He mentions the problem to a neighbour one day, a former captain in the Australian Army, who nods and calls him Charlie whenever their paths cross. Mario has given up correcting him; the captain apparently finds the Italian name too difficult to remember or to pronounce, or perhaps Mario’s accent is the problem. But he listens to Mario’s complaint and says at once, ‘Oh, you need to see Don Dunstan, Charlie.’ ‘Who is Don Dunstan?’ Mario asks. ‘Our local MP – Member for Parliament. I’ll take you round to meet him.’

The following evening the two men go to 11A George Street, a house that looks not much different from Mario’s. As they push open the gate and approach the front door they hear someone playing a piano. The music stops when they knock, and the door is opened by a man of about Mario’s age, but slighter, almost gaunt, with dark features and full sensuous lips. His hair is slicked back from a high forehead, and his eyes look at them enquiringly behind thick black frames. He invites them inside, and Mario glimpses a young woman and a child at the kitchen table before they are shown into the front-room study and the door closes behind them.

In his broken English, Mario explains the problem. ‘That doesn’t sound too good,’ Dunstan says, when he has finished. ‘I’ll come round tomorrow morning and have a look.’ Mario explains that he leaves early for work; only his wife will be at home. ‘Then I’ll come and see your wife,’ Dunstan says. ‘Tell her I’ll be there at nine o’clock.’

Next morning, at precisely nine o’clock, the member for Norwood knocks at Pia Feleppa’s door. Pia has very little English but he listens to her gravely, inspects the paddock and the horses, and promises her they will be gone by midday.

‘And they were!’ an ecstatic Pia tells Mario when he returns home.

Mario Feleppa is eighty-two this year, but the details of the story are clear in his mind. ‘He came at exactly nine o’clock, just as he said he would,’ he emphasises. Dunstan’s punctuality seems at least as important as the swift removal of the horses. A lifelong supporter and admirer of Don Dunstan, Feleppa became a member of the Australian Labor Party and in 1982 was elected to the South Australian Legislative Council, where he served until 1995. He had a spot of trouble from the ALP party office when he tried to set up an Italian sub-branch in Campbelltown after he and Pia moved there: the state secretary said it was against the rules. In that case, Dunstan said, we’ll change the rules.

Don Dunstan changed more than a few rules during the twenty-six years he was in government, as the member for Norwood, as attorney-general, and especially as premier (1967–68 and 1970–79). As a dedicated social democrat who believed that it was the role of government to civilise and nurture in the pursuit of human freedoms, he transformed South Australia from its bland conservatism and set new standards of social and cultural reform for all the states. ‘We had a quality of life,’ he wrote in his political memoir Felicia (1981), ‘which attracted to the State in droves those people to whom quality of life was a phrase of meaning and importance.’

‘I think he is probably the only premier that you could talk about as having transformed the culture of a state,’ agreed Neil Blewett. Said Barry Jones: ‘I don’t think there’s ever been a state premier with such a national impact.’

Fourteen years after his death, Dunstan is still regarded as one of the most charismatic, colourful, and remarkable of all Australian politicians, and one who remained in the public spotlight until the day he died. Bob Hawke called him ‘one of the great state premiers of the twentieth century’. To Michael Kirby he was ‘an outstanding Australian, and an outstanding human being’. Kim Beazley said simply, ‘Don Dunstan made a difference.’

One of his favourite writers was the Irish dramatist and socialist George Bernard Shaw, and the lines from Shaw’s 1921 play Back to Methuselah, famously misquoted by Robert Kennedy in a 1968 campaign speech, seem particularly apt for Dunstan: ‘You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?”’

One particular dream was the reason the young Dunstan gave up a flourishing law practice in Suva to return, with his wife and baby daughter, to Adelaide. Born in Suva in 1926 to South Australian parents, and educated principally at Adelaide’s top school, St Peter’s College, and the University of Adelaide, he had rushed back to Fiji soon after graduation. His mother had just died after a two-year battle with cancer, and his place, he felt, was with his father. He was immediately successful as a lawyer – the local Indians were a litigious lot – and in the courtroom he made good use of the acting skills gained in radio and amateur theatre in Adelaide. ‘I was in court most days. The rules of evidence and court procedure, the techniques of cross-examination, a fine sense of the use of timing and tactic became automatic to me.’ All good fun, and excellent training for the future politician. But, in a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, he worked too hard, overdid things, and collapsed.

It was during his period of convalescence that the young lawyer had time to ruminate on the direction his life was taking. His work seemed to him of little social value; he wanted to do something of ‘more lasting importance to humankind’. This is the dream he harboured at the age twenty-four, as he related in thepreface to Felicia:

to build a society in which individual citizens have security of food, shelter, work and services; which will celebrate their worth as individuals and that peoples are made many, their differences their strength, where all citizens have an equal and effective say in their own governance and an opportunity to participate in and to influence the decisions affecting their lives … to build a social democracy … I felt a driving certainty that we could build a model.

This might seem an unrealistic ambition for a young man from a privileged background with few or no political connections, and one, furthermore, who was living thousands of miles from the place he saw as the crucible for this social reform, but Don Dunstan was no ordinary young man. As a child growing up in colonial Fiji, he had felt keenly the injustice of the strict colour bar that had determined who attended his school and with which friends he was allowed to play. Sent at the age of seven to live with relatives in Murray Bridge for health reasons, he had attended the local primary school, where he instinctively sided with two children who were being bullied, one an Italian boy, the other an Aboriginal girl. ‘I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t opposed to people setting on somebody as a gang,’ he said in an interview with Craig McGregor in 1987.

He might have had a rough time of it himself. Skinny and bespectacled, he was a proud, priggish, painfully shy, effete little swot who was a great disappointment to his tall, well-built father, a sportsman and a ladies’ man. To earn his approval, and that of an undemonstrative mother who may have used the excuse of childhood asthma to rid herself of her sickly son for a time, the young Donald Allan became an over-achiever and someone who throughout his life would crave affection.

