Bob Ellis (1942-2016) worked across more fields of Australian public life than any writer of his generation. He wrote novels, plays, screenplays, memoirs, political histories, essays, poetry, songs, and journalism. He directed films. He drafted speeches for premiers and federal leaders. He stood for parliament. He held a role that thinned out during his lifetime, the public intellectual who passed between art, reporting, and partisan politics without treating the borders as real. For more than four decades he argued about culture, nationhood, and power.
He was born in Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales and raised nearby in Lismore. The home was Seventh-day Adventist, and the church marked him in ways he carried long after he left its doctrine. He lost an older sister in a road accident when he was a child, and he spoke of that death as a wound that set the emotional weather of his adult life. The theology fell away. The habits of mind did not. Adventism trained him in prophecy, in the language of judgment and ruin and rescue, in the conviction that history bends toward a reckoning. He moved that grammar into politics and never lost it. Friends and adversaries said the same thing in different tones: Ellis wrote about elections as a man who had once expected the end of the world. He kept the urgency and changed the subject.
He studied at the University of Sydney on a Sir Robert Menzies (1894-1978) Scholarship and arrived inside one of the richest student circles in postwar Australia. His contemporaries included Clive James (1939-2019), Germaine Greer (b. 1939), Robert Hughes (1938-2012), Les Murray (1938-2019), and Mungo MacCallum (1941-2020). The group wanted an Australian voice that owed nothing to British permission. Ellis took from those years a single durable belief. Australian speech, Australian memory, and Australian political life deserved serious treatment on their own ground, not as provincial copies of something larger and older.
His career opened in the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. The Vietnam War shaped his politics. Work in broadcasting and journalism taught him how mass communication operates from the inside. From the start he mixed reporting, satire, advocacy, and literary ambition, and he showed no patience for the lines that separate them. He treated the boundary between the commentator and the partisan as an invention he was free to ignore.
Theatre and film carried him to national attention first. He stood at the center of The Legend of King O’Malley (1970), a musical satire that became a landmark of modern Australian theatre. The play argued, through performance rather than manifesto, that Australian political history and Australian vernacular could hold a stage. Australian cultural institutions still leaned on imported British models at the time. The production helped the country find a more confident theatrical voice of its own.
His deepest influence came through the revival of Australian cinema across the 1970s and 1980s. As a screenwriter he shaped several of the defining works of the Australian New Wave. His screenplay for Newsfront won an Australian Film Institute Award and remains a central film about Australian journalism and the national mood after the war. More AFI awards came for Goodbye Paradise and My First Wife. His scripts carried sharp talk, political awareness, and a habit of tying one ordinary life to the larger movement of the age.
He wanted the camera too. He directed Unfinished Business (1985) and Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train (1988). Most Australian films of the period reached for landscape and myth. Ellis turned inward, toward close rooms, psychological conflict, and relationships built out of dialogue. The films followed his deeper artistic preference. He cared about character, talk, and moral confrontation more than spectacle.
Politics held the same weight in his mind as art. He read elections, parties, and leadership fights as national drama, not as institutional procedure. That reading found its fullest form in the television miniseries True Believers, which traced the history of the Australian Labor Party through the lives of its major figures. Ellis treated political conflict as a stage on which Australians work out who they are and argue over what the country should become.
He did more than watch. Unlike most commentators, he entered the contest. He wrote speeches for Labor leaders including Kim Beazley (b. 1948), Bob Carr (b. 1947), and Mike Rann (b. 1953), among others. His method was a scandal of disorder. Drafts came late and half-formed. Leaders kept asking for him anyway, because he could do the one thing they could not buy elsewhere. He turned policy into feeling. He gave an argument the shape of a story about fairness, obligation, and national purpose, and the story reached working voters and middle-class voters at once.
His direct part in politics went past the writing desk. In 1994 he contested the federal by-election for the Sydney seat of Mackellar as an independent, running against the Liberal candidate Bronwyn Bishop (b. 1942). He could not win the safe conservative electorate, and he knew it. The campaign showed how he understood politics, as theatre and argument bound together. He used the race to needle established figures and to drag attention toward questions he thought the major parties had buried. The run repeated a pattern of his whole life. He kept stepping over the line from observer to participant.
His output staggered even sympathetic readers by its size and range. He produced novels, memoirs, political histories, essay collections, poetry, songs, film criticism, and a flood of journalism. Books such as Goodbye Jerusalem, Goodbye Babylon, The Capitalism Delusion, and And So It Went braided memoir, political reading, and historical interpretation into a single voice. He wrote fast and published across genres in the same season. Writing was not his profession so much as the spine of his daily existence.
Goodbye Jerusalem, in 1997, brought the gravest controversy of his career. Tony Abbott (b. 1957), Peter Costello (b. 1957), and their wives sued Ellis and his publisher for defamation over allegations in the book, and they won. The judgment forced the withdrawal and revision of the first edition and laid heavy financial and reputational costs on the author. The case became a touchstone among political defamation disputes over an Australian book, and a standing warning about the hazard of mixing memoir, political rumor, and factual claim in one paragraph.
Controversy stayed close to him for the rest of his public life. He attacked friends as fast as enemies. The blend of literary gift and personal venom won him loyal admirers and committed foes in equal measure. Many readers prized his independence, his refusal to keep step with party discipline or professional manners. Others read him as careless, unfair, and ever more captured by old grudges. The heat of those reactions traced back to the personal grain of his writing. He rarely hid his verdicts behind institutional neutrality or cool analysis.
In his later years he moved his work onto the internet. Through his blog Table Talk he published commentary, campaign notes, memoir, poetry, and criticism at a rate few writers could hold. The blog kept his direct line to readers and proved an astonishing daily stamina. It also stripped away the editorial restraints that once shaped his prose. His writing grew more immediate, more personal, and often more reckless.
