Verbal pyrotechnics, a dash of spicy recall and analysis as a 'commentator diarist': Bob Ellis, who died in Palm Beach in Sydney's North on Sunday, was the sabre rattling inspired by the Sydney Push; a delightful Antipodean Samuel Pepys, with a vernacular to shape.
His versatile penmanship would dot all brows of Australian culture. With Michael Boddy came The Legend of King O'Malley, which inaugurated a theatrical amalgam of satire, dance and music.
Philip Noyce's Newsfront (1978) saw Ellis co-author the script with wife Anne Brooksbank and others, while propelling the careers of Wendy Hughes, Bryan Brown and Bill Hunter.
Most importantly, Ellis' work is a prime example of the notion advanced by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: that committed literature, and the act of writing, are political and ethical acts. Even in a film script, one can ponder social political change, a world of newsreel men in the Australia of the 1950s that saw an effort by the Menzies Government to ban the Communist Party and jolt Australia with Cold War fears.
Always of the left, but never formally the structured party man of faction and following, the dishevelled, sometimes wild Ellis proved contrarian even to Labor stalwarts. There were never pious reflections, or unqualified praises.
Paul Keating, for instance, was considered hefty in terms of IQ yet a victim of the 'hey-presto quick fix', giving the green light to 'corporate mendacity and rapacity'. The insanity of economic rationalism remained a permanent bugbear in the Ellis repertoire.
Suddenly Last Winter — An Election Diary (2011) supplied readers with a withering portrait of then Prime Minister Julia Gillard. 'She has no power, no influence, no friends, no learning.'
In contrast, and ever niggling to the ALP, future Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott came in for some praise, possessing 'good manners' and a 'first-class mind'. The latter, for instance, could remember that sentence from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited on 'the cloistral hush which down the years'.
"As former NSW premier Bob Carr, for whom Ellis penned many a speech, wistfully observed, Ellis was not the sort 'who would miss a train because he was back in the office checking every last fact'. "
This was Ellis the alchemist of political matter, able to navigate positions without tribal fanaticism. It was a rare thing in the parochial settings of Australian party politics. He could still lunch with Abbott and praise the latter's Battlelines, while having severe disagreements about other matters.
He