OLD) WESLEY COLLEGIANS' ASSOCIATION CENTENARY 66 / 084
FOUNDERS' DAY DINNER
TOWN HALL. MELBOURNE 2nd May. 1966
Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. Harold Holt
Mr. Presicient, Many Distinguished Guests and Fellow Collegians-
It would be a wonderful thing, as so many of you
are finding, to be at the Wesley Centenary Dinner. A very
remarkable thing to be not only at the Wesley Centenary Dinner,
but to be there as guest of honour, and to be there both as
guest of honour and as Prime Minister of the country. Well,
I think even Ken Hadley and Maurice Sloman, with whom I have
had an occasional game of poker in my more leisurely moments
of past years, would agree that is a hand which takes some
beating. And so, Trevor, I feel a great sense of pride in
being here in those various capacities this evening. The sum
of their totality makes my own enjoyment and relish of what is
for me a notable and historic night quite a moving experience.
I listened with very great interest to your rather
detailed judgment. It has confirmed a suspicion I've had for
many years that the congestion of the courts is due to the fact
that the judges do not apply themselves to the business of law
but allow their minds to wander. Anyhow, I am certainly
indebted to you for your researches because I've been reminded
of so many of the happy occasions which slip into the limbo
and only reappear on very rare occasions if they appear at all.
You mentioned some of these unanswered letters and I apologise
to several hundred people in this company who were good enough
to send me congratulations and good wishes a few months ago
when the high office of Prime Minister came my way. I can
only say by way of exculpation that the list of unanswered
letters runs into the thousands mark and I do hope some tine~
to be given sufficient opportunity by my Cabinet and by
Parliament and the people to say a personal " thank-you" to you,
but at least this medium can be taken tonight to pass on an
interim and very warm-hearted acknowledgment to you all.
But one of the dividends that I secured out of
this appointment was not merely the host of letters of good
wishes but so many of those who wrote to me were school friends
of many years back that I hadn't heard of perhaps for a
generation or more. Included amongst them, although I had,
of course, been aware of his presence in the intervening period,
was a letter from Eddie Wells and Eddie had been at the Prep.
when I was there I think he was Headmaster of the Prep.
School but certainly he looked after all of us who were boarding
at Stella in those days. Eddie wrote to me to remind me that
in 1922 I secured 100 marks for algebra in each of the three
terms. Now I think you will agree, gentlemen, that for a
Treasurer that is a pretty remarkable achievement. Had it
come before the change in office, I would have taken even more
encouragement from it. As it was, I was very glad to slip
into the somewhat easier calculations of decimal currency.
But Eddie I encountered tonight, he addressed me as " Sir"
It was the first time in the history of our relationship over
many years that I haven't been doing it that way from my end,
and so Prime Ministers do enjoy some privileges.
Gentlemen, it is for all of us tonight a wonderful
occasion. There isn't one of us in this room whoisn't proud
of what he still reg rds as the best school of all and I
exclude some of the philistines who have crept in by virtue of
that traditional Wesley courtesy which obtrudes itself from
time to time. But for those of us who have passed through,
or in the case of some of the senior boys who are still going
through the final stages of their studentship there, we shall
treasure always in a corner of our hearts and you made a
reference, Trevor, to that song I had to sing. Dickie Adamson
of whom I'll say a few more words in a moment or two, was a
very remarkable man, of course, in very many respects, but he
knew how to contrive a song so that the emotion desired from
the comparatively unemotional students with whom he had to deal,
came forward at the right moment. I defy anybody to sing the
leaving song, which is usually reserved on speech night for the
senior boys leaving the school I defy anybody at whatever
stage their voice has gone -contralto, breaking or baritone
or whatever the case may be -without an involuntary sob coming
into the voice, the music is so arranged. And so you sing on
the final day at the speech night actually this leaving
song, and in it we talk about the school still having a corner
in our hearts, and I am sure that is true of all of us. And
it is a warm corner, something to which we can turn when we
are amongst our contemporaries, when we read with pride and
satisfaction of what a fellow collegian has accomplished, or
find that some well known Wesley fnmily and I have run across
so many of them here tonight has sent on another son to carry
on the famous tradition of the father.
