kid got the same Army upbringing, I’d argue officers’ kids got an extra-strong dose. As the children of corps officers we probably attended a wider range of meetings and missed fewer of them than many solders’ kids. Because the corps my father commanded were so pathetically small, my siblings and I had to play a much bigger part than many of the comrades’ kids. Every Army kid learns to speak in public, but I did a lot more public speaking than most, giving my first speech when I was eight. Being a confident public speaker has helped me a lot in my job, and I do a lot more speaking than most journos do.
Because our corps were so small, we had to help in the family business, so to speak, just as shopkeepers’ children have to help in the shop. I remember many times standing in open air meetings in the suburbs of Newcastle with just my mother, my sister and me - singing, speaking, praying - while my father collected from the nearby houses. Whenever my father called for a volunteer to pray in the morning meeting, I’d open my eyes and look at Dad, knowing that if no one volunteered, he’d nod to me and I’d pray. Loyalty was a very big thing in my family. When I was in my last year at Newcastle University, I remember thinking that, even if I’d become an atheist, I’d still have come along to meetings and backed up my father whenever he needed it.
In a small corps we’d sometimes have a ‘social’ (what other people would have called a dance) on a Saturday night. Everyone would have a great night and go home. After they’d gone, someone would have to stay behind and sweep out the hall ready for the meeting next morning. That someone would be my father and his kids. What I learnt from being the kid of officers of a small corps was to accept ultimate responsibility for keeping the show - any show - on the road. Not a bad thing to learn.
I think I learnt a lot from my father’s attitude to his boss, the divisional commander. My father never questioned his boss’s orders, never questioned his judgment, never doubted his good intentions. My father was pro-boss. I’m not quite so unquestioning, but I’m pro-boss, too. I’ve always trusted the long succession of editors I’ve worked for to give me a square deal, to speak to me honestly and to keep their promises. I can think of only one occasion when I was let down. In contrast, many journos will tell you editors aren’t to be trusted and will promise you things without any intention of keeping their promise. My theory is that bosses, like children, tend to conform to your expectations of them. If they can see in your eyes that you trust them, they won’t disappoint you; if they can see in your eyes you don’t believe them, your expectations will be self-fulfilling. As an OK I’ve tried to be scrupulously honest with my bosses (and with those working for me), with one exception: because pay rises tend to be so dependent on job offers from rival employers, I’ve sometimes professed to be keener to take up an offer than I really was.
Although I know I’m not still a real Salvationist, I am a cultural Salvationist and I’d never think of putting myself down on the census as anything but Army. Actually, with its uniforms and ranks and other aspects of the military metaphor, as well as its open air meetings and brass bands it’s more of a sub-culture. The Army with all its meetings and sections also takes over a large part of your life, not leaving much room for other interests. It has all the hallmarks of a sect - save for the fact that its doctrines are so much a part of the protestant mainstream, apart from its rejection of the sacraments. If you’re an officers’ kid you get an extra strong dose of the sub-culture, so strong it never leaves you. You can take the boy out of the Army, but you can’t take the Army out of the boy.
As a boy I was very conscious that I came from a weird religion. Whenever my own kids complained about being embarrassed by their parents I’d say, until I turn up at your school wearing a uniform from the Crimean war, you don’t know what embarrassment means. Once I was at the airport seeing off my daughter, whose school orchestra was embarking on what it called an ‘international tour’ of New Zealand. She pointed out a girl and her father who, she said, was an Army officer. He was in civvies. My father’s uniform was his witness; except when he was on furlough, he wouldn’t leave his front door except in uniform. And I never went on school excursions. I knew my parents couldn’t afford them, so avoided embarrassing them by never asking. That morning at the airport it was all I could do to stop myself going over to the officer and asking him if he needed any help paying for his daughter’s trip. I give almost all my donations to overseas aid - including a few Army projects, such as those of the amazing Nesan Kistan - but I realised that day that OKs were my favourite charity. If you know of officers with that problem, put us in touch.
My perception of the Army’s weirdness could have left me with a burning desire just to be normal like everyone else. It didn’t. Perhaps because of my father’s personal eccentricities, it left me with a desire to be a lot more interesting than normal. Paddy McGuinness, of the Financial Review, who always dressed in black, taught me that an ambitious economics editor uses his clothing to draw attention to himself. I haven’t hesitated to follow his example. I guess I have been more ambitious than the average journo. Where did I get that from? It certainly wasn’t from my father: to the unending disappointment and frustration of his DCs, he wasn’t the tiniest bit ambitious. Nor was my mother. So where did it come from? I suspect it came from me attending divisional functions in Newcastle. The corps I came from were so small there were no boys of my age, so at divisional functions everyone had mates except me. I think I determined then that one day I’d show them I was a somebody, not a nobody.
A few years ago I attended a conference at Sydney University put on by the political economy department. They were a lot more left wing than me and I wasn’t very comfortable. There was an old gent sitting up the back and eventually he got up and aired his novel views on how to fix the economy. The others were a bit embarrassed by this oddball, and dispensed with him pretty curtly. Later my conscience smote me. I knew who the old codger was, he was perhaps the only surviving specimen of the same genus as my father, Major Ivan Unicomb - Joy Inglis’ dad - and I’m pretty sure he knew who I was. I should have stood beside him and made him feel welcome, but I didn’t.
