Celebrating Jean McLean

Address at 90th Birthday Celebration, South Melbourne, 6 October 2024

It seems a category mistake, a first order category mistake, for Jean McLean to be turning 90 – no white hair, no wrinkles, as glamourous as ever, no visible sign of geriatric infrastructure decay of a kind afflicting so many of us here, no sign at all of losing her marbles.

How she has defied gravity all these ways will no doubt be a mystery to some. Maybe a bit like the mystery of what it was that Bronwyn Bishop used to sustain that extraordinary, towering, beehive hairdo of hers: as someone said at the time, if I knew what it was I certainly wouldn’t be wasting it on my hair…

But I don’t think Jeannie’s glorious longevity will be too much of a mystery to all those of us here who have known her for decades – its because her heart is pure, her conscience is clear, her capacity for giving and receiving friendship has always been enormous, and because she’s always lived life (not least through feasts and partying of the kind we are enjoying today) as though there was no tomorrow!

Barry Jones has described (with his usual meticulous attention to historical detail) the basics of Jeannie’s life story: the really extraordinary contributions she has made to public policy – making our society safer and saner, more civilised and more decent – in so many ways over so many decades. Above all, the way she so effectively seared the national conscience as a leader in the fight against conscription for the Vietnam War.

That’s a period that I fear is not being remembered as well as it should be some of our contemporary policymakers – a time when the Labor Party had a fiercely nationally independent approach to foreign policy and defence; a period when ideals really mattered; and a period when brave individuals, like Jeannie and her Fairlea Five, were prepared to take real personal risks in defence of those ideals.

I first got to know Jeannie as she and I cut our political teeth together on opposite sides of the Victorian ALP in those heady days after the 1970 federal intervention – now, God help us, over half a century ago. Although she was a great warrior for the Left, and I was typecast as a stooge of the Right, the reality is that on foreign policy and defence issues, civil liberty issues, and major social policy issues we were never really in those days all that far apart.

And certainly we haven’t been apart at all ever since – even on hugely divisive issues like East Timor, where I’m glad to say that Jeannie and her best buddy Jose Ramos Horta, have long since acknowledged that, appearances sometimes to the contrary, we’ve always been on the same page about getting the Timorese people out from under the Indonesian heel.

Back in those early days, the truth of the matter is that why we weren’t all that far apart, despite our different factional allegiance, is because the Labor Unity group of which I was a member was always on all these contentious security and social policy issues, about three standard deviations to the left of our counterparts in NSW, who still harboured a lot of the grouper tradition that had been expunged in Victoria in the 1950s Split that created the DLP.

The trouble in Victoria was that not only had the groupers been suppressed but a lot of moderate voices as well, and it took quite some time for the wounds – which often had their roots as much in personality as in ideological differences – to heal. It was in that context that on the Administrative Committee and around the Party generally in the early 1970s we had more fierce arguments than hot dinners.

But in all of these battles Jeannie was then, as she is now, absolutely impossible to dislike: not least because, almost alone among her colleagues in the Socialist Left then, she actually possessed a sense of humour.

Jeannie of course is not someone we just ‘don’t dislike’ – she’s someone we genuinely love. For her idealism, her courage, her commitment, her feistiness, for the pleasure she takes in her friends and family, and for her sheer joy in life.

May she go on enjoying that life for many more years to come, and give us many more opportunities to say as we all do now – Happy Birthday!