John Button

John Button was rare man, rare for any time, any place and in any calling. The public face – the Senator John Button, long-time Leader of the Government in the Senate, the hands-on, hard-hat minister of the Button car plan, the policy innovator and party reformer, the straight talker, unbridled political wit, notorious doodler, note writer, and scribbler of politically incorrect postcards to Senator Bronwyn Bishop (imagine it!) – that is the John Button Australia knows. His achievements have been many and they are exemplary. But the political life is only one facet of the story. John was a sparkling man, a complex, knotty individual who retained a child’s capacity for wonder and precocious insight. Many of the tributes that have appeared since his death on April 8 have mentioned John in the context of refracted light: his glint, his anarchic twinkle, his laser way of skewering you with a truth you might not welcome but would not relinquish. He had a critical capacity that made his subjects more, not less, like themselves. He was an enabler – a wise man. I got to know John Button by reading and listening to him. There was no gap between the spoken and the written Button. His prose had the enviable, conversational ease of a born storyteller. Here is a typical example, from his book As It Happened (1998): Between the age of eight and twelve, pigeons were an important part of my life. I built an elaborate loft on top of the chookhouse roof complete with nesting boxes and a ‘drop’ to keep the cats out … I read books about pigeons and learnt the technical terms and how long it took to ‘home’ them. Some-time I rode my grid into the country with several pigeons in a basket on the back. Then I’d let them go and ride quickly home to make sure they’d come back. They were good breeders. They hatched a lot of eggs. I spent hours on the kitchen roof watching them. Before long I was selling pigeons and even advertising in the pigeon fanciers’ newsletter. I sold one pigeon three times and he always came back. He was a handsome grizzle and in the end I kept him. Sentiment got the better part of business. John had read his George Orwell and his Graham Greene, but the spare style is all his own. You can hear his voice in every phrase. You can also sense the politician in the pragmatic focus on specifics, the ‘drop’ to keep the cats out. But these are a writer’s virtues too, a focus upon the concrete, on the specific that points to the general truth. The old word for the poet, the oral chronicler of cultures, was ‘makar’. John Button was in their line – a maker. No surprise that, in his eloquent Age tribute (April 9), Senator Kim Carr should say of his predecessor in the industry portfolio that, ‘John Button was, quite simply, one of the most creative policymakers of his generation. He turned program design into an art-form.’ That wasn’t a trick that John learned in parliament or in smoky back rooms. He had been cultivating art forms all his life. At the University of Melbourne, he had listened to the poetry lectures of the legendary Professor Ian Max-well, an enthusiast who could make you believe that poetry – the work of the makers – would save the world. John made his law degree palatable by moonlighting in Fine Arts lectures. A lifetime later he would talk passionately about the paintings and drawings on his walls at home. As a student he frequented the old Savoy Cinema to taste the delights of ‘continental’ films. He recalled being particularly drawn to the Swedish film One Summer of Happiness, advertised as having ‘bathing scenes which were absolutely inoffensive’ – fit for a Presbyterian minister’s son. He was an aspiring thespian and a mate of Wal Cherry’s. They played together in Romeo and Juliet. As old Capulet John had only two lines, but he remembers them because the producer, John Sumner, accused him of overacting. Undeterred, he went on with Cherry to establish the Emerald Hill Theatre in an empty church hall in South Melbourne. And so began a formative period in Melbourne’s drama history. His was an integrated life. The arts and the ‘real world’ were never separate spheres for John. A master craftsman, he understood that the life of art is as demanding as life on the factory floor or in the Senate chamber. But he had no time for the pretentious flummery or ego flourish that so often dogs what we have come, regrettably, to call ‘the Yarts’. He was the guardian angel and patron of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and could draw a crowd from across the spectrum. When Australian Book Review conducted a readers’ survey in 2006, the writer voted most popular was John Button. I, like many ABR readers, shall miss John Button. Go well, John. And bless you.

Morag Fraser

From the New Issue

Troubled Minds: Understanding and treating mental illness by Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam

Like Fire-Hearted Suns by Melanie Joosten

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills

On Kim Scott: Writers on writers by Tony Birch

You May Also Like

Sublime: 25 years of the Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art by

Protecting the national interest? by Joy Damousi

'This is the way the world ends' by Beejay Silcox

Peter Costello: The new Liberal by Shaun Carney