What does much to make the Army a sub-culture, one you never really escape, is the music. The bands, of course, the songsters and all the old songs and choruses. When you spend the first 24 years of your life singing them in meetings and prayer meetings before the benediction, they never leave you. And they never lose their power to move me - often almost to tears. I have a lot of Army CDs, of which my favourite is one with the songs of Albert Orsborn. My favourite website is SalvoAudio. Many’s the night I sit up writing my column, listening to Tom Quick from Canada’s latest program of Army band music. I keep a copy of the old song book on my desk so I can check the words of a song and sing along.
Some years ago I spoke at a pre-election meeting of ACOSS - the Australian Council of Social Service - peak body for organisations doing social work, including the Army. Two officers from THQ were there, but they didn’t know who I was. For some reason I referred to John Stone’s contemptuous reference to ACOSS and its members as ‘the compassion industry’. I thought I’d make the officers sit up by adding that, where I came from, we used to sing: ‘Except I am moved with compassion, how dwelleth thy Spirit in me?’ But I didn’t say it because I knew I couldn’t have without getting emotional.
These days only the old would look at my surname in the paper and say I had to be some kind of Sally, just as every musician whose first name is Bram - or last name is Terracini - has to have an Army background. But, for the record, let me tell you that of my father’s 13 siblings, three of his brothers and three of his sisters also became officers, and six of my cousins are officers.
It may have changed but, in my day, the Army was into managing by ‘metrics’ long before it became fashionable in big business. Corps officers’ performance was judged primarily by their statistics - by the number of people attending meetings. Usually lacking a sergeant-major, my father would count and record the number of people over 12. Every year or two the DC would hold an inspection, when the statistics were reviewed. Oversimplifying it, if your figures were up on your predecessor’s you were likely to be moved to a bigger corps; if they were down, you were likely to be moved to a smaller one, preferably in another division. My father’s figures were almost always down; his successive corps were smaller and smaller. There were ways to massage the stats by holding extra meetings, or inviting a band to visit, but my father neither knew nor cared about these tricks. A successful CO knows how to keep his meetings entertaining, with good music and lots of emotion, happy singing and clapping, hallelujah windups and so forth. My father - who was the most saintly person I ever expect to meet - wasn’t musical and didn’t know how to jolly people along. I remember George Carpenter doing an inspection at the quarters in New Lambton. My father’s attendances were down and he couldn’t make his bank reconciliation statement balance. George - who was hardly more numerate than my Dad - couldn’t make it balance either. It went on for hours, George got angrier and angrier and ended up tearing strips off my father. Dad hardly slept for the next week. I’m sure my father soon forgot and forgave George, but I didn’t.
I understand that officers aren’t shifted as often as they were when I was an OK, but that makes me wonder why the Army persisted with the practice for so long. My father never for a moment doubted the Army’s contention that all the ‘farewell and marching orders’ he received were the will of God. But after I left home I could see a far more humanistic interpretation. Once a year all the DCs in the territory would hold a meeting that was like a kind of poker game in which they tried to keep their most successful COs, while palming off on another DC their least successful COs, starting with my father. This explains why my father was so often moved from division to division.
In recent years, however, another, happier thought has occurred to me. I see now that every time my father asked his DC for special consideration, he got it. My mother, a North Queenslander, hated the winter cold of inland country towns. This was why we were moved from Albury and, later, Bathurst, after only a year. My father was allowed to stay at Cessnock for three years so my brother could do the Leaving at the same school. When he won a bursary for Sydney University we were moved to Sydney and kept there until he graduated. When we returned to Newcastle, the city of my birth, I went off to Newcastle Boys High and decided that three high schools were enough. I asked my father to ask the DC to let us stay around Newcastle so I could complete my schooling at Newcastle Boys. As it happened, we stayed in the Newcastle division long enough for me also to spend four years at Newcastle University.
My teenage years in Newcastle were my most devout. I became leader of the Inter School Christian Fellowship at school and was active in the Evangelical Union at uni. I helped set up a branch of the Salvation Army Students Fellowship in Newcastle, and then became secretary of the StudFlip (as my mother call it) in Sydney. For some years my ambition was to become an officer. I’d become an accountant partly because my father was in awe of those officers who didn’t have to struggle with their bookwork like he did. But eventually I realised my reason for wanting to be officer was hardly what could be called a calling. I’d been watching my father’s performance closely and critically for some time. I wanted to become an officer to prove that, though he hadn’t figured out what you had to do to be a successful CO, I had.
Later, in 1972, when I’d finally become qualified as a chartered accountant but also had become disillusioned with it, and just before I embarked on the path that led me to the Herald, I wrote to the Commissioner, Hubert Scotney, offering to become an accountant at THQ, with little concern about how much I was paid. Scotney lost no time in declining my offer. The last thing he would have wanted was one of those trouble-makers from the Students Fellowship inside the headquarters tent. My past 40 years may have been very different had he accepted that offer.
