To turn to Hedley’s Canberra activities beyond the simple confines of the department’s teaching and supervision is to enter something of a contested sphere. As the only department of the subject in the university system, our staff were often called upon to help with other efforts at international understanding, to comment on current affairs, and occasionally to provide expertise, or at least suggestion, to government, though that did not always prove popular.
Two offshoots of the department in which Hedley was involved were the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and the Third Monday Group. Once again, these were cases of Crawford’s foresight and generosity in accepting advice. The first of them was modelled in some degree on the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University (headed by Professor William J.K. Fox, who, together with his wife Anne, was later a valued Visiting Fellow). The purpose of the Centre was to provide what Australian universities had not previously had—a place at which major questions of defence policy could be discussed from the standpoints of scholars rather than those of partisans, which in public had normally been the case. It developed effectively with the leadership firstly of Tom Millar and then of Bob O’Neill, both of them members of the department.
This was certain to be something of interest to Hedley, given his activities in London and at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS). It was very much to his credit that he attempted no take-over bid. We did have some problems involving which of the institutions—Centre and Department—might claim funds from the School’s total, but these were easily resolved. The Centre went on to be a major factor in any debate on Australian defence policy, and on our place in the world. Hedley had been far-sighted in supporting it.
The Third Monday Group was the product of a period before my own arrival in Canberra, when a group of academics from The Australian National University (not from the department, but some in the Research School) had attacked the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (a ‘paper tiger’ now forgotten) and the award of an honorary degree to the King of Thailand. It seemed to me that this had created a situation in which public servants no longer talked to academics (if they had ever done so in any measure), contrary to what I had experienced in London and New York.
I constructed a dining club consisting of half academics and half senior public servants in those fields concerned with external relations—Defence, Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Trade and Treasury—and put the proposition to Crawford in the first instance, and then with his support to Arthur Tange. It worked. With these two major figures in Public Service eyes, it lasted for ten years, month by month, a talk from either side of the table—or, increasingly, from the person next to you—followed by a vigorous discussion. When a new Minister for Defence appeared, we asked him along too.
Hedley fitted in as by nature to this environment. He was an Australian academic, he had worked in the Foreign Office, he was fully aware of the importance of officials in formulating policy, and he proved to be an acceptable interlocutor to all those he met. Like our other departmental members of the Group, he found the senior officials easy to deal with, and perhaps more able than ignorant academics had previously thought. Hedley managed the Group when I was away, and I am sure he enjoyed it.
He came a bit closer to political publicity when in November 1972 he signed, along with Keith Hancock, Walter Crocker (who had been the first professor in the department), Manning Clark and others, a letter to the papers denouncing the McMahon Government’s performance, especially in foreign policy, and advocating a vote for Labor—which won the subsequent election.
This was an unusual excursion into party politics for Hedley, who did not think of himself as a party man. It was motivated by the absurdities of McMahon, especially, I think, by that nonsensical fellow’s approach to China. Most of us were rather pleased.
He took a keen interest in the Australian Institute of International Affairs, being its Research Director from 1968 to 1973. He gave lectures at a number of other Australian universities, thus enlarging the department’s reach, and spoke often at various international conferences and at universities overseas. He was, in fact, an academic celebrity; not so much in the glamour sense, but that of being recognised as a leader in thinking and writing about the subject.
His connection with the IISS remained close; he acted as Australian representative on its Council, and was later very much a factor in the appointment as its Director of Bob O’Neill, one of our own people.
It is difficult for me to recognise just what was his overall effect on the Australian academic and political system, because he meant so much to me personally. But it is clear that he was a looming presence, someone who elicited admiration, even envy at times, for the effortless way in which he went about his work, and the efficiency of all he did. I have mentioned elsewhere his methods with a manuscript. He did not type, but wrote in a small but highly legible hand right up to the left edge of the page. When asked to provide a margin for comments and corrections he would politely decline. What he wrote he stood by because he had worked it out fully in advance. This did not mean he was averse to criticism, only that this could wait until the paper or chapter was complete. It was always a masterful piece.
Yet he was really masterful in personal relations. This was a man happily playing pat-ball tennis with me on Saturday mornings, who sent his children postcards adorned with funny drawings when he was abroad, who came into my room one day with an atlas, saying he couldn’t find Barataria. I set him right, but have only recently found that there is a Gulf of Barataria somewhere in the West Indies; it would have been a help to know this at the time.
He was thus a complete man: masterful when necessary, humane and even sentimental when out of the firing line. We owe him so much. The Australian National University is right to commemorate him with the opening of the Hedley Bull Centre.