In early 1951, in pursuit of his dream, he returned to Adelaide, then arguably Australia’s most conservative city in its most conservative state. Since 1938 the Liberal and Country League (LCL), headed by Tom Playford, had dominated South Australian politics and government, thanks largely to an electoral system that was massively biased against the Labor Party. It was not a promising place to build a model of social democracy, but Dunstan was a visionary and like all good leaders he saw well into the future. He took up residence in Norwood, a suburb with Dunstan family connections and an interesting mix of blue-collar workers, old-aged pensioners, prosperous established families, and newly arrived migrants. Since 1947 it had been held by the LCL; Dunstan, despite the fact that he looked and sounded like a son of the Establishment, was certain he could win it for the ALP.

‘He was politically ambitious and he wanted to win us the seat, and I recognised very early in the piece that he was our prospect,’ said Len King, later to become Dunstan’s attorney-general (1970–75), but then an active member of the Labor sub-branch. Like Dunstan, he was a young practising lawyer with strong family connections to Norwood. ‘He was driven throughout his political career by principle, ideology or idealism, call it what you will, but a conviction that his role in life was to try to improve society, to transform society into something that would give the ordinary person better opportunities,’ King said.

Dunstan, having gained preselection for Norwood, set about making himself known to the electorate and getting across his message. ‘It was a bit of a challenge,’ King said. ‘His personality at that time was not really charismatic and had only limited appeal to the general public.’ Challenging, too, in those pre-television days, when even the notion of ‘the media’ did not exist and politicians’ speeches and statements were reported briefly and formally in the newspapers. Dunstan spent nights and weekends, and every spare hour he could find away from his small legal practice, doorknocking. By the time of the 1953 election he had covered thousands of homes, as he put it, ‘never visited in living memory by a Parliamentary candidate’.

Migrant friends helped him sticker every pole in the district with ‘Vote for Dunstan’ posters. There was no electoral office then – every election campaign was organised from the family house in George Street. His daughter, Bronwen, remembered nights of folding election pamphlets and days spent letterboxing with her mother. ‘I got to know the backstreets of the electorate quite well,’ she said.

To get across his policies, Dunstan went out at night with a loudspeaker and portable amplifiers. Television would not arrive for another three years, and radio was king. Nothing but party advertisements (which he did anyway; he had what was called ‘a good radio voice’) could be broadcast, but he reasoned that people listening to the radio at night might become rather curious about someone speechifying in the street. It was also good training. As he put it: ‘You are forced to get over nervousness, aphasia, sudden blanks; you don’t have an obvious audience so somehow you have to evoke responses without obvious audience reactions.’

Dunstan won the seat convincingly and became, at twenty-seven, Australia’s youngest parliamentarian. He had made a name for himself as a man who got things done and who genuinely cared for the people in his electorate, many of whom were Greek and Italian migrants. He kept up the doorknocking as a regular practice and got into the habit of going home during the parliamentary break and getting his driver to drop him off for thirty minutes or so while he doorknocked a street. He had a small card printed with his home address and phone number, urging absent householders to call if he could help them with anything. Bronwen recalled that they would seldom sit down for a meal at night without being interrupted by a knock on the door. ‘They were always brought into the house and Dad would sit down with them and try to sort it out.’

When in 1959 the family moved farther down George Street, to number 104, a fine but rather rundown old bluestone villa with ten rooms and half an acre of land planted with vines and fruit trees, Dunstan would have weekend barbecues on the tennis court and invite party members and constituents, many of them recently arrived migrants. He joined local sporting clubs and school committees and attended church fêtes. ‘If there was a function for the Norwood canary fanciers’ association or the local knitting circle I was likely to be there.’

‘He was always a great electorate person and gave a great deal of attention to his constituents,’ says Chris Sumner, a member of the state Legislative Council for the ALP in 1975, and (briefly) attorney-general in 1979. ‘I can’t think of anyone who worked their constituency as assiduously as Don did in the 1950s. He really pioneered modern politics in that respect.’

‘Under Dunstan, things got “a little more showbizzy”’

Quickly realising that his speeches in parliament and in particular the debate over the gerrymander that had granted Playford’s Liberals another term in government – Labor had won a majority of votes but had only fourteen seats in the House of thirty-nine – scarcely rated more than a few lines in the newspapers, Dunstan started writing press releases on newsworthy items and distributing them himself to reporters. He held regular political seminars at the University of Adelaide, wrote a weekly centre-page article for Adelaide’s afternoon paper, the News, and took over the weekly ALP radio program on station 5KA (which was partly owned by the ALP). With the help of a journalist friend he re-designed Labor’s election pamphlets, making them more eye-catching and reader-friendly. After the arrival of television in 1956, he was a regular guest on Channel 7’s Sunday night program Meet the Press,the press being Noel Adams, Stewart Cockburn, and John Temple. Asked by Noel Adams ‘Are you an angry young man?’ Dunstan replied, ‘Yes, at times, when I feel that people are being unjustly dealt with.’ All these initiatives got across the Labor message and established Dunstan as newsworthy and as a confident and charismatic television performer.

He might well have been angry about the first of the many malicious rumours that would circulate about him. A loyal Norwood constituent wrote informing him that Robin Millhouse, the LCL member for the conservative seat of Mitcham, was going around telling people that Dunstan was a communist and Chinese on his mother’s side. ‘Can you tell me where and when he said it,’ Dunstan shot back, ‘because I should be very glad to take a strip off him if I can prove that he did.’ Later, Sir Henry Bolte would tag him the Java Kid; other rumours on the same theme had it that he was a ‘Melanesian half-caste orphan bastard’, which he laughed off.

David Combe, national secretary of the Labor Party (1973–81), was a young university student when he first met Dunstan in 1962. The product of conservative parents who ‘never questioned the right to rule of Bob Menzies and Tom Playford’, Combe knew that he wanted a different sort of Australia, one with more freedoms and fewer injustices. When Dunstan asked him to join the ALP, he hesitated. Join a party that upheld the White Australia policy? A party that Dunstan had admitted was anti-intellectual?

‘David, the only way you can change those things about society which you do not like is through the political process,’ Dunstan told him. ‘The only way you can change a political party is from within.’