The blog years exposed his strengths and his weaknesses in the same light. He could still see a campaign clearly and write it in vivid prose. He could also drift, recycling grievances and sliding toward conspiracy, cut off from the literary institutions that had once feted him. Critics read decline. Supporters read a writer who would not soften to buy acceptance. The argument between those two readings became part of what he left behind.
Ellis died of cancer in 2016, writing almost to the end. By then he had published more than twenty books, written numerous screenplays and plays, composed roughly a hundred songs, drafted countless speeches, and produced one of the largest bodies of political commentary any Australian writer of his era left behind.
His importance rests not in a single work but in the reach of his engagement with the public life of the country. He belonged to a line that runs through Manning Clark (1915-1991), Donald Horne (1921-2005), and Les Murray, writers who saw Australia as an unfinished project that needed constant interpretation. Ellis spent his life explaining the country to itself. He wrote as if politics, literature, cinema, journalism, and national identity were one conversation held in different rooms. In an age of specialists he stayed a generalist, a participant who held that the writer should not only record public life but try to turn it.
The Voice
Ellis wrote extravagantly. Where the spare style cuts, Ellis added. His sentences run long and pile up, clause on clause, the way a tide comes in, and he trusted accumulation to do the work that other writers trust the full stop to do. You can hear where it came from. He was raised a Seventh-day Adventist, and the King James cadence sits under everything he wrote, the rolling “and… and… and,” the prophetic lift, the periodic sentence that climbs and climbs and then breaks over you. He left the church and kept its music.
The diction mixes high and low without apology. A sentence might open in scripture and land in the pub. He sets the grand word beside the Australian vernacular, the cosmic beside the crude, and the collision is the point. He loved proper names, place names, the make of the car and the brand of the beer, the specific street in the specific town, and he used that grit to anchor the grandeur so the high notes had something to stand on. He piled adjectives, often three at a time, and he repeated his favorite words and rhythms until they became a signature you could pick out blindfolded.
He wrote in the present tense and he wrote like a man with a camera. The screenwriter never left him. He puts you in the room, the light coming through the window, the man at the bar, the woman crossing the floor, and only then does he tell you what it all means for the nation and the age. He thought in scenes and he thought in stakes, and the stakes were always enormous. Hyperbole was his native weather. Nothing was merely good or bad. It was the finest hour or the blackest betrayal, the most beautiful face or the cruelest act, and he meant it each time.
Two modes sat at the center of his gift. One was the elegy. He was a great mourner, and his tributes to the dead and the lost are among the best things he made, tender, swelling, unembarrassed by feeling, sometimes spilling over into the mawkish but always meant. The other was the kill. He could destroy a man in a clause. The savage character sketch, the contemptuous aside, the phrase that followed its target for the rest of his life, these came to Ellis as easily as the praise, and he aimed them at friends and enemies alike. The same pen that wept over a fallen leader could open the next paragraph by gutting a living one.
Gossip ran all through it. He wove the small human detail, who drank, who wept, who slept with whom, into the large story of the country, and he refused to keep them apart. History for Ellis was made of appetite and weakness and love, and he wrote the bedroom and the cabinet room in the same breath. That refusal gave his work its life and also its trouble. He wrote what felt true rather than what he could prove, the myth over the record, and the cost came due in court. Goodbye Jerusalem was pulped after Tony Abbott and Peter Costello sued for defamation. The looseness that made the prose sing was the looseness that sank the book.
His rhetoric leaned on the old devices and used them well. The catalogue, the list that builds and builds. Anaphora, the same words starting line after line until the repetition becomes a drumbeat. The rising tricolon. The rhetorical question thrown out and left hanging. And the trick he loved most, the build to grandeur followed by the sudden earthy drop, the cathedral undercut by the joke, bathos used on purpose to keep the reader off balance.
The speechwriting drew on all of it. He wrote for Labor leaders, Bob Carr and Paul Keating among them, and his gift there was to take a dry policy and write it back into a story of fairness and obligation and national purpose, language with a pulse, sentences shaped to lift a room. He was famously disorganized, his drafts late and half-formed, and leaders kept coming back because few men could make an argument feel like a cause the way he could.
He spoke as he wrote. A raconteur, rumpled and shambolic, given to long digression and the grand contrarian claim, he talked in cascades and in paragraphs, the same biblical roll in his mouth as on his page, the same readiness to charm and to wound. The film narration he recorded for The Nostradamus Kid catches the private register, wry, melancholy, self-deprecating, a literary voice musing over his own younger folly. In public he was rounder and more combative, the provocateur who would say the unsayable and then defend it past all reason.
The blog held the late voice. Table Talk, where the camaraderie of his regular readers became a source of joy to him in his last years, ran daily and torrential and unedited, the maximalism with the editor’s brake removed. The grievances multiplied and the discipline slipped, but the cadence never failed him. He kept the music to the end.
The flood that let him soar is the flood that drowned him when it ran unchecked. The hyperbole that thrilled could curdle into the unbelievable. The sentiment that moved could turn to syrup. The invective that dazzled could become plain cruelty, and the impressionism that gave the prose its warmth gave it its lies. Ellis had one instrument, a big, loud, beautiful, undisciplined instrument, and he played it the same way whether the result was a masterpiece or a mess. He wrote nineteen books that way, and you can love the voice and distrust it in the same sitting. Most of his readers did.
Hero System
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argues that the creature that knows it will die cannot bear the knowledge, so it builds a defense, and culture hands it the materials. Every society offers a hero system, a set of roles and beliefs that let a man feel he counts and that his life leaves a mark the grave cannot rub out. The hero wins symbolic immortality. He fastens himself to something larger than his body and rides it past his own death, the work, the cause, the nation, the book. Becker names the deepest form the causa sui project, the attempt to father oneself, to stand as one’s own ground and so cancel the debt every creature owes. Under all of it sits the body, the aging, dying body that mocks each claim to significance. Man is a god who must defecate. The hero system hides the shame.