A great school makes a great contribution to the
national life. It gives, as the Headmaster has said to us,
qualities of character, and it brings an individuality which I
think every community finds of advantage to possess. we don't
want all to be cast in the same mould, and even when you are
a school inside a particular system of schools, as the Great
Public Schools are in this State of Victoria, each school
somehow develops its own atmosphere, its own character, and
Wesley undoubtedly can claim that individuality and Wesley
undoubtedly can claim that thanks to the men who have gone
before in the headmastership and who today stand in that office,
there are qualities of character which any Wesley boy worth
the salt will acquire and will carry with him through his days
wherever his tasks or his inclinations may take him. And this
for an Australia of less than twelve million people is a
tremendously important thing if we are to face the great
responsibilities and challenges of developing a continent the
size of the United States, if you leave Alaska out of the
picture, and we are trying to do it with our ll, 500OOO0; against
something over 200 million in that country, then the people
must be people of quality and people of character if we are
to make our mark and have some influence on what is happening
amongst the 1,500 million people to the north of this country
who are finding themselves in a dynamic period of rapid and
revolutionary change. It is not sufficient for us to produce
people, we liave to produce leaders, we have to produce people
of character and quality. And I believe Australia is doing
just that. One of the lessons I've learned as I have gone
around in this last ten days, although it was a lesson well
perceived from many earlier voyagings, is that the best expoct
that Australia makes is the export of its own people I am
not recommending that we export them wholesale, because we
are busily trying to import people to build a nation around
us, but the Australian where he goes in the main is a person
I use that terms " he" generically because, as a matter of
fact some of the Australian " shes" abroad are pretty good,
too, and I met the daughter of orne of our most distinguished
old boys, Keith Reid's daugher, at the surgical unit in Saigon
in the last few days where she was doing a great job for
Australia also. But here Australia is making its presence felt by
the good Australians that have gone to serve in one capacity
or another, narticularly around the South East Asian arc to
our north. There are a couple of Australians in Cambodia, a
country of whose politics we don't entirely approve, but
there has developed a curious friendship between the government
of that country, and one of the reasons for this is that there
are two fellows there who have taught them how to mend the
buses when the buses break down. Now, other countries make
handsome gifts of hundreds of buses. They compete for the
favours of Cambodia. Some will come from the United States,
some will come from Russia, some will come from China or from
somewhere else, and that's fine. The buses are received but
when the buses break down, nobody knew how to fix them. well,
a couple of Australians are running a training workshop in
Cambodia and are amongst the two best known men in Cambodia
and they have built up a great store of goodwill for this
country. And that rather illustrates the sort of thing I
have in mind. You spoke, Headmaster, about this generation of
students I heard and what a wonderful thing it was, what
a moving thing it was to hear th voice of Dickie Adamson
tonight giving us something of the philosophy which we had
absorbed from him in which he talked of the criticism of that
particular generation of young Australians by their elders
and expressing his own view that it was a better generation
than the one before. I, having come in contact with a good
many of Ithe generation which succeeded me, endorse his
judgment as far as today's generation of young Acstralians
go. They are better educated, I believe, than wewre, they
have got more assurance and I believe they have got as much
earnestness and determination to do what they believe is the
right thing to do, provided their own intell!. gence can be
satisfied that this is the right thing. They have a more
challenging judgment, perhaps, than an earlier generation.
The slogans are under questioning because they find themselves
in a restless turbulent world in which the standards of the
past have come under increasing challenge. But the stuff is
there, and again I have seen this confirmed over the last ten
days by the quality of manhood and womanhood that I have
encountered in the various countries that I have visited.
We talked of Dickie Adamson and what he meant to
us, and I mention him because he happened to be my own
headmaster. Any generation of Wesley collegians who had
another headmaster to guide them will think, I have no doubt,
in very similar terms about -the man who guided the earlier
years of their own lives. But a headmaster, a good headmaster,
has his own special brand of immortality. It is an
immortality of influence which goes into the hearts and minds
of those to whom he is giving leadership, and it extends from
them perhaps through their families, perhaps in the leadership
which they in turn bring to others, but it is a species of
immortality which is very genuine and goes very deep. I shall
never forget I am sure nobody who was at Wesley in my time
could forget the impact which the character and personality
of Lawrence Arthur Adamson made upon us, the precepts which he
gave to us, which have become embedded in our own make-up and
which have illuminated so clearly for us so many of the paths
along which we have had to proceed as we have made our own way
through life. I have no doubt that in my own public life the job
of assessing what was the right thing to do in a situation has
been greatly assisted by the clear perception which Dickie
Adamson brought to the great precepts of human conduct.
Perhaps I could illustrate by an example the way
he used to go about it with us. He was, of course, a man of
legal training and he sometimes thought in legal terms, but
on one occasion, I remember, we had some discussion with him
I was one of his prefects at this time, so was Spot Turnbull,
my old room-mate in the eyrie just the two of us, in one of
those towers in the older Wesley, and somehow or other I
couldn't have persuaded him adequately at the time as to the
political course he was to follow later but, still, you can't
achieve everything. We are still very good friends and I
did have the pleasure of introducing him to the young lady who
became his wife. I would have you know, Mr. Justice Rapke,
that this rather flippant reference of yours to the dancing
prize calls for some amplification because I was in that state
of bondage at the time which afflicts the boarder I don't
know whether there has been improvement since but the only
way I could escape from the prison was to go to dancing class
on a Friday night at St. Catherine's School. Naturally,
being there one developed a certain proficiency in order to
secure the more agreeable partners that one saw around the
room. The incentive was there and finally came the accolade.