Combe was persuaded and became prominent in Young Labor. When Labor won the 1965 election and Dunstan became attorney-general, he appointed the twenty-two-year-old Combe his public-relations officer. No other minister in Frank Walsh’s government had such a person on their staff, nor did any members of the Opposition, and nor had they during their long years in power. It is arguable whether any politician in Australia had a public relations officer on staff in 1965. Dunstan saw it as an essential part of the job to let the public know what their government was doing. ‘David did a good job of getting the information out and I got more publicity than the rest of the Ministry put together, including the Premier.’

The popular feeling was spreading that the young, clever, publicity-conscious attorney-general in the new Labor government was really the man who ran it. Ninety parliamentary bills in six months, twenty-five of them pushed through! And breaking new ground with it: Australia’s first female judge, Roma Mitchell; the establishment of an Aboriginal Lands Trust, composed entirely of Aborigines. Dunstan was widely tipped to be the new premier when Frank Walsh stepped down in 1967. There was some dissent: for many Dunstan was too radical, and he made others nervous with the sheer number and speed of the new reforms.

‘The point was Dunstan was prepared to lead,’ said Barry Jones, who first met him in 1954. ‘South Australian society wasn’t ready, and it was obvious that many people didn’t like him and reacted against him, but he had a kind of star quality.’

In the meantime, Walsh was beginning to realise the value of publicity and on his insistence David Combe was transferred to his office. He also hired Gerry Crease, twenty-four, who had previously worked for the ALP’s advertising agency, to write and produce publicity scripts for film and television. Crease did not last long. Brilliant, erratic, garrulous, impetuous, and no respecter of high office, he was doomed from the start to clash with the premier. The crunch came when Walsh started altering Crease’s scripts. One had the premier saying, straight to camera, ‘Good evening. Undoubtedly you would be most desirous of knowing the usages of extruded aluminium.’ Crease tore it up, stormed out of the office, and wasn’t seen for three days. Dunstan had little trouble in getting him transferred to his own department.

The two had first worked together during the 1962 election and had become close friends. Now, three years later, Crease came up with a strategy for getting the Labor message out to the public; it would transform political use of the media in Australia. Essentially, it involved playing the various parts of the media against each other in order to obtain maximum coverage. Instead of issuing press statements to members of the parliamentary press gallery and hoping for minimal censorship, as most politicians did, statements and releases were now timed so as to allow little time for editorial interference. Television and radio were targeted first, so that the press, and particularly the Advertiser, which was not pro-Dunstan, would be forced to follow up the next morning. If there was little press response to an important issue, Crease would fire up the radio announcers in charge of talkback on the Advertiser’s own radio station 5AD, and arrange for Dunstan to go on air. This would force the Advertiser to start monitoring its own radio station to get stories. And long before politicians started popping up on all manner of television, from breakfast shows to cooking programs, Crease got his boss onto a live television variety show with an audience of 100,000 or more, which again compelled the Advertiser to give it a good run the next day.

Such strategies worked because Dunstan was a natural on both radio and television, particularly the latter. ‘Television has hit the world of the politician with the same impact that sound films hit many of the silent screen greats,’ he told TV Times.Thanks to his early theatre and radio training and a voice that commanded attention, he was one politician who made a smooth transition. Graham Maguire, who later became a Labor senator, worked in the Premier’s Department as a research assistant from 1977. ‘Don was the first South Australian leader to use the electronic media I think intelligently, or use it as it is used now,’ he said. ‘And he realised that to get round the printed media – the conservatism of the Advertiser particularly – he’d have to be a performer in the electronic media, and he did that well.’

When Frank Walsh resigned in May 1967 and Dunstan became premier, he gathered around him a personal team, including Combe and Crease, who stayed on as press secretary. At the same time, a young reporter named Mark Day was eager to make his mark as a political writer for the News, Adelaide’s afternoon paper.

‘The tradition had been for Playford and Walsh to release their information to the Advertiser as the paper of record, so press conferences took place at five o’clock in the afternoon so the Tiser had the story and the News would do a follow-up next day,’ Day told me in an interview. Under Dunstan, things got ‘a little more showbizzy’. Engineered by Crease, and in a similar fashion to his media strategy in 1965, the premier would deliberately release statements to the News in time for its afternoon editions. ‘It would be on the radio at lunchtime, it would be on television news at night, and next morning the Advertiser, as a paper of record, would dutifully report it as well ... They got their message out far more effectively doing it that way. I don’t think we saw it as spin in those days, but that’s what it was, media management.’

In his early days in office, Dunstan rarely called press conferences, relying instead on more informal channels of communication. ‘As a political writer on an afternoon paper, your work would be finished by three or four o’clock, and you’d go to the pub and meet up with your mates, or your contacts,’ Day said. ‘Gerry Crease was my key contact.’ Day was fed stories ‘at a prodigious rate’ because Dunstan believed it helped sell his policies. He was also encouraged to ring Dunstan at home each morning, at about seven-thirty. ‘He would have talked to Gerry before that, and often if the Opposition had come up with something, or he’d read some accusations in the Tiser, he’d have these precise quotes that I’d have to take down.’

Day frequently met both Crease and Dunstan informally, although he was never one of the inner circle of friends. ‘Gerry and I had what I’d call a symbiotic relationship, but it wasn’t personal in the least, it was professional.’ Nevertheless, Day was in a position to write ‘some amazing stories’ about Dunstan and Crease’s amorous behaviour together, including the time they showed up at his house, ‘very happy and all over each other … shyaking and a lot of touching and nudging’ as they sat side by side on Day’s sofa. At one point, Day told me, ‘Gerry leaned over and opened Don’s shirt and said “Look at that!” and he was covered in love bites. I was surprised and Don looked slightly embarrassed, but he just giggled and laughed it off.’ There had been rumours for years that Dunstan was gay, Day said, but he had never taken them seriously. ‘After that my only assumption could be that they were lovers.’ Preferring not to bite the hand that was feeding him, Day stayed silent. Besides, he said, ‘Around that time, early in the premiership, no one was looking for scandal, Don was still with Gretel.’