Read Ellis this way and the life falls into order.
The death comes first, and it comes early. He loses an older sister to a road accident when he is a child, and he says across his life that the loss set his emotional weather. Becker would start here, because here is the moment the abstraction turns real. Most children meet death as rumor. Ellis meets it as fact in his own home, against a body he knew. The terror Becker places at the root of character arrives in him young and stays. A man who learns at that age that the people he loves can vanish on a road must find a way to make himself proof against vanishing. The rest of the life reads as that search.
Adventism gives him the first answer and the lasting shape. Becker treats religion as the cleanest hero system men have built, a frame that meets death head on and promises to defeat it. Adventism does this with unusual force. It preaches the Second Coming, the resurrection of the saved, the end of the present order, the day the faithful are vindicated and the dead rise. The whole structure is a denial of death raised to cosmic scale, and it casts the believer as a figure in the last drama of history. Ellis leaves the doctrine as a young man. He keeps the architecture. He keeps the conviction that history bends toward a reckoning, that the present is a prelude to judgment, that a man’s task is to stand on the right side of the coming verdict. He sheds the content and holds the form, and the form needs a new object.
Politics becomes the object. Becker says that when a man loses the old immortality story he does not stop needing one. He transfers the need. Ellis transfers it onto the nation and its parties. He reads elections as the drama Adventism taught him to expect, the struggle of the righteous against the powers, the fairness that must come, the leaders who carry the cause or betray it. He writes speeches that turn dry policy into stories of obligation and national purpose because that register is native to him. He learned it in church. The miniseries on the Labor Party, the campaign for Mackellar, the lifelong reading of politics as moral theatre, all of it draws on a man who still expects an apocalypse and has moved the date and the venue. He keeps the heat and changes the subject.
Then the output. Twenty books, a hundred songs, screenplays and plays and speeches, a blog he feeds almost every day until cancer takes him. Becker would call this the immortality project in its rawest form, the causa sui bid made of paper. A man cannot stop the body from dying. He can build something the body’s death does not end. Ellis builds at a pace that frightens even men who admire him, and the pace itself carries the meaning. He writes against the grave. The work is the wall he sets between himself and the fact of his own end, and a wall that size shows how large the fear behind it must be. He does not write because he has finished thinking. He writes because the day he stops is the day there is nothing left between him and death.
The recklessness fits too. Goodbye Jerusalem brings the defamation suit, and Tony Abbott and Peter Costello and their wives win, and the judgment costs him money and standing and forces the book’s withdrawal. A prudent man would have cut the passage. Ellis would not, because for him the narrative outranks the consequence. Becker explains the choice. The hero project does not bow to ordinary safety. The man who is building his monument against oblivion will burn his ordinary interests to keep the monument true to his vision of it. The grievance, the rumor, the refusal to soften, these are the costs a man pays when the work has become his bid for permanence and he will not let editors or courts trim it down.
The way he treats allies belongs in the same reading. He attacks friends as fast as enemies and will not hold coalition discipline. Becker, drawing on Otto Rank (1884-1939), sets two motives at the center of the heroic life, the urge to stand out as a separate and singular figure and the urge to merge into something larger. The two pull against each other. Ellis tilts hard toward the first. To merge into a party, to take the line, to subordinate his voice to the team, would dissolve the singular self he is building. So he keeps breaking his own side. The independence his admirers prize and the disloyalty his enemies curse are the same trait seen from two angles, the hero’s refusal to disappear into the crowd even when the crowd is his crowd.
The late phase sharpens everything. The body begins to fail. The cancer arrives. And the writing does not slow. It speeds. Becker holds that the terror grows as the body betrays its owner, and the defense must work harder to cover the growing fear. Ellis on the blog writes more, not less, recycles old wounds, drifts toward conspiracy, loses the institutions that once gave his work a frame. A reader can call this decline. Becker would call it the immortality project under siege, a man pouring out words at the end because the wall must rise faster than the body falls. He writes almost to the day he dies, and that line, offered as a tribute, is the whole thesis in miniature. He could not stop. Stopping was the thing he had spent his life refusing.
His chosen role caps the case. He becomes the man who explains the country to itself, the bard of the national project, the writer who stands at the center of the conversation and tells Australia what it is. Becker would read the role as the largest immortality bid of all. A man who ties his name to the nation borrows the nation’s permanence. The country will outlast him, and if his words are woven into how it understands its own history, then some part of him outlasts him too. He spends his life explaining the nation because the nation is the vessel he has chosen to carry him past his own death, the last and largest beyond he can find after the church let go.
The sister on the road, the church and its end of the world, the wall of books, the suit he would not avoid, the side he would not keep, the words that came faster as the body failed. One fear runs under all of it, and one defense, built in paper and politics and national myth, against the knowledge a child took in too soon and never set down.
Alliance Theory
David Pinsof and his coauthors argue that political belief systems do not grow from values. They grow from alliances. A man does not reason his way to a coalition from first principles. He picks allies and rivals, for similarity, for shared enemies, for mutual benefit, and then he assembles the moral story that serves the people he has chosen. The values come after. They are tools. Equality, authority, loyalty, fairness, these are the rhetoric a coalition reaches for when it needs to defend its own and wound the other side. Ask a man what he believes and you learn little. Ask whom he fights for and whom he fights against, and the beliefs fall into place. Belief systems, on this account, are patchwork narratives, ad hoc justifications stitched together to mobilize support for allies and opposition to rivals. The thread that seems to tie them is an illusion. There is no thread. There is a coalition.
Run Ellis through this and his politics changes shape.