I can't claim ever to have mastered the Charleston to which
you have referred. There are some people who would be unkind
enough to say in politics that I had learned the Twist fairly
early in my career.
However, we discussed with the Headmaster at that
time what seemed to us to be a curious application of the law
because two sets of of fences had been committed within quite
recent time of each other. A group of schoolboys returning
from Geelong, having no doubt conquered either Geelong College
or Geelong Grammar as the case might have been, felt that the
occasion called for some celebration and were found by some
intrus ive master drinking a bottle of wine in the railway
carriage and were duly reported to the headmaster. The other
episode concerned a group of boys who, no doubt, for good cause
decided to ink the navel of one of their colleagues. Now
the headmaster administered a much lighter penalty on the
boys caught drinking the wine which seemed to us at school
by far the more heinous crime, than he inflicted on those
who had inked the navel of their follow student, and seeking
enlightenment we discussed this with him, and he explained
it quite logically and simply. He said the wine-drinkers
were engaged in a social misdemeanour, perhaps of some harm
ultimately to themselves but not damaging the interests of
others or interfering with the liberty of others. But those
who inked the navel of the schoolboy, that was an assault
upon the person and a grave interference with his own personal
liberty and course of action. Now, gentlemen, here was a
typical example of the logic, of the sense of principle which
Dickie Adamson had. We remember him with great affection.
I remember him with a very deep gratitude.
The generation which you now have to look to,
Headmaster, face challenges of even greater complexity than we
did in our time. We are in this restless rapidly-changing
world, but Australia is so peculiarly placed as in effect a
Western country in an Asian world, finding it of increasing
importance to trade, to collaborate, to join for purposes of
mutual security, tc confer on matters of mutual interest and
concern. And here is a test of the Australian qualities which
we believe are well enshrined at Wesley, of tolerance, of
character, of courage and of mateship, and when you think of
it that by the time this generation that I speak of the new
generation reaches its own maturity, the population of the
world, certainly of Asia will probably have doubled, and
Australia which today has this handful of people in the sea
of humanity of which I speak, will have to exercise a role,
a significant role in helping to shape the outcome of these
opportunities and challenges and problems as they open up to us.
Well here, I repeat, are claims upon the kind of
quality that a great school can produce. Wesley has a proud
record of achievement over its first one hundred years. The
purple and the gold those royal colours which we bear so
proudly and see carried so proudly by those who represent the
college will have to be again in the forefront of leadership
in the affairs of the years ahead. But the tradition is
secure. We here tonight, from those who were here in 1906
onwards, are all inheritors and participators in this great
heritage built for us by men of the quality and the character
and leadership as headmasters to whom I have referred. And
you, Sir, now have that trust and we know that in you the
Wesley tradition will be safely carried and that h: 74cI', t new
chapters will be added to the Wesley story.
Last night, I was turning over because I thought
there might be something there of interest to you the
publication, the very limited publication put out in 1921,
March of 1921, of the first 55 years of the school's history,
and it was clear that those who compiled the history then
were very much influenced by the proximity of the publication
to the school's contribution to the First World War, and we
as students honoured appropriately as the occasions seemed
Fr 6.
proper, those who had served Australia in those years. And
each generation seems to have to face up to its own challenge
to freedom and the standards that it wishes to see preserved
in its own country and in other countries to whom we can
bring our own succour. And this falls again to the
responsibility of another generation of young Australians,
and I can assure you from what I have seen of the Australians
of this noew generation abroad, we have produced a breed of
men of whom we shall be eternally proud.
Gentleman, tonight you have done me the great
honour of proposing my toast. Trevor has gone through his
researches to a degree that has not merely delighted me but
has stimulated many happy recollections which I will mull over
for a very considerable time to come. I hope that in the
next 100 years you don't merely produce a couple more Prime
Ministers, but the judges, the doctors, the lawyers, the
teachers and all those who go to make a civilised cormmunity,
able to live the good lifb themselves but more importantly in
the kind of world in which we find ourselves, able to contribute
themselves to a better life for others. This will be the
product of the Wesley of the next 100 years.
And so to the best school of all, my thanks for
the great joy and the great reward of having served my seven
years there, for the host of happy memories whenever thoughts
turn back to a wonderful school. And the best wishes of all
of us, Headm~ aster, to you and the boys for an even greater
Wesley in the hundred years ahead.