In his second term as premier, Dunstan extended the same privilege of the early morning call to a young Rex Jory, who was political writer for the News from 1970 to 1978. ‘Don Dunstan made me famous, he really made my career,’ Jory told me. ‘I could ask him any question I wanted, and I had access to him and to all his ministers. I was writing headline stories almost every day for the News. Ministers would wander into my office, which was in the Premier’s Department near the media room, sit on the end of my desk, and give me stories. There were some I rang early every morning. I remember Jack Wright [then minister for labour] ringing me one day and demanding to know why I hadn’t rung him that morning. I said, “Well, I didn’t have any questions.” “Listen, Comrade,” Wright said, “you ring me every morning.”’

Dunstan was ‘fantastic at giving quotes’, Jory said. ‘He could outline a story in three sentences. He wasn’t frightened to lead public opinion rather than follow it, and he was able to cut through all the jargon and with simple sentences get the message across.’

Tony Baker, who became his press secretary in 1970, called him a ‘dream employer’ and a ‘natural wordsmith’. His job, as he saw it, was to ‘massage, and as far as possible, manipulate the press media while making maximum use of radio and television’. But, he stressed, he was there to ‘facilitate contact, not prevent it’.

Dream employer or not, Dunstan could hit the roof if he felt reporters had got something wrong, or if he thought he had been misreported. Jory recalled a time when the premier ‘went berserk’ and ‘absolutely screamed’ down the telephone at him. ‘Dunstan, when he got the shits, could be terribly intimidating,’ Day recalled. ‘He’d lash you and call you all sorts of things and tell you why you were wrong, and all this on the telephone at seven o’clock in the morning!’

‘“He never got through to Rupert, Rupert made sure of that”’

Day was editor of the Sunday Mail from 1970 to 1972, and was appointed publisher and then editor-in-chief of The Australian in 1977. Dunstan, he said, was always fanatical about controlling his own message. ‘He’d make a bloody pest of himself, ringing the chairman of News Limited, Ken May in Sydney, with some complaint about what had appeared in the News: he wasn’t getting a fair run, or something like that. And I guess as I was one of the more senior staff and a former Adelaide exec, Ken used to pass it on to me. “Fix this pest, will you?”’

‘He never got through to Rupert, Rupert made sure of that. He’d see Don once a year when he came to Adelaide, a courtesy call, but I think even that came to an end because Don was seen as a bloody nuisance. But he did certainly have this belief that whatever he said had to be punctiliously reported.’

Former South Australian premier Mike Rann was Dunstan’s principal press secretary and speechwriter from 1978 to the premier’s retirement the following year. In a recent interview with me he likened Dunstan’s attitude towards the media to that of the late Princess Diana.

‘You know how she was in love with the media but hated them at the same time? Don was very controlling, so he basically didn’t like things he couldn’t control,’ Rann said. ‘He would ring me at 6.30 in the morning and be outraged about some criticism in the Advertiser. “I WANT YOU TO RING THE EDITOR AND …”; and he would dictate. I had a little bug in my phone to record because he could talk so fast I couldn’t write it down. Most times I just ignored him because otherwise it would be all day and every day. Then the News would come out and there’d be some criticism. He’d get angry about things I wouldn’t even take notice of. I might get irritated but I wouldn’t be on the phone complaining to editors and the head of the ABC and saying “How dare you!” In this past year I’ve complained once to the ABC, once in eight years. I do it only for extreme misrepresentation. Never once in my seventeen years as Labor leader did I reply to any letter to the editor. That just gave them oxygen and carried things on. But Don would give Force Ten when Force Three or Four would do. In the end the [editors] all got sick of him.’Don Dunstan and his second wife, Adele Koh

Dunstan was equally determined that no errors of fact would pass uncorrected on the pages of the press, not just the main Adelaide-based papers, but the country press as well. He wrote long letters to the editors, some running to two pages (one to the University of Adelaide’s student newspaper, On Dit, ran to three typed foolscap pages), and demanded that they be printed. The Sunday Mail ’s popular columnist Max Harris, who had a habit of referring to the premier as ‘Don Baby (Glitter, glitter)’, was a frequent target of the premier’s wrath, and he would shoot off aggrieved letters to the editor. ‘One becomes weary of constantly correcting the mis-statements and misrepresentations of Mr Harris,’ one twelve-paragraph letter began.

Rann said that the hardest media job he ever had to do occurred after Dunstan’s second wife, Adele Koh, was diagnosed with terminal cancer less than eighteen months after their wedding in December 1976. She was given only a few months to live, and her doctors advised Dunstan that she was in a frail psychological state.

‘Don became totally obsessed that no media outlet should run the story. I said, “Don, I’m already getting phone calls about it. People know. You’re the premier, hospitals leak. The only possible way we can stop them from running it is if I talk to all the editors and tell them, off the record, what her doctors have said.” And Don roared, “They must not run the story!” So, okay, I went and saw all the editors, TV and radio and press, everybody, and I told them the story and each of them agreed not to run it. You’d never get away with it today, zero chance.’

Derryn Hinch did break the story, on Radio 3AW, and earned Dunstan’s lifelong enmity.

It was Dunstan’s determination to control his message that led to him install, in 1974, what was effectively Australia’s first media monitoring unit, certainly the first to be used by a politician. It was so novel that Four Corners came to take a look at it. ‘It’s on all the radio stations and later it will be in the papers and on the telly that the Premier said “bloody”, and some other things as well,’ reporter Jim Downes told Four Corners in 1977. ‘And it will all be recorded here, on the slow-moving tape of the premier’s media monitoring centre …’ With the help of an electronics expert, a cheap but effective system of televisions, radios, tape and video recorders, and time-setting devices was installed on the tenth floor of the Premier’s Department. The whole thing cost about $13,000, and $3000 of that was to provide videotape and radio playback facilities at Parliament House for the use of Opposition MPs. (In 2012 federal government departments and agencies spent $10.3 million monitoring what was reported about them in the media.) Dunstan appointed Kevin Crease, brother of Gerry Crease (who had committed suicide in 1969), as media coordinator. Kevin Crease had been a radio and television personality in Adelaide for years, and a popular Channel 9 newsreader. When he eventually returned to newsreading, he was succeeded by Alan Hodgson, who would go on to become one of ABC TV’s most popular newsreaders. Three times a day Dunstan was given summaries of what was being said or reported on radio and television.

