The protest rally across the road from Parliament in Sydney was no lynch mob. They were ordinary, mostly elderly people who support police and think judges are too soft. They are baffled and angry that a ‘drunken yobbo’, who ‘king-hit’ and killed an innocent and ‘decent kid’, may only serve four years in gaol. Lawyers insist that neither public outrage nor the anguish of the victim’s family mandates the sentence for a crime. The appeal court will re-examine the issues, but meanwhile the protesters would do well to read Justice Campbell’s considered judgment on the internet.

At the Sydney Institute the other night the strange case of Mrs Olga McKenzie vs the famous sex-reformer Norman Haire received another airing. Diana Wyndham was discussing her acclaimed biography Norman Haire and the Study of Sex, which explores the ‘morality wars’ of the 20th century, including in Australia in the 1940s. Haire, born in Paddington, educated at Fort Street and Sydney University, won fame in London in the 1920s as a Harley Street gynaecologist, sex-reformer, editor and propagandist for rejuvenation and birth control. (He cowrote a 1934 pot-boiler Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge with Arthur Koestler who later complained that the 1946 Who’s Who gave more space to Haire than to Winston Churchill.) After returning to Sydney in 1940 his frank and freethinking weekly columns in the popular magazine Woman made him almost as famous and infamous in Australia as he had been in England. But in 1945 Olga McKenzie accused him of assault. McKenzie, one of Haire’s patients, had disputed his fees. She alleged that he twisted and bruised her arm. She took her improbable if not preposterous complaint to the police and in the Central Police Court in April 1945 the magistrate fined Haire £5. It was especially humiliating since the newspaper Truth, reflecting its owner Ezra Norton’s contempt for Haire (homosexual, Freemason, Jew), gave the case wide publicity. Wyndham believes that McKenzie was an agent provocateur and the charge ‘trumped up’. She asks who was behind it. She suspects the wowsers and the spooks, or both. Church-related politicians had angrily denounced Haire in Parliament, and some agents of the security services still thought, on the basis of past associations, that he was some sort of communist. But there is no hard evidence for a conspiracy.

There is another possibility. The war years were a great era for pranks, hoaxes and practical jokes. The sponsors of the immortal Ern Malley in 1944 were not the only hoaxers of the day. In 1941 Sir Evelyn Wrench, conservative apostle of Empire (and former editor of The Spectator) toured Australia. A couple of students picked him up at his Sydney hotel to drive him, they said, to the ABC for a broadcast. They drove him instead out to Botany Crematorium and dumped him in the dark. The students deemed it a hilarious prank. About the same time Haire himself, always an enthusiastic amateur actor, was the target of a practical joke at a performance of G.B. Shaw’s Saint Joan in the Independent theatre. Haire played the Bishop of Beauvais. Some bitchy actors, irritated by his condescension, tied an empty petrol tin to the elaborate episcopal robes he had bought for the role. The rattling tin reduced his grand stage entrance to farce.

Which brings us to McKenzie vs Haire in 1945. It was not beyond the Sydney anarchist bohemians of the time to guy the celebrated if overbearing sex-reformer. As well as mocking stuffy conservatives they delighted in taking the mickey out of the self-important avant garde in verse, song and revue. I gave some account of them in Memoirs of a Slow Learner. They also figure in Amy Witting’s novel I for Isobel. Was the mysterious Mrs McKenzie, agent provocateur, one of their circle? She easily could have been. There is no hard evidence, but it is a plausible option. Haire left Australia soon afterwards.

Meanwhile across the Harbour at the Centre for Independent Studies, Steven Schwartz, former Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie, sagely summed up a lively forum on the ‘reading wars’ in which Jennifer Buckingham (of CIS), Justine Ferrari (the Australian) and Tom Alegounarias (NSW Board of Studies) argued, before an audience of teachers, about why so many Australians are illiterate after ten years at school. (Some say 50 per cent are ‘functionally illiterate’.) Schwartz noted that Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous best-seller Why Johnny Can’t Read in defence of phonics nearly 60 years ago. He wrote Why Johnny Still Can’t Read in 1981. Schwartz asked why so little has changed. Is it due to the influence of ‘postmodernist crap’? Or timid government? Or entrenched bureaucracy? I favour the postmodernist crap theory myself.

While in Sydney recently Richard Court, the former Premier of Western Australia, seized the opportunity to promote and sell copies of Ronda Jamieson’s biography of his father Sir Charles Court, also a Premier. Charles Court. I Love this Place traces the life of the Premier who was, in the words of Geoffrey Blainey in his foreword, ‘one of the most creative politicians in Australia’s history’. Ronda Jamieson tells how he transformed his beloved State from mendicancy into the most productive resource-rich state in the federation. She also tells the story of his famous feud with Lang Hancock who even started a newspaper (!) to discredit him and who enjoyed malicious rumours that Charles Court was both mad and corrupt. Richard Court said the book has not had the success in the East that it has had in the West. Time to catch up.