Start with the rhetoric that made him valuable to Labor. He turns policy into stories of fairness, obligation, and national purpose, and leaders pay for the gift. Alliance Theory reads that gift for what it does rather than what it claims. The egalitarian language is not a principle Ellis holds and then applies to cases. It is a tool he reaches for on behalf of the groups he has already chosen, the working class, the union man, the Labor side of the national fight. The paper makes the point with data. Support for equality tracks allegiance to the disadvantaged group in question, not equality as such, and party identification comes first while egalitarian conviction follows. Ellis fits the pattern. He does not arrive at Labor through a theory of justice. He stands with Labor and then speaks the justice that arms it. The fairness is real as speech. It is downstream as conviction.
His treatment of politics as national moral drama looks different too. He reads elections as a struggle of the righteous against the powers, and he writes the Labor story as a crusade. The miniseries names the faithful outright, the true believers. Alliance Theory deflates the frame. The crusade narrative is coalition maintenance in costume. It codes one side as carrying the national purpose and the other side as betraying it, and that coding is the propaganda a coalition needs to hold its people and recruit third parties. The drama is not a window onto a deeper Australian morality. It is the patchwork story Ellis builds to support his allies and damage their rivals, and the conservative figures he casts as villains are villains because they are rivals, not rivals because they are villains.
The propagandistic biases run straight through his work. The paper lists three. Perpetrator bias rationalizes the transgressions of one’s own side. Victim bias embellishes the grievances of one’s own side. Attributional bias credits one’s allies with virtue and assigns their failures to circumstance while doing the reverse to rivals. Ellis is a machine for all three. He defends Labor men and the causes he loves, downplays their faults, and explains their defeats by the malice of the other side. He magnifies the wrongs done to the working class and the harm done by the Liberals. He grants his allies good motives and his rivals bad ones as a matter of reflex. None of this requires a theory of his sincerity. The biases are the toolkit of any partisan, symmetrical across the line, and Ellis simply runs them at higher volume and with better prose than most.
Goodbye Jerusalem. Ellis aims allegations at Tony Abbott and Peter Costello and their wives, the allegations damage the reputations of rivals, and a court finds them defamatory and forces the book’s withdrawal. Read through Alliance Theory, the book is not a failed attempt at truth. It is reputation attack, the core move of coalition conflict, the wounding of rivals through story. Ellis blends memoir, rumor, and factual claim into one voice because the voice serves the side, and the patchwork is the point. The paper would not ask whether the passage was true. It would ask whom it was built to harm, and the answer is plain. He harms the men on the other side of the Australian alliance structure, and the recklessness of the harm measures how much he wanted the rivals damaged.
His coalition itself looks contingent rather than principled. The paper holds that alliance structures are partly arbitrary, snowballing from small starting conditions, and that the same group can sit on either side in different countries and decades. The source notes the case directly. Australia’s Labor Party once fused economic leftism with ethnic nationalism before the 1970s. Ellis inherits a particular Australian structure, the postwar settlement of allies and rivals his generation was handed, and he treats it as the shape of justice. Alliance Theory says it is the shape of an accident he was born into and learned to defend.
Now the hard part, and the place the frame earns its keep by straining. Ellis attacks allies as fast as enemies. He will not hold coalition discipline. A theory built on supporting allies has to explain the partisan who keeps knifing his own side. The paper has an answer, and it goes some distance. People do not ally with parties as monolithic blocks. They ally with specific figures and factions inside conflicts that keep shifting, and they police transitivity, the demand that an ally share one’s allies and rivals. The two risks the paper names are infighting and betrayal, the ally who turns on a friend and the ally who sides with a rival. Ellis’s real allegiance is to a cluster, a vision of Labor and a set of men who carry it, not to the party as an institution. When a Labor leader compromises, drifts right, or makes peace with the rivals, Ellis reads betrayal and recodes the man as a rival. The attack on the friend is the expulsion of a figure who failed transitivity. By this reading his disloyalty and his loyalty are the same trait. He keeps the cluster pure by attacking anyone who pollutes it.
That answer covers much of the record. It does not cover all of it. Some of Ellis’s invective lands on his own side at his own cost and the cost of the causes he claims to serve, and a theory that explains belief by its use for the coalition has trouble with aggression that damages the coalition. The defamation suit hurt people near him and embarrassed the side he meant to help. A purely functional account of allies and rivals reaches its edge here, at the man who wounds his own camp in ways that win nothing. The frame lights up his partisan rhetoric, his villains, his reputation attacks, and the contingency of his loyalties. It dims at the point where his aggression turns self-defeating, where the harm serves no ally and no rival, only the man’s need to strike. Alliance Theory tells you whom Ellis fought and why the fighting took the moral shapes it did. It does not fully tell you why he could not stop fighting his own.
So the politics resolves into a structure rather than a creed. Not a man who reasons from fairness to Labor, but a man who stands with a cluster of allies against a cluster of rivals and speaks fairness as the weapon the standing requires. The Adventist crusade, the national drama, the egalitarian speeches, the defamatory book, the true believers, all of it is the propaganda of a coalition and the moral patchwork it throws off. The values shift with the fight. The allies and rivals hold the shape. What looks like Bob Ellis the conviction politician is, under this light, Bob Ellis the partisan, fluent in the moral languages that serve his side and willing to burn anyone, including his own, who steps to the wrong side of the line.
The Nostradamus Kid (1992)
The Nostradamus Kid is the most personal thing Bob Ellis ever put on a screen, and the last of only three features he directed. It followed Unfinished Business (1985) and Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train (1987). He wrote it, directed it, and narrated it himself, and the boy at its center is a version of Ellis as a young man.