‘He’d look at them and find something someone had said on 5DN and get angry,’ Rann said. ‘And I was the person who had to ring up and say that’s wrong, and Don wants it corrected. People call me Media Mike, and that’s all right, but Don was incredibly obsessed with the media. Often from a negative point of view. He felt people were out to get him. And yet he was a brilliant media performer.’

Nobody who saw it will ever forget the premier tearing into young television reporter Liz Doyle on This Day Tonight in 1976 when she tried to get some answers from him about the media monitoring unit. ‘Everything you’ve been trying to say during this interview has been set out to endeavour to imply impropriety, unfairness, bias, or misuse of public monies,’ he accused, and you have to hear in your mind the indignant, plummy tone. ‘You’ve come here to do a hostile interview … Oh, come on! You started today with a question about why I had refused – you said – to talk to you before. So you started out on a hostile basis, didn’t you?’

The system eventually made it possible for Dunstan and ministers to make voice tapes, which could be sent to radio stations instead of a press statement that a reporter would read on air.

‘It was such an innovation,’ Rann said. ‘All it did was to monitor what was going out on air, but it was written up in the press as if it were a Big Brother, Don Dunstan spying on the media, intruding into newsrooms, a breach of civil liberties, breach of freedom of the press.’

Dunstan noted with amusement that it didn’t take the Opposition long to copy him and install their own system. ‘They have their press secretaries now; after having put on a great turn about our media monitoring unit which they called Big Brother, they now have three of their own,’ he told Cleo in 1977.

By this time there was also a media room on the tenth floor where press conferences were held. ‘We used to type out his speeches in massive typefaces because he couldn’t see properly to read,’ Rann said. ‘He had contact lenses and also glasses with very thick lenses, but he was too vain to wear or be photographed in them.’ He also used to apply make-up. ‘I’ve only known one other politician who did that and that was Keating, to hide his five o’clock shadow. In his bathroom Don had Hollywood lights around the mirror, and he’d talk to himself, rehearsing lines, while he was applying pancake foundation. His lips would be moving constantly and I would brief him, and he’d walk in. If there was a bit of aggro from the journalists he’d put on one of his turns. In my view, a lot of that was theatre.’

It didn’t seem like theatre when Mike McEwen, a news reporter from radio 5DN, so antagonised the premier in the lead-up to the 1977 election by persistently asking questions about an alleged pilfering of food from an Adelaide hospital that a furious Dunstan rang the station manager, Paul Linkson, to complain strongly about McEwen’s ‘offensive behaviour’. Linkson immediately apologised, which in turn offended the news editor, Des Ryan, who thought McEwen’s questioning had been entirely fair and professional. At a subsequent press conference McEwen, armed with the auditor-general’s report on the matter, took up his line of questioning again. The premier became testier and testier until finally he lost his cool altogether, and stormed out of the conference, slamming the door behind him. ‘I will not have that man at my news conferences!’ he thundered to the aides who had scurried after him. Another furious phone call to Linkson was made. The newsroom, fumed Dunstan, was out to get him.

A conciliatory meeting was arranged for the following day between the premier, who was accompanied by Alan Hodgson, Linkson, and Ryan. Ryan remembers it well, as was clear when I interviewed him. ‘Dunstan read the riot act to us, he just went ballistic. He raged for a good ten minutes. His face was red, he demanded that in the future he be accorded courtesy and respect by McEwen. I said we would continue to treat him in a professional manner, which he scoffed at. He was genuinely pissed off. It was an over-the-top performance. But having done it, he was perfectly calm afterwards. Goodbye, Mr Ryan, et cetera. Great theatre to watch Don Dunstan perform.’

The meeting ended with Dunstan threatening a complete blackballing of 5DN by his entire cabinet if McEwen offended again. ‘Dunstan’s over-reaction planted a seed of doubt in our minds about a cover-up,’ Ryan told me in an email. ‘So we persisted, a natural journalistic response.’ At a subsequent news conference, and in the wake of the premier’s sacking of his police commissioner, Harold Salisbury, for withholding information about secret dossiers, the so-called ‘pink files’, McEwen asked the premier whether he was aware that the Special Branch may have been investigating him in connection with his association with John Ceruto. The question enraged Dunstan and again he lost his temper. ‘That is grossly improper! And scurrilous!’ he snapped, and stalked out of the conference. McEwen found himself banned from future press conferences.

Dunstan at a press conference, 1978

The phrase ‘it’s grossly improper’ – a favourite of Dunstan’s – became the title of the sensational, tell-all book Ryan and McEwen wrote in conjunction with Ceruto, who contacted them after they had left 5DN, armed with his story and a bunch of affectionate and revealing letters to him written in the premier’s own hand over some four years that proved that Ceruto was more than just a ‘catering officer-in-training’, the position Dunstan had created for him in his department. Published in November 1979, the book was widely believed to have been the reason for the premier’s unexpected resignation in February of the same year, and for Des Corcoran calling an early election in October. By that time, both McEwen and Ryan were jobless and neither worked as journalists on the main Adelaide papers again. Ryan suspected he had been blackballed, and had it confirmed to him years later. ‘I met Geoff Jones who was deputy editor at the News and he said, “Yes, mate, you were blackballed. No one would touch you. Anyone who did would be worried about coming to grief with the government.”’

Stewart Cockburn, a Walkley Award-winning senior journalist at the Advertiser and himself a frequent critic of Dunstan, was one of the few voices to support Ryan and McEwen for their actions. They had ‘dared to criticise Don Dunstan when all too many of us seemed never to have the guts to attack him, as a result of which, in my opinion, he used to get away with political murder too often.’

Cockburn wasn’t the only one to level this accusation. The Canberra Survey of 18 February 1977, which had devoted its entire issue to Dunstan, charged that ‘A large part of Dunstan’s success can be traced to the timidity of the Adelaide media … Only the ageing bookseller, Max Harris, gives Dunstan any stick – and nobody takes any notice.’

It wasn’t easy for any journalist, even the most experienced, to persist with the questioning when Dunstan was in outrage mode. Bruce Guerin, an ex-journalist himself before he became Dunstan’s executive assistant, remembered more than one occasion, watching a television interview, and thinking, ‘The next question they ask can destroy him … and they never asked it’.

