I was just a boy the day that the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, drowned while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea in Victoria.
When the news was broadcast, I was aware that something important had happened by the urgency of the voice of the radio announcer and the shock and surprise of my parents.
Most people know the story. The Prime Minister who fancied himself a virile man of the surf, possibly showing off to his mistress, diving into a rough ocean for a quick dip and failing to emerge. Was it an accident? Was is suicide? It probably wasn’t the case that that, as some suspected, he was picked up by a Chinese submarine and whisked off to Beijing, either willingly or not.
In this poem I have tried to capture something of the spirit of that day in December 1967, what it was like, for a child, to go to the beach that summer and the tensions that existed with the war raging in Vietnam. As much as Menzies first sent troops to Vietnam, it was Holt who dramatically escalated the Australian involvement and is remembered for his quote ‘all the way with LBJ’.
I think the other thing that I wanted to capture in this poem was the contrast between big national events, the death of a Prime Minister and the impact that it had on a six year old boy – he missed out on his ice-cream day because his father was distracted by the news.
Harold Holt on the Beach
We were at the beach that day when Harold Holt disappeared,
not, of course the same beach, Portsea, still a beach,
with waves and sand and laughing children splashing
at the edge and teenaged boys on big long boards
and teenaged girls, who’d fry in oil on bright coloured towels,
while dads, with bellies flopping over speedos, frolicked,
and nashos on their R and R with new short haircuts
gave sidelong dirty looks to long-haired uni students.
There were no politicians on the beach that day
and we didn’t hear the news until late into the afternoon,
when shadows from the hospital stretched across the sand
and told my father it was time to get us home.
The Holden was new, my Dad’s first car that wasn’t second hand,
the first to have a wireless, and he liked it for the news,
and the news that afternoon was all about Mr Holt,
as the grave voice on the wireless called him, and his last swim in the surf.
We didn’t stop for ice cream at the favoured highway milkbar,
Dad being much pre-occupied with all the news and
I with my sunburn and sand rash and Mum’s tut tutting
about all manner of things: the PM, my Dad and the war.
There’ll be a funeral soon without a body, the big eared Prince
and the big nosed President looking sad and grave for the cameras,
and in the rubber plantations, somewhere north, boys will still be dying.