Remembering Pete Steedman

Published in Pearls and Irritations, 11 September 2024

Legendary student agitator, Oz-era editor, Hawke-era Parliamentarian, union official, music industry executive and all-purpose provocateur, Pete Steedman died aged 82 on 10 July 2024 after a long battle with cancer. This is one of a number of speeches given at a memorial celebration of his life at the Melbourne Trades Hall on 7 September 2024.

I know it's a cliché to say of someone that after he or she was made they threw away the mould. But of all the unique characters I've known over the last umpteen decades, I think Pete Steedman has a pretty strong claim to being the most distinctive of them all.

He was an extraordinary combination. One the one hand, potty-mouthed student enfant terrible, potty-mouthed middle-aged enfant terrible, legendary campus lothario, bikie hoon, wild-eyed political radical and provocateur, and keeper of the nation’s largest and most meticulously catalogued dirt files (as comprehensive, I suspect as ASIO's, although with a rather different cast of characters).

But also a brilliantly innovative journalist and editor, shrewdly pragmatic political professional, highly disciplined grassroots political campaigner, hugely capable publishing and music industry administrator, effective and respected trade union official, loving partner, father, and grandfather and — perhaps most implausible of all to those who only knew him at a distance (but I’ll explain) — sweet-natured gentleman.

I first came across Pete in the mid-60s, when I was a very student-action-oriented President of the Students Representative Council at Melbourne University, and he was editor of the Monash student newspaper Lot’s Wife and a very visible and controversial figure on the Victorian, and indeed national, student scene generally. And those were the days when student ideas and activism had real visibility and traction in the mainstream press and community generally in a way that barely happens today (the Gaza protests being a very rare exception). On a whole variety of long neglected social issues – including censorship, abortion, capital punishment, Indigenous disadvantage and White Australia racism. And on big foreign policy issues like apartheid and, above all, particularly in the late 60s, the Vietnam War.

As editor of Lot’s Wife from 1965-66, and then Melbourne University’s Farrago from 1967-68, Pete was at the absolute heart — and could very much claim to be a leading part of the soul — of the debate and campaigning on all those issues. His ultimate badge of honour maybe came at a Melbourne University debate in 1967 on students’ right to send aid to Hanoi (as recorded by his wonderful late-life partner Sally Perceval Wood, in her brilliant book Dissent: The Student Press in 1960s Australia), when the fanatically anti-communist Dr Frank Knopfelmacher hissed at him: "My only objection to you, Steedman, is that you exist. The gas chamber is too good for you. You are filth and vermin. You should be exterminated."

Pete’s move to Melbourne University, which I encouraged him to make, was a little tricky to facilitate, even in those more relaxed admission times, since he had got around to passing only five subjects in his six years at Monash. And it was not entirely without public controversy, with an outraged DLP Senator Frank McManus, quoting Pete at the time as stating that he had "two purposes in attending a university; one the study of beer, and the other the study of sex".

It has to be acknowledged that both those claims, and certainly the second, had some credibility. Philip Larkin might have been stretching things a little when he wrote in his poem Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three ...

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

But certainly the invention was embraced with some gusto by my student generation, and by no-one more obviously gustily than Pete. As Sally Perceval Wood again meticulously records, Monash Professor Rufus Davis, in groping to explain the gap between Pete’s obvious high intelligence and his equally obvious lack of formal academic accomplishment, remarked at the time: "The problem with you, Steedman, is you’ve had more fucks than feeds."

And not only in deed, but in word. The thing most people noted about Pete throughout his life (including during his time in Parliament, when he made no sartorial concessions) was not just his chosen "James Dean-crossed-with-Elvis" look– black leather jacket, Levis, riding boots, swept back hair. It was also his apparent inability to get through any two sentences without at least one f-bomb being thrown in. (Not that I’m in any position to be high-minded about this, being I think the first, and possibly still only, recorded-in-Hansard Parliamentary user of that term.)

But it should be recorded that Pete's inability to do without that linguistic crutch was entirely apparent, and not at all real, any more than the rest of his carefully nurtured mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know outlaw image. He really was, and not all that far below the surface, a sweet-natured gentleman. My wife — who was Pete's advertising manager at Farrago at the time — tells the story of being in some trepidation of how her rather-proper father would react to meeting him when he called in one day at her Ivanhoe family home to pick her up (with the boyfriend with whom I was then competing: that’s another story). But she need not have worried. For a full half-hour the outlaw was an absolute model of fellow Wesley-old boy decorum: "What a pleasure to meet you, Mr Anderson", "That’s so interesting, Mr Anderson", "Yes, thank you, Mr Anderson, I would like another cup of tea" ...

But if a lot of the swagger and profanity was for show, what was absolutely not just for show was Pete's commitment to decent public policy, which came to professional fruition in his time — sadly all too short-lived — as the Labor House of Representatives Member for Casey in the first two years of the Hawke Government from 1983-84. I think I can take some credit (though his Socialist Left buddies will no doubt want to share it, and rightly so) at least for sowing the seed, in Pete's originally rather sceptical mind, that there was something to be said for working for decent change from inside the tent, rather than just pissing on it from the outside.

You don't get much opportunity as a backbencher in government to make an impact on big policy issues, but Pete commanded attention with the sheer force of his personality and presence. After barely a year in the role, he was declared the Canberra Times Parliamentarian of the Year. "You would not let your daughter marry him" said the paper (though I think they got that wrong) "but in the House he imparted colour and movement to proceedings often bereft of those qualities".

Pete, of course, was not just about colour and movement, but real substance, and had he escaped the vagaries of an electoral boundary distribution which lost him the seat he had worked so hard for in 1984, I have no doubt he would have gone on to be an absolutely first-rate reforming minister.

In later life, Pete's career, and personal life, took a whole series of turns better described by others who knew him in those years, and those close to him, better than me. But the Pete Steedman I knew and admired and respected, and for whom so many of us had an enormous fondness, will forever remain in my memory. He was a true original, and we will deeply miss him.

This article was first published in Pearls and Irritations on 11 September 2024.