A Humble Backbencher: The Memoirs of Kenneth Lionel Fry

A Humble Backbencher: The Memoirs of Kenneth Lionel Fry

Charnwood ACT: Ginninderra Press, 2002

Pp. 165.           Paperback.                   ISBN 1-74027-153-X             $25.00

For ten years from 1974 Ken Fry was a Canberra backbencher in a double sense, representing the northern suburbs of the national capital in the Commonwealth parliament. Although his cogent and humane memoirs, written at the age of eighty, lack the support of diaries, they are valuable both in recollection and comment. Fry’s grandparents emigrated in the 1880s and eventually became orchardists near Bathurst. A century later, parliamentary travel helped him explore his family links across the world, and he discovered a young relative called Stephen who was a rising actor. Ken Fry’s life and values were dominated by service in the Second World War. Army life embodied the ideal form of Australian mateship, a theme that he later explored as mature student in Manning Clark’s ANU History Department. As a parliamentarian, he was struck by the fact that the ALP’s ex-servicemen were almost all in the left faction of caucus, although their radicalism was definitely not shared by the RSL at large. The Japanese war also left him with a strong sympathy with the peoples to the north of Australia, which would later make him a campaigner for the cause of East Timor. A post-war venture into poultry farming failed at about the time a state by-election first brought him into conflict with the NSW Labor machine: as so often, it is easier to understand why idealists should join the ALP than to comprehend how they managed to remain within its ranks. In 1968 Fry moved to a public service post in Canberra. It says much for the unique openness of the political culture of the fast-growing capital that within two years he was a member of the fledgling ACT Advisory Council and after six the city’s second MHR. A late starter in politics, his role was to become organiser and conscience of the left, which ensured that he never mustered the numbers to enter the ministry. He is detached in his attitude to Whitlam and Hawke, and surprising muted about Malcolm Fraser (who, he reveals, liked to slip ice-cubes into the pockets of companions while relaxing in the members’ bar). His memoirs contain useful reflections on the role of the backbencher, along with a predictably decent emphasis on the importance of the humanities in higher education.