The film is autobiography barely disguised. It tells the religious and sexual coming of age of a Seventh-day Adventist boy in the 1950s and 1960s, and the hero, Ken Elkin, is Ellis’s alter ego. David Stratton, reviewing it on SBS in 1993, called it Ellis looking back with jaundiced nostalgia at two stages of his own life through Ken. The film moves between two times. Back to 1956, when Elkin sits as a reluctant camper at a Seventh-day Adventist summer camp in northern New South Wales, more interested in the daughter of a visiting preacher than in saving his soul. And forward to 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The shape of the story runs from the camp to the city. In the first stretch the teenaged Ken struggles at the church camp run by the Adventists. He is not with the program. He asks heretical questions during prayer meetings and keeps an admiring eye on the preacher’s pretty daughter. Some six years later he leaves the religion behind to work at a university newspaper, and despite his scruffy appearance, or because of it, he finds himself attractive to girls. One legacy of the church years stays with him, a conviction that the world might end soon, and when the Cuban Missile Crisis breaks he tries to save his new girlfriend Jennie by hauling her out of Sydney into the mountains ahead of the nuclear war he expects, and that is the last straw for the romance. The title names the obsession. Ken is the kid waiting for the prophecy to come true.
The cast is a roll call of Australian talent caught young. Noah Taylor (b. 1969) plays Ken Elkin, with Miranda Otto (b. 1967) as Jennie O’Brien, Alice Garner as Esther Anderson the preacher’s daughter, Lucy Bell as her sister Sarai, Arthur Dignam as Pastor Anderson, Colin Friels (b. 1952) as the American Preacher, and Loene Carmen as Meryl. Carmen plays a bad girl who throws off her religious background and becomes a stripper and hooker. Claudia Karvan (b. 1972) and Imogen Annesley appear as Beat Girls, John Noble as General Booth, Peter Gwynne as a false prophet, and a play-within-the-film, “General Booth Enters Heaven,” brings on strolling players including Drew Forsythe, Kate Fitzpatrick, and Jonathan Hardy. Bob Maza turns up, memorable, as a Black philosopher Elkin meets in a bar. Wikipedia + 3
Behind the camera Ellis worked with a strong crew. Terry Jennings produced, Geoff Burton shot it, Henry Dangar edited, and Chris Neal wrote the music. An IMDb reviewer notes Ellis himself wrote and sang at least one song heard in the background, another mark of how much of himself he poured in.
The making of the film is a saga longer than the film. The project sat around for more than a decade. David Puttnam (b. 1941) suggested Ellis turn his upbringing into a movie and hired him to write it in 1979. Ellis described the writing as fast and painful. He wrote it in eleven days in a rented shed two houses up, from memory, in anguish, saying he had realized what a fool he had been all his life and went on being the same kind of fool in the same ways. Early in the 1980s it was announced with Paul Cox (1940-2016) to direct, Patric Juillet and Jane Ballantyne producing, and Robert Menzies and Sarah Walker in the leads. Later, John Duigan, Carl Schultz, and Chris McGill each attached as director. Phillip Adams, set to produce with Puttnam, said they could not raise the money, that it was obliterated during the 10BA tax-incentive rush because it was not expensive enough. Ellis then turned director to make it himself and raised the money through the Film Finance Corporation.
The casting of his lead came late and almost did not happen. Another actor was first cast as Ken, but the FFC had reservations and pushed Ellis to look further. He settled on Noah Taylor, and called it one of the happiest experiences he ever had, saying Taylor turned out far less of a soft wimp than he had assumed. Ellis fought the running time too. His first cut ran 148 minutes. He got it to 122, then trimmed it under two hours, and believed losing those last two minutes hurt the film.
Reception split down the middle. It opened to mixed reviews, some readers prizing the eccentric, idiosyncratic tone that suited a randy Adventist in dread of the apocalypse, others calling it a tedious bore with suspect sexual politics. The trade press leaned warm. Variety called it an autobiographical film of distinction, blending melancholy humor with hard-edged nostalgia, and likened it to a cross between Woody Allen and François Truffaut with an Australian tone. The review praised Taylor’s sad-sack hero, Otto’s glowing turn as the refined girl both drawn to and repelled by her grungy lover, and noted Ellis narrates in the style of early Truffaut and sends his young lovers to the cinema to watch Jules and Jim.
It earned recognition without sweeping anything. It drew two AFI Award nominations, for Best Original Screenplay and Best Costume Design. The money tells a sadder story. Made on an estimated four million Australian dollars, it took only about 242,800 dollars at the Australian box office. Ellis had his explanations, and a grudge. He blamed the October release, when the young audience that might have come was studying for exams, and said the film was dogged at every turn by The Piano (1993), which he claimed to both detest and resent.
The release dates float between 1992 and 1993 across sources, with the film completed and first shown around October 1992 and its general run landing in 1993. It came out on a Region 4 DVD through Beyond Home Entertainment in 2010, with no extra features at all. And there is the long shadow of what might have been. Ellis had cherished the project for eleven years before he made it, after it was first slated for Paul Cox to direct. The film he finally got was scruffy, talky, autobiographical, funny, and shot through with the end of the world. It is the closest he came to filming the Adventist boy he had been, the one who could not stop expecting the reckoning.
Interaction Ritual Chains
Randall Collins (b. 1941) builds his sociology on one unit, the interaction ritual. He takes it from Durkheim (1858-1917) by way of Goffman (1922-1982), and he asks what happens when people gather in a room. A ritual works when a few things line up. Bodies share a space. A boundary marks who belongs and who stays out. The group fixes its attention on one thing. A common mood rises and feeds on the shared focus, and the two climb together until the bodies fall into rhythm. When that happens the encounter throws off three products. Solidarity, the feeling of membership. Symbols, the words and names and objects that stand for the group and turn sacred, so that an attack on them lands as an attack on the group. And emotional energy, which Collins sets at the center of his book Interaction Ritual Chains.