‘People often didn’t tell Don the truth,’ Rann says. ‘They were afraid they’d be blacklisted. Sometimes I’ve seen him wipe a friendship of years’ standing because of some criticism.’

‘Nobody wanted to risk being blackballed by the premier,’ Ryan says. ‘In Adelaide there was a small, tight circle of journalists and politicians, and very close relationships. Dunstan’s media team knew how to manipulate the media.’

‘At almost every election Dunstan proposed higher taxes’

The media coverage was essential to Dunstan’s vision of making South Australia a model for social reform: what good was a vision if you couldn’t persuade the voters to come on the journey with you? And how did you persuade them? For Dunstan, as always, the answer was communication. Often it involved speaking directly to the workers in their workplace. Anne Woodham, a writer for Cleo magazine, once watched Dunstan address five hundred ship construction workers in their staff canteen. Woodham was struck by the contrast between the elegantly dressed premier (‘camel-coloured trousers superbly cut’) with his well-bred voice and ‘unconscious arrogance’, and his audience with their grimy overalls and ‘nuggety faces’ and smelling of ‘steel dust and sweat and tobacco’. They listened respectfully as he talked to them, simply and clearly, about unemployment and health services and how his government was spending more than ever before on schools and hospitals and workers’ compensation. Later, back at his office, Dunstan told Woodham that ‘every one of those things has been announced in the newspapers, been discussed, been the subject of press releases, been on radio and TV, and yet most of them didn’t know about them. I have walked away from every one of those factory meetings with blokes saying “We didn’t know that.”’

‘If Don was opening something out in the country, like a new smelter at Port Pirie, say, I’d be offered a seat in the car and I’d go up there with him,’ Mark Day recalled. ‘Don would sleep most of the way, and when he was awake we’d have a bit of a chat. I remember coming back one day from somewhere out in the bush and we were driving past Parafield Airport and we were talking about suburban sprawl, which was one of his favourite topics, and he jerked his thumb and said “That land there is reserved for a university,” and my ears pricked up. Next day it was on the front page: “New Uni for SA”.’

‘He knew very well that every time he said something it would be reported, and this was his power, of course,’ said Jory. ‘Don effectively promoted public debate through the media and he used the public forum as a way of persuading people to his point of view.’

‘He was a master MP who had that enviable knack of being able to talk the voters into accepting what might have been an unpopular decision,’ said Greg Kelton, who retired at the end of 2012 as the Advertiser’s long-serving state editor (and who died in early 2013).

At almost every election Dunstan proposed higher taxes. ‘We have a moral obligation to the poor and under-privileged,’ he told the voters, and for the most part they supported him, returning him as premier in four elections between May 1970 and September 1977. They supported him when his government brought in sex discrimination legislation and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the abolition of the death penalty, consumer protection legislation, abortion law reform, and the most liberal set of censorship laws in the Commonwealth. The Dunstan government returned tribal lands to the Pitjantjatjara people, established the first environmental portfolio, ended the ‘six o’clock swill’ in pubs, opened the way for more relaxed wining and dining, and made Maslin Beach, thirty-five kilometres south of Adelaide, the country’s first official nudist beach.

As premier, Dunstan recommended the appointment of the first Indigenous Australian governor, Pastor Doug Nicholls, and Roma Mitchell as the first female South Australian Supreme Court judge. He championed the arts and multiculturalism at a time when the word did not exist; he established the South Australian Theatre Company and the South Australian Film Corporation at a time when the country did not have a film industry. The Adelaide Festival Centre is as it is because of him; the Festival of Arts was never so brilliant as during the Dunstan Decade. The Jam Factory, with its craft-training workshops, galleries, and artists’ studios and now in its fortieth year, was a Dunstan initiative. All this and he found time to write a best-selling cookbook, one that – thirty-seven years ago – encouraged suburban cooks to grow their own ingredients and cook with a wok.

‘Dunstan knew you had to lead, not follow, public opinion, but he also knew that a leader couldn’t get too far ahead, you had to bring the people along with you,’ Mike Rann says. ‘That’s why he was an early pioneer in using opinion polling, to help him craft his message in the most effective way.’

According to Rod Cameron, one of the founders of ANOP Research Services, Dunstan was the first state leader to use market research extensively and to act on its results. But ‘he used it selectively – not to influence policy formation but rather in communication: He would say: “Here’s the policy, tell me how to sell it best, and if there are any shaggy dogs attached to it, how do we defuse the negatives” … Other leaders have tried to use market research to develop their ideology. Dunstan was never one of those.’

In the mid-1970s telephone ownership was only about seventy per cent. Polling thus had to include a good bit of doorknocking, and for this reason was conducted on a weekly basis. The Liberal Party, throughout the election campaign of 1975, had sought to link the Dunstan government with the disasters and scandals of the Whitlam government (think Jim Cairns, Junie Morosi, Khemlani). Polling showed that it was working: voters were turning away from Labor in order to show their disapproval of the goings-on in Canberra. With just three days before the electronic media blackout, Dunstan went on television with a dramatic, straight-to-camera television commercial he had recorded in one take. ‘My Government is being smeared and it hurts,’ he said passionately. ‘They want you to think we are to blame for Canberra’s mistakes. The vote on Saturday is not for Canberra, not for Australia, but for South Australia.’ It was, said Cameron, a ‘powerful piece of communication. I’m quite convinced that this turned the campaign around and led to Dunstan’s eventual victory.’

To a great extent Dunstan projected and stage-managed his own image. ‘If you were walking through an airport with Don and he spotted a television [camera], wild dogs couldn’t keep him away from it,’ said Mark Day with a laugh. Photographer Barry O’Brien shot hundreds of pictures of him throughout the 1970s. ‘To me, Don Dunstan was a walking page one,’ O’Brien said. ‘He never refused my requests. He could identify a “photo opportunity” long before the term was ever coined.’

Many of those photographs have attained iconic status, such as the one on the front page of the News, 19 January 1976: a grinning Don Dunstan in front of the Glenelg Town Hall, waving to the cheering masses, at the exact time a tidal wave and earthquake, prophesied by a delusional house-painter, failed to eventuate. His detractors sniffed and said that by turning up he had only added credibility to the doomsday nonsense. They clearly didn’t have Dunstan’s instinct for publicity. Fifteen hundred people packed Glenelg’s Moseley Square to press his hand, slap his back, and pour him champagne. Also on hand were overseas and interstate press, radio, and television, including the BBC, and Channel 9’s A Current Affair.

