By Tony Wright
When Pete Steedman blew into Canberra in 1983, the year Bob Hawke’s Labor Party trounced Malcolm Fraser’s Liberals, no one had seen a member of parliament quite like him.
He wore a leather jacket and jeans, rode a 1949 Vincent motorbike, drove a blazing red Ford Galaxie convertible and filled the air with language that would make a wharfie blush.
Steedman and life partner, model Julie Reiter, who died in 2009.Credit: Steedman Family Collection
He was 40 years old, but he told anyone who asked that he was 28. You’d just about believe him.
He embodied the idea that though nothing can be done to avoid the passing of years, it is not compulsory to grow up. And yet, he held true to the numerous strands of his essential cause: social justice.
Steedman was known for a prodigious thirst.Credit: Steedman Family Collection
The years, however, weren’t to be denied. Pete Steedman died on July 10 this year, aged 80.
His immense army of friends and admirers, and very likely a few detractors, because Steedman inspired conflicting passions, aren’t about to let him go quietly.
They will fill Melbourne’s beautiful old Trades Hall on Saturday to memorialise him, wet their whistles and take in an exhibition dedicated to a long and astonishingly varied life.
We are, those of us who have lived awhile, locked in a dread season of farewells to those who set about changing everything Australia thought it knew about itself in the 1960s and ’70s.
Only days ago we learned the playwright Jack Hibberd was gone at 84. Hibberd gave Australia its own voice half a century ago.
Australians everywhere will remember him for giving them the pleasure of indulging in rollicking productions of Dimboola, Hibberd’s 1969 construction of an Australian country wedding. His 1972 one-man play A Stretch of the Imagination remains his great gift to what was then a new wave of Australian theatre.
Another voice from the past was silenced this past week, too. Tim Bowden – a journalist who reported from the Vietnam War about the time Pete Steedman was protesting against it – died on September 1, aged 87.
He wrote many books and presented, from 1986 to 1994, the ABC TV show Backchat, where he read letters from viewers, giving everyone a voice.
Among Bowden’s best books was One Crowded Hour, a biography of the Australian war photojournalist Neil Davis, killed in Thailand in 1985. The title comes from a poem by British poet Thomas Osbert Mordant – “One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name”. Davis wrote that line on the front page of all his diaries.
Steedman filled his years with many crowded hours of glorious life. He had a spooky talent for being in the right place at the right time. Who but a young Steedman could possibly have woken in the middle of the night in his inner-city Melbourne terrace in 1966 to find a confused Bob Dylan pushing his way through the door?
Pete Steedman, forever young, was famed for riding a 1949 Vincent motorcycle.Credit: Steedman Family Collection
Dylan was in search of another Melbourne character, the late poet, music promoter and eccentric, Adrian Rawlins, who lived next door.
Steedman was among the first students at the new Monash University in 1961, had a hand in virtually every influential student, youth and rock music publication of the ’60s, and took the overland hippy route to London in 1970 with Julie Reiter, who remained his life partner until her death in 2009.
In London, Steedman became part of the celebrated Oz magazine crowd and took on the managing editor role while Oz’s editors faced the longest and most absurd trial in British history for “conspiracy to corrupt public morals”.
Among other adventures in the British capital, Steedman led the protest movement to save Piccadilly Circus from being torn apart by developers.
It was all long before he became an Australian MP, and two decades before he became executive director of Ausmusic (1988-96), promoting Australian music to the world.
A hell-raiser and merry prankster by history and instinct, Steedman spent much of his public life rattling the sensibilities of everyone from the stuffed shirts of academia, big business and organised religion all the way to his own Labor colleagues.
He won the seat of Casey in Melbourne’s outer east by campaigning in a three-piece suit – a necessary subterfuge, he argued, because the media had conditioned the voters to trust only the conventional. Two unhelpful boundary changes to the electorate ended his career as an MP in 1984.
Steedman had a soft spot for demonstrators. When there were protests outside Canberra’s old parliament house, Steedman collected left-over food from committee meetings and delivered it to the demonstrators. But when a protester allegedly complained about the lack of vegetarian fare, Steedman – a supporter of the homeless with no time for the entitled – described in colourful terms where the upstart could stick his vegetables.
Even in later life, Pete Steedman carried a youthfulness with him.Credit: Steedman Family Collection
Steedman was by then a seasoned stirrer.
The first of the student radicals at Monash University, he became sole editor of the university’s newspaper Lot’s Wife in 1965-66.
He turned it into the most compelling student newspaper in the country by tackling racism, the Vietnam War, conscription, corruption, police brutality and numerous other subjects deemed controversial.
Eventually, he fell afoul of the Monash University academic board after publishing an outrageous spoof about bigotry, using terms for ethnic groups that would have us sacked today if we reprinted them.
Called before the board, Steedman knew he was about to be expelled, so he got in first.
“I resign,” he declared.
“You can’t do that,” huffed a board member.
“I just have,” said Steedman, a man of impeccable timing.
He transferred to Melbourne University and became editor of Farrago, elevating it to one of the nation’s leading voices against the Vietnam War, among other causes.
We are unlikely to witness his like again, in parliament or anywhere else.
Steedman is survived by sons Sam and Nick, daughter-in-law Abby and grandchildren Caitlin, Sunday and Jude.
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