Emotional energy, EE, is the charge a man carries out of a good ritual. High EE feels like confidence, warmth, drive, the readiness to act and to lead. Low EE feels like flatness, withdrawal, the draining away of initiative. A live ritual charges the battery. A flat or failed one empties it. Men do not sit still between encounters. They move through a chain of them, carrying the charge and the symbols from one into the next, and they steer toward the rituals that pay the best return. Collins calls us EE-seekers. We go where the charge is.
Read Ellis as an EE-seeker and the whole life lines up on a single axis. The rise runs on rich rituals. The fall runs on their loss. One logic covers both.
Start with the Sydney circle. The student milieu at the University of Sydney gives Ellis his founding ritual. Bodies in one place, a boundary that fences the brilliant generation off from the dull and the deferential, a shared focus on the task of making an Australian voice, and the high mood of young people who believe they are about to matter. The encounter charges him, and it hands him his sacred symbols. Australia as a project worth taking seriously, the vernacular, the conviction that the country’s own stories carry weight. He walks out of those years with a full battery and a set of symbols he will spend a career defending. Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Les Murray, and Mungo MacCallum are not just friends. They are the first ritual group, the circle that lights the charge.
Theatre and film give him the next rituals, and richer ones. The Legend of King O’Malley is a ritual machine, a company of people focused on one performance with an audience entrained to the same beat. The film sets work the same way. A crew and a cast lock onto a shared object for weeks, and the solidarity and the charge pour off the work. Ellis says the happiest stretch of his life was directing The Nostradamus Kid with Noah Taylor and the young actors around him. Collins reads that joy with no mystery. The set is co-presence, focus, and shared mood at full strength, and a man comes off it charged. Ellis keeps reaching for these collaborations because each one refills the battery.
Politics gives him the most intense rituals of all, and he steps into them again and again. A campaign rally is an interaction ritual in its purest form, a crowd fixed on a speaker, a mood swelling on the shared focus until the room beats as one body. Ellis can build that mood with words. His speechwriting is the craft of manufacturing collective feeling, of taking a policy and turning it into the kind of language that entrains a crowd. He is a technician of effervescence, and Labor leaders keep hiring him because few men can charge a room the way his sentences can. The run for Mackellar against Bronwyn Bishop is a losing race he enters anyway, because the contest is a ritual and the ritual pays in EE. His charisma is real in Collins’s exact sense. A charismatic man is a ritual star, the one who sits at the center of high-charge encounters and amplifies what they throw off. Ellis has that gift, and he needs the stages on which it works.
Even his solitary writing runs on this fuel. Collins holds that a man alone at a desk draws on symbols charged in live rituals, holding an internal conversation with an audience he has met in the flesh. In The Sociology of Philosophies he argues that creativity concentrates in networks, that the productive thinker sits inside a web of teachers, rivals, and allies who keep his symbols hot. Ellis writes at a furious rate for decades while plugged into theatres, party rooms, editorial offices, and the literary scene. The live encounters keep recharging the symbols, so the prose stays vital. The volume is the visible sign of a man whose batteries keep getting refilled.
Then the rituals thin, and the fall begins. Goodbye Jerusalem brings the defamation suit and the costs that come with it. The mainstream literary institutions that once feted him pull back. He drifts toward the margins, and the circles that charged him close their doors. Collins predicts what happens next. Cut from the live rituals, the battery does not recharge. The blog looks like a daily ritual, and Ellis treats his contact with readers as one, but it is thin ritual. No bodies share a room. The audience is diffuse and faceless. The feedback is weak and slow, a scatter of comments rather than a crowd beating as one. Thin ritual gives just enough charge to keep a man typing and not enough to refill him. So the output holds its volume while the charge behind it falls.
The symbols curdle for the same reason. A sacred symbol stays alive only when a live ritual recharges it. Cut off, Ellis keeps circulating his old symbols inside his own head, the villains, the grievances, the betrayals, and Collins names that move the second-order circulation of symbols, the internal conversation that runs on stored charge. Without fresh rituals to renew them, those symbols decay. The righteous anger that once bound him to a vital group, the moral heat of a man defending sacred things alongside his circle, has nothing live to attach to. It turns into grievance, which is what righteous anger becomes when the group around it is gone. His position has flipped as well. In his prime he stood at the center of attention, the order-giver, the sought-after voice. In decline he sits at the margin, the man the institutions dropped, and Collins ties the margin to low EE, to resentment and withdrawal, the emotions of the order-taker.
So the rise and the fall need only one explanation. When the rituals were thick and live, Ellis ran high, generous, vital, prolific in a way that reached people, a ritual star charging rooms and walking off charged in turn. When the rituals thinned to a man alone at a keyboard typing toward a crowd he could not see, the charge drained, and the same furious drive that once produced plays and speeches and films now produced grievance at the same rate. The output never stopped. The charge behind it did. A battery that no live encounter refills runs the engine until the engine runs rough, and that rough running, recycled daily and aimed at old enemies, is the sound of a ritual star left without a stage.
Porous vs Buffered Selves
Philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws a line through the history of the self in A Secular Age. On one side stands the porous self, the older self, whose boundary with the world is thin. Meaning lives outside it, in the cosmos, in charged objects, in spirits and grace and the hand of God. The porous self can be entered. Forces press on it from outside, bless it, curse it, call it, claim it. The world is enchanted, thick with significance the self does not make but finds, and the self stands open and exposed to it.
On the other side stands the buffered self, the modern self. It has drawn a wall around the mind. Meaning lives inside now, made by the self, and the world beyond the wall goes inert, disenchanted, a field of matter that carries no message. Max Weber (1864-1920) named the long retreat of the gods disenchantment, and Taylor traces what it does to a man. The buffered self is safe. Nothing reaches in from the cosmos, because the cosmos has gone quiet. It masters its own meanings, holds the world at arm’s length, possesses itself. The cost is flatness, the sense that the world has thinned, what Taylor calls living inside the immanent frame, a closed natural order with the transcendent bracketed away.