Don Dunstan in lederhosen, 1978 (Photograph: News Limited)To promote Penang Week in Adelaide, and in his trademark white safari suit, he pedalled his then wife, Adele Koh, down Rundle Mall in a trishaw; he donned a bowler hat and apron to make pasties at Kernewek Lowender Cornish Festival; he wore lederhosen, danced, and drank beer at Schützenfest; he fed his chooks in the backyard wearing rubber boots and tight plaid shorts; topless, he rode an exercise bike at the opening of a fitness centre, and in a safari suit sat atop an elephant to recite poetry; he stood in the street outside a building society with a loud hailer to assure the long queue of depositors that their money was safe.

‘He introduced an element of colour and personality into the very dull and grey world of politics,’ said Rann. ‘And it was that element of the theatrical, combined with his passion for reform, that made Don Dunstan special.’

Perhaps Dunstan’s most famous photo op, and one he stage-managed just as deftly as he had the others, was the Incident of the Pink Shorts. He wore them only once, for one day, but the story has resonated down the decades, the colour of the shorts changing with every retelling. They were ‘deep pink’ (the News); ‘beige pink’ (Lynn Chatterton); ‘flesh pink’ (AAP); ‘the brightly dark colour of a raspberry daiquiri’ (Kerryn Goldsworthy); ‘a staid plum colour’ (Allan Patience); and ‘candy pink’ (Ryan and McEwen). Strewth in The Australian recently referred to them as ‘pink walk shorts’, which clearly they are not. The shorts are now in the possession of Dunstan’s last partner, Steven Cheng, or Cheng Man Sin, whom Dunstan met in Melbourne in 1986 when he was chair of Victorian Tourism and Cheng, whose home was in Hong Kong, was completing a science degree at the University of Melbourne. The pair began living together at Dunstan’s home in Norwood in 1988.Gillian Dooley, Special Collections Librarian at Flinders University, has seen the shorts and says they are a ‘pale rose’, more or less exactly as Dunstan himself described them (‘a dull rose shade’). Doubters are welcome to inspect the mounted colour photograph Cheng donated to the Don Dunstan Collection at Flinders.

Wearing shorts to work was nothing new. On 17 March 1965, when the temperature in Adelaide reached ninety-two degrees fahrenheit (thirty-three degrees celsius), the new attorney-general had been photographed by the News as he arrived for work, wearing an ‘open-necked white shirt [and] linen shorts’. (In a 1977 profile for Cleo, Polly Wilson described them as ‘pink linen shorts’: if they were indeed that colour, the News missed out on a scoop.) ‘I’m used to wearing tropical clothes in a tropical climate,’ Dunstan told the News, and he looked very much the cool, forward-thinking parliamentarian. The same could not be said in 1972 when the shorts were very short, tight, and pink, and worn with a body-hugging T-shirt. Newspapers all over Australia reproduced the photograph that appeared on the front page of the News on 23 February.

The reason Dunstan looked so pleased with himself is that he had successfully evaded the clutches of his minders who had done their best all day to hide him from the view of the media. He had first startled ministers in the Chamber that morning; Joyce Steele, former minister for education in the Hall Government, had looked up and blurted out, ‘Oh Don, you do look chic!’ Members of his personal staff had thought otherwise. Lyn Leader-Elliott, who now teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at Flinders University, was then Lyn Scott, twenty-four, an assistant press secretary, who worked closely with Tony Baker, press secretary, and the premier’s executive assistant, Peter Ward: ‘We decided that under no circumstances was anybody with a camera going to get anywhere near Don that day,’ she said. ‘We succeeded all day until about four o’clock when he got out of the office in Parliament House by the back door that we weren’t watching, and went and stood on the front steps. He had quite obviously set it up himself. He wanted to be photographed in those clothes.’

Dunstan later maintained that the fuss was not about the shorts at all but ‘simply an absurd reaction of community prejudice about the sexual connotation of colour. My mistake was not to have realised how deep-seated that prejudice was,’ he wrote in a 1996 letter. ‘Shorts had been worn to Parliament for quite some time before that with no protest or scandal at all.’ But never shorts quite so short and tight, and never with a T-shirt; Dunstan was being a little disingenuous. Even today, if you Google ‘pink shorts for men’ on the Internet, you will not find any as short and tight as the ones Dunstan sported on the steps of Parliament House that afternoon. They had been tailored especially for him.

The shorts are apparently now seen as a subversive strike for the gay community. At the time they were seen as a visual statement of the liberation in personal dressing that Dunstan always championed, or simply Dunstan ‘showing off’. Leader-Elliott agrees on both counts. ‘He’d been going to the gym and transforming his physical appearance for several years, and he really liked the way he looked, and this was him in full display mode.’

Leader-Elliott had been hired in 1970 as a research assistant, but her job eventually expanded to include other duties, particularly after Don and Gretel separated in April 1972. She found herself accompanying the premier to events that ranged from luncheons to trade union meetings, even weekends away. ‘I was taken on because I was young, attractive and female, in order to counter the rumours of Don’s gay attachments,’ she told me. ‘When the rumours peaked, I was sent out with him more often. I know because Tony and Peter discussed it with me.’

She was encouraged to wear colourful, stylish clothes that would photograph well and complement the Premier’s outfits. There is a photograph of them together that appeared in the Sunday Mail about this time: they are about to enter the Hilton Motel for a trade union function. She is wearing a pink-and-white checked pantsuit with white accessories, and Dunstan is wearing a blue Nehru suit. The photo op had been organised in advance by Tony Baker.