Most moderns live buffered, inside that frame. Ellis does not. He carries a porous self into a buffered age, and the gap between the two holds his power and his strangeness in the same hand.
The training came from the church. Adventism builds the most porous self a man can carry. Its cosmos is charged at every point. Prophecy reads the future as already written and bearing down on the present. The Second Coming hangs over each day. History bends toward a reckoning, grace can enter a man and remake him, and the world brims with signs for those who can read them. The Adventist boy does not make his own meaning. He receives it from a world saturated with God’s purpose, and he stands open to a future that presses in from beyond. That is the porous self in its full religious form, and Ellis is raised inside it.
He leaves the doctrine as a young man. He keeps the porousness. The wall never goes up. He stops believing in the Adventist God and goes on feeling a world charged with stakes that reach past the self, and he moves that charge onto politics and history. An election is not administration. It is a struggle with the weight of the last things on it. History does not drift. It bends toward judgment, and a man’s task is to stand on the right side of the verdict. The nuclear dread that runs through The Nostradamus Kid, the boy who drags his girlfriend out of Sydney ahead of the end of the world, is the porous self meeting the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world can end. Forces gather beyond him and bear down. He never enters the immanent frame. He camps at its edge his whole life, a man for whom the cosmos still speaks.
His readers and his country live on the other side of the wall. Secular Australia, the literary set, the party rooms, the press, all of it sits inside the immanent frame. They treat politics as procedure and policy as management. They hold meaning private and optional, a thing a man chooses for himself and keeps to himself. The world for them is disenchanted, and the stakes of an ordinary Tuesday are ordinary. Ellis writes to that audience with a self built for a different one.
The gap gives him his power. A porous self feels the charge a buffered self has walled out, and that charge runs into his prose and his speeches and gives them a force the buffered cannot summon on their own. His gift as a speechwriter is the gift of re-enchantment. He takes a policy, a dry thing in the immanent frame, and he writes it back into a world of obligation, fairness, and national purpose until a buffered listener feels, for the length of a paragraph, that the stakes are cosmic again. Taylor’s word for the experience of meaning and plenitude is fullness, and Ellis draws his fullness from a charged world. He lends it out. He gives readers who live in a thinner world a borrowed hour inside a thicker one. The phrase secular evangelist gets its exact content here. He is a porous prophet working an immanent age, carrying the structure of religious feeling, prophecy and reckoning and the elect, into a frame that has bracketed every word of it.
The same gap gives him his strangeness. To a buffered eye a man who feels an election as Armageddon, who waits for the reckoning, who reads cosmic weight into a campaign, looks overwrought and excessive and at last unhinged. The porous self reads meaning as already inscribed in the world, so where the buffered see contingency and accident, Ellis sees design and telos and malice. This is the deep root of the late grievance and the drift toward conspiracy. A buffered self meets a bad turn of events and calls it chance. A porous self meets the same turn and feels a hidden hand. Disenchantment never took in Ellis, so his world stays full of forces and plots and fate, and in the blog years, cut off and aging, that openness to hidden agency curdles into a hunt for the design behind his defeats. The trait that let him re-enchant a rally is the trait that lets him see enemies moving in the dark.
The honest objection runs the other way. A skeptic might say Ellis is only a buffered secular intellectual with a taste for apocalypse, that the enchantment is a style he reaches for rather than a world he lives in, aesthetic and not real. Taylor’s test is whether the world presses on the man from outside or whether the man decorates an inert world with borrowed intensity. The record leans toward the first. The dread is felt, not posed. The boy who flees the city before the bomb, the grown man who keeps expecting the end and reading the signs, behaves as a man on whom the world genuinely bears down, not as a man choosing a mood. The enchantment goes deeper than taste. It is the shape of his self.
There is a cross-pressure in him too, and Taylor names that condition. Ellis is not a believer and not a buffered secularist. He left the doctrine and kept the openness, and so he stands between the frames, drawn toward a transcendence he no longer names and unable to settle into the flat safety of the immanent. That in-between might account for the restlessness, the man who cannot stop writing toward a meaning he can feel and cannot ground.
So the power and the oddity come from one source. A porous self speaks to a buffered age. When the charge runs into his work, it lifts dull material into something that feels like the last things, and the buffered, for a moment, are moved by a fullness they had forgotten. When the charge runs the other way, into his reading of his own life, it fills the world with hidden hands and turns an old man’s defeats into a plot. The gift and the affliction are the same self, open where the age is closed, reading a world the age has agreed to call silent.
Dark Morality & Dark Idealism
David Pinsof writes:
Dark morality. When morality—the heartfelt conviction that we are doing the right thing—fuels tribalism, dishonesty, bullying, censorship, hatred, terrorism, and genocide.
Dark idealism. When idealism—the heartfelt conviction that we are pure and noble and benevolent—fuels dark morality, by blinding us to our biases and making those who don’t share our ideals seem evil or subhuman.
David Pinsof sets two concepts side by side, and they work as a pair. Dark morality is the heartfelt conviction of doing right turned into tribalism, dishonesty, bullying, and hatred. Dark idealism is the conviction of one’s own purity and nobility, and it blinds a man to his own bias and makes those who do not share his ideals look evil or subhuman. The order runs from the second to the first. The idealism comes first, the belief in one’s own goodness, and that belief fuels the dark morality, the righteousness that licenses cruelty. The cynical edge cuts here. The sincerity is not the defense. The sincerity is the engine. A man who knows he is doing wrong holds back. A man certain he is doing right does not, and the more heartfelt his sense of virtue, the darker the conduct he will allow himself in its name.
Ellis is a clean case, and the church built the foundation.
Adventism trains a man to grade the world. The saved and the damned, the righteous and the wicked, the elect who read the signs and the world that ignores them. The boy learns to feel moral weight in everything and to sort people onto the right side or the wrong side of a coming judgment. Ellis leaves the doctrine and keeps the sorting. He carries into politics the conviction that history runs as a moral contest, and he knows which side he stands on. His side carries the cause. The other side carries the harm. That grading, learned in church and moved onto Labor and its enemies, is the soil both concepts grow from.
The dark idealism shows in how he sees the two sides. He holds his own camp as noble, the working man, the fair go, the Labor cause, the decent country trying to be born. He holds the conservatives as something worse than wrong. He casts them as villains, mean of spirit, enemies of the good, and he writes them that way for decades. Pinsof’s point is that this conviction of his own nobility does a specific work. It blinds the man to his own bias. Ellis cannot see his contempt as contempt, because the contempt feels like clear sight. He cannot weigh whether his anger is fair, because the conviction of his own goodness has already settled the question. He reads his opponents as evil, and a man who reads his opponents as evil grants himself permission he would refuse to anyone else.
The dark morality is what that permission produces, and Goodbye Jerusalem is the sharpest instance. Ellis aims allegations at Tony Abbott and Peter Costello and their wives. A court finds the allegations defamatory and forces the book’s withdrawal. Read through this pair, the case is dark morality in plain form. Pinsof lists dishonesty among the things a heartfelt conviction will fuel, and here the conviction fuels it. Ellis does not defame as a cynic working an angle. He defames as a man so sure of the cause that wounding the rivals feels like duty. The false claim does not register to him as a lie. It registers as the truth the enemy deserves to have told about him. The idealism has already decided that these men are wicked, so the harm done to them looks like justice rather than slander. That is the whole move. The certainty of the cause converts cruelty into righteousness inside the man’s own head, and he never sees the conversion happen.
The venom toward his own side fits the same pattern. A man who holds a standard of purity will turn it on anyone who fails the standard, friend or enemy. Ellis attacks allies as fast as opponents, and dark idealism explains the reflex. The Labor figure who compromises, who makes peace with the rivals, who falls short of the noble vision, becomes impure, and the impure draw the same fire as the wicked. The purity that arms him against conservatives arms him against his own when they disappoint him. He polices the camp by the standard the idealism set, and the standard has no mercy in it.
The late years follow the logic to its end. A man certain of his own rightness, cut off and aging, does not lose the certainty. He turns it on the world that rejected him. The grievance hardens, the search for the hidden malice behind his defeats begins, and the opponents grow more plainly evil in his telling as the evidence for it thins. Dark idealism running without check produces this. The conviction of one’s own nobility, met by failure, does not consider that the nobility was overdrawn. It concludes that wicked forces must be at work, and it goes looking for them.
This pair names the thing the other readings circled. Becker found the venom in a man’s terror of death and his need to stand alone. Collins found it in a battery of emotional charge that ran dry when the rooms emptied. Both account for where the venom came from. Neither calls it a moral failing. This pair does. It says the cruelty is not only a symptom of fear or a sign of drained energy. It is the predictable fruit of a man who believed too firmly in his own goodness and let that belief license what it would have condemned in anyone else. The sincerity that his admirers prize as integrity is, on this reading, the source of the harm. He was not a hypocrite. He was a true believer, and the true belief is what did the damage, because it hid the cruelty from the one man who most needed to see it.
The frame has a cost. The Darwinism cuts so hard that it can flatten every moral conviction into suspicion, and it cannot, on its own terms, tell us when Ellis was right. He sometimes attacked real abuses of power and told truths the polite would not. A lens that treats heartfelt virtue as the engine of cruelty struggles to grade the cause, to separate the righteous anger that the target earned from the tribal anger that only flattered his side. The pair explains the structure of his moral aggression with great economy. It cannot, by itself, hand down the verdict on whether a given target deserved the blow. It tells you why a man certain of his goodness will bully and lie in its name. It does not tell you, in any single case, whether the man he bullied was a villain after all.
So the moral shape of Ellis comes clear. The Adventist sorting, carried into politics, becomes a conviction of his own side’s nobility and his opponents’ evil. That conviction blinds him to his own bias and licenses the venom, the dishonesty, the defaming book, the contempt poured on enemies and on friends who fell short. The certainty that made him brave made him cruel, and the two were the same certainty. He did not lie because he scorned the truth. He lied because he was sure he was good, and a man sure he is good will do almost anything and call it right.
The Set
Three sources for the Bob Ellis set: the University of Sydney cohort around 1960 (James, Greer, Hughes, Murray, MacCallum, John Bell), the libertarian Push that grew from John Anderson’s lectures (Roxon, Moorhouse, Cox, Bacon, McGuinness), the theatre and film New Wave (Boddy, Wherrett, Williamson, Hewett, Buzo, Hibberd, Romeril, Beresford, Weir, Schepisi, Armstrong, Noyce, Duigan, Adams, Neville, Sharp, Marr, Summers, Oakes, Ramsey), and the Labor court he served (Whitlam above all, then Wran, Hawke, Keating, Carr, Beazley, Rann, Richardson, Latham, with Anne Brooksbank beside him).
What they prized: brilliant talk, an Australian voice free of London, the sixties package, and drink. Their hero: the stay-at-home genius who made the great work and took the local authenticity as his prize, the prophet who read the nation’s moral history, the truth-teller punished by philistines, the man who died at the desk. Their status games: wit, output, proximity to power, the leaving-versus-staying contest, sexual and drinking reputation, the public feud. Their normative claims: the republic, the engaged left artist, the wickedness of the wowser, Labor as moral home, the fair go, loyalty to mates. Their essentialist claims: a true Australian character, the conservative as a born type, genius as innate, class as character, the genius assumed male. And the moral grammar under all of it, the two-color world of the generous and the mean, the sacred and the damned, betrayal as the cardinal sin, redemption through the great work and the noble defeat, and nostalgia laid over everything.