Leader-Elliott’s appointment coincided with that of John Ceruto, a young man whom Dunstan had met in an Adelaide gym in 1966 and to whom he had been close ever since. In their book It’s Grossly Improper (privately published by Wenan Pty Ltd), Ryan and McEwen alleged that Ceruto was Dunstan’s lover and that the premier had used his position to advance his career. Dunstan dismissed the book as a ‘farrago of lies’, even though it reproduced many of his letters to Ceruto, which, if they didn’t prove a homosexual affair, certainly suggested it. ‘John baby,’ one began, ‘I have tried to show you the depth of my feelings for you – and that remains a constant … Please keep in touch with me because I worry like Hell about you. Love, Don.’ From a letter dated 29 February 1972, when Ceruto was in San Francisco: ‘Have missed you a great deal – am constantly struck by vivid memories – in all senses.’ He mentioned a book he had given Ceruto – Logic and Sexual Morality, by John Wilson (1967) – and went on: ‘You realise that you are potentially bisexual. So is everyone. The compulsively heterosexual are merely crippled in the same way as the compulsively homosexual. But what you do about it has to be what you want to do. Some can disentangle themselves from their idiot inhibitions and others can’t.’

‘Perhaps Dunstan’s most famous photo op … was the Incident of the Pink Shorts’

The nature of their relationship was unknown at the time, both to the general public and to Leader-Elliott, who disliked Ceruto – he had ‘an air of sleaze about him’ – as did other members of Dunstan’s staff. Peter Ward, perhaps the premier’s closest confidant at the time, tried to talk to him about the image he was presenting by his association with Ceruto, but Dunstan became less and less ready to accept any criticism or listen to any argument. Leader-Elliott said that he ‘threw caution to the wind’ after his separation from Gretel, and indulged in multiple affairs and sexual flings. But it was Ceruto who stood to damage the premier the most. Employed as a catering manager-in-training but with no obvious qualifications and a drug habit, he had moved in to share the flat at Kent Town that Dunstan had occupied since moving out of the family home. Ward eventually wrote the premier a long, anguished letter (19 June 1972) in which he first described the media management surrounding that event:

The news of your separation from Gretel was delicately handled, not only because we called the editors in and got them on-side in that way, but also because Tony, Lyn and I maintain complex, cross-referencing, personal and professional relationships with the media, and had, in the weeks prior to the announcement of the separation, intensively maintained these. As a result there was no secondary scandal following the announcement.

He warned that this would not continue, that rumours were circulating and certain journalists were watching the situation and asking questions. ‘They smell the bloody scent of scandal,’ he wrote.

The scandal erupted in spectacular fashion some seven years later with the publication of It’s Grossly Improper,but by that time Dunstan had resigned. In that period South Australians were the beneficiaries of more major reforms than had occurred in any other state in ten years. To an admirable extent, the dream that Dunstan had had all those years ago in Fiji had been realised, and has to be counted as one of the spectacular success stories of Australian politics.

Another iconic photograph dates from this time: Dunstan, looking ill and tired, leaning on a walking stick and dressed in shortie pyjamas, at Calvary Hospital where he announced his resignation as Premier and Member for Norwood at a crowded media conference.

‘The day he collapsed in Parliament and was taken to Calvary, I got a message to go and see him and bring a pen and paper,’ said Rann. ‘He dictated to me his resignation press release. I was absolutely stunned. He wanted to do it the next day. I tried to talk him out of it. Why don’t you have a couple of months off? But he was adamant: “I’ve made the decision.”’

Mark Day watched the press conference on television. ‘Along with many other distant observers, I suppose, I wondered how much was genuine and how much was contrived. He would have said to Rann, “This is what the doctor says, I feel ill, I have to resign as a consequence, now I’ve got to face the press, how am I going to look my best? I’ll do it in a dressing gown with a stick!”’

Rann says that he asked Dunstan, who was wobbly on his feet, whether he wanted a wheelchair and Dunstan replied, ‘No, I don’t. This is not Hollywood and you’re not Cecil B. de Mille!’

For a long time, of course, it had been Hollywood, or the nearest thing to it in Adelaide. Don Dunstan, who had always wanted to be an actor, found a stage on which to perform and had become a star. Or, as Max Harris observed in 1976, had had the star system foisted on him. Once he left that stage nothing that he did afterwards – editing POL magazine, chairing the Victorian Tourism Commission, making documentaries and cooking shows for television – measured up to what he had achieved in that glittering decade.

His last performance was as host at Don’s Table, the restaurant he opened in Norwood in 1994 with his young lover and partner, Steven Cheng. For a man of nearly seventy who had been told to avoid stress and who had been diagnosed with cancer of the bile duct only a few years before, it was a foolhardy enterprise. It might have succeeded on Dunstan’s name alone, had it been run more professionally and with a chef who knew what he was doing. It lasted four years, always struggled financially, and finally closed after ‘irreconcilable differences’ with Cheng’s brother, one of the financial partners. In 1997 Dunstan developed cancer of the pharynx from which he would not recover.

His last appearance on television was an interview with George Negus, recorded in Dunstan’s Norwood house and broadcast on ABC TV’s Stateline on 5 February 1999, just hours before his death. Negus, a close friend, referred to Dunstan’s lifelong determination not to discuss his sexuality and asked him whether he might now be prepared to speak. Dunstan declined, even though Cheng was living in his house at the time, and had been for the last eleven years. A similar silence had operated when Peter Wilmoth had interviewed Dunstan at home for a long profile in the Sunday Age at the beginning of 1994. In it Wilmoth makes a passing reference to a ‘Chinese chef’, presumably never introduced, who is making spring rolls in the kitchen when he arrives.

Des Ryan, then an A-grade journalist, did not work for three years after the publication of It’s Grossly Improper. Whether you believe or not that the book played any role in Dunstan’s sudden resignation in February 1979, it changed the life of both men. ‘I don’t regret it, even though the repercussions were severe,’ Ryan told me. ‘But I can’t get rid of it from my life, even if I wanted to. There’s no escape in Adelaide. It was one of the consequences. I’m now forever connected to Don Dunstan.’ And it is surely one of the biggest ironies of Dunstan’s life that, had he kept his temper instead of reacting so furiously to McEwen and his line of questioning about a relatively minor case of food pilfering, had he not been so fixated on controlling the message and remembered his aides’ advice that the media were really not out to get him, the matter would soon have passed without consequence: no blackballing, no resignations, no Ceruto and his damning letters, no It’s Grossly Improper. In the end, as his principal private secretary Kelvin Bertram said, ‘Don didn’t have a lot of respect for the press.’